Did you know that Cornell has an online book club? Check it out!<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n For more titles by Big Red authors, peruse our previous round-ups<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Have you published a book you’d like to submit? Scroll down for details!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Matt Dallos, MA \u201920<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Dallos is a PhD candidate in history<\/a> on the Hill, studying (as his Arts & Sciences bio notes) \u201chow Americans have viewed plants and the natural world in various contexts during the 20th century.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n He\u2019s also the founder of an Ithaca-based, ecologically focused landscape design firm and a contributor to the 2022 Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial with a work comprising a \u201cwild garden<\/a>\u201d on Libe Slope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His book<\/a> is subtitled Dispatches from the Largest Park in the Lower 48<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s part travel memoir, part Adirondack history\u2014delving into the region\u2019s evolution, landscape, people, and culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTo get there from any direction, go up,\u201d he writes. \u201cHigher than the valleys all around, the Adirondacks is a place set apart. Where boreal plants venture south to meet temperate. Where the air is chill and the summer short. \u2026 Up there, where the frontier held on until the 20th century. Some people are convinced it still does and always will.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n James Sturz \u201987<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sturz\u2019s novel<\/a> is a fantasy set entirely underwater. It concerns an intelligent civilization divided into tribes, each with its own culture and dialect\u2014a society that\u2019s upended and driven into conflict after one tribe discovers a sunken, decomposing human corpse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDeep below the surface, our world is cold, dark, and content,\u201d he writes. \u201cColors are fickle. Red disappears first as you descend, followed by the yellow of the sun. The hundred shades of blue last the longest, but eventually there is only black\u2014and the candied ooze of the ocean floor. Where the pressure is constant, it clings to you as an embrace.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div> Sturz is a journalist<\/a> whose coverage of the ocean and other topics has appeared in such publications as the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, the Atlantic<\/em>, the New York Times<\/em>, and Outside<\/em>. After getting certified in scuba as an English major on the Hill, he went on to become a dive master, free diver, and ice diver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Praise for Underjungle<\/em> includes a blurb from fellow Cornellian (and Pulitzer Prize-winning author) Junot D\u00edaz, MFA \u201995, who calls it a \u201cbrilliant novel\u201d that\u2019s \u201cluminous, strange, thought-provoking, and as profound as the seas.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Karen Dillon \u201986<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This self-help guide<\/a>, published by Harvard Business Review Press, was named one of the best books of summer 2023 by the Financial Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s subtitled How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems\u2014and What to Do about It<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Dillon and her coauthor explore an \u201cunrecognized epidemic\u201d of microstresses\u2014seemingly small, daily issues and conflicts that can add up and harm productivity, wellbeing, and personal relationships.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n The authors include numerous case studies and examples of microstresses, distinguishing them from stresses. For instance: navigating a contentious and expensive divorce is a stress. Having to call your spouse and say you won\u2019t be home in time to keep your promise to attend your daughter\u2019s softball game? That\u2019s a microstress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAnd of course, you\u2019re never coping with just one or two microstresses,\u201d they write. \u201cYou\u2019re likely to be facing dozens in a given day. And they pile on, week after week and month after month. So, you\u2019re exhausted and burned out, but you can\u2019t quite put your finger on why.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n An Arts & Sciences alum and a former editor at Harvard Business Review<\/em>, Dillon is a motivational speaker and the coauthor<\/a> of several self-help books including the New York Times<\/em> bestseller How Will You Measure Your Life?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Lauren Mukamal Camp \u201988<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWith the gifts of a visual artist and poet\u2019s attention, An Eye in Each Square<\/em><\/a> confronts our era\u2019s barbed and shifting networks of power and atrocities,\u201d says the publisher, the small poetry press River River Books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the press goes on to state, the volume \u201casks the reader to hold the conscience of the world and also to claim what we might need most\u2014the risky and urgent space of comfort found within the artist\u2019s line.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div> The collection is the sixth book of poetry for Camp, a Human Ecology alum who is Poet Laureate of New Mexico and has served as astronomer in residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Her previous publications<\/a> include Took House<\/em> (winner of the American Fiction Award in Poetry), and her work has appeared in such journals as Kenyon Review<\/em> and Poet Lore<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As she writes in a poem titled \u201cInto This Absence\u201d: \u201cWhat is available to us? \/ Simple routines: fault and moments. \/ Between building and building, dark fogs \/ drizzle. The world is enormous. Unfathomable salt. \/ A slug on the path posits its feelers to figure which way \/ to turn. Some slow work to go forward.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Julie Schumacher, MFA \u201986<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This comic novel<\/a> rounds out Schumacher\u2019s celebrated trilogy<\/a>, which began with the bestselling 2014 novel Dear Committee Members<\/em> and continued with The Shakespeare Requirement<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like those two, it stars a beleaguered English professor named Jason Fitger, who navigates the absurdities of academia\u2014a subject near and dear to the author<\/a>, who teaches at the University of Minnesota\u2014at a fictional institution of higher learning, while maintaining a fierce devotion to the humanities.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n Here, Fitger is reluctantly chaperoning a three-week tour of the U.K.