Bookshelf

(University of California Press, 2021)
Best known for his experimental film about its own making, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, William Greaves was an influential independent documentary filmmaker who produced, directed, shot, and edited more than 100 films on a variety of social issues and on key African American figures ranging from Muhammad Ali to Ralph Bunche to Ida B. Wells.

MacDonald’s book offers the first comprehensive overview of Greaves’ career, bringing together a mix of essays from critics and scholars, Greaves’ own writings, an extensive meta-interview with Greaves, conversations with his wife and collaborator and his son. Together, they illuminate Greaves’ mission to use filmmaking as a tool for transforming the ways African Americans were perceived by others and the ways they saw themselves.

(Montgomery, Ala.: China Aerospace Studies Institute, 2021)

Garafola, a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corp., and Allen, a retired Air Force analyst, explore the evolution of China’s air force since its founding in 1949 and the directions it might pursue leading up to its 80^th anniversary. Topics considered include strategy and doctrine, organizational structure, personnel, education, training, and military diplomacy and exchanges.

(Virginia Beach, Va.: Köehler Books, 2020).
A thousand miles off course, a private plane strikes a lighthouse and crashes near snowy Lake Superior. The pilot’s body is found, but three VIP passengers are missing. Combine that with a deadly snowmobile accident, an upstart congressional candidate, and alarming discoveries in Isle Royale National Park, and local sheriff Sam MacDonald finds he has more than enough challenges as the solitude of the North Shore is disrupted by events that could have national and international repercussions.

(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2021)

Selected by Publishers Weekly as one of its Top Ten Books in Business and Economics for Spring 2021, this book employs tools of microeconomics to investigate how individual economic choices in response to climate change will transform the larger economy. The author, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Economics and Business at Johns Hopkins University, “suggests new ways that big data can be deployed to ease energy or water shortages to aid agricultural operations and proposes informed policy changes related to public infrastructure, disaster relief, and real estate to nudge land use, transportation options, and business development in the right direction.”

(Louisville, Ky.: Sarabande Books, 2021)

Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and boasting a 2020 Pushcart-winning story, this collection of 13 tales is described as “part domestic horror, part flyover gothic.” Collins’ characters — including a young woman who must give birth to future iterations of herself; a widower who kills a horse en route to his grandson’s circumcision; a summer camper who is haunted by a glass eye and motorcycle crash — must choose to fight or flee the “big bad” that dwells within us all.

(Seattle: Marrowstone Press, 2020).
The prolific poet has given us another collection, this one described as one book of poems composed of two. According to the publisher: “Its epigraph is taken from the English Romantic poet, John Clare: to ‘turn the blue blinders of the heavens aside/To see what gods are doing.’ In Weltner’s book, the gods are such fundamental powers and presences as the past, memory, human existence in place and time, passion in all its senses, and what glimpses of transcendence humanity is allowed to see. It is a poetry of quest and questioning, of a late life looking back, of form and freedom pondering those essential things long pondered before us.”

(New York and London: Routledge, 2021).
This volume focuses on teaching classics in a prison setting and features articles that examine how incarcerated adults read and discuss classical texts and the best pedagogical practices for teaching within a prison.

(self-published, 2019)

Focusing on the plight of Cavaar, a 9-year-old street urchin, and Alera, a young noblewoman longing for a life of freedom from her abusive father, this novel is the first in an original character-driven fantasy series about confronting darkness within and without.

(Scotts Valley, Calif.: CreateSpace, 2020).
Technology growth, cultural divides, and a hyper-paced world are creating confusion, fear, and separation in our society. So maintains the author, who has led global tech human resource teams with the goal of enabling individuals to prosper so companies can prosper. In his book, he looks at such questions as “How do we understand that we have more in common than not?” and “What can each of us do to heal differences while leaving a meaningful, personal legacy?”

(Boston: Everidge Press, 2019)
A murder mystery combines with a story of heroism and betrayal — all taking place in Boston’s old South End. The author invites readers to travel back in time as he explores life in the rented rooms and funky old bars of a dying neighborhood.