BOOKSHELF
Recent Releases Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways Sara Stein Greenberg ’00 TEN SPEED PRESS
There is no ironclad design to “design thinking,” thus Creative Acts for Curious People is not a road map or a step-by-step “how-to.” In fact, the book is more of a how-to-undo: how to overcome self-censorship, how to unlearn the usual ways a problem is approached, how to see an issue in an entirely new light. The book offers more than 80 exercises and stories, many developed out of classroom activities at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (dubbed “the d.school.”), which Greenberg leads as executive director. Fittingly, readers are untethered to the tyranny of reading the book start-tofinish: Its assignments, many taking up just a page or two, offer handy self-contained explorations, each intended to unleash creativity and imagination. The book’s approach mirrors that of the d.school which, says Greenberg, “prepares you to take on any challenge in life or work without knowing exactly how to do it before you do it.”
Fire at the Freedom House Matthew Rinaldi ’69 AUDACITY PRESS
Cleveland Architecture, 18901930: Building the City Beautiful Jeannine deNobel Love M’83
How Other People Make Love Thisbe Nissen ’94 WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Most Americans are familiar with the broad outlines of the Civil Rights Movement—the leaders, the speeches, the legislation passed. But the movement was made up of many individuals, and each has a story. Rinaldi, a white freshman from a Long Island, N.Y., Italian-American family, headed to Mississippi in 1966 with a dozen and a half other Oberlin students to join in voter registration and integration campaigns. His story is full of vivid detail and candid confessions: though committed to the cause of civil rights, he admits he may have been partly attracted to the adventure—and even danger—of participating. He was also scared, a fear that is justified by events outlined in the book. Though brimming with Oberlin content, this is a fascinating read for anyone interested in an individual’s American history. OBERLIN ALUMNI MAGAZINE 2021 FALL
The City Beautiful Movement of the early 20th century was either a reform-minded, progressive attempt to transform gritty cities into more livable spaces around an orderly and monumental architecture, or, as writer and theorist Jane Jacobs called it, “an architectural design cult,” or both. Cleveland was one of the cities that adopted many of the principles behind the movement. The “group plan”—which clustered Beaux-Arts-style public buildings (city hall, library, courthouse, among others) around a grand, green mall—can still ignite passionate debate more than a century later. This study by Love, an independent art historian and a graduate of Oberlin’s MA program in art history, takes an in-depth look at this transformative period in Cleveland architecture.
In a single sentence, Nissen’s writing can convey all of the complexity and density of a three-axis, multivariable graph, but with the timing and humor of an observational stand-up comic. The compression—of information, of telling detail—makes her short stories carry more story and character than their page count might indicate. While fantasy and sci-fi works get credited for world-building ability, Nissen’s tidy, down-to-earth tales create their own complete and vivid worlds. Even if you have never visited a lesbian bar in Pittsburgh or crowded into a vestibule with a minister and an F-bomb-dropping, 200-pound maid of honor wearing an “oxidized green refrigerator box” of a dress, you will think you have after reading How Other People Make Love. And you’ll be glad you did.
Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic Jennifer L. Morgan ’86 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Morgan, a professor in New York University’s department of social and cultural analysis, opens Reckoning with Slavery with the story of a woman with two names: Elizabeth Keye—carrying the name of her Englishman father, and “Black Besse”—expressing her role as an enslaved African woman. From this beginning, Morgan charts the meanings of these identifications, including the way Blackness eclipsed kinship, and slavery became entirely racialized. “By centering women,” Morgan explains in an interview about the book, “we get to what I believe is the heart of the system of racial slavery, the claim that the body is a site of commodification and the production of race as a legible sign.”
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