This fascinating novel explores a world rarely revealed: a public school classroom for middle-school students with diverse disabilities ranging from blindness to severe retardation. Lou, their caring teacher, goes the extra mile for "his kids," and in doing so helps the rest of the school learn that every student deserves respect and a chance to learn. Meanwhile, Lou's personal life takes a strange turn when he begins an unconventional affair with a fellow teacher. Beautifully written, uproariously funny and extremely moving.

Michael Bisceglia ’72G, is an educator with over 25 years of experience in the fields of teaching and administration, six of which were spent teaching students with diverse disabilities. Active in communications and public relations, Mr. Bisceglia is the author of numerous books and articles. Among his many degrees are a bachelor's in English from McPherson College, a master's in Urban Education from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a certificate of training from the University of Notre Dame. He currently resides in New Hampshire.

Tequila has come a long way from the hangover-inducing protocol of salt, shot, lime, repeat. With tequila consumption on the rise, people are drinking tequila on more occasions, experimenting with new labels, and learning to appreciate the nuances of flavor. TEQUILA is an all-in-one reference for the top-shelf tequila connoisseur, with chapters on the history and lore of tequila, insight into how tequila is made, and a drinker's guide to the three types of tequila: blanco, reposado, and añejo. Cocktail recipes from the country's top bartenders and recipes for tequila-infused sides, mains, and desserts reveal new and innovative ways to enjoy tequila, completing this sleek and complete handbook.

Joanne (Tenanes) Weir ’75 is the star of the PBS series Joanne Weir’s Cooking Class. She has published recipes from her latest 26-episode season (along with great photos and wine pairings) in Wine Country Cooking (Ten Speed Press, 2008). Her next book, due in May, is Tequila: A Guide to Types, Flights, Cocktails and Bites (Ten Speed Press, 2009). Joanne says, “I had so much fun researching and writing this reference book—tasting all the different brands of tequila, visiting Mexico to see the agave fields and learn how tequila is produced, meeting the bartenders and mixologists around the country who contributed cocktails, and of course coming up with my own cocktails and recipes!” Joanne holds cooking classes in California, Italy, and other sumptuous locales. For more information, visit joanneweir.com.

Even after 150 years, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is irresistibly compelling. But how can this idea—in which competition prevails—be consistent with all that we know about the thoroughly cooperative nature of life at the genetic and cellular level? This book reconciles these discrepancies.

Assembling a set of general principles, authors Kenneth Weiss and Anne Buchanan build a comprehensive, unified theory that applies on the evolutionary time scale but also on the developmental and ecological scales where daily life is lived, and cells, organisms, and species interact. They present this story through a diversity of examples spanning the fundamental challenges that organisms have faced throughout the history of life. This shows that even very complex traits can be constructed simply, based on these principles. Although relentless competitive natural selection is widely assumed to be the primary mover of evolutionary change, The Mermaid’s Tale shows how life more generally works on the basis of cooperation. The book reveals that the focus on competition and cooperation is largely an artifact of the compression of time—a distortion that dissolves when the nature and origins of adapted life are viewed primarily from developmental and evolutionary time scales.

Anne V. Buchanan ’77 co-wrote a book on evolution, The Mermaid’s Tale: Four Billion Years of Cooperation in the Making of Living Things (Harvard University Press, 2009), with her husband, Kenneth M. Weiss. She took her first anthropology class at UMass Amherst the summer after her junior year in high school, and is now a senior research scientist in anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. Anne writes, “I still remember vividly the description of evolution as it was taught then. It took me a while to get back to the subject, but back I am. We thought of the title when we were on sabbatical in Cambridge (UK), and we were walking into town to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the lawn of one of the colleges. We had just written a chapter about why evolutionary principles make creatures like mermaids so unlikely, and probably the combination of the fanciful play we were about to see and this place steeped with so much history inspired us.”

The secret is out: cooler-zone gardeners are discovering that with a little wintertime TLC, plants that have long been considered "annuals" can thrive for many years. These plants — including geraniums, gladioli, dahlias, begonias, rosemary, lavender, and even impatiens — aren't annuals at all. Rather, they are tender perennials. Not hardy enough to survive winter on their own, they can be moved indoors during the cold months, and then returned to the garden in spring. Many are even more beautiful in their second and third years!

