Bookshelf
Beneficence: A Novel typography
Beneficence book cover
body copy of Beneficence
Meredith Hall, former faculty
David R. Godine,
Oct. 2020
I

n fictional Alstead, Maine, the Senter family — parents Tup and Doris and children Sonny, Dodie and Beston — live off the 236 acres of good land that’s been in Tup’s family for generations, and in which Tup’s forbearers are buried. In alternating chapters, Doris, Tup and Dodie take turns describing a quiet, steady life of hard work and deep contentment as they run their dairy farm. But it doesn’t take long for Doris to make an assertion that presages a tragedy that will turn the family of five to a family of four: “I have learned that nothing terrible is going to happen here. You have to be careful, to pay attention, and then you just trust that everything is going to be all right. It’s a price you pay for the quiet and beauty of the land.”

Indeed, the heart of “Beneficence,” divided into sections titled “Before,” “During,” “After” and “Now,” is a tragic accident and the manner in which it shapes the surviving Senters. Doris sinks into a nearly paralytic depression that threatens to take the entire family down. Tup escapes into his work, which soon includes a second job that becomes a second life in a nearby town. Dodie struggles to balance her own grief and her new role as the de facto family center, embodying the beneficence — an act of charity or mercy rooted in moral obligation — that gives the novel, Hall’s first, its name.

A former professor in UNH’s writing program and the author of the prize-winning memoir “Without a Map,” Hall writes with restraint and grace about love and loss and how a family heals when a hole is blown through its center.

The Strange Genius of Mr. O book cover
The Strange Genius of Mr. O title
Carolyn Eastman ’97G
UNC Press,
Dec. 2020
W

hen James Ogilvie arrived in America in 1793, he was a deeply ambitious but impoverished teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1817, he had become a bona fide celebrity known simply as Mr. O, counting the nation’s leading politicians and intellectuals among his admirers. And then, like so many meteoric American luminaries afterward, he fell from grace. “The Strange Genius of Mr. O” is at once the biography of a remarkable performer—a gaunt Scottish orator who made appearances wearing a toga — and a story of the United States during the founding era. In her second book, Eastman, an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, examines Ogilvie’s roller-coaster career and the Americans who admired (or hated) him.

Call My Name, Clemson book cover
Call My Name, Clemson
Rhondda Robinson Thomas ’00G, University of Iowa Press, Nov. 2020
Between 1890 and 1915, a predominantly Black crew of South Carolina prisoners built Clemson University on John C. Calhoun’s Fort Hill Plantation; today, Calhoun’s plantation house still sits in the middle of campus. From the establishment of the plantation in 1825 through the integration of Clemson in 1963, Black South Carolinans have played a pivotal role in sustaining the land and the university, yet their stories and contributions are largely omitted from Clemson’s public history. Thomas, Clemson’s Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature, launched a project that helped convince the university to reexamine and reconceptualize the institution’s complex story, from the origins of its land as Cherokee territory to its transformation into an increasingly diverse higher-education institution in the 21st century. “Call My Name, Clemson” recounts that story and provides compelling illumination of the link between the history and legacies of slavery and the rise of higher education in America.
Wild Symphony
Dan Brown with Bob Lord ’99 and Karl Blench ’03
Rodale Kids,
Sept. 2020
D

an Brown became a household name following the 2003 publication of “The DaVinci Code,” an imaginative mystery thriller about the life of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. In “Wild Symphony,” a children’s picture book that follows Maestro Mouse through the trees and across the seas with his musical friends, Brown takes his imagination in a different direction entirely. The story, aimed at children age 3-7, is paired with original music and an application that plays the songs that correspond to specific pages as they are read. Lord, CEO of North Hampton, New Hampshire-based PARMA Recordings, served as producer for the musical aspects of the project and worked on the orchestration alongside Brown and Blench. The symphony is being performed in locations around the world and will have its U.S. debut at the Portsmouth Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in July.

Wild Symphony book cover
Wild Symphony book cover
Wild Symphony
Dan Brown with Bob Lord ’99 and Karl Blench ’03
Rodale Kids,
Sept. 2020
D

an Brown became a household name following the 2003 publication of “The DaVinci Code,” an imaginative mystery thriller about the life of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. In “Wild Symphony,” a children’s picture book that follows Maestro Mouse through the trees and across the seas with his musical friends, Brown takes his imagination in a different direction entirely. The story, aimed at children age 3-7, is paired with original music and an application that plays the songs that correspond to specific pages as they are read. Lord, CEO of North Hampton, New Hampshire-based PARMA Recordings, served as producer for the musical aspects of the project and worked on the orchestration alongside Brown and Blench. The symphony is being performed in locations around the world and will have its U.S. debut at the Portsmouth Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in July.

—Kristin Waterfield Duisberg