The White Hot, by Quiara Alegría Hudes ’04 MFA (One World)
Noelle is just home from high school and planning an 18th-birthday dinner with her dad, stepmom, and brothers when she sees a thick envelope on the kitchen counter. It’s propped up against the microwave and is from her mom, April Soto, who disappeared from Noelle’s life eight years before. That’s the jumping-off point for this vivid, epistolary novel by Hudes, who is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. What follows is never quite an apology, but more an explanation of April’s rage, or “the white hot” she felt the day she left North Philadelphia at 26, and where that journey propelled her. A quick, compelling read shot through with humor and empathy.
The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, by Ray D. Madoff ’80 (Univ. of Chicago)
The Second Estate in Madoff’s title looks back to the French nobility who before the revolution did not pay taxes. This shifted the financial burden of running France on to everyone else, from the peasants on up. Madoff, a Boston College law professor, argues that in recent decades our 7,000-plus-page tax code has morphed to create a new Second Estate where the wealthiest Americans, whose income is largely from investments, get to live tax-free, leaving a heavier load for everyone else. The solution, she argues, is not to tax wealth but to draw inherited and investment income back
under the tax umbrella to ease the inequity.
Protected: Birth Control’s Remarkable Story and Uncertain Future, by Katherine Quimby ’13, ’14 MPH (Bloomsbury Academic)
As long as people have been having sex they’ve been thinking about birth control. And in this brief but comprehensive history Quimby is a clear and companionable guide. It’s a history that stretches from the ancient attempts, like the early Egyptians’ mix of sour milk and crocodile dung, through the development of modern methods, and one that’s always been buffeted by religion and politics. As Quimby points out the story remains in flux, as recent changes in abortion laws are intimately intertwined with birth control’s future.
Alumni Fiction
The Animal Room by Lauren Acampora ’97 (Grove Press)
Hidden River by Sara Lippmann ’97 (Tortoise Books)
Alan Opts Out by Courtney Maum ’01 (Little, Brown, and Company)
The Gulf of Lions by Caitlin Shetterly ’97 (Harper)
The Outermost Mouse by Lauren Wolk-Hall ’81 (Dutton Books for Young Readers)
Alumni Nonfiction
Novel Atmospheres: Air, Affect and Literary Modernism by Anna Abromson ’07 (John Hopkins University Press)
Catch the Devil by Pamela Colloff ’94 (Knopf)
Organizing Relation: Attachment Theory and Literary Criticism by Theo Davis ’94 (Oxford University Press)
The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice by Lawrence Douglas ’81(Princeton University Press)
A Daring Enterprise: A US-Egyptian Partnership and the Case for Soft Power by James Harmon ’57 (The American University in Cairo Press)
Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn from Animal Sex by Perrin Roosevelt Ireland ’08 (WW Norton)
Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights by Amy Littlefield ’09 (Legacy Lit)
Hurricane Camille: When Natural Disasters Became National Disasters by Andrew Morris ’91 (University of Pennsylvania Press)
Above the Oxbow: Stories Entangled with a Mountain by Danielle Raad ’10 (West Virginia University Press)
Riling Up the Base: Examining Trump’s Use of Stereotypes through an Interdisciplinary Lens by Ian Reifowitz ’93 (De Gruyter)
On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular by Jonathan Sheehan ’91 (Princeton University Press)
Independently Published
The Laboratory Assistant by Nicole Edgeworth ’09 (Apprentice House)
Just Business-A Medical Malpractice Odyssey by James L. Frank ’78 (Physicians Defenders)
Survivor at Law by Dovie King ’94 (SOAR for Justice Publishing)
Exit Plan: Mapping a Way Out of the Youth Mental Health Crisis by Kathleen Mackenzie ’86 (Get Ready to Evolve)
Unfinished Business: A New Story for a New Era of Human Flourishing by Michael Megalli ’94 (Indi.Biz)
The Breakwater by Leslie Shimotakahara ’07 (Cormorant Books)
