America and the Great Depression
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Recommended reading: Freedom From Fear (Chapters 1 – 12 only), David M. Kennedy.
Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. This book tells the story of how Americans endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities. |
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Recommended reading: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, William E. Leuchtenburg.
In this groundbreaking work, William E. Leuchtenburg traces the evolution of what was both the most controversial and effective socioeconomic initiative ever undertaken in the United States—and explains how the social fabric of American life was forever altered. It offers illuminating lessons on the challenges of economic transformation—for our time and for all time. |
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Recommended reading: The Worst Hard Time . . . the Great American Dust Bowl, Timothy Egan.
In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time is “arguably the best nonfiction book yet” (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of trifling with nature. |
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Recommended reading: Lords of Finance, Liaquat Ahamed.
As yet another period of economic turmoil makes headlines today, Lords of Finance is a potent reminder of the enormous impact that the decisions of central bankers can have, their fallibility, and the terrible human consequences that can result when they are wrong. |
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Recommended veiwing: Bound for Glory, DVD
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Biography of Woody Guthrie, 1976. |
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Recommended veiwing: The Grapes of Wrath, DVD.
Dust-bowl odyssey of the Joad family, 1940. |
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Recommended veiwing: All the King’s Men, DVD.
Roman à clef inspired by career of Huey Long, 1949 version only. |
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Recommended veiwing: Gold Diggers of 1933 , DVD.
Busby Berkeley choreographs the Depression. |
American History through Fiction
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Required reading: Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier.
Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. |
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Required reading: Main-Traveled Roads, Hamlin Garland.
This volume contains a selection of his short stories including: A Branch Road; Up the Coolly; Among the Corn-Rows; The Return of a Private; Under the Lion's Paw; The Creamery Man; A Day's Pleasure; Mrs. Ripley's Trip; and Uncle Ethan Ripley. |
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Recommended reading: Giants in the Earth, Ole Rolvaag.
The classic story of a Norwegian pioneer family's struggles with the land and the elements of the Dakota Territory as they try to make a new life in America. |
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Recommended reading: The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck.
Set during the Great Depression, it traces the migration of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family to California and their subsequent hardships as migrant farm workers. |
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Recommended reading: Postcards, Annie Proulx.
The tale of the Blood family, New England farmers who must confront the twentieth century -- and their own extinction. As the family slowly disintegrates, its members struggle valiantly against the powerful forces of loneliness and necessity, seeking a sense of home and place forever lost. |
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Recommended reading: Killer Angels, Michael Shaara.
This novel reveals more about the Battle of Gettysburg than any piece of learned nonfiction on the same subject. Michael Shaara's account of the three most important days of the Civil War features deft characterizations of all of the main actors. |
American Literature: Currents in Conscience
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Required reading: A Woman Called Moses, Marcy Heidish.
Marcy Heidish's literary mastery and lyrical prose bring us unforgettable characters, rich evocations of their times, and a passionate, suspenseful storyline. |
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Required reading: A Man For All Seasons, Robert Bolt.
The classic play about Sir Thomas More, the Lord chancellor who refused to compromise and was executed by Henry VIII. |
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Required reading: The Crucible, Arthur Miller.
Based on historical people and real events, Arthur Miller's play uses the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence unleashed by the rumors of witchcraft as a powerful parable about McCarthyism. |
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Required reading: Smilla's Sense of Snow, Peter Hoeg.
She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love. She lives in a world of numbers, science and memories--a dark, exotic stranger in a strange land. And now Smilla Jaspersen is convinced she has uncovered a shattering crime... |
Bridge: Advanced Beginning Play of the Hand
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Required reading: 25 Bridge Conventions You Should Know, Seagram, Barbara.
The authors have selected 25 basic conventions and treatments that novice players can easily assimilate into their own methods. |
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Recommended reading: Watson's Classic Book on The Play of the Hand at Bridge, Louis Watson.
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Bridge: Intermediate Play-of-the-Hand
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Recommended reading: Play of the Hand in the 21st Century: The Diamond Series, Audrey Grant.
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Recommended reading: Watson's Classic Book on The Play of the Hand at Bridge, Louis Watson.
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Contemporary American Short Stories: Repeat
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Required reading: Best American Short Stories 2009, Alice Sebold.
The collection boasts great variety from "famous to first-timers, sifted from major magazines and little reviews, grand and little worlds" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch), ensuring yet another rewarding, eduring edition of the oldest and best-selling Best American. |
Delights of Nature: Pass It On
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Recommended reading: Sharing Nature with Children, Joseph Bahrat Cornell.
Describes Cornell's philosophy of outdoor education and gives instructions for playing outdoor education games that work. |
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Recommended reading: Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv.
