Bright College Years

"Bright College Years is a wistful trip in a time machine, back to those college years so filled with fun, friendship, and heartache. Travel there with Pessin to a Yale of the early 80s, when a handful of friends thought ever-so-briefly they owned the world."-Scott Johnston, Yale '82, author of Amazon bestseller, Campusland Coming of age doesn't only happen to the young. When a former close friend and rival is murdered, world-weary but still aspiring optimist Jeffrey goes back to the beginning, to those fraught college years at Yale University during the 1980s and to her, to make sense of what happened-only to discover that what needs most making sense of is himself. By turns smart, funny, and heart-wrenching, Bright College Years tracks Jeff and an ensemble cast as they navigate the shortest, gladdest, most complex years of life-and then the rest of it.

The author of "Where the Buffalo Roam" provides an unprecedented portrait of today's college experience as the world of academe goes about reinventing itself, seeking to reconcile new economic realities with our vision of the campus as the gateway to knowledge.

In 1964, when author J. Kirk Casselman applied to Yale College, more than five thousand other secondary school students also applied for admission to one of the 1,300 places in the Yale Class of 1968. Of those applicants, 1,569 were offered admission, for an acceptance ratio of approximately 30 percent. Today, thirty thousand students apply for admission for the same number of places, for an acceptance ratio of just 7 percent. The drastic change in the college application process results in today's students regularly applying to colleges based solely on name and reputation, without knowledge of a school's profile and character. In the case of Yale, at least, Casselman hopes to correct that lack of knowledge. In ... and for Yale, Casselman provides a subjective-and perhaps even impressionistic-view of his association with Yale, its institutions and traditions, and the effects they have had on his life. In this memoir, he recalls his undergraduate years at Yale and his more than forty years of involvement with the university as an alumnus recruiting, interviewing, and counseling prospective and current students. This memoir reflects Casselman's passion and lifelong involvement with Yale and helps applicants and future students to understand the nature of the admission process, the college experience, the institution, and the influence it has on its graduates.

ONE OF WASHINGTON POST'S NOTABLE NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR A bracingly honest exploration of why there are still so few women in STEM fields—“beautifully written and full of important insights” (Washington Post). In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, asked why so few women, even today, achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack set out to find the answer. A successful fiction writer, Pollack had grown up in the 1960s and ’70s dreaming of a career as a theoretical astrophysicist. Denied the chance to take advanced courses in science and math, she nonetheless made her way to Yale. There, despite finding herself far behind the men in her classes, she went on to graduate summa cum laude, with honors, as one of the university’s first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics. And yet, isolated, lacking in confidence, starved for encouragement, she abandoned her ambition to become a physicist. Years later, spurred by the suggestion that innate differences in scientific and mathematical aptitude might account for the dearth of tenured female faculty at Summer’s institution, Pollack thought back on her own experiences and wondered what, if anything, had changed in the intervening decades. Based on six years interviewing her former teachers and classmates, as well as dozens of other women who had dropped out before completing their degrees in science or found their careers less rewarding than they had hoped, The Only Woman in the Room is a bracingly honest, no-holds-barred examination of the social, interpersonal, and institutional barriers confronting women—and minorities—in the STEM fields. This frankly personal and informed book reflects on women’s experiences in a way that simple data can’t, documenting not only the more blatant bias of another era but all the subtle disincentives women in the sciences still face. The Only Woman in the Room shows us the struggles women in the sciences have been hesitant to admit, and provides hope for changing attitudes and behaviors in ways that could bring far more women into fields in which even today they remain seriously underrepresented.

Focus: Choral Music in Global Perspective introduces the little-known traditions and repertoires of the world’s choral diversity, from prison choirs in Thailand and gay and lesbian choruses of the Western world to community choruses in the Middle East and youth choirs in the United States. The book weaves together the stories of diverse individuals and organizations, examining their music and pedagogical practices while presenting the author’s research on how choral cultures around the world interact with societies and transform the lives of their members. Through an engaging series of portraits that pushes beyond the scope of extant texts and studies, the author explores the dynamic realm of world choral activity and repertoire. These personal portraits of musical communities are enriched by sample repertoire lists, performance details, and research findings that reposition a once Western phenomenon as a global concept. Focus: Choral Music in Global Perspective is an accessible, engaging, and provocative study of one of the world’s most ubiquitous and socially significant forms of music-making.

In 1964, when author J. Kirk Casselman applied to Yale College, more than five thousand other secondary school students also applied for admission to one of the 1,300 places in the Yale Class of 1968. Of those applicants, 1,569 were offered admission, for an acceptance ratio of approximately 30 percent. Today, thirty thousand students apply for admission for the same number of places, for an acceptance ratio of just 7 percent. The drastic change in the college application process results in todays students regularly applying to colleges based solely on name and reputation, without knowledge of a schools profile and character. In the case of Yale, at least, Casselman hopes to correct that lack of knowledge. In and for Yale, Casselman provides a subjectiveand perhaps even impressionisticview of his association with Yale, its institutions and traditions, and the effects they have had on his life. In this memoir, he recalls his undergraduate years at Yale and his more than forty years of involvement with the university as an alumnus recruiting, interviewing, and counseling prospective and current students. This memoir reflects Casselmans passion and lifelong involvement with Yale and helps applicants and future students to understand the nature of the admission process, the college experience, the institution, and the influence it has on its graduates.