Christopher Alexander, professor emeritus of architecture, takes on the relationships between life and space in The Nature of Order, a much-anticipated four-volume magnum opus (Center for Environmental Structure).

Richard G. Beidleman, a research associate at the University and Jepson Herbaria, chronicles the story of the botanists, zoologists, geologists, paleontologists, astronomers, and ethnologists who were drawn to California over the decades from 1786, when the La Perouse expedition arrived at Monterey, to the Death Valley expedition in 1890–91, the proclaimed “end” of the American frontier, in California’s Frontier Naturalists (UC Press).

Linda Blachman, MPH ’79, weaves together first-person narratives in Another Morning: Voices of Truth and Hope from Mothers with Cancer, based on the author’s decade of work capturing the personal stories of her clients (Seal Press).

Samuel Farber, Ph.D. ’69, delves into recently declassified U.S. and Soviet documents and Cuban biographical and narrative literature to reinterpret the island nation’s radical shifts between 1959 and 1961 in The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (University of North Carolina Press).

Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, examines Western ideas about the nature of human experience in Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (UC Press).

Mimi Koehl, professor of integrative biology, tells the story of one stretch along the Pacific coast of North America in Wave-Swept Shore: The Rigors of Life on a Rocky Coast by explaining how resident mussels, limpets, crabs, grasses, starfish, kelp, and other animals and plants function and flourish there (UC Press).

Jengyee Liang ’05 draws on four summers of internships at large corporations to advise college students on how to land a first job in HELLO REAL WORLD! A Student’s Approach to Great Internships, Co-ops, and Entry Level Positions (BookSurge Publishing).

Ken Light, adjunct professor and director of the Center for Photography (Graduate School of Journalism), and his wife, Melanie, chronicle the legacy of coal mining in southern West Virginia in Coal Hollow: Photographs and Oral Histories. With a foreword by Journalism Dean Orville Schell (UC Press).

Rebekah Presson Mosby ’75 edited and produced Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work (1888–2006), a collection of four CDs that includes archival readings by the likes of Tennyson, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon Olds, and Seamus Heaney (Shout! Factory).

Journalism Professor Michael Pollan follows the food chains that sustain us from the source to a final meal in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Group). See an excerpt in his article here on the site.

Jonas Pontusson, Ph.D. ’79, compares the relative merits of the labor markets and welfare systems in the United States and Britain, on the one hand, and in northern Europe, on the other, analyzing how two different economic models have flourished in the face of globalization in Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe vs. Liberal America (Cornell University Press).

After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire features an essay by Rebecca Solnit, M.J. ’84, in which she considers the meaning of ruins, resurrection, and the evolving geography and history of San Francisco (UC Press).

Lance Williams, M.J. ‘74, and fellow San Francisco Chronicle reporter Mark Fainaru-Wada co-wrote Game of Shadows (Gotham Books), detailing the secrets of the federal BALCO steroid investigation, with their groundbreaking reporting that rocked major league baseball and tarnished some of the game’s biggest stars.