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New & Notable

Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Miss Emma Mills: China’s First Lady and Her American Friend
Thomas A. DeLong (Law ’60)
McFarland & Co.

From the 1930s to 1975, the brilliant Madame Chiang acted as co-president of nationalist China, securing millions of U.S. dollars in aid and a leadership alliance with Britain, Russia and the U.S. Through the letters and journals of Emma Mills, a close Wellesley classmate of Madame Chiang’s, this book traces their lifelong friendship and the respective challenges both women faced, searching for a career and a cause in a pre-women’s liberation generation. Ultimately, both found strength and purpose in work for China.


Vision, Reflection & Desire in Western Painting
David Summers (Faculty)
University of North Carolina Press

Spanning more than 2,500 years in the history of art, this book demonstrates how the rise and diffusion of the science of optics in ancient Greece and the Mediterranean world correlated to pictorial illusion in the development of Western painting. The spread of understanding of how light is transmitted, reflected and refracted is evident in the works of artists such as Brunelleschi, van Eyck, Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci.


Managing for Stakeholders: Survival, Reputation, and Success
R. Edward Freeman (Faculty), Jeffrey S. Harrison and Andrew C. Wicks (Faculty)
Yale University Press

This book is the culmination of 20 years of research, interviews and observations in the workplace with regard to management thinking and practice. Freeman, a world-renowned management scholar, and his coauthors outline 10 concrete principles and seven practical techniques for managing stakeholder relationships to ensure a firm’s success.


Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
Heather Love (Grad ’00, ’01)
Harvard University Press

While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear benefits, the author weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. Her book makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experiences that now threaten to disappear.


Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995
C.T. Funkhouser (Col ’86, Grad ’88)
University of Alabama Press

Focusing primarily on programs and experiments produced before the emergence of the World Wide Web, the author analyzes numerous landmark works of digital poetry. He illustrates how today’s most advanced works are rooted in the rudimentary generative, visual and interlinked productions of the genre’s prehistoric period.


Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers, and Artists
Michael Hamilton Morgan (Col ’73)
National Geographic Books

The founder of New Foundations for Peace, Morgan was spurred to write this book out of a concern that, after 9/11, Americans’ lack of knowledge of Muslim contributions could intensify a sense of alienation. He shows how early breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, science and culture laid the cornerstones of the European Renaissance and continue to reverberate today.


One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets
Bliss Broyard (Grad ’96)
Little, Brown and Co.

Daughter of the writer and critic Anatole Broyard, Bliss Broyard learned shortly before his death in 1990 that her father was part black. A book of family history and memoir, One Drop explores his secret choice to pass for white. She writes of her own privileged upbringing in Connecticut and travels to New Orleans, her father’s birthplace, to learn more about her African ancestry and to Los Angeles, where she meets a white and a black set of Broyard relations.


Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity
Charles Marsh (Faculty)
Oxford University Press

In recent years, American evangelicals have achieved more political power than at any time in their history. But access and influence have come at a cost to the integrity of their message, according to Marsh. He offers a contrast between the contemporary evangelical elite, which forms the core of the Republican Party, and the historic Christian tradition, arguing that the most prominent voices in American evangelicalism have arrogantly redefined Christianity on the basis of partisan politics rather than Scripture and tradition.


The New Time Travelers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics
David Toomey (Grad ’98)
W.W. Norton & Co.

Time travel, long relegated to science fiction, became serious scientific inquiry when a group of theoretical physicists at the California Institute of Technology undertook an investigation of the possibility of time travel into the past. This book tells the story of their groundbreaking work; they concluded it might well be possible in the universe we know.


Hero
Perry Moore (Col ’94)
Hyperion

Moore’s debut novel is a coming-of-age story about the world’s first gay superhero and is geared to young adults. Teenager Thom Creed learns he has a special ability to heal things, but it’s a secret—along with his sexuality—that he has to hide from his father, a disgraced ex-superhero who hates all things superhuman. When Thom joins a motley crew of other superheroes, he’s forced to reconcile his sexuality, face his father’s legacy, save the world and grow up.


Unfinished Business: Racial Equality in American History
Michael J. Klarman (Faculty)
Oxford University Press

A leading authority on the history of civil rights law in the U.S., Klarman won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his earlier work From Jim Crow to Civil Rights. This book traces the long and turbulent history of race relations in America and the slow judicial progress of racial equality—a progress that is less than we’d like to think. He highlights social and political factors that have influenced the path of racial progress and argues that court decisions have tended to reflect the racial mores of the times.


The Rebel and the Rose
Wesley Millett (Engr ’62) and Gerald White

In the waning days of the Civil War, Navy paymaster James A. Semple was entrusted with all the remaining gold in the Confederate treasury: $86,000 in coins and bullion. Then he disappeared with it into the night. In this book, the authors reveal for the first time what happened to the gold, tracing Semple’s odyssey from the swamps of Georgia to the Staten Island home of Julia Gardiner Tyler, the “Rose of Long Island,” where he eventually took refuge.


Food Fights: Winning the Nutritional Challenges of Parenthood Armed with Insight, Humor, and a Bottle of Ketchup
Laura A. Jana and Jennifer Shu (Col ’88)
American Academy of Pediatrics

The authors share their expertise on how to bring “peas and harmony” to family meals with practical advice gleaned from their experience as both pediatricians and moms. The book offers simple and realistic strategies for introducing children to lifelong healthy eating habits.


Tiki Barber: My Life in the Game and Beyond
Tiki Barber (Com ’97) with Gil Reavill
Simon Spotlight

In this memoir, Barber talks about his childhood, growing up alongside his identical twin brother Ronde (now a cornerback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) with a strong mother and absent father. He recounts his extraordinary career with the Giants, where he became a star running back, and the surprise announcement of his retirement at the age of 31. He also looks at personal and professional challenges that lie ahead.