Your February 2025 Reads

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This month’s featured titles include poetry, a kids’ book about Bali, and a look at how feminine stereotypes hold women back

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!

The cover of "Nasty Women"

‘Nasty Women’

Janet Rivkin Zuckerman ’75

While geared toward an audience of mental health professionals such as psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, Zuckerman’s book is also accessible to lay readers.

As the publisher (Routledge) describes it, the volume “addresses the fraught relationship between women and aggression, one troubled by age-old patriarchal forces that disparage women’s ambition, assertion, and voice.”

A Human Ecology alum who has practiced clinical psychology for more than a quarter-century, Zuckerman holds a doctorate from Adelphi as well as a JD from Hofstra.

In the book, she draws on her own experiences as well as examples from recent history—particularly the 2016 presidential race—to explore how stereotypes of femininity can prevent women from understanding themselves and achieving their goals.

“One of the many problems with the term ‘aggression’ is that we use it in an overly broad way to capture many different human behaviors that often clash,” she writes.

“From the more positive end, one typically less acknowledged, we use aggression to represent agency, self‑assertion, healthy competition, ambition, positive risk‑taking, growth, creativity, and vitality. But from the more negative end, we ask aggression to describe violence, rage, hate, hostility, dominance, envy, malevolence, and demandingness. In serving such disparate functions, the meaning of ‘aggression’ becomes blurred and confusing.”

Alternative Facts

Emily Greenberg ’14

“Greenberg’s short-story collection invites readers to reconsider their perspectives on seemingly familiar topics, including politics and interpersonal relationships,” says Kirkus, going on to call the volume “a bold and often eerie set of tales that skillfully explore life’s what-if complexities.”

The author’s debut book comprises seven stories in which she crafts speculative peeks into the inner lives of such famous names as George W. Bush, Jay Leno, Kellyanne Conway, and Paris Hilton (who, in Greenberg’s imagination, falls from a helicopter onto the fire escape of famously reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon ’59).

The cover of "Alternative Facts"

A double major in English and fine arts on the Hill, Greenberg earned an MFA from Ohio State. Her work has been published in the Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

The cover of "Womanist Bioethics"

Womanist Bioethics

Wylin Dassin Wilson, MS ’98

This nonfiction work, published by NYU press, critiques the field of bioethics for primarily prioritizing (and being driven by) white males. Given that Black women have worse average health outcomes than many other demographic groups, it posits a new form of bioethics that centers them and their needs.

“This innovative womanist bioethics is grounded in the Black Christian prophetic tradition, based on the ideas that God does not condone oppression and that it is imperative to defend those who are vulnerable,” states the publisher.

“It also draws on womanist theology and Black liberation theology, which take similar stances … and it outlines ways in which hospitals, churches, and the larger community can better respond to the healthcare needs of Black women.”

Wilson, who earned a master’s in agricultural economics from CALS, holds a doctorate in ethics from Emory and is on the faculty at Duke Divinity School.

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Borrowing Paradise

Kaja McGowan, PhD ’96

A doctoral alum in art history, McGowan is an associate professor in that field on the Hill, specializing in South and Southeast Asia. She has a particular focus on the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali—and this co-authored children’s book shares a cultural tale about the latter.

The story draws on McGowan’s experiences during a Fulbright Fellowship, when she learned about a tradition in which Balinese Hindus borrow a single, communal bird of paradise—one that has been stuffed after death—to use in funeral rites rather than hunting one, facilitating a spiritual practice while sparing animals’ lives.

The cover of "Borrowing Paradise"

Aimed at children ages three to eight, the book—featuring illustrations by McGowan’s artist sister—centers on a Balinese boy named Surya, who helps with funeral preparations after his beloved grandfather dies, including carrying the bird during the ritual procession.

“Borrowing something implies that you will return it, and it is this concept of ‘return’ that most intrigues me,” McGowan says in an interview on the Arts & Sciences website. “‘Re-using’ one stuffed bird of paradise to assist the souls of an entire village over time argues for a more ecologically sustainable approach to preserving nature.”

The cover of "Purchase"

Purchase

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

This is the latest poetry collection by Van Clief-Stefanon, an associate professor of English and American studies whose previous work includes the National Book Award finalist Open Interval.

“From a hidden river in upstate New York to a massive flood in Kentucky, currents of all strengths run through these poems," says the publisher, University of Pittsburgh Press, "taking the reader through grief, estrangement, and the too-often unseen interiority of Black women, landing at a new perspective, the light of faith dawning.”

As Van Clief-Stefanon writes in a poem titled “Currents”:

“Think of the way blood is. / A host, listening. Roiled under the tide—. / A windowsill cat’s making a new language / For birds, cracks his whisper into chittering. Day breaks like silver levered / Trays once cracked opaque cubes to scattered white sheering, skittered. The secret to beats / A shattering—the world is cold. I could have been a better host to love. / But look there. Under the creek bank’s tangled branches / A delicate line of ice blossoms—made, swayed by the freezing brook bump ...”

Peace by Design

Mardelle McCuskey Shepley

A professor emerita of human-centered design in Human Ecology, Shepley edited this nonfiction book comprising essays by fellow academics—including Cornell alumni and faculty—and wrote the opening and closing chapters.

Aimed at students, designers, and fellow academics but accessible to others interested in the topic, the volume explores how design can promote peace—from a vast scale (for example, mitigating climate change) to a more personal level.

The cover of "Peace by Design"

“We are in a world fraught with peril,” Shepley says in an interview published in the Cornell Chronicle. “I wanted to write a book that would contribute to mental wellness and hope.”

The resulting volume addresses how individual and community wellbeing can be fostered through architecture, landscape architecture, and various design fields, and contemplates how practitioners can help address challenges such as gun violence and racial inequity.

To submit your book for consideration, email cornellians@cornell.edu. Please note that to be included in our listings of new titles, books must be recently published by a conventional publisher—not self published, pay-to-publish, publish on demand, or similar—and be of interest to a general audience. Books not featured will be forwarded to Class Notes.

Published February 17, 2025

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