July 7, 2004: Features

Professors’ picks
PAW’s now-annual reading recommendations

Illustration by Michael Witte '66

For the second time, PAW presents a summer reading list with recommendations by Princeton professors. Contributors were asked to recommend any books – old or new – that would interest an educated but general audience. CLICK HERE for the PAW PLUS article offering more suggestions.

D. GRAHAM BURNETT JR. ’93, assistant professor of history, Program in History of Science:

• Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville (1851). Through a stygian veil of smoke, fire, and salt spray Melville offers lighting – illuminations on a vast dissecting theater where nature and knowledge lie open on a heaving stage. The result is an oceanic anatomy of man and beast penned in the language of cetology, the science of whales. As Ishmael puts it: “To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of this world; this is a fearful thing.” C.L.R. James’s republished 1953 study, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (University Press of New England, 2001), which was penned under detention and presents Moby-Dick as a stirring meditation on tyranny, terror, and the fragile membranes of American national identity, helps this classic novel feel very timely indeed.

• De Rerum Natura, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius (Latin and English edition: Loeb Classical Library, 1997). Anyone interested in the history of science will take pleasure in this long poem which lays out the world view of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. By his account, knowledge of the laws of nature promises nothing less than freedom from “the terrible fears of our minds.” Here, then, is a physics intended to help its students achieve “katastematic” pleasure, the pleasure of equilibrium, achieved when we are without pain or unfulfilled desire.

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LAWRENCE DANSON, professor of English:

• A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell. Published between 1951 and 1975, the 12 novels that make up the four “movements” of Powell’s Dance offer a leisurely chronicle of English life, from Great War through swinging 60s. (Some readers might substitute “excruciating” for “leisurely,” but I find it addictively funny and touching.) The characters – a motley lot from aristocracy through the seedy margins of Soho bohemianism, left-wing politics, journalism, and university teaching – appear, disappear, and reappear, newly married or divorced or surprisingly partnered, rising and falling, always in new configurations, as they move with dreamlike unpredictability in and out of the life of Nick Jenkins, the most observant if colorless of first-person narrators. (Available in a four-volume paperback set from University of Chicago Press.)

• Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays, by James Richardson ’71 (Ausable Press, 2001). The aphorist walks a dangerous line between wisdom and greeting card, unprotected by anything except wit and a love of language. One false step leads directly to the self-help guru’s phony sagacity. But when he’s on, his one- or few-liners make common words glitter and mere prose dance like poetry. These are the aphorisms that amuse, puzzle, and pierce, that make you wish you’d said that, and happy that someone did. Richardson, a Princeton professor of English, dares 500 of them, of which 490 work like charms. At random: “If you change your mind, you are free. Or you were.” And, “Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear.”

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CARYL EMERSON, A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures:

• The Russian Moment in World History, by Marshall T. Poe (Princeton, 2003). Poe’s fascinating thesis: that Russia, while looking like Europe in certain external features, was in fact an ambitious and successful West Eurasian state, one defined by Europe largely in terms of the European military threat. For centuries, Russians have been burdened with myths that are largely untrue – that they are predisposed to authoritarian government, to cruel and unusual expansionism, and to messianism – and for most of them, Russia’s “Easternness” has been held to blame. But it was not the “Mongol Yoke” that barbarized Russia. It was Russia’s proximity to unprecedentedly aggressive European states, which always managed to modernize first. Perpetually invaded, Russia was forever catching up with those enemies; her strategies for doing so were “autocracy, command economics, cultural insularity, and an emphasis on arms.”

• How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism, by Steven Marks (Princeton, 2002). Marks devotes chapters to Russian-style terrorism, Kropotkinist anarchism in England, Dostoevskyism in Latin America, Tolstoyanism in India, the Stanislavsky method that influenced Japanese theater, and Russian ballet that conquered the globe. The Russian influence has not been a fixed ideology but rather an attitude, a maximalist style for processing ideas, which has as its base a suspicion of modernization along European lines.

