George Anastasia ’69
Gotti’s Rules: The Story of John Alite, Junior Gotti, and the Demise of the American Mafia
(Dey Street Books)
In his sixth true-crime book, Anastasia turnshis sharp eye on John Gotti Sr., “the Dapper Don,” his inept son, John “Junior,” and the hubris and greed that fueled the family’s bloody rise and devastating fall. The book reads like a fast-paced crime thriller, full of details extracted from court documents, prosecutors and former Gotti family insider John Alite, who testified in the 2009 trial of Junior. “Alite was a murderer, drug dealer and thug,” Anastasia explains in the opening lines of the book. “Over the course of a 25-year career as a gangster he brutalized people: stabbing them, shooting them, beating them with pipes, blackjacks and baseball bats.” Alite also slipped into the Gotti family, where he served as Junior’s “babysitter” and learned Gotti Sr.’s rules (such as, whenever possible, underlings must take the weight of a crime pending against Gotti or his family). “You can’t make this stuff up any better than it is,” says Anastasia.

Anastasia had just retired from The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he covered the mafia for 30 years, when Alite called, wanting to tell his story. Armed with more than 30 interviews with Alite, as well as FBI files and other documentation, Anastasia tackled the Gotti story. “I’ve always wanted to write a New York-based mob book,” he tells DAM. “It’s a bigger stage and a broader story.” Anastasia built a career tracking the Philadelphia mafia and a reputation for telling stories from street level, informed by insights and access provided by investigators, prosecutors and the mobsters themselves. “Covering the mob became a beat,” says Anastasia. “The principals had better nicknames than in almost any other arena other than sports.” His ability to draw first-hand accounts of murder and corruption from wise guys-turned-witnesses also fueled his best-sellers, including Blood and Honor: Inside the Scarfo Mob—the Mafia’s Most Violent Family in 1991, dubbed the “best gangster book ever written” by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jimmy Breslin, and The Last Gangster in 2004.

Anastasia says that although the American mafia will always exist, it’s no longer the monolithic institution it was, in part because the “best and the brightest in the Italian-American community are now doctors, lawyers, educators, and the mob is scraping the bottom of the gene pool.” But there’s still plenty of organized crime to cover. This spring he’s teaching crime reporting at Rowan University, writing for magazines and websites, including Politico.com and bigtrial.net, and pitching the Philadelphia mob story to Hollywood.                    —Theresa D’Orsi

Robert L. Grenier ’76
88 Days to Kandahar
(Simon & Schuster)
Double dealing, spies, bureaucratic infighting, Osama bin Laden and Tora Bora all play a part in the former Islamabad CIA station chief’s account of the U.S. effort to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and install Hamid Karzai as president in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It’s a compelling insider’s memoir of what it was like to be a top spy at war in the uncertain world after the towers fell.

Christine Carter ’94
The Sweet Spot
(Ballantine Books)
Sociologist and “happiness expert” Carter follows her 2011 bestseller Raising Happiness with a new guide to finding peace and energy in the mayhem of everyday life. Incorporating tips on technology use, prioritizing and knowing when to say “yes,” she offers a guide to living with strength and ease.

Jonathan Waldman ’00
Rust
(Simon & Schuster)
Journalist Waldman traveled from Florida to Alaska to detail the fierce, ongoing fight against what the Pentagon refers to as a pervasive menace. It’s a “detailed, fun read with a valuable reminder that every seemingly irrelevant item we take for granted each day is front and center for someone else,” according to Publishers Weekly.

Jonathan Mingle ’01
Fire and Ice
(St. Martin’s Press)
Environmental journalist Mingle tackles the history of black carbon to explain what its devastating effects on Himalayan glaciers and their surrounding villages could mean for the world at large. Called “top-notch on-the-ground-reporting” by environmentalist Bill McKibben, Fire and Ice looks at both the fires that sustain and those that destroy.

Kabir Sehgal ’05
Coined
(Grand Central Publishing)
J.P. Morgan vice president Sehgal surveys the origins and significance of currency in his examination of money’s crucial role in global discourse. He offers a history of coinage and a reflection on the human psyche in this “lively account with an unconventional viewpoint,” according to Kirkus Reviews. Click here to read an excerpt from Coined.

Additional books that were not listed in our print edition:

Philip E. Coyle ’56 provides an exhaustive survey of the many aspects of nonproliferation efforts as coauthor of The Challenges of Nuclear Non-Proliferation (Rowman & Littlefield). Coyle is a former associate director for national security and international affairs in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.

Bob Farmer ’60—one of the Democratic Party’s most effective fundraisers and national treasurer for the presidential campaigns of John Glenn (1984), Mike Dukakis (1988), Bill Clinton (1992) and John Kerry (2004)—traces his experiences in various political campaigns in his memoir, The Money Guy: The Education of a Political Fundraiser (Outskirts Press).

Smith College math professor Jim Henle ’68 draws on recipes, problems and puzzles to explore the commonalities between cooking and mathematics in The Proof and the Pudding: What Mathematicians, Cooks, and You Have in Common (Princeton University Press).

Edmund Sim ’88, a partner at law firm Appleton Luff and a professor at the National University of Singapore Law School, explores the complex rules of origin in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) trade agreements and recommends reforms as coauthor of Rules of Origin in ASEAN: A Way Forward (Cambridge University Press).

Theologian Tony Jones ’90 tackles one of the more important phenomena in Christian dogma—Christ’s crucifixion—to explain the guilt so intrinsic to faith today in Did God Kill Jesus? Searching for Love in History’s Most Famous Execution (HarperOne).

David S. Cohen ’94, a professor at Drexel University law school, interviews numerous abortion providers to better understand the ongoing harassment they face and to propose several legal and societal reforms as coauthor of Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism (Oxford University Press).

New School for Social Research history professor Orit Halpern ’94 connects postwar advances in the communication sciences to trends in data management, art and design to anticipate the role of cybernetics in our future in Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945 (Duke University Press).

Rebecca Leffler ’04 draws on nearly a decade spent in Paris to create a stylish guide to clean living and eating—and aims to “boost your body to its optimum vitality,” according to Vogue Paris—with Très Green, Très Clean, Très Chic: Eat (and Live!) the New French Way with Plant-Based, Gluten-Free Recipes for Every Season (The Experiment).

The Fat-Burning Man Show host Abel James Bascom ’06 explains that the answer to vibrant health is rooted in a Paleo-inspired diet of whole foods—not calorie-restricted diets or exercise programs—in The Wild Diet: Get Back to Your Roots, Burn Fat, and Drop Up to 20 Pounds in 40 Days (Avery).