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...

They Didn’t See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties
by Lisa Levenstein ’94 (Basic Books)

“Is Feminism Dead?” That was Time magazine’s late June cover story in 1998. But here Levenstein, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, argues that feminism became deeply, if quietly, embedded in ’90s culture. She points...

The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival
by Amra Sabic-El-Rayess ’00 with Laura Sullivan (Bloomsbury)

Sabic-El-Rayess was just 16 in 1992 when Serbian tanks clanked into her town of Bihać, near the Bosnian-Croatian border. That day upended her Muslim family’s life and signaled the start of a 1,100-day Serbian...

Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife
by Ariel Sabar ’93 (Doubleday)

The possibility that Jesus might have married intrigued and confounded the religious world in 2012 after Karen King, a Harvard Divinity School professor, announced the discovery of a second-century papyrus fragment that hinted this was the case....

Nobody Will Tell You This But Me
by Bess Kalb ’10 (Knopf)

Bobby Bell is gone but she’s still talking. That’s the premise of Kalb’s intriguing debut, a memoir told through a scrim of fiction. Barbara “Bobby” Bell, Kalb’s grandmother, lived to be 90—and Kalb, a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live!, conjures her brassy, advice-laden...

Likes
by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum ’95 (FSG)

In the title story of this exquisite collection, a father tries to decode his taciturn 12-year-old daughter’s life by scrolling through her Instagram posts. It’s a quiet, moving drama as he worries the mystery, afraid his daughter’s silence might be his fault. For many of Bynum’s characters,...

Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy
by Larry Tye ’77 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Tye’s eighth book brings Joe McCarthy back in ways that make the self-aggrandizing senator seem both more sinister and surprisingly human. This illuminating look at McCarthy’s rise, beginning with growing up on a Wisconsin farm, and final...