DAVE BRADLEY (M.S.Ed. ’79), Management by Essay. Kino Publishing. The author is executive director of a child welfare agency, La Paloma Family Services Inc., in Tucson, and a member of the Arizona Legislature. His book is a collection of letters and essays he wrote to his agency staff over a 10-year period. His hope is that “others may find them useful in meeting the challenges of their everyday work life.” Proceeds from the book will go to his nonprofit agency to provide housing for children who are aging out of the system and have no other place to live. david@lapalomakids.org

DEBORAH MOORE CLARK ’75, O Come, Let Us Bow Down and Worship, Smyth & Helwys. The book targets pastors, ministers of music and other church staff ministers, liturgists, worship committees, worship focus groups, worship workshop participants and seminary students engaged in learning about, planning and leading Christian public worship within free church traditions and beyond. It is for anyone desiring to look critically at their own worship practices. www.helwys.com

LAVERNE DICKENS ’86, Simon Says, Strivers Row. Writing under the pseudonym Collen Dixon, Dickens offers a coming-of-age tale combining urban drama and political intrigue. It’s the story of Alexander Baxter, a young man from D.C.’s most notorious ghetto and destined to a life of crime before being saved by the mayor, who sees potential in him. He eventually becomes Washington’s golden boy, until his world is turned upside down and he must return to the past he once escaped in order to protect his family. www.villard.com

RITA JAGET ELLIS ’91, Heaven’s Whisper: A Journey Through Crisis, Xulon Press. An engineering graduate, Ellis takes readers on a journey of self-discovery by unveiling some hard truths about life, suffering and death. Inspired by three decades of watching her father lose the battle to multiple sclerosis, her book pulls no punches about the devastating effects of MS on both victim and family. In seeking answers to the question Why?, Ellis delves into God’s place and purpose in human suffering and offers a message “about getting perspective under the most trying of circumstances.” www.XulonPress.com

JOHN A. FAHEY (emeritus faculty), and JOHN A. FAHEY JR. ’72, Maverick on the School Board, B&J Books. Serving on the Virginia Beach City Public School Board for nine years, the senior Fahey confronted a veteran board and a division with some serious challenges, which he says included school buses that did not meet federal safety standards, older elementary schools lacking adequate physical education facilities, and a curriculum weak in foreign language, science and math. The authors write about bucking the opposition and battling to change the status quo. jafahey@whro.net

HILVE AYERS FIREK ’87 & ’88, 10 Easy Ways to Use Technology in the English Classroom, Heinemann. Practical, accessible and, most of all, doable, this guidebook helps teachers quickly learn how to use computers, including Web sites, presentation packages and concept mapping software. It also offers a fresh look at audio, video, TV and movies. Teachers will discover how all of these technologies can be valuable tools for reinforcing the study of literature, interpreting and evaluating text, and conducting research. Readers can download project templates and access resources at a companion Web site. www.heinemann.com/shared/products/E00547.asp

JAMES GIBSON (M.B.A. ’74), Anasazi Quest, Pentacles Press. The third in a series, the novel follows Caleb Stone and his beloved Anasazi princess, Shanni. Forced out of their ancestral home in Mesa Verde by drought, Shanni and her people, the Huastecs, suffer deprivation and death in the desert as they cross the border into Mexico on their journey to the mythical “Center” of their Mayan civilization in the Yucatan peninsula. But Mexico is in the throes of revolution, and all of Stone’s skills are needed for the Huastecs to survive attacks by bandits and soldiers. www.pentaclespress.com

FARIDEH GOLDIN ’76 (M.A. ’95, M.F.A. ’02), Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman, Brandeis University Press. Portraying a little-known corner of Jewish life, Goldin offers a passionate and painful account of her childhood in a poor household and her emigration to the U.S. She was born in 1953 into a Jewish community living in an increasingly hostile Islamic state – prerevolutionary Iran. Her memoir chronicles her childhood, her extended family and the lives of the women in her community. She writes of sadness, such as the time her father burned the books she had hidden in violation of his command that she not “corrupt herself, giving all of us a bad name,” but also of a child’s wonder as she savors the scenes and scents of Jewish Iran. FaridehD@aol.com

SARA NAIR JAMES (M.A. ’83), Signorelli and Fra Angelico at Orvieto: Liturgy, Poetry and a Vision of the End-time, Ashgate Publishing Ltd. With the book’s publication, the author, known as Sara James Laster during her student days, concludes 14 years of study on the frescoes depicting the Apocalypse and Last Judgment in the Cappella Nuova in the Cathedral of Orvieto and related liturgical texts in the cathedral archives and the Vatican Library. She presents the decoration as an integrated whole, a program complex in iconography, message, source material and theory, and, through a detailed response to Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and a moralized reading of classical legends, explains how the events of the end-time join the literary narratives to form a sermon on salvation through penance. The book is also a study in the theory and techniques of the visual representation of religious belief and its reception by the laity. www.ashgate.com

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