The Best Faculty Books to Buy for Recent Columbia Graduates

College or graduate school may be over, but a lifetime of reading awaits. From James Shapiro's The Playbook, which is about the Federal Theatre Project, a Works Progress Administration program that, from 1935 to 1939, staged over a thousand productions in 29 states; to the novel, Long Island, the sequel to Colm Tóibín’s much-loved Brooklyn; Keeping the Faith, Brenda Wineapple's account of the Scopes Trial; and Hisham Matar's novel, My Friends, about a relationship that traverses revolution and safety, as well as family and exile.

Columbia professors have recently published a wide range of books. Below is a sampling of great gift ideas for graduation season.

George's Daughter

By Carol Becker

Dean Emerita of the School of the Arts Carol Becker has written a new book, George’s Daughter,  which is both memoir and essay. Becker, still a professor at SoA, tells the tale of her beloved, but domineering and racist father in post-World War II Brooklyn. The family lived in Crown Heights, which, at the time, was where survivors from concentration camps settled and built new lives. In the following years, racial and religious discrimination again came to the fore, and Becker found herself increasingly at odds with her out-of-touch father. When he disapproved of her new romantic partner, a rupture threatened to ruin the family forever.

Read a Columbia News interview with Professor Becker about the book.

We're Alone

By Edwidge Danticat

The essays gathered in We’re Alone by Edwidge Danticat, Wun Tsun Mellon Professor of the Humanities, trace a loose arc from childhood to the pandemic and recent events in Haiti. The pieces include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, and Gabriel García Márquez that explore several themes—environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience. From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat moves from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art are her reliable companions and guides through both tragedies and triumphs.

Read a Columbia News interview with Professor Danticat about the book.

Harold Arlen and His Songs

By Walter Frisch

Harold Arlen and His Songs, by Walter Frisch, the H. Harold Gumm/Harry and Albert Von Tilzer Professor of Music, is the first comprehensive book about the music of one of the great song composers of the 20th century. Arlen wrote many standards of the American Songbook—including "Get Happy," "Over the Rainbow," "Stormy Weather," "Come Rain or Come Shine," and "The Man That Got Away"—which today rank among the best known and loved. Frisch places these and other songs in the context of a long career that took Arlen from Buffalo, New York, to Harlem's Cotton Club, Broadway stages, and Hollywood film studios. Even with their complex melodies, harmonies, and formal structures, Arlen's tunes remain accessible and memorable. As Frisch shows, he blended influences from his father's Jewish cantorial tradition, his experience as a jazz arranger and performer, and peers like George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Irving Berlin. Arlen always emphasized the collaborative nature of songwriting, and he worked with the top lyricists of his day, including Ted Koehler, Yip Harburg, Johnny Mercer, and Ira Gershwin. Harold Arlen and His Songs is structured around these and Arlen's other partnerships, analyzing individual songs as well as the shows or films in which they appear. The book also treats Arlen's performances of his own music as a vocalist and pianist, through numerous recordings and appearances on radio and television. A final chapter explores the interpretations of his songs by great singers, including many who worked with him, among them, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald.

Read a Columbia News interview with Professor Frisch about the book.

The Stadium

By Frank Guridy

Stadiums are monuments to recreation, sports, and pleasure. Yet from the earliest ballparks to the present, stadiums have also functioned as public squares. Politicians have used them to cultivate loyalty to the status quo, while activists and athletes have used them for anti-fascist rallies, Black Power demonstrations, feminist protests, and much more. In The Stadium, Frank Guridy, Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, recounts the contested history of play, protest, and politics in American stadiums. From the beginning, stadiums were political, as elites turned games into celebrations of war, banned women from the press box, and enforced racial segregation. By the 1920s, these arenas also became important sites of protest as activists increasingly occupied the stadium floor to challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, and more. Following the rise of the corporatized stadium in the 1990s, this complex history was largely forgotten. But today’s athlete-activists, like Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe, belong to a powerful tradition in which the stadium is as much a place of protest as of pleasure. 

Read a Columbia News interview with Professor Guridy about the book.

Liberty, Equality, Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution

By Anne Higonnet

In 2017, Anne Higonnet, Barbara Novak Professor of Art History at Barnard, was checking footnotes for an essay she was writing when she came across a cryptic catalog entry from the Morgan Library & Museum. It indicated that the Morgan owned a complete set of extremely rare and revolutionary fashion plates on the history of costume. “Very specialized scholars were unaware of the location of any complete set of these plates, so it seemed unlikely to me,” she said. “But the Morgan is only a subway ride away, so I went to investigate.” To her astonishment, the museum did indeed have a full set of engravings from the Journal des Dames et des Modes, a groundbreaking Parisian style magazine that began publishing in 1797, after the French Revolution upended European society, including fashion. The result of Higonnet’s research is Liberty Equality Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution.

In the book, Higonnet examines the lives of Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, one of the most beautiful women in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, a muse of intellectuals. After surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, they dared sartorial revolt. Together, Joséphine and Térézia shed the underwear cages and massive, rigid garments that women had been obliged to wear for centuries. Instead, they wore light, mobile dresses, cropped their hair short, wrapped themselves in shawls, and championed the handbag. Juliette made the new style stand for individual liberty. Their erotic audacity conquered Europe, starting with Napoleon. Everywhere a fashion magazine could reach, women imitated the news coming from Paris—one of the fastest, most complete changes in clothing history. Two centuries ahead of its time, this fashion revolution was rolled back after only a decade by misogynist rumors of obscene extravagance.

Read a Columbia News interview with Professor Higonnet about the book.

