Rodzina
Karen Cushman, ’63
Clarion Books, 2003
$16 (audio cassette $26)

From 1850 to 1929, “orphan trains” shunted homeless children from America’s cities to the farmlands of the West, where many were adopted by families in need of helping hands. This is the fictional story of a 12-year-old Polish girl, gawky and grouchy but with strong survival instincts, who loses her family to fire and illness and finds herself on the westbound train from Chicago, caring for a carload of fellow orphans and overwhelmed by grief. Oliver Twist meets the American Heartland in this novel for ages 8 to 12. Cushman is the Newbery-winning author of Midwife’s Apprentice and Catherine, Called Birdy.

The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered
Kenneth Baxter Wolf, ’79, MA ’81, PhD ’85
Oxford U. Press, 2003
$39.95

The author, a history professor at Pomona College, exposes a dark side of the virtue of one of the Catholic Church’s favorite saints. His unusual thesis: by advocating self-imposed poverty as the key to heaven, Francis and his 13th-century clerical colleagues in effect denied that avenue to the genuinely poor, who had nothing to divest, and competed with them for charity.

The Body of Brooklyn
David Lazar, MA ’79
U. of Iowa Press, 2003
$24.95

Lazar summons up his Brooklyn boyhood—from pudgy preadolescence to teenage trysts under the Verrazano Bridge—with fondness and a wordsmith’s irony. His essays portray the dynamics and occasional disconnects of a family with immigrant parents raised in the Depression and two kids cutting their teeth in the Sixties. The author is associate professor of creative writing at Ohio U.

Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America
Renee C. Romano, MA ’92, PhD ’96
Harvard U. Press, 2003
$35

Today, all the formal barriers to interracial marriage are gone. Yet society’s increased tolerance does not signal the end of racism, or even a complete quashing of the old taboo, the author asserts in her eye-opening survey. A white scholar of African-American studies at Wesleyan University, whose husband is black, Romano combines archival research and interviews to narrate this complex cultural history.

Eating Apes
Dale Peterson, MA ’71, PhD ’77
UC Press, 2003
$24.95

Backed by photographer Karl Ammann’s grim evidence, Peterson documents a scarcely publicized disaster. Humankind’s closest relatives—the chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas of Central Africa—face extinction within decades unless the sudden boom in Africans’ bush meat consumption is curbed. European logging companies enabled the onslaught by carving roads into primary forests, and the author argues that many conservation groups are doing more harm than good by associating with the loggers.

The Eisenhower Court and Civil Liberties
Theodore M. Vestal, ’58, PhD ’62
Praeger, 2002
$64.95

Vestal, a political science professor at Oklahoma State U., sets out to do justice to the Supreme Court under Earl Warren during the Eisenhower years. Its work has been woefully upstaged, he says, by its “crowning achievements” in later years. But this exhaustive account of decisions from 1953 to 1962 makes a convincing case for the early court’s crucial contribution to civil rights and liberties.

Return for Good
Dick Holt, ’63
Isle Publishing, 2002
$9.95

In the author’s third futuristic thriller, billionaire Clarke Sabin has been struck by a mysterious, always-fatal virus. So he’s the ideal guinea pig for his inventor friend’s time-travel experiment. Armed with a weapon that vaporizes its targets, Sabin makes it from 2005 back to Europe in 1944, finally meeting his parents (the war orphaned him), playing havoc with Nazis and finding romance.

Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement, and Interaction
James E. Katz and Ronald E. Rice, MA ’78, PhD ’82
MIT Press, 2002
$55

Does heavy Internet use lead to isolation and depression, or does it foster stronger community involvement and friendships? Mining data collected over five years, the authors conclude that users’ online activities are extensions—and often powerful enhancements—of their offline lives, and carry the potential for both good and ill.

Secret Lives of Second Wives
Catherine Todd, MA ’69
William Morrow, 2003
$24.95

“It’s like walking onto the stage in the middle of the play, when all the other actors know their lines except you,” the heroine says of life as a second wife. Her initially blissful marriage starts to crumble under the stress of two icy stepchildren and an intrusive ex-wife. But the real crunch comes when a new man offers a way out.