Recent works by alumni and faculty

From class clown to
corner office
For most people, high school is a difficult time of personal growth and trying to fit in with others, all while getting through term papers, tests and the prom. Almost everyone is happy the experience ends with graduation.

But Wilma Bor Davidson '65 (CLAS), '65 (ED) says high school really never ends.

In her book Most Likely to Succeed at Work (St. Martins' Press), co-authored with Jack Dougherty, Davidson outlines how the world of work can be viewed as an adult version of high school, where the A student is serious and prepared for any task, the teacher's pet echoes the boss' sentiment, the cheerleader's enthusiasm gets staff motivated to do a tough job, and the geek still asks the right questions and solves the problems.

"Our idea was to crack the code of what makes some people successful and others not, in the workplace. As we looked around, it just hit us," Davidson says. "The class president is in the big corner office, the class clown is in the cafeteria making fun of someone, the gossip is busy spreading the word and the party animal is out entertaining clients."

As professional communication consultants working with a variety of businesses, the authors had the goal of outlining communications skills that would be recognizable to anyone in the workplace.

"At work as in high school, we're still trying to convince people we're worth being liked, being trusted and being included," Davidson says. "Using high school examples, we thought people could not only recognize themselves but also look at other types of people they'd like to be like and model their behavior after them. They could pump up the skills that help, downplay those that don't."

She cites President George W. Bush, who had an early career history of underachievement and changed his behavior. "You can look at someone like George Bush, the typical underachiever, and with the events that occurred around 9/11, see the class president, the A student emerge."

The book is set up in two parts, with the first section describing the high school characters, their positive and negative traits and how to deal with them at work. The second section outlines lessons for survival in an organization using this new information.

"We tried to stage our book somewhere between Dilbert and the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People so it would be entertaining and useful," Davidson says. "It's common sense but not common practice."
- Kenneth Best

Resilience and Courage: Women,
Men and the Holocaust
Nechama Tec
(Yale University Press)
Documenting history by interviewing eyewitnesses is a dual-edged sword. Memories are filtered by time and sometimes distorted by experiences. It requires patience, determination and careful listening to extract accurate information that can stand up to the scrutiny of historians.

Nechama Tec's expertise as an interviewer and determined researcher of accurate information allows her to succeed as a historian in her fifth book about the Holocaust. Tec, a professor of sociology at UConn's campus in Stamford, opens a new area of historic perspective in Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust.

Previous works on the Holocaust generally have centered on the overall Jewish experience without regard to the detailed history of how women and men each reacted and coped in concentration and death camps. Tec, herself a survivor of the camps, extends her prior studies of altruism, cooperation, compassion and resistance among Jews at the time and uncovers gripping stories of how men and women were affected differently.

The author's careful research and probing questions adds to the documentation of the Holocaust and earned Tec the 2002-03 National Jewish Book Award.

Guerrilla Season
Pat Hughes '77 (CLAS), '80 M.A.
(Farrar Straus Giroux)

The first novel from Pat Hughes tells the story of a 15-year old Missouri boy during the Civil War and his struggle to live up to the expectations of others while facing difficult decisions at a time of uncertainty and danger.

Hughes' central character is Matt Howard, the son of a father from the North and a mother from the South. After his father dies, Matt tries to be the leader of the household even as his mother insists that the family remain neutral in the war. Complicating matters is that Matt's best friend, Jesse - modeled after Jesse James - may be following in the footsteps of an older brother who joined the infamous Confederate guerrilla raiders led by William Quantrill.

Guerrilla Season explores the questions of family, friendship and loyalty with a careful attention to historic detail and passionate writing.