ROBERT C . BORDONE ’94

Bridging the Divide

Harper Business

Faced with conflict of almost any sort—personal or political, in the home or workplace or the public square—most people try to avoid it. (I’m one of them.) And in situations where avoidance is impossible, our instinct is to treat even minor disagreements as life-and-death battles or, more often, to steer the conversation toward common ground, minimizing differences and shutting down the stressful business of argument as soon as possible.  

We’re doing it all wrong, says Robert C. Bordone, coauthor with Dr. Joel Salinas of Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In. Bordone, founder and former director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program, and Salinas, a behavioral neurologist at New York University, combine their expertise to help us “befriend” conflict, allowing us to sit with and grow from it. The result is productive conversations that don’t always lead to resolving an issue but can foster deeper understanding and empathy between adversaries. It’s a start.  

Accessibly written for the general reader and exhaustively supported with examples from Bordone’s advanced negotiation practice and Salinas’ knowledge of the latest brain science, Conflict Resilience could hardly be more timely. Especially since the onset of the Covid pandemic, we live in a divided society in which our fractious national politics increasingly filters down like acid rain on our interactions with neighbors, coworkers, even family members. Everyday conversation has rarely felt so fraught, the stakes so fearfully high.  

This wise and realistic book provides no easy answers, but it does offer a three-part framework for negotiating conflict in ways that make it more doable, practical, and potentially useful. The first step involves both naming the issue and digging deep into its layers, especially the underlying emotional ones. (Logic, the authors say, is rarely sufficient.) The second step encourages exploration, curiosity, and courage. The third step is about committing to and “owning” the conflict, including whether it’s resolvable at all and where to go from there.  

This leads me to a concern I had while reading this book, which is whether it will be useful in situations in which one or both sides of a conflict are not acting in good faith. If people use the conflict itself to bludgeon their opponent—to “own” him or her, empathy be damned—what hope can there be for a positive outcome? What happens when a positive outcome is not the true goal? 

—Kevin Nance

HENRY HART ’76 

Seamus Heaney’s Gifts 

LSU Press 

Irish poet Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, maintained that poetry mysteriously came to him like a gift of grace. This warm and affectionate portrayal, by an English professor at William & Mary who knew the poet quite well, probes Heaney’s preoccupation with gifts and the exchange of gifts and his belief that anyone born with a gift such as his for poetry was ethically bound to share it with others. Hart traces Heaney’s commitment to sharing his poetry as a public art to the gift the poet’s parents gave him as he left home for boarding school at age 12—which inspired his renowned poem “On the Gift of a Fountain Pen.” 

JONATHAN P. EBURNE ’93 

Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry 

University of Minnesota Press 

The author, a professor of comparative literature, English, and French at Penn State, delves into the contradictory frictions and messiness of scholarly inquiry and how the tools of creative critical thinking work. He invites readers to think in bold new ways by scaling things up—things as diverse as insect microhabitats, failed writing experiments, time, and memory systems— into exploded mashups that reveal their riot of possibilities. “What a weird and welcome journey,” says one reviewer. 

BRAD PARKS ’96 

The Boundaries We Cross 

Oceanview Publishing 

In this suspenseful novel packed with plot twists, Charles Bliss, a married teacher at an elite Connecticut boarding school, is accused of philandering with a student who happens to be the daughter of a high-powered state senator. The student has filled her journal with incriminating fantasies and yearning for Mr. B. and confided to her mother that they had an inappropriate encounter. When she then mysteriously disappears, his only hope to clear his name is to find her. 

LINDSAY MACMILLAN ’16 

Summer on Lilac Island 

Harper Muse 

After the gig economy in Los Angeles leaves Gigi Jenkins destitute, the rebellious young woman returns to her horse-and-buggy Mackinac Island hometown in Michigan to spend the summer with her mother, only for them to play matchmaker for one another, drive each other nuts, and overcome years of misunderstandings. Filled with vivid characters, this evocative tale of second chances makes for an entertaining summer read. 

These books were not included in our print edition.

JAMES P. LENFESTEY ’66

The Time Remaining: Body Odes, Praise Songs, Oddities, Amazements

Milkweed Editions

Inspired in part by Pablo Neruda’s Elemental Odes, poet Lenfestey, a former professor and journalist, fearlessly celebrates his 80-year-old body parts, lazy royal namesake, and more—from Bruce Springsteen and Robert Frost to ice skaters, fruit flies, and the letter “n”—in his joyful eighth collection.

DOUGLAS MARTIN ’72

American Reporter

Self-published

Following his four-decade career with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the journalist digs into personal memories of his family and childhood growing up in a small town in Iowa, his insatiable curiosity, and his later work writing storied newspaper obituaries in this memoir.

MARISOL NEGRÓN ’93

Made in NuYoRico: Fania Records, Latin Music, and Salsa’s Nuyorican Meanings

Duke University Press

Negrón tells the cultural history of salsa, beginning with how Fania Records capitalized on salsa’s Nuyorican imagery in the 1960s to cultivate a global audience. She draws on interviews with fans, legendary musicians, and music industry figures as well as analyses of songs, albums, and films to show how salsa’s Nuyorican aesthetics challenged mainstream notions of Americanness and Puerto Ricanness and produced an alternative public sphere through which New York’s poor and working-class Puerto Ricans could confront racialization and colonial power.

SHARANG BISWAS ’12, Th’13

The Iron Below Remembers

Neon Hemlock Press

This captivating queer love story follows archeologist professor Laxman Yadav and his superhero boyfriend Saviour. Crafting an intricate alternate reality where South Asian imperial interest has colonized much of the world, Biswas interweaves comic book tropes, academia, politics, and sex in this genre-blending novella.