AFTER THE DELUGE
In the Lap of the Gods, ; Leapfrog Press, $15.95.
More than 1 million people were uprooted as Three Gorges Dam was completed in China during the past decade. Debut novelist Lovett focuses on the lives of the displaced as they strive against the elements, the relentlessly self-serving bureaucracy and capricious fortune. Most of the time readers' hearts are fastened on the widower Liu, "a young man drowning in an old man's sorrows." Liu—ignoring the conventional advice he hears in his circumstances—does not sell the baby girl he finds while scavenging.
The Shah, Abbas Milani; Palgrave Macmillan, $30.
The many contradictions of autocrat reformer Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi are explored in this comprehensive biography, which offers new material particularly about Iran's nuclear program. Milani, the director of Stanford's Iranian studies program, observes, "For the Shah, character was destiny and many of his weaknesses as a leader were his virtues as a human being." Shakespearean epigraphs, accounts of Peacock Throne extravagance, and details of Cold War volatility combine within Milani's capable storytelling to reveal the Shah and modern Iran as a confounding tragedy.
Tracking Medicine: A Researcher's Quest to Understand Health Care, John E. Wennberg, '56; Oxford U. Press, $29.95.
Founder of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Wennberg has been instrumental in learning how overutilization of health care has made the United States less healthy—and emptier pocketed—than counterpart nations. From a 1967 study that compared the dramatically different surgery rates in comparable Vermont towns, Wennberg went on to analyze how medical supply, not demand, has raised costs. He offers an epidemiologist's perspective on healthcare reform.
Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling, David F. Labaree; Harvard U. Press, $29.95.
Public schooling is an "archetype of dysfunction" that achieves in spite of itself, writes education professor Labaree. The system's 19th-century origins insist that education should serve to solve great social problems. But families expect schools to meet personal goals. The clash between citizen and consumer perspectives explains why school reform remains a quagmire.
By Nightfall, Michael Cunningham, '75; Straus and Giroux, $25.
Peter, a Manhattan art dealer with everything going for him, stands to lose it all if he acknowledges his attraction to his brother-in-law. Drug-addicted, aimless and a lookalike of his sister, young Ethan is a catalyst for existential crises that Cunningham describes in luxurious prose. An added bonus are the artists, real and imagined, whom the author drolly analyzes.
Secrets of the Moneylab: How Behavioral Economics Can Improve Your Business, Kay-Yut Chen and Marina Krakovsky, '92; Portfolio/Penguin, $29.95.
Experimental research on motivation, trust, fairness, risk aversion and other intangibles has provided new ways—often counter-intuitive ones—to improve the bottom line. Chen founded the first corporate behavioral economics program—at Hewlett-Packard, where he is lead economist.
"A white man, a black man, and an Arab man walked into the room. The beginnings of a bad joke were not lost on me, but I was not sure which was more cringe-inducing: thethree men . . . or the fact that I was about to meet a couple of drug traffickers and an assassin at a fast-food chain called Wimpy's."
—Asale Angel-Ajani, MA '95, PHD '99, in Strange Trade: The Story of Two Women Who Risked Everything in the International Drug Trade; Seal Press, $16.95.
