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.