Polis

By John Ma

The ancient Greek polis, or city-state, was a resilient and adaptable political institution founded on the principles of citizenship, freedom, and equality. Emerging around 650 BCE and lasting until 350 CE, it offered a means for collaboration among fellow city-states and social bargaining between a community and its elites—but at what cost? In Polis, John Ma, chair of the Classics Department,provides a new history of the origins, evolution, and scope of the early Greek city-state. He gives an account of its diverse forms and enduring characteristics over the span of a millennium. Charting the spread and development of poleis (the plural of polis) into a common denominator for hundreds of communities from the Black Sea to North Africa, and from the Near East to Italy, Ma explores the polis’s achievements as a political form offering community, autonomy, prosperity, public goods, and spaces of social justice for its members. Ma also discusses how, behind the successes of civic ideology and institutions, lie entanglements with domination, empire, and enslavement. His narrative draws widely on historical evidence, weighs in on scholarly debates, and gives new readings of Aristotle as the great theoretician of the polis.

Read a Columbia News interview with Professor Ma about the book.

My Friends

By Hisham Matar

As a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Libya, Khaled hears a short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat. Khaled has the sense that his life has been changed forever by the story. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that takes him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh. This is how My Friends, the new novel by Hisham Matar, a professor of English and Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard, begins. While in college, Khaled starts to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, where he is seriously injured, and unable to leave Britain, much less return to Libya. He cannot tell his mother and father back home what has happened, on tapped phone lines, as it would expose them to danger. When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face-to-face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the short story, he begins the deepest friendship of his life. The friendship eventually forces Khaled, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.

Read a Columbia News interview with Professor Matar about the book.

American Diva

By Deborah Paredez

What does it mean to be a diva? A shifting, increasingly loaded term, the word “diva” has been used to both deride and celebrate charismatic and unapologetically fierce performers like Aretha Franklin, Divine, and the women of the funk rock band Labelle. In American Diva, a blend of criticism and memoir, Deborah Paredez, chair of the Writing Program at School of the Arts, unravels the enduring fascination with divas, and explores how they have challenged American ideas about feminism, performance, and freedom. American Diva journeys into Tina Turner’s performances, Celia Cruz’s command of the male-dominated salsa world, the revival of Jomama Jones after a period of exile, and the excellence of Venus and Serena Williams. Recounting how she and her mother endlessly watched Rita Moreno’s portrayal of Anita in West Side Story, and how she learned much about being bigger than life from her Tía Lucia, Paredez chronicles the performers who not only shaped her life, but expressed the aspiration for freedom among brown, Black, and gay communities. Paredez also traces the evolution of the diva through the decades, dismayed at the mid-aughts’ commodification and juvenilizing of its meaning, but eventually finding the diva’s lasting beauty and power.

Read a Columbia News interview with Professor Paredez about the book.

The Playbook

By James Shapiro

From 1935 to 1939, the Federal Theatre Project staged over 1,000 productions in 29 states that were seen by 30 million (or nearly one in four) Americans, two thirds of whom had never seen a play before. At its peak, the program employed more than 12,000 struggling artists, some of whom, like Orson Welles and Arthur Miller, would soon be famous, but most of whom were ordinary people eager to work again at their craft. The project resulted from a moment when the arts, no less than industry and agriculture, were thought to be vital to the health of the country, bringing Shakespeare to the public, alongside modern plays that confronted the pressing issues of the day—from slum housing and public health to racism and the rising threat of fascism. The Playbook by James Shapiro, Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature, takes readers through some of the project’s productions, including a groundbreaking Black production of Macbeth in Harlem, and an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s anti-fascist novel It Can’t Happen Here, which opened simultaneously in 18 cities, underscoring the Federal Theatre’s wide range and vitality. But this once-thriving Works Progress Administration relief program did not survive, and has left little trace. The Federal Theatre was the first New Deal project to be attacked and halted on the grounds that it promoted un-American activity, sowing the seeds not only for the McCarthyism of the 1950s, but also for our own polarized times. 

Read a Columbia News interview with Professor Shapiro about the book.

Long Island

By Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín, Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities, has written Long Island, a sequel to his novel, Brooklyn, which features, once again, Eilis Lacey. Eilis is Irish, and married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island; a huge extended family. It is the spring of 1976, and Eilis is now 40, with two teenage children. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new home, she has not returned in decades. One day, an Irishman comes to the door, asking for Eilis by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child, and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it, but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. What Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this news is at the heart of Tóibín’s new novel.

Read a Columbia News interview with Professor Tóibín about the book.

Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation

By Brenda Wineapple

“No subject possesses the minds of men like religious bigotry and hate, and these fires are being lighted today in America,” said attorney Clarence Darrow in 1925, as hundreds of people descended on the town of Dayton, Tennessee, for the trial of a schoolteacher named John T. Scopes, who was charged with breaking the law by teaching evolution to his biology class in a public school. Brenda Wineapple, an adjunct professor in the Writing Program at School of the Arts, explores how and why the Scopes trial quickly seemed a circus-like media sensation, drawing massive crowds and worldwide attention, in her book Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation.  Darrow, in his defense of Scopes, said that people should be free to think, worship, and learn. William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic nominee for president, argued for the prosecution that evolution undermined the fundamental, literal truth of the Bible, and created a society without morals, meaning, or hope. Wineapple examines the early years of the 20th century—a time of racism, intolerance, and world war—to illuminate, through this pivotal legal showdown, a seismic period in American history. At its heart, the Scopes trial dramatized conflicts over many of the essential values that define America—and continue to divide Americans today.

Read a Columbia News interview with Professor Wineapple about the book.