The Passenger: How a Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises & Other Lies from a Sinking Ship by Chaney Kwak ’02 (Godine)

In March of 2019, Kwak, a veteran travel writer, found himself on assignment aboard the Viking Sky, a cruise ship off the coast of Norway. When the ship sailed into a storm with 80-mile-per-hour winds...

William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia by William C. Kashatus ’84 AM (University of Notre Dame Press)

William Still, who died in 1902, led a remarkable life. In the years before the Civil War, Still, a free Black abolitionist, helped nearly a thousand runaway slaves make their way from Maryland’s Eastern Shore north...

Workparent: The Complete Guide to Succeeding on the Job, Staying True to Yourself, and Raising Happy Kids by Daisy Dowling ’96(Harvard Business Review Press)

This upbeat, encyclopedic guide is full of clear, supportive tactics for how to merge the whirling, often conflicting universes of parenthood and work with less guilt and a bit more peace. Populated with...

Field Notes From An Unintentional Birder by Julia Zarankin ’97(Douglas & McIntyre)

Zarankin, who was born in the Soviet Union, found herself back in Toronto after a dissolved marriage looking for a hobby that would “exercise my patience.” This led to a birding class that left her frustrated and freezing on the shore of Lake Ontario, missing...

The Little French Bridal Shop by Jennifer Dupee ’96 (St. Martin’s Press)

Larisa Pearl has returned home to the North Shore of Massachusetts to put her late Aunt Ursula’s home, Elmhurst, up for sale. Larisa is freshly jobless and boyfriend-less when she spots a satin gown in a bridal shop window and buys it. There is...

The Effort by Claire Holroyde ’01 (Grand Central Publishing)
An eight kilometer “dark comet” is on its way, set to dissolve life as we know it in a burst of mass extinction. Ben Schwartz, head of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, is tasked with stitching together a team to deflect the comet and save...

Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind
by Kermit Pattison ’90 (William Morrow)

In this vast and vivid debut, Pattison starts with the story of Ardi, the 4.4-million-year-old fossil remains of an Ardipithecus ramidus woman found in Ethiopia’s Middle Awash in 1994. Ardi was uncovered by a team led...

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
by Brian Christian ’06 (Norton)

With the odds increasing daily that the first read of your mortgage application or even your medical tests is not being carried out by a human, the question is now how to make sure artificial intelligence understands what we want—with all the...

Launched: Start Your Career Right After College Even During A Pandemic
by Rob Feinstein ’81 

While the pandemic has short-circuited internships and upended countless job searches, Feinstein, a former executive at CareerPath and MonsterTRAK, the recent-grad division of Monster.com, has put together a helpful and even optimistic guide to landing a first job. There is...