Faculty's List of "Must-Read" Books for Summer--Part III
The CSJ asked several professors what books they'd recommend to the College community for this summer's reading. Here's the third installment of their suggestions. Happy reading.
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is a very funny and wise book about writing; it's as entertaining as it is instructive. I'd also suggest Lamott's Operating Instructions, which is her hilarious and uncompromisingly honest journal of her son's first year and the pressures of single parenting. (Friends of mine who have kids have told me that this is the only book they've ever read that talks about what the first year of parenting is really like.) I'd also recommend William Zinsser's On Writing Well, a clear, honest, and very readable book about how to avoid the things that keep bright people from being good writers.
A must-read book is Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action. Lawyers, big corporations, poisoned well water, lawsuits ... it has it all, and is extremely well written. It reads like a mystery novel, and you will not be able to put it down. Plus it is by a local author!
Choosing to Lead: Women and the Crisis of American Values by Constance H. Buchanan. In this 1996 book, Buchanan argues that contemporary women leaders can learn from U.S. women reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who broke free of restricted social roles as they articulated a new vision for the country. A look back and forward at women who contribute to U.S. public policy.
A Hedge Away: The Other Side of Emily Dickinson's Amherst by Daniel Lombardo. In short sketches, local curator Lombardo paints a lively picture of the Connecticut River Valley we rarely see--an area of struggling immigrants, eccentric visionaries, and craft opportunists. Emily Dickinson described her hometown as "plain, whole and permanent and warm." Lombardo's book confirms that nineteenth-century Amherst was indeed that and more.
Multiculturalism by Charles Taylor with commentaries by others; and Mapping Multiculturalism, edited by Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield.
Black Sea by Neal Ascherson: A kaleidoscopic account of the peoples, communities, kingdoms, and empires that have inhabited the shores of the Black Sea, from Scythians to the Soviets and beyond. A journalist with a command of Russian and Polish, Ascherson combines deep reading with firsthand experience and comes up with an elegantly written and thoroughly engaging portrait of the Black Sea region through history. Perfect summer reading for the adventurous.
The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians by W. Bruce Lincoln: Not groundbreaking, but good, old-fashioned narrative history. It's got scope.
The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh: A compelling, beautifully written novel (in English) by one of South Asia's best new writers. Ghosh chronicles the lives of two families, one in Calcutta, and one in London, from World War II to the present, exploring the complex interactions of personal relationships, history, memory, and the imagination in creating and erasing the "shadow lines," including political boundaries, that we draw between people and nations. Many novels have been written about the partition of India into the two nations of India and Pakistan, but this novel is about the division of Bengal into an Indian state and what is now Bangladesh.
Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Short Stories, translated from the Bengali by William Radice. The poet Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, was the first short story writer in an Indian language. His stories from the 1890s, well represented and beautifully translated in this volume, are among the great short stories of world literature, and deserve to be rediscovered. In these stories Tagore depicts the lives of men and women from rural Bengal at the turn of the century with compassion and the vision of a great humanist.
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