Harvard Magazine
Main Menu · Search ·Current Issue ·Contact ·Archives ·Centennial ·Letters to the Editor ·FAQs

The Browser
In this issue's Alumni section:
Books: Working Poor - Music: Sax Appeal - Open Book: The College of Conversation - Off the Shelf - Chapter & Verse


A random sampling of current books received at this magazine


Paul Starrett Sample's Beaver Meadow, (detail), 1939, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. From Picturing Old New England.

Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, edited by William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein '54, Ph.D. '60 (Yale University Press, $45). Hardy Puritans, intrepid fishermen, steadfast farmers, rock-strewn coastlines, white churches on tidy town greens: that's Old New England, and it occupies a central niche in the American psyche. This book, which accompanied a just-ended exhibition at the National Museum of American Art, tells the story with the aid of more than 200 illustrations, 90 in color, by 97 artists.

Books Mentioned in this Issue
Tigers and Ice: Reflections on Nature and Life, by Edward Hoagland '54 (Lyons Press, $22). Whether the celebrated essayist and naturalist is telling you about his circus days as a tiger-cage boy or how he was for three years legally blind and then could see, you'll want to listen.

The Restless Sea: Exploring the World beneath the Waves, by Robert Kunzig '80 (Norton, $24.95). Kunzig, European editor of Discover magazine, writes engagingly about attempts in recent decades to fathom the mysteries of the sea. Laurence Madin of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution declares on the jacket, "It's certainly the best account of discovery in modern oceanography I've ever read."

Civic Beauties: A Musical Novel, by C.D. Payne '71 (Aivia Press, $12.95, paper). Payne will be remembered as the author of an underground cult novel Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp, which sober critics deemed a wild success when it finally was properly published, the Los Angeles Times calling it "an unstintingly hilarious black comedy." In this new one, the two teenage daughters of a minister who is running for vice president of the United States set out to subvert his campaign. The characters are likely to burst into song.

The Tower, by Gregg Andrew Hurwitz '95 (Simon & Schuster, $23). A bucket-of-blood thriller. See if you can figure out whether the author, who began writing the book when he was living in Currier House, intends it as a parody.

A Kiss in Space, by Mary Jo Salter '76 (Knopf, $22). This is the fourth collection of poems from Salter, who is coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. They are elegantly crafted, have a lot of narrative value, and are unencrypted and a pleasure to read. The first poem has readers up in a hot-air balloon floating above Chartres; the last --the title poem--has a Russian cosmonaut greeting with a kiss an American arriving at the Mir space station. In between is much that's rewarding --a robin nesting in a fuchsia, kangaroos, a French au pair exasperated because no one in America has a last name and children aren't made to finish the food on their plates.

Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America's Moral Divide, by Andrew Bard Schmookler '67 (MIT Press, $29.95). Through a fictional Internet conversation between a couple of dozen Americans, Schmookler explores two questions at the heart of the culture war and of squabbles over child rearing and education, political policy, sexual morality, and the evolution-creation debate. Where does goodness come from? How is good social order to be achieved? The ground, argues the writer and NPR talk-radio host, is littered with half-truths.

Seven Stages of Money Maturity: Understanding the Spirit and Value of Money in Your Life, by George Kinder '70 (Delacorte, $23.95). The author is a certified financial planner and a teacher of Buddhism. He offers a spiritual and psychological guide for those seeking a new relationship with money.

Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926, by Adele Logan Alexander '59 (Pantheon, $30). Alexander is professor of history at George Washington University. She has written an epic history of three generations of an African-American family (her own) as it journeys through adversity to realize the American dream.

George Parker Winship as Librarian, Typophile, and Teacher, by Thomas R. Adams, Martin W. Hutner, and Michael B. Winship '71, G '79 (Harvard College Library; $15, paper, postpaid, from Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge 02138; make check payable to Harvard College Library). Three talks given at the library, attractively printed with illustrations, portray Winship, A.B. 1893, as a scholar-librarian who cared as much for the book as its content. He was in charge of the Widener collection at the library and was a lecturer in fine arts on the "History of the Book," and in these capacities he helped train a generation of bookmen and bibliophiles.



Main Menu · Search ·Current Issue ·Contact ·Archives ·Centennial ·Letters to the Editor ·FAQs
Harvard Magazine