If you’re reading this indoors, a secret force is already at work on you: the building you’re in is helping shape your emotions, your thoughts, your behavior, and even your memories. That’s one of the conclusions, based on recent cognitive science, in this compelling tour of how the built environment affects us. In what turned into a seven-year project, Goldhagen traveled the world and wound up with a forceful argument that a well-built environment is not simply a luxury but an actual need.
In this intriguing and sumptuous book, you’ll find novelistic essays about eighteen vanished San Francisco worlds. The “worlds” here, illustrated with vintage photographs, period postcards, and some full-color advertisements, include the Point Molate Whaling Station, which was used until the late 1960s; Neptune Beach, a Coney Island–like bathing spot on the Alameda coast; and the Oakland redwoods, a grove of ancient trees, some thirty feet in diameter, that were logged by 1860. A vivid look into what used to be.
At the start of Peterson’s third novel (The Manny, The Idea of Him), Katie Doyle decides to move, along with her eight-year-old son, from Oregon to Long Island for the summer—hoping to fan a brief affair with George, an investment banker, into a more substantial romance. In this perfect beach read, Katie instead finds herself in a swirl of lavish wealth, sudden extramarital affairs, and sharp betrayals as she tries to navigate between Southampton’s upper- and middle-class worlds.
Alumni Fiction
The Little Queen by Meia Geddes ’14 (Poetose)
A Promising Life: Coming of Age with America by Emily Arnold McCully ’61 (Scholastic)
Sweat by Lynn Nottage ’86 (Theatre Communications Group Books)
The Memory Trees by Kali Wallace ’01 (HarperCollins)
Alumni Nonfiction
How Development Projects Persist: Everyday Negotiations with Guatemalan NGOs by Erin Beck ’07 AM, ’12 PhD (Duke)
A Journey To God: Beyond Christianity by John Birchall ’86 (AuthorHouse)
Beatles, Books, Bombs, and Beyond by Robert J. DeLuca ’66 (Createspace)
Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes by Richard Clarke and R.P. Eddy ’94 (Ecco)
A Patient's Guide to Unnecessary Knee Surgery: How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Hasty Medical Advice by Dr. Ronald P. Grelsamer ’75 (Skyhorse)
It's All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World's Family Tree by A.J. Jacobs ’90 (Simon & Schuster)
Discovering Princeton: A Photographic Guide with Five Walking Tours by Wiebke Martens and Jennifer Jang ’95 AM, ’03 PhD (Schiffer)
The Schmuck In My Office: How to Deal Effectively with Difficult People at Work by Jody Foster and Michelle Joy ’07 (St. Martin’s)
Kosti’s Foreman: Richard’s Richard by Richard Kostelanetz ’62 (Archae)
Rash: A Memoir by Lisa Kusel ’88 AM (WiDo)
Caroline’s Comets by Emily Arnold McCully ’61 (Holiday House)
Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil by Rielle Navitski ’06 (Duke)
Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary by Pooja Rangan ’08 AM, ’12 PhD (Duke)
Naked in the Public Eye: Leadership in an Era of Accountability by L. Oliver Robinson ’91 (Rowman & Littlefield)
American Higher Education: Issues and Institutions by John R. Thelin ’69 (Routledge)
The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities by Natasha Warikoo ’95 (Chicago)
Making Teacher Evaluation Work by Sarah Woulfin ’00 (Heinemann)
Alumni Poetry
Rueful Reflections, Books I and II by Irene Margolis Backalenick ’47 (Createspace)
Love Letters to the World by Maia Geddes ’14 (Poetose)
