Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson’s Image in His Own Time
by Robert M. S. McDonald (Col ’92)

McDonald, a history professor at the United States Military Academy, examines how Thomas Jefferson was perceived by his contemporaries. He was a divisive figure in his time; his supporters held parades in his honor, his opponents saw him as radical and dangerous. “Jefferson stood as a symbol for his age,” McDonald writes, “appearing to champion a future for which many hoped and others feared.”

How Did This Happen? Poems for the Not So Young Anymore
Edited by Mary D. Esselman (Staff) and Elizabeth Ash Velez

Esselman, the editor of Iris, the UVA Women’s Center magazine, and Velez help readers face “both the insults to the flesh and the injuries to the soul that come with growing older” through poetry. The poets in this anthology cover a wide span from William Shakespeare (“We are such stuff/As dreams are made on”) to Ada Limón (“Say you’d still want this: us alive,/right here, feeling lucky.”)

Fräulein M.
by Caroline Woods (Col ’05)

This novel, set in both 1930s Berlin and 1970s South Carolina, tells the story of two German sisters living very different lives in the era leading up to World War II. One sister works as a cigarette girl in a bar; the other works as a servant for a Nazi family. Woods captures the creativity and turmoil of Weimar Berlin, and the terror as Hitler rises to power.

The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque
by Libby Murphy (Grad ’99)

“War doesn’t make you better. The most you can hope for is that it doesn’t make you worse,” writes Murphy, a professor of French literature at Oberlin College. This sentiment, she finds, is expressed over and over again in texts written during World War I. Murphy argues that in writing, WWI soldiers used sarcasm, humor and satire as a mode of survival, as did veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Flash: The Photography of Ed Roseberry
Edited by Steve Trumbull, photography by Ed Roseberry (Com ’49)

Ed Roseberry made roughly 180,000 images of Charlottesville and the University, starting in the 1940s when he was a UVA student, working for the Cavalier Daily, and then as a professional photographer from the 1950s through the ’70s. The vibrant photos in the book document everything from early-1950s Midwinters in Memorial Gym to Queen Elizabeth II’s UVA visit in 1976.

He Comes in Fire
by Aaron R. Even (Col ’93, Grad ’95)

Even, a graduate of the UVA Creative Writing Program, tells the story of a string of church arsons in this novel set in central Virginia at the turn of the 21st century.  Even’s prose is lyrical yet precise; he sets the book’s elegiac, vaguely violent tone in the first few pages through descriptions like this: “She crushed the season’s last mosquito against her forearm with a kind of sadness, wiping away the pearl of blood.”