\u2014and overseeing a motley assortment of students, including one who desperately misses her cat and another who has decamped to continental Europe. (Kirkus<\/em> calls them \u201ca wonderfully weird mix of exiles from the Island of Misfit Toys\u201d and praises the book as \u201cfeather-light, affable, and sweet.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, Fitger has carried many of his troubles across the pond with him; in particular, he\u2019s still obsessing over his ex-wife, a fellow academic who may be taking a new job and moving away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt must be said that The English Experience<\/em> cannot be appreciated without having read the previous volumes, and, although entertaining and bittersweet, it is not as mordantly funny as its predecessors,\u201d says the Washington Post<\/em>. \u201cBut those of us who have followed Jason Fitger through the pages of those wonderfully sharp, witty comedies will want to learn the professor\u2019s fate. And that is, in its small, melancholy way, an illustration of the fate of the humanities in the 21st century: dumped upon, pushed to the side, ranks dwindling\u2014and still stubbornly limping along.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Christy Brown Teal \u201988<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Human Ecology alum is surgical director<\/a> of the breast care center at George Washington University. In this self-help guide<\/a>, she teams up with a colleague to offer insights for patients and their families on the once \u201cradical\u201d option of surgical mastectomies\u2014either for breast cancer treatment or to prevent the disease in women at significant risk of developing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the authors note in the guide, subtitled Understanding Mastectomies and Choosing the Breast Cancer Care That\u2019s Right For You<\/em>, their knowledge is not only professional, but also deeply personal.<\/p>\n<\/div> They each have family histories of the disease, and first-hand experience with weighing treatment options. Teal, whose mother died of breast cancer after battling it for many years, decided to have preventive mastectomies; her coauthor, radiologist Rachel Brem, underwent treatment for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNo matter where they live, or who their doctor is, women deserve to know that they may have access to a procedure that has brought relief, freedom, and even joy to both of us personally,\u201d they write. \u201cAs female doctors who have had mastectomies ourselves, we want to share with you the same critical information we give our patients every day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Martin Hogue<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hogue, an associate professor<\/a> of landscape architecture in CALS, offers (in the words of the subtitle) a \u201cvisual history of camping\u2019s most essential items and activities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The book<\/a>, published by Princeton Architectural Press, traces its genesis to Hogue\u2019s first-ever foray into the pastime more than two decades ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI set out to write this book to help recapture some of the shock and wonder I experienced when I first laid down a friend\u2019s tent at a KOA campground at the edge of the Badlands in June 2000,\u201d he writes in the intro. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n \u201cI expected to be set loose on the property to find my own shady spot. What I found instead was a highly structured spatial setting, rows of parked, humming RVs, lawn chairs, and the like. How can I square the mythical image of camping that many of us hold in our minds with the reality I later experienced? Are they even connected?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hogue\u2019s fascination<\/a> with camping also inspired his book Thirtyfour Campgrounds<\/em><\/a>, published by MIT Press in 2016, in which he compiled photos of nearly 6,500 campsites around the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Classic by a Cornellian<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Kurt Vonnegut \u201944<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As Cornellians<\/em> noted in a recent round-up of alumni\u2019s swim test memories<\/a>, Vonnegut\u2019s debut novel<\/a> includes a satirical reference to that Big Red rite of passage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Published in 1952\u2014but unsettlingly current in our age of ascendant A.I.\u2014it\u2019s set in a dystopian future following a third world war, when human labor (both manual and skilled) has largely been supplanted by machines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That leaves most people unemployed and idle, except for an elite class of engineers needed to repair and fine-tune the system.<\/p>\n<\/div> \u201cIt is a little like Brave New World<\/em>, except that Mr. Vonnegut keeps his future closer to the present than Aldous Huxley succeeded in doing,\u201d said a New York Times<\/em> review at the time, \u201cand his satire therefore focuses more sharply on the contemporary situation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The story involves, among other plotlines, an engineer named Paul Proteus from a powerful family. After getting an up-close look at the meaninglessness of most people\u2019s everyday lives, he becomes disillusioned and winds up embroiled in a revolutionary movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen Paul [and his friends] had graduated from college, early in the war, they had felt sheepish about not going to fight, and humbled by those who did go,” Vonnegut writes in the first chapter. \u201cBut now this elite business, this assurance of superiority, this sense of rightness about the hierarchy topped by managers and engineers\u2014this was instilled in all college graduates, and there were no bones about it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The novel, which was inspired in part by Vonnegut\u2019s time working at General Electric, was later released under the more sci-fi-friendly title Utopia 14<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/09\/In-the-Adirondacks-A.jpg\")
<\/figure>In the Adirondacks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nUnderjungle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/09\/UnderJungle-A.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/09\/TheMicrostressEffect-A.jpg\")
<\/figure>The Microstress Effect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nAn Eye in Each Square<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/09\/an-eye-in-each-square-A.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/08\/english-experience-cover-A.jpg\")
<\/figure>The English Experience<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nNo Longer Radical<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/09\/No-Longer-Radical_Cover-A.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/09\/MAKING_CAMP-A.jpg\")
<\/figure>Making Camp<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Player Piano<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/09\/player-piano-A.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n