It describes the experience of raising her daughter, who is disabled and nonverbal, and of coping after the sudden passing of her husband, who died of a heart attack when the child was still a toddler.
Now the president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Rutherford has taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Plunder and Survival
Abigail Wilentz ’93
A former comp lit major in Arts & Sciences, Wilentz coauthored this nonfiction work with Suzanne Loebl, a Holocaust survivor who escaped Germany with her family. It chronicles some of the perpetrators, victims, and spoils of the Nazi’s massive looting of European artworks, which they say numbered some 650,000 pieces.
The book, which includes some two dozen illustrations of stolen art, unfolds in part as a memoir: Loebl recalls her childhood in Germany—where her affluent family were avid art collectors—and their escape to Belgium, where they went into hiding.
The volume explores both the works that the regime prized and those—like German Expressionist paintings—that it found “degenerate,” but nevertheless profited from. It traces auctions and sales of pillaged collections, and efforts to restore some works to the heirs of their rightful owners.
Red Tide at Sandy Bend
Mary Gilliland ’73, MAT ’80
Gilliland is an award-winning poet who has taught on the Hill and elsewhere (including at Weill Cornell Medicine’s branch in Qatar). She has published several collections of her work, including Ember Days, The Ruined Walled Castle Garden, and The Devil’s Fools.
Her latest is a chapbook that’s inspired by the marine phenomenon of the title. “Nourished by human waste and warming waters, cyanobacteria multiply in harmful algal blooms that release neurotoxins,” explains the publisher, the Bodily Press.
The work has its roots in a poetry residency that Gilliland did on the southwest coast of Florida, where—expecting a sun-drenched paradise—she was warned to avoid the beach due to toxic algae.
