Peter Quinn studied for a doctorate in history that he never finished, and his literary career - which overlaps with three decades as a political and corporate speech-writer - retains a deep curiosity about the past.

But it's not only history of the verified, annotated variety; it is history also imagined and remembered.

In Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower, Cynthia Cooper quickly reveals herself to be surprisingly open-hearted about the multi-billion-dollar WorldCom fraud that she exposed in 2002.

The author, who will be speaking at Augustana College on Thursday, treats her subjects as people rather than villains, which plays into what she hopes to accomplish with her book.

"I felt strongly that there were such valuable lessons that could be gleaned and shared, particularly with the next generation," she said in an interview last week. "With professionals, but also with students."

Stacy A. Cordery didn't want to rescue Alice Roosevelt Longworth from her reputation.

The literary works of author Elizabeth McCracken include a novel about an unusual romance between a 26-year-old woman and a boy 15 years her junior; a period piece exploring the 30-year friendship between two vaudeville performers; and a short-story collection that includes tales of a wife who allows her tattoo-artist husband to use her body as a canvas, and a man who grows his hair irrationally long so his comatose spouse can cut it upon her awakening.