Alumni Bookshelf

Understanding the High-Functioning Alcoholic
Professional Views and Personal Insights
Sarah Allen Benton (’98)

This is an in-depth exploration of a hidden class of alcoholics. The author challenges the stereotype of the “skid-row” alcoholic by lifting the veil on alcoholics who believe they can hide behind their external successes. This book is intended to inform the audience that being successful professionally or personally and being an alcoholic are not mutually exclusive. Alcoholism may manifest differently in individuals, but all alcoholics have the same disease. Research, interviews and the author’s personal experiences as both a high-functioning alcoholic and professional experience as a licensed mental health counselor are integrated into this comprehensive work.

Girls Against Girls
Why We Are Mean to Each Other and How We Can Change
Bonnie Burton (’95)

People have been shocked by girls’ and young women’s behavior toward each other, reading about how they post vile messages on MySpace, take part in organized physical beatings or call someone names until she quits school or even attempts suicide. Girls have always been cruel to each other, but their methods have become more advanced and calculated. Girl-on-girl cruelty is one of the most pressing issues teen girls deal with today. Bonnie Burton spent months doing research for the book but also has a deep personal connection to the topic. “When I was suffering through school, I distinctly remember the unspoken politics of being a girl,” she writes in the opening author’s note. “You could be making plans with your best friend one week and being given the silent treatment the next. Or some girl you don’t even know might make you the victim of a terrible rumor for no reason at all.”

Well Read and Dead
Catherine O’Connell (’77)

When socialite Pauline Cook returns from Europe in the wake of a disastrous love affair, she finds her apartment in shambles, her accounts ravaged and her best friend missing. A tip from an iconoclastic book club sends her to the dangerous depths of Southeast Asia in search of answers. There she learns there are no boundaries to the time-honored motives of passion, greed and jealousy. “O’Connell’s wry observations on the rich are hugely entertaining,” according to a Chicago Sun-Times review.

Standardization and Digital Enclosure
The Privatization of Standards, Knowledge and Policy in the Age of Global Information Technology
Timothy Schoechle (Ph.D. ’04)

Decades of privatization and deregulation based on unrestrained free-market ideas and practices have now culminated in a meltdown of the global economy. The international standards system that provides the foundation for worldwide technology and trade has also been afflicted with such ideas. In this book, a result of the author’s SJMC doctoral research, he examines the standardization process and establishment of the technical standards that define virtually every artifact of the modern world – from screw threads and paint colors to mobile phones and jet planes.