Category: Books

Lauryn Chamberlain (BSJ14)

Four friends. Fifteen years. Who We Are Now is a story of Sliding Doors moments, those seemingly small choices of early adulthood that determine the course of our lives.

It is 2006 and Rachel, Clarissa, Dev, and Nate are best friends, seniors on the eve of their graduation from Northwestern. Their whole lives are before them, at once full of promise and anxiety. Bound to one another as they are, they imagine their closeness will last forever—but things change as they take their first steps away from one another and into adulthood.

Each year is told from one character’s point of view, and in that way, we stride swiftly through their lives. These four friends feel their twenties and thirties flying by, and suddenly small moments fast become regrets or unexpected boons, decisions they’ll spend years wishing they could undo and choices that come to define them. As the foursome endure professional setbacks, deep loss, and creative success, fortunes shift and friendships strain—and it will take a tragic turn of events to bring them together again.

Who We Are Now is a poignant story of epic friendship that jumps boldly through the years, moving at the same unforgiving pace as does that precious, confusing time between college and real life.

Jordan Minor (BSJ14)

Pong. The Legend of Zelda. Final Fantasy VII. Rock Band. Fortnite. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. For each of the 40 years of video game history, there is a defining game, a game that captured the zeitgeist and left a legacy for all games that followed. Through a series of entertaining, informative, and opinionated critical essays, author and tech journalist Jordan Minor investigates, in chronological order, the innovative, genre-bending, and earth-shattering games from 1977 through 2022. Minor explores development stories, critical reception, and legacy, and also looks at how gaming intersects with and eventually influences society at large while reveling in how uniquely and delightfully bizarre even the most famous games tend to be.

Illustrated throughout with retro-inspired imagery and featuring contributions from dozens of leading industry voices, including New York Times bestselling author Jason Schreier (Blood, Sweat, and Pixels; Kotaku), Max Scoville (IGN), Rebekah Valentine (IGN), Blessing Adeoye Jr. (Kinda Funny), and Devindra Hardawar (Engadget), this year-by-year anthology is a loving reflection on the world’s most popular art form.

Frank Sennett (BSJ90)

One of the first novels to explore the implications of the January 6 insurrection, and the infiltration of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys into law enforcement, SHADOW STATE finds the nation’s first Black woman president, Wyetta Johnson, a wounded veteran of the war in Afghanistan, targeted for assassination by racist terror groups.

President Johnson works with Rafe Hendrix, former head of her Secret Service detail and a Special Forces veteran she served with on active duty, to thwart the conspiracy, which features grisly re-creations of terrible events in U.S. history.

The thriller, first in a series featuring Hendrix and Johnson, will be published Feb. 21 by Crooked Lane Books and distributed by Penguin Random House. It will be available in hardcover, ebook and audio formats.

Advance praise: “Fans of stoic and resilient action heroes will be entertained,” Publishers Weekly says. Adrian McKinty, award-winning author of The Chain, calls SHADOW STATE
“An exciting contemporary thriller that is both psychologically astute and action packed.”

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/717325/shadow-state-by-frank-sennett/

David Lumley (MSJ77)

It’s Impossible to Commit to Maybe: a bold guide for business managers provides the how to lessons and proven recommendations for managers of all levels. Told in a first hand to the point manner and in real life examples former CEO Dave Lumley presents key business issues his and others learnings and successful techniques to provide a winning approach to reaching your goals based on almost 4 decades of success at several public fortune 500 private private equity owned and family businesses and a record of seventh straight company turnaround Dave Lumley lays out your choices and the how to steps to help you move forward with confidence.

Laurie Lawlor (BSJ74)

Restoring Prairie, Pond, and Woods: How a Small Trail Can Make a Big Difference is full color nonfiction for readers age 10 and up to be released in April by Holiday House, NY. This is the remarkable story about the cooperative effort in a small southeastern Wisconsin community to clean up an eight-acre abandoned lot. With only a bare-bones budget, a group of volunteers–everyone from local firemen and high school students, to local business owners and Boy Scouts–came together to pitch in to clear invasives, grade the trail, and plant native prairie, woodland, and wetland species. The trail leads through what’s become an outdoor classroom and valued community resource for all ages. In a starred review, Kirkus calls the book: “More than a simple account of a wilderness restoration project. This is activism at its most accessible: the beautiful struggles of a region and community to make a large difference in a small world. A magical and timely story of ecosystems restored to their former glory.” (January 2023)

Robert Drews (BSJ71, MSJ72)

J.J. Werth has lived for his work, allowing career to replace the need for a family or outside interests. So when his company decides to lay him off in favor of someone younger and cheaper, 61-year-old J.J. is at a crossroad. After indulging in a healthy dose of self-pity, he decides to look for answers. Through bonding with Father Thomas, a former Marine and very unlikely priest, J.J. embarks on a journey to find his place in the world and winds up finding so much more.

Ian Douglass (MSJ06)

Before Steve Keirn became one of the most influential trainers in professional wrestling history, he had a one-of-a-kind wrestling career that stretched around the pro wrestling world.

In “The Keirn Chronicles Volume One: The Fabulous Wrestling Life of Steve Keirn,” Douglass helps Steve Keirn tell the story of a young man who appeared to have lost his father to war at a delicate age, and whose subsequent quest to find a suitable father figure led him into a lifelong career in the professional wrestling industry. Keirn became one of the signature faces of Florida wrestling before evolving into one of wrestling’s most irrefutable trendsetters during his time as one half of the pioneering Mid-American tag team known as The Fabulous Ones!

Douglass and Keirn withhold no details with respect to everything from Keirn’s tumultuous childhood to each hair-raising incident that transpired during the first 20 years of his wrestling career. Over the course of more than 400 pages, Douglass helps Keirn elaborate on all of the latter’s interactions and relationships with dozens of legendary professional wrestling figures, including Eddie Graham, Mike Graham, Jack Brisco, Gerald Brisco, Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant and Dusty Rhodes.

This is the backstory behind one of the most unheralded influencers in professional wrestling history!

Michael Chacko Daniels (MSJ68)

In his foreword to the book, Deepak Dalal writes:

“Although Michael Chacko Daniels has lived and written for over five decades in the US, presently in San Francisco – a city at the cutting edge of technology – this little fable shows that his heart still lingers in his beloved India, where he grew up.

The story starts off about a change to vegetarianism and how a member of the Indian Christian community, who loves meat and everything non-vegetarian, must bid farewell to his meat-eating days. But the inner story within the outer story develops into what reads like an Indian folktale. The central characters – the crows, the parrot and sunbird, the people and their offerings made to inanimate deities, and the transcendent transfiguration at the end – evoke the very essence of India.

Adrija Ghosh’s illustrations are of a uniformly high quality, the most appealing of which are her depictions of crows, evocatively conveying the bird’s cunning and resourcefulness. Her work is a perfect accompaniment complementing Daniels’s narrative.”