Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece
James Romm ’80
(W. W. Norton, $31.99)
Since Plato’s influential Republic was written nearly 2,500 years ago, both the Greek philosopher and his take on the best governance system have been enshrined in an intellectual Mount Olympus. But in an engaging historical drama in five acts, Romm mines a collection of Plato’s letters that cast the writer and the “new form of autocracy—philosopher-kingship” that he touted as a political cure-all in a modern light. “Did Plato, while extolling the Good as the source of transcendent joy, end up collaborating with evil?” asks Romm.
Please Don’t Lie
Christina Baker Kline ’86 and Anne Burt ’89
(Thomas and Mercer/Amazon Publishing, $28.99)
In the middle of a blinding snowstorm, Hayley Stone’s Adirondack Eden has become a hellish nightmare. She cowers in the shelter of the smokehouse on her new husband Brandon’s family property and clutches a makeshift weapon to protect her from . . . Well, what? So opens a riveting novel grounded in a collision between family tragedies that rushes headlong into betrayal and violence. In her new home, Hayley, a refugee from New York City, “imagines she can hear whispers from the past.”
The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines
Jonathan Horn ’04.
(Scribner/Simon & Schuster, $30.99)
After General Douglas MacArthur fled the Philippines in March 1942 in advance of the Japanese army, he famously promised the world, “I shall return.” But he left behind his colleague Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright, who, along with US and Filipino troops, would surrender to the invaders—Wainright received no special treatment— and remain imprisoned until the war ended three years later. Using “almost completely overlooked diaries and previously unexamined correspondence,” journalist-historian Horn presents a riveting account of two men who “received the same medal but found honor on very different paths.”
What We Leave Behind: A Novel
Sue Halpern ’77
(HarperCollins, $18.99)
When a pair of state troopers arrived at Melody Marcus’s upscale suburban home, they had to deliver the awful news that the teen’s adoptive mom Delia had been killed by a mammoth boulder that “fell from the ledge above the road and crashed through the roof” of her red Audi. The accident sets in motion an array of events that bring together the lives of Melody and an unrelated and seemingly happy-to-be-unattached business executive named Candace. This tender novel revolves around the deepest of family secrets and the collision of nature and nurture. “The genes don’t lie,” says Melody. But what kinds of truth do they tell?
Baldwin: A Love Story
Nicholas Boggs ’97
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $36)
The “groundbreaking” Black novelist and essayist James Baldwin did not “understand racism as an isolated form of oppression. Instead,” writes Boggs, “he forced readers to confront the connections between white supremacy, masculinity, and sexuality.” Boggs explores these links by focusing on the loves of Baldwin’s life: school teachers like Orilla “Bill” Miller, who took him under her wing at PS 24 in Harlem; the painter Beauford Delaney, Baldwin’s mentor; and the men who nurtured him as he moved restlessly between the US and France.
The Turning: Seasons 1, 2, and 3
Erika Lantz ’11
(iHeartPodcasts and Rococo Punch)
“When Mary [Johnson] was nineteen years old, she dropped out of college and joined Mother Teresa’s order of nuns. She could leave at any time, but she was convinced there was no turning back.” So goes the first episode, aired in May 2021, of a remarkable podcast series, now finishing its third season, that has looked intensely at three groups of women: members of the Missionaries of Charity, ballet dancers wedded to master choreographer George Balanchine, and the Maidens of a cult called the River Road Fellowship. In this series, podcaster and investigative reporter Lantz gives her subjects the space to tell their unforgettable stories of too-total immersion and eventual escape.
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