Output: January/February 2026

No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson 
Gardiner Harris ’86
(Random House, $32) 
At the start of the Civil War, 16-year-old Robert Wood Johnson was sent by his parents to work in a Poughkeepsie apothecary shop. He brought his brothers into the business known as Johnson & Johnson, which has become not only the “largest healthcare conglomerate in the world,” notes the author, but a company “beloved for generations” and considered a “paragon of ethics.” Harris came to suspect “the company’s culture and its apple-pie image might be entirely at odds.” 

The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America
John Fabian Witt ’94, ’99JD, ’00PhD
(Simon & Schuster, $35) 
In the early 1920s, an idealistic Wall Street scion named Charles Garland was convinced by author Upton Sinclair and ACLU founder Roger Baldwin not to reject the fortune he was to inherit but to use most of the money to endow a foundation “to promote the wellbeing of mankind throughout the world.” The so-called “Garland Fund” did a considerable amount of good in its 19 years of helping bankroll “transformative social change,” says Witt. He offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of an organization that cultivated “progressive reformers.”

We the People: A History of the US Constitution
Jill Lepore ’95PhD
(Liveright/W. W. Norton, $39.99)
As this country lurches towards its 250th birthday, the glue that has kept a disparate and often polarized “We the People” together is its Constitution, notes the author. In an examination of the “core rules, customs, and principles” that bind its citizens “to their government by an act of consent,” historian Lepore demonstrates how the nation’s founders produced a guidebook “intended to be amended.”

An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories
Ed Park ’92
(Random House, $28) 
Master storyteller Ed Park begins with a tale about an incompetent translator that includes the most aggrieved of questions: “Why not call a spade a spade—or, as the case may be, a rubbery bathtub ornament a rubbery bathtub ornament?” In 16 stories, Park marries wit with a Korean magical realism to consider everything from a girlfriend named Tabitha Grammaticus, who “reviews science fiction for a living, which just goes to show you that America is still the greatest, most useless country in the world,” to a dystopian tale about New York City in the grip of a deadly virus known as MtPR—pronounced “metaphor.” From Yale’s Machine City to a conversation between a has-been actress and director, Park has produced fiction to savor. 

Steal a Pencil for Me
Gerald Cohen ’82 and Deborah Brevoort, composers
(Sono Luminus, 2024. Available on streaming services, or $24.99 for a 2-CD set from https://www.sonoluminus.com)
The new opera from composer Gerald Cohen is now available in a full new recording by Opera Colorado, conducted by Ari Pelto. Steal a Pencil for Me is based on the true story of a couple who met at a party then found themselves fellow prisoners in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. Much of Act 1 is set in a transit camp in the Netherlands, Act 2 mostly in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The score is sweeping and old-school operatic. The source material—letters between Ina Soep and Jaap Polak that find hopefulness and affection amid an environment of death and despair—previously inspired a book and a documentary. 

Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People
Imani Perry ’94
(Ecco/HarperCollins, $28.99)
“Becoming Black,” writes Perry, is “both a parable and a process,” but the color that best exemplifies the metamorphosis, adds Perry, “is not black or brown or yellow or milky—all the colors Black people come in. It is blue, with its hues of melancholy and wonder.” In this amalgam of essays, the author provides a quilt of “loose threads and frayed patches”—the blues, enslavement, freedom, the indigo trade, a “traditional Black spiritual-medical-ethical-social” practice called hoodoo, and a wealth of blue-themed writers, musicians, and luminaries. They examine “the mystery of blue and its alchemy in the lives of Black folk.”