Book Blurbs

The Promised Hand
by Susan Wolfe, '81
Writers Club Press, 2000; $12.95 (fiction).

It's a classic love triangle. Should Isaac Grossman stay in his arranged marriage, bound by his obligation to family and faith? Or should he leave his wife for his longtime love, sacrificing everyone's standing in their tight-knit Jewish community? This time, we know the ending at the outset, because Grossman is patterned after the author's grandfather, and the Other Woman became her grandmother. Wolfe was captivated by the revelation, in a late-night phone call from an unknown cousin, that in 1924 Wolfe's beloved grandfather abandoned a wife and two young children in New York, obtained a Reno divorce and spirited her grandmother to California to start a new life. Her fictionalized account alternates between the two wives' perspectives, and in doing so, illuminates her grandfather's personal and spiritual crisis. This is a novel that examines notions of duty—to family, religion, community and, ultimately, the heart.

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
by H.W. Brands, '75
Doubleday, 2000;
$35 (biography).

"Of those patriots who made independence possible, none mattered more than Franklin," historian Brands asserts in this sweeping biography of Benjamin Franklin, the first to appear in more than 60 years. Franklin's story, he contends, is "the story of the birth of America&emdash;an America this man discovered in himself, then helped create in the world at large." Statesman, scientist, philosopher, entrepreneur, journalist, humorist and inveterate ladies' man, Franklin comes alive in all his charismatic complexity in this intimate profile, which draws on previously unpublished letters and anecdotes. Brands, who teaches at Texas A&M, has also written books on the Cold War, Theodore Roosevelt and American life in the 1890s.

The Tarantula Whisperer
by Laura Pasten, '70
Conari Press, 1999;
$11.95 (pets/humor).

Vultures circle only dead things, right? So veterinarian Laura Pasten found it a bit unsettling when a nearly electrocuted buzzard she revived circled over her Carmel, Calif., clinic for a week. But just as she sees the humor in that potential pr crisis, Pasten spices her book with other near-tragedies, like the bloodhound who swallowed his mistress's tiny cell phone and was rushed in for surgery only after the phone rang. The former vet for Morris the 9-Lives cat is a font of animal lore and practical advice, who firmly believes pets have much to teach us, too. She draws on 25 years of professional practice with an eye to strengthening bonds between people and their owners.

School Choice and Social Controversy: Politics, Policy and Law
Stephen D. Sugarman and Frank R. Kemerer, '63, MA '68, PhD '75, editors
Brookings Institution Press, 1999; $19.95 (law/public policy).

This timely book steps beyond the debate over school choice into the more complex field of legal and public policy issues raised by charter schools and vouchers. Eleven scholars, including editors Sugarman, a Berkeley law professor, and Kemerer, director of the Center for the Study of Education Reform at the University of North Texas, look at how such programs affect public schools and examine whether the Constitution allows religious schools to participate. They also explore what sort of control government might exert over admissions and how supply and demand would function in a voucher system.