Books
Faculty and alumni authors

The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter
by Mary Titus ’78
University of Georgia Press, 2005
Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) once lived near Saratoga Springs, according to Mary Titus.
“So you can claim her as a local writer—as local
as she was anywhere in her peripatetic life.”

Throughout her career Porter “probed cultural arguments about female creativity, a woman’s maternal legacy, romantic love, and sexual identity, always with startling acuity, and often with painful ambivalence,” Titus says. For this biography Titus, an associate professor of English at St. Olaf College, drew on mostly unexplored papers—letters, journals, drafts—that Porter left to the University of Maryland.

“I discovered that she was brilliant, difficult, and impassioned—a woman whose life choices responded to the amazing changes in women’s lives from the late nineteenth into the mid-twentieth century.” Titus’s book (her first) was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. Although it didn’t win (a new title by Winona LaDuke beat her out), she still took it as “a wonderful compliment.”

• • •

A Precious Liquid: Drinking Water and Culture in the
Valley of Mexico
by Michael C. Ennis-McMillan, associate professor of anthropology
Wadsworth Thompson Learning, 2006
A case study of community initiatives to manage drinking-water supplies.

• • •

The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting
Your Divine Spark
by Sara Beak ’97
Jossey-Bass, 2006
Encourages women in their twenties and thirties to search for the spiritual
in all things.

• • •

I Don’t Want to Be Crazy
by Samantha Schutz ’00
Push, 2006
A true story of growing up, breaking down, and coming to grips with
anxiety attacks



Get booked. Alumni authors are urged to send copies of their books, publisher’s notes, or reviews, so that Scope can make note of their work in the “Books” column.