Presenting for Humans

Insights for Speakers on Ditching Perfection and Creating Connection

Lisa Braithwaite ’87 challenges preconceived notions about public speaking and guides the creation of meaningful and memorable presentations.

Fascinating New Yorkers

Power Freaks, Mobsters, Liberated Women, Creators, Queers and Crazies

Clifford Browder ’50 profiles the famous and forgotten, from J.P. Morgan’s nose to a pioneer in female erotica.

Aldo

In this mystery/thriller /love story by Betty Jean Craige ’68, a university president is held hostage when a dangerous ideologue tries to eradicate the school’s genetics institute.

Everyday Creatures

A Naturalist on the Surprising Beauty of Ordinary Life in Wild Places

George James Kenagy ’67 offers13 personal essays on nature, gleaned from observations, discoveries and experiences of deserts, mountains, forests and the sea.

Come West and See

This debut collection of short stories by Maxim Loskutoff ’07 describes a violent separatist movement, with tales of love and heartbreak.

Win

The Atlantis Grail (Book Three)

In this fantasy novel by Vera Nazarian ’88, nerdy Gwen Lark must fight her way through a difficult contest as the fate of two worlds, Earth and Atlantis, hangs in the balance.

The Big Note

A Guide to the Recordings of Frank Zappa

Charles Ulrich ’79 offers a guide to Frank Zappa’s music composed from hundreds of interviews, letters and email correspondences spanning 35 years.

Woodswork

New and Selected Stories of the American West

Miles Wilson ’66 offers a collection of short stories set in the American West—geographically, culturally and psychologically—ranging from fable to realism and ranchers to fathers.

Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution

Thomas C. Wright ’63 offers an interpretation of the Cuban Revolution era, synthesizing its trends, phases, impact and influence on Latin America.

Understanding Nanomaterials

Professor of Chemistry Malkiat Johal and his former student, Lewis Johnson ’07, co-wrote this second-edition textbook, providing a comprehensive introduction to the field of nanomaterials as well as an easy read.

The AI Delusion

Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics Gary Smith argues that our faith in artificial intelligence is misplaced and makes the case for human judgment.

The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse

The author of the acclaimed children’s book Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, Mac Barnett ’04, again joins illustrator Jon Klassen for a fable with a twist and a wink—in this case, a mouse and a duck who set up housekeeping inside a wolf.

Return

Illustrator and Caldecott honoree Aaron Becker ’96 completes his epic children’s trilogy with a third wordless journey through a hidden door into a visually stunning realm of enchanted landscapes and strange creatures.

Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India

Rebecca M. Brown ’93 uses archival research and interviews with artists, curators, diplomats and visitors to analyze a selection of museum shows that were part of the Festival of India.

Come As You Are

Steven Ramirez ’74 writes a young-adult supernatural horror novella about a middle schooler and the terrifying evil forces he unleashes from the pages of an old notebook.

Roadside Geology of Southern California

Award-winning Santa Barbara geologist Arthur G. Sylvester ’59 offers a tour of the iconic features of the Golden State, combining science and stories about its rocks and landscapes.

The Silly Parade and Other Topsy-Turvy Poems

Inspired by the book art of Nikolai Popov, Associate Professor of German and Russian Anne Dwyer translates and retells traditional Russian songs and folk poetry for children.

Real Deceptions: The Contemporary Reinvention of Realism

In her third book, Pankey Professor of Media Studies Jennifer Friedlander explores a new theory of realism, examining a range of contemporary art, media and cultural practices to argue that our sense of reality lies within the deceptions themselves.

Money Machine: The Surprisingly Simple Power of Value Investing

Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics Gary Smith offers expert guidance on value investing to beginning investors and veterans alike, debunking current strategies and promoting what consistently outperforms the market.

In her new book, Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives, Associate Professor of Anthropology Pardis Mahdavi tells heartbreaking stories about migrants and trafficked mothers and their children in the Persian Gulf and talks to state officials, looking at how bonds of love get entangled with the law. Mahdavi talked to PCM’s Sneha Abraham about her book and the questions it poses about migration and families. This interview has been edited and condensed.

PCM: Talk about the relationship between family and migration.

MAHDAVI: Our concept of family has been reconceptualized and reconfigured in and through migration. People are separated from their blood-based kin; they’re forming new kinds of fictive kinship in the labor camps or abroad. Some people migrate out of a sense of familial duty, to honor their families. Sometimes they get stuck in situations which they feel they can’t get out of because of their family and familial obligations. Other people migrate to get away from their families, to get away from the watchful eyes of their families and communities. Families are not able to necessarily migrate together, and children are not able to migrate with their parents; they’re in a more tenuous relationship now than we would recognize when we look at migrants really just as laborers.

Laws complicate those relationships. Laws on migration, citizenship and human trafficking create a category of people caught in the crossfire of policies—and those people are often women and their children, and often they are trapped in situations of illegality.

