The Garamond Agency

Lisa

Jamie Kreiner

Jamie Kreiner is a historian of the early Middle Ages. She teaches at the University  of Georgia and her courses cover Europe and the Mediterranean in the late antique and medieval periods. Her research focuses on narrative, cognition, and the interplay between science and religion, and animals. She is especially interested in the quieter forces that shape ethical systems — forces that were not always purposeful, individual, or human.

Jamie Kreiner’s work has been awarded prizes from the Medieval Academy of America, the American Society for Environmental History, the Society for French Historical Studies, the Agricultural History Society, the University of Georgia, and the Whiting Foundation. And her work has been supported by several grants and fellowships, including a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University and a Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

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Moving the Needle

The dynamics of the current tight labor market have gotten a good deal of coverage, but what is missing from the conversation is any discussion about the widespread social effects of today’s employment landscape. Given that the effects of the opposite trend – high unemployment and joblessness – are widely believed to have led to persistent poverty and its associated social costs, this is particularly surprising.

In Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor, Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs propose that today’s tight labor market is a critical and unmatched opportunity.  As communities that have been blocked from the labor market are now gaining access, they are benefitting in unprecedented ways from the economic expansion that has previously been out of reach.  And some of these benefits may persist even after the inevitable changes in the unemployment numbers.

As labor markets tighten, hiring managers have no choice but to give a chance to job candidates who would otherwise be kept out of the labor market.  And when workers have more options, unpredictable hours and wages are no longer sustainable. The implications go well beyond improved financial profiles, as changes to families, neighborhoods, and communities reflect the benefits of better jobs, better working conditions, and the ability to plan for a different future.

Moving the Needle is an overdue look at the social implications of today’s changing labor market, and a call to consider ways that better labor practices might make some of these advances permanent. It is a call to understand the current economic climate in the broadest possible way.

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Sleeping Beauties

There are all kinds of successful life forms – animals, plants, even genes – whose success was delayed for millions of years. The first ants, for example, go back 140 million years, but ants did not begin to branch into today’s more than 11,000 species until forty million years later. Mammals with various lifestyles – ground-dwelling, tree-climbing, flying or swimming – originated more than 100 million years before they became successful. And a family of saltwater clams had to wait for 350 million years before it became well enough established to diversify into the many species that thrive today.

These life forms are the sleeping beauties of biological evolution. They cast in doubt truths about success and failure that we hold dear. And they lead us to question the role that the quality of a new life form – or of any other innovation – plays in its success.

In Sleeping Beauties, evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner explores findings about evolution that molecular biology has recently revealed, and applies them to understanding how biological evolution creates new solutions to life’s problems. New work in the biological sciences ­– some of it no more than a decade old – is turning much of what we think is fundamental to evolutionary innovation on its head. By exploring a four-billion-year-long record of innovation in biological evolution, Wagner discovers the often-surprising rules that govern which innovations succeed and which fail.

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The Most Crooked River in the World

The Kankakee River was once the crookedest river in the world, flowing for 250 miles, but coming to its end at the Des Plaines River only 95 miles away from where it started.  At one time it drained one of the largest wetlands in North America.  But over time its channel was altered, to straighten its path and to allow acres of cropland to be drained for development. Its many pools and bogs, swamps and marshes disappeared as the “problem” they presented to agricultural interests was solved by engineering solutions. Advocates for draining and dredging made – and sold – the argument that the wetlands were a wasteland and that “improvement” was  inevitable.

Lost in this process were vast regions that were rich in wildlife; this moisture-filled ecosystem had long been a diverse engine of biodiversity and a source of sustenance for centuries from trapping, hunting, and fishing as well as from tourism.  Sometimes referred to as the “Everglades of the North,” the wetlands of the Kankakee are an underappreciated treasure.

In The Most Crooked River in the World: The Waters of the Kankakee and the Nature of Time, Jon Coleman sets out to help us understand what happened to the Kankakee by turning back the wheels of time and reversing the history of the river as if to run a movie of its life story backwards.  It’s a daring move that puts the changes that were imposed on the Kankakee, and the changes that might be considered to remediate some of their impact, in a new and startling light.

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Harnessing Grief

The inspiring story of a mother who took unimaginable tragedy and used her grief as a force to do good…

When Maria Kefalas’s daughter Calliope was diagnosed with a degenerative, uncurable genetic disease, the last thing Maria expected to discover in herself was a superpower. She and her husband, Pat, were head over heels in love with their youngest daughter, whose spirit, dancing eyes, and appetite for life captured the best of each of them.

When they learned that Cal had MLD (metachromatic leukodystrophy), their world was shattered. But as she spent time listening to and learning from Cal, Maria developed the superpower of grief. It made her a fearless warrior for her daughter. And it gave her voice a bell-like clarity—poignant and funny all at once.

This superpower of grief also revealed a miracle—not the conventional sort that fuels the prayers of friends and strangers but a realization that, in order to save themselves, Maria and Pat would need to find a way to save others. And so, with their two older children, they set out to raise money so that they, in their son PJ’s words, could “find a cure for Cal’s disease.”

They had no way of knowing that a research team in Italy was closing in on an effective gene therapy for MLD. Though the therapy came too late to help Cal, this news would be the start of an unexpected journey that would introduce Maria and her family to world-famous scientists, brilliant doctors, biotech CEOs, a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback, and a wise nun, and it would also involve selling 50 thousand cupcakes. They would travel to the FDA, the NIH, and the halls of Congress in search of a cure that would never save their child. And their lives would become inextricably intertwined with the families of 13 children whose lives would be transformed by the biggest medical breakthrough in a generation.

A memoir about heartbreak that is also about joy, Harnessing Grief is both unsparing and generous. Steeped in love, it is a story about possibility.

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