Bulbs in the Basement, Geraniums on the Windowsill by Alice McGowan and Brian McGowan, is the first comprehensive resource on the care and maintenance of tender plants. In this zone-defying guide, readers will find simple techniques for overwintering, followed by 160 detailed plant profiles. Profiles include individualized advice for overwintering and indoor care. The growing advice is clear and time tested; the authors themselves spent decades introducing and nurturing tender plants at the renowned Blue Meadow Farm Nursery in Montague, Massachusetts.

From familiar snapdragons to the more exotic bush morning glory (a woody vine whose fragrant white blooms will cheer any indoor setting in late winter), tender perennials are appealing to a wide and diverse audience — perennial pros looking to expand their plant palettes, container gardeners hoping to create a more colorful indoor landscape during the cold months, and thrifty gardeners of all skill levels. Both inspirational and practical, Bulbs in the Basement, Geraniums on the Windowsill will revolutionize perennial gardening, allowing enthusiastic growers in any location to enjoy their favorite plants year after year.

Brian McGowan ’80 writes, “After nearly two decades operating a nursery in Montague with my wife, Alice, we decided to write a book for gardeners. One of our nursery’s specialties was tender perennials, and Bulbs in the Basement, Geraniums on the Windowsill (Storey Publishing, 2008) is a guide to the storage and culture of 165 tender perennial plants.” Brian now works in Orleans for a firm that specializes in coastal bank restoration and invasive plant management. He writes, “To some extent, Cape Cod is the canary in the coal mine, as its fragile ecosystem so readily reflects the negative impacts that people have on the environment.”

From Publishers Weekly
In the exemplary title story of Brady's third collection of closely observed San Fran-centric stories (following Curled in the Bed of Love), a relationship both playful and tense is revealed subtly by everyday stresses to be a charged power struggle between privileged equestrian college dropout Annie and Clay, the stable manager. Whether carried away by their horses or their hearts, Brady's characters fixate on the unpredictable, teetering between knowing what was ahead and refusing to know. Buffeted by outside forces (illnesses, busted pipes, financial straits and death), Brady's characters often waver and fall: in The Dazzling World, a woman who lost her last boyfriend to suicide can't make sense of her current relationship; Slender Little Thing follows a teenage mom, who struggles by day with the rich children she nannies and by night with her own daughter; a businessman leaves his family to work in a church-run homeless shelter in Those Who Walk During the Day. Excepting the self-involved protagonist of Wicked Stepmother, Brady's leads are likable and idiosyncratic, and her insight into their unstable lives will keep readers swaying between a sense of comfort and loss. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Catherine Brady ’81G has published her third short-story collection, The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories (University of Nevada Press, 2009), which includes 11 stories set in and around San Francisco. She says, “I’m still trying to get away with writing a story that doesn’t fit neatly into the box, even though I know that everything astonishing and heartrending in a story depends on that box being there.” Brady’s work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco.

A young girl is given a golden key to a house. “In the house / burns a light. / In that light / rests a bed. On that bed / waits a book.” And so continues this simple text, which describes sometimes fantastical pleasures as a bird from the book spirits the child through the starry sky to a wise-faced moon. The cumulative tale is a familiar picture-book conceit; the difference in success comes from the artwork. Here, the art is spectacular. Executed in scratchboard decorated in droplets of gold, Krommes’ illustrations expand on Swanson’s reassuring story (inspired by a nursery rhyme that begins, “This is the key of the kingdom”) to create a world as cozy inside the house as it is majestic outside. The two-page spread depicting rolling meadows beyond the home, dotted with trees, houses, barns, and road meeting the inky sky, is mesmerizing. The use of gold is especially effective, coloring the stars and a knowing moon, all surrounded with black-and-white halos. A beautiful piece of bookmaking that will delight both parents and children. Preschool-Kindergarten. --Ilene Cooper

Beth Krommes ’80G won the 2009 Caldecott Medal, given to the illustrator of the year’s best picture book, for The House in the Night (Houghton Mifflin, 2008) written by Susan Marie Swanson. Her illustrations were done using scratchboard, which she likes for its fi ne line work, and watercolor. “I have worked as a public school art teacher, a manager of a fine handcraft shop, and an art director for a computer magazine. I have been working as a full-time freelance illustrator since 1989, focusing on children’s book illustrations for the last 10 years,” Krommes says. She lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, with her husband and two daughters. Visit www.bethkrommes.com to see more of Beth’s work.

