Chris Benner ’87, an associate professor of community and regional development at the University of California Davis, analyzes the recent resurgence of progressive politics at a local level as co-author of This Could be the Start of Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity Are Reshaping Metropolitan America (Cornell University Press).

Paul Griffin ’88, who works with schoolchildren across New York City, follows three kids through the pressure cooker of inner-city teenage life in The Orange Houses (Penguin), a 2009 pick of the Junior Library Guild.

Matt Royer ’93 illustrates Nightbear & Lambie (Yellow Cottage Press), a children’s picture book written by his wife, Kerry McGuinness Royer, based on stories they told their children about their plush toys.

Bruce A. Kimball ’73, director of the School of Educational Policy and Leadership at the Ohio State University, profiles the Harvard Law School dean who designed the educational model that most leading professional schools have emulated in The Inception of Modern Professional Education: C.C. Langdell, 1826-1906 (University of North Carolina Press).

Psychiatrist Kathryn Fraser ’79, DMS’85, follows the stories of a 17-year-old Rapture believer on a pilgrimage, a wounded Iraq War veteran as she recovers her identity and a former leader who acknowledges his mistakes in her novel, A Journey, a Reckoning, and a Miracle (O Books).

Poet Heid E. Erdrich ’86 explores the depths of national identities in her latest collection, National Monuments (Michigan State University Press), which earned a 2009 Minnesota Book Award.

Leonard Chang ’91, whose previous noir trilogy (Over the Shoulder, Underkill and Fade to Clear) was a USA Today Summer Reading Pick and a finalist for the Shamus Award, takes an unflinching look at the lives of Korean immigrants in California in Crossings (Black Heron Press).

Brothers Thomas O’Connell ’50, the founding and emeritus president of Berkshire (Massachusetts) Community College, and Jeffrey O’Connell ’51, a law professor at the University of Virginia, profile 16 lawyers and others intertwined with law, public policy and politics in Political and Legal Adventurers: From Marx to Moynihan (Carolina Academic Press).

Lynmar Brock Jr. ’55, Tu’56, tells the story of a Jewish family finding unlikely refuge from the Holocaust in In This Hospitable Land (BookSurge).

Boston attorney David Hosp ’90 blends fact and fiction with a tale that answers some of the questions surrounding the still-unsolved 1990 art theft from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in his fourth novel, Among Thieves (Grand Central Publishing).

William Morgan ’66, an architectural historian and photographer, profiles 10 houses by Rhode Island-based architects James Estes and Peter Twombly and situates their work in regional and historical contexts in Yankee Modern: The Houses of Estes/Twombly (Princeton Architectural Press).

Sara Leach ’93, a teacher-librarian in Whistler, Canada, offers a playful look at the machines that manage a ski hill in her book for young children, Mountain Machines (Poppy Productions).

Sarina Schrager ’88, M.D., an associate professor in family medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, offers physicians a concise resource of essential information on all major diseases and disorders for female patients from adolescence through adulthood as coauthor of The ACP Handbook of Women’s Health (American College of Physicians).

Jonathan Good ’94, an assistant professor of history at Reinhardt College, traces the origins and growth of the cult of the patron saint of England in The Cult of St. George in Medieval England (Boydell Press).

Brigid Pasulka ’94, a descendant of Polish immigrants and an English teacher at a Chicago magnet school, braids together tales of old and new Poland in  A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True (Houghton Mifflin).