Bostonia: The Alumni Magazine of Boston University

No Hand Can Destroy

By Elaine Bazarian (GRS’72), writing as Marion Earl Mackenzie (1stBooks)

The background of this first novel is mystery and international intrigue set in the Scottish Highlands; the core is the psychological struggles of a mathematical prodigy who has never been permitted a normal, independent life, but finally finds a true and loving friend.

Happiness on 7 Dollars a Week: A Formula for Living

By Harley B. Bernstein (SMG’85) (Barstin Books)

Reporting his aging father’s philosophy as they discussed it on their walks together, Bernstein also describes a close and loving family.

Seversen’s Roadhouse: Crossroads of Bristol Bay, Alaska

By John Baker Branson (SED’69), editor (Cook Inlet Historical Society)

Based largely on the diaries and other written accounts of Myrtle and Jack Bailey and including family snapshots, Branson, historian of the Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, describes this remote Alaskan area in the thirties as prospectors, explorers, and fugitives moved in and it changed from a dog-sled to an aviation economy.

The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry

By Rafael Campo (GRS’91) (W. W. Norton & Company)

Campo took a sabbatical from Harvard Medical School to earn an M.A. in BU’s Creative Writing Program. Now in his internal medicine practice, he prescribes poems along with medication, and finds patients live more comfortable, happier, and perhaps longer lives. Here he explicates a few relevant poems, urging both patients and future patients — that is, all of us — to explore the link between body and imagination via poetry, comprised as it is of the intellectual and the instinctive, the idiosyncratic and the universal. ~Natalie Jacobson McCracken

Knitting Simple Sweaters from Luxurious Yarns.

By Marilyn Saitz Cohen (CAS’59) (Lark Books)

Talking Heads: 77

By John Domini (CAS’74) (Red Hen Press)

It’s 1978 and Kit Viddich has launched a Boston-area alternative biweekly. He has the tickets for success: a Harvard degree, five years of reporting for the Boston Globe, a Nieman Fellowship awarded following his hard-hitting Globe series on migrant workers, a Brahmin wife with useful connections. On the downside, there’s his seventies idealism.

A Field Guide to Bacteria

By Betsey Dexter Dyer (GRS’78,’84) (Cornell University Press)

For serious amateur naturalists, perhaps some professionals, and biology teachers, an accessible guide to the most abundant, least-seen of creatures.

Litigation as Spiritual Practice

By George J. Felos (LAW’76) (Blue Dolphin)

Emotionally devastated by divorce, attorney Felos undertook a two-month monklike residency at a yoga center and returned with little patience for anything but religious activity. Still, life demands income. He took on defense of a right-to-die case and then of a complex tax case that transformed him for a while into an international detective, and learned that spiritual truth exists in all endeavours and leading a purposeful life means being ever open to that truth. ~NJM

The Ups and Downs of Raising a Bipolar Child: A Survival Guide for Parents

By Candida Fink (CAS’82, MED’87) and Judith Lederman (Simon & Schuster)

remfs: Peanuts, Fish Farms, Hog Hormones and Broken Hearts.

By Richard Galli(LAW’76) (RGA)

Three decades after coming back from Vietnam, Galli was still cynical about the war, but less angry. This “utterly unexpected novel” is about the quiet moments, comradeship, and humor of young people caught where they don’t want to be and making the best of it.

Max and Moritz and Other Bad-Boy Stories & Tricks, written and illustrated by Wilhelm Busch

By Andy Gaus (MET’93), translator (James A. Rock)

Stories told in a sequence of pictures, sometimes of humorously anthropomorphized animals, “are at least as old as ancient Egypt,” reports Gaus, but he calls Busch’s nineteenth-century Max und Moritz the first clear ancestor of the comic book. It is undisputedly the immediate forebear of “The Katzenjammer Kids,” created in its likeness late in the century by Rudolph Dirks (reputedly at William Randolph Hearst’s direct order) and still in syndication, now drawn by Hy Eisman.

