David LowOctober 23, 20133min
From reviewing hundreds of published research studies and years of treating children with autism and ADHD, Dr. Debby Hamilton '87 has developed a comprehensive prevention plan to help women control risk factors before, during and after pregnancy, which she shares in her new book, Preventing Autism and ADHD (Hedwin Press). This guide helps women reduce their risk factors in the areas of nutrition, digestion, immune function, inflammation, hormones, and detoxification. Hamilton stresses that women have the best chance of having a strong, healthy child by improving their health starting before pregnancy. The Boulder Daily Camera recently interviewed Hamilton and comments…

David LowOctober 23, 20133min
In Designing Together: The Collaboration and Conflict Management Handbook for Creative Professionals (New Riders), Dan Brown ’94 offers practicing designers a guide to working with other people. The increasing complexity of design projects, the greater reliance on remote team members, and the evolution of design techniques demands professionals who can cooperate effectively. This book encourages cultivating collaborative behaviors and dealing with the inevitable difficult conversations. Brown covers 28 collaboration techniques, 46 conflict management techniques, 31 difficult situation diagnoses, and 17 designer personality traits. The volume should prove helpful for designers on large or small teams and those working in remote…

David LowOctober 23, 20133min
Scott R. Lowden ’62 has just published Import Transactions and Customs Compliance (FTA Publications, LLC), a comprehensive, 472-page guide to U.S. customs law and import practices for importers and trade practitioners. The book is the result of the writer’s 10 years’ experience practicing import and export law with Braumiller Schulz and nearly two years devoted heavily to writing the book. Importers must deal with foreign suppliers, freight forwarders, brokers, carriers, banks and other service providers just to make a purchase. They also have to make these purchases in a way that satisfies an astonishing array of regulations enforced by U.S.…

David LowOctober 23, 20132min
Richard Grossman, professor of economics, is the author of Wrong: Nine Economics Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them, published by Oxford University Press in October 2013. In recent years, the world has been rocked by major economic crises, most notably the devastating collapse of Lehman Brothers, the largest bankruptcy in American history, which triggered the breathtakingly destructive sub-prime disaster. What sparks these vast economic calamities? Why do our economic policy makers fail to protect us from such upheavals? In Wrong, Grossman addresses such questions, shining a light on the poor thinking behind nine of the worst economic policy mistakes…

David LowOctober 2, 20133min
Bradley Whitford ’81 (The West Wing) stars as Pete Harrison, a high-powered environmental lawyer with three kids and two ex-wives in the new ABC comedy Trophy Wife, which premiered in September on ABC. On the Tuesday night show, Pete marries Kate, a younger woman, played by Malin Akerman, who previously led a rowdy, carefree life and whose life is shaken up with the new responsibilities of family life. In his review of the program in The Hollywood Reporter, Tim Goodman wrote: “Whitford shines with his surprisingly Zen-like approach to having three women he's been married to weave in and out of…

David LowOctober 2, 20132min
Ron Medley ’73 is a featured speaker in the hour-and-a-half commentary on the DVD of How to Survive a Plague, (Sundance Selects), a highly acclaimed documentary directed by David France that was nominated for an Academy Award. (Medley also appears briefly in the movie.) The film tells the story of the brave men and women in two coalitions—ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group)—whose activism and innovation turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition. Despite having no scientific training, these improbable, self-made activists infiltrated the pharmaceutical industry and helped identify promising new drugs, moving them from experimental…

David LowOctober 2, 20133min
In her academic study Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan), Margaret Koehler ’95 identifies a pervasive cultivation of attention in 18th-century poetry. The book argues that a plea from a 1692 ode by William Congreve—'Let me be all, but my attention, dead'—embodies a wider aspiration in the period’s poetry to explore overt themes of attention and demonstrate techniques of readerly attention. It historicizes 18th century accounts of attention and pioneers a link between the period's poetry and recent discussions of attention in cognitive psychology. Koehler’s book contributes to the largely neglected history of a psychological trait that…

David LowOctober 2, 20134min
Not So Fast: Parenting Your Teen Through the Dangers of Driving (Chicago Review Press) by Tim Hollister ’78 is an informative and empowering guide to help parents understand the causes of teen crashes and head them off each time before their teens get behind the wheel. Most of the information available to parents of teen drivers acknowledges that driving is risky, and then advises parents that their obligation is to teach their teens how to operate a vehicle. However, missing from most resources are explanations of why teen driving is so dangerous and specific, proactive steps that parents can take…

David LowOctober 2, 20133min
David Rabban '71 is the author of Law’s History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History (Cambridge University Press), concentrating on the central role of history in late 19th-century American legal thought. In the decades following the Civil War, the founding generation of professional legal scholars in the United States drew from the evolutionary social thought that pervaded Western intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic. Their historical analysis of law as an inductive science rejected deductive theories and supported moderate legal reform, conclusions that challenge conventional accounts of legal formalism. The book is unprecedented in its…

David LowAugust 28, 20133min
Liz Garcia ’99 is the director, screenwriter, and co-producer of The Lifeguard (Focus World and Screen Media), in which a young woman (Kristen Bell, Veronica Mars) nearing 30 quits her Associated Press reporting job in New York and returns to her childhood home in Connecticut. She gets work as a lifeguard and has an affair with a troubled teenager (David Lambert), the son of a co-worker. The film’s also stars Mamie Gummer, Martin Starr, Alex Shaffer, Adam LeFevre and Joshua Harto, who also is a co-producer (and Garcia’s husband). The Lifeguard premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last January and…

David LowAugust 28, 20133min
William Klaber ’67 is the author of a new novel, The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell, published by Greenleaf Book Group Press. This fictional memoir is based on the real-life Lucy Ann Lobdell who, in 1855, decided to live the rest of her life as a man. She was involved in what may have been the first same-sex marriage in America when she married Marie Perry and made history when she was put on trial in Minnesota for wearing men’s clothes. While Lobdell promised to write her own memoir about her adventures in male attire, her account was never found, and…

David LowAugust 28, 20133min
In his new collection Cut These Words into My Stone: Ancient Greek Epitaphs (Johns Hopkins University Press), Michael Wolfe ’68 brings together his English translations of ancient Greek epitaphs, with a foreword by Richard Martin, a classics professor at Stanford University. Greek epitaphs, considered by some scholars to be the earliest artful writing in Western Europe, are short celebrations of the lives of a rich cross section of society that help form a vivid portrait of an ancient era. Wolfe divides his book into five chronological sections spanning 1,000 years, beginning with the Late Archaic and Classical periods and ending…