Alumni Services

September 2015

This month's bookshelf runs the gamut from the the significance of the Second Vatican Council to poetry about love and loss.

1.

Author Nigel Zimmermann
Degree Divinity PhD
Book

The Great Grace: Receiving Vatican II Today

Nigel Zimmermann presents critical reflections from leading Catholic prelates and scholars on the significance of the Second Vatican Council fifty years after it began. These include two senior Cardinals, one of whom is the head of the Congregation of Bishops and the other a member of Pope Francis' new advisory body on reforming the Roman Curia, as well as Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy.

Nigel Zimmermann is also the author of Facing the Other: John Paul II, Levinas, and the Body.

The Great Grace: Receiving Vatican II Today

2.

Author

Fiona Cameron

Degree History and economics
Book

By Heart

On her eleventh birthday, Lucy Simmons dances with Richard Rainey, the man who is about to marry her sister. It marks the end of a bleak and lonely childhood. Lucy feels loved and valued for the first time in her life. All through her adolescence, Richard is, as she tells her best friend, ‘her rock’, her confidant, the one person who’s always there for her.

But once Lucy’s grown up and married to Mark, the relationship with her brother-in-law takes a more sinister turn. Will her marriage and her family survive?

Fiona Cameron is also the author of the Balvaig Trilogy.

By Heart

3.

Author

James Giles

Degree

Philosophy PhD

Book

Sexual Attraction: The Psychology of Allure

How and why does sexual attraction happen? This book is an exploration of the universal yet highly individualized experience of being sexually attracted to another person.

Incorporating interviews, research findings, and excerpts from romantic and erotic literature, lyrics, and film, Sexual Attraction: The Psychology of Allure explores a subject that is central to the human experience and highly relevant not only in personal, intimate interactions but also other relationships as well. Although the causes and effects of sexual attraction have been studied, sexual attraction itself—how we experience others in terms of their sexual attractiveness—remains a neglected, rarely researched topic.

Scholar James Giles presents jargon-free information that is accessible and fascinating to the general reader as well as highly useful and informative to students and researchers in social psychology, sexology, sex and marital therapy, and relationship counseling.

Sexual Attraction: The Psychology of Allure

James Giles's website

4.

Author Russell Jones
Degree MSc Creative Writing, PhD Creative Writing
Book

The Green Dress Whose Girl is Sleeping

Russell Jones’ poems are about love and loss. From terraced flats to outer space, its narrators are trying to make sense of the universe and their position in it. He experiments in form, from sonnet sequences to one-word poems, concrete poetry to haiku, attempting to express the changing world and the variety of life within it.

The Green Dress Whose Girl is Sleeping

5.

Author Stuart Richardson
Degree Business Studies and Accounting
Book

The TRIM course

Fed up with other people running your life? Snowed under by events you can't control?

250 pages of helpful advice on "How to do life better". Packed with practical, easy to follow steps and full colour graphics to help you make those crucial steps up from motivation to achievement.

The TRIM course

Please note

All of the further information links listed are the external websites of the book publisher, the author, or the bookseller. The University of Edinburgh is not responsible for the content and functionality of these sites.