Lawrence Today magazine, Spring 2009
Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer
In this biography, Jerald Podair, associate professor of history and Robert S. French Professor in American Studies, chronicles one of the unsung heroes of the modern civil rights movement. Rustin planned the 1963 March on Washington that featured Martin Luther King, Jr.’s classic “I Have a Dream” speech, and helped “create” King as the iconic figure we know today. But for his homosexuality, which kept him from assuming a major role in the movements he did so much to shape, Rustin might have become our nation’s preeminent civil rights leader.
Religion, Culture, and Sacred Space
Martyn Smith, assistant professor of religious studies, proposes a new way of thinking about how a place becomes sacred and investigates the cultural considerations that influence the way a place becomes fixed in a society’s consciousness. Through an examination of a wide range of sites — including Abydos in ancient Egypt, Delos in classical Greece, and Mecca in medieval Islam — Smith offers a new theory of the human relationship to space.
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
Elizabeth De Stasio, associate professor
of biology and Raymond H. Herzog
Professor in Science
Narrated by a character who speaks from a unique perspective on the impact of WWII in Munich on the life of the young girl and those closest to her, this novel transcends mere categories. It is more than a coming-of-age novel; it is not just historical fiction; it is a story that defines humanity in its several forms. The novel is wonderfully structured, with asides to the reader including key words defined by the narrator, and it moves the reader from tears to laughter with ease. Some characters speak in ironic tones, one is poetic, and others are plainspoken. All are believable. Without a doubt, this is the most powerful and most beautifully written book I’ve read all year. Marketed for young teens, but captivating for adults as well, it can be an intergenerational conversation-starter.
Marty Erickson, lecturer of music
Sound in Motion: A Performer’s
Guide to Greater Musical Expression,
David McGill
This is a wonderful book which took 13 years to find its way into print, mainly because of the exhaustive research by the author. He uses the musical concepts of the legendary Marcel Tabuteau to develop musical thought. I was particularly interested in the section which raised issues about baroque performance. One of the quotes from the book that hit home for me in the chapter entitled “Sound Connection,” was the following: “Printed music is only a pale likeness of the true sound of performed music as it sails through the air. Played music has everything to do with what one hears and nothing to do with what one sees...Aristotle believed that the eyes are the organs of temptation and the ears are the organs of instruction.” McGill’s thoughts about vibrato, articulation, ornaments, note groupings, and much more are not only instructional, but fascinating and directly applicable to what musicians do on a daily basis. I continue to use this book as a reference to stimulate my own creative pursuits and thoughts on a weekly basis. Most strongly recommended!
Catherine Kautsky, professor of music
The Lost, Daniel Mendelsohn
I found this book enormously gripping (despite its estimable length!). The book takes the reader along on Mendelsohn’s literal and figurative journey as he traces a family of six of his cousins whose lives ended in the Holocaust and all trace of whom has been lost in his family history. Though clear on their deaths, the book devotes just as much time to these people’s lives: the mundane details of their home, their teenage romances, their relationships with one another. One feels at the end as if important people have been reclaimed, and Mendelsohn’s reflections along the way on parallels in biblical history, as well as on his own current family life, make the past all the more vivid. I found this a wonderful and moving way to do history — resonances everywhere, and a personal, fluid style of writing that allowed them to appear as unexpectedly just as they would in one’s own musings.
Richard Yatzek, professor of Russian
Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón
This novel is set in a Spanish used bookstore. The son of the owner, at age 12, is allowed to pick out any book from a depository something like Borges’s Library. The book, the only copy in existence, leads him to danger, friendship, love and, ultimately, wisdom. At the conclusion he is as “grown-up” as we are liable to get.
Minoo Adenwalla, professor emeritus
of government
The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise
Of India and China and What It Means
for All of Us, Robyn Meredith
A New York Times bestseller, this is an excellent introduction to the recent economic rise of India and China, the two most populous nations on earth. The study blends anecdote, history, personal experience, statistics, and vivid description in tracing the reasons for the economic surge, its amazing progress, its problems, limitations, and consequences for the United States and the West. It also evaluates the different paths taken by India and China, and speculates on their success. Meredith calls upon the United States to face the inevitable challenge, to readjust where necessary, to rebuild and enter into a partnership with the two behemoths, in which all gain eventually and there are no losers.
Bertrand A. Goldgar, professor of English
and John N. Bergstrom Professor
in Humanities
Londonstani, Gautam Malkani
This novel is serious and comic by fits and starts, but this time more a source of laughter rather than tears. The main characters are mostly Southeast Asian young men living in Hounslow and other parts of west London, and this book is very much about being young and coping with friends or peers while also needing to deal constantly with what Jas, the narrator, calls “complicated family-related shit.” It’s full of stylistic fireworks that one has to get used to, but there is a short glossary, and it’s easier reading than Clockwork Orange. A “must read” category, in my view.
Timothy X. Troy, associate professor of
theatre arts and J. Thomas and Julie Esch
Hurvis Professor in Theatre and Drama
Christine Falls, Benjamin Black
What happens when one of Ireland’s foremost fiction writers and dramatists, John Banville, turns his keen eye and lyrical ear for language to crime fiction? Read Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black, and you’ll see why fans of Banville’s other work flock to the books written under his new pen name, Benjamin Black. Black speaks through his lead character, Quirke, with sparse prose, attention to detail, and a deep curiosity about failed human relationships. The setting is Dublin in the 1950’s. Quirke’s apartment is a short walk from where I lived during my semester as a visiting professor in the Beckett School of Drama, Trinity College-Dublin. I spent time in the same pubs, parks, and busy streets just south of the River Liffey as Black’s vivid characters.
Jane Parish Yang, associate professor
of Chinese and Japanese
Shanghai Express, Zhang Henshui
A detective thriller, serialized in a travel magazine in China in the mid-1930s and read for my Modern Chinese Literature and Cinema course. It touches on issues of gender, modernity, especially the role of the modern woman in a changing society, and class. Set on a train between the old Peiping (now Beijing), and the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, the novel details the encounter between a rich banker and a young woman traveling alone. While not a part of the engaged literature of the earlier decades, it illuminates the changes overtaking Chinese society right before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War.
