Output

Newcomers: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York
Alan Mikhail, Chace Family Professor of History
(Liveright/W. W. Norton, $29.95) 

Long before New York became New Yawk, it was part of New Netherland, a short-lived Dutch colony established in the early 1600s that encompassed a good part of the Northeast. Sometime in the early 1630s, “Anthony the Turk,” who had probably been a pirate, and his new wife Grietje, allegedly a part-time prostitute, left Amsterdam for America to forge a “rags-to-riches” success story. Mikhail tells the “swashbuckling” tale of this plucky couple who embody “the city’s mythos as a place of reinvention and recreation.”

Since You’re Mortal . . . Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays
James Romm ’80
(W.W. Norton, $24.99)  

In a sort of precursor to Ann Landers, a fifth-century dad from Macedonia named Johannes Stobaeus pulled together a massive book of wisdom culled from Classical Greek writings to guide his son. The quotes came from poetry, prose, and plays, by well-known authors like Sophocles and Euripides, along with other material whose source is long gone. Historian Romm offers English translations of otherwise lost works in the Stobaeus collection that offer insights into the human condition. “Living’s a fine thing, provided one learns how to do it,” wrote Anonymous.

The Emergency: A Novel  George Packer ’82 
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $29)

When the collapse came, “imperceptibly, then shockingly,” for the empire that had long ruled an all-too-familiar land, Hugo Rustin, chief surgeon at the hospital in the “city by the river,” recalled, “no one [could] believe that a way of life [was] about to end or imagine the strange new life that [would] replace it.” But the empire-imposed “age-old harmony” between economic classes quickly disappears. In the nightmare that emerges, Packer sends Rustin on a chilling mission through a now dangerous landscape rife with generational and class fault lines, conspiracy theories, mistrust, and downright hatreds.

Plastic Inc.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil’s Biggest Bet
Beth Gardiner ’93
(Avery/Penguin Random House, $32)

When an adult at Benjamin Braddock’s end-of-college party in The Graduate offers career advice, it’s “Plastics.” The young man wasn’t convinced, but the petrochemical industry was already moving steadily, and, as Gardiner shows, stealthily towards making plastics an inescapable fact of modern life. The author details how companies dedicated to fossil fuel extraction pivoted to turning their raw material into a stream of plastics—and the ensuing global pushback.

The Bavarian Radio Recordings: Chamber Music for Flute
Linda Marianiello ’80 and Friends
(MSR Classics)

This flute-forward album opens blissfully with a work by one of the most spirited composers for the instrument, Philippe Gaubert. There’s a jaunty, almost Gershwinesque quality to the playing and the studio production, setting the tone for an album where sweetness and lightness abound but deeper stirrings lie beneath. In a concluding flourish, Marianiello is joined by Tunji Beier on the Indian percussion instruments the mridangam and the ghatam for a multicultural jazzy improvisation on Johann Sebastian Bach’s previously staid “Partita for Solo Flute.”

Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince
Edited by Daphne A. Brooks, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Black Studies; American Studies; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Music.
(Duke University Press, $29.95)

Bowie and Prince were the “boldest of ‘envelope-pushers’ . . . unafraid to transgress social and cultural mores in ways that brazenly critiqued the presumed fixity of racial, gender, and sexual identity formations,” writes Brooks, introducing this collection of analyses, reportage, and reflections. By considering these “cosmic twins” in tandem, the book offers a window into the lives, output, and impact of these “designers of the astonishing, the sublime, and the resplendent in popular music culture.”