Future Dean's Book Course Book Selections
Each year the Dean’s Readers review dozens of possible book selections before finally choosing two for the year ahead. The process is a long and careful one, as the Readers consider each selection in itself and in relation to previous Dean's Book Course choices.
No book alone can meet all the final selection criteria. But we can create over time a canon of books embodying particular principles and characteristics. We wish to present to the Commonwealth College community books that individually and collectively
• Appeal to an audience of differing academic and personal interests;
• Present a rich array of topics for research and discussion;
• Incorporate and illustrate varied approaches to research;
• Represent an expanse of social and cultural experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives in content & authorship;
• Represent contemporary and, when possible, local authors;
• Offer students an uncommon reading experience;
• Stand out in style and/or content;
• Promise to sustain seven weeks of exploration and discussion;
• Work well to complement other DBC selections; and
• Have the power to delight as well as instruct.
Your comments on the book possibilities listed below, as well as suggestions of other books fitting our criteria, are very much welcome. Please send them to Alex Phillips, Dean's Book Course Director, at deansbook@comcol.umass.edu.
Books Selected for 2008-2009
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – Fall 2008
 Jonathan Safran Foer
Houghton-Mifflin; 2005; 326pp
Like his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, Foer's second novel follows a young boy on a self-determined journey--really a quest--both actual and spiritual to unlock family secrets, this time not of the Holocaust, but of September 11. Foer's website is worth a trip.
Monique and the Mango Rains – Spring 2009
 Kris Holloway
Waveland Press; 2006; 240pp
“Monique and the Mango Rains is the true story of the life and death of a remarkable West African midwife, seen through the eyes of a young Peace Corps Volunteer who worked side-by-side with her, birthing babies and caring for mothers, in a remote, impoverished village.”
Finalists under Consideration for 2008-2009
The following eight books, listed alphabetically by title, made the Dean's Readers' short list for next year's selection. Out of these eight titles, two were chosen for the 2008-2009 Dean's Book Course.
Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
 Daniel Tammet
Free Press; 2006; 225pp
Tammet sees numbers as shapes, colors, and textures -- media that allow him to perform extraordinary calculations in his head. This memoir describes his difficult journey into human society and explains how uses patterns to calculate numbers instantly and learn new languages almost as fast.
Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness
 Pete Earley
Berkley Trade; 2007; 384pp
"A journalist with a seriously mentally ill son tells the chilling story of how difficult it was to find people and institutions that could help them. The larger story, told with equal grace and thoroughness, is that U.S. prisons and jails are increasingly warehousing people not reached by the mental health system" (AudioFile).
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Jonathan Safran Foer
Houghton-Mifflin; 2005; 326pp
Like his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, Foer's second novel follows a young boy on a self-determined journey--really a quest--both actual and spiritual to unlock family secrets, this time not of the Holocaust, but of September 11. Foer's website is worth a trip.
The Ghost Map
 Steven Johnson
Riverhead Hardcover; 2006; 320pp
Subtitled "The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World," Johnson's page turner blends science and history to tell the tale of physician John Snow and his radical proposition that the cholera decimating London was spread through contaminated water, not through "miasma" or smells in the air as the medical world of 1854 believed.
Monique and the Mango Rains
Kris Holloway
Waveland Press; 2006; 240pp
“Monique and the Mango Rains is the true story of the life and death of a remarkable West African midwife, seen through the eyes of a young Peace Corps Volunteer who worked side-by-side with her, birthing babies and caring for mothers, in a remote, impoverished village.”
The Road
 Cormac McCarthy
Knopf; 2007; 304pp
“A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-—and each other” (Boston Globe).
The State Boys Rebellion
 Michael D'Antonio
Simon & Schuster; 2004; 320pp
The State Boys Rebellion is the meticulously researched story of a group of boys who never accepted their incarceration at the infamous Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts. Originally named the Massachusetts School for Idiotic Children, it housed some 2500 people at its peak, over half of whom were of normal intelligence but poor, homeless, or parentless. Inmates—many of whom lived their entire lives within its walls—were subject to physical and sexual abuse, but most notorious were experiments performed by scientists from Harvard and MIT that exposed fifty-seven of the children to repeated doses of radiation.
