For the Book Lovers on Your Holiday Gift List

We’ve compiled a short list of recent books by Graduate Center faculty and alumni that the book lovers on your holiday gift list might enjoy. Or you might want to gift them to yourself.

Happy holidays and happy reading!

Find Me

This is Distinguished Professor André Aciman’s (Comparative Literature and French) highly anticipated follow-up to his celebrated book and film, Call Me by Your Name. Aciman talked to The Graduate Center about revisiting his iconic characters, Elio, Oliver, and Samuel. Enjoy as he reads a selection from the book. 

Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth

The new book by Professor Dána-Ain Davis (GC/Queens, Anthropology/Urban Studies)  analyzes how racism within the medical profession affects the lives and health of black American women who give birth to premature and low birth weight infants. She spoke to The Graduate Center about why she focused on professional black women and possible solutions.

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World

Visiting Presidential Professor Branko Milanovic (Economics) has been called one of the small group of leading economists who “hold up a mirror so that we Americans can better see ourselves.” Through storytelling, theorizing, and innovative research, Milanovic considers inequality and the future of democracy in a world in which capitalism is the only game in town. He spoke about his book in a sold-out event at The Graduate Center just this month.

Historia Cultural de los Hispanohablantes en Japon (A Cultural History of the Spanish Speaking People in Japan) 

 

Professor Araceli Tinajero (GC/CCNY, Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures/Spanish) brings her personal and scholarly experience to tell the little known story of the children and grandchildren of Japanese emigres who moved from Latin America to Japan in the 1990s to work in the country’s booming factories.
 

Horse Crazy: Girls and the Lives of Horses

Through a unique combination of memoir and rigorous sociological research, Professor Jean Halley (GC/College of Staten Island, Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies), who is also a Graduate Center alumna, explains the fascination girls have with horses and what it means for our society. She spoke about her book and her past in a podcast and video.

 

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas

Praised as “frequently startling, yet eminently persuasive,” Professor Corey Robin’s (GC/Brooklyn, Political Science) book offers a detailed analysis of the Supreme Court’s longest serving but least known justice. 
 

You Don’t Look Like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism

Who belongs and who doesn’t? This book by Tsedale Melaku (Ph.D. ’16, Sociology), a postdoctoral researcher at The Graduate Center’s Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Carribean (IRADAC) examines the challenges black female associates face as a result of institutional practices that marginalize them based on race and gender.
 

Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

From religious missionary in China to scholar and activist in New York, Amber Scorah (CUNY BA) describes her journey as she left the Jehovah’s Witness religion. She describes her harrowing memoir and what brought her to CUNY in a story of reinvention.