Born of a tradition that satirized nineteenth-century cautionary tales for children and rendered in uncluttered black-and-white caricatures, Max and Moritz come to a just end more reminiscent for modern readers of Edward Gorey’s work than of the comic pages: after a succession of delightfully nasty tricks, they are chopped into fine bits and eaten by geese. Gaus’s translation is as gleefully casual about exact rhyme and word use as it is about the boys’ fate:

As the news went round the place,
Sorrow there was not a trace.
Widow Bolt spoke up benignly:
“Well, it had to happen finally!”
“Yes, oh yes,” cried Master Swain:
“Evil gives your life no aim!”
[. . .]
In short, each villager and farmer
Joined in one ecstatic murmur:
“Thanks be to God! From
off our backs
Moritz is gone, and so is Max!”~NJM

Ice-Cream Cones for Sale!

By Elaine Greenstein(CFA’81) (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic Press)

Not much tickles a kid’s fancy more than an ice cream cone on a hot summer’s day. But who invented the first cone? Greenstein’s picture book takes us back to the opening day of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and to the five men (and one lady friend) who claimed to have invented the very first ice cream cone — usually made of a warm waffle cookie twisted into a scoop-holding shape. After telling their stories, Greenstein reveals the apparent winner: one Italo Marchiony, who patented his cone in 1903. The large illustrations, monoprints overpainted with gouache, perfectly complement the tale, which is ideal for storytime for the younger set. ~Taylor McNeil

Heat Shock

By Robert Greer (SDM’73,’74, GRS’89) (Mysterious Press)

The world of cockfighting is brutal, but who knew that grenade-wielding psychopaths, ruthless businessmen, and weapons of mass destruction were part of the mix? E.R. doctor Carmen Nguyen stumbles onto this bloody scene when, against her personal code of ethics, she agrees to look after a dying miner’s prize cocks. She soon realizes there’s more to their fighting form than chicken feed; these birds are radioactive. Jack Kimbrough, a Denver entrepreneur sans scruples, recognizes this too and believes that genetically engineered mutants could add muscle to rogue armies — and to his scientific reputation.

Greer takes care to explain the science behind his jackknifing plot and bestows his complex characters with backstories. But it’s in his descriptions of Carmen’s tradition-bound Aunt Ket and Kimbrough’s guinea-pig team of Navajo lost souls that his prose truly glows ~Jennifer L. Becker

The Sauna Is

By Bernard Hillila (CAS’43) (Penfield Books)

Finns describe saunas as “fun and so hot your navel will smoke.” Hillila (whose qualifications as a sauna expert include speaking only Finnish until he started school) writes a paean to the sauna and practical instructions for its construction and use.

Little People: Learning to See the World Through My Daughter’s Eyes

By Dan Kennedy (MET’84) (Rodale)

Ten days after she was born, Kennedy learned his daughter, Rebecca, had achondroplasia, and thus was destined to be about four feet tall, with a disproportionately large head and short arms and legs. He immediately began learning what he could about dwarfism, historically, medically, politically, socially, ethically, psychologically. He is, after all, a reporter, concerned with facts; more important, he’s a father, determined to help Becky grow from a very sick baby into a happy if “funny looking kid” and then into an adulthood as productive and well-rounded as it would be for anyone with her promise but without her disability and its attendant physical inconveniences and dangers.

Is dwarfism in fact a disability? Although he doesn’t consider it abnormal (he speaks always of people of “average” rather than “normal” height), Kennedy believes it qualifies for ADA accommodations: ATMs and elevator buttons low enough to reach, for example. Without obscuring his own opinions, he cheerfully argues both sides of issues that also relate to other minority groups. Do dwarfs have the right to be self-denigrating comedians or porno stars although it stigmatizes others? Are dwarfs happier among people of average height or together? Will “interspacial” marriage (short jokes are endemic among dwarfs) lead to unhappiness? Should dwarfs have children, who may also be dwarfs?

