Selected New Books in Ekstrom Library: June 2018

A National Besteller "Chilling...Reads like a West Coast version of All the President's Men." --The New York Times Book Review The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers. In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work. A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.  

"The book we didn't realize we needed."---Chicago Reader Dogs do it. Millipedes do it. Dinosaurs did it. You do it. I do it. Octopuses don't (and nor do octopi). Spiders might do it: more research is needed. Birds don't do it, but they could if they wanted to. Herrings do it to communicate with each other. In 2017 zoologist Dani Rabaiotti's teenage brother asked her a most teenaged question: Do snakes fart? Stumped, Rabaiotti turned to Twitter. The internet did not disappoint. Her innocent question spawned the hashtag #doesitfart and it spread like a noxious gas. Dozens of noted experts began weighing in on which animals do and don't fart, and if they do, how much, how often, what it's made of, what it smells like, and why. Clearly, the public demands more information on animal farts. Does it Fart? fills that void: a fully authoritative, fully illustrated guide to animal flatulence, covering the habits of 80 animals in more detail than you ever knew you needed. What do hyena farts smell especially bad? What is a fossa, and does it fart? Why do clams vomit but not fart? And what is a fart, really? Pairing hilarious illustrations with surprisingly detailed scientific explanations, Does it Fart? will allow you to shift the blame onto all kinds of unlikely animals for years to come.

Clapper traces his career through five decades of national intelligence operations, the growing threat of cyberattacks, his relationships with Presidents and Congress, and the truth about Russia's role in the presidential election. He describes, in the wake of Snowden and WikiLeaks, his efforts to make intelligence more transparent and to push back against the suspicion that Americans private lives are subject to surveillance.

This panoramic fictional oral history begins with one small mystery: the body of a young woman found in an Arizona border town, presumed to be an illegal immigrant, disappears from the town morgue. To the young CDC investigator called in to consult with the local police, it's an impossibility that threatens her understanding of medicine. Then, more bodies, dead from an inexplicable disease that solidified their blood, are brought to the morgue, only to also vanish. Soon, the U.S. government--and eventually biomedical researchers, disgruntled lawmakers, and even an insurgent faction of the Catholic Church--must come to terms with what they're too late to stop: an epidemic of vampirism that will sweep first the United States, and then the world. With heightened strength and beauty and a stead diet of fresh blood, these changed people, or "Gloamings," rapidly rise to prominence in all aspects of modern society. Soon people are beginning to be "re-created," willingly accepting the risk of death if their bodies can't handle the transformation. As new communities of Gloamings arise, society is divided, and popular Gloaming sites come under threat from a secret terrorist organization. But when a charismatic and wealthy businessman, recently turned, runs for political office--well, all hell breaks loose. Told from the perspective of key players, including a cynical FBI agent, an audacious campaign manager, and a war veteran turned nurse turned secret operative, A People's History of the Vampire Uprising is an exhilarating, genre-bending debut that is as addictive as the power it describes.
The body of a young woman found in an Arizona border town disappears from the town morgue. Then more bodies, dead from an inexplicable disease that solidified their blood, are brought to the morgue, only to also vanish. An epidemic of vampirism sweeps first the United States, and then the world. With heightened strength and beauty and a steady diet of fresh blood, these changed people, or "Gloamings," rapidly rise to prominence in all aspects of modern society. Soon people are beginning to be "re-created," willingly accepting the risk of death if their bodies can't handle the transformation. But when a charismatic and wealthy businessman, recently turned, runs for political office-- well, all hell breaks loose.

A New York Times Bestseller From #1 New York Times bestselling author Karen Kingsbury comes a brand-new love story in the Baxter Family collection about two people who lost their parents in the same national tragedy--two people desperate to find each other and the connection they shared for a single day...a day that changed everything. Brady Bradshaw was a child when the Oklahoma City bombing killed his mother. Every year, Brady visits the memorial site on the anniversary to remember her. A decade ago on that day, he met Jenna Phillips, who was also a child when her parents were killed in the attack. Brady and Jenna shared a deep heart connection and a single beautiful day together at the memorial. But after that, Brady never saw Jenna again. Every year when he returns, he leaves a note for her in hopes that he might find her again. This year, Ashley Baxter Blake and her sister Kari Baxter Taylor and their families take a spring break trip that includes a visit to the site to see the memorial's famous Survivor Tree. While there, Ashley spots a young man, alone and troubled. That man is Brady Bradshaw. A chance moment leads Ashley to help Brady find Jenna, the girl he can't forget. Ashley's family is skeptical, but she pushes them to support her efforts to find the girl and bring them together. But will it work? Will her husband, Landon, understand her intentions? And is a shared heartache enough reason to fall in love? Deeply emotional and beautifully romantic, To the Moon and Back is an unlikely love story about healing, redemption, hope and the belief that sometimes a new tomorrow can grow from the ashes of a shattered yesterday.

Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller Instant #1 USA Today Bestseller "President Duncan for a second term!" --USA Today "This book's a big one." --New York Times "Towers above most political thrillers." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "The plotting is immaculate . . . the writing is taut." --Sunday Times (London) "Ambitious and wildly readable." --New York Times Book Review The President Is Missing confronts a threat so huge that it jeopardizes not just Pennsylvania Avenue and Wall Street, but all of America. Uncertainty and fear grip the nation. There are whispers of cyberterror and espionage and a traitor in the Cabinet. Even the President himself becomes a suspect, and then he disappears from public view . . . Set over the course of three days, The President Is Missing sheds a stunning light upon the inner workings and vulnerabilities of our nation. Filled with information that only a former Commander-in-Chief could know, this is the most authentic, terrifying novel to come along in many years.

Reveals many little-known facts about the role and treatment of the Black GIs—Publishers Weekly.“Dr. Mullen combines in one volume a much needed chronology of Black American participation in American wars from the Revolution to Vietnam and an in-depth examination of Black attitudes toward these wars.”—[U.S. Air Force] Friday Review of Defense Literature “Mullen offers a quick, readable overview of Afro-American stances in relation to all American wars (making it the only work in print with that range)…. The book’s many excellent photos, brief bibliography and direct writing may make this a useful educational tool even after more comprehensive studies finally appear.”—Black Scholar “An excellent historical account of black participation in American wars.… [Mullen’s] analysis of the economic and political implications surrounding each war period is unsurpassed … an excellent reference source.… [Should] be read by all Americans, particularly black Americans.…”—Journal of Negro History Photos, drawings, notes, index.

This book focuses on the significant role that professional education programs play at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and these programs' impact on society. Chapter authors discuss the contexts and experiences of students who have attended these programs, including their relationships with faculty, research opportunities, professional growth, personal enrichment, and institutional support. Taking into account social supports, identity development, and doctoral student socialization patterns, this book sheds light on what development and status of such professional education programs mean for future research and practice, while emphasizing issues of race, oppression, and marginalization.

Behind the twenty-first-century curtain of "colorblind" public sentiment lies an often-ignored reality shared by many African American males#65533;racism continues to thrive and often drastically affects their lives. Fitzgerald draws on his extensive interviews of black males to reveal the experiences of racism that continue in public schools and in American higher education. Using empirical data and the methods of sociological research, Fitzgerald analyzes how the persistent effects of white supremacy in education have threatened the psychological and economic welfare of black males. The effects often last well into adulthood. Unraveling the subtle and overt mechanisms of institutional social control leads Fitzgerald to proposals to reduce structural racism and improve the lives of African American youth.

From the inception of slavery as a pillar of the Atlantic World economy, both Europeans and Africans feared their mass extermination by the other in a race war. In the United States, says Kay Wright Lewis, this ingrained dread nourished a preoccupation with slave rebellions and would later help fuel the Civil War, thwart the aims of Reconstruction, justify Jim Crow, and even inform civil rights movement strategy. And yet, says Lewis, the historiography of slavery is all but silent on extermination as a category of analysis. Moreover, little of the existing sparse scholarship interrogates the black perspective on extermination. A Curse upon the Nation addresses both of these issues. To explain how this belief in an impending race war shaped eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American politics, culture, and commerce, Lewis examines a wide range of texts including letters, newspapers, pamphlets, travel accounts, slave narratives, government documents, and abolitionist tracts. She foregrounds her readings in the long record of exterminatory warfare in Europe and its colonies, placing lopsided reprisals against African slave revolts--or even rumors of revolts--in a continuum with past brutal incursions against the Irish, Scots, Native Americans, and other groups out of favor with the empire. Lewis also shows how extermination became entwined with ideas about race and freedom from early in the process of enslavement, making survival an important form of resistance for African peoples in America. For African Americans, enslaved and free, the potential for one-sided violence was always present and deeply traumatic. This groundbreaking study reevaluates how extermination shaped black understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and the political, social, and economic worlds in which it thrived.

