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This month’s featured titles include an Austen-inspired YA novel and memoirs by an FBI explosives expert and a neurosurgeon

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!

Dashed

Amanda Quain ’13

Dashed is Quain’s third contemporary young-adult novel inspired by the works of Jane Austen.

It follows Ghosted (in which the stately manor Northanger Abbey is recast as a haunted high school) and Accomplished, which puts Mr. Darcy’s younger sister from Pride and Prejudice at center stage.

Quain’s latest is an updating of Sense and Sensibility—focused on the youngest sister, Margaret (who plays a minor role in the original novel).

The cover of "Dashed"

With her levelheaded oldest sister Elinor happily married, Margaret aims to follow her example rather than that of their volatile middle sibling, Marianne, who barely survived a car crash fueled by a dramatic heartbreak.

“Quain moves the story along with ease and charm, spinning a tale that’s as much about the love between sisters as the intrigues of unexpected romance,” says Kirkus. “Characters and key themes maintain the Austen connection, but Margaret’s journey of healing from trauma and accepting herself is a Quain original.”

The cover of "The Bomb Doctor"

The Bomb Doctor

Kirk Yeager, PhD ’93

A doctoral alum in inorganic chemistry, Yeager is the FBI’s chief explosives scientist.

During his years in the field, he worked on such cases as 2003’s infamous “collar bomb”—in which a criminal locked an explosive device around a stranger’s neck and forced him to rob a bank.

Yeager’s memoir—written with his sister, a journalist—recounts his experiences with the bureau as well as his decades as an academic researcher and expert consultant. (He also served as a technical adviser to TV’s “MythBusters.”)

“The forensic work required to solve the mystery of a crime involving high explosives is like nothing you’ve ever seen on a made-for-television investigative series,” he observes in the intro.

“Forget about fingerprint evidence—that’s blown to smithereens. There is rarely DNA of any value. As a true bomb detective, what you have to work with are fragments, soot, fields of twisted metal, and charred human remains. You have carnage and chaos. And in that sea of wailing sirens, beeping horns, screaming survivors, and the stench of diesel fuel and decaying bodies, your job is to ferret out forensic clues in a type of macabre scavenger hunt.”

All the Campus Lawyers

Louis Guard, JD ’12

Guard is a vice president and general counsel at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and an adjunct professor at his doctoral alma mater, where he teaches a seminar on higher-ed law.

That course formed much of the basis for this nonfiction book, published by Harvard University Press and subtitled Litigation, Regulation, and the New Era of Higher Education.

“On today’s campus, the long arm of the law is inescapable,” he and his coauthor write in the introduction.

The cover of "All the Campus Lawyers"

“Policies, procedures, trainings, and forms reign supreme. When and how did higher education become so dominated by the law and by lawyers?”

Named “one of the best books we’ve read so far in 2024” by the New Yorker, it covers how colleges and universities are coping with the legal complexities around such topics as free speech, civil rights, admissions, student life, governance, and pandemic-era policies.

In April 2024, the Law School held an event marking the book’s release and delving into the issues it raises.

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The cover of "The Memo"

The Memo

Rachel Dodes ’99

Publishers Weekly compares this coauthored novel to Sliding Doors—the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow film that follows two potential versions of the protagonist’s life, depending on whether she makes or misses a subway train—and notes that “this well-told tale will leave readers wanting more.”

The book’s 35-year-old heroine is unhappy in work and love when she goes to her 15th reunion at a Cornell-esque university; there, she reconnects with a career counselor who offers her a magical “memo” allowing her to revisit key points in her past and give herself advice.

Kirkus praises the book’s “insight, wit, and perfectly chosen details” and observes that the authors “explore issues of love, work, friendship, ambition, and fulfillment that feel timeless yet particularly pertinent in the social media era, when it’s so hard to see past the surface of other people’s high-powered facades.”

Dodes is a freelance culture writer who has been published in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and elsewhere.

Gray Matters

Theodore Schwartz

In this hybrid of memoir and science history that Publishers Weekly calls “sweeping and consistently captivating,” a Weill Cornell Medicine neurosurgeon describes his field’s evolution and reflects on his experiences in the operating room.

The book includes anonymized case studies of patients Schwartz has treated, as well as those of public figures like Michael J. Fox—who underwent a procedure to ameliorate symptoms of Parkinson’s disease—and Argentine first lady Eva Perón, who was subjected to a lobotomy.

The cover of "Gray Matters"

“While parts of the text are inevitably technical, the author is warm and insightful, making the book accessible to general readers as well as specialists,” says Kirkus. “Mixing expertise with storytelling, Schwartz provides a remarkable account of a crucial but misunderstood field.”

At Weill Cornell, Schwartz holds several leadership positions, including vice chair for clinical research. He discussed the book in an August 2024 appearance on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

The cover of "From Chromosomes to Mobile Genetic Elements"

From Chromosomes to Mobile Genetic Elements

Lee Basevin Kass, PhD ’75

A pioneering researcher on the hereditary characteristics of corn, Barbara McClintock 1923, PhD 1927, observed that genes could “transpose”—positing that physical traits could be switched on and off depending on certain conditions.

While her findings defied popular theory of the era, she was ultimately recognized with a Nobel Prize in 1983. In this scientific biography, Kass (an adjunct professor in CALS) chronicles McClintock’s life and work.

The author aims, in part, to correct earlier inaccuracies—such as the perception that McClintock was a loner in her youth and that she was denied tenure at the University of Missouri.

“Indeed, as a woman who wished to pursue a career in science, Barbara McClintock did confront many obstacles before settling into a full-time job where she felt the ‘female element’ would not be a barrier,” Kass writes.

“Yet, years before McClintock became a public figure, she was recognized by her scientific peers in plant biology and in plant breeding (genetics) and by her alma mater, Cornell University.”

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 September 10, 2024

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