Gold Medal Physics: The Science of Sports
(2010, The Johns Hopkins University Press)
by John Eric Goff, BS’92
Using performances by elite athletes such as Greg Louganis, Bob Beamon and Lance Armstrong as starting points, Goff discusses the science behind diving, long jumping, cycling, skating, football, soccer, and a host of other sports.
Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective
(2009, Southern Illinois University Press)
by Marguerite H. Rippy, MA’90
Orson Welles was the first of the Modernist directors who was as much star as artist. Rippy looks at film and radio projects shelved by Welles himself or by RKO Pictures during his early years there to show how his work straddles the fine line between fact and fiction, serving as a precursor to today’s reality television and fake news shows.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
(2010, The New Press)
by Michelle Alexander, BA’89
In her first book, Alexander asks what the election of Barack Obama means for black men when more African Americans are behind bars today than were enslaved in 1850. Alexander argues that the racial caste system has not been eradicated in America, and that an astounding percentage of the African American community remains in prison, viewed and treated as a subordinate class.
Monk’s Tale: The Pilgrimage Begins, 1941–1975
(2009, University of Notre Dame Press)
by the Rev. Edward A. Malloy, C.S.C., PhD’75
The Rev. Edward “Monk” Malloy, emeritus president of the University of Notre Dame (and emeritus trustee at Vanderbilt), writes in this first volume of a three-part autobiography about the years from 1941 to 1975, chronicling his life from his beginnings as a middle-class Irish American Catholic boy with a gift for basketball, to his call to become a priest, to his receiving a doctorate in Christian ethics from Vanderbilt.