From the Castro Theatre to the Telephone Building, from Jazz Age skyscrapers to opulent movie palaces, many iconic structures of San Francisco’s Art Deco heritage are the work of a draftsman turned prolific architect, Timothy Pflueger. Therese Poletti ’81 has compiled a stunning visual chronicle of Pflueger’s life and work during the post-earthquake reconstructionist boom in Art Deco San Francisco: The Architecture of Timothy Pflueger (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008). Archival photos alongside full pages of striking new photography by Tom Paiva tell much of the story, while Poletti’s lively narrative traces Art Deco designs as unconventional as the man who created them.
Molly Gore ’10
In the fraught relationship between wolves and people, wolves generally have not come out ahead—or at least, not recently. But “in most cases we can do better; and in all cases we have an obligation to strive to do better than our predecessors,” writes one contributor toA New Era for Wolves and People (University of Calgary Press, 2009), co-edited by Paul C. Paquet ’70. As the subtitle suggests—Wolf Recovery, Human Attitudes, and Policy—since the 1970s, wolf populations in the United States and Europe have in fact been increasing. In this collection of academic essays, multiple scientists and wolf experts examine how best to support and live with these beautiful and fierce carnivores. Paquet has studied wolves for more than 35 years and is an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary, and his collaborators on this editing effort are scholars Marco Musiani and Luigi Boitani. The text takes a detailed look at populations in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe, with plenty of examples to keep nonscientist readers engaged.
Lisa Taggart
In The Day the Dancers Stayed: Performing in the Filipino/American Diaspora (Temple University Press, 2010), Theodore S. Gonzalves ’90 traces a genealogy of Pilipino Cultural Night—a celebration of Filipino identity through music, dance, and theater that has become a tradition at a number of U.S. campuses in recent decades. Gonzalves, an associate professor of American Studies at University of Hawaii at Manoa, illuminates the way cultural memories are created, validated, and changed.
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Sandy Nathan ’68, M.A. ’80, delivers the first book in her Bloodsong Series with Numenon (Vilasa Press, 2008), a novel about a Silicon Valley leader whose gilded life belies a tortured interior. Entrepreneur Will Duane “made more money with every breath” but was haunted by terrifying, mysterious dreams and some kind of evil “stalker.” His search for the source of his troubles leads him, and a number of his employees, through the American Southwest to the Mogollon Bowl on a transformative journey where his high-powered corporate world collides with a spiritual, nature-based ethic.
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Through his words, Bill Hayes ’83 has a talent for bringing to life the most unlikely of subjects: In The Anatomist, he braids together three corporally linked stories to build a tale of science that is equally riveting and profound. Published in hardback in 2008, the book is now out in paperback (Bellevue Literary Press, 2009). Hayes set out to write a biography of the author of the world’s best-known medical textbook, Henry Gray of Gray’s Anatomy, first published in 1858. Gray’s work is linked to that of another Henry: Henry Carter, better known as H.V. Carter, the oft-overlooked artist behind the textbook’s original illustrations, ones Hayes describes as “exquisitely wrought.” And Hayes relates his own contemporary journey as he joins UCSF students in first-year anatomy, facing a cadaver and cutting into a human body for the first time. Hayes, the author of two previous books of nonfiction—Sleep Demons: An Insomniac’s Memoir and Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood—deftly carries each narrative thread in a book whose sum is even greater than its parts.
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Finding the positive and delivering the negative are two topics for the motivational speaker Barbara Khozam ’88 in two new anthologies. The Power of the Platform: Speakers on Purpose (Las Vegas Convention Speakers Bureau and TwoBirds Publishing, 2009) includes a recipe for embracing a positive perspective on your own life. Executive Etiquette Power: Twenty Top Experts Share What to Know to Advance Your Career (PowerDynamics Publishing, 2009) offers specific, step-by-step guidance for managers on how to reprimand employees and how to garner support for workplace changes. Khozam earned a chemistry degree at SCU and was a professional beach volleyball player before becoming a speaker and trainer.
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