Your March 2026 reads

3/13/2026 By | Staff , Cornellians

This month’s featured titles by A&S alumni and faculty include an evolutionary look at dating, a Christian work on inner peace and a queer love story.

Bonded by Evolution

Paul Eastwick ’01

Subtitled The New Science of Love and Connection, this nonfiction work by a professor at the University of California, Davis, parses psychology research for a general audience, with some self-help lessons woven in.

Part of Eastwick’s mission is to challenge decades-old findings in the field of evolutionary psych that cast heterosexual dating and mating in a Darwinian light: that men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and romance is a zero-sum game.

Such notions aren’t just unproductive, the Arts & Sciences psychology alum argues—they have been hijacked by an incel culture and a “manosphere” that promotes misogyny and even violence.

“This book is for anyone who has felt that this popular scientific story of human mating is bleak—that if you look at it too directly or internalize it too deeply, you could become overwhelmed with cynicism and quit the whole gross spectacle,” he writes.

The Search for Shalom

Will Dickerson ’80, PhD ’92

Dickerson – who earned a master’s of divinity degree from Princeton as well as a doctorate in medieval history from Cornell after his A&S history undergraduate degree – is a pastor who spent more than three decades with One Mission Hungary, a nonprofit based in Budapest, where he also taught English at a secondary school.

He previously penned The Fingerprint of God: Reflections on Love and Its Practice. His latest work is described as “not a self-help book” in the struggle against the anxiety of the modern age, but rather a guidebook toward shalom, the Hebrew word for peace.

Middle Spoon

Alejandro Varela ’01

“The novel explores the beautiful complexity of unorthodox, progressive family dynamics with tenderness and humor in equal measure,” says Kirkus, calling Varela’s work a “touching yet provocative queer love story about defying societal expectations.”

The story unfolds as a series of letters from a heartbroken man to the former lover who recently dumped him. But he’s been devastated by the end of a polyamorous relationship with a younger man, and is penning the letters as a coping mechanism at the behest of his therapist.

Varela’s debut novel, The Town of Babylon, was a finalist for the National Book Award; Publishers Weekly named his short story collection, The People Who Report More Stress, one of 2023’s top works of fiction.

The Future Is Foreign

Hilary Holbrow, PhD ’17

Holbrow, who earned a doctorate in sociology on the Hill, is an assistant professor of Japanese politics and society at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Her nonfiction work delves into how Japanese companies are coping with the steep decline in the nation’s native-born population, and the impacts of those efforts.

She argues that although labor shortages are inducing firms to hire more immigrants and women, not all employees benefit equally from the shift.

“Japanese women’s enduring overrepresentation in low-status clerical roles reinforces gender biases that hold all women back,” says the publisher, Cornell University Press.

Haunted by the Civil War

Shirley Samuels

Samuels is the Litwin Professor of American Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her latest nonfiction book, from Princeton University Press, is subtitled "Cultural Testimony in the Nineteenth-Century United States". In it, she studies the work of the era’s leading authors, artists, and others to explore why the Civil War continues to haunt America.

As she puts it in the introduction: “In other words, why does a series of often inchoate battles fought more than 160 years ago continue to be debated as though the victory or the loss contained something like the soul of the country?”

Samuels mines answers in the works of writers like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; statesmen including Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass; the paintings of Winslow Homer; early photography; and illustrations in news media of the day.