SHOWCASE

Shelf Life

September/October 2002

Reading time min

The Truth About Hormone Replacement Therapy: How to Break Free from the Medical Myths of Menopause
National Women’s Health Network (Charlea Massion, ’73, Jane Zones, ’65, MA ’66, et al.)
Prima Publishing, 2002
$15.95

The first edition of this guide, cautioning women against rushing into hormone replacement therapy, came out in 1989. Its warning was prescient: in July, the only large-scale study of HRT’s effects on healthy women was curtailed because the hormones were doing more harm than good. The popularity of the therapy is a “triumph of marketing and advertising over science,” the authors assert in this sixth edition, which offers a balanced view of the pros and cons as well as natural alternatives.

Caste and Outcast
Dhan Gopal Mukerji, ’14
Stanford University Press, 2002
$18.95

 

 

In this reissue of his 1923 memoir, Mukerji—the pioneer of South Asian immigrant literati—recalls his life in India as a Hindu of Brahmin parentage and his days picking hops as a newcomer to California. Stanford associate history professor Gordon H. Chang, MA ’72, PhD ’87, provides a new introduction; associate professors of cultural and social anthropology Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta, PhD ’88, provide an afterword illuminating Mukerji’s life and works.

Vulture Capital
Mark Coggins, ’79, MS ’88
Poltroon Press, 2002
$26

The hard-boiled, Chandleresque narration might suggest redheaded bombshells pleading for help in exchange for a kiss. Instead, this mystery set in the post-dot-com world features a venture capitalist as protagonist and a biotech executive as purported victim. Can Ted Valmont save Silicon Valley from ruin? Maybe not—but the quest gives Coggins a second case for private eye August Riordan, introduced in The Immortal Game (2000).

 

A Single Shard
Linda Sue Park, ’81
Clarion Books, 2001
$15

Tree-ear is a homeless orphan in 12th-century Korea, named after the mushroom that grows on tree trunks without a parent seed. Watching a master potter at work, the boy becomes intrigued. His dream of mastering celadon craftsmanship is a metaphor for his path to fulfillment, as a single pottery shard changes his destiny. The novel received the John Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American children’s literature.

 

Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius
Lawrence Jackson, PhD ’97
John Wiley & Sons, 2002
$30
In this first Ellison biography, Jackson, an assistant professor of English at Howard University, draws on the closed archive of Ellison papers at the Library of Congress and the renowned essayist’s correspondence with other black intellectuals. Ellison was the first African-American to win the National Book Award for fiction, with Invisible Man (1953). A visionary, enigmatic figure, he never completed another novel.



Bootstrap: Lessons Learned Building a Successful Company from Scratch
Kenneth L. Hess, ’74
S-Curve Press, 2001
$24.95
From his experience starting a software company on his own in 1984 and seeing sales grow to more than $23 million 12 years later, the author offers advice to budding entrepreneurs on all aspects of running a business—and having a life, too. Venture capital played no part in his operation, and the contractions in that industry today make his do-it-yourself ethos timely.
In the Shadow of Love: Stories from My Life
Walter Meyerhof
Fithian Press, 2002
$12
The emeritus physics professor gives a candid account of his life and loves, from his days as a Jewish teenager in Nazi Germany to his misadventures as an energetic senior citizen sailing on San Francisco Bay. His father’s status as a Nobel laureate helped Meyerhof narrowly escape the Gestapo’s clutches and start a new life in the United States.
Pursuit
Erica Funkhouser, MA ’73
Houghton Mifflin, 2002
$22
This award-winning poet’s fourth collection is a taxonomy of sorts, based on close examination of birds, beasts, people and their interactions. In “Turning Point,” a hunter passes up the chance to shoot a buck at close range: “The gun barrel pointed to his feet, a waste of readiness.” Describing the aftermath of a marauding animal’s garden visit, Funkhouser describes “whole rows of over-anticipated greens and high-strung succulence demolished.”

Vouchers Within Reason: A Child-Centered Approach to Education Reform
James G. Dwyer, PhD ’95
Cornell University Press, 2002
$32.50

Most discussion in the school-voucher debate—and other educational reform schemes—revolves around the interests of people other than children, charges the author, who teaches law at the College of William and Mary. State funding of private schools is a moral and constitutional right, he argues, but so are tough standards on content, teaching and treatment of pupils.

You May Also Like

© Stanford University. Stanford, California 94305.