Schroder by Amity Gaige ’95 (Twelve).Gaige has a gift for probing love’s complexities. In this, her third novel, she tells the story of a father who kidnaps his young daughter during a parental visit. Over the next few days, he takes her on a very confused but sweet journey. As TVs broadcast their faces across the region, he shows himself to be a deeply flawed but caring parent.

Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire, America’s Deadliest Rock Concert by John Barylick ’71 (University Press of New England). Ten years ago this February, pyrotechnics discharged at a Rhode Island concert by Great White, a heavy-metal band, ignited sound insulation, engulfing the building in flames, killing 100 concertgoers, and injuring twice that number. Barylick, a lead attorney for the victims, describes the events leading up to the fire and takes us through its aftermath. There’s more than enough blame to go around, most of it attributable to greed.

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Revolution by Rob Tannenbaum ’83 and Craig Marks (Penguin). When it first broadcast in 1981, MTV was a crazy idea: a round-the-clock rock concert aimed at teens. By 1984, it was a worldwide powerhouse, driving the careers of Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, and other superstars. At 600 pages, this compendium of snippets from interviews with musicians and industry leaders is like its subject: lackluster at times, but punctuated by gems so brilliant that it’s addictive.

 

ALUMNI FICTION

The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up by Jacob M. Appel ’96 (Cargo Publishing).

A History of the Present Illness by Louise Aronson ’86 (Bloomsbury USA).

Schroder: A Novel by Amity Gaige ’95 (Twelve). 

Keyhole Factory: A Novel by William Gillespie ’05 MFA (Soft Skull Press).

Come Here, Go Away by Elizabeth Laytin ’76 (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform).

Love is a Canoe: A Novel by Ben Schrank ’91 (Sarah Crichton Books).

ALUMNI NON-FICTION

Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial by Ralina L. Joseph ’96 (Duke University Press).

The Watchful Clothier: The Life of an Eigtheenth-Century Protestant Capitalist by Matthew Kadane ’99 AM, ’05 PhD (Yale University Press).

Captured: The Forgotten Men of Guam by Roger Mansell ’57 and Linxa Goetz Holmes (Naval Institute Press).

Lenin’s Harem by William Burton McCormick ’92 (Knox Robinson).

Family-Centered Treatment With Struggling Young Adults: A Clinician’s Guide to the Transition From Adolescence to Autonomy by Brad Sachs ’78 (Routledge).

The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 1715-1747: A Sojourner in the French Atlantic by Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny; translated by Gordon M. Sayre ’88 and edited by Carla Zecher (University of North Carolina Press).

How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields ’78 (Alfred A. Knopf).

The Science of Consequences: How They Affect Genes, Change the Brain, and Impact Our World by Susan M. Schneider ’82 AM (Prometheus Books).

Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye: A Family Field Trip to the Arctic’s Edge in Search of Adventure, Truth, and Mini-Marshmallows by Zac Unger ’96 (De Capo Press).

FACULTY NON-FICTION

Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes by Jeremy Ravi Mumford (Duke University Press).

The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America by James T. Patterson (Basic Books).