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After more than 35 years on the market, the pill gets a thorough medical and cultural check-up. |
Holy Hunger: A Memoir of Desire, by Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Ph.D. '84 (Knopf, $23). The author grew up in an emotionally repressive home, where her father's alcoholism was kept secret within the family it shaped. The home was at Quincy House, where her father was master. As a superachieving graduate student in comparative literature, the author fed an addiction of her own: an insatiable desire for food misshaped her life. She beat that hunger, and this book is an account of how she did--through helping others, a 12-step program, and God. Bullitt-Jonas is now an Episcopal priest and associate rector of All Saints Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies, by Sanford Levinson, Ph.D. '69 (Duke University Press, $13.95, paper). This essay by a professor of law at the University of Texas may promote clear thinking on how we the people should commemorate the past when our views of the past differ or change. He introduces his subject by reproducing a photograph of the Shaw monument on the Boston Common, named for its central figure, Robert Gould Shaw, A.B. 1860, the white commander of the Massachusetts Fifty- fourth Regiment, the first black regiment to be raised in a free state during the Civil War. Levinson quotes a reference to those troops in a poem by Robert Lowell '39, Litt.D. '66: "Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat." "Anyone familiar with the tangled history of race relations in Boston can well appreciate the power of Lowell's simile," writes Levinson. "Lowell could, however, just as easily be writing about many monuments in many cities and countries."
The dust jacket reproduces a detail of the National Gallery's Ginevra de' Benci, painted by Leonardo circa 1473. |
Leonardo da Vinci: Origins of a Genius, by David Alan Brown '64 (Yale University Press, $55). The curator of Italian Renaissance painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., gives readers a scholarly account of Leonardo's mysterious beginnings as an artist, in a large-format book that makes beautiful use of close-up details of paintings.
Royal Blood: Richard III and the Mystery of the Princes, by Bertram Fields, J.D. '52 (HarperCollins, $25). An entertainment lawyer and litigator examines the evidence and the witnesses in a celebrated murder case, advancing the hypothesis that everything we know about Richard III is wrong.
Extra Life: Coming of Age in Cyberspace, by David S. Bennahum '90 (Basic Books, $23). A memoir of digital adventure from a member of the Atari generation. "A must read," declares the creator of Dungeons and Dragons. "How strange it is that no one except David Bennahum is paying attention to a force so powerful that it has displaced TV in one generation," writes the executive editor of Wired.
Three Seductive Ideas, by Jerome Kagan, Starch professor of psychology (Harvard University Press, $27.50). A child's development is determined in the first two years of life. The basic goal of humans, like all primates, is to pursue pleasure. Abstract processes, such as intelligence or fear, are measurable entities, of which one might have a lot or a little. According to Kagan, a founder of developmental psychology, all three of these popular ideas are wrong.
Lawyer: A Life of Counsel and Controversy, by Arthur L. Liman '54, with Peter Israel (Public Affairs, $30). Chief counsel in the Iran-Contra hearings, the late Arthur Liman was most at home as a corporate litigator and counselor to the rich. He also devoted much time to public service. His widow, Ellen, is donating the proceeds from the sale of this memoir to Phillips Brooks House.
Seasons of Verse: An Anthology of Poetry by Members of the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement (paper, $11.25, postpaid, from the Institute, 51 Brattle Street, Cambridge 02138). A gathering of 162 poems by 52 people.