Good books, rain or shine

With the long days of summer ahead, PAW offers some summer reading ideas, culled from new books by alumni.

The Sisters Antipodes: A Memoir — Jane Alison ’83 [aka Jane A. Shumate] (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). When the author was 4 and living in Australia with her mother, a teacher, and father, an Australian diplomat, her parents met an American couple and had affairs. Both couples had two girls about the same age. Soon the couples divorced and the fathers traded places. Alison moved with her mother, sister, and stepfather to the United States. It would be seven years before Alison saw her birth father again. Alison describes the implications of this shocking split and the competition between her and one of her stepsisters for their fathers’ love. Kirkus Reviews called the memoir “an incomparable personal story exquisitely, stunningly told.” Alison is the author of Natives and Exotics and The Love-Artist and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Miami.

Click here for a PAW story on Alison’s novel Natives and Exotics.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street — Justin Fox ’87 (Harper Business). The author tells the story of the rise and fall of the belief that financial markets are rational, reliable, and capable of regulating themselves. He traces the development of that idea and the thinkers who constructed economic theory and the financial landscape, from Irving Fisher to Milton Friedman and Robert Merton. Fox is the business and economics columnist for Time magazine.

(Photo by Allison Downing)

New art by Weatherford ’84 on display in Los Angeles

The work of Los Angeles-based artist Mary K. Weatherford ’84, including “January cave,” right, is featured in an exhibit at ACME., a gallery in Los Angeles, through April 18. Curated by New York painter Stephen Westfall (who has lectured at Princeton), the exhibit, titled “The Ballad That Becomes an Anthem,” also includes works by Mary Heilmann, Chris Martin, Rebecca Morris, Amy Sillman, and Westfall. Weatherford’s paintings of vines and caves have been called “complex ruminations on spatial depth” by C Magazine.

For Nelson ’77, a whirlwind tour with Shakespeare and Chekov

(Photo by Joan Marcus)

During the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s production of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” this winter, Mark Nelson ’77, center, playing the Lord of Sicilia, was “trying to keep order in the court” between Hermione (Rebecca Hall) and Leontes (Simon Russell Beale). A member of the Bridge Project, the new classical repertory company comprised of American and British actors, Nelson is on a five-month world tour performing “The Winter’s Tale” and Tom Stoppard’s new version of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.”

The Bridge Project (created by British director Sam Mendes, actor Kevin Spacey, and Joseph Melillo, executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music) is headed to The Singapore Repertory Theatre March 26-31; the Edge in Auckland, New Zealand, April 8-12; Teatro Espanol in Madrid April 18-29; the Ruhr Festival in Germany May 3-13; and the Old Vic theater in London May 23-Aug. 15. The group completes its tour at the ancient theater of Epidaurus in Greece Aug. 21-22.

Felix ’97 stars on Web series

Actor Todd Felix ’97, who has appeared on TV in CSI, Felicity, ER, and The Mentalist, is taking on a new medium as a star of the Web series My Two Fans. The show follows the life of an average late-20’s single woman, Kate Maxwell (played by Barret Swatek) as she rebounds from a broken heart with the help of her two fans — Franklin (Felix) and Teddy (Bill Escudier). As fans, not friends, they insert themselves into Kate’s life, root her on through life’s ups and downs, and clean up her dating disasters. The series launched its first webisode March 9. To watch the show, visit www.mytwofans.com.

Programming note: Reid ’66 to debut ‘Sick Around America’

“Sick Around America,” T.R. Reid ’66’s documentary follow-up to 2008’s “Sick Around the World,” will debut on Frontline March 31 at 9 p.m. ET on PBS stations. The program takes a look at health care in the United States, focusing on the uninsured or underinsured and highlighting problems that small businesses face as they try to insure their employees.

Items for this post were prepared by Katherine Federici Greenwood and Brett Tomlinson.

MFA Boston displays works collected by Horace Wood Brock *75

When it comes to art in the era of $17-million Damien Hirst sharks, Horace “Woody” Brock *75 is a contrarian. “Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection,” an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, includes many works that Brock has bought since earning his Ph.D. in mathematical economics. The works include Louis XIV clocks, George II chairs, and Tiepolo drawings — each of superb design, workmanship, and quality.

“The kinds of things I have loved have become ever more unfashionable since I began collecting 30 years ago,” Brock writes in “The Truth about Beauty,” his essay in the MFA’s catalog. “Beauty per se is out, and ‘interesting’ shock-art is in. As for my love of elegance, God forbid! This is today’s form of ‘the love that dare not speak its name.’ As a result of such changing tastes, there has never been a better time to acquire works of great beauty and elegance.”

The fruits of Brock’s countless hours visiting collections, working with dealers, and studying art — mostly English, French, and Italian works from 1675-1820 — can be seen in Boston until May 17.

After Princeton, Brock founded Strategic Economic Decisions, a consulting group that advises governments, corporations, and private investors on economic risk. Of the prospects of financial gain as an art collector, he says, “I realized as an economist that attempting to ‘beat the market’ or find bargains would prove ill-fated.” By Richard Trenner ’70

Works on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, include at top, Resurrection of Christ, a drawing by the Italian artist Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo; and at left, Louis XVI mounted vase (beau bleu vase Daguerre ovale or cassolette à monter), from the French Sèvres factory, about 1786-88, with mounts attributed to Pierre Philippe Thomire.

Richard Trenner ’70, who taught writing at the Woodrow Wilson School for 10 years, is a Princeton-based writer, editor, and communication consultant.