Peter L. Arango '68 has recently published two books: America's Best Kept College Secrets: An Affectionate Profile of Outstanding Colleges and Universities, and The Christmas Quilt, a novel.

Chandra D. Bhimull '98, coeditor, Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline (University of Michigan Press). Bhimull, a professor at Colby College, helped edit this collection of academic essays exploring the intersection of history and anthropology.

Scott Carney '00, The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers (William Morrow). Carney exposes the underground industry in human tissue, covering everything from the source of medical cadavers and skeletons, to pregnancy surrogates, for-profit blood banks, kidney harvesting, clinical-trial guinea pigs, kidnapping for adoption, and the trade in human hair for wigs.

E.L. Doctorow '52, All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories (Random House). Doctorow never disappoints. Here, he prefaces a collection of masterful pieces with thoughts on how stories, as opposed to novels, begin in writers' minds.

Larry Enright '72, Four Years from Home. Enright's unconventional mystery novel pits two brothers against one another. One is the family's black sheep; the other can't seem to do anything wrong.

David Martel Johnson '61, Three Prehistoric Inventions that Shaped Us (Peter Lang). Johnson posits that modern human culture springs from three specific developments: the domestication of animals, the invention of language, and religious consciousness.

Ben Keene '00, Best Hikes Near New York City (Falcon Guides, Globe Pequot Press). Packed with maps, tips, and pictures, this guide covers forty hikes within an hour's drive of the Big Apple.

Adam Lazarus '04, Super Bowl Monday: The New York Giants, the Buffalo Bills, and Super Bowl XXV (Taylor Trade Publishing). Lazarus chronicles one of the all-time great Super Bowl contests: the personalities, the drama, and also the backdrop-the start of the Persian Gulf War.

Eric D. Lehman '94 and Amy Nawrocki, A History of Connecticut Wine: Vineyard in Your Backyard (History Press). Pilgrims landing in New England in 1621 found native grapes, but it took generations of hybridization to make the Northeast's vineyards succeed. Lehman and Nawrocki profile the vintners and their fans.

Andrew Richmond '96, Equal in Goodness: Ohio Decorative Arts 1788-1860 (Decorative Arts Center of Ohio). This catalog of handmade objects wows like the best Antiques Roadshow ever. Curator Richmond provides an expressive introduction that sets the historical background.

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara '88, Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World (University of New Mexico Press). A history professor at Tufts University, Schmidt-Nowara broadly explores the rise and fall of slavery in Latin America, as well as the question of why slavery persisted in Cuba until 1886 and Brazil until 1888.

Christina Shea '86, Smuggled (Black Cat). The author of the well-received Moira's Crossing offers another elegantly written historical novel. This one follows Eva, who is smuggled into Romania at the age of five to escape World War II. She becomes an adult struggling with lost identity, lost family, and the chance to rescue a child as lost as she was.

Tad Troilo '90, Neon-Colored Spider Webs (Markham Road Press). When Stewart, uncool brainiac, loses his grandfather's prized baseball at school, his world suddenly becomes much more complicated in this sprightly novel that will appeal to young adults and the not-so-young alike.

Andrew Welsh-Huggins '83, Hatred At Home: al-Qaida on Trial in the American Midwest (Swallow Press). Welsh-Huggins, legal affairs reporter with the Associated Press, tells the true story of three men--a Somali immigrant, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen, and an African American--overheard in a coffee shop in Columbus, Ohio, venting about the war in Afghanistan. The Bush administration's decision to charge each on unrelated terrorism charges sparked unease. Were these really terrorists, or merely talkers? Welsh-Huggins investigates the implications.

"Getting to school is the first test," Brooke Hauser '01 writes in The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens (Free Press). "School" in this case is the International High School, a melting pot of immigrants in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. The students find themselves in the confusing hallways of a strange big-city institution where the challenges range from language to alien customs like prom. Guiding them: teachers who are as diverse as they are. In a riveting journalistic narrative, Hauser follows a number of students through the 2008-09 school year and tells us their fascinating personal stories in the process.