Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History
Whitney Barlow Robles ’11
(Yale University Press, $40)
“The word ‘curiosity’ has a convoluted and contradictory past,” notes historian Robles in this captivating look at how “the [proverbial] thing that killed the cat” was also, in the eighteenth century, “the key to unlocking secrets of nature.” That uneasy dualism is with us still. In this wide-ranging look at four groups of animals—corals, rattlesnakes, fish, and raccoons—Robles turns to historical archives and modern-day scientists alike to show how “this deliberately mixed bag of curious creatures helps capture the diverse ways animals have shaped human knowledge.” Her book is about them and us, inextricably together and too often apart in the modern extinction era. “We are damned with animals,” she writes, “damned without them.”
Hum
Helen Phillips ’04
(Marysue Rucci Books/Simon & Schuster, $27.99)
The AI-powered robots have won, and in this vividly imagined novel about our possible dystopian fate, protagonist May has lost her job to the very intelligence she helped create. She offers her face to the “hums” in a lucrative surgical experiment that may render her invisible to the ubiquitous face-recognition system that prevails. With the money, she takes her husband and two young kids on a devices-free idyll to the Botanical Garden, an oasis of semi-genuine nature in the middle of a parched and polluted city. “She had done it. She had borne them to a clean green place,” May said. But then things go horribly wrong, and she’s forced to rely on the unpredictable kindness of humanoids to save her family. Can she really trust a “hum”? Read on.
Illiberal America: A History
Steven Hahn ’79PhD
(W. W. Norton, $35)
This country’s creation and development story leans heavily on a “liberal tradition” as the “centerpiece of American society, culture, politics, and history,” writes New York University historian Hahn. But as the Pulitzer Prize–winning author reveals in this magisterial work, illiberalism and its core principles of “assigned hierarchies, elite rule, restricted popular political influence, militarism, and the marking of internal as well as external enemies” are also “deeply embedded in our history, not at the margins but very much at the center.” Hahn offers a valuable exploration of what kind of center may hold.
Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class
Rob Henderson ’18
(Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster, $28.99) “When adults let children down, children learn to let themselves down,” writes the author in an unflinching look back at a harrowing upbringing perhaps best summarized by an introductory account of his full name, Robert Kim Henderson. Each part comes, he notes, from an adult—birth father, birth mother, adoptive father, respectively—with “something in common: All abandoned me.” Growing up in “the top 1 percent of the most unstable childhoods in the US” meant that the likelihood of achieving anything beyond incarceration was small indeed, but Henderson has managed to forge a successful military career, a Yale BA, and a Cambridge doctorate. In this plea for “family, stability, and emotional security for children,” the author details how he beat the odds and prospered—and how kids in the same situation could do the same.
Requiem
Jeremy Beck ’95DMA
(album released by Acis Productions, www.acisproductions.com. Available on the major music streaming services.)
Composer Beck gets right to the point with his new requiem. There are a few stirring seconds of orchestral mood setting (by the Cincinnati String Ensemble) then the choir (Coro Volante, also from Cincinnati, who specialize in works by living composers) is heard at once singing “Requiem.” From there it gets very interesting. Through 11 sections in just under an hour, there are bursts of strings, complex vocal harmonies, powerful shouts of “Rex tremendae,” and a modernistic, layered concluding “Lux aeterna” that mixes all the feelings of the preceding 10 tracks for a final emotional wallop. This is a contemporary requiem clearly affected by the COVID pandemic, brash and impassioned, in a grand classical tradition of funeral mass music while also sounding current and vital.
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