HOW TO KNOW WHAT'LL GET SHARED
Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Jonah Berger, '02, PhD '07; Simon & Schuster, $26.
The wisdom about word of mouth has often focused on the mouths. Berger, an assistant professor of marketing at Wharton, knows it can be good to have "mavens," or "influentials" or "connectors" praising your products and ideas, but he's found that attributes of the message are more important in determining what goes viral. Studying "contagious" content—including a $100 cheesesteak, "Will It Blend?" videos, Livestrong bracelets and Rebecca Black's "Friday"—he identifies the characteristics that make an idea or product as spreadable as warm butter.
The Constant Choice: An Everyday Journey From Evil Toward Good, PETER GEORGESCU, MBA '63, with DAVID DORSEY; Greenleaf Book Group Press, $24.95.
In a book that combines memoir, inspiration and epigenetics (the research that studies whether our habits get encoded genetically), Georgescu professes, "The potential for mankind to evolve toward the good appears to be both extraordinary and also within our grasp." His conviction isn't that of a naïf: The author, chairman emeritus of the Madison Avenue giant Young & Rubicam, immigrated as a teen after being held for years in a Romanian labor camp and knowing that his grandfather had been murdered in a political prison.
Still Points North: Surviving the World's Greatest Alaskan Childhood, LEIGH NEWMAN, '93; Dial Press, $26.
"Most of my life requires explaining," Newman understates in this endearing memoir. The product of a messy divorce, Newman's childhood was split between Alaska with a backwoods-loving physician father whose motto was "can't lives on won't street" and Maryland with a social-worker mother who coveted museum-quality finery. Their daughter grew to be a peripatetic young woman with surpassing resourcefulness and some confounding issues about intimacy. To her readers' great relief, she resolves the latter.
Trading Bases: A Story About Wall Street, Gambling and Baseball, JOE PETA, MBA '96; Dutton, $27.95.
Injured in an accident that put him in a wheelchair for months, former Wall Street trader Peta passed the time by conjoining his two loves—baseball and risk analysis—to develop a model for betting on MLB games. Packed with anecdotes and pop culture references—Peta compares watching Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw to listening to a young Bruce Springsteen singing "Thunder Road"—this book straddles a geek's fascination with number-crunching and a fan's ardor for a game that transcends efforts to exploit it.
Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road With Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier, BOB THOMPSON, '72; Crown, $26.
A road-trip exploration of how myth always, always trumps historical reality, this is a book about David Crockett, the Tennessee congressman and financially insecure frontiersman who died in a Tex-Mex standoff at the Alamo, and Davy, the coonskin-wearing creation of political spinmeisters, hack almanac writers and a Disney television series. Thompson is a former editor of the Washington Post Magazine.
Follow Her Home, STEPH CHA, '07; Minotaur Books, $24.99 (April).
Juniper Song, the Yale-educated-but-adrift Korean-American protagonist of this homage to Philip Marlowe, likes everything about noir mysteries except their concept of the femme fatale—the notion that "a woman could never be beautiful without a taint of evil." Cha's mystery—in which a couple of key women are beautiful and innocent—may not satisfy fully in regard to the resolution of its crime, but the book is notable for its sociologically sharp observations of Los Angeles.
The Gaza Strip 'seemed less an actual place than a metaphor for human suffering, the modern world's dirty little secret, a forbidden, forgotten, crowded, besieged penal colony. . .'
—Pamela J. Olson, '02, in Fast Times in Palestine: A Love Affair With a Homeless Homeland, Seal Press, $16.
