Books by faculty authors released

Recent books by Skidmore authors include original poetry by Peg Boyers, an analysis of the political philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft by Natalie Fuehrer Taylor, and an illustrated guide to Skidmore’s North Woods by Sue Van Hook.

Honey with Tobacco (2007, University of Chicago) is the newest volume of poetry by Peg Boyers, a 1975 Skidmore graduate, executive editor of Salmagundi, and teacher of creative writing at Skidmore. According to the publisher, Honey with Tobacco vividly demonstrates the poet’s “intensely personal voice.” The first part of the book is explicitly autobiographical, bringing together poems that explore the author’s Cuban-American experience and a childhood marked by travel, the tropics, and varieties of disenchantment. The middle sequence of poems concerns a mother, a father, and a son— “a post-modern holy family whose ordeals are evoked in a terse, terrifying narrative.” In the final section of the book, Boyers confronts age, desire, and regret in a series of personal poems.

Writer George Steiner notes that Boyers’s poems “have a rare power: they match the private to the public, the intimate to the political.”

Honey with Tobacco follows Hard Bread, the debut poetry collection by Boyers, in which the verse was spoken in the imagined voice of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg. Steven Cramer, writing in Poetry, called Hard Bread “a great achievement of poetic voice.”

 

 

Author, philosopher, and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft is the subject of The Rights of Woman as Chimera: The Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (2007, Routledge) by Natalie Fuehrer Taylor, assistant professor of government.

A native of London, Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) is best known for her 1792 book-length essay, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, considered a classic feminist text. Taylor describes her book as a study of Wollstonecraft’s philosophical pursuit of her utopian dream on the pages of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Taylor considers Wollstonecraft’s political philosophy in light of the political thought of Rousseau and then examines the influence of John Locke on Wollstonecraft. Finally, she turns her attention to the benefit Wollstonecraft may have gained by a study of Aristotle and considers the ways in which her thought “may be more fully elaborated in an Aristotelian framework.” Taylor argues that such a consideration sheds light on how Wollstonecraft could fulfill her utopian dream and demonstrates the ways in which Wollstonecraft’s political philosophy moves beyond Aristotle’s.

Treasure in the North Woods: A Guide to the Natural Campus at Skidmore College (2007, Skidmore College), is a new book edited by Sue Van Hook, senior teaching associate in biology. In her preface, Van Hook tells readers of the seasonal riches of the North Woods, noting that the North Woods “is not your average woodlot.” After providing details on the area’s geologic heritage, she writes, “The North Woods is a living museum full of antiquities, many dating back 300 million years to their evolutionary beginnings…. It is our natural laboratory.”

With illustrations by Jacqueline Callahan and essays contributed by a number of Skidmore authors, the book is “one way to foster a land ethic among members of the college community and the general public across academic generations,” writes Van Hook. She is the author the chapter titled “A Seasonally Guided Nature Walk,” in which she provides four-season information on such easily observed North Woods phenomena as poison ivy, white pine, and the Mayfly Pond.  

Appendices identify soils, as well as common plant, animal, and bird species. Space is provided for field notes by the reader/hiker.