The lecturer's tale

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Alyce Miller

It is the late 1960s, and in the small university town of Brazil, Ohio, a young white girl embarks on a journey of political and sexual awakening the summer after Martin Luther King is assassinated. Chafing against her parents and what she perceives as their romanticized white liberal notions of integration, Tish tries to take on the characteristics of her militant black girlfriends. Her desire to be one of them is so strong it's palpable, yet no matter how hard she tries, she encounters a wall. All of Tish's confusion and loneliness seem to disappear when she meets and falls in love with Goody, a black man of nineteen who arouses in Tish a new sense of herself. But it will take a heartbreaking betrayal to help Tish truly make sense of her world, in a way that no one else can do for her. Stopping for Green Lights is a poignant evocation of the potent desire to fit in and the grander ambition to be extraordinary.

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Alan Lightman

Attending his thirtieth college reunion, Charles, now a middle-aged professor, recalls his senior year, when he had an affair with a beautiful young dancer amidst the turbulent social and political upheaval of the 1960s.

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Mark Powell

Luther Redding lost his job, and almost lost his wife, Pamela, and teenaged daughters Katie and Lucy, when the real estate bubble burst in Florida. Now he pilots a Reaper drone over the mountains of Afghanistan from a command center in the bowels of Tampa's MacDill Air Force Base, studying a target's pattern of life and awaiting the command to end that life. Meanwhile Bobby Rosen has returned home from his tours in Iraq to a broken marriage and an estranged son, his promising military career cut short in a moment of terrible violence in a Sadr City marketplace. As the tales of Luther and Bobby unfold, Mark Powell masterfully engages with the vexing, bifurcated lives of combatants in the global war on terror, those who are simultaneously here and there and thus never fully freed from the life-and-death chaos of the battlefield.

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Polly Young-Eisendrath

Kids today are depressed and anxious. They also seem to feel entitled to every advantage and unwilling to make the leap into adulthood. As Polly Young-Eisendrath makes clear in this brilliant account of where a generation has gone astray, parents trying to make their children feel special are unwittingly interfering with their kids' ability to accept themselves and cope with life. Clarifying an enormous cultural change, THE SELF-ESTEEM TRAP shows why so many young people have trouble with empathy and compassion, struggle with moral values, and are stymied in the face of adversity. Young-Eisendrath offers prescriptive advice on how adults can help kids--through the teen and young adult years--develop self-worth, setting them on the right track to productive, balanced, and happy lives.