Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education

By Jonathan Marks, AB’91, AM’94, PhD’97

Conservatives should participate in debates about the aims of higher education rather than dismiss colleges and universities as institutions under the sway of leftist academic activists, writes Ursinus College politics professor Jonathan Marks. Such dismissals rest on an inaccurate assumption, Marks contends, and they sideline his fellow conservatives from efforts to help those institutions better explain the value of a liberal education. Marks draws from John Locke to define the liberally educated person as a truth-seeker who regards reason as an authority.

Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America

By Maria Hinojosa, LAB’79

The first televised refugee crisis in US history, writes Emmy Award–winning journalist Maria Hinojosa, came in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It reached her through the evening news in her parents’ Hyde Park home. The degrading language journalists then used for Vietnamese refugees still unsettles Hinojosa, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico as a child when her father was recruited to UChicago’s surgery department. This memoir from the anchor of NPR’s Latino USA takes readers from her upbringing in the “multicultural oasis” of Hyde Park to her frontline reporting on US immigration, tracing the personal journey of a reporter committed to portraying her subjects in their full humanity.

Antitrust: Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age

By Amy Klobuchar, JD’85

In 2008, a year into her first term as a US senator, Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) learned from a constituent about the staggering price increase for a drug used to treat heart valve defects in premature babies. Though Klobuchar and others succeeded in prompting a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against the drug maker for price gouging, the case failed in the courts—evidence, for Klobuchar, that US antitrust law was being outmatched by 21st-century corporate titans in the pharmaceutical, tech, and other industries. In this primer on the origins and evolution of our legal apparatus for curbing monopolies, Klobuchar calls for updates aimed at strengthening procompetition and proconsumer laws and policies.

A Voice for Justice: Writings of David Schuman

Edited by Sharon J. Schuman, PhD’75

A man of letters and the law, the late David Schuman, PhD’74, retained qualities of the former literature professor he was, even as his career took him to the University of Oregon School of Law and the Oregon Court of Appeals. This collection, edited by his widow, Sharon J. Schuman, includes short fiction, law review articles, judicial opinions, and speeches. Many of the legal writings reflect a judicial philosophy that seeks clarity from the state constitution before applying rules from the federal one. Meanwhile, David Schuman’s commencement address “Lawyers in Hell” shows his literary and philosophical bent, outlining a professional ethics inspired by Dante and Socrates.

Anticipation

Music by Cameron Knowler and Eli Winter, AB’20

Named a new artist to watch by the Guardian, Eli Winter is joined by fellow guitarist Cameron Knowler for an album of instrumental duets that puts Americana in conversation with the avant-garde. Stemming from a concert tour the two musicians made across Texas in the winter of 2018, the album contains original compositions and improvisations, including the multilayered “Sippin’ Amaretto,” along with several folk and bluegrass covers and a baroque reinterpretation of the traditional “Cumberland Gap.” Country in spirit, this collaboration is jazzy and experimental in style.

Nothing Happened: A History

By Susan A. Crane, AM’87, PhD’92

After Italian steelworker Luigi Trastulli was killed by police during a 1949 protest, the local community remembered for decades, angrily, that nothing happened to hold authorities accountable. For University of Arizona historian Susan A. Crane, that’s “Nothing” with a capital “n.” When it comes to historical memory, Crane argues, Nothing is always something—in this case, a grievous awareness of injustice. Crane analyzes what people have in mind when they say that Nothing is happening or Nothing is the way it was, discovering in moments like these some fundamental conditions of modern historical consciousness.

For additional alumni book releases, use the link to the Magazine’s Goodreads bookshelf at mag.uchicago.edu/alumni-books.