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New & Notable

Three new books from UVA grads

The CIA's Greatest Covert Operation
by David Sharp (Engr '56, '69, '73)

In March of 1968, a Soviet submarine containing nuclear weapons sank in the North Pacific. This book tells the true story of the CIA's Project Azorian, the 1974 recovery of the sunken sub from a water depth of 16,700 feet. David Sharp was in charge of the recovery operations on the ship and provides the backstory of the program through his own recollections and personal records, declassified documents, conversations with team members and rarely seen photos.


Fast Girl: Don't Brake Until You See the Face of God and Other Good Advice from the Racetrack
by Ingrid Steffensen (Col '88)

A successful art history professor with "a husband, a preteen daughter and a fluffy little embarrassment of a dog," Ingrid Steffensen's life was comfortable and staid. But when she decides to join her car-crazed husband on a trip to the racetrack and learns to drive her Mini Cooper "really, really fast," she quickly falls in love with the world of high-performance driving. In this memoir, Steffensen describes the addictive thrill of pushing her limits—and feeling liberated in a way she didn't know she needed.


Petrochemical America
by Richard Misrach and Kate Orff (Col '93)

This book examines 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production known as "Cancer Alley." Through Richard Misrach's haunting photographs and landscape architect Kate Orff's Ecological Atlas—a series of "speculative drawings" developed through research of the region—Petrochemical America provides analysis of decades of environmental abuse along the river. Orff and Misrach suggest that Cancer Alley may well be an apt metaphor for the impact of petrochemicals on humans worldwide.