U Reads 2004

If you've been looking for a captivating read, you've come to the right place. U Reads is a recommended reading list sponsored by the University of Minnesota's College of Continuing Education. The College is adults' gateway to the lifelong learning resources at the University. Each year we ask some of the U's leading minds to let us in on the book (or books) that had the most impact on their thinking. The 2004 results are in and feature telling biographies, inspiring children's books, spotlights on science, thought-provoking fiction, and works on Orientalism and Zen philosophy.

Books are available via the University of Minnesota Bookstores.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee

Recommended by: Judith Martin, urban studies professor

Comments: John McPhee has 20-plus collections of detailed reporting on subjects ranging from oranges to bark canoes and greenmarkets, with much attention to geology interspersed. The Control of Nature immerses us in the lower Mississippi River countryside, an Icelandic volcano center, and Los Angeles' urbanizing San Gabriel Mountain edge. Characteristically, perspectives of the locals dominate. These seemingly disparate locales illustrate the book's theme: the creative, energetic, unending, and questionable energy that human beings invest in physically altering whatever landscape we encounter. The sheer scale and cost of these interventions is daunting. Importantly, we are left to draw our own conclusions about their wisdom and likely endurance.

Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams by Nick Tosces

Recommended by: Karal Ann Marling, professor of art history and American studies

Comments: I read biographies: stars, generals, artists, famous wives, historical figures (I draw the line at pets). This is probably a result of a juvenile tussle with Plutarch's Lives in Latin class. Anyway, I LOVE biographies. One of my current favorites is Nick Tosces' Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams. Another is Edmund Morris' Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. Why? Because both of these exemplary and experienced biographers were utterly defeated by their subjects. Tosces cannot account for much in Dean Martin's life, despite a mountain of evidence. There was, he concludes, an emptiness at the core, a staggering unknowability. Morris is driven to such despair over his hero that he resorts to a fiction: he becomes part of the story himself. In the case of Morris, this approach was roundly panned. And unjustly, I think. Increasingly, if one is not writing to edify or to smear, modern lives have become great voids (even as the computer seems to know everything about everybody). This is a sobering thought, at least to me. These books scare me silly, so I think about them a lot.

Everyday Zen: Love & Work by Charlotte Joko Beck

Recommended by: Michael Dennis Browne, poet, professor of English and creative writing, and 2001 College of Continuing Education Distinguished Teacher

Comments: This is a remarkable book, one I have found so helpful over the years. It consists of talks given by Beck at the Zen Center of San Diego, where she teaches, and is filled with brilliantly sane and perceptive advice about how to get through the days (and nights) and years by practicing seeing reality as it is rather than as what our often tumultuous thoughts, feeling, projections, and paranoias keep trying to tell us that it is. Beck is a tough, shrewd, aphoristic thinker and she doesn't let the reader off easily. She blocks all kinds of reflexive escape routes, nips our self-pity and self-delusion before they can get very far. I believe it was Freud who wrote of mental health as the ability to work and to love; Charlotte Joko Beck offers some of the best advice I know to help us along the paths we must follow as we pursue lives that contribute to common reality.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

Recommended by: Anna Katharine Mansfield, enology project leader

Comments: Gaudy Night is my favorite of Sayers' fiction works. Anchored by the framework of a classic 'cozy' mystery, Gaudy Night provides an instructive view of the academic life of women in an era when they were just beginning to assert themselves as scholars. The mystery itself centers on the conflict of work/career vs. home/family, and the popular perception of women's duty to each. I found Sayers' unique take on this timeless struggle both amusing and thought-provoking.

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

Recommended by: Christine Maziar, executive vice president and provost

Comments: It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale told to the America of the mid-1930s but that has resonance for us today. While much of Europe was suffering under strengthening fascist movements, many Americans believed that such a movement could not take root in our nation. Lewis describes just such a possibility and tells a story of an America reeling through a depression and a population willing to trade away civil liberties for promises of a more secure material future. Lewis' story warns that the consequences of such choices would leave America much like our European counterparts of the mid-1930s and the battle to reclaim lost liberties would be fought at great cost and with much suffering.

The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas

Recommended by: Dr. John S. Najarian, M.D., professor of surgery

Comments: This book is a collection of essays that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine. Thomas was one of the most eloquent writers of short essays of our "biological cosmos." As one critic stated, this book is "an ode to biology, luminous in style and bursting with information, a celebration of and a cerebration of life." Easy to read, it will steer the young toward a career in biology and all of us to a further appreciation of the miracle of life.

I also highly recommend two other books by Thomas. The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher is another series of remarkable essays filled with poetic excitement. One of my favorites is "The Deacon's Masterpiece" in which Thomas analyzes Oliver Wendell Holmes' "One-Hoss Shay" as a metaphor for a live organism or a living cell. Thomas treats his readers to a new look at life and death as only he can describe. I would also recommend The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher, written at the request of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This book should be required reading for any student interested in a medical career. Thomas muses on the medicine practiced by his father in the 1920s, with only a black bag containing nothing but morphine and magic. But, as Thomas stresses, his father's very presence reassured patients. In contrast, the medical science of today features CAT scans, MRIs, and other technological marvels, but are we losing the personal contact that encompasses the true art of medicine? All three books are worth reading more than once.

Orientalism by Edward Said

Recommended by: Imed Labidi, graduate student and instructor of cultural studies and comparative literature

Comments: Orientalism, Edward Said's masterpiece is a unique literary production and a reading so profound and dedicated that it remains always unfinished. With every new reading, new meanings and ideas are unfolded. Hence, the ideas of Orientalism have influenced many disciplines in literature, theory, and criticism, and altered our views of knowledge, power, and history. In like manner, these same ideas conjure up the spirits of the past to interrogate the claims of Orientalist thinking and its prejudices against other races, in particular Arabs and Muslims. In so many words, Orientalism debunks the linearity of history, which constructed the past of the Orient as "a defunct epoch" used to condemn the Other. Indeed, the book unveils Said's exceptional talent as a scholar, a critic, a philosopher, an artist, and most importantly a humanist.

The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg

Recommended by: Dr. Michael Osterholm, director, Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, and public health professor

Comments: Published in 1985, this has been my favorite book since I first began reading it to my children on Christmas Eve of that year. The book reminds me of what is really important in life and what life is really all about. I continue to read the book every year to my children as a special holiday tradition on Christmas Eve.

When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi by David Maraniss

Recommended by: Pam Borton, women's basketball coach

Comments: I picked this book for two reasons. One: He was the best at what he did (coaching) during his time. Two: I also learned that he did not spend a lot of time with his family, and he did not have a balance in his life. This really made an impact on me because of his commitment, dedication, discipline, the passion he had to win and for his sport, and how much his players respected him as a coach and person.  But, I also saw in reading the book that he did not spend much time with his family because he put everything into his sport. So, I really got inspired on what to do as a coach in my sport and what not to do as a person in neglecting family.

The Wump World by Bill Peet

Recommended by: Dan Gilchrist, president's speechwriter

Comments: In my first years of school, one book that I read again and again was The Wump World by Bill Peet. It tells the story of a peaceful race of furry animals, the wumps, who live happily in the wilderness until their planet is invaded by silvery, pollution-spewing aliens. The book is illustrated in colored pencil by the author, and the drawings are charming and funny. At the same time, the book carries a powerful message about preserving the natural world and the possibility of environmental renewal.