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Arts & CultureIn printBooks by Yale authors
Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White Novelist, photographer, and arts patron Van Vechten was “a white man with a passion for blackness,” notes English professor Bernard. In this fine biography filled with observations by Van Vechten’s friends—such as Langston Hughes, Ethel Waters, and Zora Neale Hurston—the writer details Van Vechten’s complicated and crucial role in “helping the Harlem Renaissance, a black movement, come to understand itself.”
The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice Elizabeth Taylor was more than just a movie superstar; she was a “brand,” writes Lord. The critic and investigative journalist explores films as different as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and National Velvet, as well as the star’s later work as an AIDS activist, to show how “the Taylor brand deserves credit for its under-the-radar challenge to traditional attitudes” about women.
The Weather in Proust In the last decade of her life, eminent literary critic and queer-theory pioneer Sedgwick was working on a book about Proust. This collection of essays displays the remarkable breadth and depth of her insights, which range from fountain mechanics to karma, from Oedipal mythology to chaos and complexity science—and that’s on page three. Sedgwick offers, as she says of Proust, an abundance of “surprise and refreshment.”
The Very Hungry City: Urban Energy Efficiency and the Economic Fate of Cities Like a body, a city has what Troy terms an “urban energy metabolism.” As the cost of energy increases and supplies tighten—an inevitability, the author argues—the urban areas with the best metabolism-management strategies will be the biggest winners, environmentally and economically. Troy provides both a useful assessment and numerous success stories.
Things to Do in a Retirement Home Trailer Park . . . When You’re 29 and Unemployed In a hauntingly drawn graphic memoir, the author and illustrator recounts how he cared for his father as the old man entered hospice and slowly died of emphysema. Wright, an artist and animator, casts himself as a minotaur; his dad, an architect, is drawn as a rhinoceros. The clashes between these two stubborn personalities form the foundation of a powerful and poignant story of family reconciliation.
The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans Long before New Orleans was the “Big Easy,” or the post-Katrina symbol of bad federal management, it was known to scholars as “the impossible but inevitable city.” Tulane historian Powell describes the Crescent City’s earliest years, from its founding in the early 1700s—in a “dreadful” site “prone to flooding and infested with snakes and mosquitoes”—to its rapid growth over the next century into a center of commerce and an uneasy melting pot.
More books by Yale authors Alex Berenson ’94 Emily Bernard ’89, 98PhD Robert A. Burt ’64LLB Ivan Chermayeff 55BFA, Tom Geismar, and Sagi Haviv Scott Donaldson ’50 Julia B. Frank ’77 and Renato D. Alarcón Theodore Friend ’54, ’58PhD, and William Jenkins Jacob S. Hacker ’00PhD and Ann O'Leary Susannah Hollister ’09PhD, Emily Setina ’10PhD, editors, and Gertrude Stein Eloisa James ’95PhD William Landay ’85 Meira Levinson ’92 Jeffrey Lewis ’66 Amy R. W. Meyers ’79, ’85PhD, and Lisa L. Ford David L. Mikics ’88PhD David A. Mindell ’88 Wendy Moffat ’77, ’85PhD Marco Pasanella ’84 Robert C. Post ’77JD Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Assistant Professor of American Studies Corey Robin ’99PhD Jośe David Saldivar ’77 Peter Stansky ’53 and William Abrams Leonard Volk ’49 T. M. Wolf ’11JD
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