New books from the Brown community:
Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry ’08 (Penguin).
Nora, the narrator in Berry’s swift present-tense debut, leaves London for a weekend with her sister at Rachel’s hilltop farmhouse. But when Nora arrives, she finds Rachel’s German Shepherd strangled and dangling from the banister and Rachel’s body at the top of the stairs. Shocked and unmoored, Nora weaves herself into the police investigation and eventually starts one of her own, a quest that draws old secrets to the surface. A thoroughly engrossing, one-sitting literary thriller.
Love the House You're In: 40 Ways to Improve Your Home and Change Your Life by Paige Rien ’97 (Roost Books).
In this reassuring self-help book for homeowners who may have fallen out of love with their house, Rien, a designer who worked for years on HGTV’s Hidden Potential, wants readers to forget their Pinterest lists and think about what they want their home to be, not what everyone else thinks it should be. You’ll find loads of practical advice here, peppered with quizzes and worksheets, plus helpful aphorisms by everyone from William Morris to Mother Teresa. By the end, you might not want to move after all.
From Green to Mean: The GOP's Downward Environmental Spiral by Edward Flattau ’58 (The Way Things Are Publications).
Though it now seems hard to imagine, Republicans were not always against being green: Abraham Lincoln signed the first bill to protect Yosemite, Teddy Roosevelt helped found the National Wildlife Refuge system, and Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. But with the rise of Ronald Reagan, the GOP’s pro-business, anti-regulation leanings hardened into orthodoxy. Flattau, a long-time syndicated environmental columnist, charts the course of this shift and offers some possible routes back for the party.
ALUMNI NONFICTION
Policy Walking: Lighting Paths to Safer Communities, Stronger Families & Thriving Youth by John A. Calhoun ’62 (BookBaby)
Ordinarily Well: the Case for Antidepressants by Peter D. Kramer ’70 (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After An Epidemic by Katerhine A. Mason ’04 (Stanford)
John Henry Wigmore and the Rules of Evidence: The Hidden Origins of Modern Law by Andrew Porwancher ’08 AM (Missouri)
Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame by Irene V. Small ’97 (The University of Chicago Press)
Resilience in the Face of Adversity: A Suffolkian’s Life Story by Margaret Ellen Mayo Tolbert ’74 PhD (Balboa Press)
ALUMNI FICTION
Josh Baxter Levels Up by Gavin Brown ’06 (Scholastic)
The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire by Karl Jacoby ’87 (Norton)
Float The Pooch by Mark Malamud ’82 (Regulus Press)
The Sun in Your Eyes by Deborah Shapiro ’98 (Morrow)
All Is Not Forgotten by Wendy Walker ’89 (St. Martin’s)
Magruder’s Curiosity Cabinet by H.P. Wood ’92 (Sourcebooks)
