With many people headed to the beach or a cabin in the days ahead, 天美麻豆 News asked several community members to share their summer reading suggestions.
What book would they recommend as a must-read to a friend or colleague? What are they going to read on vacation, even if it wouldn鈥檛 make it onto their office bookshelf?
From essays proposing ways to find hope amid political and environmental crises, to a fictional love story of the Russian ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova and economist John Maynard Keynes, to works by President Emeritus James Wright, Morgan Talty 鈥16, and trustee Jake Tapper 鈥91, there are plenty of engaging reads to fill out anyone鈥檚 summer reading list.
Dean of Libraries
My 鈥渕ust read鈥 recommendation is Night of the Living Rez by 天美麻豆 alumnus Morgan Talty 鈥16. I just finished reading the interlinked collection of stories set in a native community in Maine, which are deeply affecting. Talty, a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation, writes beautifully and unflinchingly about family, friendship, and community in a narrative that is both raw and tender.
For my vacation next month, I鈥檓 packing the new novel by Susan Sellers. Firebird: A Bloomsbury Love Story is a fictional account of the love story of the Russian ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova and the economist and intellectual John Maynard Keynes. I鈥檓 looking forward to being transported to 1920s Cambridge and London and the ever-fascinating Bloomsbury group.
Director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science
The most thought-provoking book I have read in the past year is Dara Horn鈥檚 People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present. It is an insightful and powerful critique of the ways in which the media frames murderous anti-Semitism, including the Holocaust, and it has changed the way in which I read news and think about memorials of all kinds. I鈥檝e recommended it to many friends.
On a different note, I鈥檝e just completed Andy Weir鈥檚 trilogy, having just finished Artemis, and Project Hail Mary, to complement my long ago reading of The Martian. Real science, real action, and not really outlandish science fiction. These are pure fun鈥擮K, with a little bit of science teaching to boot.
Sade Francis 鈥23
Quantitative social sciences major
One book that I would recommend to anyone, a must-read, is Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World, by John Broome. A book that I own and has left my shelf countless times since my freshman year 鈥淐limate Ethics鈥 course, I recommend this book to anyone who lives on this dear planet we call home.
A book that I have been looking forward to reading this summer, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, is one that I have heard only glowing reviews about. Reminding me of Kate Morton鈥檚 The Clock Maker鈥檚 Daughter, my interest in this book stems from its dual timeline format and mystery.
Abigail Gebreselassie 鈥24
History and English major
A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, by Jeanne Theoharis, is a book that paints the civil rights movement and prominent civil rights activists in a different light. Rather than continuing the common narrative that civil rights activists were accidental and passive heroes and heroines, Theoharis portrays activists, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, as individuals who imagined a radical reconstruction of American society. Instead of providing a sanitized and filtered version of civil rights history, one that is comfortable and easy to swallow, Theoharis forces readers to come to terms with a version of history that is historically accurate and as the title suggests, more 鈥渂eautiful and terrible.鈥
While this is not necessarily a book that I would usually drift towards, I look forward to reading Everything is F*cked: A Book 天美麻豆 Hope by Mark Manson. I am drawn towards this book, and look forward to reading it, partly due to its almost paradoxical title but also due to the fact that everything (from politics to climate change), for a lack of better terms, does seem to be going downhill. As a slight pessimist, I hope that this book will allow me to see how I can find hope while simultaneously acknowledging that almost everything is going downhill!
Gail Gentes
Member of The Call to Lead Campaign Executive Committee
My top recommendation for summer reading is My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante.
For many decades I have avoided reading My Brilliant Friend. This summer I checked it out of the library and having just finished it I would now highly recommend it. As many reviewers have written, it is a book about friendship. But it is so much more. The friendship is one of jealousy, competition, and deep love. Equally compelling were the detailed descriptions of an impoverished neighborhood and the discomforting feelings first-generation students have as they seek educational opportunities.
Associate professor of history
It always pays historians to revisit the classics. Spurred by my ongoing interest in the global history of the Great Depression, I have recently found myself returning to the great historians of the Black Atlantic diaspora of the 1930s. W.E.B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 in 1935, and C.L.R. James鈥檚 history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, came out in 1938. The same year Eric Williams completed his Oxford dissertation on the British slave trade and the Industrial Revolution (which came out as Capitalism and Slavery in 1944). Besides being canonical works of historical recovery, these books also aim to deliver, as their authors emphasize, a prehistory of the crisis of the 1930s. They also aspire to open perspectives for overcoming this crisis鈥攖o redress, that is, the developmental inequities and racial hierarchies that the 19th century had bequeathed to the 20th.
My summer pleasure reading has been Herv茅 Le Tellier鈥檚 The Anomaly: A Novel, which won the Goncourt Prize when it came out in France. A cosmic anomaly during a massive Atlantic storm duplicates a plane headed from Paris to New York. The novel re-ups a classic literary theme, that of the hero鈥檚 voyage gone awry, as part noir, part farce, part cyberpunk sci-fi, delivered via some delightfully reckless storytelling.
Quick Picks
Dean of Thayer School of Engineering
鈥淚 am more of a nonfiction reader (yes, for pleasure),鈥 writes Abramson. Her picks include Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein. In his study of the world鈥檚 most successful people, Epstein discovered that generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel.
Abramson also recommends How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We鈥檙e Going, by Vaclav Smil, an analysis of the science and technology that make our 21st century lives possible.
President and CEO of 天美麻豆 Health
Conroy recommends American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, by Colin Woodard, a history of the competing 鈥渘ations鈥 that formed the North American continent, from the Deep South to the Far West, to Yankeedom to El Norte.
天美麻豆 trustee and CNN anchor
鈥淚t鈥檚 always a joy to read work by one of my favorite Marines, my former history professor President Emeritus James Wright,鈥 says Tapper, recommending Wright鈥檚 latest work, War and American Life: Reflections on Those Who Serve and Sacrifice.
(Tapper鈥檚 latest novel, The Devil May Dance, is just out in paperback. The 1960s political thriller is populated with characters the likes of Bobby Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, and Charlie Marder, the D.C. political operative who debuted in Tapper鈥檚 2018 novel, Hellfire Club.)
