New from Rutgers University Press

Worried Sick: How Stress Hurts Us and How to Bounce Back (October 2014), by Deborah Carr, a professor in the Department of Sociology at the School of Arts and Sciences and a faculty member of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research, explores the debilitating effects of stress on the elderly and prescribes techniques for avoiding its unhealthy consequences. (See more on Carr’s research.)

New Jersey’s Postsuburban Economy (October 2014), by James W. Hughes ENG’65, GSNB’69,’71 and Joseph J. Seneca, provides an analysis of the challenges facing the state’s economy as it evolves from a postindustrial economy into a postsuburban digital economy driven by high technology and an internet-based global economy. Hughes, the dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, and Seneca, university professor of economics at the Bloustein School, are the directors of the Rutgers Regional Report series on which their analysis is based.

A Ray of Light in a Sea of Dark Matter (November 2014), by Charles Keeton, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the School of Arts and Sciences, offers readers an accessible explanation of how astronomers probe dark matter, which constitutes 95 percent of the universe. Dark matter is the enormous halo of matter that we do not see but which, acting as a cosmic web, contains the stars and gas that are observable, providing the gravitational pull that keeps the Milky Way, for instance, from flinging apart.

Soldiers’ Stories

In Brothers Forever (Da Capo Press, 2014), Tom Sileo LC’01, SCILS’01 has collaborated with retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel Tom Manion to write the moving account of two close friends, Travis Manion (the coauthor’s son), who was a U.S. Marine, and Brendan Looney, a U.S. Navy Seal. Both young men were killed in action, Manion while serving in Iraq and, three years later, Looney in Afghanistan. They had been roommates at the U.S. Naval Academy and quickly became best friends, and were buried side by side in Arlington National Cemetary. President Obama eulogized them on Memorial Day 2011 for their heroism and sacrifice.

Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War: The Undaunted 369th Regiment and the African-American Quest for Equality (University Press of Kansas, 2014), by Jeffrey T. Sammons RC’71 and John H. Morrow Jr., arrives during the centennial observance of the beginning of World War I to reveal a little-known fact about the Great War. The 369th Regiment, comprising African-American soldiers, was a tenacious unit that served with exceptional valor as it fought for an American principle far from realized for them: the ideal of equality for all.

Navy Crazy (Hansen Publishing Group, 2014) is Michael Aaron Rockland’s memoir, often very amusing, about his time serving as a medic in a locked U.S. Naval psychiatric ward in Yokosuka, Japan, in the mid-1950s. The book is also an interesting look back at military medicine in the postwar era. Rockland, the author of 14 books, is a professor in, and the founder of, the Department of American Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences.