Legislative Politics in the Arab World: The Resurgence of Democratic Institutions
Guilain Denoeux (government), Abdo Baaklini and Robert Springborg
Lynne Reinner Publishers Inc.
This is the first comprehensive, comparative analysis of modern Arab legislatures. The vitality it reveals in Arab parliaments, and the significance thereof, is one of the overlooked stories of politics in the 1990s, the authors contend. Guilain Denoeux and his colleagues draw on their extensive experience as scholars and project consultants to show how legislatures have contributed to the process of democratic transition throughout the Arab world. The book includes detailed case studies of Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, Yemen and Egypt. The first people mentioned in the acknowledgments are Katherine Charbonnier ’97, Omar Sánchez ’98 and William Barndt ’99, “for their first-rate research assistance.”

Alaska’s Copper River Delta
Riki Ott ’76
Artists for Nature Foundation/University of Washington Press
In the foreword to Riki Ott’s book, Anne and Paul Ehrlich write: “There’s a feeling in the North that’s now hard to find on most of the rest of Earth, a feeling that human beings have not yet completely dominated the landscape.” Alaska’s Copper River Delta, lavishly illustrated with paintings, photographs and drawings by 22 artists, comes as close as a book can to evoking that feeling. Ott, who has lived in Cordova, Alaska, since 1985, is executive director of the Copper River Watershed Project and a fiber-arts designer. Her text describes the natural history, climate, habitats and human activities in the largest wetlands on the Pacific coast of North America. An appendix covers the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill that “devastated Cordova, economically and spiritually”—an event about which Ott is regularly quoted in national media.

A Little Pregnant: Our Memoir of Fertility, Infertility,
and a Marriage
Linda Carbone and Ed Decker ’75
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999
In alternating chapters Carbone and Decker offer unflinching accounts of how nearly 10 years of fighting “the fertility wars” affected their psyches and their relationship. Insightful, sometimes self-mocking, by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, this is a story of self-discovery by two quirky observers—she an editor, he a humor and opinion writer—who explore the emotional and medical issues of a couple increasingly desperate to have a baby. It includes a section on their unsuccessful attempt at a private adoption before they finally gave up altogether—and then unexpectedly conceived and had a daughter. Recommended reading for couples, parents, fertility patients and people who have desperately wanted something they couldn’t have.