New and Noteworthy
Six new books from UVA alumni and faculty
Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans
by LaKisha Michelle Simmons (Col ’03)
Historians have documented the brutality black men experienced in the segregated South, but little has been written about racial violence against black women. Through oral histories and police reports, Simmons gives us a glimpse into the inner lives of African-American girls in Jim Crow-era New Orleans.
Discovering Tuberculosis: A Global History, 1900 to the Present
by Christian W. McMillen (faculty)
Although tuberculosis is preventable with a vaccine and curable with antibiotics, the disease has never been under control in the developing world. McMillen writes passionately about the failings of TB control, such as race-based theories about who is susceptible to TB, and how those failings date back to the earliest days of TB work.
Count the Waves: Poems
by Sandra Beasley (Col ’02)
In her third collection of poetry, Beasley focuses on the themes of travel, distance, love and fidelity through her authoritative, metaphysical verse. In the book’s penultimate poem, she writes, “I traveled before I was born, and I will travel after I die …/A wrought-iron gate makes beautiful/not its bars, but the spaces between its bars. Without structure/there can be no mystery.”
Chasing the Wind: Inside the Alternative Energy Battle
by Rody Johnson (Engr ’56, Darden ’60)
In this thoughtful, measured book, Johnson, a retired aerospace engineer, researches wind power, focusing at first on Appalachia and then on alternative energy movements nationally. Coal and nuclear power still dominate, and always will, Johnson determines, unless we transform our energy infrastructure.
Never a Good War: A Novel
by Winston Wood (Col ’72)
This novel contains the stories of soldiers struggling through the last years of the Vietnam War. The book’s title comes from the Benjamin Franklin quotation, “There was never a good war, or a bad peace,” and the hapless characters in this novel live out that philosophy. Wood, who worked as an editor for the Wall Street Journal, served with the last U.S. infantry regiment to leave Vietnam in 1972.
Eight Hundred Grapes: A Novel
by Laura Dave (Grad ’03)
A week before her wedding, 30-year-old Georgia discovers her fiancé has been keeping a shocking secret. She flees to her family’s vineyard in Sonoma, California, where she grew up. She expects to recover amid the comfort of all that is familiar, but she finds that her parents’ long marriage is on the brink of collapse and her brothers have secrets of their own. Best read with a glass of wine in hand.