East Wind, Rain
Caroline Paul, ’86
William Morrow
$23.95.
When Pearl Harbor was attacked, one Japanese pilot crashed on Niihau, a tiny island owned by a rancher who had quarantined it as a kind of American Eden. Niihau’s residents, speaking only Hawaiian and knowing nothing of the war, must cope with an intruder. Paul, whose first book was a memoir about being a San Francisco firefighter, crafts a novel from these still-little-known circumstances, paying particular attention to the lone Japanese-American couple on the island who, in being able to understand the pilot, face an agonizing quandary of loyalty and identity.
White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era
Shelby Steele
HarperCollins
$24.95.
Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, explores issues of moral authority in race relations, noting that the realization that racism is socially unacceptable has transformed society in both predictable and unintended ways. Whites “must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed of it,” but white guilt may foster ethical relativism that undermines all parties, he writes.
The Money Changers: A Guided Tour Through Global Currency Markets
Robert G. Williams, PhD ’78
Zed Books
$27.50.
A professor of economics at Guilford College, Williams took inspiration for this book from an Italian study-abroad trip in which he scrambled to husband his group’s purchasing power as the dollar fluctuated against the lira. He interviews all sorts of deal-makers and money-movers about the gigantic currency market and pays special attention to “the infancy of the euro.”
The Sad Story of Burton, Speke, and the Nile or, Was John Hanning Speke a Cad?
W.B. Carnochan
Stanford U. Press
$16.95.
The Stanford humanities professor emeritus revisits the storied rivalry of two Victorian explorers. Richard Burton rejected fellow adventurer Speke’s claim to have found the source of the Nile Speke’s untimely death left Burton’s accusations unanswered and widely accepted. Through a close reading of both men’s journals and a recently discovered account by Speke, Carnochan shows the limitations of memoirs in finding truth.
The Man of My Dreams
Curtis Sittenfeld, ’97
Random House
$24.95.
The bestselling author of Prep examines the life, from age 14 to 28, of a determined introvert. Hannah Gavener’s romances fail to thrive and at some point she must stop blaming their failure on her estrangement from her harsh father. Of the many situations in which Hannah feels ill at ease, the funniest is a foursome’s camping trip in Alaska.
At Home in the Vineyard: Cultivating a Winery, an Industry, and a Life
Susan Sokol Blosser, ’66
U. of California Press
$24.95.
History majors Susan Sokol and Bill Blosser, ’65, had been married for four years when they bought some land. Their day jobs soon gave way to an instrumental role in Oregon’s wine industry. Sokol Blosser’s memoir covers land-use struggles, winery concerts, the dissolution of her marriage, efforts to go organic, and the passing of the business to the next generation.
Isolation Ward
Joshua Spanogle
Delacorte Press
$22.
Fifth-year medical student Spanogle sets this thriller in Baltimore and the Bay Area. A brash investigator from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention probes an outbreak of unidentifiable illness in a group home for the mentally challenged, and soon learns that the man responsible for the infection has been murdered.
The Real War Against America
Brett Kingstone, ’81
Specialty Publishing
$24.95.
Founder of Super Vision International in Orlando, Fla., a leading producer of fiber-optic and LED products, Kingstone found himself in a trade-secrets war against Asian manufacturers. With the pacing of a spy novel, he writes about the events that led to a $33.1 million jury verdict and how intellectual-property theft poses a national threat.
The Sand Café
Neil MacFarquhar, ’82
Public-Affairs
$24.95.
In the months following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, hundreds of journalists are ensconced in a hotel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. A wire service correspondent named Angus Dalziel combats his cabin fever by seducing a television reporter in this jaundiced look at news gathering and Saudi excess. Debut novelist MacFarquhar, a New York Times correspondent, served as its Cairo bureau chief.
