Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family
Jordan Mechner ’85
(First Second Books, $29.99)
This book begins with an escape: “In 1938, my grandfather was desperate to get out of Austria.” What follows is a compelling story, richly drawn—literally: it is a graphic memoir. It tells the story of a family that fled to America after their “lovely safe world blew itself up.” Mechner himself, of course, hadn’t been born yet. But eventually he emerged as a US citizen, grew up there, became a video game designer, and then decided to move his family to France. There he worked on a new edition of his best-selling Prince of Persia franchise. “Nobody knows what will succeed,” he notes.
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Jonathan Haidt ’85
(Penguin Press, $30)
The gauntlet that kids have to navigate on the road to adulthood has always been challenging. But Haidt, a social psychologist, believes the difficulties have been made worse by the pervasive technologies that dominate everyone’s lives. The impact is heaviest, Haidt maintains, on children and adolescents, who are at their most vulnerable developmental stages. Couple smartphones and their digital cousins with a trend in the 2000s towards “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world,” and the result is an anxious generation: Gen Z. Haidt gives a compelling explanation of how we got to this place and how to help “reverse the damage.”
Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story
Leslie Jamison ’16PhD
(Little, Brown and Company, $29)
In three essay collections and a novel, the author, a Columbia writing professor, has mined her often difficult past—from alcoholism and eating disorders to her parents’ divorce. Jamison focuses on the years after the birth of her daughter, a period that encompassed the end of her marriage, ill-fated romances, and the pandemic. The book’s core is about finding serenity and growth, in the mundane and in motherhood. “My daughter broke me open for the whole world,” says Jamison. “She broke me open for everything that wasn’t her.”
The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives
Brook Manville ’72, ’79PhD, and Josiah Ober
(Princeton University Press, $29.95)
These two historians propose a “corrective” for the current pessimism by examining “classical Athens, republican Rome, British parliamentarianism, and US constitutionalism”: four “highly influential democratic experiments.” The messy process of “bossless self-governance,” the authors maintain, requires a “civic bargain” based on seven agreed-on essential conditions: from “no boss” to “civic education.” But it only works when citizens “constructively and peacefully” interact, learn, and compromise with each other.
The Ghost of Childhood
Julie Flanders ’81 and Marina Belica ’81
(album by October Project, available on all major streaming services)
The Ghost of Childhood returns October Project to its original pop/folk classical blend. It’s a more conventional album than some of their work, but it’s still their own layered, expertly produced music. They used the song “Once Blue” as the soundtrack of a video tribute to the Yale Class of ’81. All 11 songs capture the same spiritual lyricism. They flow together and build until the vocals, guitar, and piano draw you ever closer to the clouds. (They are scheduled to perform live at the NYC Yale Club on October 8.)
Exhibit: A Novel
R. O. Kwon ’05
(Riverhead Books, $28)
Jin Han, a critically acclaimed photographer, has a problem. There’s an exhibit coming up, but the photos she captured seemed so bad that, she says, “I failed with each image I shot.” To make matters worse, her husband wants a baby; she does not, and instead tells him, “I wish you’d hurt me”—as in, fulfill her desire to be beaten. And then there’s the ghost of a kisaeng, an enslaved Korean courtesan who has long bedeviled the Han family. Enter a rehabbing ballet dancer named Lidija—part inspirational muse, part dominatrix—and all the elements of a haunting fictional ride are there for the reading in this well-crafted tale.
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