Collaborative Crisis Management: Prepare, Execute, Recover, Repeat

By Thomas A. Cole, JD’75, and Paul Verbinnen; University of Chicago Press, 2022

Crises happen. To deal with the inevitable, lawyer and UChicago trustee Thomas A. Cole and communications consultant Paul Verbinnen have teamed up to produce a primer on managing crises successfully—from anticipation to resolution. Drawing on real-world examples of corporate disasters, the authors share lessons from crises that they witnessed up close or observed from afar.

The Tomorrow Game: Rival Teenagers, Their Race for a Gun, and a Community United to Save Them

By Sudhir Venkatesh, AM’92, PhD’97; Simon and Schuster, 2022

Columbia University sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh chronicles how members of a South Side Chicago community united to protect a group of teenagers from gun violence. The true story follows young people from rival crews who reach for guns as a conflict escalates. Venkatesh gives voice to the teens and other players—parents, gun dealers, clergy, and police—to reveal intersections between poverty and gun violence and how both upend lives and communities.

What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer

By Anne Myles, AM’86, PhD’93; Final Thursday Press, 2022

In 1660 Mary Dyer was hanged in Puritan Boston for her Quaker religious beliefs and missionary zeal. She speaks again in this debut poetry collection by Anne Myles, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. Bringing together history and imagination, the 28 poems move between Dyer’s voice and Myles’s and explore timely themes including gender, power, faith, and courage in the face of persecution.

Blue Jeans

By Carolyn Purnell, AM’07, PhD’13; Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

Blue jeans, historian Carolyn Purnell argues, are both simple and contradictory. Levi Strauss & Co. released the denim work pants for miners in the 1870s, but today they’re a fashion staple. At once an American symbol and a global consumer product, jeans come in styles to fit toddlers, moms, and presidents. Purnell’s history is a new installment of Object Lessons, a series about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Unraveling Time: Thirty Years of Ethnography in Cuenca, Ecuador

By Ann Miles, AB’81; University of Texas Press, 2022

For more than 30 years, Western Michigan University sociology professor Ann Miles has documented life in Cuenca, Ecuador, a rapidly changing regional capital. Rural migrants and tourists have arrived while longtime residents have moved abroad for work. New roads and cell phones connect people, the city center has gentrified, and remittances from overseas have had both positive and negative effects. In what she calls an “ethnography of accrual,” Miles reveals the complex dynamics that transformed a city.