What Is the What
 Dave Eggers
McSweeney's; 2006; 475pp
"Starred Review. Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war-the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath-of the 1980s and 90s. In this fictionalized memoir, Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) makes him an icon of globalization. Separated from his family when Arab militia destroy his village, Valentino joins thousands of other "Lost Boys," beset by starvation, thirst and man-eating lions on their march to squalid refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where Valentino pieces together a new life" (Publishers Weekly).
Books Eliminated from Consideration
The remaining books listed here were, after careful consideration and sometimes heated deliberation, eliminated from our selection pool. In other years and under other circumstances, many of them would be worthy choices for the Dean's Book Course. Some of them may, in fact, be put back on the table for next year's Dean's Readers to consider. All of them we recommend to you.
Initial List
Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future
Jeff Goodell
Houghton-Mifflin; 2006; 352pp
“The book's strength lies in Goodell's ability to connect our mundane daily activities, such as flipping on the living room lights and powering up our laptops, with the grimy business that powers these things… It's hard to write a lively book about the coal industry, but Goodell, a Rolling Stone contributing editor and the author of Our Story, a book about a 2002 mine accident, has managed to pull it off” (Washington Post’s Book World).
The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink
Dr. Robert D. Morris
HarperCollins; 2007; 296pp
Morris chronicles the fascinating and sometimes frightening story of our drinking water, including epidemics of water-borne disease, the scientists who have fought them, and the economic and political forces that have impeded their progress.
The Boys from Dolores: Fidel Castro's Classmates from Revolution to Exile
Patrick Symmes
Pantheon; 2007; 331pp
By researching and presenting Castro's classmates at the prestigious Jesuit-run academy of Dolores, Symmes draws a strikingly different picture of Cuba's dictator. As Wendy Gimbel wrote in the Washington Post: "Perhaps ... Castro is neither monster nor hero. Maybe he's just a 'boy' from Dolores."
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz
Riverhead; 2007; 352pp
"Paralleling his own experiences growing up in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, [Diaz] has choreographed a family saga at once sanguinary and sexy that confronts the horrific brutality at loose during the reign of the dictator Trujillo" (Booklist).
Chrysalis
Kim Todd
Harcourt; 2007; 336pp
Todd "insightfully chronicles [Maria Sibylla] Merian's extraordinary life [1647-1717] as the daughter of a prominent Frankfurt publisher, an artist's wife in Nuremberg, a member of an isolated religious community, a renowned scientist and artist in progressive Amsterdam, and the practitioner of pioneering fieldwork in the rain forest of Surinam” (Donna Seaman, Booklist).
Confessions of a Street Addict
James J. Cramer
Simon & Schuster; 2003; 352pp
Jim Cramer’s CNBC Mad Money has affected popular investment habits as forcefully as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series has affected reading habits. Here Cramer recounts the emotional as well as financial profits and losses of his turbulent career as hedge fund manager and stock-pick guru.
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
Bill McKibben
Times Books; 2007; 261pp
Vermont writer and economist Bill McKibben’s purpose here is bold and simple: persuade Americans they’ll feel fulfilled not by getting more but by wanting less. He may have a point. Once the U.S. had the happiest citizens in the world; recent studies now put us at number 23.
Devil in the White City. Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America.
Erik Larson
Random House; 2003; 390pp + apparatus.
"Their fates were linked by the magical Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, nicknamed the “White City” for its majestic beauty. Architect Daniel Burnham built it; serial killer Dr. H. H. Holmes used it to lure victims to his World’s Fair Hotel, designed for murder. Both men left behind them a powerful legacy, one of brilliance and energy, the other of sorrow and darkness. Here, then, is your ticket to the greatest fair in history—a place where incredible dreams came to life alongside darkest nightmares" (Random House website). Larson's nonfiction/crime narrative about the creation of the 1893 World’s Fair and a serial killer who stalked it won the Edgar Award for “fact crime” and was a National Book Award finalist.
Dry Manhattan
Michael A. Lerner
Harvard; 2007; 351pp
“In this solid account of the calamitous effect of dry utopianism on New York City, Lerner explains how the Prohibition amendment was passed and why its execution failed” (Pete Hamill, NYT 3/11/07).
