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In Print

Non-Fiction

No Seat at the Table CoverNo Seat at the Table — How Corporate Governance and Law Keep Women Out of the Boardroom
Douglas Branson LL.M. ’74
NYU Press

Women are completing MBA and law degrees in record high numbers, but their struggle to attain director positions in corporate America continues. Although explanations for this disconnect abound, neither career counselors nor scholars have paid enough attention to the role that corporate governance plays in maintaining the gender gap in America’s executive quarters.

Analyzing corporate governance models applied at Fortune 500 companies, hundreds of Title VII discrimination cases, and proxy statements, Douglas Branson suggests that women have been ill-advised by experts who tend to teach females how to act like their male, executive counterparts. Instead, women who aspire to the boardroom should focus on the decision-making processes that nominating committees — usually dominated by white men — employ when voting on membership.
 
Filled with real-life cases, No Seat at the Table opens the closed doors of the boardroom and reveals the dynamics of the corporate governance process and the double standards that often characterize it. Based on empirical evidence, Branson concludes that women must follow different paths than men to gain CEO status, and as such, encourages women to make flexible, conscious, and often frequent shifts in their professional behaviors and work ethics as they climb the corporate ladder.

Douglas M. Branson is the W. Edward Sell Professor of Business Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. His publications include Questions and Answers: Business Associations, Understanding Corporate Law, and Corporate Governance.

WIM CoverWatch It Made In the U.S.A.: A Visitor’s Guide to the Best Factory Tours and Company Museums
Bruce S. Brumberg ’84
Avalon Travel Publishing

Have you ever wondered how toothpaste gets into the tube? How stripes get on a candy cane? More than a travel guide, Watch It Made in the U.S.A.: A Visitor’s Guide to the Best Factory Tours and Company Museums helps travelers experience firsthand the products, companies, technology, and workers that fuel our economy, from Boeing to Ben & Jerry’s, Hallmark to Harley-Davidson.

Whether you’re curious about jelly beans or journalism, tea or teddy bears, factory-tour experts Karen Axelrod and Bruce Brumberg provide ways for families to visit hundreds of companies across America. Along with updates throughout the book, the fourth edition has added 60 new factory tours and company museums, including the Ford Rouge plant in Michigan, CNN’s studios in New York City, NASA sites in Florida and California, the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky, Orvis (fly-fishing rods) in Vermont, and Sony Pictures Studios in California.

The authors traveled across the U.S.A. to “kick the tires of the American economy” by enjoying all the amazing factories that make some of most popular and recognizable products in the world. This husband-and-wife team share how and where you can celebrate the products we make here in the U.S.A. When not traveling, they live with their children, Hilary and Gregory, near Boston.

Etched in Stone CoverEtched In Stone: Enduring Words from Our Nation’s Monuments
Ryan Coonerty ’01
National Geographic Books

This first-of-its-kind book celebrates the words that define America’s storied past and symbolizes the drive of its people — from the boardrooms of Manhattan to the farm fields of Iowa. Ryan Coonerty highlights profound phrases inscribed on 52 monuments and public sites. Some are famed monuments like the Lincoln Memorial; others are simple or stark places of  honor, such as Angel Island, where immigrant Chinese scrawled their words on imprisoning walls.

Etched In Stone unfolds the American saga from four perspectives. “In Praise of Public Lives” celebrates leaders, thinkers, and innovators. “Ordinary Heroes” honors ordinary people who did extraordinary things. “Bearing Witness” seeks to remind future generations of horrendous moments in history that must not be repeated, and “A More Perfect Union” reveals the promises of America — freedom and future.

Images by noted architectural photographer Carol Highsmith enhance the messages and give each site a life and purpose beyond stone. The interplay of words and photographs makes this a book that appeals to readers interested in American history, architecture, culture, and art.

Ryan Coonerty is vice president of Bookshop Santa Cruz and a lecturer of law at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He writes for numerous magazines and newspapers and is co-writing a “postcard” history.

