The Scroobious Pip
Poem by Edward Lear; Illustrations by Charles Santore and Nicholas Santore ’00MFA.
(Running Press Kids, $19.99)
When beloved children’s book illustrator Charles Santore died suddenly in 2019, he left behind an unfinished masterwork: an artistic realization of an obscure and also unfinished poem by Edward Lear that featured an amazing creature assembled from a diversity of disparate parts. To complete the project, the publishers and the illustrator’s family prevailed on Santore’s son Nick, a talented but reluctant painter who was not then following in his dad’s footsteps. After taking up residence in his father’s studio in Philadelphia, Nick produced a series of stunning paintings that brought his dad’s vision to seamless life.
Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance and the Road Ahead
Kenneth Rogoff ’75BA/MA
(Yale University Press, $35)
“The greenback rules the global financial system today like no currency before it,” states economist Rogoff, and while other forms of money, from Spain’s “pieces of eight” to Britain’s pound sterling, have dominated the world in the past, “the dollar is the undisputed lingua franca of today’s highly globalized trade and financial markets.” But for how much longer? In this wise and entertaining book, Rogoff explores why pretenders to the greenback’s throne have failed to dislodge it; he also offers a cautionary tale about how debt and inflation might lead to the end of “dollar supremacy.”
The Ends of Things: A Novel
Sandra Chwialkowska ’05
(Blackstone Publishing, $26.99)
When New York attorney Laura Phillips and her new boyfriend Dave Mitchell, a lawyer at the same firm, checked in at the romantic Pink Sands resort on a Bahamian island paradise called Eleuthera, everything looked blissful. But Laura, who had been betrayed in love and friendship, “began to only imagine the ends of things.” When she encountered a mysterious woman named Diana, who was jarringly out of place at the resort as a single amidst couples, the intense relationship that forms between the two leads to Laura revealing painful old secrets and Diana attempting to heal the past. Then Diana disappears, and as Laura becomes the chief suspect in what might be a murder mystery, her entire world unravels.
True Conservatism: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Arrogant Age
Anthony Kronman ’72PhD, ’75JD, Sterling Professor of Law
(Yale University Press, $30)
“The conservative cause has lost its way,” states philosopher and legal scholar Kronman, but before progressives start running a victory lap, the author has a humbling message. “Humanism is conservatism,” says Kronman, and in a book that should be read on both sides of the political aisle, the author shows how the progressive platform of “more justice, greater equality, and better science” is haunted by “three prejudices” about the “value of equality,” a “particular view of the past,” and the “existence of God” that, taken together, “make the humane age in which we live so strangely inhuman.” A “true conservatism,” Kronman argues, “invites us to remember and to cherish our ageless dependencies” and help heal our divisions.
Everyone, Everywhere
Cecilia Chorus of New York, Mark Shapiro ’81.
(Naxos, available on CD or through major streaming services)
Shapiro, music director since 2011 of the 119-year-old, 150-voices-strong Cecilia Chorus of New York, conducted the world premiere of Daron Aric Hagen’s monumental Everyone, Everywhere in December 2023 at Carnegie Hall. A recording of the concert, which has an orchestra of nearly three dozen freelance musicians from the New York metropolitan area backing the chorus, has now been released. Alternately grandiose and intimate, the fluid five-section work is a glorious sonorous choral setting of portions of the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), celebrating the 75th anniversary of that document’s adoption by the United Nations General Assembly. A response to World War II, the UDHR remains vital and relevant and frequently referenced—Amnesty International calls it “a global road map for freedom and equality.” Hagen gives the text a spiritual dignity and Shapiro and the Cecilia Chorus add an ethereal sweetness that evokes both church music and grand opera.
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