From Publishers Weekly
The language of clinical psychology can convey detachment—or, as in this starstruck study of the 42nd president, gushing admiration. Deploying his trademark diagnosis, Johns Hopkins psychologist Gartner (The Hypomanic Edge) pegs Clinton as a hypomanic personality with boundless energy and charisma, but prone to impulsive appetites and lapses in judgment. The author attributes much of Clinton's psyche to genes (many inherited, he argues, from an illegitimate father he tentatively identifies), but he also embraces Freudian notions: Clinton's relationships with women, Gartner contends, follow a pattern established in childhood when he felt torn between his bossy, Hillaryesque grandmother and his lushly erotic, Monica-like mother. Gartner sometimes overreaches—We can almost see Clinton going through the stages of his relationship with [stepfather] Roger in his approach to Bosnia—but his analysis of Clinton's political talents, right down to his mesmerizing facial expressions while on receiving lines, yields intriguing insights. The author himself unabashedly surrenders to Clinton's magnetism and genius intellect: [H]e has been walking in the footsteps of moral giants, Gartner rhapsodizes about Clinton during an AIDS-relief junket, comparing him to Jesus as a healer of the sick. Nevertheless, Gartner reminds us why this complex figure still fascinates. 17 pages of b&w photos. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

John Gartner ’82G, ’85G, a psychologist on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, wrote In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography (St. Martin’s Press, 2008). Gartner’s expertise is treating patients with hypomanic temperaments, which can lead to success as well as issues with impulse control and judgment. His book uncovers new information about Clinton’s mother, revelations surrounding Clinton’s birth, and the effects of having an abusive alcoholic stepfather. The American Library Association’s Booklist named it one of the best books of 2008.

From Publishers Weekly
Lott picks up the themes that dominated his 1999 Oprah Book Club Selection, Jewel, in this multigenerational saga. In 1927, 14-year-old Earl Holmes runs away from his unhappy home in Hawkins, Tex., for Hollywood to become a movie star. But poor bumpkin Earl has better luck in marrying big band singer Saralee Kennedy than he ever does building his acting résumé. Earl and Saralee's only child, Joan, grows up to resent her father's dogged pursuit of a practically nonexistent film career at the expense of his family's happiness. She has plenty of her own residual problems by the time she has her son, Brad, who joins the navy and returns in 1980 to live with his grandparents, Earl and Saralee, in L.A. Estranged from Joan, Brad takes it upon himself to heal the family's rifts. The colorful off-camera anecdotes of filmmaking are gems, particularly how Earl lands a bit role in a forgettable Three Stooges skit. This chronicle of the Holmes family is sluggish in spots, but Lott's handling of characters and domestic conflicts picks up for readers who stick through the first act. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Bret Lott ’84G lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and has published his 12th book, Ancient Highway (Random House, 2008). Lott drew upon his own family history to write this story. A former editor of The Southern Review, his writing has appeared in The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, Story, and other top literary journals. His novel Jewel was a 1999 Oprah’s Book Club pick.

For 100 years or more, the best salespeople have been slowly developing and cataloging best practices for their own use. Nowhere has all of this information been assembled at once until now. With the publication of Sales Encyclopedia, salespeople and sales managers have a single-volume source for information on every facet of the sales process. In 47 chapters and 678 pages, six authors with a combined 143 years of sales experience guide both new and experienced sales staff through every step of selling. In a clear, easy-to-digest style, the six authors provide a comprehensive guide that will enable new salespeople to gain the equivalent of years of experience, and remind veteran sellers of why their game stays sharp.

John Chapin ’87, a consultant, speaker, and sales trainer, co-wrote Sales Encyclopedia: The Most Comprehensive How To Guide on Selling (Eagle View Publishing, 2009). Visit completeselling.com for more on John.

In the aftermath of a tragedy Jack Walker leaves his forty acre homestead and takes up residence in the small village of Cooper Hill, Vermont. In Cooper Hill, the tidy white homes appear tranquil from a distance and conceal the heartbroken family of a teenage runaway, a bitter postmistress, a woman from the city trying to live out a fantasy of country living, a young couple attempting to raise the perfect child, an entrepreneurial couple on the verge of financial collapse, a cat with attitude, and an otherwise peaceful dog who terrorizes the paper boy.

In the course of a year, set against community rituals that bind them together, and the war in Iraq that turns old friends against one another, Jack Walker and the people of Cooper Hill strive to achieve some measure of happiness while they deal with diminishing expectations.

