Arts & Culture

In print 

Books by Yale authors

Memoir: A History
Ben Yagoda ’75
Riverhead Books, $25.95

“It is a Western, or possibly human, trait to want to tell others about one’s experiences, and people have done so in their various ways since time immemorial,” says Yagoda. In this entertaining look at a genre that has at least some of its written roots in the Old Testament—David’s Psalms were early tell-all autobiography—the author traces the development of an overwhelmingly popular genre and offers advice on how to tell truth from the memoirist’s fictions.

 

Milton’s Words
Annabel Patterson, Sterling Professor Emerita of English
Oxford University Press, $34.95

In 1947, T. S. Eliot dismissed Milton’s use of the English language as “a perpetual sequence of original acts of lawlessness.” A half-century later, “we are free to admire Milton again,” says Patterson. Beginning with the poet’s use of the words “unlibidinous” and “indefatigable,” Patterson crafts an engaging analysis of “what Milton’s words look like when we acknowledge their freight of personal and political history.”

 

No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life
Thomas J. Espenshade ’66MAT and Alexandria Walton Radford
Princeton University Press, $35

Legalized discrimination based on race is history in this country, but, say the authors, complete equality remains elusive. “Many solutions have been proposed for healing these divisions, but education—and especially higher education—has traditionally been believed by most Americans to be an effective strategy,” Espenshade and Radford write. The thrust of their thorough assessment of elite colleges’ success in promoting social mobility: “We are not there yet.”

 

Eureka Man: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes
Alan Hirshfeld ’78PhD
Walker & Company, $26

Everyone knows the tale, perhaps even true, of the Greek mathematician Archimedes taking a bath and deducing how to find out, through water displacement, whether a gold crown had been adulterated with silver. But that was just one achievement of this polymath, who developed a kind of calculus nearly 2,000 years before Newton and Leibniz, and whom Galileo termed “superhuman.” Hirshfeld’s book is partly intellectual biography, partly a scholarly detective story about an ancient manuscript by Archimedes himself.

 

Judaism: A Way of Being
David Gelernter ’76, ’77MA, Professor of Computer Science
Yale University Press, $26

“What is it about Judaism that is transfixing enough to have kept a brilliant, fractious, bickering, relentlessly skeptical people alive for three thousand years?” Gelernter creates four “image-themes” to build a novel, personal, and provocative explanation of the essence of an ancient religion. Through this effort to educate Jews and non-Jews alike about the “grand scheme,” Gelernter hopes also to halt the decline of the American Jewish community.

 

The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey
Trysh Travis ’98PhD
University of North Carolina Press, $35

“The number of people who identify themselves as ‘in recovery’ is staggering,” says Travis. But while millions have taken part in AA and other 12-step programs, the organizations and the process remain both understudied and undervalued by academics. Travis explains how the recovery movement came about and why it is so important to so many.

 

More books by Yale authors

Charles Affron ’63PhD and Mirella Jona Affron
Best Years: Going to the Movies 1945–1946
Rutgers University Press, $32.50

Bromwell Ault ’49
Eminent Disdain: The Triumph of Cynicism over Integrity in 21st Century America
AuthorHouse, $29.20

Peter Baldwin ’78
The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe are Alike
Oxford Press, $24.95

C. Stephen Baldwin ’65JD
Shadows over Sundials: Dark and Light: Life in a Large Outside World
iUniverse Books, $24.95

Katharine P. Beals ’87
Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World: Strategies for Helping Bright, Quirky, Socially Awkward Children to Thrive at Home and at School
Trumpeter/Random House, $16.95

May R. Berenbaum ’75
The Earwig's Tail: A Modern Bestiary of Multi-legged Legends
Harvard University Press, $23.95

Joseph Ciabattoni ’76MD
Doctor C's Medical Guide: What You Need to Know
Xlibris, $23.99

Sheldon S. Cohen ’53
Commodore Abraham Whipple of the Continental Navy: Privateer, Patriot, Pioneer
University Press of Florida, $42

Tom Dolby ’98
Secret Society: A Novel
Harper Collins, $16.99

Julia Schlam Edelman ’76
Menopause Matters: Your Guide to a Long and Healthy Life
Johns Hopkins University Press, $18.95

Shelley Fisher Fishkin ’71, ’77PhD
Mark Twain's Book of Animals
University of California Press, $27.50

Robert Gooding-Williams ’75, ’82PhD
In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America
Harvard University Press, $35

Jonathan Hafetz ’99JD and Mark P. Denbeaux, editors
The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law
NYU Press, $32.95

Terence Hawkins ’78
The Rage of Achilles: A Novel
Casperian Books, $13.50

Gary L. Kaplan ’80
Executive Guide to Managing Disputes
Beard Books, $49.95

Mark S. Kende ’82
Constitutional Rights in Two Worlds: South Africa and the United States
Cambridge University Press, $90

Randolph Kwei ’58
East to West to East: Journey of a U.S. Trained Chinese Financier
Inkwater Press, $37.95

Rika Lesser ’74, translator
Mozart's Third Brain by Goran Sonnevi
Yale University Press, $25

Theodore R. Marmor, Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Management
Comparative Studies and the Politics of Modern Medical Care
Yale University Press, $55

David Mickics ’88PhD
Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography
Yale University Press, $30

Margarita A. Mooney ’95
Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora
University of California Press, $21.95

Roy C. Nelson ’85
Harnessing Globalization: The Promotion of Nontraditional Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America
Penn State University Press, $65

Annabel Patterson, Sterling Professor Emerita of English
Milton's Words
Oxford Press, $34.95

David Pogue ’85
The World According to Twitter
Pogue Press, $12.95

Laura Quinney ’80
William Blake on Self and Soul
Harvard University Press, $39.95

Maxim D. Shrayer ’95PhD
Yom Kippur in Amsterdam: Stories
Syracuse University Press, $24.95

Debra Spark ’84
Good for the Jews: A Novel
University of Michigan Press, $24

Paul E. Stepansky ’78PhD
Psychoanalysis at the Margins
Other Press, $39

Ann Reynolds ’79 and Kenneth Wapner
Medical Mysteries: From the Bizarre to the Deadly . . . The Cases That Have Baffled Doctors
Hyperion, $14.99

Gina Welch ’01
In The Land of Believers: An Outsider's Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church
Metropolitan Books, $25

John V. Wylie ’64
Diagnosing and Treating Mental Illness: A Guide for Physicians, Nurses, Patients and their Families
DemersBooks, $19.95

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