Fresh Ink

By Edward Hardy / May/June 2017
April 28th, 2017

 

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Al-Tounsi by Anton Piatigorsky ’94 (Ankerwycke).
Piatigorsky, an award-winning Toronto playwright, weaves a path through the lives of nine fictional Supreme Court justices as they consider the case of Majid Al-Tounsi, an Egyptian held in an American prison in the Philippines for funding terrorists. The novel tracks the drama in the justices’ lives as they consider the case, attempting to show how personal lives can twist public outcomes in ways that are messier than one might expect.

 
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Touch by Courtney Maum ’01 (Putnam).
Sloan Jacobson, heroine of this follow-up to I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, is a trend forecaster in from Paris for a six-month gig at a New York tech firm. She is gleefully child-free, with a French intellectual partner and a driverless talking car named Anastasia. Sloan predicts parenting will soon be considered an indulgence, until she starts seeing people actually rejecting technology and embracing intimacy, a trend that leads to its own set of complications. A funny, smart, absurdist, and often touching read.

 
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The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter by Bonnie S. Anderson ’64 (Oxford).
This is the highly readable story of an instrumental nineteenth-century feminist you’ve probably never heard of. Ernestine Rose, the only child of a rabbi, left Poland for Berlin at seventeen, then lived in Paris and London before marrying and arriving in New York City in 1836. She was a contemporary of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, lecturing for women’s rights, free thought, and abolition. So why isn’t she in the history books? Anderson, an emerita history professor at the City University of New York, argues that it’s because Rose, an immigrant and an atheist, never fit neatly into the American feminist narrative.

 

ALUMNI FICTION

A Psalm for Lost Girls by Katie Bayerl ’00 (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers).

Max the Mouse and the Secret of Mars by Michael Cantwell ’51 (iUniverse).

The Big Buddha Bicycle Race by Terence Allison Harkin ’68 (Silkworm Books).

The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama by Roland Merullo ’75, ’76 AM (Penguin Random House).

It Happens in the Hamptons by Holly Peterson ’87 (HarperCollins).

After the Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahora ’07 PhD (Dundurn Press).


ALUMNI NON-FICTION

In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs edited by Andrew Blauner ’86 (Blue Rider)

Be Thou at Peace by Edward Blomstedt ’69 (Barton Cove Publishing). 

Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image by Mary Campbell ’96 (University of Chicago Press).

Brown & Sharpe and the Measure of American Industry by Gerald Carbone ’13 (McFarland & Co.).

The Wisdom of Finance by Mihir A. Desai ’89 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr. ’88 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Stack Your Bones by Ruthie Fraser ’82 (The Experiment).

Staging Memory, Stating Strife: Empire and Civil War in the Octavia by Lauren Donovan Ginsberg PhD ’11 (Oxford University Press).

A Piece of Valiant Dust: An Essay in Living by Ja Hijiya ’73 (Createspace).

Global Latin America into the Twenty-First Century by Matthew Gutmann ’04 and Jeffrey Lesser (University of California Press).

A Description of the New York Central Park by Clarence C Cook, introduction by Maureen Meister '83 AM, '00 PhD (New York University Press).

The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty by Jonathan Morduch ’85 and Rachel Schneider (Princeton University Press).

American Berserk by Bill Morris ’76 (Sunbury Press).

My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul ’93 (Henry Holt and Co.).

The Lucky Captain: The Life & Times of Capt. George Q. Dow, His Ancestors, and 40 Years at Sea by William Dow Turner ’67 (Dow Turner).

What’s Your Creative Type? Harness the Power of Your Artistic Personality by Meta Wagner ’81 (SEAL Press).

The Writer in the Well: On Misreading and Rewriting Literature by Gary Weissman ’90 (Ohio State University Press).

 

ALUMNI POETRY

Said Not Said by Fred Marchant ’68 (Graywolf Press).

 

FACULTY

The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of the American Empire by Stephen Kinzer (Henry Holt and Co.).

 

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Related Issue
May/June 2017