Book Beat

Author and Brooklyn College creative writing professor Helen Phillips has struck a scary nerve with her genre-busting hit new novel, “The Need.” It’s a suspense-sci fi-ghost story that The New York Times playfully dubbed “What to Expect When You’re Expecting Evil.”

For more on Helen Phillips and “The Need” visit CUNY Sum

Photo on the CUNY Podcasts home page by David Barry 

 

In his latest book on the digital technology revolution, renowned media theorist Douglas Rushkoff argues that there’s an “anti-human agenda” embedded in our technology that deters human connection and expression and turns our major cultural institutions into forces of isolation and repression. But the Queens College professor says it doesn’t have to be that way.

Thirty years after emigrating from the British West Indies in 1915, Bertram L. Baker became the first black person ever elected to office in Brooklyn. Baker was a pioneering state legislator, city power broker and leader of social justice causes with a national impact. In “Boss of Black Brooklyn,” his grandson, Brooklyn College journalism professor Ron Howell, tells the story of Baker’s rise during a fascinating era of black history in New York and the nation.

Brooklyn College history professor Karen Stern has spent the past decade shining a searchlight on the writings and drawings that have been found on the walls, passages and doorways of sites throughout the ancient world. In her new book, “Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity,” she reveals new clues about the lives of ordinary Jews nearly 2,000 years ago.

Alex Vitale has been an impassioned advocate of police reform for 25 years, and now the Brooklyn College sociologist is making waves with his new book, The End of Policing. Vitale, who runs the Policing and Social Justice Project at the college, argues that police in recent decades have taken on an expanded, intensified and largely unchecked role in American society – a fundamental change fed by a “warrior mentality” that he says damages the country as much as it protects it.

The history of factories is an epic story with thousands of moving parts: A story of invention and innovation, progress and exploitation with vast economic, political, social and cultural consequences across continents and centuries. Joshua Freeman, a distinguished professor of history at Queens College and The Graduate Center, tells it all in his acclaimed new book, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World.

In “Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change,” Ashley Dawson argues that coastal cities like New York are the frontlines for both the causes and the consequences of the world’s rising seas. The book establishes Dawson, a professor of English at the College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center, as an important new voice in the world’s growing climate chaos.

CUNY historians Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burroughs won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Gotham, their sweeping history of New York City through 1898. Nearly 20 years later, Wallace is getting early acclaim for his eagerly awaited, and equally epic, next volume – Greater Gotham. The indefatigable historian – a distinguished professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The CUNY Graduate Center – tells the story of the two decades through World War I that transformed the city, seemingly overnight, into the global metropolis it is today.

CUNY’s Cathy Davidson thinks so. The director of the Futures Initiative at The Graduate Center, and an influential voice in American education, Davidson argues that college as we know it was conceived for an earlier era and needs to be wholly reimagined for today’s “ever more complex and bewildering world.” She offers a roadmap for reboot in The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux.

Even as he glides toward a second term as mayor, Bill de Blasio remains something of an enigma to many New Yorkers. In The Pragmatist: Bill de Blasio’s Quest to Save the Soul of New York, Joseph Viteritti of Hunter College and The Graduate Center says the mayor's challenge is fulfilling his progressive promise in New York at a time of polarized politics in Washington.