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Spring means the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books heads to campus. It’s also when UCLA Today celebrates faculty and staff authors. The books featured here are only a few of the many interesting titles published in the past year by faculty and staff. Don’t miss the Times’ annual book extravaganza. The event will be 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. April 29 and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. April 30. The Times expects more than 370 authors and 131,000 book fans. Tickets are required to attend indoor panel events and are available free of charge at all Ticketmaster locations until 5 p.m. Thursday, April 27.

Husband-and-wife authors krystina Castella and Brian Boyl discovered the alphabet in nature. Look for “B” above in the vein of an ivy leaf (left), a leaf fiber (top center), fungus on a tree stump (bottom center) and a pink dahlia (right).

“Discovering Nature’s Alphabet” (Heyday Books, 2005) by Brian Boyl, visiting assistant professor of animation, and Krystina Castella, UCLA Extension instructor

While hiking in Southern California’s Joshua Tree National Park six years ago, Boyl and his wife Castella snapped a photo of two Joshua trees growing several yards from each other, both in the shape of a perfect “Y.” This prompted a little game in which the two avid hikers looked for letters of the English alphabet in nature. The only requirement: The “letters” had to be formed naturally, untouched by human hands.

 The photo of Joshua trees became the first of 2,000 such images made by couple in their cross-country travels. “It took us three years to find all the letters, ‘Q’ being the hardest one,” Castella said. Their beautifully designed book, which contains at least two photographs of each letter and an index explaining where each letter was found, has spawned a Web site, www.discoveringnaturesalphabet.com, that offers discussion points and curriculum support for parents and teachers.

 “Our goal is to get people out there — hiking and looking for the letters or even just stopping and looking at things differently,” Castella said. “Everything is not necessarily what it appears to be. It could be whatever you want it to be.”

-- Wendy Soderburg

“Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary” (Princeton University Press, 2006) by Patrick J. Geary

The written record on human origins is fairly large. So why do women often play a marginal role in the origin myths of Western civilization? In this insightful study, history Professor Patrick J. Geary tells us how the fairer sex was frequently kept out of origin folklore by male authors struggling with deeply ambivalent personal attitudes toward women.

The author shows us how ancient and medieval authors, regardless of religious tradition or region, wrote about women – whether warring Amazons or the Virgin Mary, enchanting prophetesses or Frankish noblewomen. Men were much more ambivalent toward women during the Christian Middle Ages, however, than in Greco-Roman antiquity.

This book tells us a lot about women, their beginnings, their present and the future. Although there were ideological reasons for the exclusion of women from male discourse, the practice itself was rooted in deep historical tensions and contradictions, which Geary brilliantly unravels.

In the medieval idolatry of religions, “there is room for a man or a woman, but not both,” writes Geary, providing an explanation that sounds surprisingly relevant to our own times: “Conceptualizing family as a social group in which men stand at the center cannot but diminish the women, and conversely women who stand in the center cannot but diminish the men.”

--Ajay Singh

“The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution” (Harvard University Press, 2006) by Gary B. Nash, emeritus professor of history and director of the National Center for History in the Schools

“The Forgotten Fifth” is full of “what-ifs”: What if the Americans, like the British, had offered freedom to slaves willing to fight in the Revolutionary War? What if the founding fathers – specifically Washington, Jefferson and Madison – had done more to abolish slavery?

While it’s clearly a book brimming with ideas, what makes “The Forgotten Fifth” so readable is the way it is peopled with the stories and anecdotes of ordinary and extraordinary black Americans. We meet Mum Bett, the Massachusetts slave who sued for freedom; Ona Judge and Hercules, the runaway slaves of George Washington; Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; James Forten, a powderboy on an American warship who became a sailmaker, employed an interracial crew of 30, and emerged as a leader in Philadelphia. 

Nash challenges the idea that tolerance of slavery was a necessary compromise – an inevitable step on the road to freedom rather than a fatal misstep that ultimately led to 600,000 dead in the Civil War.

--Anne Pautler

“The Search for Beauty in Islam: A Conference of Books” (Rowan and Littlefield, 2005) by Khaled Abou el Fadl, Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Fellow of Islamic Law

This volume was a 10-year labor of love for the prolific young law professor and Islamic scholar, who, in his spare time, enjoys contemplating and critiquing the contemporary Muslim condition.

In “Search for Beauty,” Abou el Fadl inhabits the minds and imaginations of scholars from ancient times to explore an idea that is central to Islam but has been lost in the maelstrom of modern life: the value of beauty.

In his book, Abou el Fadl wrestles with the questions, “Where is beauty, and what is beauty, and what does it mean to have a beautiful soul, a beautiful marriage, a beautiful relationship with your maker?”

“I’ve gotten messages from people of all faiths – Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Christians and Hindus – saying ‘Thank you’ for allowing us to see a side of Islam that no one sees,” Abou el Fadl said.

A shorter version of “Search for Beauty” was published in 2001 as “A Conference of Books.” Sadly, this new volume has been overlooked amid the shower of media attention on  Abou El Fadl’s “The Great Theft,” which urges moderate Muslims to wrest control of their faith from extremists.

--Anne Burke

“The Bridge to Humanity: How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene” (Oxford University Press, 2006) by Walter Goldschmidt, emeritus professor of anthropology

Our craving for love and belonging is an essential part of our genetic heritage, says author Walter Goldschmidt.

This 93-year-old cultural anthropologist has studied native cultures from Alaska to East Africa, written more than 100 articles and books, and won prestigious awards during a career that spans more than seven decades. While “The Bridge to Humanity” will most likely not be his last book, it is “the culmination of my career,” the professor said. “Everything else is prologue.”

Jumping into the “nature versus nurture” debate, Goldschmidt refutes Richard Dawkins’  evolutionary theory about “the selfish gene” -- that genetic determinism is the central force driving human behavior. Dawkins’ theory, said Goldschmidt, fails “to recognize that people are inherently as eager to have love and be loved as they are to compete and fight. We have to put this need for love into the equation to understand human behavior. Without it, we treat ourselves as being nothing more than biological automatons.”      He calls this primal need for affection “affect hunger.”

“The bottom line is not who gets the most money or the largest house, but who gets this affection that we all need,” the anthropologist said.

--Cynthia Lee