Tiger Nation
Tigers in Print Julie Cantrell (1995 BACH H&SS, 1997 MAST H&SS) Perennials and Crescendo (HarperCollins) Perennials – Eva Sutherland, known as Lovey, grew up safe and secure in Oxford, Miss., surrounded by a rich literary history and her mother’s stunning flower gardens. A shed fire, and the injuries it caused, changed everything. Her older sister, Bitsy – homecoming queen and the perfect Southern belle who could do no wrong – blamed Lovey for the damage. At eighteen, suffocating in her sister’s shadow, Lovey turns down a marriage proposal and flees to Arizona, carving a satisfying life for herself as a successful advertising executive and weekend yoga instructor. But at forty-five, Lovey is feeling alone and questioning the choices that led her here. When her father insists she come home three weeks early for her parents’ fiftieth anniversary, Lovey is at her wits’ end. She’s about to close the biggest contract of her career, and there’s a lot on the line. Despite the risks, her father’s words, “Family First,” draw her back to the red-dirt roads of Mississippi. Lovey is quickly engrossed in a secret project – a memory garden her father has planned as an anniversary surprise. The landscaper working on it is none other than Fisher, the first boy she loved. As she helps create this sacred space, Lovey begins to rediscover her roots, the power of second chances, and how to live perennially in spite of life’s many trials and tragedies. Crescendo – More than eighty years ago, a musical prodigy with a brilliant mind was born into a poor, uneducated, and abusive
88 LSU Alumni Magazine | Summer 2020
family in rural South Georgia. At three years of age, Fred Allen could play Mozart sonatas on the piano without missing a note. In spite of his obvious talent, Fred’s parents discouraged him, even locking away the piano. Forced to fend for himself through his adolescent years, Fred knew he needed to find a way to rise above his broken background. With incredible effort, and a few miracles along the way, Fred earned acceptance into the Julliard School in New York City. While simultaneously attending Juilliard, Union Theological Seminary, and Columbia University, he directed a local church choir, caught the attention of the music industry, and in the 1960s received numerous Grammy nominations. As his career was taking off, Fred’s wife announced she no longer wanted to raise their daughter in New York City and was heading home to the South. Trying not to think about what could have been, Fred took a job as a high school music teacher in his hometown. Far from the executive suites of RCA and the allure of Broadway, Fred never could have imagined that his new role would not only transform his life but also change an entire community forever.
Barbara Cook Overton (2015 PHD H&SS) Unintended Consequences of Electronic Medical Records: An Emergency Room Ethnography (Lexington Press) Unintended Consequences of Electronic Medical Records: An Emergency Room Ethnography argues that while electronic medical records (EMRs) were supposed to improve health care delivery, EMRs’ unintended consequences have affected emergency medicine providers and patients in alarming ways. Higher healthcare costs, decreased physician productivity, increased provider burnout, lower levels of patient satisfaction, and more medical mistakes are just a few of the consequences Barbara Cook Overton observes while studying one emergency room’s EMR adoption. With data collected over six years, Overton demonstrates how EMRs harm health care organizations and thrust providers into the midst of incompatible rule systems without appropriate strategies for coping with these challenges, thus robbing them of agency. Using structuration theory and its derivatives to frame her analysis, Overton explores the ways providers communicatively and