Lee Wicks ’87 founded Singing Dog Press to publish her novel Some Measure of Happiness and to help emerging writers, small bookstores, and local nonprofits. She’s donating profits from her book ($750 so far) to the Dakin Pioneer Valley Humane Society. Wicks writes: “After years of nonfiction writing for newspapers, NPR, and Salon.com, this is exciting. I am hoping book lovers and dog lovers will unite to support this idea.” Lee lives in Montague, and says she writes “when my house is dirty and the garden needs care, when I could be spending time with my family, and when the laundry pile begins to slide off the top of the dryer.”

"But Mommy, Why?" is a book which attempts to answer questions about the coming to America by Africans - their travels and experiences as told to a young child by her parent as she reads.

Joan Cottman ’88G, dedicated her first book to her daughter, Alexis. But Mommy, Why? A Trip Thru History and Foods (Legwork Team Publishing, 2008) explains to children why we eat the foods we do. Cottman is an adjunct professor at Hofstra University, Adelphi University, and St. John’s University.

The only text available that presents white-collar crime to undergraduates from both theoretical and practical / professional perspectives, in a unique text-adapted readings format

Hank “HJ” Brightman ’90 is a professor in the war gaming department of the U.S. Naval War College. His textbook, Today’s White- Collar Crime: Legal, Investigative, & Theoretical Perspectives (Routledge, 2009), is an analysis of government corruption, corporate wrongdoing, fraud and its links to terrorism, and the legal aspects of abuse-of-trust crimes. Hank spent 15 years in law enforcement, investigative, and intelligence analysis positions with the Department of the Interior, the Secret Service, and the Navy and eight years as a professor and chair of the criminal justice department at St. Peter’s College.

PAGANISM / HEALING A Druid's Herbal of Sacred Tree Medicine The Druids used the ancient Ogham Tree Alphabet to work magic and honor the dead, surrounding each letter with medicinal and spiritual lore. Poets and bards created a secret sign language to describe the letters, each of which is named for a tree or a plant. For centuries this language was only transmitted orally in order to protect its secrets. Combining her extensive herbal knowledge and keen poetic insight, Ellen Evert Hopman delves deeply into the historic allusions and associations of each of the twenty letters of the Ogham Tree Alphabet. She also examines Native American healing methods for possible clues to the way ancient Europeans may have used these trees as healing agents. Druidic spiritual practices, herbal healing remedies, and plant lore are included for each tree in the alphabet as well as how each is used in traditional rituals such as the Celtic Fire Festivals and other celebrations. Hopman also includes a pronunciation guide for the oghams and information on the divinatory meanings associated with each tree. ELLEN EVERT HOPMAN is a Druid priestess, master herbalist, and lay homeopath who holds an M.Ed. in mental health counseling. She is a founding member and co-chief of the Order of the White Oak (Ord na Darach Gile), serves on the Grey Council of Mages and Sages, and is a professor of Wortcunning at the Grey School of Wizardry. She is the author of A Druid's Herbal for the Sacred Earth Year; Walking the World in Wonder; Tree Medicine, Tree Magic; and Priestess of the Forest. She lives in Massachusetts.

Ellen Hopman ’90 published two books last year: Her first novel, Priestess of the Forest: A Druid Journey (Llewellyn Publications, 2008) is available as a Kindle book. A Druid’s Herbal of Sacred Tree Medicine (Destiny Books, 2008) is a nonfiction work about Celtic spirituality and trees. She teaches herb classes in the Amherst area and lectures widely in the United States and Europe on Celtic spirituality.

Andrew McNabb’s ethereal debut story collection, The Body of This, is a gathering of tough, close, and spiritual stories illuminating the complex architecture of people and their places.

With writing as raw as it is powerful, McNabb’s stories will by turns shock and delight: a man gives up a winning lottery ticket to keep his wandering girlfriend; a Sudanese refugee discovers the simple beauty of a new way home; a mother sees her true self reflected in her newborn son’s albinism; an awkward seminarian seeks a wife during a single night out. One thing is certain, these are unusual stories that will entertain and, as good fiction often does, leave the reader lightly dazed and wondering.

Informed by a deep, real-life spirituality, Andrew McNabb’s award-winning stories have appeared in such diverse literary venues as The Missouri Review, and Not Safe, But Good: Best Christian Short Stories, 2007.

Andrew McNabb ’91 just published a short-story collection, The Body of This (Warren Machine, 2009). He left a business career 10 years ago to become a writer and his stories have appeared in some of the nation’s premier literary journals. He lives with his wife and four young children in the West End of Portland, Maine. Visit www.andrew-mcnabb.com for his book tour dates.