Despite the messages we hear from social scientists, policymakers, and the media, black Americans do in fact get married--and many of these marriages last for decades. Marriage in Black offers a progressive perspective on black marriage that rejects talk of black relationship "pathology" in order to provide an understanding of enduring black marriage that is richly lived. The authors offer an in-depth investigation of details and contexts of black married life, and seek to empower black married couples whose intimate relationships run contrary to common--but often inaccurate--stereotypes. Considering historical influences from Antebellum slavery onward, this book investigates contemporary married life among more than 60 couples born after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Husbands and wives tell their stories, from how they met, to how they decided to marry, to what their life is like five years after the wedding and beyond. Their stories reveal the experiences of the American-born and of black immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean, with explorations of the "ideal" marriage, parenting, finances, work, conflict, the criminal justice system, religion, and race. These couples show us that black family life has richness that belies common stereotypes, with substantial variation in couples' experiences based on social class, country of origin, gender, religiosity, and family characteristics.

In a series of "call and responses" whose various narrators engage in what might be called duets with Robert Johnson.  With the refreshing and uncanny empathy for which she is admired and respected as a critic and poet, Blakely offers a fresh attention to Johnson's music (her poems take their titles from his extraordinary compositions) in relation to her own abiding concerns with what she once called, in an essay about Eleanor Ross Taylor, "oh, dear God, let us outgrow those terms of race, class, and gender, but for now they're what we've got--the hand life deals us."  ...

Poetry. "'The devil is in the details' is not a phrase that I feel I fully understood until I read Noah Eli Gordon's clever book, IS THAT THE SOUND OF A PIANO COMING FROM SEVERAL HOUSES DOWN? The problem is, as Gordon might write, that the devil, while enjoying his/her residence among the details, has no necessary relationship to them. Injection of a strange, vivid consciousness into the bureaucratic nihilism of our times is just one of the achievements of this subtle, unflinching collection. I recommend reading it for the elegant patterns and power-washed prose, as well as for its extremely useful descriptions of the fine line between paradox and hypocrisy."--Lucy Ives "It's like Noah Eli Gordon brings an abacus to calculus class. To seminary. To couples therapy. To band practice. What is it for? His tabulations, his many rearrangements of the beads, sound like solving. I love their deliberateness, undeceived about how absolute the quandary continues to be."--Brian Blanchfield

In poems that are by turns intimate and wild, provocative and tender, award-winning poet Donna Masini explores personal loss, global violence, and the consolations of art. She brings her wit, grief, fury, and propulsive energy to bear on the preoccupations of our daily lives and our attempts to bargain with endings of every kind. Equal parts lament and praise, 4:30 Movie is fueled by despair and humor, governed by the ways in which movies enter our imaginations and frame our experiences. The movie theater becomes a presiding metaphor: part waiting room, part childhood, part underground depths where the self is a bit player, riding the subway with "its engine of extras." Masini's exquisite wordplay shows the mind wrestling ferociously to forestall grief, as if finding the right words might somehow allow us to extend our beautiful, foreshortened run.

Jenny George's debut showcases an astonishing poetic talent, a new voice that is intensely focused, patient, and empathic.The Dream of Reason explores the paradoxical relationships between humans and the animals we imagine, keep, fear, and consume. Titled after Goya's grotesque bestiary, George's own dreamscape is populated by purring moths, bats that crawl like goblins, and livestock--especially pigs, whose spirit and slaughter inform a central series of portraits. The poems invite moments of stark realism into a spacious, lucid realm just outside of time--finding revelation in stillness, intimacy in violence, and visionin language that lifts from the dark. From "Threshold Gods": I saw a bat in a dream and then later that week I saw a real bat, crawling on its elbows across the porch like a goblin. It was early evening. I want to ask about death. But first I want to ask about flying. Jenny Georgelives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she runs a foundation for Buddhist-based social justice. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

The poems in Reini-Grandell's second collection time travel her world, taking us on wild, unpredictable journeys to her childhood, into the minds of bears, horses and reindeer, seeing her marriage from her partner's viewpoint, with visitations to the Witch Tree, and her Finnish ancestors. All in all, a celebration of the writer's daunting ability to recreate the universe on her own terms.

In this highly lyrical, imagistic debut, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo creates a nuanced narrative of life before, during, and after crossing the US/Mexico border. These poems explore the emotional fallout of immigration, the illusion of the American dream via the fallacy of the nuclear family, the latent anxieties of living in a queer brown undocumented body within a heteronormative marriage, and the ongoing search for belonging. Finding solace in the resignation to sheer possibility, these poems challenge us to question the potential ways in which two people can interact, love, give birth, and mourn--sometimes all at once.

