Books Your July 2025 Reads Stories You May Like CU in Congress: Alumni in the House Cornellian Crossword: ‘School Spirit’ Cornellian Crossword: ‘Holiday on Ice’ This month’s featured titles include a look at the world’s first advice column and a literary mystery set in a Jesuit high school Did you know that Cornell has an online book club? Check it out! For more titles by Big Red authors, peruse our previous round-ups. Have you published a book you'd like to submit? Scroll down for details! ‘I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer’ Mary Beth Norton If you think Dear Abby invented the personal advice column, think again. As Norton—Cornell’s Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History Emerita—explains in her latest work of nonfiction, the genre debuted in late-17th-century England, in a newssheet called the Athenian Mercury. “Many, though by no means all, were young, just starting out in marriage or a trade,” Norton writes of the publication's numerous advice-seekers. “They confronted all the problems common to that stage of life, including conducting courtships, acquiring property, and engaging in premarital negotiations.” In the book, published by Princeton University Press, Norton reproduces dozens of the queries (lightly edited for clarity to modern eyes) and divides them into six topics including choosing a spouse, matrimony, and “dangerous liaisons”—meaning those outside wedlock. “The intriguing exchanges offer a distinctive window into the conservative gender politics of the late Stuart period, in which women’s purity was paramount and marriage was the goal to which all individuals were expected to aspire,” says Publishers Weekly. “This fascinates.” One of the foremost experts on Colonial America, Norton is a past president of the American Historical Association and a 1997 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her previous books include 1774: The Long Year of Revolution, which chronicles the run-up to America’s war for independence. Emotion-Savvy Parenting Alissa Worly Jerud ’08 “Your kids are at the center of your world and you love them more than anything,” Jerud writes in her intro. “At the same time, being with them can be unimaginably taxing and sometimes downright infuriating.” Jerud is a clinical psychologist and a clinical assistant professor at Penn; she’s also a mom who has struggled with how best to react when her kids are a handful. Her self-help book offers (in the words of the subtitle) a “shame-free guide to navigating emotional storms and deepening connection.” As the former Arts & Sciences psychology major writes, although parents typically focus on how to change their kids’ behavior, it’s inevitable that children will push their parents’ buttons—so it’s healthier and more useful for the adults to adopt coping mechanisms that help them be less reactive. And while the book is focused on child-rearing, its principles can be adapted to other situations that require coping with difficult feelings. As Jerud writes in a recent personal essay in Cornellians: “Instead of dreading or trying to avoid moments of emotional pain, I now see these as valuable opportunities to strengthen my muscles for tolerating distress, thus enabling me to better weather whatever challenging emotions I encounter down the road.” Fine Young People Anna Bruno, MBA ’10 Booklist calls Bruno’s literary mystery a “finely crafted meditation on family, community, class, wealth, insidious power, and the limits of religion.” It’s set in a prestigious Jesuit high school in suburban Pittsburgh, where two senior girls, Frankie and Shiv, are doing an investigative story for a journalism course on a student death from nearly two decades earlier. The boy, a star hockey player, died of a drug overdose that authorities dismissed as unsuspicious. Now, the young reporters are delving into the case—interviewing school officials and the late student’s friends and family to learn the truth about his death. “Bruno nimbly toggles between Frankie and Shiv’s investigation and chapters chronicling the lives of their interview subjects, playing fair with readers and planting a few major surprises along the way,” says Publishers Weekly. Stories You May Like CU in Congress: Alumni in the House Cornellian Crossword: ‘School Spirit’ “For the most part, though, mystery-solving takes a backseat to weightier considerations of growing up and finding purpose. A less assured writer might have failed to make it all coalesce, but Bruno pulls it off, thanks to her keen sense of what’s at stake for her teenage characters and Frankie’s indelible voice. It’s a winner.” Bruno previously penned the novel Ordinary Hazards. The Necromantic State Irina Troconis Troconis, an assistant professor of Romance studies, is a native of Venezuela. Her scholarly book was inspired by trips to her home country in the 2010s, after the death of Hugo Chávez—the revolutionary leader turned authoritarian president who ruled the nation for 14 years. As she noted during her visits, images of Chávez remained ubiquitous—as though his ghostly eyes were still observing the populace. “They were everywhere,” Troconis says in an interview in the Cornell Chronicle. “On buildings, on T-shirts, on billboards, on posters, on earrings, on keychains, and on necklaces. And yet, the people I saw going about their day did not seem disturbed by them. In fact, they barely paid any attention to them.” In the book, Troconis examines how Chávez’s “specter” has lingered in the country’s public, private, and digital spaces. Says the publisher, Duke University Press: “Drawing from a diverse corpus that includes tattoos, toys, memes, graffiti, and a hologram haunting the streets of downtown Caracas, Troconis contends that, in moments of failed transitions, political tensions, and crises of legitimacy, the state brings the dead back to life to negotiate the terms of its survival.” Searching For Slippers Stacy Smith Ross ’88 The Human Ecology alum is a former consultant turned motivational speaker, offering advice and inspiration to fellow parents of children with mental illness. Her memoir shares the story of how she and her husband—her Cornell sweetheart, Howie Ross ’88—faced the challenges of raising a daughter with borderline personality disorder. “I tried so many times to fix her,” she writes, recalling a New Year’s Eve when she had to call the police on her 16-year-old daughter as a danger to herself and others. “I saw this coming. I wanted to fix her before it grew into this. Get her help or meds or whatever she needed. Damn those teachers who told me she was fine. Damn the misdiagnoses, one after the next. Damn the hospital stays that ended too soon before the fixing could happen, or the answers could be found.” Ross is also a contributor to a 2014 volume in the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series, titled Reboot Your Life: 101 Stories about Finding a New Path to Happiness. Tragic Resistance Megan Shea, PhD ’09 A doctoral alum in theater arts, Shea is on the clinical faculty at NYU. In her first book, she (in the words of the publisher, Routledge) “analyzes playwrights, directors, and performers who shatter gender norms to gain agency within the patriarchal institutions restricting them.” The scholarly book includes chapters on such topics as a 20th-century adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone; the 1996 Suzan-Lori Parks play Venus, which explores the sexualization of Black women; and the tragic story of Anna Nicole Smith as interpreted by comedian Margaret Cho. The book, the publisher says, “examines the nature of these performances to interrogate how theatrical and performative resistance works and why performance might be a vehicle for altering patriarchal structures that withhold agency from women and trans/genderqueer+ people.” Also an actor, director, and playwright, Shea authored the award-winning short play Penelope and Those Dang Suitors, a gender-bending take on Homer’s Odyssey. As she writes in her book’s introduction: “Feminist resistance depends upon the unsettling of prescribed social identities.” To submit your book for consideration, email cornellians@cornell.edu. Please note that to be included, books must be recently published by a conventional publisher—not self published, pay-to-publish, publish on demand, partner-published, or similar—and be of interest to a general audience. Books not featured will be forwarded to Class Notes. Published July 16, 2025 Leave a Comment Cancel replyOnce your comment is approved, your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *Comment * Name * Class Year Email * Save my name, email, and class year in this browser for the next time I comment. Δ Other stories You may like Alumni MD Keeps Adventure Travelers Healthy on the High Seas Cornelliana And the Greatest Fictional Cornellian in TV and Movie History Is … ? Campus & Beyond A Global Database of Chirps, Whistles, Tweets, and So Much More