Alum Authors 2020

Winner of the GOLD Nonfiction Book Award presented by the Nonfiction Authors Association!

Speaking Out on Governance presents a range of viewpoints concerning the role of today's corporation and its board of directors. The author engages in candid discussion with subject matter experts including boardmembers, corporate attorneys, academics, institutional investors, regulators, and activists. These interviews of leading authorities in the corporate governance arena provide the reader with unique insight into the vitally important but often misunderstood role played by the board.

Deborah Hicks Midanek discusses perspectives regarding what directors of businesses actually do and should do; the true motivations and concerns of the various parties seeking to influence corporate behavior; legal issues surrounding the board; and the key similarities and differences of opinion that may help improve effectiveness of all parties and increase board and director effectiveness. This book is essential reading for corporate directors and would-be directors, senior managers, attorneys, consultants and anyone interested in what drives organizational behavior.

But science showed that her method taught only skimming, with disastrous effects on comprehension--a fact Wood was aware of from early in her career. Fudging test results, and squelching critics, she founded a company that enrolled half a million. The course's popularity endured even as evidence of its shortcomings continued to accumulate. Today, as apps and online courses attempt to spark a speed-reading revival, this engaging look at Wood's rise from mission worker to marketer exposes the pitfalls of embracing a con artist's worthless solution to imaginary problems.

This book proposes that the performance of archival research is related to the experience of tourism, where an individual immerses herself in a foreign environment, relating to and analyzing visual and sensory materials through embodiment and enactment. Each chapter highlights a particular set of tangible objects including: pocket diaries, portraits, drawings, magic lanterns, silhouettes, waxworks, and photographs in relation to actresses, authors, and artists such as: Elizabeth Inchbald, Sally Siddons, Marguerite Gardiner the Countess of Blessington, Isabella Beetham, Jane Read, Madame Tussaud, and Amelia M. Watson. Ultimately, operating as an archival tourist in my analyses, I offer strategies for thinking about the presence of women artists in the archives through methodologies that seek to connect materials from the past with our representations of them in the present.

A look into the tantalizing secrets of Florence's Palazzo Rucellai.

House of Secrets tells the remarkable story of Palazzo Rucellai from behind its celebrated façade. The house, beginning with its piecemeal assemblage by one of the richest men in Florence in the fifteenth century, has witnessed endless drama, from the butchering of its interior to a courtyard suicide to champagne-fueled orgies on the eve of World War I to a recent murder on its third floor. When the author, an art historian, serendipitously discovers a room for let in the house, she lands in the vortex of history and is tested at every turn--inside the house and out. Her residency in Palazzo Rucellai is informed as much by the sense of desire giving way to disappointment as by a sense of denial that soon enough must succumb to truth. House of Secrets is about the sharing of space, the tracing of footsteps, the overlapping of lives. It is about the willingness to lose oneself behind the façade, to live between past and present, to slip between the cracks of history and the crevices of our own imagination.