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Shelf Life |
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Carry Me Across the Water |
Protagonist August Kleinman is a wealthy Jewish widower whose advancing
age and fading health prompt him to reflect on the convoluted course of
his life. Rather than trace that course chronologically, master storyteller
Canin weaves together a series of flashbacks, recounting, among other
things, Kleinman’s early escape from Nazi Germany, his scrappy childhood
in Brooklyn, an eerie experience in the South Pacific during World War
II, and the loss of his wife to Alzheimer’s, a tragedy he continues
to mourn. This is Canin’s third novel, a complex and satisfying meditation
on love, death, truth, beauty and atonement. |
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Big Shot: Passion, Politics, and the Struggle for an AIDS
Vaccine |
“I expected to find a classic struggle between scientific ingenuity
and an exceptionally wily microbe,” the author writes. In fact, she
discovered additional roadblocks to vaccine development, including society’s
negative perception of people with aids, the economic pressure on pharmaceutical
companies to make maintenance drugs rather than one-time injections and
the challenges of testing the vaccines’ efficacy. |
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Generous Helpings: Six Stories of California, Calamity
and Love |
A sense of place pervades this short-story collection—nudist hot
springs, a Santa Cruz flophouse, a Hollywood garage-turned-recording studio.
Then there are the characters: a New Age healer by day and jaded bartender
by night, a rap group named Ahab Kim and the Wailers, and a piano-bar
player with abominable fashion sense. They dart in and out of each other’s
tales, dispensing comfort—and causing earthquakes. |
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The Laser Odyssey |
Maiman devised, demonstrated and patented the world’s first laser—the
ruby laser—in 1960, but rival scientists hardly congratulated him.
In this frank but good-humored memoir, he tells how he bucked orthodox
science to pursue his research and describes how many in the “establishment,”
including two Nobel laureates, tried to discredit him and marginalize
his achievement. |
| Sharkman
Six Owen West, MBA ’98 Simon and Schuster, 2001 $24 (fiction) |
The novel opens with a surreal
scene: an elite Marine platoon makes a night assault on the beach at Mogadishu,
Somalia, only to be greeted by swarms of reporters and tv cameras. In West’s
darkly witty depiction of modern warfare, commanding officers compete for
airtime and follow the military action on CNN. West, a former Marine officer,
is an energy-futures trader and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. |
| One
More Cast: A Celebration of Fly-Fishing Albert Haas Jr. ’43 Frank Amato Publications, 2001 $24 (outdoors) |
The author concedes the world may
not need another fly-fishing book, then counters: “Why, after all,
do people continue to write about love?” Haas’s favorite pastime
has as much to do with a deep love of nature as an urge to outwit trout;
his memoir catches the local color that has suffused 70 years of fishing
trips. |
| The Logic of Microspace Rick Fleeter, MS ’78 Microcosm Press, 2000 $24.95 (space technology) | Huge, costly space missions will
one day be obsolete, the author argues. He and others now build microsatellites
“for less than the cost of one astronaut’s space suit, spacecraft
that can perform missions humans can only dream of.” In a surprise
twist, Fleeter couples his jovial nuts-and-bolts descriptions of aerospace
engineering with an engaging novella that depicts microsatellites’
potential for earthly usefulness. |
| Gold Fever Tom Stern, ’67 AEI Titan, 2000 $21.95 (fiction) |
Physician-adventurer Stern has turned
real-life escapades into page-turning fiction. The hero, like the author,
is a doctor whose life changes course during a volunteer medical mission
in the Philippines. He gets caught up in a hunt for the world’s largest
treasure—tons of gold and jewels plundered by Japanese during World
War II and supposedly hidden on the island of Mindanao. But sex, politics
and underworld violence intervene. |
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How to Get Into the Top Law Schools |
In the wake of the dot-com debacle, reports the New York Times, law school applications soared 20 percent this year. And getting in is the hardest part of earning a law degree, author Montauk asserts. He offers exhaustive, step-by-step advice on how to do it—but counsels graduates to first consider carefully whether they really, really want to. |