Shelf Life

Brown: The Last Discovery of America
Richard Rodriguez, ’67
Viking, 2002
$24.95

This completes the author’s trilogy examining American life through his own experience as “a queer Catholic Indian Spaniard.” Rodriguez, a Pacific News Service editor and essayist on PBS’s NewsHour, reflects on the fast-blurring color lines of a society long fixated on racial and ethnic distinctions. “Browning” is his term for the mixed coupling that began when Native Americans encountered European and African arrivals and more recently burgeoned with Hispanic immigration. The author champions the obsolescence of racial typing but foresees that others may continue to strike out against melting-pot “impurities.”

Man Walks into a Room
Nicole Krauss, ’96, MA ’96 Doubleday, 2002
$23.95

In this debut novel, Columbia English professor Samson Greene can’t recognize his wife or remember his own name. Suffering from a cherry-sized brain tumor, Greene has surgery to recover his memory, but it reinstates only childhood recollections. Through friendships with a former student, an ambitious doctor and an older man dying of cancer, Greene struggles to discover his former self as he tries to forge a new life.

Friedman, a professor at Stanford Law School, chronicles the rise of the welfare-regulatory state, the centralization of power in the federal government, the “law explosion,” the rights revolution and dozens of other trends. No topic—from income tax to divorce to the death penalty—escapes the author’s wry worldview. Most 20th-century presidents, he writes, “were pygmies, intellectually and otherwise, but then so were most Roman emperors.”

Management Lessons from the E.R.
Paul S. Auerbach, MS ’89
The Free Press, 2002
$24

Drawing on his experiences as a surgeon in Stanford’s emergency medicine division and as an executive and venture capitalist, Auerbach posits that running a company calls for skills remarkably similar to the requirements for successful doctoring. This is especially so in times of crisis, when knowing how to deal with the unexpected before it happens can make the difference between life and death—for a patient and a company.

Like a kaleidoscope twisting random bits of colored glass into patterns, Sorrentino shapes an unconventional novel from amorphous memories about the lives and loves of mid-20th-century denizens of his hometown, Brooklyn. The narrator morphs into a saucy self-critic in marginalia that weave in and out of his vignettes, peppered with literary allusions and pop culture references. Sorrentino is an emeritus English professor at Stanford.

The authors helped start a dating service designed to ease the pain of finding a suitable mate; here they show how a seven-minute encounter can reveal a potential partner’s values and goals. The husband-and-wife team tells how to avoid the fatal Shooting Star syndrome, dig for the elusive Buried Treasure relationship and determine whether you’ve found the real deal.

Set in the 1840s, the story chronicles the coming of age of Cesa de Haro, a spirited Mexican girl whose family owns a vast rancho in upper California. When Mexico loses the war with the United States, Americans come looking for gold and land. The world of the proud de Haro family begins to disappear, and Cesa must adapt to loss and change. This is Wood’s second novel for readers age 10 and up.

Slater, director of UC-Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities, spent 15 years talking to people in the Amazon and came away convinced of glaring omissions in most outsiders’ discussions of the region. To dwell on rainforest flora and fauna and selected photogenic “natives” and ignore the many other Amazon people and landscapes, she argues, serves neither ecological nor human needs.

Bringing God Home: A Traveler’s Guide
Forrest Church, ’70
St. Martin’s Press, 2002
$22.95

The author confesses that despite years of experience counseling parishioners, his own spiritual health was poor. In this candid account, the senior minister at All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan offers guidance based on his and others’ successful efforts to reconnect with God, often in the face of daunting personal problems.