Becky is now eleven, and Kennedy’s primary quandary is a complex version of that facing any thoughtful father with a daughter moving toward adolescence. Perhaps in twenty years or so, she’ll write the sequel.~NJM

Secrets of the Young & Successful: How to Get Everything You Want Without Waiting a Lifetime

By Jennifer Kushell (SMG’96) with Scott M. Kaufman (Fireside)

Many consider youth an impediment to climbing the corporate ladder or running a successful business, but Kushell and Kaufman, founders of the Young & Successful Media Corp., declare it can work for you. Their guide to grabbing the goods while still young enough to enjoy them outlines strategies and techniques, such as making an “ideal life monument” and “productive dreaming,” profiles youthful do-ers, and provides exercises to help reach the top rung. ~Jenny Brown

The Namesake

By Jhumpa Lahiri (GRS’93, UNI’95,’97) (Houghton Mifflin)

Lahiri’s first book achieved the near-unachievable: a collection of short stories published quietly and only in paper, it won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. Perhaps its most memorable story (by which, of course, a reviewer means, the story I remember best) is itself the quietest: a young man from India working at MIT marries a stranger selected by his family. They learn to love each other, move when they can to the suburbs, and send their son to Harvard. They have kept their Bengali customs, but become comfortable in the United States: a quiet but remarkable achievement.

Lahiri’s second book, a novel, extends the story into the next generation. These newlyweds also come to know American ways and each other in Cambridge, then move to a house, where their neighbors are “the Johnsons, the Mertins, the Aspris, the Hills” and their friends almost entirely Bengali. Their children grow up in both worlds, as children do. At birthday parties, their honorary aunts, dressed in festive saris, talk around the dining room table, and the uncles, in slacks and polo shirts, sit cross-legged on the floor playing poker, while the children watch The Love Boat and Fantasy Island.

Their son (Lahiri’s central characters are frequently Bengali men) grows up, goes to Yale, and then to New York, seeking a life away from his parents and his upbringing. His story and that of his sister and the daughter of friends, intriguing as fiction and informative about Bengali-American culture, is the story of second-generation Americans. ~NJM

Quicksilver: Volume One of the Baroque Cycle

By Neal Stephenson (CAS’81) (William Morrow)

In 1984 Stephenson’s first novel, The Big U, attracted some polite reviews in major periodicals and probably most of its readers at his alma mater. While his Megaversity is a send-up of all large universities, it is strikingly like BU, only more so. All but a lucky few students live in the relentlessly plastic, multitowered Monoplex, which also houses every other element of the university except, significantly, the stadium. Even the president’s office is in the Monoplex — with its parquet floors, deep carpets, wood paneling, and most enviably archaic of all, windows that open, a historic haven remarkably like the double mansion that was BU’s president’s office up until last year.

The Big U is no longer listed under “also by Neal Stephenson” (although unlike E. I. Doctorow and others, he allows his earliest effort to be reissued) but the successes that have followed are themselves like The Big U, only more and more so: witty, ever more sprawling, complexly intellectual, self-indulgent, joyfully satiric, and with an amused affection for techno-nerds. In the most recent, Cryptonomicon, computer programmer Randy Waterhouse struggles to break the code that by coincidence his grandfather also struggles with in interspersed episodes set five decades earlier. If Randy can crack that code, the story suggests, he can perhaps hack into every human secret.

Having dealt in his several novels with the near future, the present, and the recent past, Stephenson now jumps back to another age of intellectual exploration, 1647 to 1713 — beginning, typically, at its end. One David Waterhouse is commissioned to reconcile Newton’s and Leibniz’s differing concepts of calculus, an undertaking that suggests cracking the mysteries of the universe.

