Faculty, staff make the case for great winter reads

Settling down with a good book is one of life’s great joys. For many, winter break provides time away from work and the classroom, giving a chance to set aside the usual distractions to enjoy some pleasure reading instead. Assorted faculty and staff from across campus were polled for their recommendations for books that will not disappoint. So make your selection, turn off the TV and read away.

Arnold Alanen, landscape architecture: “Learning to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field” by Anne Whiston Spirn, 2008. Dorothea Lange’s photographs offer some of the most remarkable and poignant depictions of America during the Great Depression. By using Lange’s 1939 portfolio and unpublished field notes, Spirn provides us with insights to the genius and hard work that characterize one of the country’s great artists from the 20th century. Genre: photographic criticism.

Barry Alvarez, athletics: I just purchased “Cross Country” by James Patterson, 2008, but haven’t started reading it yet. I’ve read all of the books by Patterson and highly recommend them, especially those featuring detective Alex Cross as the main character, which is the case with this latest book. Genre: mystery/thriller.

Emily Auerbach, Division of Continuing Studies: “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, 1960. Rereading Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” recently, I was struck by its sheer perfection as aclassic work offiction. Although Iremembered the racial conflicts, coming-of-age theme and dramatic trial scenes, I had forgotten the powerful passages satirizing public “education” and eloquently describing Scout’s love of reading. Genre: fiction.

Buckingham U. Badger: “B is for Badger, A Wisconsin Alphabet” written by Kathy-jo Wargin and illustrated by Renee Graef, 2004. What’s not to love in a book with a badger on the cover? Readers of all ages will learn state history, events and facts as they reinforce alphabet skills. Genre: children’s. Another option to consider is “Nickname Mania: The Best of College Nicknames and Mascots and the Stories Behind Them” by Mark T. Jenkins, 1997. Although the cover is cluttered with photos of lesser mascots, the book is still a keeper, in my humble opinion.

Jill Casid, Visual Culture Center: “I Live Here” by Mia Kirshner, 2008. Marketed as a “paper documentary” focused on four world crises, the “book” challenges the jaded with its experimental format and packaging: a boxed assemblage encasing four books (84 pages each), which are themselves hybridized combinations of word and image formatted as collage-illustrated multimedia journals and including elements of the graphic novel.Genre: I’m going to classify it as new media visual culture.

Robert N. Golden, School of Medicine and Public Health: “They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America; October 1967” by David Maraniss, 2003. David Maraniss, one of my favorite authors, weaves together the history of three powerful events in October 1967: the Dow Chemical recruitment protests on the UW–Madison campus; the ambush of a platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam; and the tipping point in the Johnson administration’s deliberations over the course of the war. Genre: documentary.

Kathleen Horning, Cooperative Children’s Book Center: “Minders of the Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature” by Leonard Marcus, 2008. The now-famous battle over the publication of E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web” is just one of the fascinating anecdotes recounted by historian Leonard Marcus in this deliciously gossipy survey of 20th century American children’s literature, based largely on interviews the author conducted over the years with children’s book editors. Genre: history/literature.

Sheila Leary, UW Press: “Human Goodness” by Yi-Fu Tuan, 2008. “Human Goodness” is an inviting meditation by Professor Emeritus Yi-Fu Tuan. This year, as we look for hope in the midst of war and light in winter’s darkness, it’s well worth reading his reflections on gratitude, good manners, selflessness, generosity, respect, appreciation and courage — especially courage, to do good in the midst of evil. Genre: philosophy/ethics.

More book suggestions

There are readers, and then there are Readers. Faculty from the Department of English offered the following suggestions.

Mike Bernard-Donals: “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2006. This is a sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking story of a child coming to terms with his father’s death in the twin towers on 9/11. It’s an imaginative journey through New York City, through childhood, through recent history, and ultimately suggests something about how redemption works.

Heather Dubrow: “Gilead” by Marianne Robinson, 2006. It is wry and at times ironic—yet also so moving that at a few junctures it almost brought tears to my eyes.

David Lowenstein: “The Naked and the Dead” by Norman Mailer, 1948. Based on Mailer’s experiences in the Pacific during World War II, this is an epic-scale masterpiece about the degradation of war.

Judy Mitchell: “The Monsters of Templeton” by Lauren Groff, 2008. It’s not often that a literary novel makes the New York Times bestseller list, but this first novel about family secrets, James Fenimore Cooper and, of course, monsters, did just that. Smart, beautifully written, a fun read—and by one of our own.

Lorrie Moore: “Unaccustomed Earth” by Jhumpa Lahiri, 2008. These are rich, moving stories, not just of immigrant families but of the moments when the shape of an individual’s

life suddenly reveals its contours. It’s unprecedented for a young writer’s story collection to be No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, but this book has done that.

Rob Nixon: “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” by Dinaw Mengestu, 2007. A tender, passionate (and brief) novel about African immigrants, the quest for love, and gentrification in Washington, D.C. Reminiscent, in style, tone, and wit of early Saul Bellow. And it’s just out in paperback.

Ellen Samuels: “Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller” by Georgina Kleege, 2006. The best book I read in 2007, this is a tour de force of historically informed memoir that compels while it surprises with visions of the unknown Helen Keller, who preached socialism to Andrew Carnegie, toured the vaudeville stage and wrote of phenomenology before it bore that name.

Ron Wallace: “The Royal Baker’s Daughter” by Barbara Goldberg, 2008. This collection of poems received this year’s Brittingham Poetry Prize from UW Press. It was selected from among the 800 book-length manuscripts submitted to the press in last fall’s annual competition.

David Zimmerman: “Truth and Bright Water” by Thomas King, 2001. Wow. I can’t wait to teach this book. It’s a smart, moving, tender, lyrical, sometimes dark, sometimes funny, mystery novel about Native life and history on the Montana–Ottawa border.