Mexifornia: A State of Becoming
Victor Davis Hanson, PhD ’80
Encounter Books, 2003
$24.95

The author decries the social problems he sees stemming from California’s uncontrolled border with Mexico and a flood of immigrants who have not integrated into mainstream society. Drawing on his experience as a fifth-generation Central Valley farmer and a Cal State-Fresno professor, Hanson, a Hoover Institution fellow, faults employers who value cheap labor above social responsibility, and intellectuals who he says promote victimhood over citizenship. In his view, assimilation through intermarriage may yet provide a solution.

Storms, Ice, and Whales: The Antarctic Adventures of a Dutch Artist on a Norwegian Whaler
Willem van der Does, trans. Ruth van Baak Griffioen, PhD ’88
Eerdmans, 2003
$29

Whimsical pen-and-ink drawings of emperor penguins and the ship’s crew complement this travelogue of a 1923 voyage to Antarctica aboard a Norwegian whaler. The view is mostly rosy and dotted with conversations about Smörland (Butterland in Norwegian)—those elusive sightings of land that melt, like butter, with the rising sun.

Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala
Victoria Sanford, PhD ’00
Palgrave, 2003
$35

Sanford witnessed the exhumations and stayed on through the reburial of more than 200 victims of the Plan de Sánchez massacre. Drawing on more than 400 testimonies from survivors of other massacres and on interviews with human rights leaders, she recounts the horrifying genocidal campaign against the indigenous Maya that was conducted by the Guatemalan army in the late 1970s and ’80s.

The Eyes of the Blind
David Grace (David M. Alexander, ’67)
Wildside Press, 2003
$15

At the Baltimore Federal Courthouse, eight immigrants are being sworn in as U.S. citizens. Next door, five men face trial for the bombing of a federal office building. In this fifth novel by attorney Alexander, the two proceedings collide when the terrorists break loose and take everyone in the citizenship court hostage. Among them is the narrator, a reporter whose wife was one of the bombers’ victims.

King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon
David R. Montgomery, ’84
Westview Press, 2003
$26

Montgomery looks at the decline of salmon populations in Europe and North America and uses his training in geology to explain how changing landscapes have imperiled the king of freshwater fish. If we want to save wild salmon, then some people “will lose money or the ability to do things they wanted to do,” he writes. “But we all lose if we lose the salmon.”

Deeply Dug In
R.L. Barth, MA ’80
University of New Mexico Press, 2003
$16.95

Barth was a Marine patrol leader in Vietnam; he is also a translator of Martial. Both experiences mark his own poems, which lay bare war’s truths using the classical Greek and Roman satiric epigram form. In “One Way to Carry the Dead,” he writes: A huge shell thundered; he was vaporized/And, close friends breathing near, internalized.

Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente
Jeremi Suri, ’94
Harvard U. Press, 2004
$29.95

In the late 1960s, world leaders pursued a balance of powers to keep the Cold War from erupting. At the same time, China, Western Europe, the United States and even the Soviet Union were experiencing social upheaval at home. Historian Suri demonstrates how these nations’ common desire for domestic stability was a key motivation for their foreign policy.

Happy Baby
Stephen Elliott
MacAdam/Cage & McSweeney’s Books, 2004
$21

A ward of the court in Chicago from age 13 to 18, the author, a Stanford lecturer in English, knows juvie hall all too well. Theo, his protagonist, has been raped and abused all his life. He’s a tough, but he’s also redeemingly sweet and hopeful and looking for love in all the wrong places. When he breaks into the theme song from Sesame Street, it’s teary-eye time.

The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs About the Use of Force
Martha Finnemore, MA ’88, PhD ’92
Cornell U. Press, 2003
$26

States have long used military force against one another; but internationally accepted reasons for intervention have changed. The author, an associate professor of political science and international relations at George Washington University, examines three traditional motives—collecting debts, aiding humanitarian crises and addressing threats to peace—and explains how today’s norms evolved.

RETURN TO TOP