This month’s featured titles include the latest by a National Book Award winner and a classical history of Jewish resistance to Rome, many by A&S alumni and faculty:
“Flashlight is acutely aware that for every miraculous survival, there are countless stories that remain mysteries, the ‘presumed’ in ‘presumed dead’ freighted with many unanswerable questions,” says the Chicago Review of Books. “Even what might read as a happy ending from the outside does not eliminate the scars of what it took to get there, all the minutes that slogged by, hard to explain but crucial.”
Ellen Andersen ’88
Andersen, an A&S government alum, is a professor of political science at the University of Vermont.
Her nonfiction book focuses on Lambda Legal—the nation’s oldest nonprofit legal advocacy organization devoted to LGBTQ+ issues—and its major civil rights cases.
The coffee-table volume, from the art book publisher Phaidon, is laid out in a style akin to a scrapbook—with numerous images and ephemera, like pamphlets.
Andersen co-authored the book—which features a foreword by famed writer and academic Roxane Gay—with Jennifer Pizer, the organization’s chief legal officer.
As it happens, it’s Halloween—and the holiday allows them to pass as kids wearing masks. They eventually make friends with a human boy, whose own experience with social rejection helps him sympathize with the monsters’ plight.
How to Have Willpower
Michael Fontaine
Subtitled An Ancient Guide to Not Giving In, the volume is the latest entry in the “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers” series, several of which have been penned by the Cornell classics professor.
“In the spirit of the best ancient self-help writing, Plutarch, a pagan Greek philosopher and historian, offers a set of practical recommendations and steps we can take to resist pressure and to stop saying ‘yes’ against our better judgment,” says the publisher, Princeton University Press.
Also an artist, she currently works at the Cornell University Library.
“When the reader encounters the story of how the mother and father came together, I start the text as two columns telling two separate stories,” Buell explains in a recent personal essay in Cornellians that explored the importance of experimental art. “As they meet, the columns alternate line by line and start to ‘braid’ together until they form one passage.”
Jews vs. Rome
Barry Strauss ’74
A longtime Cornell faculty member, Strauss is now Arts & Sciences’ Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus.
He has published numerous books on classical history, including The Battle of Salamis, The Trojan War, The Spartacus War, The Death of Caesar, and Ten Caesars.
With his latest, he chronicles (in the words of the subtitle) “two centuries of rebellion against the world’s mightiest empire.”
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