In America, Christian adolescents and young adults have grown up with fiercely competing narratives about sex, relationships, and fulfillment. Within a Christian world of church services, formal religious education, and retreats, they have been warned about the dangers and sinfulness ofpremarital sex. All the while, popular culture has inundated them with a very different message: casual sex is fun, thrilling, expected, and no-big-deal. Popular culture's influence is perhaps nowhere more evident than on college campuses where hookups - casual sexual encounters devoid of commitmentor emotional attachment - have become the norm for emerging adults. College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics engages 126 college students as sober ethnographers whose task is to observe and analyze their own complex social reality. Part I reveals students' disillusionment with contemporary sexual and relational norms, challenging benevolent or even neutral viewsof hookup culture. Part II brings the students into conversation with Christianity's counter-cultural narrative of what it means to become fully human and experience genuine joy and fulfillment. The spokesperson for this vision is theologian Johann Metz, whose portrait of Jesus enduring his deserttemptations and becoming fully human resonates profoundly with today's college students. Comparing Jesus' way of being in the world with their college culture's status quo, many undergraduates discover in "poverty of spirit" a hopeful, counter-cultural path to authenticity and happiness. Part IIIculminates in a call to action. Students explore obstacles to sexual justice on college campuses, identify key commitments necessary for change, and envision how undergraduates can work to create the college culture they truly desire and deserve.

For many today, retirement and the leisure said to accompany it have become vestiges of a slower, long‑lost time. In a world where the sense of identity is tied to work and careers, to stop working often is to become nobody. In this deeply perceptive and personal exploration of last works, Mark C. Taylor explores the final reflections of writers and thinkers from Kierkegaard to David Foster Wallace. How did they either face or avoid ending and leaving? What do their lessons in ending teach us about living in the time that remains for us?     Some leavings brought relief, even joy, while others brought pain and suffering. Whether the cause was infirmity, impending death, or simply exhaustion and ennui, the ways these influential voices fell silent offer poignant examples of people negotiating the challenges of ending. Throughout this profound and moving book, Taylor probes how the art of living involves learning to leave gracefully.

Gun control, voting rights, family planning, and environmental protection--these are all hot-button issues today, but they were also the same difficult and intractable issues that Senator Joseph D. Tydings of Maryland faced during his tenure in the Senate in the 1960s. In this timely memoir, Tydings looks back on a life of public service, from the Maryland General Assembly to chief federal prosecutor in Maryland and ultimately to the United States Senate. As an early "Kennedy Man," Tydings's political stock soared, but it just as quickly crashed because of his willingness to go "against the grain" on perhaps one progressive issue too many. As the adopted son of a US senator, grandson of an adviser to three US presidents, and step-grandson of perhaps the wealthiest woman of her age, Tydings nevertheless made his own way, rising from horse platoon corporal in war-ravaged Germany to legislative reformer. He prosecuted fellow Democrats for fraud, stood up to presidents over Supreme Court nominees and the war in Vietnam, and faced down segregationists over voting rights. His family planning initiatives are still in effect. He battled the National Rifle Association over gun control--and suffered the consequences. After a decade of political assassinations, from the Kennedy brothers to Martin Luther King Jr., and a turn to the right with the election of Richard Nixon, America's political climate soured for progressive politics, and Tydings narrowly lost reelection. My Life in Progressive Politics provides an important, insider account of a landmark era in American politics.

LGBTQ people are a gift to the Church and have the potential to revitalize Christianity. As an openly lesbian Episcopal priest and professional advocate for LGBTQ justice, the Reverend Elizabeth Edman has spent her career grappling with the core tenets of her faith. After deep reflection on her tradition, Edman is struck by the realization that her queer identity has taught her more about how to be a good Christian than the church. In Queer Virtue, Edman posits that Christianity, at its scriptural core, incessantly challenges its adherents to rupture false binaries, to "queer" lines that pit people against one another. Thus, Edman asserts that Christianity, far from being hostile to queer people, is itself inherently queer. Arguing from the heart of scripture, she reveals how queering Christianity--that is, disrupting simplistic ways of thinking about self and other--can illuminate contemporary Christian faith. Pushing well past the notion that "Christian love = tolerance," Edman offers a bold alternative: the recognition that queer people can help Christians better understand their fundamental calling and the creation of sacred space where LGBTQ Christians are seen as gifts to the church. By bringing queer ethics and Christian theology into conversation, Edman also shows how the realities of queer life demand a lived response of high moral caliber--one that resonates with the ethical path laid down by Christianity. Lively and impassioned, Edman proposes that queer experience be celebrated as inherently valuable, ethically virtuous, and illuminating the sacred. A rich and nuanced exploration, Queer Virtue mines the depths of Christianity's history, mission, and core theological premises to call all Christians to a more authentic and robust understanding of their faith.

