|
|
Shelf Life |
|
Silence at Boalt Hall: The Dismantling of Affirmative Action |
UC-Berkeley’s law school was a pioneer in affirmative-action
admissions, and by 1994, one-quarter of its students were blacks, Native
Americans and Latinos. Their numbers dwindled after racial criteria were
outlawed three years later, dropping to 9 percent in 1999. Guerrero, an
immigration lawyer and one of the last beneficiaries of Boalt’s affirmative
action, documents the fierce struggles of students, faculty and politicians
on both sides of the issue. She musters evidence that race-blind admissions
criteria do not provide equal opportunity, that standard tests fail to
accurately predict minority students’ success, and that killing affirmative
action is a step backward toward racial segregation. |
|
Wild Heart, A Life: Natalie Clifford Barney’s Journey
from Victorian America to the Literary Salons of Paris |
Rodriguez’s biography of the American-born heiress reads like a
belle époque romance, except that this beautiful, brilliant and
high-spirited heroine is openly lesbian. Barney, whose many lovers included
novelist Colette and celebrated courtesan Liane de Pougy, was a writer
whose literary salon drew Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, Truman Capote
and Gertrude Stein. |
|
Heartbeat |
An emergency-room physician struggles for his sanity
in this medical fiction penned by a real-life ER specialist. Beset by
divorce, long-repressed memories of his identical twin’s slow death,
and guilt over two fatal mistakes made on his watch, Leon Mendel is going
downhill fast—hearing voices, hallucinating, obsessing over death.
A new love interest and an old friend’s request for euthanasia bring
everything to a head. |
|
Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties |
The author, a University of Washington history professor,
examines the first three years of the Sixties as a prelude to the tumultuous,
more widely studied, remainder of the decade. He argues that the JFK years
were promising in two senses. The country showed the potential, or promise,
to achieve its ideals, but it was also a time of utopian schemes, promises
that defied reality. Camelot remains a myth. |
| Cold
Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26-June 3, 1864 Gordon C. Rhea, JD ’74 Louisiana State University Press, 2002 $34.95 |
A practicing attorney and military
historian, Rhea has written three previous books on the Civil War’s
Overland campaign, when Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee first battled
directly. No two military figures have been more misunderstood, writes Rhea,
who proceeds to set the record straight on the engagement that brought 7,000
casualties to the Union and 1,500 to the Confederates. |
|
Tiny Game Hunting: Environmentally Healthy Ways to Trap and Kill the
Pests in Your House and Garden Hilary Dole Klein, ’67, and Adrian M. Wenner UC Press, 2001 $14.95 |
Profiles of household
invaders and prescriptions for nontoxic, often novel, countermeasures are
interspersed with anecdotes and historical tidbits—and praise for beneficial
bugs. Not all the remedies are lethal. You can keep cats away from houseplants,
for example, using cotton balls soaked in lemon oil or ammonia. |
| The Business
of Options: Time-Tested Principles and Practices Martin P. O’Connell, JD/MBA ’70 John Wiley & Sons, 2001 $69.95 |
A veteran consultant
and educator, the author offers a guide for those who want to use options
trading as a risk-management and investment tool. He dispels any notion
that this complex market activity can be mastered with a few mathematical
tricks. Rather, he argues, it is a business that has much in common with
an insurance company or casino operation. |
| Expect the Unexpected
Or You Won’t Find It Roger von Oech, PhD ’75 Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2002 $12.95 |
Von Oech, who conducts
corporate seminars on creativity, recommends the 2,500-year-old epigrams
of Heraclitus as a stimulus to problem-solving. Here, he translates and
analyzes 30 “creative enigmas,” suggesting that readers puzzle
out how they might apply to a current situation. |
|
Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley |
What turns a small-town
New England girl into a traitor? Olmsted, an assistant history professor
at UC-Davis, plots Bentley’s trajectory from spy for the Soviets to
chief informer for J. Edgar Hoover. The promiscuous, alcoholic Bentley outwitted
both the KGB and FBI, but her mental instability and propensity for lying
stymied historians until the recent opening of Russian and U.S. archives. |