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Christopher Hitchens
Twelve; 2007; 320pp
“Although Hitchens’s title refers to God, his real energy is in the subtitle: “religion poisons everything.” Disproving the existence of God . . . is just the beginning for Hitchens. In fact, it sometimes seems as if existence is just one of the bones Hitchens wants to pick with . . . . And God should be flattered: unlike most of those clamoring for his attention, Hitchens treats him like an adult” (M. Kinsley, NYT).
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
J.K. Rowling
Arthur Levine; 2007; 784pp
Yes, Harry Potter is a possible DBC book choice. Our first-year students were approximately nine years old when their age-mate Harry entered Hogwarts and changed the reading habits of a generation. It's time to take him seriously as a literary figure, cultural icon and imaginary friend to millions.
Istanbul: Memories of the City
Orhan Pamuk; trans. by Maureen Freely
Knopf; 2005; 384pp
“Even if you didn't know Orhan Pamuk as the author of acclaimed novels such as 'Snow,' even if you had no familiarity with Istanbul as a city, Pamuk's memoir, 'Istanbul: Memories and the City,' would still be a fascinating literary adventure. In part tales of the city, laden with photographs, in part the portrait of the artist as a young man, it is overall a skillful literary exercise using the personal to map a larger portrait of a society at a crossroads” (Sandip Roy, San Francisco Chronicle).
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
Berkley; 2003; 371pp
"Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy through the horrific rule of the Taliban, The Kite Runner is the heartbreaking story of the unlikely and inseparable friendship between a wealthy Afghan boy and the son of his father's servant, both of whom are caught in the tragic sweep of history" (Publisher's book description).
The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece
Jonathan Harr
Random House; 2005; 262pp
"Mercurial, supremely gifted, and prone to violence, Caravaggio lived like an outlaw and a pauper most of his troubled life. Yet even when he attained wealth and fame . . . he was still hounded by the law (for murder) and numerous vengeful enemies. Harr does an admirable job of bringing the man alive in these pages while keeping his long-lost painting at the center of the action" (Shawn Carkonen, Amazon.com).
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War.
Nathaniel Philbrick
Viking; 2006; 358pp excluding apparatus.
Philbrick provides a thorough and eye-opening nonfiction account of the Pilgrim voyage, early settlements and contacts with Native Americans, and King Philip’s 1775-1776 War. The book contains numerous important regional, state, and local connections that make it of special interest to the UMass community.
Measuring the World
Daniel Kehlmann; trans. by Carol Brown Janeway
Pantheon; 2006; 272pp
Loosely based on the lives of 19th-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt and a contemporary, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, Kehlmann's novel, a German bestseller widely heralded as an exemplar of "new" German fiction, injects musty history with shots of whimsy and irony (Publishers Weekly).
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
Harriet A. Washington
Doubleday; 2007; 512pp
“Starred Review. This groundbreaking study documents that the infamous Tuskegee experiment … was simply the most publicized in a long, and continuing, history of the American medical establishment using African-Americans as unwitting or unwilling human guinea pigs. … Washington is a great storyteller, and in addition to giving us an abundance of information on ‘scientific racism,’ the book, even at its most distressing, is compulsively readable” (Publishers Weekly).
Native Guard (with Bellocq's Ophelia)
Natasha Trethewey
Houghton Mifflin; 2007; 64pp
“Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South — where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history” (HM website). Trethewey, a UMass Amherst graduate (MFA ’94), won the Pulitzer Prize for this collection of poems.
Outwitting History. The Amazing Adventures of the Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books.
Aaron Lansky
Souvenir Press; 2005; 315pp
Lansky’s tales of collecting the books now filling the Yiddish Book Center located at Hampshire College represent hands-on scholarship at its most impassioned and amusing. His adventures begin and end here in Amherst, with fascinating stops in between.
Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
Laurence Bergreen
Harper; 2004; 512pp
“Journalist Bergreen, who has penned biographies of James Agee, Louis Armstrong, Irving Berlin and Al Capone, superbly recreates Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan's obsessive 16th-century quest, an ill-fated journey that altered Europe's perception of the planet: ‘It was a dream as old as the imagination: a voyage to the ends of the earth.... Mariners feared they could literally sail over the edge of the world’” (Publishers Weekly).