Relentless Pursuit CoverRelentless Pursuit: A True Story of
Family, Murder, and the Prosecutor Who Wouldn’t Quit
Kevin Flynn ’82
G.P. Putnam’s Sons

What happened to Diane Hawkins and her daughter Katrina — a brutal double murder in which the girl’s heart was cut from her body — devastated a Washington, D.C., community and left its mark on everyone involved in the subsequent investigation. Federal homicide prosecutor and author, Kevin Flynn, was especially moved. He had handled any number of grisly murders and was no stranger to the depravity of the human soul. Yet the way Hawkins’s family and friends rallied together to help each other through the tragedy — and the generosity they extended to Flynn, whose own father was dying of cancer at the time — turned this case into a personal mission. He was determined to use his position to effect real closure, to right a wrong, to bring justice on behalf of the victims and their families.

Relentless Pursuit is the story of that journey to justice, a gripping beat-by-beat reconstruction of the events as they unfold — the murder, the arrest, the trial, the verdict — told with candor and providing a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the life of a dedicated prosecutor. Above all, it’s about healing and community, a story in which the system works and justice prevails.

Relentless Pursuit works well on many levels: as a police procedural and courtroom drama, as a candid portrait of life in black Washington, and as an example of how decent people of both races can work together against the violence that threatens us all,” says The Washington Post.

Kevin Flynn has been a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office since 1987 and recently served as chief homicide prosecutor. He lives with his wife and two children outside Washington, D.C.

Plutonics CoverPlutonomics: A Unified Theory of Wealth
S. E. Harrison ’97
ePoet

Plutonomics: A Unified Theory of Wealth presents a new economic (or plutonomic) theory. The author breaks down the factors that interact to create wealth: capacity, environment, appreciation and influence, says reviewer David Wilkening. .

“But wealth, as it turns out, is not just something that you have; it’s more like something you do. And just as cooks see their raw food evolve into edible servings over time, wealth is also an ongoing development that can be judged in the short term or the long term. Through his uniquely comprehensive description of wealth, the author puts his finger on what’s wrong with all we’re told in this area: instead of just acquiring, what we need to know is how to relate wealth to a good and happy life. So with some of these precepts solidly in hand, how do you master wealth?”

The book is a “hybrid,” part e-book and part traditional print book. Specifically, the glossary, index, and bibliography of the book are hosted online only at www.plutonomics.wordpress.com and do not appear in print. This approach saves paper and allows for easier pursuit (through hyperlinks) of reference material. It also allows the theory to continue developing interactively through the blog associated with the supplementary materials.

Author S. E. Harrison teaches law, logic, writing, and reading comprehension in Los Angeles.

Rationing JusticeRationing Justice: Poverty Lawyers and Poor People in the Deep South
Kris Shepard ’03
Louisiana State University Press

Established in 1964, the federal Legal Services Program serves a vast group of Americans desperately in need of legal counsel: the poor. At the program’s zenith in 1981, more than 1,450 offices employing 6,000 attorneys and 3,000 paralegals worked to aid those who could not afford private attorneys. In Rationing Justice: Poverty Lawyers and Poor People in the Deep South, Kris Shepard looks at this pioneering program’s effect on the Deep South.

An historian as well as a practicing attorney, Shepard conducted oral interviews with former poverty lawyers and investigated documents and judicial decisions related to hundreds of cases in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, tracing widespread social change over three decades. Before the advent of legal services, Shepard contends, law was often a weapon of oppression wielded with singular force against impoverished southerners, particularly women and African Americans. By using these legal advocates and processes, the poor made tangible gains in cases involving federal, state, and local social programs, low-income housing, consumer rights, domestic relations, and civil rights.

They also confronted the limits of the American legal and political system in its institutional and cultural boundaries — including gender and race — and its limitations of will.

Kris Shepard is in private practice in Charlotte, N.C., where he also works with Volunteer Lawyers Program and local legal services offices. He is co-editor of A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.