PCM: Would you tease out the question of migration versus trafficking? That is something you’re exploring in your book.

MAHDAVI: I think it’s a real tension that needs to be teased out in the larger discourse. That’s the central question. What constitutes migration? What constitutes trafficking? It’s very difficult and that space is much more gray than we think. We’ve tended to assume that women in industries like the sex industry are all trafficked. We assume if there’s a woman involved, it’s the sex industry; if it’s a minor, it is trafficking; if it’s a male, if they’re in construction work, that’s migration. But that’s just not true. Trafficking really boils down to forced fraud or coercion within migration. It’s kind of a gray area, a much larger area than we think. The utility of the word “trafficking” really is questioned in the book. How useful is that word? The very definitions of migration and human trafficking are extremely politicized and depend on who you ask and when. Some people might strategically leverage the term, whereas other people strategically dodge it.

Some interpretations have positively elevated the importance of issues that migrants face; other people might say that the framework is used to demonize migrants or further restrict their movement.

PCM: What’s an example of a policy that affects these issues of migration and trafficking?

MAHDAVI: The United States Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) is one policy, kind of a large one, to the extent that the report ranks all the countries into tiers and then makes recommendations based on their rankings. And sometimes the recommendations that the TIP report makes actually exacerbate the situation instead of making it better.

For instance, the United Arab Emirates is frequently ranked Tier 2, or Tier 2 Watchlist [countries that do not comply with minimum standards for protecting victims of trafficking but are making efforts], and the recommendation is that there should be more prosecutions and there should be more police. Now, the police in the U.A.E. are imported oftentimes, and from my interviews with migrant workers, it’s often the police who are raping sex workers and domestic workers. So you double up your cops, you double up your perpetrators of rape. So that is a policy that’s not helping anyone.

Other policies are more tethered to citizenship. They don’t have soil-based or birthright citizenship in the Gulf. Citizenship passes through the father in the U.A.E. and Kuwait. Citizenship also passes through the father in some of the sending countries, for instance, up until recently Nepal and India. So that means a domestic worker from India or Nepal, five years ago, who goes to the U.A.E., perhaps is raped by her employer or has a boyfriend and gets pregnant and has a baby, that woman is first incarcerated and then deported because as a guest worker she is contractually sterilized, and that baby is stateless because of citizenship laws that are incongruent.

There is a whole generation of people that have been born into this really problematic situation.

PCM: You write about “children of the Emir.” Who are they? 

MAHDAVI: So, “children of the Emir” is kind of the colloquial nomenclature given to a lot of the stateless children. They could be children of migrant workers, children who oftentimes were born in jail; maybe they were left in the Gulf when their mothers were deported. They may have been left there intentionally. It’s not clear, but they’re stateless children who were born in the Gulf. And some of them are growing up in orphanages; others are growing up in the palaces. There was a lot of tacit knowledge about these children and rumors that the Emir or members of the royal family are raising them. But nobody could find the kids. Nobody knew where they were or if it was actually true that they were being raised in the palaces or not. That was rumor until I conducted my research and I was able to confirm that by interviewing these children. And it is true that some are raised in various palaces, given a lot of opportunities, and treated very well.

So now many of them are adults, living and working in the Gulf but still stateless. Recently there’s been a slew of articles that have indicated that some of the Gulf countries, the U.A.E. and Kuwait included, are engaging in deals with the Comoros Islands where, in exchange for money to build roads and bridges, they are getting passports from the Comoros Islands. Initially it was thought that they would just get passports to give to these stateless individuals, but the individuals had to remain in the Gulf. However, a closer look at some of the contracts indicates that some of these stateless individuals who are being given Comoros citizenship actually will have to go to the Comoros Islands, which is a very disconcerting prospect for many stateless individuals in the Gulf. And for people who are from the Comoros Islands, they are now thinking, “Oh, our citizenship is for sale,” to stateless individuals who are suddenly told that they are citizens of a country they’ve never even heard of.

PCM:  You write about something you call “intimate mobility.” What is that?

MAHDAVI: Intimate mobility is kind of a trope that I’m putting forward in the book. Basically, it’s the idea that people do migrate in search of economic mobility and social mobility—which is obvious to a lot of people—but people also migrate in search of intimate mobility, or a way to mobilize their intimate selves. For example, they migrate to get away from their families in search of a way or space to explore their sexualities. Some form new intimate ties through migration. For others, their intimate subjectivities are challenged when one or more members of the family leave. My book is asking us to think about how intimacy can be both activated and challenged in migration.

PCM: What does it mean to mobilize one’s intimate self?

MAHDAVI: There was a young woman who migrated, who left India because her parents wanted her to get married in an arranged marriage. But she left because she saw herself as somebody who would not want to marry a man. She identifies as a lesbian, and so she migrated to Dubai so that she could explore that sexual side of herself. So that’s some of the intimate mobility I’m talking about.

