From the Bookshelf
Reality Check. By Peter Abrahams ’68. HarperTeen, 2009. A high school football star sets off across the country to find his girlfriend, who disappeared from her boarding school in Vermont.
Riot at the Calc Exam and Other Mathematically Bent Stories. By Colin Adams, the Thomas T. Read Professor of Mathematics. American Mathematical Society, 2009. A collection of comedic stories, skits and letters aims to ease students’ anxieties about math.
Lacandonia 1951. By Jack H. Birchall ’48. Lulu, 2008. A memoir of a 16-week expedition into the jungles of southern Mexico in 1951.
Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe Kobo. By Christopher Bolton, associate professor of Japanese and comparative literature. Harvard University Press, 2009. How biochemistry, geology, mathematics and computer programming influenced the language and style of one of Japan’s most important novelists.
Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court. By James MacGregor Burns ’39, the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government, emeritus. The Penguin Press, 2009. How the Supreme Court has come to wield more power than the founding fathers ever intended.
The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year-Round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses. By Eliot Coleman ’61. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009. A guide to harvesting fresh, organic produce year-round using little or no energy.
Priceless: The Case that Brought Down the Visa/Mastercard Bank Cartel. By Lloyd Constantine ’69. Kaplan Publishing, 2009. The lead counsel on the largest federal antitrust settlement in U.S. history recounts the behind-the-scenes and courtroom dramas.
Dress Her in Silk. By Martha Andrews Donovan ’80. Finishing Line Press, 2009. Through 20 poems, the narrator tries to reconcile the child her mother was with the woman she has become, now dying of cancer.
Primo Levi and Humanism after Auschwitz: Posthumanist Reflections. By Jonathan Druker ’80. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. A re-examination of the international critical consensus that the Holocaust writer experienced and interpreted Nazi genocide through the lens of secular humanism.
When Europe Went Mad: A Brief History of the First World War. By Terence T. Finn ’64. Ivy House Books, 2009. A book for readers with limited knowledge of history who want to learn more about The Great War.
Dance Class: American High School Students Encounter Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Edited by John A. Gould ‘66. iUniverse Inc., 2009. Essays offer a fresh perspective on Powell’s comic novel.
Race and the Politics of Solidarity. By Juliet Hooker ’94. Oxford University Press, 2009. At a time when political theorists claim it’s necessary to move beyond race to achieve political solidarity, the author argues that racial identity is the starting point for any such endeavor.
Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing. By D. Bradford Hunt ’90. University of Chicago Press, 2009. An account of the decline of Chicago’s formerly celebrated public housing projects, from their New Deal start through Mayor Richard M. Daley’s Plan for Transformation.
Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen’s Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics. By Christopher Ives ’76. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. A study of the famed priest, professor and activist’s critique of Japanese imperialism, which had been supported by Zen Buddhist leaders.
Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology. By Morgan McGuire, assistant professor of computer science, et al. AK Peters, 2009. The ins and outs of game design presented from the perspectives of computer science and art.
Magic Gardens: The Memoirs of Viva Las Vegas. By Viva Las Vegas (Liv Osthus ’96). Dame Rocket Press, 2009. A memoir of the author’s life as a stripper in Portland, Ore., offers a unique perspective on the sex industry and the women who work in it.
Space-Age Aesthetics: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and the Postwar European AvantGarde. By Stephen Petersen ’85. Penn State University Press, 2009. A study of the artistic responses to the age of space exploration and the historical emergence of pop, conceptual, postmodern and installation art.
Everyday Ethics and Social Change: The Education of Desire. By Anna L. Peterson ’85. Columbia University Press, 2009. An exploration of the disconnect between private virtues in our personal relationships and the ethical decisions we make in the public arena.
The History of Forgetting. By Lawrence Raab, the Morris Professor of Rhetoric. Penguin, 2009. Raab’s seventh collection of poems explores the nature of remembering and forgetting.
Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet. By Seth Rogovoy ’82. Scribner, 2009. A look at the role of Judaism in the life of Bob Dylan.
Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness. By Willard Spiegelman ’66. Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 2009. Essays tout the positive effects of reading, walking, looking, dancing, listening, swimming and writing.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. By Thayer Tolles ’87. Yale University Press, 2009. How the French-Irish immigrant became a renowned 19th-century American sculptor in the Aesthetic Movement and helped to advance American art internationally.
Levinas and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Ethics and Otherness from Romanticism Through Realism. Ed. by Donald Wehrs ’78 et al. University of Delaware Press, 2009. Essays reinterpret major British, American and European literary works from the 19th century using post-deconstruction ethical philosophy.
Museum Legs: Fatigue and Hope in the Face of Art. By Amy Whitaker ’96. Holart Books, 2009. A humorous collection of essays on why museums matter.
Bajo la Palabra de las Plantas. Poesía Selecta: 1979-2009. By Steven F. White ’77. 400 Elefantes, 2009. One hundred poems with Nicaraguan and environmental themes.
La Poesía de Nicaragua y sus Diálogos con Francia y los Estados Unidos. By Steven F. White ’77. UNAN-León, 2009. How key 20th century Nicaraguan poets such as Ernesto Cardenal, Pablo Antonio Cuadra and Joaquín Pasos assimilated poetry by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Whitman, Eliot and others.
ON DVD
A Beautiful Ship: The S.S. John W. Brown. By Ernie Imhoff ’59. Project Liberty Ship Inc., 2009. The story of one of the many Liberty ships that played an important role for the Allied forces during World War II.
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