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Alumni Bookshelf

Art historian and scholar Margaret Moore Booker, MA ’87, chronicles the life of an extraordinary nineteenth-century artist in Nantucket Spirit: The Art and Life of Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin (Mill Hill Press, Nantucket, Mass., 2001). A painter in the American Realist tradition, Coffin made her mark in the competitive New York art world before settling on Nantucket and devoting her life to education, art patronage, and philanthropy. The first person in the United States to be awarded a master’s degree in fine arts, she preserved in her canvases the people, landscapes, and rural lifestyles that were fading from the island. Booker also organized an exhibition of Coffin’s work at the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies on Nantucket, where she serves as associate director and curator.

When Thomas Jefferson passed away in 1826, he was more than $100,000 in debt, forcing his heirs to sell Monticello, his beloved house in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. In Saving Monticello: The Levy Family’s Epic Quest to Rescue the House that Jefferson Built (Simon & Schuster Inc., 2001), Marc Leepson, BA ’67, MA ’71, offers the first complete post-Jefferson history of the famous estate. Sweeping across generations, he tells the moving story of how the house twice came to the brink of ruin, and how one remarkable family saved the great national monument.

Presidential marriages and their impact on national policy take center stage in Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages that Shaped our Recent History (Pantheon Books, 2001), by Kati Marton, BA ’69, MA ’72. The book explores the marriages of 12 modern presidents—from Woodrow and Edith Wilson to George and Laura Bush—and analyzes how their relationships affected the nation. Marton’s four previous books focused on Europe.

George Mason University faculty members Nelly and Gus A. Mellander, BA ’59, MA ’60, PhD ’66, recently conducted a book tour throughout Puerto Rico. There, they lectured on U.S.-Panamanian relations and spoke about their most recent book, Charles Edward Mangoon: The Panama Years (Editorial Plaza Mayor, Puerto Rico, 2001). Managoon simultaneously served as governor of the Panama Canal Zone and as U.S. ambassador to Panama during the early days of the canal construction.

The lexicography world is once again buzzing about the work of Anne Soukhanov, BA ’67, executive editor of the new 1,728-page Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary (St. Martin’s Press, 2001). The veteran wordsmith oversaw a global staff of 72 editors, as well as an advisory board of 41 English professors, to create a reference book aimed at the computer spell-check generation. The innovative volume includes a list of common misspellings, followed by the correct spellings, as well as warnings on common usage blunders. The dictionary includes the latest technological and scientific vocabulary, as well as new words from pop culture and the Internet. Soukhanov was also general editor of the Encarta World Dictionary (1999) and executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition (1992).