On the flip side, I talk about intimate immobility and I talk about how people’s intimate lives, as in their intimate connections with their children back home or their partners back home, become immobilized when they are in the host country. Their intimate selves are immobilized because they can’t fully express their love for their children or for their partners. And also women who are guest workers or low-skilled workers legally cannot engage in sexual relations so they can’t as easily engage in a relationship.

Pardis Mahdavi is associate professor of anthropology, chair of the Pomona College Anthropology Department and director of the Pacific Basin Institute. Crossing the Gulf is her fourth book.

Moab, Utah by Day & Night
In his new book of landscape photography, Grant Collier ’96 shares the eerie beauty of earth and sky in the canyon country of eastern Utah. EXCERPT: “In my dreams, I occasionally find myself standing atop impossibly large arches or bizarre, almost whimsical pillars of stone. I will wander far too close to the edge, but I have little fear, as I am rapt in awe by the splendor of the scene. Only in the landscape around Moab do these dreams ever meld with reality. The scenery here is so otherworldly that it seems precariously balanced on the cusp of fantasy.”

Walking with Alzheimer’s:
A Thirty Year Journey
This book by physician Shelly Kruse ’76 is both a personal memoir of her mother’s progressing illness and a guidebook for families and caregivers. EXCERPT: “My mother drove everyone crazy. Her favorite activity was calling out, ‘Help me, help me, help me.’ She sounded sincere and in trouble and would continue however long it took for someone to arrive. After the nurse or myself came running to ask, ‘What’s wrong, Jo?’ she would smile sweetly and reply, ‘Nothing.’ Then a few minutes later, she would do the same thing again.”

The Fog Seller
This Sausalito-based, literary mystery from Don Daglow ’74, the creator of the Emmy Award–winning Neverwinter Nights, has won a number of awards. EXCERPT: “Liam the Fog Seller stands atop the round concrete bench in the Powell St. BART station, 50 feet below the streets of San Francisco. He wears a black satin top hat, a tuxedo with tails, baggy black pants, neon yellow T-shirt and a diaphanous pale blue scarf. “Ladies and Gentlemen!” he proclaims, drawing a glare from an old Chinese woman sitting nearby. “The trains that roll through this station will take you away from this place and time!”

Rosa’s Very Big Job
With illustrations by Sarah Vonthron-Laver, this children’s book by Ellen Mayer ’74, about a spunky preschooler named Rosa who enlists her imaginative grandfather to lend a helping hand to her busy mom, is part of Mayer’s new series of “Small Talk Books,” which are designed to demonstrate practical techniques parents can use to facilitate language development in their children. Other titles in the series include Cake Day, with illustrations by Estelle Corke, and a pair of board-books titled Red Socks and A Fish to Feed, both illustrated by Ying-Hwa Hu.

The Legacy of the Moral Tale:
Children’s Literature and the English Novel, 1744–1859
Patrick Fleming ’05 traces the rise of the moral tale in children’s literature and its impact upon such authors as Charles Dickens and Maria Edgeworth. EXCERPT: “By the time he wrote Great Expectations, Dickens had changed his didactic narrative style. Unlike his earlier novels, Great Expectations does not take the form of an example illustrating a moral precept, rewarding the virtuous characters and punishing the villains. If Great Expectations is to succeed in its didactic goals, the experience of reading the novel must accomplish this task.”

Alphabet Fun:
Playing ‘Eye’
In her new children’s book, based on a game she plays with her grandchildren, Alice Ronald ’63 teaches imaginative observation using photographs of found alphabet letters in everyday objects. “When I was little,” she explains, “my father played a game with my brother and me. It was called Playing Eye. We looked for animal shapes in the clouds or slightly different colors and shapes in trees or flowers or rocks. Playing Eye trains young minds to observe and to use the artistic parts of their brains. I am continuing the Playing Eye game with my grandchildren.”

Preparing to Teach Social Studies for Social Justice:
Becoming a Renegade
Nick Henning ’95 and co-authors Ruchi Agarwal-Rangnath and Alison Dover offer a guide to teaching justice-oriented social studies classes within the Common Core State Standards. EXCERPT: “Before the beginning of each school year, every teacher is faced with the important content-focused curricular question, “What will I teach?” Embedded within this question are the corollary questions, “What do I want to teach?” and “What am I supposed to teach?” For most justice-oriented teachers in accountability driven classrooms, the answers to these two questions often do not match…”

Peak Performance:
How Denver’s Peak Academy Is Saving Millions of Dollars, Boosting Morale and Just Maybe Changing the World. (And How You Can Too!)
J.B. Wogan ’06 joins co-author Brian Elms, a founding member of Denver’s Peak Academy, to offer a guide to improving organizational performance. EXCERPT: “It’s the small innovations that can transform a process—and the small questions that can cause you to reexamine the way something’s always been done. When you’re looking for an opportunity to innovate, think small, and ask yourself this question: Is there anything you do just because it’s always been done that way?”