Output

Frog and Other Essays
Anne Fadiman: Francis Writer in Residence; Professor in the Practice, English 
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26)
“Until last summer, we had a dead frog in our freezer.” Well, doesn’t everybody? So begins the title essay of Anne Fadiman’s collection of seven stunningly good accounts that range from how and why she had an amphibian on ice—“There are two kinds of pets: the ones you choose and the ones that happen to you”—to considerations of her too-long love affair with her obsolete printer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the South Polar Times, and pandemic-era oysgezoomt, overexposure to Zoom. The haunting final piece, on the too-short life of her student Marina Keegan ’12, who died in a traffic accident five days after her Yale graduation, includes the young woman’s own words on her dogged persistence in editing, “THERE CAN ALWAYS BE A BETTER THING.” Maybe, but in Fadiman’s masterful hands, maybe not.

Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
Leo Damrosch ’63
(Yale University Press, $35) 
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!” These epic lines from Treasure Island, the classic Robert Louis Stevenson novel, the book that at one time every adventure-seeking kid knew by heart, have, more recently, faded from collective memory. That’s a shame, explains Damrosch, a noted literary biographer. By the time Stevenson died at the end of 1894 in Samoa, his home away from his birthplace in Scotland, the just-44-year-old author of 11 novels, more than 100 essays, several hundred poems, and thousands of letters was widely considered “a writer’s writer” by his peers. “I aim to celebrate what is great in his writing, and to inspire new readers to enjoy it,” says Damrosch of his subject, aptly dubbed Tusitala, or “storyteller,” by his Samoan friends.

Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840­–1920
Akhil Reed Amar ’80, ’84JD, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science 
(Basic Books, $40)
“All men are created equal. Lincoln’s opening sentence at Gettysburg thus 
placed the words of the Declaration at the core of American constitutionalism.” In 
this, the middle volume of Amar’s “planned trilogy narrating the epic saga” of our constitution from 1760 to the present, the legal scholar offers a guided tour of the “four score” years during which this country tried, through the often-turbulent adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments, to make equality for all “the very cornerstone of the American constitutional project.”

Dealing with Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want — Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence
(Celadon Books, $29.99) 
In the introduction to what, for many, might be a truly life-changing book, psychologist Brackett, aka the “Feelings Master,” makes a bold statement. “Pretty much everything that has gone right in your life was the result of you having an intelligent, helpful response to an emotion you experienced,” he declares, adding that the opposite outcome could most likely be traced to “an unwise reaction to what you felt.” Managed correctly, feelings can help everyone become their best selves, writes Brackett. In this step-by-step guide, grounded in an abundance of research and programs the author has developed for schools and corporations throughout the world, he provides “small acts [that] will add up to a new version of yourself. Not perfect, of course. But better.”

The Girl from Greenwich Street: A Novel of Hamilton, Burr, 
and America’s First Murder Trial
Lauren Willig ’99
(William Morrow, $30) 
“The shadows were gathering in the back of the house in Greenwich Street,” writes Willig, and they were about to get deeper and darker in this page-turner about what might, or might not, have actually happened on the night of December 22, 1799. On that night, a real young woman named Elma Sands left her cousin’s boardinghouse in New York City, never to return alive. Soon after her drowned and bruised body was recovered from the Manhattan Well, Levi Weeks, a local carpenter, who may or may not have been about to elope with Elma, was charged with the killing. To his defense came two of America’s founding fathers, and using transcripts from America’s first recorded murder trial, Willig presents a compelling courtroom drama that vividly reimagines the still-unsolved case.