Horace Mann - Spring 2017 - 35

Bookshelf
T

his column celebrates Horace Mann School's many alumni authors.
Please share news of a book you or another alum has written.
The Alumni and Development Office makes every effort to keep up
on recent publications by alumni. Keep us posted at (718) 432-3453 or
alumni@horacemann.org.

Saving Face: The Emotional Costs
of the Asian Immigrant Family Myth
By Angie Y. Chung, Ph.D. '91
Rutgers University Press, September 2016
Tiger Mom. Asian
patriarchy. Model
minority children.
Generation gap. The
many images used to
describe the prototypical Asian family have
given rise to two
versions of the Asian
immigrant family myth.
The first celebrates Asian families for
upholding the traditional heteronormative
ideal of the "normal (white) American family"
based on a hard-working male breadwinner
and a devoted wife and mother who raises
obedient children. The other demonizes Asian
families around these same cultural values by
highlighting the dangers of excessive
parenting, oppressive hierarchies, and
emotionless pragmatism in Asian cultures.
Saving Face cuts through these myths,
offering a more nuanced portrait of Asian
immigrant families in a changing world as
recalled by the people who lived them firsthand: the grown children of Chinese and
Korean immigrants. Drawing on extensive
interviews, sociologist Dr. Angie Y. Chung
'91 examines how these second-generation
children negotiate the complex and conflicted feelings they have toward their family
responsibilities and upbringing. Dr. Chung,
an Associate Professor in the Department of
Sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY,
reveals that although they know little about
their parents' lives Korean and Chinese
Americans assemble fragments of their
childhood memories, kinship narratives, and
racial myths to make sense of their family
experiences. Prof. Chung also finds that these
adaptive strategies come at a considerable
social and psychological cost and do less to
reconcile the social stresses that minority

immigrant families endure today. Saving Face
not only gives readers a new appreciation
for the often painful generation gap between
immigrants and their children, it also reveals
the love, empathy, and communication strategies families use to help bridge those rifts.
Prof. Nazil Kibria, Chair of the Department of
Sociology at Boston University wrote: "Wellwritten and engaging, Saving Face takes a
novel approach of exploring the emotional life
of Chinese and Korean immigrant families."
Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent
By Joseph J. Fischel, Ph.D. 2000
University of Minnesota Press, May 15, 2016
Sex and Harm in the
Age of Consent
cautions against the
adoption of consent as
our primary determinant of sexual freedom.
For Joseph J. Fischel,
Ph.D., Assistant
Professor of Women's,
Gender, and Sexuality
Studies at Yale University, consent is not
necessarily always ethically sound. It is, he
argues, a moralized fiction, and it churns out
figures for its normativity: the predatory sex
offender and the innocent child.
Examining the representation of consent
in U.S. law and media culture, Prof. Fischel
contends that the figures of the sex offender
and the child are consent's alibi, its negative
space, enabling fictions that allow consent to
do the work cut out for it under late modern
sexual politics. Engaging legal, queer, feminist,
and political theory, case law, statutory law and
media representations. Prof. Fischel proposes
that we change our adjudicative terms from innocence, consent, and predation to vulnerability, sexual autonomy, and "peremption," which
he defines as the uncontrolled disqualification
of possibility. Such a shift in theory, law, and life
would be less damaging for young people, and
more responsive to sexual violence.

The book "offers a breathtakingly queer
account of sex, perversion, innocence, and
consent" and Fischel's "careful and complex
reading of the social and legal meaning of the
'sexual predator' boldly challenges the common wisdom about the justifications for and
consequences of regulating outlaw sexuality,"
wrote Katherine Franke, director, Center for
Gender & Sexuality Law, Columbia Law School.
Trump Revealed: An American Journey
of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power
By Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher '76
Simon and Schuster, August 23, 2016
Published in August
2016 Trump Revealed:
An American Journey
of Ambition, Ego,
Money, and Power,
offers an authoritative
and provocative look at
now President Donald
J. Trump. This deeply
researched biography
by two journalism veterans, reporter/editor
Marc Fisher '76 and investigative reporter
Michael Kranish, provides a complex portrait.
Despite decades of scrutiny, many aspects of
President Trump's life are not well known. To
discover him in full, while President Trump was
still candidate Trump, The Washington Post
assembled a team of award-winning reporters
and researchers to delve into every aspect of
his life, from his privileged upbringing to his
astonishing 2016 rise to seize the Republican
candidacy for president. This comprehensive
book documents Trump's fascinating family
roots, his aggressive efforts to make a name
for himself in New York social circles, and his
penchant for big bets-on real estate, branded
businesses, and, ultimately, on himself. The
authors interviewed President Trump for this
book, and scrutinize everything from his youthful alliance with the power broker Roy Cohn
'44 to his alleged dealings with organized
crime and his controversial projects in New
York City, Atlantic City, Florida, Scotland, and
Azerbaijan. The authors examine President
Trump's wealth, the evolution of his political
beliefs, and his peculiar identity as a billionaire
businessman, celebrity, global brand, television
star, and then candidate for the most powerful
office in the world. The book asks how the life
of this person who roams widely through such
diverse realms as real estate, sports, entertainment, and national politics informed his
bold statements on the economy, immigration,
race, global trade, terrorism, and women. The
Horace Mann Magazine Spring 2017

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