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Shelf Life |
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Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier
Mental Hospital
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Beam, a Boston Globe columnist, traces the history of the legendary McLean Hospital through the stories of patients and staff, and in doing so follows the evolution of psychiatric treatment. Created in 1817 to serve Boston’s elite, McLean was as much a country retreat as a mental hospital, housing patients in Tudor mansions and offering gentle psychotherapy along with poetry seminars, golf, tennis and horseback riding on 250 acres landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted. Now languishing for lack of funds, the hospital once drew a string of creative geniuses, including Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Ray Charles, James Taylor—and Olmsted himself.
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The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University
of California, 1949-1967. Vol. 1: Academic Triumphs
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As Berkeley’s chancellor, then UC president, Kerr was at the helm during the university’s greatest growth and most wrenching upheavals. Here he chronicles UC’s scientific and scholarly development while revisiting the minefields he negotiated until his 1967 dismissal. Volume Two will discuss UC’s place in the sociopolitical landscape. |
| Divine Intervention Ken Wharton, ’92 Ace Books, 2001 $7 (science fiction) |
In this physics professor’s first novel, the citizens of Mandala, a colony outside our solar system whose settlers came from Earth, regard their former planet with more distrust than nostalgia. After a century of isolation, the “Originals”—including a young deaf-mute with unusual powers—confront the arrival of thousands of “Earthies” as an invasion to repel at all costs. |
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The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations
in the Global Arena |
Domestic affairs and foreign relations can affect each other profoundly, as this study shows. Even as civil rights activists and third-world anticolonialists fortified each other’s causes, they created a dilemma for Washington: how to avoid inflaming white supremacists at home and abroad, yet maintain credibility as the leader of the “free” world’s struggle against communism. |
| Fantasmas:
Supernatural Stories by Mexican American Writers ed. Rob Johnson Bilingual Press, 2001 $14 (fiction) |
These 19 stories inject the twilight zone into everyday life. Daniel Olivas, ’81, writes of Aztec gods vying with Christianity’s devil in contemporary Los Angeles. Ghosts pull two strangers into a passionate romance in a story by Elva Treviño Hart, MS ’78. In her introduction, Kathleen Alcalá, ’76, calls these tales “an outlet for the parts of the subconscious over which we feel we have no control.” |
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Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet H. Gardner, M. Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon Basic Books, 2001 $27.50 (work life/professional ethics) |
How can journalists, scientists and other professionals uphold the highest ethical and work standards despite pressures to compromise? Damon, a Stanford education professor, and his co-authors provide in-depth interviews with people who have done just that. |
| The Beacon
Best of 2001: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures ed. Junot Díaz G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001 $14 (literature) |
Editor Diaz sought writers who “present a vision of the world that is complex, multi-vocal and contradictory.” Danzy Senna, ’92, writes about her mixed racial heritage in “The Color of Love.” Current Stegner fellow Felicia Ward, whose “Good Night Moon” is in this anthology, calls herself “a 34-year-old black woman, alive at the end of the 20th century and passing for sane.” |
| Courthouses
of California: An Illustrated History ed. Ray McDevitt, '65, JD '69 Heyday Books/California Historical Society, 2001 $50 (California history) |
Temple, theater, seat of power, workplace, community center: courthouses have filled all those functions. With its essays on architecture, law and history—and hundreds of photographs that bring to life the stories of all 58 counties’ halls of justice—this anecdotal chronicle speaks volumes about California’s social, political and economic evolution. |
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Moral Questions in the Classroom: How to Get Kids
to Think Deeply About Real Life and Their Schoolwork |
Simon, a former teacher, suspects that she and her colleagues “were not teaching what matters.” While teachers often get caught up in “closed answers, definitions and formulas,” she argues, they should actively explore moral and existential issues. One suggested topic: what it means to lead a good life. |