Like its immediate predecessor, Quicksilver is more than 900 pages of intrigue, humor, obsessive search for truth, excursions into the familiarly fabulous (including this time slave girls and a Turkish harem, Barbary pirates, the court of Louis XIV, Samuel Pepys, and young Ben Franklin), and an overriding sense that Stephenson is having a very good time. His fans — and they are legion — better read fast: Quicksilver initiates a trilogy, with books two and three due out next year. ~NJM

The Haunting of Captain Snow

By Rachel Nickerson Luna (CFA’73) (Emma Howard Books)

The second in the Eel Grass Girls mystery series finds the four yacht club girls who summer on the Cape stumbling onto what seems like a haunted house. It turns out to be far more complicated than any Nancy Drew mystery — and odder and scarier too, with witches and hypnotists — but the girls solve the case in the end. ~Taylor McNeil

Good Clinical Practice: A Question & Answer Reference Guide.

By Douglas R. Mackintosh (GSM’68), Mark P. Mathieu (COM’89), and Vernette J. Molloy (Parexel)

FDA regulations, standards, and recommendations meet the real world of clinical trials.

The Stranger in My Mirror and Other Reflections

By Rose Madeline Mula (PAL’50) (iUniverse)

Many of these lighthearted essays on the elderly person who has taken over Mula’s mirror and on misplacing things and other aspects of getting older have appeared in the Boston Globe, Andover Townsman, Boston Herald, Baltimore Sun, and other newspapers, and at www.seniorwomen.com.

A Company of Three

By Varley O’Connor (CFA’75), formerly Anne Varley (Algonquin Books)

People are marrying later now, allowing time for the development of friendships, which are the setting but not really the developed topic of popular television series from Three’s Company to Seinfeld to Friends. O’Connor’s three — two men and a woman— are young actors trying to make it in New York in the seventies, when she began her own acting career. They and their supporting cast — friends, acquaintances, teachers, agents, parents, et al. — will be amusingly and then hauntingly familiar to readers who have been there themselves in any decade.

The novel, O’Connor’s second, says a lot, unobtrusively, about the art and business of acting, even about particular plays (I’d forgotten, if I’d ever noticed, the sexiness of the sentimental comedy Same Time, Next Year), about how much more than honed talent is required for success, and about how much harder success can be than failure. Mostly it is about the complex mixing of professional and personal lives, and about the joys, terrible responsibilities, and sorrows of loving, interdependent friendships. ~NJM

Equivalence

By Shin Yu Pai (CAS’97) (La Alameda Press)

Daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, visual artist Shin Yu Pai writes poetry about connections and contrasts: paintings and poems (her words are sometimes arranged on the page), Asian and American culture, the traditional past and the present. For modern artists, papermaking, “[a] closely guarded secret for centuries until the T’ang Dynasty” requiring spices and other exotic ingredients, begins with paper remnants of ordinary life and a gadget: “Send legal briefs, failed attempts at love / letters and other confidential documents / through a shredder.” ~NJM

Good Morning, Killer

By April Smith (CAS’71) (Knopf)

Rogue agent Ana Grey is back on the FBI’s Los Angeles beat in Smith’s razor-sharp novel. Grey’s assignment: collar the serial rapist who’s plucked teenager Juliana Meyer-Murphy from her ritzy neighborhood and brutalized her into silence.

The perp isn’t the only demon haunting Grey. Her moody boyfriend, Detective Andrew Berringer, is less than thrilled to be taking orders from her as they work the kidnapping case together. His behavior goes from surly to suspicious; after Ana accuses him of tomcatting, Andy breaks into her apartment and lunges at her. In a scene worthy of a Jodie Foster thriller, Ana fires at the man she loves, provoking suspension from the Bureau and attempted murder charges. Now she must continue hunting for the rapist and counseling Juliana without the authority of her badge and the support of her lover.

Smith has fashioned a world where resolutions do not bring peace and handcuffs act more as security blankets for stymied agents than guarantees of public safety. Happily, the book’s dark themes are lightened by tart punchlines that zing like bullets. And impetuous Ana stands out as the heart of this stylish noir thriller. ~Jennifer L. Becker