David LowDavid Igler ’88 has written the new history book, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford University Press), the first book to combine American, oceanic, and world history in a vivid portrayal of travels in the Pacific world. He researched hundreds of documented voyages to explore the commercial, cultural, and ecological upheavals following Captain Cook’s exploits, and concentrated on the eastern Pacific in the decades between the 1770s and the 1840s. Igler starts with the expansion of trade as seen via the travels of William Shaler, captain of the American Brig Lelia Byrd. Soon he…
Gregory Heller ’04 is the author of Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press), the first biography of the controversial architect and urban planner. A book launch will be held on Thursday, May 16 at the Center for Architecture in Philadelphia (1218 Arch Street) at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Go to http://hellergreg.ticketleap.com/edbacon/ for more information. In the mid-20th century, Edmund Bacon worked on shaping urban America as many Americans left cities to pursue life in suburbia. As director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, Bacon forged…
Storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar ’77 is the author of Traveling Heavy: A Memoir Between Journeys (Duke University Press), in which she recounts her life as an immigrant child and later, as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. Behar shares moving stories about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family, as well as the kind strangers she meets on her travels. The author refers to herself an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness and repeatedly returning to her homeland of Cuba. She asks the question why we leave home to find home. Kirkus Reviews writes: “A…
Virginia Pye ’82 has published her first novel, River of Dust (Unbridled Books), which begins on the windswept plains of northwestern China not long after the Boxer Rebellion. Mongol bandits kidnap the young son of an American missionary couple. As the Reverend sets out in search of the child, he quickly loses himself in the rugged, drought-stricken countryside populated by opium dens, nomadic warlords, and traveling circuses. Grace, his young wife, pregnant with their second child, takes to her sick bed in the mission compound, and has visions of her stolen child and lost husband. The foreign couple’s dedicated Chinese…
Best-selling author Mary Roach 81 has just published her latest gift to readers, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (W. W. Norton), in which she takes a memorable tour inside and outside of the body. Her fascinating book on the process of eating brings readers upclose with the bodily equipment that turns food into the nutrients and sustenance that keeps us ticking. On her quest for knowledge of the digestive tract, Roach meets with professors and technicians, murderers, mad scientists, Eskimos, exorcists, rabbis and other unique characters. She is fearless in asking taboo and embarrassing questions with relish and humor.…
Gabe Rosenberg '16Nancy Rommelmann ’83 has released Transportation (Dymaxicon), a new book of short stories. A journalist as well as an author, Rommelmann writes with an unflinching documentarian gaze, focusing on the dreams, delusions, and occasionally criminal behaviors of subjects like serial killers, con men, and homeless teens. In her new collection, Rommelmann tells stories that lean towards science fiction at points and towards magical realism at others. The opening story, “The White Coyote,” is a piece of black humor about a creature injected at birth with human DNA and its shaming at a Catholic grade school gymnasium. In “X-Girl,” a woman…
Mark Saba ’81 recently released Painting A Disappearing Canvas (Grayson Books), a collection of poems spanning 30 years. Centering on his Polish and Italian roots in Pittsburgh, the poems focus on the subject of family life and universal themes of what it means to be alive. Paolo Valesio, professor of Italian literature at Columbia University, writes in the book’s foreword that Saba is a “writer who meditates on the entanglement of his roots and who sounds as if he is tenderly worried that his children not be too bound up with this entanglement while at the same time he is…
Betty Goes Vegan (Grand Central Publishing) by Annie and Dan Shannon ‘01 is one of the first comprehensive, everyday cookbooks for creating meals for today's vegan family. This must-have guide features more than 500 recipes inspired by The Betty Crocker Cookbook, as well as hundreds of original, never-before-seen recipes that may also entice meat eaters. In preparation for the book, the authors attempted to cook all the Betty Crocker recipes vegan-style. The book offers insight into why Betty Crocker has been an icon in American cooking for so long—and why she still represents a certain style of the modern super-woman…
Jodi Daynard ’79 recently published her first novel, The Midwife’s Revolt (Opossum Press), a work of historical fiction set during the founding days of America. The novel centers on midwife Lizzie Boylston from her grieving days of widowhood after Bunker Hill, to her deepening friendship with Abigail Adams, and finally to her dangerous work as a spy for the Cause. Daynard takes the reader into the real lives of colonial women patriots and explores human connections in a violent time. According to Publishers Weekly, the book is “a charming, unexpected, and decidedly different take on the Revolutionary War.” Daynard also is…
Respected tax scholar Leonard Burman ’75 is the co-writer (with Joel Slemrod) of Taxes in America: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press), a clear, concise explanation of how the U.S. tax system works, how it affects people and businesses, and how it might be improved. This highly accessible book, organized in a question-and-answer format, describes the intricacies of the modern tax system in an easy-to-grasp manner. The book starts with the basic definitions of taxes and then examines more complicated and controversial issues. They address such questions as: How much more tax could the IRS collect with better…
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University recently announced that Visiting Writer in English Adina Hoffman ’89 is one of the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell Prizes. This new global writer’s award was created with a gift from the late Donald Windham and his partner, Sandy M. Campbell, and is now one of the largest literary prizes in the world. Nine $150,000 prizes were awarded for outstanding achievement in fiction, nonfiction, and drama and recognize writers from all stages of their careers. The recipients range in ages from 33 to 87. Writers were considered from around…
In his new nonfiction collection Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories (University of Chicago Press), acclaimed journalist Carlo Rotella ’86 explores a variety of characters and settings, His writing has been praised for going beneath the surface of the story as he sympathetically dwells in the lives of the people and places he encounters. The two dozen essays in this volume deal with subjects and obsessions that have characterized his previous writing: boxing, music, writers, and cities. “Playing in time” refers to how people make beauty and meaning while working within the constraints and limits forced on…