Kenyon College - CASE

Answering Ovid
recent books by Kenyon authors
Michael Berryhill ’67, The
Trials of Eroy Brown: The Murder Case That
Shook the Texas Prison System (University
of Texas Press). Chair of the journalism
program at Texas Southern University,
Berryhill recounts the story of a Texas
prisoner who killed two prison officials,
pleaded self-defense, and finally won
acquittal—but who remained in jail. “It was
a tragedy that needn’t have happened,”
writes Berryhill, “but it also became a
signal moment in the history of prison civil
rights, revealing everything that can go
wrong in prisons.”
Sarah Blick and Laura D. Gelfand,
editors, Push Me, Pull You: Imaginative and
Emotional Interaction in Late Medieval
and Renaissance Art (Brill). Two volumes
offer essays on “the layered relationships
. . . between devotional objects and those
who interacted with them.” Blick is a
member of Kenyon’s art history faculty.
Simone Dubrovic and Daniela
De Pau, editors, Zoom d’Oltreoceano:
Istantanee sui registi Italiani e sull’Italia
(Vecchiarelli Editore). Dubrovic, of the
Italian faculty, and his co-editor have
assembled interviews with leading Italian
film directors, by Italian scholars working
in the U.S. The aim is to engage these two
perspectives in an exploration of Italian
identity and a changing Italy.
Larry Enright ’72, A King in
a Court of Fools. In this enjoyable novel
of 1950s America, Enright spins out the
adventures of sixth-grader Tom Ryan and
his “gang,” as told by little brother Harry.
Klondike bars, drive-in movies, Isaly’s
dairy store, and
a baseball mitt
signed by Bill
Mazeroski—
they’re all here.
Emily King ’87, Field Tested:
Recruiting, Managing, and Retaining Veterans
(American Management Association). A
seasoned organizational
consultant,
King is also a
veteran—a veteran,
that is, in studying
the nature of
military and civilian
leadership and the
unique challenges
involved in making
the transition from
the military realm to the civilian workplace.
Her book guides civilian managers, human
resource professionals, and other executives
through the process of recruiting veterans—
and retaining them.
Thomas D. LaBaugh ’64,
The Wins of Change. An executive coach,
LaBaugh has seen many careers derailed
by poor “management style.” His book
offers practical advice and proven tools for
avoiding “bad behavior” and developing
leadership.
Victor Rodríguez-Núñez,
Tareas (Renacimiento). Based on trips back
to his native Cuba, this long poem won
Spain’s prestigious Rincón de la Victoria
International Poetry Prize. Tareas (homework)
is about “memory, place, and cultural
identity,” Rodríguez-Núñez, a Spanish faculty
member, has said.
Clara Román-Odio and
Marta Sierra, editors, Transnational
Borderlands in Women’s Global Networks:
The Making of Cultural Resistance (Palgrave
Macmillan). Globalization has posed
challenges to feminism as well as to the
established orders (whether political or
cultural) that feminism has often opposed.
Román-Odio and Sierra, both of Kenyon’s
Spanish faculty, have assembled ten essays
that explore these challenges.
Jessica Savitz ’00, Hunting
Is Painting (Lake Forest College Press).
“Siesta time in sultry summer,” wrote Ovid,
opening one of the poems in Amores. “I lay
relaxed on the divan.”
“ ‘Happy hour’ in harsh winter,” writes
Professor of English Jennifer Clarvoe, “You
hunch, tense, at your desk.”
Clarvoe’s newest poetry collection,
Counter-Amores (University of Chicago
Press), includes a section with twelve poems
that “engage in call-and-response” with the
ancient Roman’s lyrics on love and sex.
Playful, richly suggestive, and finely crafted,
Clarvoe’s poems talk back to Ovid’s, often
twisting situations and reversing roles.
Ovid’s speaker gazes at his lover “On the
loose in a short dress, / long hair parted
and tumbling past the pale neck.” Clarvoe’s
proclaims herself “buttoned up / pinned up,
wound up, just to make you / work hard at
the work at hand . . . .”
Here, and in the other poems in this,
Clarvoe’s second collection, she makes the
work at hand seem effortless.
Reflecting on this
poetry collection,
Savitz has said,
“I feel liberated
thinking about how
poetry relates to our
relationship to the
animal world, to the
roots of things, to
primitive people, to
the first fire—and I
wanted to explore these ideas.” Savitz was
the first winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker
Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize at Lake
Forest College.
Edward Schortman and
Patricia Urban, Networks of Power:
Political Relations in the Late Postclassic
Naco Valley, Honduras (University Press
of Colorado). Based on the extensive
archaeological work done by anthropology
professors Schortman and Urban along with
Kenyon students as part of the Kenyon-
Honduras Program, this book reconstructs
the “fragile hierarchical structure” of Naco
Valley society prior to the Spanish conquest.
Wendy Singer, Independent India
1947-2000 (Pearson). Most histories of India
stop before independence. Singer, of Kenyon’s
history faculty, takes up the story from there,
examining political change and social movements
as well as the arts and culture in this
dynamic world power.
Mark E. Sullivan ’68, The Military
Divorce Handbook (American Bar Association).
This is the second edition of Sullivan’s complete
guide for lawyers handling domestic cases
involving service members, military retirees,
and their families.
Stephen C. Volz, African Teachers
on the Colonial Frontier: Tswana Evangelists
and Their Communities during the Nineteenth
Century (Peter Lang). A history professor at
Kenyon, Volz re-examines the colonial encounter
between Europeans and Africans, focusing
on the role of African converts to Christianity,
often the sons of chiefs who became preachers.
Colonization was not a simple process of
oppression, he argues, but entailed a period of
give-and-take.