Working Through the Past
Labor and Authoritarian Legacies in Comparative Perspective

Coedited by Teri L. Caraway ’89 with Maria Lorena Cook and Stephen Crowley, this collection of essays examines the clash of labor movements and authoritarian governments. ILR Press, 2015 / 296 pages / $27.95

Global Families
A History of Asian International Adoption in America

Catherine Ceniza Choy ’91 looks at the complex history and impact of Asian international adoption in the United States. NYU Press / 244 pages / $25.00

Straights
Heterosexuality in Post-Closeted Culture

James Joseph Dean ’97 explores how straight Americans make sense of their sexual and gendered selves in a time of dramatic change in societal attitudes. NYU Press, 2014 / 320 pages / $26.00

Hitler’s Money Trail
How He Aquired It, How He Squandered It

David Green ’58 fills a gap in 20th-century history by investigating the financing of Adolf Hitler’s dramatic makeover of the German economy and war machine.CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015 / 294 pages / $16.95

Two Women Against the Wind
A Tierre del Fuego Bicycling Adventure

Réanne Hemingway-Douglass ’63 recounts her 300-mile bicycle journey across the southern tip of South America, one of the most remote and beautiful regions on the planet. Cave Art Press, 2015 / 130 pages / $12.95

Faust, Parts I and II

This curatorial version of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s masterwork, intended to bring the tragedy back to the theatre, was translated into English by Douglas Langworthy ’80 and trims the 21-hour work to only six. Richer Resources Publications, 2015 / 247 pages / $18.95

Supporting the Dream
High School-College Partnerships for College and Career Readiness

Charis McGaughy ’91 and Andrea Venezia ’91 offer educators a guide to cross-system partnerships to support college-bound students. Corwin, 2015 / 152 pages / $28.95

Frederick Law Olmstead
Plans and Views of Public Parks

Coedited by Lauren Meier ’79 with Charles E. Beveridge and Irene Mills, this lavishly illustrated volume reveals Olmstead’s design concepts for more than 70 park projects. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015 / 448 pages / $74.95

Driving Hungry
A Memoir

The author of the cult blog “Taxi Gourmet,” Layne Mosler ’96 takes her readers on a delicious tour from the back seat of taxis in Buenos Aires, New York and Berlin. Pantheon, 2015 / 320 pages / $24.95

Southern California Mountain Country
Places John Muir Walked and Places He Would Have Loved to Know

Photographer Glenn Pascall ’64 provides a delightful visual tour of the high country of Southern California, using the words of John Muir to tie the photography together. Sierra Club Angeles Chapter 2015 / 106 pages / $24.99

Interstellar Cinderella

This futuristic retelling of the classic tale, in a new picture book written by Deborah Underwood ’83 and illustrated by Meg Hunt, gives Cinderella a fairy godrobot and an unladylike knack for interstellar mechanics. Chronicle Books, 2015 / 40 pages / $16.99

On Betrayal

In his second book and first novel, Reuben Vaisman-Tzachor ’88 offers an intricately woven tale of betrayal and redemption spanning generations, places, cultures and languages. CBH Books, 2015 / 266 pages / $24.99

Impunity, Human Rights, and Democracy
Chile and Argentina, 1990-2005

Thomas Wright ’63 traces a triumph for human rights—the erosion and collapse of the impunity of former repressors in Chile and Argentina. University of Texas Press, 2014 / 206 pages / $55.00

Ideas With Consequences
The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution

Assistant Professor of Politics Amanda Hollis-Brusky shows how a network of lawyers, judges, scholars and activists worked successfully to push American constitutional law to the right. Oxford University Press, 2015 / 264 pages / $29.95

From Trafficking to Terror
Constructing a Global Social Problem

Associate Professor of Anthropology Pardis Mahdavi challenges the anti-Muslim panic surrounding two socially constructed conflicts, the “war on terrorism” and the “war on trafficking.” Routledge, 2013 / 106 pages / $18.42

Copyright © 2013 by Aaron Becker. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA.

As a boy growing up in Baltimore, Aaron Becker ’96 knew a trick: when he drew pictures, he became all-powerful. “Drawing was a way of making sense of what life was about,” Becker says, “On a piece of paper I could make all the rules that I wanted to.”

 This year, with the release of his debut children’s book, Journey, Becker has created a world that invites its audience to follow the spirit of that child of years ago. Journey features a girl who uses a magical pen to slip from her distracted family to a rich world of her own timbre. With not a single word of text, Journey unfolds over 40 pages of captivating illustrations, detailed but not busy.

The book has won widespread positive notice. Amazon included it among its “Best Books” for young readers in summer 2013 while the New York Times called it a “masterwork.” School Library Journal placed the book on its list of contenders for the Caldecott Medal, the most notable award for picture books.

Comparisons to the 1955 classic Harold and the Purple Crayon have been numerous. People Magazine, for example, called Becker’s work “a descendant” of the earlier book. But Becker says that it was not until he completed Journey that he sat down with a copy of its predecessor—and was startled by the similarities. After mentioning a few of the plot parallels, he jokes, “Obviously I read the book when I was 3 and it entered my subconscious.” Becker feels he owes a greater debt to someone like Bill Watterson, creator of the popular comic Calvin and Hobbes, both for the quality of Watterson’s art and for his ability to authentically evoke childhood.

