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Review

Editors’ Picks for September and October

By Middlebury Magazine Staff
October 5, 2019
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In the Attic of My Mind

Chris Van Curan and Bonzo Serizio

Looking back over a lifetime of memories, Chris Van Curan ’54, with his coauthor, has put together an autobiography of over 50 short stories that are spun from his time growing up in White Plains, N.Y., attending Middlebury, serving in the Army, earning an MBA, working in a bank, founding the Lincoln Canoe Company, and so much more. Funny, heartwarming, and intimate, the stories are told in a colloquial fashion that makes one feel like they are sitting in Van Curan’s living room, listening as he recalls the memories of his life.

A Day in June

Marisa Labozzetta

In this poignant, thoughtful, and witty novel, Marisa Labozzetta, Spanish ’71 weaves together the stories of three millennials caught up in a web of deception that puts an entire town on its ears. When a young resident of the town suggests a contest offering a free wedding in town to boost the economy, and the winner finds herself without a fiancé because he has decided to become a priest, events begin to snowball. Part love story and part philosophical discourse, the novel twists and turns its way to a satisfying ending.

Love Letters from a Voluptuous Sexagenarian

Miguel Delibes
Trans. Teresa Boucher

Teresa Boucher, MA Spanish ’88, MA French ’89 has translated from Spanish this epistolary novel by prolific and award-winning writer Miguel Delibes. Appearing for the first time in English, the novel is comprised of letters written by a 65-year-old retired Castilian newspaperman to a 56-year-old widow from Seville, whose son is writing a graduate thesis on censorship of the press in the 1940s under Franco. In a mono-dialogue fashion, the story weaves a comic love story with an unwitting exposé of the state of journalism under an authoritarian regime.

One Rough Life

Robert D. Bethke

This ethnographic and musicological book is the first to be devoted to a northern New York State lumberjack, who was an unaccompanied traditional singer of folk ballads and other songs circulated in lumber camp bunkhouses and area ballrooms. Robert Bethke ’67 has pulled together texts, tunes, and annotations for 35 British, Irish, and American folk ballads and songs learned by Ted Ashlaw mainly through oral tradition from about 1900 to 1950. The book comes with two CDs of original field recordings.

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A summer immersed in a language can do wonders, as veterans of Middlebury College’s famous language-learning program can attest. The lockdown is clearly going to amount to the equivalent of about two summers, and there are mini-Middleburys happening in millions of houses worldwide.”

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