By Laurie Gunst '73, '74G
Soho Press, 2005

Laurie Gunst '73, '74G was born in 1949 into a prominent Jewish family in Richmond, Va., and into a life full of contradiction and conflict. Her father parlayed his inheritance into a business manufacturing products for hunting dogs. Gunst's mother was a passionate liberal who fought vociferously against the segregation policies of the time, and with her husband about their many political differences. Gunst relates a dinnertime squabble in which her mother, who has just finished reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, takes her husband to task for using pesticides in his dog products. Gunst's uncle, her father's business partner, sarcastically notes that Gunst's mother is enjoying her meal while biting the hand that feeds her.

The person Gunst went to for comfort and shelter from family storms was Rhoda Lloyd, a descendant of slaves who cared for four generations of Gunst's family. Much of this memoir is in homage to Lloyd, for "the ties that bound me to Rhoda," Gunst asserts, "were indeed not entirely of this world." Family legend has it that Lloyd "worked roots" on Gunst when she was a baby, binding them together for life and beyond; Gunst believes the legend, and is visited by Lloyd's spirit several times throughout the book.

Because her black nanny felt most like family and because her Jewishness further separated her from the surrounding Episcopalian culture, Gunst grows up not quite knowing where she fits and develops what she calls an "off-white sensibility." The flea-collar heiress embarks on a far-ranging intellectual and emotional journey, taking the long way back to the South via UNH, Harvard and Jamaica; along the way, she gets married a couple of times, develops a drug habit, and writes a book about Jamaican gangs in the United States.

The most important research she conducts, though, is genealogical—and in delving into both her family's and Lloyd's ancestry, she learns some shocking things that deepen the contradictions she has inherited. "Some of our roads lead to sanctuary, and some to shame. They are so often the same road," she writes. And we learn that some of the most absorbing and haunting mysteries may lie in our own past, if we only have the courage to confront them.

By Alexander Parsons
Doubleday, 2005

American novels about the Second World War fit roughly into two categories: realistic (Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead) and absurdist (Joseph Heller's Catch-22). UNH assistant professor of English Alexander Parsons' haunting and moving second novel, about the destruction of a New Mexican family at the dawn of the nuclear age, is decidedly realistic. But the war scenes are tempered by Parsons' luminous descriptions of landscape—both the desert badlands of New Mexico and the fetid jungle of the Philippines—and the latter are ultimately what remain in the reader's mind.

Parsons' narrative shifts between two battle-fields: the Strickland family ranch that brothers Baylis and Ross are fighting to keep from the government's nuclear testing; and the Philippines, where Ross's 18-year-old son, Jack, is being held as a prisoner of war.

In New Mexico, eviction from the ranch causes rifts in the family, and the brothers' wives and daughters are drawn to a nearby town. Meanwhile, Jack is enduring a different hell as one of the 70,000 men who were forced on the Bataan Death March: "...there was no reading what surrounded him—no orderly progression of victory and defeat, no high-minded goal. There was only the motion of one moment to the next and the demands of survival."

The Stricklands are mistakenly sent word that Jack has been killed, and the family disintegrates as the government moves machinery onto their property. But a world away, Jack is only half-dead, and his memories of the ranch are all that keep him moving. The narrative tension of whether Jack will ever make it back compels the reader to march on, too, with the bitter knowledge that the home Jack so longs for no longer exists.

"One incandescent dusky world is all there is," reads the epigraph from Edward Hirsch, but the radiance of Parsons' prose creates another, light-filled world in the mind of his reader.

Overviews: Books
In Good Faith, by Joe Lapchick '61G, May River Press, 2005. Lapchick's first novel exposes the power-hungry elite's cabals on an upstate New York school board.
Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861, by John Ernest, University of North Carolina Press, 2004. See at amazon.com Ernest, UNH professor of English, argues effectively for a serious assessment of texts by African American historians, who, despite a racist cultural climate, promoted the development of a unified African American community.
Killing Neptune's Daughter, by Randall Peffer '73G, Intrigue Press, 2004. See at amazon.com Peffer's first novel is a racy murder mystery that uncovers the wild past of a rock star's wife, who is found dead in a Greenwich Village cemetery.
Constance Fenimore Woolson, Selected Stories and Travel Narratives, edited by Sharon L. Dean '65, '69G and Victoria Brehm, University of Tennessee Press, 2004. See at amazon.com This anthology is the first to collect Constance Woolson's different genres, and it showcases the wit and perception of this prolific and much overlooked 19th-century writer.
Sneak Attack! Survival in the Aftermath, by Clifford J. Moody '58, iUniverse, 2004. See at amazon.com Set in the mountains of New England, this well-wrought thriller imagines life in the aftermath of a catastrophic terrorist attack.
Music Judy Pancoast: Judy's Tune Room, Mamanook Music, 2005. See at amazon.com A collection of witty children's songs written and performed by the sunny-voiced Pancoast '77G.
Anita Brown Orchestra: 27 East, Lasheda Records, 2003. See at amazon.com For her lovely debut CD, jazz composer/arranger/ conductor/singer Anita Brown '84 was inspired in part by the sea off Montauk, N.Y.
Dreadnaught: Live at Mojo, Comet Records, 2004. See at amazon.com Propelled by the super-sized bass work of Bob Lord '98, this collection of experimental rock is a wild ride.
High Range: Around One Mic, Rural Root Records, 2005. The newest CD of this energetic bluegrass band (with Todd Jones '92 and Steve Roy '01) contains some terrific traditional tunes, including a hot and humorous "That's Alright (Mama)."
Also of Note... The Exeter-Squamscott, River of Many Uses, by Olive Richards Tardiff '37, Peter E. Randall Publisher, reprinted 2004. See at amazon.com
Exploitation: What It Is and Why It's Wrong, by UNH associate professor of philosophy Ruth J. Sample, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. See at amazon.com
Industry Research Using the Economic Census: How to Find It, How to Use It, by Jennifer Boettcher '87 and Leonard Gaines, Greenwood Press, 2004. See at amazon.com

Anne Downey '95G, a freelance writer who lives in Eliot, Maine, received her Ph.D. in English from UNH.