Becker eyed the possibility of writing a children’s book for years, but his path toward the goal was indirect. “I never had an art class,” he says of his K-12 education. He did briefly try one out in sixth grade, but found the approach was rote. Having drifted away in his teens from his artistic interests, Becker arrived at Pomona with a plan to study the Japanese language and Pacific Rim politics. When that desire dimmed, he considered designing his own major before settling on media studies, a newly offered concentration. His
coursework led him to renew his interest in the visual arts.

After Pomona, Becker settled in the San Francisco Bay Area with a job in web design. Still, he felt unready to sink into a desk job for the long haul. He left his position to travel and work with kids as a camp counselor. Next he decided on a further leap of faith: he would invest in classes at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., a move that paid off when it led to a job as a concept designer in the film industry. His work on such films as The Polar Express and Cars offered him artistic challenges and the opportunity to design for a children’s audience.

The moniker “kid at heart” is an apt one for Becker, who describes himself as a happy-go-lucky child who became a young man determined not to take life too seriously. Friend Aaron Rhodes PI ’97 says, “Aaron’s always had a playful side, and a very creative, active imagination. He’s never lost the ability to connect with his inner child.”

Becker has never been one to let life grow too routine. He and wife Darci Palmquist ’96 moved from California to the town of Amherst, Mass., in their mid-30s with plans to buy a house and start a family while telecommuting to their jobs back on the West Coast. When his company folded, Becker found himself the father of an infant daughter, living where he wanted to be—but with no job. That’s when he turned to children’s literature. It was a natural fit.

“Children are not jaded,” he says. “I’m not a jaded person. I don’t like cynicism.” He goes on: “I get that part of being a human being, when you’re young. The world can be scary, and it can be adventurous, but it’s something to be explored and something to find some wonder inside of. I think that wonder and enchantment are very much things that belong to the realm of childhood and children’s books. It’s its own emotion—wonder.”

In an online posting, he recounts how reading to his daughter reminded him of the comfort he gained as a boy from the pages of a book. It was not so much the story, but the color of the pages, the characteristic hue in the pictures. “Certainly, the experience of a good children’s book is far more interesting for kids than for adults who quickly assign meaning, judgment and structure,” he writes. “As kids, it can all just float and mingle.”

Becker is pleased with his publisher’s decision not to pursue an electronic version of the book. “Even on a big computer screen you don’t really see everything that’s going on,” he says. “The book is meant to be held. The other thing a physical book does is it brings the child toward the book as opposed to the book coming toward the child.”

Becker is far from a technophobe, however. He makes frequent use of software to create digital images of three-dimensional scenes that can be rotated and manipulated like a physical model before being brought to life by hand with watercolor and ink.

Journey, which landed on the New York Times bestseller list for picture books, is the first installment in a three-part collection. The second book, an extension of the dreamscape developed in the first, is completed and due out next year. Another project in the works features new characters set amid a “pirates and knights” tableau. Determined to make this stick—“failure is not an option,” he says, in a rare gritty departure from his usual buoyant manner—Becker is also learning the ropes of marketing and promotion. He secured a spot as the “Artist of the Month” at the Amherst gallery Hope and Feathers this fall. Becker is “elated” at the warm welcome his work has received. It’s been a journey in itself, one that began with a boy and pages of drawings, and a drive to map his own route. “I think that’s the lure for learning how to draw better,” he says. “I don’t want to learn how to draw a house, I want to draw the house I want to live in.”

Though it is set in Queens, Pomona College Professor Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, Dissident Gardens, contains a fun little nod to his SoCal college home. Deep in the novel about “three generations of All-American radicals,” as Lethem is unspooling a bit of background about purist music teacher Harris Murphy, we learn that Murphy was part of the short-lived duo which contributed one song to the anthology LP Live at the Sagehen Cafe.

For those who are decades away from campus life, the Sagehen Cafe is the sitdown eatery in the Smith Campus Center, adjacent to the Coop Fountain.

Lethem says it is the only Pomona allusion he dropped into the book (available Sept. 10), but he did pass along the news that Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Bleeding Edge (available Sept. 17), also set in New York, contains a brief reference to Pomona College in its first few pages.

Perhaps it is no surprise that Pomona was recently named to Flavorwire’s list of the most literary colleges …

More from the magazine about Jonathan Lethem, Pomona’s Roy Edward Disney ’51 Professor in Creative Writing.

During his Pomona College days, Dan Hickstein ’06 landed a prestigious Churchill Scholarship to study at Cambridge (where he earned his master’s in physics), co-authored articles for such publications as the Journal of the American Chemical Society and  completed two internships at the National Institutes of Health.

But Hickstein also knows how to let off some steam in the great outdoors, and he recently took a year off from pursuing his Ph.D. in chemical physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder to write The Mountain Biker’s Guide to Colorado, earning rave reviews on amazon. The result: 367 pages chock full o’ trail details and ratings, maps, photos and even tidbits on bike shops and places to eat from Fort Collins to Aspen.

As Hickstein told Colorado Daily:

“A week at a time I’d drive out to some part of Colorado and ride all the trails — and ride them all with a GPS. I wanted to have really good maps in the book. I would ride with digital camera and each time I got to a turn I’d make a point on the GPS and record the instructions as a little movie on my  camera. I spent hours going through the videos and GPS tracks. I really tried to be out there most every day, rain or shine, trying to get the trails ridden and get the research done.”

When Susan Beilby Magee ’66 was 6 years old, she posed for a portrait by Kalman Aron, a Holocaust survivor and fine artist who had come to Los Angeles after World War II and was barely eking out a living.