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Silence at Boalt Hall: The Dismantling of Affirmative Action |
UC-Berkeley’s law school was a pioneer in affirmative-action admissions, and by 1994, one-quarter of its students were blacks, Native Americans and Latinos. Their numbers dwindled after racial criteria were outlawed three years later, dropping to 9 percent in 1999. Guerrero, an immigration lawyer and one of the last beneficiaries of Boalt’s affirmative action, documents the fierce struggles of students, faculty and politicians on both sides of the issue. She musters evidence that race-blind admissions criteria do not provide equal opportunity, that standard tests fail to accurately predict minority students’ success, and that killing affirmative action is a step backward toward racial segregation. |
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Wild Heart, A Life: Natalie Clifford Barney’s Journey from Victorian America to the Literary Salons of Paris |
Rodriguez’s biography of the American-born heiress reads like a belle époque romance, except that this beautiful, brilliant and high-spirited heroine is openly lesbian. Barney, whose many lovers included novelist Colette and celebrated courtesan Liane de Pougy, was a writer whose literary salon drew Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein. |
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Heartbeat |
An emergency-room physician struggles for his sanity in this medical fiction penned by a real-life ER specialist. Beset by divorce, long-repressed memories of his identical twin’s slow death, and guilt over two fatal mistakes made on his watch, Leon Mendel is going downhill fast—hearing voices, hallucinating, obsessing over death. A new love interest and an old friend’s request for euthanasia bring everything to a head. |
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Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties |
The author, a University of Washington history professor, examines the first three years of the Sixties as a prelude to the tumultuous, more widely studied, remainder of the decade. He argues that the JFK years were promising in two senses. The country showed the potential, or promise, to achieve its ideals, but it was also a time of utopian schemes, promises that defied reality. Camelot remains a myth. |
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Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26-June 3, 1864 Gordon C. Rhea, JD ’74 Louisiana State University Press, 2002 $34.95 |
A practicing attorney and military historian, Rhea has written three previous books on the Civil War’s Overland campaign, when Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee first battled directly. No two military figures have been more misunderstood, writes Rhea, who proceeds to set the record straight on the engagement that brought 7,000 casualties to the Union and 1,500 to the Confederates. |
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Tiny Game Hunting: Environmentally Healthy Ways to Trap and Kill the Pests in Your House and Garden Hilary Dole Klein, ’67, and Adrian M. Wenner UC Press, 2001 $14.95 |
Profiles of household invaders and prescriptions for nontoxic, often novel, countermeasures are interspersed with anecdotes and historical tidbits—and praise for beneficial bugs. Not all the remedies are lethal. You can keep cats away from houseplants, for example, using cotton balls soaked in lemon oil or ammonia. |
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The Business of Options: Time-Tested Principles and Practices Martin P. O’Connell, JD/MBA ’70 John Wiley & Sons, 2001 $69.95 |
A veteran consultant and educator, the author offers a guide for those who want to use options trading as a risk-management and investment tool. He dispels any notion that this complex market activity can be mastered with a few mathematical tricks. Rather, he argues, it is a business that has much in common with an insurance company or casino operation. |
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Expect the Unexpected Or You Won’t Find It Roger von Oech, PhD ’75 Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2002 $12.95 |
Von Oech, who conducts corporate seminars on creativity, recommends the 2,500-year-old epigrams of Heraclitus as a stimulus to problem-solving. Here, he translates and analyzes 30 “creative enigmas,” suggesting that readers puzzle out how they might apply to a current situation. |
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Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley |
What turns a small-town New England girl into a traitor? Olmsted, an assistant history professor at UC-Davis, plots Bentley’s trajectory from spy for the Soviets to chief informer for J. Edgar Hoover. The promiscuous, alcoholic Bentley outwitted both the KGB and FBI, but her mental instability and propensity for lying stymied historians until the recent opening of Russian and U.S. archives. |