Why do we have children and what do we raise them for? Does the proliferation of depictions of suffering in the media enhance, or endanger, compassion? How do we live and die well in the extended periods of debility which old age now threatens? Why and how should we grieve for the dead? And how should we properly remember other grief and grievances? In addressing such questions, the Christian imagination of human life has been powerfully shaped by the imagination of Christ's life. Christ's conception, birth, suffering, death, and burial have been subjects of profound attention in Christian thought, just as they are moments of special interest and concern in each and every human life. However, they are also sites of contention and controversy, where what it is to be human is discovered, constructed, and contested. Conception, birth, suffering, burial, and death are occasions, in other words, for profound and continuing questioning regarding the meaning of human life, as controversies to do with IVF, abortion, euthanasia, and the use of bodies and body parts post mortem, indicate. In The Ethics of Everyday Life, Michael Banner argues that moral theology must reconceive its nature and tasks if it is not only to articulate its own account of human being, but also to enter into constructive contention with other accounts--in particular, it must be willing to learn from and engage with social anthropology if it is to offer powerful and plausible portrayals of the moral life and answers to the questions which trouble modernity. Drawing in wide-ranging fashion from social anthropology and from Christian thought and practice from many periods, and influenced especially by his engagement in public policy matters including as a member of the UK's Human Tissue Authority, Banner develops the outlines of an everyday ethics, stretching from before the cradle to after the grave.

In this timely and dynamic collection of essays, Laura Dubek brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the literary response to the most significant social movement of the twentieth century. Covering a wide range of genres and offering provocative readings of both familiar and lesser known texts, Living Legacies demonstrates how literature can be used not only to challenge the master narrative of the civil rights movement but also to inform and inspire the next generation of freedom fighters.

Naturalists in antiquity worked hard to dispel fanciful ideas about the meaning of living lights, but remained bewildered by them. Even Charles Darwin was perplexed by the chaotic diversity of luminous organisms, which he found difficult to reconcile with his evolutionary theory. It fell to naturalists and scientists to make sense of the dazzling displays of fireflies and other organisms. In Luminous Creatures Michel Anctil shows how mythical perceptions of bioluminescence gradually gave way to a scientific understanding of its mechanisms, functions, and evolution, and to the recognition of its usefulness for biomedical and other applied fields. Following the rise of the modern scientific method and the circumnavigations and oceanographic expeditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, biologists began to realize the diversity of bioluminescence's expressions in light organs and ecological imprints, and how widespread it is on the planet. By the end of the nineteenth century an understanding of the chemical nature and physiological control of the phenomenon was at hand. Technological developments led to an explosion of knowledge on the ecology, evolution, and molecular biology of bioluminescence. Luminous Creatures tracks these historical events and illuminates the lives and the trail-blazing accomplishments of the scientists involved. It offers a unique window into the awe-inspiring, phantasmagorical world of light-producing organisms, viewed from the perspectives of casual observers and scientists alike.

Graywolf reissues one of its most successful essay collections with two new essays and a new foreword by Charles Baxter As much a rumination on the state of literature as a technical manual for aspiring writers,Burning Down the Househas been enjoyed by readers and taught in classrooms for more than a decade. Readers are rewarded with thoughtful analysis, humorous one-liners, and plenty of brushfires that continue burning long after the book is closed.

Poetry. "FROM THE FILES OF THE IMMANENT FOUNDATION is a beautiful work of hesitant wonder, coaxing stark narration, precept, adage and a strange, winsome yet doleful music out of bureaucratic and documentarian argot and protocol. Its long run of quirks and particulars makes it also a work of rash but strict invention, both an inquiry into invention and its anthem or hymn, its exemplum. Immanence's openly secret accord with emanation seems to be at issue or at least at work. I read it wishing it would never end."--Nathaniel Mackey

Surveying the landscape of youth literature, this contributed volume shows how books have grown to include the wide range of our increasingly diverse society.