Physicist Thaddeus Bell ’46 describes the Cold War development of underwater sonar—the same location system technology used in ships built today—in his new memoir, Probing the Ocean for Submarines: A History of the AN/SQS-26 Long-Range, Echo-Ranging Sonar (Peninsula).

Robert Hargraves ’61, a professor at the Institute for Lifelong Education at Dartmouth, focuses on the liquid fluoride thorium reactor and the very real possibility for clean, inexpensive energy for all in Thorium: Energy Cheaper Than Coal (CreateSpace).

Dan Mayland ’90 dives into the seedy underworld of international espionage, focusing on an ex-CIA station chief who finds himself smack in the middle of a deadly power-play by the United States, Iran and China for control of the world’s oil in The Colonel’s Mistake (Thomas & Mercer).

Peter Golenbock ’67, a 1970 graduate of the NYU School of Law, gives a behind-the-scenes look at the twists and turns of the Casey Anthony trial in Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony, The Inside Story (BenBella Books), written with Anthony’s defense attorney, Jose Baez.

Former Chicago and New York magazine editor Richard Babcock ’69 tells the story of an ambitious young Chicago editor whose scheme to publish a sexy novel and escape exile in the Midwest for the promised publishing land of New York backfires disastrously in his comic novel, Are You Happy Now? (Amazon Publishing).

Gregory Curtis ’69, chairman of wealth-management firm Greycourt & Co., reveals the investment secrets of the world’s wealthiest families so that financial planners, fund managers and wealthy individuals everywhere can follow in their footsteps in The Stewardship of Wealth: Successful Private Wealth Management for Investors and Their Advisors (Wiley).

Psychotherapist Hill Anderson ’70 weaves a tale of love and betrayal between psychotherapists with ethical misconduct in the behavioral healthcare industry in Stoneport: A Psychological Novel (iUniverse).

Douglas Kimball ’76 enters the frenzied world of a startup company where the defective chief financial officer must make a choice between saving his career and protecting a friend with his first novel, Thicke & Thin (Maturin).

Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr ’80 offers a fascinating anecdotal history of stardom, with all its blessings and curses for star and stargazer alike, in Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame (Pantheon).

Adventure writer Peter Heller ’82 follows a pilot and his dog through a post-apocalyptic world that contains as much loveliness as it does devastation in his first novel, The Dog Stars (Knopf).

Lara N. Dotson-Renta ’03, an assistant professor of modern languages at Quinnipiac University, explores the movement of Muslim immigrants throughout Europe, specifically Spain, and examines new Muslim identities and their relationships to popular culture in her first academic work, Immigration, Popular Culture, and the Re-routing of European Muslim Identity (Palgrave Macmillan).

Michael Lowenthal ’90 explores the complications of the modern family in his tale of a gay couple’s rocky quest for parenthood in his fourth novel, The Paternity Test (University of Wisconsin Press).

Allison Markin Powell ’95, a literary translator of Japanese, has translated two novels this year: The Briefcase (Counterpoint) by Hiromi Kawakami, a sentimental novel about the friendship between a Tokyo woman in her late 30s and her former high school teacher; and Schoolgirl (One Peace Books) by Osamu Dazai, a stream-of-consciousness day-in-the-life novella.