What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America
Ariela J. Gross, MA ’92, JD ’94, PhD ’96
Harvard U. Press
$29.95.
A professor of law and history at USC, Gross provides a comprehensive look at racial-identity trials—cases in which the determination of a person’s “whiteness” might lead to greater freedom or property rights. Seemingly objective (albeit often specious) definitions of ancestry sometimes gave way to subjective perceptions about people’s behavior or associations.
Match Day: One Day and One Dramatic Year in the Lives of Three New Doctors
Brian Eule, ’01
St. Martin’s Press
$24.95.
Each year, at the same hour on the third Thursday of March, more than 150,000 graduating medical students get sorted into hospital training in the National Resident Matching Program. Eule—then the boyfriend and now husband of prospective Stanford surgery resident Stephanie Chao, ’02—examines the history of the Match and how the fraught decision-making required by the system plays out in the lives of three women.
Where the Line Bleeds
Jesmyn Ward, ’99, MA ’00
Balden/Agate Publishing
$15.
Two roads diverge in the piney woods of southern Mississippi, and twins Joshua and Christophe take separate paths when only one of them finds a job after graduation from high school. The other, equally conscientious about trying to grow up and support their blind grandmother, begins to deal marijuana. In a fiction debut that shows off a lovely, quiet voice, Ward, a Stegner fellow, describes a rural, black and Creole setting where the scales are always tipping between fatalism and hope.
Legend of a Suicide
David Vann ’90
U. of Massachusetts Press
$24.95.
An assistant professor of English at Florida State University and a ’94 Stegner fellow, Vann won the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction for this work. A novella with the flavor of Cormac McCarthy and five stories circle around the son of a womanizer who loves the Alaskan wilderness. Like Vann’s father, the man killed himself when the son was entering adolescence.
Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce
Sarah Abrevaya Stein, PhD ’99
Yale U. Press
$30.
The 1880s vogue for the most luxurious feathers to adorn hats was satisfied by a worldwide network of Jewish speculators and exporters. But after a “feather bust” at the beginning of the first world war, many dealers felt “as hard done by as the ostriches had formerly felt after being plucked.” Stein, a professor at UCLA, examines an intriguing colonial commodity.
O the Clear Moment
Ed McClanahan
Counterpoint
$23.
McClanahan, who came to Stanford in 1962 as a Stegner fellow and departed as a Merry Prankster, writes an “implied memoir” in nine nostalgic and cheerfully vulgar stories. He discusses small-town Kentucky, high school athletics, honky-tonk heroines, peace movement pretentiousness, and the way irony trips up everybody in the end.
