Reading List: Alumni Books That Caught Our Eye
Reading List
Alumni books that caught our eye
All The Horrors of War
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020By Bernice Lerner (Wheelock’01)
Nonfiction book traces the converging stories of Rachel Genuth, a Jewish teenager enduring the brutality of Hitler’s concentration camps, and British Brigadier H. L. Glyn Hughes, a doctor who helped liberate Bergen-Belsen. Lerner is Genuth’s daughter and a senior scholar at BU’s Center for Character and Social Responsibility.
Black Flag
Berkley, 2020
By David Ricciardi (CAS’89)
In the latest Jake Keller thriller, the CIA agent battles a new breed of well-organized high-seas pirates while involved with a Greek shipping heiress and a hidden agenda from headquarters.
A Clean Heart
Mango Press, 2020
By John Rosengren (GRS’94)
Carter Kirchner is a counselor at Six West, an adolescent drug treatment center run by Sister Mary Xavier, a hard-drinking nun, when personal and professional demons threaten his sanity and sobriety.
Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces
Kelson Books, 2019
By David Biespiel (CAS’86)
Revised and updated 10th anniversary edition of this slim but potent guide to the creative process for writers but also artists, musicians, and anyone else who leads a creative life. Foreword by Chuck Palahniuk.
Geode
Black Sparrow Press, 2020
By Susan Barba (GRS’12)
Poetry collection ponders Earth and our sins against it, full of anguish and lyricism.
How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences
University of Nebraska Press, 2020
By Sue William Silverman (CGS’66, COM’68)
Thematically linked essays by the memoirist and poet search for transcendence amid life’s tumult, including a long-hidden sexual assault.
Pale Colors in a Tall Field: Poems
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020
By Carl Phillips (GRS’93)
Depictions of the Cape Cod of Phillips’ youth are threaded through poems rich in memory and images.
Passage West
Ecco, 2020
By Rishi Reddi (GRS’01)
Ram Singh arrives in California’s Imperial Valley in 1913 hoping to make his fortune so he can return to his wife and son in India, but the precariousness of farming and rising anti-immigrant sentiment dramatically raise the stakes of his quest.
The Power of Experiments: Decision-Making in a Data-Driven World
The MIT Press, 2020
By Michael Luca (GRS’10,’11) and Max H. Bazerman
In today’s online world, we are often guinea pigs whether we know it or not. The authors, both professors at Harvard Business School, look at the key role of experiments in the tech sector—at StubHub, Uber, Airbnb—and how they can be used for social good.
Rainbow Revolutionaries: Fifty LGBTQ+ People Who Made History
HarperCollins, 2020
By Sarah Prager (CAS’08)
Short bios of people like Alexander the Great, Ellen DeGeneres, Billie Jean King, Harvey Milk, Rudolf Nureyev, and Sally Ride. For ages 8 to 12. Illustrated by Sarah Papworth.
The Real Deal: My Decade Fighting Battles and Winning Wars with Trump
Broadside Books, 2019
By George Sorial (CAS’90, LAW’95, Questrom’96) and Damian Bates
Longtime Trump Organization executive and attorney Sorial shares his insights into Donald Trump’s methods of using “chaos, the media, and a single-minded focus to achieve things everyone else said were impossible.”
What Retirees Want: A Holistic View of Life’s Third Age
Wiley, 2020
By Ken Dychtwald and Robert Morison (GRS’77)
How will work, family, and retirement be transformed by the two billion baby boomers over the age of 60 worldwide? What new products, services, and technologies will arise?
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