Political and Personal

Hillary Rodham Clinton ’69
Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty
Simon & Schuster
336 pages, $29.99

In her latest memoir, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ’69 reflects on both the political (her operation to evacuate Afghan women to safety in the harrowing final days of America’s longest war, her loss to Donald Trump in 2016) and the personal (her joy in playing the New York Times Spelling Bee game side-by-side with former President Bill Clinton in the morning, though he always wins). Throughout, she emphasizes her commitment to advancing the freedom of women around the world.

Sound and Vision

Nikki A. Greene, faculty
Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and the Sonic in Contemporary Black Art
Duke University Press
288 pages, $27.95

Associate Professor of Art Nikki A. Greene employs her concept of “visual aesthetic musicality” to interpret contemporary Black visual art, exploring the musical genres of jazz, rap, funk, and rumba within art historiography. Considering the multimedia work of Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Greene traces the intersection of the visual’s sonic possibilities with the Black body’s physical, representational, and metaphorical use in art. She demonstrates that these artists use sound to make themselves legible, recognizable, and audible.

Embodied Fables

Emilie Menzel ’14
The Girl Who Became a Rabbit
Hub City Press
84 pages, $16

This book-length poem by Emilie Menzel ’14 explores how the body carries and shapes grief and considers what it means to tell a story. She has described thinking about her writing environment as a theatrical scene setting—as if her physical surroundings are a theater in which the play of her life is mounted. Menzel, a librarian at Duke University, employs the language of fables, fairy tale, and myth as they cross genre boundaries between poetry and prose.

How Her Garden Grows

Jacqueline Briggs Martin ’66
Farmer Eva’s Green Garden Life
Readers to Eaters
32 pages, $19.95

The fifth volume in the “Food Heroes” series by children’s author Jacqueline Briggs Martin ’66 celebrates Eva Coifman Sommaripa ’63, a 2014 Alumnae Achievement Award recipient. Sommaripa founded Eva’s Garden in South Dartmouth, Mass., some 50 years ago, in a place “so close to the ocean, she can smell the sea, so close to woods, she can talk to trees.” Sommaripa, who continues to grow culinary herbs, greens, and flowers on 22 acres there, wrote the afterword to this charming and informative book.