Eye Contact

A 9-year-old autistic boy witnesses the murder of a schoolmate in this suspenseful novel by a former Stegner fellow. Adam cannot articulate what he saw, so it falls to his mother—a confident single woman whose life has been circumscribed by devotion to her son—to decipher the crime and its implications for a host of other characters who, it becomes apparent, have limita­tions of their own. (See End Note)

Private Lives: Families, Individuals, and the Law

Law professor Friedman surveys a 20th-century transformation in family law, from a focus on societal and familial concerns to an assertion of individuals’ rights. Serious topics—trends in adoption law, legal treatment of same-sex relationships—are interspersed with observations about what personal ads demonstrate about marriage today and what reality television reveals about celebrity and privacy.

I Do But I Don’t: Walking Down the Aisle Without Losing Your Mind
Kamy Wicoff, ’94
Da Capo Press, 2006
$22.95

The pressure to avoid the Bridezilla stereotype and the manipulations of a $125 billion wedding industry weigh heavily on the modern bride—so often sandwiched be­­tween feminist ideas and cultural tradition. Wicoff explores this clash by drawing on academic research, conversations with brides and her own wedding with Andrew Kassoy, ’91.

The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans
Patricia Klindienst, PhD ’84
Beacon Press, 2006
$26.95

Inspired by the garden kept by Bartolomeo Vanzetti (one of two Italian immigrants wrongly executed after a famous 1920 trial), Klindienst under­took a three-year journey across the country to document how ethnic Americans preserve their cultural identities through their relationships with the land. The stewards of the 15 plots she explores “create gardens that are a form of living, embodied memory.”

Sky in a Bottle
Peter Pesic, MS ’70, PhD ’75
MIT Press, 2005
$24.95

The classic childhood query—“Why is the sky blue?”—has preoccupied some of the greatest minds in history. Pesic, a physicist who is a tutor and musician-in-residence at St. John’s College, chronicles history’s efforts to understand the polarization of sky light. In an appendix, he invites readers to replicate the experiments of Leonardo da Vinci, Newton and others.

I Am My Mother’s Daughter: Making Peace with Mom Before It’s Too Late
Iris Krasnow, ’76
Basic Books, 2006
$25

Journalist Krasnow gathers up dozens of stories about mother-daughter reconciliations—and the wisdom of resolving conflicts on this side of the grave. “When you ditch old baggage and open your heart,” she counsels, “you’ll find that your aging, difficult mother still has important lessons to teach you.”

The Catastrophist
Lawrence Douglas, ’72
Other Press, 2006
$24.95

Daniel Ben Wellington, art history professor at a small New England college, has the perfect life: academic renown, job security, a happy marriage with a smart, beautiful wife, and impending fatherhood. So why is he trying so hard to screw it all up? Douglas, who teaches at Amherst College, writes a caustic, funny novel about one man’s bumbling self-sabotage.

Two books mark the children’s literature debut of Justina Chen Headley, ’90. In a young-adult novel, Nothing but the Truth (and a few white lies), Little, Brown, 2006, $16.99, Patty Ho, 17, suffers from self-consciousness about her name, her talent for math and her parents—an overprotective Taiwan-born mother and a white father who abandoned the family before Patty could even form memories. The teen’s attitudes are transformed in a summer spent at Stanford’s math camp. The picture book, The Patch, illustrated by Mitch Vane, Charlesbridge, 2006, $15.95, takes on amblyopia, a loss of vision that can occur in early childhood. “Lazy eye” patients must cover their stronger eye so that the weaker one gets trained to see. Ballet-loving heroine Becca figures out ways to make her eyepatch a pink badge of courage and imagination.