The Art of Choosing, Sheena (Sethi) Iyengar, PhD '98; Twelve, $25.99.
People who can't tell a difference between two shades of neutral nail polish will decidedly prefer one of them when the colors are named. (Ballet Slippers beats Adore-a-Ball, 7 to 3.) By the way, the researcher who contemplates this study is blind.
Iyengar, a social psychologist who is a business professor at Columbia, studies choice, and this book is her user's guide to the many dimensions of human decision making. (Some of her research, on speed dating, was discussed in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink.) With examples as trivial as Coke vs. Pepsi, as consequential as love matches vs. arranged marriages, and as philosophical as capitalism vs. communism, she ponders what her publisher calls "nothing less than the subtext of our lives." Born to Indian parents in Canada, Iyengar is especially good at explaining the cultural contexts of choice—and just how off-the-chart is America's love of unlimited options.
Model Home,
This novel, set with perfect pitch in the 1980s, nevertheless feels as immediate as Facebook postings. With high hopes and genuine prospects, Warren Ziller has moved his wife and three children from Wisconsin to Southern California. But when the economy sours, the household's ruin assumes Job-like proportions. (And each family member's point of view is shown, not just Warren's.) Puchner, a Stegner fellow from 2002 to 2004, is a master of the telling detail and the delayed revelation—especially as they relate to the youngest Ziller, an odd boy thought to have caused the family's worst catastrophe.
The Professor and Other Writings, Terry Castle; HarperCollins, $25.99.
"Having labored in the dusty groves of academe for over twenty years," English professor Castle decided she wanted "to write more directly and personally." Does she ever! "The Professor" is a wry memoir about her education as a lesbian (the womyn's music, the humorless collectivism, the flannel) and a contemplation of the affair she endured with an admired mentor. Six additional essays range over such topics as trench warfare, dysfunctional stepsiblings, shelter magazines, artistic pilgrimages, English stoicism and more. She also rakes the ashes of her semi-friend Susan Sontag.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,
"We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it," argues Ohio State law professor Alexander. Largely because of its War on Drugs, the United States now imprisons six to 10 times more of its citizens than other industrialized nations, and the disproportionate number of African-American "drug felons"—often small-time offenders represented negligently in court—become permanently disenfranchised.
Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President, and the Speech That Ended the Cold War,
Ratnesar, a deputy editor at Time, provides a readable history of Ronald Reagan's 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate. The personal friendship between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev paved the way for the U.S. president's resounding dare. The much-haggled-over speech was written by then-30-year-old Peter Robinson, MBA '90, now a Hoover fellow.
The Birth (and Death) of the Cool,
Musician and critic Gioia believes that cool—the ultimate approbation for much of the past century—has become passé. Writing a cultural history of the concept (and name-checking such icons as Bix Biederbecke, Miles Davis, James Dean and Michael Jordan), he says commercialization and other forms of co-opting have killed cool's irony and knowingness. What's supplanted cool? Earnestness.
—Surgeon ATUL GAWANDE, '87, in The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right; Metropolitan Books, $24.50