Packed with practical pointers and examples, this indispensable, straight-talking guide helps professionals conduct productive interviews while building strong working relationships with culturally and linguistically diverse clients. Chapters cover avoiding different types of bias; verbal and nonverbal ways to build rapport and convey respect; how to overcome language barriers, including effective use of interpreters; culturally competent interviews with children and adolescents; and key issues in working with immigrants and refugees. Strategies for avoiding common cross-cultural misunderstandings and producing fair, accurate reports are presented. Every chapter concludes with thought-provoking discussion questions and resources for further reading.

Lisa Aronson Fontes ’92G wrote Interviewing Clients Across Cultures: A Practitioner’s Guide (Guilford, 2008). The book serves Fontes’s mission to make the social service, mental health, criminal justice, and medical systems more responsive to culturally diverse people.

This book traces the evolution of racial caricatures in American cartoons during the first half of the twentieth century. From the introduction of animated film in the early 1900s to the 1950s, ethnic humor was a staple of American-made cartoons. Yet as Christopher Lehman shows in this revealing study, the depiction of African Americans in particular became so inextricably linked to the cartoon medium as to influence its evolution through those five decades. He argues that what is in many ways most distinctive about American animation reflects white animators' visual interpretations of African American cultural expression. The first American animators drew on popular black representations, many of which were caricatures rooted in the culture of southern slavery. During the 1920s, the advent of the sound-synchronized cartoon inspired animators to blend antebellum-era black stereotypes with the modern black cultural expressions of jazz musicians and Hollywood actors. When the film industry set out to desexualize movies through the imposition of the Hays Code in the early 1930s, it regulated the portrayal of African Americans largely by segregating black characters from others, especially white females. At the same time, animators found new ways to exploit the popularity of African American culture by creating animal characters like Bugs Bunny who exhibited characteristics associated with African Americans without being identifiably black. By the 1950s, protests from civil rights activists and the growing popularity of white cartoon characters led animators away from much of the black representation on which they had built the medium. Even so, animated films today continue to portray African American characters and culture, and not necessarily in a favorable light. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including interviews with former animators, archived scripts for cartoons, and the films themselves, Lehman illustrates the intimate and unmistakable connection between African Americans and animation.

Christopher P. Lehman ’97G, ’02G began The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907-1954 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008) as his doctoral dissertation in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of African-American Studies. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including interviews with former animators, archived scripts for cartoons, and the films themselves, Lehman illustrates the connection between African Americans and animation. Lehman is a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota.

Blighted, contaminated, and abandoned property mars nearly every major American city. Justin Hollander conducted primary research in twenty urban centers containing such "brownfields" or, in the most serious cases, "HI-TOADS" (High-Impact Temporarily Obsolete Abandoned Derelict Sites). His goal was to study the sites and the official handling of them through the lenses of sustainability, urban planning, redevelopment, and environmental justice. In Polluted and Dangerous, he scrutinizes specific sites in five of the affected cities: New Bedford, Massachusetts; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Richmond, Virginia; Trenton, New Jersey; and Youngstown, Ohio. Hollander poses the serious questions that local planners face when dealing with issues related to HI-TOADS. For instance, to what degree do planners recognize and acknowledge the problems? Do they see intervention as necessary, and, if so, to whom do they assign the responsibility for it? What measures are undertaken, and how successful are these? In his timely, topical study, Hollander lists common implications of living with and rehabilitating HI-TOADS, and he puts forward specific policy recommendations for redressing the critical issues that are raised. At a time when we are ever more concerned with the intersection of the built and natural environments, this book is not to be missed.

Justin Hollander ’00G is the author of Polluted and Dangerous: America’s Worst Abandoned Properties and What Can Be Done About Them (University of Vermont Press, 2009). He is an assistant professor at Tufts University’s department of urban and environmental policy and planning.

Born into slavery, T. Thomas Fortune was known as the dean of African American journalism by the time of his death in the early twentieth century. The editorship of three prominent black newspapers--the New York Globe, New York Freeman, and New York Age--provided Fortune with a platform to speak against racism and injustice.

For nearly five decades his was one of the most powerful voices in the press. Contemporaries such as Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington considered him an equal, if not a superior, in social and political thought. Today's histories often pass over his writings, in part because they are so voluminous and have rarely been reprinted. Shawn Leigh Alexander's anthology will go a long way toward rectifying that situation, demonstrating the breadth of Fortune's contribution to black political thought at a key period in American history.

