BOOKSHELF
Recent Releases Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning Alex Halberstadt ’92 RANDOM HOUSE
While the Great Men view of history—in which history can be explained as the large sweeping actions of heroic figures— still dominates Texas-approved textbooks, it has long been rejected by others, such as Marxists (including Marx) and the Russian literary icon Leo Tolstoy. In a way, Alex Halberstadt, a son of the Soviet Union, also rejects it—though not necessarily in favor of viewing class struggle as the engine of history. Rather he locates history closer to home: the story of his family, including his grandfather, who worked at the notorious Lubyanka prison in the Soviet Union before eventually becoming one of Stalin’s bodyguards. Call it the not-so-great men theory. With this memoir, Halberstadt seeks to confront his family’s personal and political past, by among other things, visiting the grandfather and spending time with his father who stayed behind when Alex came to the U.S at age 10. “This, I understood finally, was history: not the ordered narrative of books but an affliction that spread from parent to child, sister to brother, husband to wife,” he writes.
Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California’s Iranian Pop Music Farzaneh Hemmasi ’97
Shoreline Recall Freedom Baird ’86
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Freedom Baird set up an old military campaign desk with a pad of paper and writing implements at spots along Boston’s various island shorelines and invited people to jot down or draw their memories and impressions of the locales. Though it appears as an exercise in looking back, the effort is actually geared toward looking forward: Without dramatic intervention, climate change will obliterate many of these waterfronts, which range from a fishing pier and a state park to a wastewater treatment site and a Civil War-era fort. It forces visitors to contemplate what future generations will look back on, and from where—“Anticipatory nostalgia for a place that will eventually be long gone.”
Los Angeles is the home to the largest concentration of Iranians outside of Iran, earning it the nickname Tehrangeles. According to Farzaneh Hemmasi, an associate professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto, it’s also the birthplace of a distinctive form of postrevolutionary pop music. Tehrangeles Dreaming explores how cultural products made in L.A. express “modes of Iranianness not possible in Iran.”
OBERLIN ALUMNI MAGAZINE 2020 FALL/WINTER
DRUMLIN
African-Centered Education: Theory and Practice Edited by Kmt G. Shockley and Kofi Lomotey ’74
The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move Sonia Shah ‘90
MYERS EDUCATION PRESS
BLOOMSBURY
African-Centered Education brings together some of the top thinkers in the field, with contributors discussing the history, methods, successes, and challenged of African-centered education, discussions of the efforts made to counter the miseducation of Black children, and possible ways forward for Black children and Black communities. The authors address what African-centered education is, how it works, and why it is a critical imperative at this moment.
If science journalist Sonia Shah can see around corners—her last book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, appeared four years before COVID did—it’s probably time to start paying attention to the topic of her new book. The Next Great Migration looks not only at the movement of great swaths of people expected by climate change, but also the natural history of movement of many living things, for whom terms such as native and non-native appear increasingly irrelevant. Worried this is a buzzkill? Well, spoiler alert: Shah concludes the good outweighs the bad.
19