Volume six of the faculty reading list includes an array of scholarly works penned by Northeastern University professors, such as history professor Bill Fowler’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated book about the American Revolution, which was released today, and College of Arts, Media and Design Dean Xavier Costa’s look at an unorthodox installation by a controversial Chinese artist.

 

 

Title: “An American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783”

Author: Bill Fowler, distinguished professor of history

Description: Most people believe the American Revolution ended in October 1781, after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. In fact, the war continued for two more traumatic years. Fowler’s book chronicles this tumultuous time, from Yorktown until the British left New York in November 1783. At the center of this trying time was a remarkable speech by General George Washington to his troops encamped at Newburgh, N.Y., which quelled a brewing rebellion that could have overturned an emerging nation.

 

Title: “Lead With Cash: Cash Flow for Corporate Renewal”

Author: Harlan Platt, professor of finance and insurance

Description: This book takes an entirely new look at how companies should be managed. It argues that managers need to focus on how corporate decisions affect the firm’s cash. The authors suggest that companies that follow this paradigm are more likely to survive tumultuous times, provide higher returns to their investors and provide a better work environment.

 

 

 

Title: “Ai Wei Wei: With Milk, Find Something Everybody Can Use”

Author: Xavier Costa, dean of the College of Arts, Media and Design

Description: This book explores a series of installations that visual artists and architects from around the world created in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona. It contains photos and an interview with Ai Weiwei, one of the leading and most controversial figures of Chinese contemporary art, who filled the indoor Pavilion pool with coffee and the outdoor one with milk — two uncommon mediums in architectural construction.

 

 

Title: “Reduced-Order Modelling for Flow Control”

Author: Gilead Tadmor, professor of electrical and computer engineering

Description: The book focuses on the physical and mathematical foundations of model-based turbulence control: reduced-order modeling and control design in simulations and experiments. Leading experts provide elementary self-consistent descriptions of the main methods and outline the state of the art. Areas covered include optimization techniques, stability analysis, nonlinear reduced-order modeling, model-based control design as well as model-free and neural network approaches. The wake stabilization serves as unifying benchmark control problem.

 

Title: “Beauty and the Beast: Human-Animal Relations as Revealed in Real Photo Postcards, 1905–1935”

Author: Arnie Arluke, professor of sociology and anthropology

Description: From fairy tales to photography, nowhere is the complexity of the relationship between human and animals more apparent than in the creative arts. In this book, Arluke explores this relationship through the unique lens of 350 photo postcards from 1905 to 1935. He examines the variety of roles animals played in society, from pets and laborers to symbols and prey, and discuss the contradictions, dualisms and paradoxes of our relationship to animals, illustrating how they were distanced, embraced, commoditized and anthropomorphized.