August 4, 2023
Alumni bookmarks: fourteen recent reads for the changing leaves
Trust us: there’s nothing that makes you look cooler than reading a book by a fellow UO alumnus. Whether you prefer to read on park benches, in the café, or all curled up in your bed on those soon-to-be misty autumn mornings, you’re opening your mind to different perspectives and paying it forward while you do. Reading published alumni helps you engage with your alma mater in a whole new way, and sometimes, you can even find a bit of that UO pride seeping through the pages. This list contains standout literature from the past three years that is sure to keep you entertained and inspired as we creep closer toward fall and the leaves begin to change.
Did you or a UO alum you know recently write a book? Tell us about it for a chance to be featured on a future UO alumni author list! Didn’t see your book featured on our newest list? We might be saving it for a future issue!
Featured
By Nathan Harris, BA ’14 (English)
The Sweetness of Water is our Alumni Book Club read for August—October. In it, two former enslaved men and brothers named Prentiss and Landry seek refuge during the waning days of the Civil War. When they’re hired by a farmer and his wife living in Old Ox, Georgia, they become deeply involved in one family’s grief and the evolution of small-town politics following emancipation. At the same time, two confederate soldiers return, and their forbidden romance causes the foundations of Old Ox to crumble while unlikely leaders rise up to reexamine and reestablish just what community means. A multiple-award nominee, the winner of an Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and an Oprah’s Book Club pick, The Sweetness of Water is packed with introspection, empathy, and unforgettable characters.
Fiction
By S.M. Hulse, MFA ’12 (creative writing)
Eden Mine is the winner of a Christianity Today Book Award and was an Amazon Best Book of 2020. The story examines the aftershocks of an act of domestic terrorism rooted in a small Montana town on the brink of abandonment, as it tears apart a family, tests the faith of a pastor and the loyalty of a sister, and mines the deep rifts that come when the reach of the government clashes with individual freedom. A timely story of the tensions splintering families and communities all over this country, it’s also a steady-eyed gaze into the ideals of the West and the legacies of violence, a moving account of faith in the face of evil, and a heartrending reckoning of the terrible choices we make for the ones we love.
By Francesca Varela, BA ’14 (environmental studies)
Francesca Varela is a critically acclaimed climate fiction author. In her newest story, two sisters must navigate a world that is unraveling due to climate change. Wildfires blot out the sky, coastlines are being washed away by rising seas, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has been geo-engineered into an actual island called Blue Mar. When Laurel and Paloma visit their great-aunt in El Salvador, they find that things are far worse than in the US, so bad that many people are moving to Blue Mar to start a new life. As they search for their identity and their place in the world, Laurel and Paloma must decide whether to go to Blue Mar themselves, or whether to stay, reconnect with their culture, and fight to save the land of their ancestors.
By Tammy Salyer, BA ’03 (women's studies)
As an ex-paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division, Tammy Salyer turned to writing science fiction and fantasy after trading in her M-16 for a MacBook in 1999. Knight Chosen, the first book in the Shackled Verities series is an epic fantasy with magic, monsters, and a cosmos-crossing adventure. The story revolves around the realm of Vinnr where peace is fragile and the social hierarchy between the knights and the commonfolk is strictly adhered to. But when certain doom comes to conquer the people of Vinnr, the fates of two knights and a peaceful foreigner will become forever intertwined as they battle not only for the safety of the realm, but for the cosmos itself.
By Chang-rae Lee, MFA ’93 (creative writing)
From the award-winning author of Native Speaker and On Such a Full Sea, comes this national bestseller named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, TIME, and Marie Claire. In My Year Abroad, Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese-American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong, and of himself. My Year Abroad is an exploration of the surprising effects of cultural immersion—on a young American in Asia, on a Chinese man in America, and on an unlikely couple hiding out in the suburbs. Check out our interview with the author here.
By M Jackson, PhD ’17 (geography)
M Jackson is a geographer, glaciologist, TED Fellow, National Geographic Society Explorer, and the recipient of three Fulbright grants, and a Fulbright ambassadorship. She is also currently the arctic expert for the National Geographic society and the author of numerous award-winning science books. In her newest book, The Ice Sings Back, a young girl’s disappearance in the western Oregon Cascades sets off a chain of events that reveal a long history of violence, abuse of power, and environmental precarity. This is a story of how four women make sense of the everyday extraordinary traumas that contour their lives, and how their individual strengths come together to sing a fierce hymn of survival. Nobel Peace Prize winner, Henry Pollack, calls the book a “powerful narrative of humanity.” Check out our feature on the author.
