New York Rising: An Illustrated History from the Durst Collection
by Kate Ascher ’80 & Thomas Mellins (The Monacelli Press)

New York City has been morphing for centuries. In this sumptuous, very readable volume, layered with photographs, vintage postcards, maps, blueprints, and illustrations, ten scholars have composed visual roadmaps charting the city’s rise....

Landfall
Thomas Mallon ’73 (Pantheon)

In his tenth novel (Dewey Defeats Truman, Henry and Clara), Mallon continues his mastery of political historical fiction, this time taking on the presidency of George W. Bush. Landfall has the spine of a romantic comedy as Allie O’Connor, a national security advisor, and Ross Weatherall, a humanities...

Healthy Habits for Your Heart: 100 Simple, Effective Ways to Lower Your Blood Pressure and Maintain Your Heart’s Health
by Monique Tello ’95 (Adams Media)

This crisp, witty compendium has all the advice you’ll need to rework some nagging habits and help prevent heart disease. It’s full of suggestions you might know—aim for a...

The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey
by Rowan Ricardo Phillips ’98 AM, ’03 PhD (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The ATP tennis tour starts in Australia’s January heat and finishes up eleven months later in London. Here, Phillips, an award-winning poet with two collections, Heaven and The Ground, who also writes a sports column for The Paris Review,...

In Search of The Canary Tree: The Story of a Scientist, a Cypress and a Changing World
by Lauren E. Oakes ’04 (Basic Books)

This begins as a vivid account of months spent in the remote, foggy, rain-slicked Alaskan forests of the Alexander Archipelago while Oakes, now a scientist at the Wildlife Conservation...

All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf
by Katharine Smyth ’03 (Crown)

“Perhaps there is one book for every life.” That’s the opening line of this inventive debut, a memoir that uses Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as a meditative backdrop to Smyth’s chronicle of growing up in New England, including...

Dispatches from the Sweet Life: One Family, Five Acres, and a Community’s Quest to Reinvent the World
by William Powers ’93 (New World Library)

Lured by the hope of sidestepping the hectic pace of the American Dream, Powers, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, moved his wife and infant daughter from...

Riddance: Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children
by Shelley Jackson ’94 MFA (Black Balloon)

Jane Grandison, who is 11 and stutters, has been invited to live at The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children. In addition to being the headmistress, Joines can travel...

Technicolored: Reflections on Race in the Time of TV
by Ann DuCille ’91 PhD (Duke)

DuCille, an emerita professor of English at Wesleyan, writes that her latest work was “born of a year of living dangerously in front of the television set.” The result is a book that hopscotches between memoir and cultural...