July|August Alumni Authors

By Ryan Duffy in July | August 2018, TXEX on July 1, 2018 at 9:00 am | No Comments

Patterns of Power

By Jeff Anderson, BS ’88, MEd ’94, Life Member, and Whitney La Rocca

Anderson and La Rocca team up to produce this thick yet accessible handbook for young writers in grades one through five. From the essentials, like capitalizing names, to the more advanced—when it is tasteful to use an adverb?—Patterns of Power covers and distills the conventions of language. The format is immersive and inviting; ready-to-use lessons are interspersed with exercises, samples, and examples for application.

 

 

Killing Sustainability: Blunt Truths about Corporate Sustainability/Social
Responsibility Failures and How to Avoid Them

By Lawrence M. Heim, BA ’85, Life Member

Heim stares down the green corporate buzzwords of the day: sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR), setting out to find out if these concepts really mean anything. Among other arguments, he writes that “sustainability” is ambiguous, that corporations are plagued by “short-terminism,” and that the existence of environmental audits isn’t the same as good and effective environmental audits. There are some big signs of progress with how corporations are thinking about environmental protection, Heim notes, but there is still a long way to go.

 

Through the Eyes of Nursing: Educational Reform at the University of Texas School of Nursing

By Barbra Mann Wall, BS ’71 and Billye J. Brown, BS ’53

In this ambitious effort, Wall and Brown take a sweeping look at how UT’s School of Nursing changed over the course of more than a century. The book opens with the first nursing school in Galveston, Texas, and traces how the programs, faculty, and educational initiatives evolved across multiple decades. They identify the ebbs and flows of certain trends, categorizing them neatly across chapters like centralization, decentralization, and consolidation. The book is also peppered with instructive vignettes, like the experience of a student nurse.

 

White Witch

By Larry D. Thompson, BBA ’62, JD ’64, Life Member

White Witch is the sixth legal thriller by former trial lawyer Thompson. The Jamaican Maroons, descendants of slaves, once fled into the interior mountains of the Caribbean island and waged a guerrilla warfare campaign on their former colonial overlords.  Years later, multinational conglomerate Global American Metals has arrived on the scene, bent on extracting precious resources from their home. A relationship between GAM’s head of security and a member of the Maroon clan, a 300-year-old treaty, and rumors of a “white witch” conjured from her centuries-old grave all come into play in this captivating story.

 

Yours Faithfully, J.A.
By Gary B. Borders, MA ’87, Life Member

Borders tells the story of H.B. Fox, a small-town Texan, prolific newspaperman, and indefatigable columnist who wrote for country newspapers in their idyllic heyday. His columns, often authored under pseudonyms, landed him plum positions and syndication in as many as 150 newspapers. Iconoclastic, candid, and biting, Fox was adept and versatile, musing on farming issues one day and taking potshots at rival editors or Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev the next. Yours Faithfully is the biography of a larger-than-life, philosophical, and funny Texan who was armed with nothing more than a shrewd mind and a sharp pen.

 

Steeples of Texas

By Melissa Macatee, BBA ’85, Life Member

In preparation for this photobook, Macatee traversed the vast state of Texas and crisscrossed its far-flung outposts to find and photograph a collection of church steeples. The architecture, style, and age of each church run the gamut, as do their locations. From Amarillo to Terlingua, each church steeple has its own story. Steeples of Texas makes for more than just a coffee table book—beyond the wide pages and glossy photos is a compelling and distinct story of Texas and its small towns.

 

101 Things I Learned in Advertising School
By Tracy Arrington, BS ’97, and Matthew Frederick

Arrington and Frederick tactfully distill years’ worth of institutional knowledge in the field of advertising into the latest installment of the bestselling 101 Things I Learned series. From inspirational quotes by Blaise Pascal and Henry Ford (“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”) to bona fide object lessons (“The six elements of a print advertisement” and “Emote with color”) the authors provide an easily digestible, illuminating look at their world for advertising students and professionals alike.

 

The Trinity Knot
By DonnaLee Overly, BA ’05

The Trinity Knot is a graphic, gripping novel of sexual harassment that will jolt the reader’s conscience. In this adults-only piece of women’s contemporary fiction, protagonist Gabby King finds herself growing apart from her boyfriend, who is unfaithful and distant. Her world is shattered when she is sexually assaulted by a man she trusted. As she struggles to recover, she stays mum about the traumatic experience, making it all the more painful, and unexpectedly strikes up a romance with her harasser.

 

Mindset for Success: Shut Up Your Inner Critic and get the Life You Want

By Jack M. Allen, BJ ’82, Life Member

This guide provides readers with the tools to get from self-doubt to success. Drawing from multiple disciplines, Allen offers a handy, no-nonsense framework for achieving the “good life.” One of his key tenets for doing so is management—of time and energy but also stress, money, and relationships.  He also writes about balancing priorities, positive attitudes, and the power of confidence and conviction. His book, tightly packed and thoroughly organized, offers a streamlined reading experience, actionable pieces of advice, and opportunities for self-engagement.

 

Auroras, Petroglyphs, and Pagans

By Jeff Ransom, BS ’62, MA ’65, PhD ’67, Life Member

In his book, Ransom, a plasma physicist, presents research conducted on petroglyphs, or ancient rock art, from every habitable continent. Because the art is similar in each case, Ransom suggests that the artists were all drawing the same long-gone auroras they witnessed as they gazed upon the same sky. Importantly, Ransom argues, these auroras helped form and solidify ancient pagan beliefs—that the auroras moving across the sky were the gods above in heaven, to be feared and worshipped.