A Northern Light in Provence by Elizabeth Birkelund ’82 (Ballentine)
Birkelund’s appealing third novel, following The Runaway Wife and The Dressmaker, takes us first to the west coast of Greenland, where we meet translator Ilse Lund, who at 35 has never left the island. Lund is given the task of translating the French poet Geoffrey Labaye, who is considered a national treasure, and she eventually makes her way to his home in Provence. There she falls in love with French culture, and it becomes clear that some things are not so easily translated. Soon enough Labaye’s engineer son makes his appearance and the novel takes a turn.
The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. and the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age by Ralph Watson McElvenny ’91 and Mark Wortman ’79 (Public Affairs)
While the title might raise eyebrows, it’s a Fortune magazine quote, and this biography of 1937 Brown grad and Watson Institute namesake Tom Watson Jr. is an intriguing read, layered with corporate, family, and succession drama. Watson flew for the Army in World War II and went to work at IBM, then run by Thomas Sr., his domineering father, in 1946. By 1952 he was running the company and IBM owned a massive share of the computer business. In 1964 Watson took a risk with the introduction of IBM 360, which allowed companies to run IBM computers of different sizes with the same software. His big bet led to a personal computing boom and eventually the constellations of PCs and servers that compose the internet.
The Air They Breathe: A Pediatrician on the Frontlines of Climate Change by Debra Hendrickson ’83 (Simon & Schuster)
“The climate crisis is a health crisis,” Hendrickson writes, “and it is a health crisis, first and foremost, for children.” Hendrickson is a pediatrician in Reno, Nevada, and in a narrative shot through with telling anecdotes from her practice, she highlights the not always recognized effects—ranging from heatstroke to a steep rise in tick bites to lungs inflamed by wildfire particulates—that climate change has on children. The solutions here can feel incremental, but Hendrickson does an admirable, wide-angle job at underscoring yet another facet of the climate crisis.
