Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories
Tobias Wolff
Knopf
$26.95
The much-honored professor of creative writing collects three decades’ worth of stories—work often described as Chekhovian. In an author’s note, Wolff says that because his stories aren’t “sacred texts” he granted himself “the liberty of revisiting them here and there.” In the book’s 10 new stories, readers meet an uxorious dog, some brook-no-nonsense professionals, and passengers troubled at their destinations.
Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for the Post-Bush America
Eric Alterman, PhD ’03
Viking
$24.95
Media critic and academic Alterman catalogs all the ways in which liberalism creates an America more in sync with what Americans say they want—a nation that’s fair, kind, secure, moral and strong. He also documents how conservatives, especially at Fox News, have slandered liberalism so effectively that even the left hesitates to use the label.
Memoirs of My Childhood in Yugoslavia
Wayne S. Vucinich, edited by Larry Wolff, PhD ’84
Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship
$35
History professor Vucinich, who died in 2005, left this detailed account of life among herders in Hercegovina. Orphaned at 5 in Butte, Mont., by the 1918 flu epidemic, Wayne was sent to live with his paternal relatives in a place where smallpox vaccinations coexisted with witches’ spells, and no social gathering lacked a guslar who recited epic poems.
Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement
Wendy L. Wall, MA ’91, PhD ’98
Oxford U. Press $35
Wall, an assistant professor at Colgate, thinks the usual degree of consensus that characterized mid-20th-century American history was less an outgrowth of shared convictions than a manufactured response to the Depression and the rise of fascism. Enlivening her argument are discussions of the 1947 Freedom Train, The Adventures of Superman and the anti-bigotry ballad, “The House I Live In.”
Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living
Doug Fine, ’92
Villard, $24
With a pair of goats he found on Craigslist and a resolve to use as little fossil fuel as possible, journalist Fine conducts a yearlong makeover of his 41-acre Funky Butte Ranch in southern New Mexico. He converts a vehicle to burn fast-food oil, installs solar panels and intermittently keeps the coyotes from killing the hens.
Isn’t It Their Turn to Pick Up the Check?
Jeanne Fleming, MA ’77, PhD ’82, and Leonard Schwarz, MA ’73, MBA ’78
Free Press
$21
Partners who write an advice column in Money magazine, Fleming and Schwarz know that the intersection of personal finance and personal relationships has more hazards than Interstate 880 in an earthquake. Their book offers practical and ethical wisdom for dealing “with all the trickiest money problems between family and friends—from serial borrowers to serious cheapskates.”
