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Summer 2003
BOOKSHELF

The Train They Call the City of New Orleans
Steve Goodman
Illustrated by Michael McCurdy, A64, Museum 71

G. P. Putnam’s Sons

The song “City of New Orleans,” written by Steve Goodman and made famous by Arlo Guthrie, captured an era in American history when people criss-crossed the country by train. Using scratchboard-and-watercolor illustrations, award-winning illustrator Michael McCurdy has illuminated the striking views from the train of the same name as it journeys from snowy, industrial Chicago through small Midwestern towns to lush Louisiana.

A Mango-Shaped Space
Wendy Mass, J89
Little, Brown and Company

Thirteen-year-old Mia Winchell appears to be the most normal kid in her family, but she knows that she is far from ordinary. Mia is keeping a secret: Sounds, numbers, and letters cause her to see an array of color. When she finally reveals the truth, she feels like a freak and embarks on an intense journey of self-discovery. And before it’s too late, she must lose something very special in order to find herself.
Worried All the Time: Overparenting in an Age of Anxiety and How to Stop It
David Anderegg, Eliot-Pearson 81
Free Press

In the tradition of Dr. Spock, child and family therapist David Anderegg reminds contemporary parents that parenting is not “rocket science.” So why are so many worrying? Even though most American families are safer and healthier today than at any other time in our history, studies show that parental anxiety has reached an all-time high. Anderegg draws on social science research and his own experience to clarify facts and fantasies about kids’ lives today and the key issues that preoccupy parents.

Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders & Their Legacies in Italy & Japan
Richard J. Samuels, G74
Cornell University Press

Two late-developing nations, Japan and Italy, have traveled parallel courses despite very different national identities. Richard J. Samuels, the Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for International Studies at MIT, explores the role of human ingenuity in political change. Beginning with the founding of modern nation-states, he traces the developmental dynamic in both countries through the failure of early liberalism, the coming of fascism, and wartime defeat.

At War with Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World
Michael Hirsh, A79


As correspondent for Newsweek, Michael Hirsh has reported on American foreign policy from every continent. Using colorful vignettes and up-close reporting from his coverage of the first two post–Cold War presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Hirsh offers an explanation of America’s role as the world’s uberpower and shows the grave danger of our failure to understand that our overwhelming military and economic power makes us more and not less dependent on our standing in the international community.
Restore Your Magnificence: A Life-Changing Guide to Reclaiming Your Self-Esteem
Dr. Joe Rubino, D81
Vision Works Publishing

This latest book by personal-development trainer and life-changing success coach Dr. Joe Rubino is a guide to re-establishing self-image. He takes the reader step-by-step through exercises, including the “12 steps to restoring your self-esteem,” which include uncovering the source of lack of self-esteem, discovering the secret to reclaiming personal power and an upset-free life, and creating a vision of “no regrets.”
The Story of Metal Trading
Peter Marc Waszkis, A84, G85, and Helmut Waszkis
Metal Bulleting Books Ltd

With his father, Helmut, Peter Marc Waszkis chronicles the development of the metal trading profession from man’s first discovery of metal some 8,000 years ago to today’s modern global trade. Starting with the history of how traders facilitated the making of bronze, the book follows the development of the metal trading profession from Greeks mining silver to the early German lead and silver merchants to the start of the Industrial Revolution by metal traders.
Great Neck
Jay Cantor
Random House

English professor Jay Cantor’s newest novel, Great Neck, tells the story of a group of friends growing up idealistic, radical, and romantic in the 1960s and ’70s. The novel brings the reader inside privileged Long Island childhoods, into the churches, juke joints, and jails of Mississippi, and the underground meetings and protest marches fueled by a potent mix of sex, politics, and drugs. A story of members of a generation who sometimes saw themselves as superheroes.

Freedom Evolves

Daniel C. Dennett
Viking Press

Daniel Dennett, University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, has played a major role in expanding the understanding of consciousness, developmental psychology, and evolutionary theory. In Freedom Evolves, he explains how evolution is the key to resolving the ancient problems of moral and political freedom. According to Dennett, biology provides the perspective from which we can distinguish the varieties of freedom that matter. Here is the story of how we came to be different from all other creatures, how our early ancestors mindlessly created human culture, and how culture gave us our minds, our visions, our moral problems—in a nutshell, our freedom.
Eating Apes
Dale Peterson
The University of California Press

English lecturer Dale Peterson exposes a disturbing secret: the looming extinction of humanity’s closest relatives, the African great apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. He details how, with the unprecedented opening of African forests by European and Asian logging companies, the traditional consumption of wild-animal meat in Central Africa has suddenly exploded in scope and impact, moving from what was recently a subsistence activity to an enormous and completely unsustainable commercial enterprise. Supported by color photographs, Eating Apes documents the when, where, how, and why of this rapidly accelerating disaster.