Legacy and Destiny
by J. Michael Reidenbach, '67, and Dana K. Drenkowski
Corinthian Books, 1999; $24.95 (fiction).
This political thriller's heroine is the first woman to run for the U.S. presidency. Elizabeth Armstrong steps into the race that her husband, Peter, had planned to enter before he was killed in a plane crash. She's a seasoned politician who served as governor of New Hampshire before giving up her career to support Peter's aspirations. But her campaign takes a terrifying turn when it becomes clear the plane crash was no accident -- and Peter's closest colleague is not above suspicion. The authors' experience in law, politics and aviation lends credibility to a twisting plot that includes an assassination attempt, a hostage-taking drug cartel and a fuel gauge that registers half-full when the tank is empty.
Fixed for Life: The True Saga of How Tom Became Sally
by Irene Preiss, MA '68
toExcel Press, 1999; $14.95 (autobiography).
When Preiss was a young boy, his mother told friends he should have been a girl, since she already had a son. Preiss, who had a sex-change operation at age 62, agrees. In this memoir, she chronicles her journey from naval officer and father of three to Seattle schoolmarm. Preiss's first wife, frightened by her husband's desire to wear her nightgown, labels him gay. Switching back and forth between male and female identities makes it difficult for Preiss to get a job. And Preiss must leave a happy second marriage to live permanently as a woman. But the book is balanced with lighter anecdotes: shopping for dresses as a 6-foot-tall man, taking lessons in female behavior at a Los Altos modeling studio and discovering the joy of woman-to-woman friendships.
Reflections on a Ravaged Century
by Robert Conquest
Norton, 2000; $26.95 (history).
From the Holocaust to Stalin's prison camps to the Khmer Rouge's killing fields, the 20th century was indisputably a catastrophic period. A senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Conquest blames the carnage, murder and brutality on a handful of powerful and absolutist ideologies, from Marxism to National Socialism, that promised to solve all of humanity's problems. Where did these ideologies come from? How did they mesmerize so many people? In part, Conquest argues, laziness and impatience led to infatuation with easy, cure-all theories. A longtime critic of totalitarianism who has seen his views vindicated, Conquest has his own vision of Utopia. It is, by definition, messy and imperfect: a pluralist society characterized by debate, compromise and constant adjustment.
Now Hear This: The Life of Hugh S. Knowles, Acoustical Engineer and Entrepreneur
by Susan Goodwillie, '63
The Francis Press, 1999; $24 (biography).
When Hugh Knowles was an undergraduate at Columbia in the 1920s, one of his professors predicted that he would become a "high cheese radio engineer." Sure enough, Knowles went on to take his place among the visionary mid-20th-century engineers who turned the era's electronic breakthroughs into consumer products. This biography is one in a series devoted to the lives of influential unknowns. It tracks Knowles (1904-1988) through his early success as a designer of speakers (he was nicknamed "Mr. Loudspeaker"), radios and sound equipment for film projectors. But his period of greatest achievement came in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, when he took advantage of evolving transistor technology to invent a miniaturized microphone that led to modern hearing aids.
