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November/December 2012
This column used to be called In Print, and it was
for books only. But we’ve branched out. We now include other work produced for
a wide audience, such as movies, video games, and CDs/DVDs. To have your work
considered for mention here, please mail a review copy to:
Arts Editor
Yale
Alumni Magazine
P.O. Box 1905
New Haven, CT 06509-1905
or e-mail
a copy to yam@yale.edu
Self-published work cannot be considered for publication,
but we list all works we receive on our website.

Back to Blood: A Novel
Tom Wolfe ’57PhD
Little, Brown, $30
It’s evening in Miami—well, Mee-AH-Mee—and Yale man
Edward T. Topping IV, a Chicagoan transplanted to edit the Herald,
and his alumna wife Mac have just been cut off in their attempt to find “a very
nearly mythical piece of geography … a parking place.” What unfolds after a
fiery confrontation is a sprawling novel that explores, in vintage Wolfe
fashion, the uneasy way bloodlines play out in “the only city in the world
where more than one half of all citizens were recent immigrants.”

Spillover: Animal Infections and the
Next Human Pandemic
David Quammen ’70
W. W. Norton, $28.95
The word “zoonosis” may be unknown to most readers,
but the concept—an animal infection transmissible to humans—is all too
familiar. Ebola, plague, many different kinds of influenza, Lyme disease, AIDS:
these and numerous other ailments have made the jump from another species to
our own, often with horrific results. In a gruesomely fascinating report,
master science journalist Quammen details how pathogens “spill over” from the
natural world to the human world.

Sex and God at Yale: Porn, Political
Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad
Nathan Harden ’09
Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, $25.99
Sex Week! Sex toys! “Everything is sexual,” writes
Harden, who was shocked, when he arrived at Yale, by activities on campus
relating to human sexuality. In this impassioned exploration of what he sees as
moral decline in both the curricular and extracurricular realms, Harden
delivers a cri de coeur for a return to the university as
the “modern-day equivalent of the Athenian agora,” rather than its current
status as, he asserts, “an intellectual whorehouse.”

Samuel Barber: An American Romantic
Conspirare, conducted by Craig Hella Johnson ’95DMA
Harmonia Mundi, $20
A friend of the great twentieth-century US composer
Samuel Barber once said, “Poetry was as necessary to his existence as oxygen.”
In this fine collection of 21 tracks, conductor Johnson leads the choral
organization Conspirare—the name means “to breathe together”—in a stunning
performance of verse that Barber set to music. The poets Barber chose range
widely in form and era, from a medieval monk to Pablo Neruda.

Vagina: A New Biography
Naomi Wolf ’84
Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99
In 2009, when she was 46, Wolf lost her sexual mojo.
In an attempt to regain it, she discovered the critical importance of the
pelvic nerve—hers had been muted by a spinal compression injury that was
correctable—and as Wolf recovered, she began a remarkable journey that reframed
her understanding of her vagina and the nerve connections to her brain. Her
account, gleaned from scientists and Tantric masters, provides bold answers to
the age-old question, “What do women want?”

Ceremony of Carols
Etherea Vocal Ensemble
Delos Audio CD, $17.99
New Haven–based Etherea, which includes several Yale
alumni and staff among its singers and instrumentalists, offers a traditional
Christmas collection: a moving performance of Benjamin Britten’s exquisite Ceremony
of Carols, a joyful “I Saw Three Ships,” a spiritual “Coventry Carol,” and
many more. The seven female voices and lone male countertenor (alternating as
baritone), with occasional harp and organ accompaniment, were recorded at the
Divinity School’s Marquand Chapel.

Books by Yale Authors
Lisa Garcia Bedolla ’99PhD and Melissa R. Michelson ’94PhD
Mobilizing Inclusion: Transforming
the Electorate Through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns
Yale
University Press, $35
J. Wesley Boyd ’85 and Eric Metcalf
Almost Addicted: Is My (Or My Loved
One’s) Drug Use a Problem?
Hazelden Books, $14.95
Rebecca Dana ’04
Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless
Blonde
Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, $25.95
Martin Duberman ’52
Howard Zinn:
A Life on the Left
The New
Press, $26.95
Max Gladstone ’06
Three Parts Dead
Tor Books,
$24.99
Gary B. Gorton, Yale School of
Management Frederick Frank Class of 1954
Professor of Management and Finance
Misunderstanding Financial Crises:
Why We Don’t See Them Coming
Oxford
University Press, $24.95
Lisa Kereszi ’00MFA
Joe’s Junk Yard
Damiani Books, $45
Klaus Kertess ’62
Toxic Beauty: The Art of Frank
Moore
Grey Art
Gallery/New York University, $50
Mark S. Komrad ’79
You Need Help! A Step-By-Step Plan to
Convince a Loved One to Get Counseling
Hazelden Books, $14.95
Jill Lepore ’95PhD
The Story of America: Essays on
Origins
Princeton
University Press, $27.95
Meira Levinson ’92, David E. Campbell, and Frederick M. Hess, editors
Making Civics Count: Citizenship
Education for a New Generation
Harvard
Education Press, $29.95
Richard Lingeman ’59LAW
The Noir Forties: The American
People from Victory to Cold War
Nations
Books, $29.99
Edison Miyawaki ’79
What to Read on Love, Not Sex:
Freud, Fiction, and the Articulation of Truth in Modern Psychological Science
Medical
Humanities, $35
Jefferson Morley ’80
Snow-Storm in August: Washington
City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835
Nan A. Talese, $28.95
Todd L. Pittinsky ’92
Us Plus Them: Tapping the Positive
Power of Difference
Harvard
Business Review Press, $27
David Quammen ’70
Spillover: Animal Infections and
the Next Human Pandemic
W. W.
Norton Books, $28.95
Frank Silverstein ’78, JJ Ramberg, and Lisa Everson
It’s Your Business: 183 Essential
Tips That Will Transform Your Small Business
Hachette/Business
Plus, $29.99
Steven M. Southwick ’70, Yale
School of Medicine Glenn H. Greenberg Professor of Psychiatry, and Dennis S. Charney ’90MAH
Resilience: The Science of Mastering
Life’s Greatest Challenges
Cambridge University
Press, $23
John Fabian Witt ’94, ’00PhD
Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in
American History
Free Press, $32
Tom Wolfe ’57PhD
Back to Blood
Little
Brown and Company, $30

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