The Places in Between
Rory Stewart
Harvest/Harcourt; 2006; 299pp
Stewart "recounts his journey across Afghanistan in January 2002. Even in mild weather in an Abrams tank, such a trip would be mane-whitening. But Stewart goes in the middle of winter, crossing through some territory still shakily held by the Taliban — and entirely on foot....It's a great travel narrative. Learned but gentle, tough but humane, Stewart .... writes with a mystic's appreciation of the natural world, a novelist's sense of character and a comedian's sense of timing" (NYT Sunday Book Review).
Returning to Earth: A Novel
Jim Harrison
Grove Press; 2007; 280pp
“Dying at 45 of Lou Gehrig's disease, Donald, who is Chippewa- Finnish, dictates his family story to his wife, Cynthia, who records this headlong tale for their two grown children (and also interjects). … As Donald weaves the tale of his settled life of marriage and fatherhood with that of his restless ancestors, he reveals his deep connection to an earlier, wilder time and to a kind of people who are ‘gone forever’” (from Publishers Weekly).
The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century
Martha Hodes
Norton; 2006; 384pp
“Award-winning historian Martha Hodes brings us into the extraordinary world of Eunice Connolly. Born white and poor in New England, Eunice followed her first husband to the Deep South and soon found her relatives fighting on opposite sides of the Civil War. Back in New England, Eunice and her children struggled to get by -- until Eunice fell in love with a well-to-do black sea captain, married him, and moved to his home in the British Caribbean. Tracking every lead in the family letters, Hodes retraced Eunice’s footsteps and met descendants along the way. The Sea Captain’s Wife takes up grand themes of American history -- war, racism, freedom -- and illuminates the lives of ordinary people in the past" (jacket notes).
A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler.
Jason Roberts
Harper Collins; 2006; 355 pp
"Roberts, a contributor to the Village Voice and McSweeney's, narrates the life of a 19th-century British naval officer who was mysteriously blinded at 25, but nevertheless became the greatest traveler of his time" (Publishers Weekly). A Sense of the World offers a range of research possibilities in the areas of history, geography, medicine, navigation, and others. It offers notes, sources, a website, and a website related to access for the blind. Roberts received the Van Zorn prize for emerging writers.
Sentience and Sensibility
Matthew Silliman
Parmenides; 2006; 314pp
“Sentience and Sensibility is a lively and thought-provoking fictional conversation between an immigration officer named Harriet Taylor and an immigrating philosopher named Manual Kant, who is seeking `philosophical asylum' in the United States. In the course of Mr. Kant's application the two … develop a friendship and a compelling dialogue that continues over several days” (Amazon Book Description). The topics they discuss range from “microbe morality” to “political courage” to "Moral Progress" and "Parenting."
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
Daniel J. Levitin
Plume;
2006; 266pp
A Scientific American book club selection and L.A. Times book prizes finalist, This Is Your Brain on Music explores the mysteries of our musical preferences and the meaning of music in our lives. Levitin writes with special authority: he is a successful rock musician, record producer, and neuroscientist.
Triangle: A Novel
Katharine Weber
Picador; 2007; 256pp
"Before September 11, 2001, the deadliest workplace disaster on U.S. soil was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which took place on March 25, 1911 and killed 146 workers. Katharine Weber's excellent new novel, Triangle, is about both disasters, as well as (among other things) genetics, classical music, family, and history" (Scott Esposito, The Quarterly Conversation) .
Underwater to Get Out of the Rain
Trevor Norton
Da Capo; 2006; 400pp
“In this beautifully written combination of memoir and natural history, Norton, a retired professor of marine biology, recalls night explorations in kelp forests among transparent shrimp visible only because of food moving through their guts, and celebrates unusual sea cultures, such as that of the ama, in Japan—women who free-dive for abalone shells in temperatures so cold that they lose half their body fat each winter. Norton's style is whimsical but tempered by a passionate concern for the ocean's vulnerability to human impact” (The New Yorker, July 10 & 17, 2006).
Zoli
Colum McCann
Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 2006; 279pp
McCann's novel “is a broad panorama of the fortunes of these people [the Roma or Gypsies] - particularly those who clung to their nomadic way of life - in Slovakia, Hungary and Poland from the 1930s to the years after the collapse of the Soviet world” (Andrew Riemer, smh.com ).
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