Campus booksellers are recording a banner year for UCLA’s prolific authors among faculty and staff. You can find many of their works at the ASUCLA BookZone tent at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in association with UCLA on April 26-27. Come celebrate the written word.

“Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future,” (Houghton Mifflin Company)

“We know that Homo sapiens is not the final word in primate evolution, but few have yet grasped that we are on the cusp of profound biological change, poised to transcend our current form and character.” So writes Gregory Stock, director of UCLA’s Program on Medicine, Technology and Society and member of the advisory board of the Center for Society, the Individual and Genetics. Stock points to the Human Genome Project — the deciphering of the entirety of our genetic constitution — as bringing very close to reality the modification of human biology. Already, researchers are engaged in hundreds of gene-therapy trials, developing expertise that will make possible the manipulation of specific genes to prevent disease, among other benefits. While some still predict we will see peril and turn away, Stock says, “the question is no longer whether we will manipulate embryos, but when, where and how.”

— Judy Lin-Eftekhar

“The Memory Bible: An Innovative Strategy for Keeping Your Brain Young,” (Hyperion)

Ever come out of the mall and wander aimlessly around the parking lot looking for your car? No matter when those tiny plaques and tangles start accumulating in your brain — some speculate as early as our 20s — the time to fight brain-aging is now. Gary Small, Parlow-Solomon Professor on Aging and director of the UCLA Center on Aging and the UCLA Memory Clinic, has put together a battle plan against forgetfulness, complete with tests to rate your memory, mental exercises and advice on memory-protective foods, drugs and treatments. In a highly readable book filled with stories about individuals fighting to retain their memories, Small spells out what the latest research shows about brain function, what happens to our memories as we age and how memory training and mental aerobic exercises can yield encouraging results. “The goal of aerobically working out our brains is to get ourselves to think creatively in order to stimulate, strengthen and enhance our brain cells, to maintain healthy dendrites and extend their branches,” he writes.

— Cynthia Lee

“Awakening the Academy: A time for new leadership,” (Anker Publishing Company, Inc.)

Rising costs, dwindling state support, uncertain revenue and spiraling student enrollment are some of the changes buffeting higher education. How are colleges and universities adapting to these shifts? Not as nimble by nature as quick-moving corporations in reacting to change, universities are bound by traditions of academic freedom and, in UCLA’s case, shared governance. In 1994, the campus, under the leadership of Chancellor Emeritus Charles E. Young, began experimenting with fiscal decentralization. The new model, under which leaders of academic and administrative units would make financial decisions based on costs and revenues, was founded on the philosophy of Responsibility Center Management. Using this experiment as a case study, Wellford W. Wilms, a professor with the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, and Deone M. Zell, assistant professor of management at Cal State University, Northridge, show how a large research university “responds to external demands while safeguarding the very qualities that make a university such a special place.” Their study, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, concludes with specific recommendations on how the process of change can occur smoothly through adaptation and improvement.

— C.L.

“Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives,” (University of Minnesota Press)

By examining the lives of three real Afro-Caribbean women — Nanny, the spiritual leader of a maroon community; Joanna, the mulatto concubine of a Scottish mercenary soldier; and Mary Prince, a fugitive slave who journeyed from Antigua to England — English Professor Jenny Sharpe produces a model for understanding slavery from contemporary Caribbean literature that represents a slave past. Through these women, Sharpe explains how the diasporic experience of slavery enabled black women to claim an authority they didn’t possess in Africa, how concubines empowered themselves through their mimicry of white women, and how less privileged slave women manipulated situations that they were powerless to change. Sharpe’s methodology was based on Toni Morrison’s characterization of her novels as “literary archaeologies” of the slaves who left no records of their lives. “In turning to fictional reenactments of a slave past, I don’t mean to suggest that ‘this is how it really was,’ ” Sharpe says. “Rather, I use fiction, poetry and drama as an entry point into reading the historical records at their limits not only for what they do reveal, but also for what they do not say or cannot represent.”

— Wendy Soderburg

“Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics” (Princeton University Press)

“[Joe] McCarthy, the disgraceful senator, would have been an excellent organizer,” writes Andrew Sabl, assistant professor of policy studies. “If this conclusion confounds partisan biases and ideological categories, so much the better.” In “Ruling Passions,” Sabl discusses current debates in the ethics and theories of democracy and offers implications for political action. He also presents various case studies of individuals — ranging from Everett Dirksen to Martin Luther King Jr. — to demonstrate how distinct political roles contribute to a pluralistic democracy. To pass legislation, elected officials must compromise, “sometimes more compromise than ordinary citizens are comfortable with,” Sabl explains. The effectiveness of civil rights leaders, whom the author calls moral activists, “depends on bearing moral witness, and that requires a certain purity.” Finally, he says, there are grassroots organizers trying to persuade powerless people to stand up for and express their own ideas. “Each is indispensable to a democratic society.”

— Marina Dundjerski

“The Tending Instinct: How Nurturing Is Essential to Who We Are and How We Live,” (Henry Holt and Company)

UCLA Psychology Professor Shelley E. Taylor argues that nurturing others and caring for their needs are as wired into our genes as our aggressive and competitive nature. “The tending instinct is every bit as tenacious as our more aggressive, selfish side,” Taylor writes in her book. “Tending to others is as natural, as biologically based, as searching for food or sleeping.” An internationally renowned scientist in the field of stress and health, Taylor has conducted 25 years of research and analyzed more than 1,000 research studies. “I originally assumed that biology largely determines behavior,” she says, “and so it was a tantalizing surprise to see how clearly social relationships forge our underlying biology, even at the level of gene expression. Chief among these social forces are the ways in which people take care of one another.” People with social support have “younger” stress systems and better protection against major chronic diseases, Taylor writes. Strong ties with family and close friends protect against health ailments, while social isolation increases the risk for all causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, strokes and accidents.

— Stuart Wolpert

MORE FACULTY BOOKS

Also published over the last year: “As the Walls of Academia Are Tumbling Down” (Economica) edited by Werner Z. Hirsch, UCLA professor emeritus of economics, and Luc E. Weber, professor of public economics at the University of Geneva; “A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal” (Fowler Museum) by Allen F. Roberts, professor of world arts and cultures and director of the James S. Coleman African Studies Center, and Mary Nooter Roberts, deputy director and chief curator of the Fowler Museum of Cultural History; “Friendly Enemies: Maximizing the Director-Actor Relationship” (Watson-Guptill Publishing) by Delia Salvi, professor of film, television and digital media; “Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know About Sex, but Were Afraid They’d Ask: The Secrets to Surviving Your Child’s Sexual Development from Birth to the Teens” (Crown Publishers) by Mark Schuster, associate professor of pediatrics and public health, and Justin Richardson, assistant psychiatry professor at Columbia and Cornell; “American Indians and Yellowstone National Park: A Documentary Overview” (National Park Service, Yellowstone Center for Resources) by Peter Nabokov, professor and acting chair of the Department of World Arts and Cultures, and Lawrence L. Loendorf, professor at New Mexico State University; and “Painting the Middle East” (Syracuse University Press) by Ann Kerr, UCLA Fulbright coordinator.