The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, Heidi W. Durrow, '91; Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $22.95.
"A breathless telling of a tale we've never heard before" is Barbara Kingsolver's assessment of Durrow's debut, which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction. (Kingsolver funds the prize, given every two years, for a manuscript that addresses social justice.)
The tale is that of Rachel, who plummeted from a Chicago rooftop. The child of a Danish mother and an American airman, Rachel has been uprooted in the '80s from base housing in Germany to a black neighborhood in Portland, Ore. The little brown-skinned, blue-eyed sophisticate is a mystery to her grandmother, to classmates who look askance at girls who "act white" and to a culture determined on categorizing race. Overwhelming personal loss sometimes makes Rachel a mystery to herself, too. As revealed by several memorable narrators, the story is a haunting exploration of mixed-race identity.
Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate, Stephen H. Schneider; National Geographic, $28.
From the days in which he chatted on TV with Johnny Carson about environmental stress to the press conference in which he stood with Al Gore to acknowledge the 2007 Nobel Peace Peace, biology professor Schneider has been a public scientist on the frontlines of political struggle. His accounts of futile hearings and tentative negotiations, willful ignorance and dawning awareness can be eye-opening, but the question that keeps him awake nights is this: Can democracy survive complexity?
Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology, and Misfits of the Machine Age, John C. Burnham, '51, PhD '58;U. of Chicago Press,$40.
Burnham, a history professor at Ohio State University, examines the rise and fall of an idea. Accident proneness—the notion that some individuals were more susceptible than others to maiming or killing by industrial machinery—arose in both Britain and Germany in the 1920s. For decades, psychology's approach was to try to identify workers who seemed accident prone, but by the end of the century—in what the author deems a radical equalitarianism—the approach had changed to trying to make machines safer for all.
Across the Endless River, Thad Carhart, JD '77; Doubleday, $26.95.
Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, born to Sacajawea during the Lewis and Clark expedition, had a childhood split between moccasins and shoes. When he became an assistant to Duke Paul of Württemburg, his young adulthood was split between the American frontier and a European court. Carhart imagines the six years of Charbonneau's life after he crossed the endless river. (How disorienting the Atlantic was to someone accustomed to riverbanks!) It was a time in which an educated, observant, multicultural young man comes to feel like a natural-history specimen.
Mark Twain's Book of Animals, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, illustrated by Barry Moser; U. of California Press, $27.50.
English professor Fishkin, director of American studies, collects Twain's writings about "nonhuman animals" and commends Twain as "the most prominent American of his day to throw his weight firmly behind the movement for animal welfare." (Twain's furry fave? If his daughter Clara needed to disturb him at work, she always found it "expedient to be accompanied by a kitten.")
Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling, Robert Kunzman, PhD '03; Beacon Press, 27.95.
A former high school teacher who is now an associate professor of education at Indiana University, Kunzman writes about six homeschooling families with a wide span of demographic signifiers. His evenhanded profiles—fascinating in their daily detail—are intercut with Kunzman's observations on packaged curricula, government oversight and political action.
The "paradox of aging" is that "a group that is collectively losing its physical stamina, youthful attractiveness, and opportunities for economic growth is, somehow, happier."
—Laura Carstensen, Director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, in A Long Bright Future; Broadway Books, $26
