Two Lives
Vikram Seth, MA ’79
HarperCollins, 2005
$27.95
At 17, Seth stayed in London with his great-uncle Shanti and Auntie Henny—two people whom he would come to see as remarkable survivors of an alarming century. The two met when Shanti came from India to study dentistry in Berlin and lodged with Henny’s family. The war would disrupt their lives—she was sent to England in 1939, but her mother and sister died in a concentration camp; he lost an arm in combat in Italy in 1944—yet their unusual friendship would grow into a marriage that spanned four decades.
A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down
Robert B. Laughlin
Basic Books, 2005
$26
In their preoccupation with the universe’s tiniest particles, scientists perhaps are failing to pursue another kind of knowledge. Laughlin, Stanford’s Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor and a co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in physics, explores many facets of “emergence”—wherein the whole is more than can be explained by the sum of its parts. He makes a charmingly written case for emergence as science’s next frontier.
Copy This! Lessons from a Hyperactive Dyslexic Who Turned a Bright Idea into One of America’s Best Companies
Paul Orfalea and Ann Marsh, ’88
Workman Publishing, 2005
$23.95
The founder of Kinko’s was expelled from four of the eight schools in which his supportive parents enrolled him, but Paul Orfalea learned “how to succeed in business without really reading.” The entrepreneur says learning difficulties gave him big-picture perspective and sensitized him to the importance of customer service and employee satisfaction.
Admission Matters: What Students and Parents Need to Know about Getting into College
Sally P. Springer, PhD ’71, and Marion R. Franck
Jossey-Bass, 2005
$14.95
As the “echo” generation of the baby boomers comes of age, Springer, a psychologist and the associate chancellor at UC-Davis, and Franck, a writer, offer insights into why the college admissions process has become so stressful. The book’s epilogue is a letter to prospective students written by former Stanford and Princeton dean of admissions Fred Hargadon.
Full Service
Will Weaver, MA ’80
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005
$17
In the summer of 1965, Paul Sutton’s mother urges her shy son to take a job at the local gas station. There the Minnesota farm boy from a straitlaced religious community meets unforgettable customers. Weaver, a professor of English at Bemidji State, is the author of six previous novels for young readers.
Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture
David Schmid, PhD ’96
U. of Chicago Press, 2005
$29
Opening with mentions of “murderabilia”—souvenirs such as locks of Charles Manson’s hair or bricks from Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment building, Schmid discusses how serial killers have become iconic in America. One chapter about these “idols of destruction” examines how the portrayal of serial killers informs the national debate about terrorism.
Florida
Mason Smith, MA ’73, PhD ’73
Xlibris, 2005
$24.95.
Full of North Woods voices, Smith’s second novel follows the eddies of gossip in a New York town at the Canadian border. Some of the rumors involve Julia—a college person up from New Jersey to do her practice teaching. Florida is the destination of defendant Robert Sochia, just freed after a second murder trial.
American Christmases: Firsthand Accounts of Holiday Happenings From Early Days to Modern Times
ed. Joanne (Fish) Martell, ’49
John F. Blair, 2005
$24.95.
Some 250 verbatim entries show how the 1659 anti-Christmas law of the Massachusetts Bay Colony gave way to revelry. Many memorable holidays take place far from a hearth: John C. Fremont wrote about an 1848 Yule breakfast of mule and snowmelt; a private stationed on Bataan in 1941 admired a mango tree that swarmed with “millions of fire flies.”
The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention
of Silicon Valley
Leslie (Ritt) Berlin, MA ’94, PhD ’02
Oxford U. Press, 2005
$30
The co-founder of Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor was a Depression-era preacher’s kid who moved from technical genius into entrepreneurial brilliance. Berlin, a scholar active with Silicon Valley archives at Stanford, found a boyhood journal in which Noyce’s comment about hobby handicrafts foreshadowed his role with the integrated circuit: “You can make things cheaply that are worth a lot.”