Fiction

Simple Genius CoverSimple Genius
David Baldacci ’86
Warner Books

Sean King and Michelle Maxwell are back, and struggling in the emotional aftermath of the events that brought them to the brink in Hour Game. Dogged by personal demons, Maxwell agrees to treatment in a psychiatric institution, after barely surviving a violent barroom brawl. And King, to right their partnership, accepts an offer to investigate a murder in a scientific think tank named Babbage Town. Feeling cured, Maxwell joins him on the case, and they penetrate this secret enclave of geniuses working to surpass the capabilities of the most sophisticated microprocessor in the world. Suddenly, the pair find themselves in a race against time to expose those who would tip the entire global power structure … and destroy what’s left of their lives.

With a publication release date that coincided with press deadlines, reviews were not yet available for Simple Genius. Baldacci is on tour in the U.S. (see www.DavidBaldacci.com for dates) and this summer heads to Ireland, England, France and the Netherlands for more of the same.

Bad Blood CoverBad Blood
Linda Fairstein ’72
Scribner

Bad Blood finds Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cooper deeply involved in a complicated, high-profile homicide case. Defendant Brendan Quillian, a prominent young businessman, is charged with the brutal strangulation of his young wife. His conviction is not a certainty: Quillian was conveniently out of town on the day of the killing, and he has hired a formidable defense attorney who seems one step ahead of Cooper as the trial opens. But with the help of detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, she is confident she can prove Quillian paid a hit man to commit the crime.

Halfway through the trial, a major catastrophe alters the course of Cooper’s case. A cataclysmic explosion rips through New York City’s water tunnel under construction, a spectacular feat of modern engineering that will be completed years in the future. Carved through bedrock 600 feet underground, the tunnel will replace a vital artery in the city’s rapidly deteriorating water supply system. Was the blast caused by terrorism? Political retribution? Or was it merely an accident?

Publisher’s Weekly says, “The crisp writing and Fairstein’s enviable capacity to translate her own experience as a prosecutor into an accessible plot puts this series a cut above most entries in this crowded subgenre.”

Murder Suicide Whatever CoverMurder … Suicide … Whatever …
Gwen Freeman ’81
Capital Crime Press

Fifi Cutter is an acerbic, biracial twenty-something with family issues and a delightfully cynical world view. Just fired from her boring but steady job at Colchester Casualty, she is barely making it as an independent insurance adjustor when her freeloading half-brother, Bosco Dorff, shows up with the news that their Uncle Ted has been murdered. Fifi is hired to investigate. Ted was an insurance broker to the stars — porn stars. Posing as grief counselors, Fifi and Bosco interrogate a colorful array of suspects, including Ted’s smoking hot mistress, his portly assistant, and his deadly competition. Fifi zips around Los Angeles to check out the various and vaguely guilty suspects — all classic L.A. characters. When Bosco disappears, however, Fifi is catalysed into immediate action, finding the unlikely killer and gaining an unlikely accomplice.

Booklist writes, “When a novel’s principal characters are a currently unemployed insurance investigator and her usually unemployed half brother, you know you’re in for a bit of weirdness. Debut novelist Freeman doesn’t disappoint: from its first page to its last, the book sparkles with offbeat wit and snappy dialogue.”

Gwen Freeman is an artist with a loyal cult following and has shown her work nationally. She is a also partner at Knapp, Petersen & Clarke in Glendale, Calif.

Seeing Emily CoverSeeing Emily
Joyce Lee Wong (Joyce M. Lee) ’95
Harry N. Abrams / Amulet Books for Young Readers

Told in free verse, Seeing Emily speaks directly to readers of the heady, messy experience of being a teenager. Joyce Lee
Wong was awarded the 2007 Lee Bennett Hopkins Promising Poet Award for the young adult novel.

Called “highly visual and eloquently wrought” by Publishers Weekly and “finely crafted” by Kirkus, Seeing Emily has been selected as an International Reading Association Notable Book and a New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age.