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This month’s featured titles include poetry, a look at what we eat (and why), and a management guide on the art of firing

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!

And did you know that Cornell has an online book club? Check it out!

The cover of "The Necessary Goodbye"

The Necessary Goodbye

Peter Banko, MHA ’92

In this management guide, Banko—a longtime health executive who’s now president and CEO of a Massachusetts hospital system—addresses a topic that few businesspeople relish: letting workers go.

Subtitled How Great Leaders Fire with Clarity, Confidence, and Compassion, the volume comes from the book arm of Forbes magazine.

Kirkus praises it as a “wise and wide-ranging consideration of the delicacies involved in dismissing employees.”

Having fired some four dozen people over the course of his career, Banko ponders the circumstances in which terminations become necessary and offers advice on best practices for doing it fairly and well.

He covers such topics as handling these conversations empathetically and with precision; reframing firing as a leadership act rather than a personal failure on the employee’s part; and preserving team morale amid staff departures.

“It makes complete sense that in classrooms and boardrooms there is a hush and stillness to this dialogue,” Banko writes of the lack of attention to firing as a key leadership tool.

“We are taught to get along when we land in school at age five. … I value welcoming and belonging in my work. I don’t value glossing over it when someone on the team is not performing and is bringing down the whole team and the organization.”

Grub

Lee Cadesky, MS ’15

A food scientist and former lecturer on the Hill, Cadesky spent the second half of the 2010s working on startups that aimed to turn crickets into a source of protein akin to tofu.

That endeavor serves as a backdrop to her first book, a general-audience work in which she contemplates how humans think about what constitutes food.

She identifies seven forces that shape that concept, including genetics, microbiology, anthropology, trade, and technology.

The cover of "Grub"

“Food’s definition can change a lot depending on whom you ask,” Cadesky writes, going on to observe: “Why eat a snail but not a slug? Why eat a lobster but not a locust? Is the only difference butter? How we categorize food is perhaps even more fluid. Are alligators meat or seafood? … Is soy milk actually milk? Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is a cucumber a vegetable?”

Booklist calls Grub a “complex narrative that opens in a most unexpected way,” noting that the author “offers a fresh perspective for readers interested in a broad look at culinary traditions and changing approaches to what we eat and why.”

Now the director of innovation for a major Canadian food manufacturer, Cadesky pens a Substack newsletter titled the Digest Digest.

The cover of "Tracks in Snow"

Tracks in Snow

Thaddeus Rutkowski ’76

Rutkowski’s latest volume is a collection of short lyric poems inspired by his life experiences—from childhood in Appalachia to adulthood in NYC.

“These candid, compact poems focus on themes of alienation and belonging, closeness to nature, eventual parenthood, and aging,” states the publisher, Finishing Line Press. “Each poem contains careful observation of detail—the flapping of a bird’s wing, the sound of a mantra, the smell of smoldering charcoal briquettes—and a conceptual twist that casts new light on the subject.”

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Rutkowski’s previous books include the novels Safe Colors and Haywire and the poetry collections Border Crossings and Tricks of Light.

As he writes in a poem from the new collection: “I see a moment of happiness on my wife’s face. / She smiles after she gets out of the bay water / before she sees I’m looking. / She holds a towel to her cheek / and stands over the bedsheet / we’ve brought to the beach. / We turned down the offer of reclining chairs, / at high prices, and even more / for the ones with sunshades.”

Medicines That Feed Us

Stacey Langwick

Langwick is a professor of anthropology on the Hill; in addition to her doctorate in the field, she holds a master’s in public health.

Her research focuses on cultural and medical anthropology—and her latest book delves into plant-based healing and sustainable farming practices in Tanzania.

It examines (in the words of the publisher, Duke University Press) “the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises” that shape modern life.

The cover of "Medicines That Feed Us"

“Together we ask: ‘What does it mean to heal in a toxic world?’” Langwick writes in the intro, adding: “The double bind defining our contemporary moment unsettles and disorients.”

Langwick previously penned Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania and co-edited Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa: Transnational Health and Healing.

The cover of "American Bridge"

American Bridge

Gregory Dreicer, PhD ’93

This volume from MIT Press traces the evolution of bridge-building, from an endeavor done a single structure at a time to a standardized practice performed worldwide. Along the way, author Dreicer chronicles related historical and societal shifts and offers a plethora of visuals.

The book earned a blurb from fellow Cornellian and MIT prof John Ochsendorf ’96: “Dreicer’s engrossing study of the lattice truss bridge makes a nuanced and original contribution to the history of technology.”

A doctoral alum in science and technology studies, Dreicer is a historian, designer, and creator of visitor experiences.

“American Bridge explores a radical reimagining," says the publisher, "a new way of building that introduced uniformity and modularity on a global scale while enabling the connectivity essential to the rise of the nation-state.”

Persia’s Greek Campaigns

John Hyland ’99

Dubbed “impressive” by the New York Times, this war history was penned by an Arts & Sciences alum who’s on the faculty at Virginia’s Christopher Newport University.

“The wars between the Achaemenid Persian kings and the Greek city-states—especially Xerxes’s invasion of Greece—are often remembered as foundational events in Greek history, and therefore, we often hear about them through Greek accounts,” states the publisher, Oxford University Press.

The cover of "Persia’s Greek Campaigns"

“While the Persians left no campaign narratives to compare with Herodotus and Aeschylus, their documents, artwork, and artifacts offer the foundations for an illuminating reassessment of these pivotal conflicts.”

The volume was featured in an April 2026 Times round-up of books that demonstrate similarities between the Persian invasion of Greece millennia ago and the current U.S. conflict with Iran.

Hyland previously published Persian Interventions: The Achaemenid Empire, Athens, and Sparta, 450–386 BCE and co-edited Brill’s Companion to War in the Ancient Iranian Empires.

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 August 10, 2026

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