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ROBERT GEORGE, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence:

• The Importance of What We Care About, by Harry G. Frankfurt (Cambridge, 1988). Princeton professor emeritus Harry Frankfurt is one of the great philosophers of our time. He has dedicated himself to philosophy as classically understood: the pursuit of wisdom. For those who lament that contemporary academic philosophy has become too technical and detached from basic questions of human meaning and value, this small, readable book is a breath of fresh air.

• Interpreting Elections, by Stanley Kelley (Princeton, 1983).With a presidential election in the offing, there is no better time to consult this classic study by one of Princeton’s great political scientists. By closely examining two “landslide” elections – Lyndon Johnson’s trouncing of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Richard Nixon’s massive victory over George McGovern in 1972 – Kelley teaches us to be very cautious in “interpreting” the messages voters send when exercising the franchise.

PETER SINGER, Ira W. Decamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values:

• How to Be Good, by Nick Hornby (Riverhead Books, 2002). I fear that I’m the kind of person who comes off badly in this very funny novel about how hard it is to be good nowadays.

• Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream, by Carl Elliot (W. W. Norton, 2003). A fascinating look at the present and future of “enhancement technologies” from Prozac to cosmetic surgery, and the ethical issues that they raise.

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VALERIE SMITH, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature and director of the Program in African-American Studies:

• Unafraid of the Dark: A Memoir, by Rosemary L. Bray (Random House, 1998). This brave and eloquent autobiography describes Rosemary Bray’s path from her impoverished childhood on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s to an editorship at The New York Times Book Review. As one would expect, education plays a central role in her development; Bray describes her teachers and passion for knowledge with wit and an incisive attention to detail. She captures the conflicting messages she receives from her parents, who want desperately for her to achieve what they can barely imagine, and her own ambivalent responses when faced with class privilege. What makes the book especially unusual is that Bray weaves throughout her compelling narrative rigorous and cogent defenses of the welfare system and affirmative-action policies, without which she believes her successes would never have been possible.

• The Price of a Child, by Lorene Cary (Vintage, 1996). Set in antebellum Philadelphia and based on an actual incident, this novel tells the story of Mercer Gray, a fugitive who escaped slavery with two of her three children. The Price of a Child brilliantly evokes the experiences of a woman forging a sense of herself as an individual, a mother, and a citizen within both a community of free black people and the integrated abolitionist movement. This rich and provocative book explores how free black identities are forged out of political movements, in the context of fierce legal battles, in the search for voice on the antislavery lecture circuit and through the struggle for literacy.

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DAVID SPERGEL ’82, professor of astrophysical sciences:

• The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality, by Brian Greene (Knopf, 2004). A sophisticated introduction to many of the deepest questions in physics: What is space? What is time? What are particles? Greene introduces the reader to two great ideas of 20th-century physics: quantum mechanics and general relativity, and brings the reader into the most active debates in 21st-century physics. He discusses some of the most profound questions in physics without recourse to equations and with only a handful of figures.

• Echo of the Big Bang, by Michael Lemonick (Princeton, 2003). Lemonick tells the tale of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a recently launched NASA satellite whose measurements of the leftover heat from the Big Bang rigorously tested current ideas and confirmed our bizarre view of the universe. While introducing the reader to modern cosmology, the book focuses on a small group of scientists at Princeton and the Goddard Space Flight Center. (Truth in reviewing: I am a member of the WMAP team.)

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Your listening pleasure . . .

STEVEN MACKEY, professor of music, suggests three CDs – all of which, he says, have “something of a spiritual vibe”:

Beginnings, by Eight Blackbird (Cedille, 2004). Music with a mystical bent, by a brilliant performing ensemble.

So Percussion, by So Percussion (Cantaloupe, 2004). Hypnotically rhythmic quasi-trance music from another great ensemble.

Le Pasion Segun San Marcos, by Osvaldo Golijov (Hannsler Classics, 2001). An interpretation of the Passion according to Mark.

CLICK HERE for the PAW PLUS article offering more suggestions.