Arts & Culture

In print

Books by Yale authors

Lip Service: Smiles in Life, Death, Trust, Lies, Work, Memory, Sex, and Politics
Marianne LaFrance, Professor of Psychology

W. W. Norton, $26.95

“Brides do it; teasers do it; even educated geezers do it,” notes LaFrance. They smile, and in this wide-ranging work, the experimental social psychologist explores the “science of smiles,” including those practiced by infants before birth—it’s not gas—and the grins now being carefully integrated into robot faces. LaFrance gives us an entertaining examination of why smiles are “social acts with consequences.”

 

American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era
David Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History

Harvard University Press, $27.95

Fifty years ago, when this country marked the centennial of the Civil War, “the national temper and mythology still preferred a story of the mutual valor of the Blue and Gray” as the conflict’s defining narrative. For the sesquicentennial, historian Blight mines the work of four notable writers of the Civil Rights period—Yale professor Robert Penn Warren, historian Bruce Catton, literary critic Edmund Wilson, and essayist James Baldwin—to show how their insights into the central role of slavery and emancipation helped reshape thinking about the war.

 

Why Jane Austen?
Rachel M. Brownstein ’63PhD

Columbia University Press, $29.50

As anyone with an eye on popular culture may have noticed, “Jane-O-Mania”—the veneration of all things Austen—has taken hold of the book and movie world with a vengeance. But too often lost, says Austen expert Brownstein, is what makes Jane “a great writer, delightful to read.” In a combination of memoir, cultural analysis, and literary criticism, Brownstein details the perennial appeals and the overlooked depths of an author who “writes fiction, but she doesn’t lie.”

 

Journey of the Universe
Mary Evelyn Tucker, senior lecturer and senior research scholar, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; and Brian Thomas Swimme

Yale University Press, $25

“The great discovery of contemporary science is that the universe is not simply a place, but a story,” and Tucker and Swimme offer a provocative reading of this nearly 14-billion-year-old epic. They combine insights from cosmology, evolution, and the humanistic traditions into a hopeful narrative that sees in the current “vast destruction”—which is hardly the first—the seed of a “moment of profound creativity” and renewal.

 

The Magician King
Lev Grossman ’97MPhil

Viking Adult, $26.95

The magician heroes of Grossman’s last bestseller are back, with four spell-weavers now installed as kings and queens of Fillory, the storybook-kingdom-made-real that they rescued from evil in the first installment. “Everything was easy. Nothing was hard,” says the narrator. But after a couple of years of the good life, protagonist Quentin Coldwater is bored. “Maybe a change would do us good,” he suggests. There’s a quest in the wind, of course—one that will do good by readers of this page-turning fantasy for adults.

 

What It Is Like to Go to War
Karl Marlantes ’67

Atlantic Monthly Press, $25

“The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn’t teach me how to deal with killing,” writes Marlantes, who served in the highland jungle of Vietnam as a young lieutenant. Marlantes weaves gut-wrenching accounts of his military service and the story of his subsequent decades of self-examination—including a search through various religions and reading of classic writers from Homer to Jung—into a powerful guidebook for warriors struggling with the spiritual aftermath of combat.

 

More Books by Yale Authors

Jack M. Balkin ’94MAH, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment
Living Originalism
Harvard University Press, $35

Thomas F. Banchoff ’86
Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies
Cornell University Press, $35

Willis Barnstone ’60PhD
Café de L’Aube à Paris/Dawn Café in Paris: Poems
Sheep Meadow, $19.95

Richard Brookhiser ’77
James Madison
Basic Books, $27

Katerina Clark ’71PhD, Professor of Comparative Literature and of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Moscow—The Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941
Harvard University Press, $35

John R. Cooper ’57, ’62PhD
Wit’s Voices: Intonation in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry
Lexington Books, $55

Eric Drott ’01PhD
Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981
University of California Press, $29.95

Charles Eisenstein ’89
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition
Evolver Editiona, $22.95

Gerald Elias ’75, ’75MusM
Death and the Maiden: A Daniel Jacobus Mystery
Minotaur Books, $25.99

Cara Eliot ’73, ’74MFA
Too Wicked to Wed
Forever Mass Market, $7.99

Richard A. Epstein ’68LLB
Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law
Harvard University Press, $29.95

Holly Finn ’90
The Baby Chase: An Adventure in Fertility
byliner.com, $1.99

Samuel Fleischacker ’82, ’89PhD
Divine Teaching and the Way of the World: A Defense of Revealed Religion
Oxford University Press, $110

Denise Gigante ’87
The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George
Harvard University Press, $35

David D. Hall ’60, ’64PhD
A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life People in New England
Knopf, $29.95

Emil Henry ’51
Triumph and Tragedy: The Life of Edward Whymper
Troubador Publishing, $19.95

Stephanie H. Jed ’76, ’82PhD
Wings for Our Courage: Gender, Erudition, and Republican Thought
University of California Press, $34.95

Jill Kargman ’95, Sadie Kargman, and Christine Davenier
Pirates and Princesses
Duttons Children’s Books, $16.99

Angela Barron McBride ’64MSN
The Growth and Development of Nurse Leaders
Springer Publishing Company, $55

Edie Meidav ’88
Lola, California: A Novel
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $28

William Ian Miller ’72, ’75PhD, ’80JD
Losing it: In Which an Aging Professor Laments His Shrinking Brain
Yale University Press, $27

Ann Morning ’90
The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference
University of California Press, $26.95

Dan Mulhern ’80 and Jennifer M. Granholm
A Governor’s Story: The Fight for Jobs and America’s Economic Future
Public Affairs, $27.99

Roger J. Porter ’59, ’67PhD
Bureau of Missing Person: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers
Cornell University Press, $35

Jesse Rhines ’83
Black Harvard/Black Yale: The Testament to America’s Greatest Hopes for Progress in Race and Education
CreateSpace, $25

Robert Riche ’47
Days Like These
Plain View Press, $14.95

Dorothy Roberts ’77
Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century
The New Press, $29.95

Patricia Meyer Spacks ’50
On Rereading
Harvard University Press, $26.95

Chandler Tedholm ’73
Irrepressible Conflict
Booklocker.com, $15.95

Philip Thibodeau ’93
Playing the Farmer: Representations of Rural Life in Vergil’s Georgics
University of California Press, $60

Harlow Giles Unger ’53
Improbable Patriot: The Secret History of Monsieur de Beaumarchais, the French Playwright Who Saved the American Revolution
University Press of New England, $26.95

Scott Wallace ’77
The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes
Crown Publishers, $26

Ivy G. Wilson ’98, ’99MPhil
Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum US 
Oxford University Press, $29.95

Stacy Ellen Wolf ’83
Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical
Oxford University Press, $24.95

Charles Young ’53
The Hydra Chronicle
Cosmos, $19.95

 

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