By Doug Hawley, MA ’67, PhD ’69 (mathematics)
In this short story collection by Doug Hawley, an abominable snowman speaks, dreams are so good you’ll never want to wake up, a cat develops the power of telepathy, a magical stream burbles in USA’s Northwest, and an unexpected invasion occurs in the far north of Canada.
Nonfiction
By Anne Helen Petersen, MA ’07 (English), and Charlie Warzel
Out of Office is a book for every office worker—from employees to managers—currently facing the decision about whether, and how, to return to the office. Based on groundbreaking reporting and interviews with workers and managers around the world, Out of Office illuminates the key values and questions that should be driving this conversation: trust, fairness, flexibility, inclusive workplaces, equity, and work-life balance. Above all, they argue that companies need to listen to their employees—and that this will promote, rather than impede, productivity and profitability. Adam Grant, bestselling author of Think Again, and Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit, both recommend this book.
By Laurence Leamer, MA ’68 (interdiscplinary studies)
New York Times bestselling author Laurence Leamer reveals the complex web of relationships and scandalous true stories behind Truman Capote's never-published final novel, Answered Prayers—the dark secrets, tragic glamour, and Capote's ultimate betrayal of the group of female friends he called his "swans." Capote befriended them, received their deepest confidences, and ingratiated himself into their lives. Then, he made their thinly fictionalized lives (and scandals) the subject of Answered Prayers. Needless to say, Capote was banished from their high-society world forever. In Capote’s Women, Laurence Leamer re-creates the lives of the swans, their friendships with Capote and one another, and the doomed quest to write what could have been one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
By Daniel Levitin, MS ’93, PhD ’96 (psychology)
In this instant bestseller, Levitin looks at the science behind those who age joyously, as well as how to adapt our culture to take full advantage of older people’s wisdom and experience. Throughout his exploration of what aging really means, using research from developmental neuroscience and the psychology of individual differences, Levitin reveals resilience strategies and practical, cognitive-enhancing tricks everyone should do as they age. Successful Aging inspires a powerful new approach to how readers think about our final decades, and it will revolutionize the way we plan for old age as individuals, family members, and citizens within a society where the average life expectancy continues to rise.
By Alexandra Jamieson, BA ’97 (history), and Bob Gower
Discover the proven “low drama, high joy” method for productive, empathy-based communication and collaboration. With Radical Alignment, top-level life and business coaches (and happily married couple) Alexandra Jamieson and Bob Gower share their potent method for helping groups to stop clashing and start working together―to jump from “we can’t” to an enthusiastic “hell yes!” The essential tool at the heart of Radical Alignment is the all-in method: a four-step approach to communication designed to increase clarity, minimize miscommunication, honor each person’s individuality, and build a shared sense of trust and respect for long-term success.
By Dean Snow, PhD ’66 (anthropology)
In The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram, author Dean Snow rights the record on a shipwrecked sailor who traversed the length of the North American continent only to be maligned as a deceitful storyteller. After being marooned near Tampico, Mexico, David Ingram was one of only three English sailors found alive after the close of John Hawkins’s disastrous third slaving expedition. After interrogation, Ingram was defamed as an unreliable early source of information about the people of interior eastern North Africa prior to a string of historical epidemics which erased much of their history. In The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram, Snow shows that Ingram was not a fraud, contradicting the longstanding narrative of his life. Snow's careful examination of three long-neglected surviving records of Ingram's interrogation reveals that inaccurate records and poor editing negated Ingram’s rightful title as a unique, bold adventurer in the halls of history.
By Ray Miller, MS ’77 (dance), PhD ’84 (speech: theater arts)
This book provides an overview of the history of dance on the American musical theater stage from the colonial period to today. It emphasizes the cultural context in which dance adapted and evolved throughout the American experience.
By Shin Shin Tang, PhD ’09 (psychology)
Shin Shin Tang has provided psychotherapy to a wide range of Asian and Asian American communities for more than two decades, including war refugees, adoptees, veterans, international students, immigrants, and subsequent generations. She has also conducted national and international research focusing on the intersection of trauma, gender, and culture. Her book Asian American Psychology and Psychotherapy: Intergenerational Trauma, Betrayal, and Liberation is an essential resource for understanding the two-fold battle many Asian Americans face of anti-Asian racism and intergenerational trauma. Drawing from liberation psychology and cultural betrayal trauma theory, it rightly situates Asian American trauma in its historical and cultural context.