In The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit (Twelve), MICHAEL CANNELL ’82 chronicles the career of race-car driver Phil Hill, a mechanic from California who became the first American-born Grand Prix driver to win the Formula One international championships. Cannell is a former editor at The New York Times.

A former managing editor of Forbes magazine and a former deputy managing editor of The Wall Street JournalSTEWART PINKERTON ’64 explores the Forbes family — including Malcolm Forbes ’41, Steve Forbes ’70, and Christopher Forbes ’72 — and its financial media company in The Fall of the House of Forbes: The Inside Story of the Collapse of a Media Empire (St. Martin’s Press).

Investing in the stock market was regarded as suspect for much of Ameri­can history, writes JULIA C. OTT ’97 in When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Har­vard University Press). An assistant professor of history at The New School for Social Research in New York City, Ott tells how investing in stocks became a common practice in the first three decades of the 20th century, and how the federal government, corporations, and financial institutions campaigned to provide individuals a stake in the economy.

THOMAS BANCHOFF *93 ­provides an over­view of political ­struggles about embryo research in four countries — including the United States — over the last 40 years in Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies (Cornell University Press). He is director of Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs.