Bookshelf

Alumni Authors

China’s Economic Challenge: Smashing the Iron Rice Bowl
Neil C. Hughes, F65
M.E. Sharpe

More than two decades ago, China’s reformers insisted that the iron rice bowl, symbol of the Communist Party’s compact to provide cradle-to-grave security, had to be broken for China to modernize. Hughes, who has spent 28 years working as an industrial and financial specialist and project manager for the World Bank, explores why China’s reforms have not gone far enough, and captures the complexity and contradictions of China’s transition from a planned to a market-oriented economy. He also looks at the impact of reform on China’s cities and farms.

Journey Around New York from A to Z
Martha and Heather Zschock, J88
Commonwealth Editions

Twins Martha and Heather Zschock turn their attention to New York City in this third of their “Journey” series (Journey Around Boston from A to Z; Journey Around Cape Cod & the Island from A to Z) in which a pigeon escorts readers on a circuit of the city, pointing out interesting sights and facts along the way. Each page illuminates a New York theme with alliterative headlines, mini-history lessons and facts. Walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. Shop along Fifth Avenue. See the five boroughs from the top of the Empire State Building.

The Wedding Goes on Without Us
Raymond Downing, A71
Jacaranda Designs ltd.

Downing, a physician who has practiced “poverty medicine” in the South Bronx, Appalachia, Sudan, Tanzania and Kenya, recounts his work, focusing primarily on Africa. Aware that discussions of poverty often focus on what people don’t have, Downing talks about what they do have and shows, along the way, that in the midst of the suffering, African wisdom and strength persists.

The White Fire of Time
Ellen Hinsey, Museum 85
Wesleyan University Press

In her new collection of poems, Hinsey, who teaches writing and literature at Skidmore College’s program in Paris and the French graduate school, the Ecole Polytechnique, explores the boundary between poetry and metaphysics, and the intimate bonds between morality and mortality. Drawing on philosophical and spiritual readings, the work is composed in three sections: The World, meditations on the ordinary, the daily life of the body and its place in nature and time; The Temple, investigations into language and the ethical life; and The Celestial Ladder, in which poems trace the soul’s spiraling journey through desire, love, grief and endurance.

If Only They Could Speak: Stories about Pets and Their People
Dr. Nicholas H. Dodman
New England University Press

Did you hear about the dog who always arranged exactly six pieces of kibble in buttonhole depressions in the couch before he could lie down? Or the cat who compulsively hoarded shiny objects? Dr. Nicholas H. Dodman presents 14 true stories about troubled pets and their distressed owners, revealing that the emotional problems of animals are often as complex, heartrending and treatable as those of their human counterparts.

These emotional stories reveal the fruits of Dodman’s research on animal behavior, which he has carried out as the founder of the Animal Behavior Clinic at Tufts Veterinary School. With humor, compassion and a profound understanding of the way animals think and feel, Dodman explores how separation anxiety, jealousy, fear and death all affect the lives of the animals he has treated.

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