The President's Page - January
26, 2000
Books to Lighten Long Winter Nights
As winter settles in here in the Northeast, the thought of staying indoors and reading a good book becomes increasingly appealing. My own reading selections are often based on suggestions from family, friends and colleagues. I asked members of the faculty committee that advises me on appointments and advancements as well as faculty salaries to provide me and you with some reading suggestions.
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Josiah Ober (Classics). One of the wittiest books I've read in a while is Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (editors), Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler. The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age. This by turns angry and tongue-in-cheek collection of essays blasts some big holes in the pretensions of leading cultural icons of left and right alike. The underlying argument is profoundly serious: Contemporary business is now so skillful at marketing that it is capable of making just about any cultural trend, no matter how seemingly outrageous, into a salable commodity. This capacity has created wealth for many businesses and fame (as well as wealth) for certain "counter-cultural" individuals. But it also renders sustained dissent to the dominant culture increasingly difficult; the dissenting voice is now quickly appropriated, packaged as a new commodity, and marketed to consumers eager to buy into the next hot trend. Can democracy actually exist without the capacity of dissident voices to remain outside the dominant culture for longer than the nanosecond it takes for the market to find a niche for them? This is, I think, one of the really big questions that we, as a nation and as a culture, will be confronting in the next decade.
Harvey Rosen (Economics). The Reader by Bernhard Schlink begins as a typical coming-of-age novel, with a teenaged boy being seduced by an older woman. But the setting is postwar Germany, and the woman's experiences during the Holocaust take the story in very unexpected directions. The book deals movingly with the themes of guilt, memory and forgiveness.
William Russel (Chemical Engineering). My recent reading is rather eclectic (or, more honestly, erratic), including amusing fiction such as Time's Arrow, or The Nature of the Offence by Martin Amis and well-known nonfiction such as A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr. Perhaps most memorable was Rising Tide by John M. Barry, an engrossing account of the great Mississippi flood of 1927. It provides a wonderful description of the disaster informed by the sociology of the Delta region, a historical perspective on the role of the corps of engineers, and ample interpretation of the event's political import from New Orleans to Washington.
Gertrude Schupbach (Molecular Biology). I am a very unorganized reader who enjoys reading a wide range of books, from classics to mysteries, and from science-based reports to poetry. Recently I enjoyed rereading some of Virginia Woolf's novels and was particularly moved by To the Lighthouse. I also enjoyed reading the book Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior by Jonathan Weiner, which describes research into issues of learning and memory using fruitflies as a model system. This book struck a very good balance between describing the science in terms that are easy to follow while still providing much insight into the questions, hopes and problems of scientists.
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To these recommendations from my colleagues, let me add a fascinating "double trio" of books that I read over the holidays. The first of these trios came from the Penguin/Viking/Lipper series of short biographies of famous people by famous writers. I read the biographies of Proust (by Edmund White), Joyce (by Edna O'Brien) and Mozart (by Peter Gay). When Ken Lipper first described this series to me, I was skeptical that the lives and creativity of great artists could be dealt with meaningfully in two hundred pages. I was wrong. The second trio of books is joined by a common setting. One was Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. I thought this an unlikely subject, but the author, Mark Kurlansky, provides a fascinating and wonderfully written tale about the secret Newfoundland fishing grounds of the ancient Basques, how cod became a critical source of protein for Europeans, and the only too human story of how human folly turned abundance into scarcity. The second book, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston, is a historical novel that centers around the life and career of Joey Smallwood, a longtime premier of Newfoundland, which was the last of the Canadian provinces to give up colonial status and join the Canadian confederation. Finally, I turned rather belatedly to E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, The Shipping News. This sometimes comical and sometimes sad tale of a wonderfully woven group of characters is also set in Newfoundland and is remarkably resonant of this intriguing place. This last trio of books left me with a strong desire to revisit Newfoundland, which I have not seen for thirty years.
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