Spring 2002 - Haverford College

Reviews
Bart Campolo ’85
Kingdom Works
SERVANT PUBLICATIONS, 2001
Bart Campolo has devoted his life to Christian service, working as an urban missionary and
directing Mission Year, a program that recruits young people to give a year of their lives to serve
in outreach teams. These outreach teams live and work in inner-city neighborhoods, inspiring
people to love one another and work together as a community. Kingdom Works is a collection
of stories based on the author’s own experiences and those of the students who participate
in Mission Year. Some of the stories feature difficult situations for Mission Year participants,
while others show the obstacles inner-city kids have overcome to become Christians. Not
every story, however, is one ending in success. Campolo does not attempt to hide this fact, and
is not afraid to discuss his own shortcomings as well. Regardless of religious conviction,
Kingdom Works invites the reader to reflect on humanity, and how many people there are
who could use just a little help, a little guidance, and a little love.
– Maya Severns ’04
Richard Lederer ’59 and Gayle Dean
Merriam-Webster’s Word Play Crosswords, Vol. 1
MERRIAM-WEBSTER, 2001
Lederer and Dean have teamed up to produce a collection of word play crossword
puzzles that will keep even the crossword guru busy for hours. The duo determined
that the possibility of wordplay in a crossword puzzle is the most enjoyable and challenging
factor in the game, and so with Lederer’s knack for wordplay and Dean’s perfect
puzzle constructions, 50 brand new puzzles were born. Each puzzle is centered
around a different form of wordplay from homophones to beheadment, puns to anagrams,
and cynical definitions to euphemisms. Lederer is the well-known author of
many linguistic books and articles, including Anguished English, Get Thee to a Punnery,
The Play of Words, and The Word Circus. Dean’s puzzles have appeared in The New York
Times, The Washington Post, and Dell Puzzle magazines.
– M.S.
Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk ’86, eds.
Felicia Hemans:
Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century
PALGRAVE, 2001
This collection of 12 scholarly essays analyzes the poetry of Hemans and its importance to modern
readers. An extensive forward by Marlon B. Ross poses the question “Why Hemans now?” as
the editors try to answer that very question. Divided into three sections, the book examines the
Romantic poet’s work, analyzes her reputation as a domestic feminine poet, and reveals the significance
of Hemans’ work during both her lifetime and our own. Sweet and Melnyk demonstrate
the evolution of the poet’s work from her early works (praised for their seemingly masculine
tones), to a middle period (termed “feminine” and “affectional”), to her later works (which
attempted to free women’s poetry from its traditional confines by turning to religious inspiration).
From feminine to feminist, Sweet, Melnyk, and their colleagues argue that Hemans has
much to teach us about gender, culture, and poetry itself.
– M.S.
10 Haverford Magazine