Shawn Alexander ’01G, ’04G, wrote T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro- American Agitator: A Collection of Writings, 1880-1928 (University Press of Florida, 2009). He is a professor of African and African American studies at the University of Kansas and the interim director of the Langston Hughes Center.

Although historians frequently use memoirs as source material, too often they confine such usage to the anecdotal, and there is little methodological literature regarding the genre's possibilities and limitations. This study articulates an approach to using memoirs as instruments of historical understanding. Jennifer Jensen Wallach applies these principles to a body of memoirs about life in the American South during Jim Crow segregation, including works by Zora Neale Hurston, Willie Morris, Lillian Smith, Henry Louis Gates Jr., William Alexander Percy, and Richard Wright.

Wallach argues that the field of autobiography studies, which is currently dominated by literary critics, needs a new theoretical framework that allows historians, too, to benefit from the interpretation of life writing. Her most provocative claim is that, due to the aesthetic power of literary language, skilled creative writers are uniquely positioned to capture the complexities of another time and another place. Through techniques such as metaphor and irony, memoirists collectively give their readers an empathetic understanding of life during the era of segregation. Although these reminiscences bear certain similarities, it becomes clear that the South as it was remembered by each is hardly the same place.

Jennifer Jensen Wallach ’04G, a history professor at Georgia College & State University, published Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow (University of Georgia Press, 2008). Her book began as a UMass Amherst dissertation and she is now writing a biography of Richard Wright.

In June 1962, a group calling themselves the Students for a Democratic Society gathered at a retreat in rural Michigan to discuss and revise their founding manifesto. The result of that meeting was the famous Port Huron Statement, a document that not only reflected their disenchantment with America's elite-controlled social and political institutions but also called for the creation of a participatory democracy in which all citizens engage in public life and share the responsibility of political decision making.

This demand for participatory democracy characterized the New Left ethos and captured the imagination of a generation of radicals and political activists from the late 1950s to the close of the 1960s. So, why did participatory democracy fail to materialize in any recognizable form? Why was it forced to retreat from mainstream public discourse into the academy? Its fate, political scientist Robert Lacey asserts, was determined in large part by its intellectual origins.

The idea of participatory democracy germinated in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, founders of American pragmatism, and fully blossomed in the work of John Dewey, who argued that democracy should (and could) be a way of life for every person. Dewey rested his democratic faith on three pragmatist tenets: truth is probabilistic and socially determined; humans are malleable and educable; and humans, endowed with free will, can act collectively for their individual and social betterment.

When the realities of modern life in the mid- to late-20th century posed serious challenges to these tenets, the very foundation of participatory democratic thought began to crumble. Yet, willfully disregarding the rubble, C. Wright Mills, Sheldon Wolin, Benjamin Barber, and other theorists have continued to support participatory democracy as a viable political idea. Today's participatory democrats have constructed a fragile theoretical enterprise that rests on questionable assumptions inherited from the pragmatist tradition about truth, human nature, and free will.

Tracing the history of a salient idea in American political thought, Lacey elucidates the assumptions underlying participatory democracy, assesses both its usefulness and coherence, and ultimately reveals it to be less a theory than a faith a faith that has largely failed to follow through on its promise.

Robert Lacey ’06G teaches political science at Iona College. He wrote American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith (Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), which traces the history and legacy of participatory democracy.

Told in the first person, DMR tells the story of a recent college graduate's first six months in the real world, working as a direct caregiver within the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation. During the six month period, John works in two group homes, both composed of four people, or as they are referred to in the department, Individuals. John's duties include helping the individuals with bathing, dressing, medication, eating, and recreational excursions (although he devotes very little time to this last activity). Confronted with the horrific pasts and current conditions of the individuals, John is forced to learn some terrible things about the world--things he would've preferred to have never known. When John encounters an incident of sexual abuse perpetrated against an individual by one of his fellow direct caregivers, he realizes he has a choice to make--a choice of whether to respond, a choice of whether to change his own thinking and prejudices, a choice of whether what he has stumbled upon is really abuse at all.

Daniel Trask ’06 is a graduate student in biomedicine at UMass Boston. He spent last summer on the road promoting his book, DMR, based on his experiences working for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation. His travel blog is on lettersontheroad.blogspot.com. Daniel formed his own publishing company, One Tiny Pizza, to publish his first book, My Dog the Meat Eater; his grandfather’s WWII memoir, Harry’s War; and DMR.