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Among the most recent plays by the Olivier- and Tony-Award winner, it was first produced off-Broadway in 2002. In the playwright’s sensitive exploration of “shadowy sexuality” among three generations of characters, the lines between childhood and adulthood blur in the oppressive heat of a Greenwich Village summer during the 1950s.

A collection of Harriet Martineau’s abolitionist essays and articles published from 1837 through the Civil War era.

Reclaiming Class offers essays written by women who, poor as children, changed their lives through the pathway of higher education. Collected, they offer a powerful testimony of the importance of higher learning, as well as a critique of the programs designed to alleviate poverty and educational disparity. The contributors explore the ideologies of welfare and American meritocracy that promise hope and autonomy on the one hand, while also perpetuating economic obstacles and indebtedness on the other.

William R. Hutchison '51, a professor at Harvard's Divinity School, is the author of Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal, an "ambitious reappraisal of American religious history." In the book, Hutchison chronicles the historical developments that have gradually led Americans to go beyond mere tolerance of religious differences to the actual acceptance of religious diversity. An illumniating volume, scholarly but written with a clarity that makes it readily accessible to the general reader, it welcomes the "new pluralism" as a work in progress towards fulfillment of one of the nation's founding ideals.

The sacred landscape of imperial China was dotted with Buddhist monasteries, Daoist temples, shrines to local deities, and the altars of the mandarinate. Prominent among the official shrines were the temples in every capital throughout the empire devoted to the veneration of Confucius. Twice a year members of the educated elite and officials in each area gathered to offer sacrifices to Confucius, his disciples, and the major scholars of the Confucian tradition.

Bruce Cutler '70 is the author of Closing Argument: Defending (and Befriending) John Gotti and Other Legal Battles I Have Waged. The book is an autobiography of Cutler, who became one of the most famous lawyers in America through his defense of mob boss John Gotti. Although Gotti threatens to overpower the book, it would be a great mistake to dismiss it as primarily centered on the "Teflon Don." Cutler also tells of his early upbringing, his days at Hamilton and his practice of the lawyer's craft, in addition to his insider accounts of high-profile criminal trials.

John Gordon '67 is the author of Phisiology and the Literary Imagination: Romantic to Modern, an impressive scholarly study, unique in its approach, which explores the impact of medical developments on writers including Wordsworth, Dickens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Eliot, Joyce, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath, as reflected in their works. By painstakingly analyzing their writings, Gordon, a professor of English at Connecticut College, casts new light on literary inspiration in seven significant authors spanning almost two centuries.

Bringing together classic and new writings of the trailblazing feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders addresses some of the most pressing and complex issues facing contemporary feminism. Forging vital links between daily life and collective action and between theory and pedagogy, Mohanty has been at the vanguard of Third World and international feminist thought and activism for nearly two decades. This collection highlights the concerns running throughout her pioneering work: the politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and scholarship to organizing and social movements. Mohanty offers here a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of transnational feminist practice toward anticapitalist struggles.

Stephen Rabe, whose publications include three monographs on U.S. relations with Latin America, is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas. In this work, he joins with James N. Giglio, a professor of history at Southwest Missouri State University, in examining the foreign policy of John F. Kennedy and its legacy. In their respective essays, to which pertinent documents are appended, they offer challenging interpretations and provocative views. Although they agree on some points, Professor Giglio largely defends the Kennedy record while Professor Rabe is more critical, depicting Kennedy as “a relentless cold warrior who perpetuated the Cold War more than he resolved it.” The book is ideal for stimulating discussion both in and outside of the classroom.

Brett H. Mandel '91 is the author of Is This Heaven? The Magic of the Field of Dreams, about the some 75,000 people a year who make a pilgrimage to the baseball diamond carved out of a northeast Iowa cornfield for the 1989 film Field of Dreams. Why do they do it? Mandel addresses that question by relating the stories, often poignant, of those who seek, and frequently find, comfort, fulfillment and even redemption at that make-believe place, which has somehow taken on mystical reality.