In this issue’s batch of recently published alumni-penned books, radical women, matriarchal women, and mysteriously ill women share a page with the mafiosos of Trumpland, the evils of the Ozarks, and the souls of Civil War soldiers. Below are excerpts from each. 

The Lady’s Handbook For Her Mysterious Illness: A Memoir
By Sarah Ramey ’99
Doubleday, 2020

“I have become a well-known woman with a mysterious illness (WOMI). I am sure you know a WOMI already. A spouse, a little sister, a cousin. The signs are unmistakable. She is exhausted, gluten-free, and likely in possession of at least one autoimmune disease. She is allergic to (everything), aching from tip to toe, digestively impaired, and on uneasy terms with her reproductive system. She is addled, embarrassed, ashamed, and inflamed. She is one of us.”

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Daring To Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
By Alice Echols ’69 
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

“In the fall of 1967 small groups of radical women began meeting in the United States to discuss the problem of male supremacy. At that time the majority were committed to organizing a women’s movement within the larger radical Movement. Indeed, most early women’s liberation groups were dominated by ‘politicos’ who attributed women’s oppression to capitalism, whose primary loyalty was to the left, and who longed for the imprimatur of the ‘invisible audience’ of male leftists. ‘Feminists,’ or radical feminists, who opposed the subordination of women’s liberation to the left and for whom male supremacy was not a mere epiphenomenon of capitalism, were an embattled minority in the movement’s infancy.”
 

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The Children of the Creek Trilogy: Wellspring of Evil, Stream of Life, and Life is a River
By Todd Parnell ’65
Pen-L Publishing, 2020

“Few alive could remember the Big Pig Flood which had devastated both the village and the creek, or the brutal antics of the yellow-eyed Demon Lady and her followers directed toward the extermination of all Hardlyvillains. The children of the creek had only heard the stories and had written them off as dementia-induced meanderings among a select set of antique Hardlyvillains. The tales were simply too tall to be true.”
 

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Remembering the Civil War: The Conflict as Told by Those Who Lived It
By Charles D. Kupfer ’80 and Michael L. Barton
Globe Pequot / Lyons Press, 2019

“Most Civil War soldiers wrote letters home, many kept diaries, and some wrote memoirs after the war was over. Civil War memoirs thence became an American literary genre. They are an account of the most momentous events in a man’s life, and a record of his part in his country’s history. They cover duty, boredom, fatigue, distance from home, and yearning for family. They detail the soldier’s ground-level view of tactics and strategy, his admiration for his superiors or else disdain, his fellowship with comrades or else rebuke. Memoirs tell about his encounters with the enemy and the enemy’s country. The reveal the shock of gore, the gasp of death, and the turns between bravery and fear.”
 

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Grandmothering: Building Strong Ties with Every Generation
By Keen Stassen Berger ’59 
Rowman & Littlefield, 2019

“Grandmothers make the gears of a family machine mesh and move, clicking together in harmony. They help babies sleep, toddlers eat, preschoolers read, school children study, adolescents find themselves, and young adults become happy and successful. Smooth clicks are not automatic: some grandmothers are uninvolved, others destructive. But most older women are wiser and happier than their younger selves, more sanguine, more patient, and more willing to sacrifice for the younger generation.”
 

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Sinking In The Swamp: How Trump’s Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington
By Asawin Suebsaeng ’07
and Lachlan Markay
Viking, 2020

“It was both an absurd spectacle and a perfect encapsulation of our escapades as journalists in the Trump era in Washington, D.C. We were surrounded by the gilded splendor that is the Trump hotel lobby, flanked by a crew of mobbed-up-in-Trumpworld luminaries with whom we’d been having farcically overpriced cocktails and very amiable conversation just a few minutes earlier. And suddenly the whole thing was degenerating into a screaming match, with each party looking increasingly likely to throw a punch to the teeth. … We were there mingling with people with whom we’d become friendly, even though they think we’re part of a borderline-treasonous disinformation apparatus and we think they’re part of an incompetent graft machine. And in true Trumpian fashion, though tempers flared, threats were made, and heated words were exchanged, in the end not much was accomplished.”