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Let’s Go In
My Journey to a University Presidency
T. Alan Hurwitz
Gallaudet University Press, 2020
Alan Hurwitz ascended the ranks of academia to become the president of not one, but two, universities—National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology and Gallaudet University. In Let’s Go In: My Journey to a University Presidency, Hurwitz discusses the unique challenges he encountered as a Deaf person, and the events, people, and experiences that shaped his personal and professional life. He demonstrates the importance of building a strong foundation for progressive leadership roles in higher education, and provides insights into the decision-making and outreach required of a university president, covering topics such as community collaboration, budget management, and networking with public policy leaders. He also stresses that assessing students’ needs should be a top priority. As he reflects on a life committed to service in higher education, Hurwitz offers up important lessons on the issues, challenges, and opportunities faced by deaf and hard of hearing people, and in doing so, inspires future generations of deaf people to aim for their highest goals.

Additional images, videos, and supplemental readings are available at the Gallaudet University Press/Manifold online platform.
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My Journey
How One Woman Survived Stalin's Gulag
Olga Adamova-Sliozberg
Northwestern University Press, 2011
This is the first English translation of Olga Adamova-Sliozberg’s mesmerizing My Journey​, which was not officially published in Russia until 2002. It is among the best known of Gulag memoirs and was one of the first to become widely available in underground samizdat circulation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn relied heavily upon it when writing Gulag Archipelago, and it remains the best account of the daily life of women in the Soviet prison camps.

Arrested along with her husband (who, she would much later learn, was shot the next day) in the great purges of the thirties, Adamova-Sliozberg decided to record her Gulag experiences a year after her arrest, and she “wrote them down in her head” (paper and pencils were not available to prisoners) every night for years. When she returned to Moscow after the war in 1946, she composed the memoir on paper for the first time and then buried it in the garden of the family dacha. After her re-arrest and seven more years of banishment to Kazakhstan, she returned to the dacha to dig up the buried memoir, but could not find it. She sat down and wrote it all over again.

In her later years she also added a collection of stories about her family. Concluding on a hopeful note—Adamova-Sliozberg’s record is cleared, she re-marries a fellow former-prisoner, and she is reunited with her children—this story is a stunning account of perseverance in the face of injustice and unimaginable hardship. This vital primary source continues to fascinate anyone interesting in the tumultuous history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century.
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A Path Twice Traveled
My Journey as a Historian of China
Paul A. Cohen
Harvard University Press, 2019
In this memoir, Paul A. Cohen, one of the West’s preeminent historians of China, traces the development of his work from its inception in the early 1960s to the present, offering fresh perspectives that consistently challenge us to think more deeply about China and the historical craft in general. A memoir, of course, is itself a form of history. But for a historian, writing a memoir on one’s career is quite different from the creation of that career in the first place. This is what Cohen alludes to in the title A Path Twice Traveled. The title highlights the important disparity between the past as originally experienced and the past as later reconstructed, by which point both the historian and the world have undergone extensive change. This distinction, which conveys nicely the double meaning of the word history, is very much on Cohen’s mind throughout the book. He returns to it explicitly in the memoir’s final chapter, appropriately titled “Then and Now: The Two Histories.”
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Tommy
My Journey of a Lifetime
Tommy G. Thompson and Doug Moe
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
The many facets of Tommy G. Thompson—small-town grocer's son, brash campaigner with a common touch, shrewd political strategist, savvy policy wonk, and ebullient promoter of Wisconsin—come across vividly in these pages. Thompson, with journalist Doug Moe, traces his journey from boyhood to politics to the world stage, including his unprecedented four terms as Wisconsin governor, his service as a cabinet secretary under President George W. Bush, and his continuing work in global efforts to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.

Personal and revealing stories punctuate the biographical details and policy discussions. Here is Tommy as a young man, just happening to be on the National Mall in 1964 when Dr. Martin Luther King told the nation "I have a dream." Here is Tommy as Wisconsin governor, struggling to start a Harley-Davidson motorcycle before leading "a pack of Hell's Republicans" on a ride through the state. Here is Tommy in Washington after the 9/11 attacks, slipping out of a secure bunker (in defiance of orders) to aid the emergency medical response.

Thompson speaks candidly of his achievements and regrets, including his involvement with welfare reform, school choice, land conservancy, prisons, the financing of Miller Park, stem cell research, and health insurance.

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