JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA and the Sino-Indian War by Bruce Riedel ’75 (Brookings). In October 1962, as the United States faced down the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy administration found itself confronting an equally dangerous crisis when the People’s Republic of China decided to invade portions of India. A China-U.S. war was narrowly averted, and the conflict reverberates even today. Using diaries, letters, and newly declassified CIA documents, Reidel, a thirty-year CIA veteran, recounts this largely forgotten episode.

In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis by Casey Schwartz ’04 (Pantheon). Schwartz, a former staff writer at Newsweek, offers a lively first-person account of her quest to reconcile thinking about the mind (psychoanalysis) and the brain (neuroscience). The book describes her year in London studying Freud and her year at Yale studying neuroscience, which led her to South African psychoanalyst Mark Solms. The first to coin the term neuropsychoanalysis, Solms has worked to incorporate recent insights about the brain’s structure into Freud’s theories. Schwartz highlights the limits of both disciplines and hints at where they may be heading.

St. Francis of America: How a Thirteenth-Century Friar Became America’s Most Popular Saint by Patricia Appelbaum ’75, ’01 PhD (North Carolina). How did an Italian friar who died in 1226 end up as the most popular saint in America? Adored as the patron saint of animals, Francis of Assisi was “discovered” by Protestants and freethinkers in the nineteenth century and lived on as the patron saint of 1967’s Summer of Love. In this academic but very readable book, Appelbaum surveys Francis’s reputation and how certain widely accepted facts about him differ from the historical record.

 

ALUMNI NONFICTION

Theory Can Be More Than It Used To Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition edited by Dominic Boyer ’92, James Faubion, and George Marcus (Cornell)

Dickinson in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates by Jane Donahue Eberwein ’99 PhD (Iowa)

A to Z D-Toxing: The Ultimate Guide to Reducing Our Toxic Explosures by Sophia Ruan Gushee ’96 (S Fire Publishing)

Approaching Great Ideas: Critical Readings for College Writers by Lee Jacobus ’57, ’59 AM (Bedford/St. Martin’s)

Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca by Eileen Kane ’94 (Cornell)

Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} edited by Jessica Pressman, Mark Marino ’94, and Jeremy Douglass (Iowa)

Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything by George Musser ’88 (Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, and Future by Lauren Redniss ’96 (Random House)

Sacred Enticement: A Skeptic’s Journey to Faith by Greta Schipper Reed ’60 (Greta Schipper)

Pleasure and Profit: 100 Lessons for Building and Selling a Collection of Rare Coins by Robert Shippee ’70 (Whitman Publishing)

 

ALUMNI FICTION

Square Wave by Mark de Silva ’00 (Two Dollar Radio)

The Ghost Lovers by David Orsini ’66, ’75 PhD (Quaternity Books)

ALUMNI POETRY

Swimming The Hellspont: Selected Poems 1971-2001 by Jesse Mavro Diamond ’75 AM (Wilderness House)

BY ALUMNI FOR YOUNG READERS

The Tiara on the Terrace by Kristen Fiedler Kittscher ’96 (HarperCollins)

FACULTY NONFICTION

A Fragmented Continent: Latin America and the Global Politics of Climate Change by Guy Edwards and J. Timmons Roberts (MIT)