Richard Louv was the first to identify a phenomenon we all knew existed but couldn't quite articulate: nature-deficit disorder. His book Last Child in the Woods created a national conversation about the disconnection between children and nature, and his message has galvanized an international movement. |
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Recommended reading: The Nature Principle, Richard Louv.
Richard Louv makes a convincing case that through a nature-balanced existence—driven by sound economic, social, and environmental solutions—the human race can and will thrive. This timely, inspiring, and important work will give readers renewed hope while challenging them to rethink the way we live. |
Doctors on the Edge: Will Your Doc Break the Rules for You?
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Required reading: Doctors on the Edge, Fredrick R. Abrams, MD.
This book, handed out on the first day to those who order through the Academy, exposes some of the hardest decisions to be made in a profession in which bodies are vulnerable and souls are laid bare. Doctors on the Edge is the true account of doctors who are faced with wrenching moral dilemmas, thrust upon them uninvited and unexpected. Sometimes complementary and sometimes conflicting--law, medicine, and morality intrude on the daily practice of medicine. In gripping stories that often include life-and-death decisions, doctors maneuver through ambiguities, subjectivity, and the essential principles of medical ethics. |
Egypt since WWII
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Required reading: Egypt on the Brink: From Nassar to Murbarak, Tarak Osman.
In this immensely readable and thoroughly researched book, Tarek Osman explores what has happened to the biggest Arab nation since President Nasser took control of the country in 1954. He examines Egypt’s central role in the development of the two crucial movements of the period, Arab nationalism and radical Islam. |
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Recommended reading: Sadat and After: Struggles for Egypt's Political Soul, Raymond William Baker.
In examining Egypt from the margins rather than from the center, Baker proposes a new direction for Third World political studies. He suggests a way out of the impasse in the current development literature, which is fixed on a scientific study of causes and determinants, by focusing on actual political struggles and alternative political visions. |
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Recommended reading: A Woman of Egypt, Jehan Sadat.
This is an autobiography by Jehan Sadat, widow of Anwar el Sadat, tracing her early life in Cairo where she had a middle-class Egyptian upbringing, to when she was 17 and fell in love with a divorced revolutionary. She recounts how she and Anwar Sedat overcame her parents' objections to their marriage and how she was soon the wife of a rising political leader who was an intimate of President Nasser. |
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Recommended reading: Modern Egypt: The Formation of a Nation-State, Arthur Goldschmidt.
Modern Egypt is anecdotal as well as authoritative, covering social history, religion, politics, economics, military history, geography, and even the psychology of selected leaders. Faruq's impotence, Nasir's paranoia, and Sadat's glamour are all presented as they relate to policy motivations and outcomes. |
Explorers of North America
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Recommended reading: American Colonies: The Settling of North America, Alan Taylor.
With this volume, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America. Transcending the usual Anglocentric version of our colonial past, he recovers the importance of Native American tribes, African slaves, and the rival empires of France, Spain, the Netherlands, and even Russia in the colonization of North America. |
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Recommended reading: Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest For the Northwest Passage, Glynn Williams.
In Arctic Labyrinth, Glyn Williams charts the entire sweep of this extraordinary history, from the tiny, woefully equipped vessels of the first Tudor expeditions to the twentieth-century ventures that finally opened the Passage. |
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Recommended reading: Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose.
In this sweeping adventure story, Stephen E. Ambrose, the bestselling author of D-Day, presents the definitive account of one of the most momentous journeys in American history. Ambrose follows the Lewis and Clark Expedition from Thomas Jefferson's hope of finding a waterway to the Pacific, through the heart-stopping moments of the actual trip, to Lewis's lonely demise on the Natchez Trace. |
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Recommended reading: A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell, Donald Worster.
The heart of Worster's biography is Powell's epic journey down the Colorado in 1869, a tale of harrowing experiences, lethal accidents, and breathtaking discoveries. After years in the region collecting rocks and fossils and learning to speak the local Native American languages, Powell returned to Washington as an eloquent advocate for the West, one of America's first and most influential conservationists. |
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Recommended reading: A Journey to the Northern Ocean, Samuel Hearne.
Widely recognized as a classic of northern-exploration literature, A Journey to the Northern Ocean is Samuel Hearne's story of his three-year trek to seek a trade route across the Barrens in the Northwest Territories. |
Falling Awake: A Haiku Workshop
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Required reading: The Essential Haiku, Robert Haas.
This definite collection brings together in fresh translations by an American poet the essential poems of the three greatest masters: Matsuo Basho in the seventeenth century; Yosa Buson in the eighteenth century; and Kobayashi Issa in the early nineteenth century. |
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Recommended reading: The Haiku Handbook, Wm. J. Higginson and Penny Harter.
The Haiku Handbook is the first book to give readers everything they need to begin appreciating, writing, or teaching haiku. |
How the United States Got Its Shape: It Wasn’t by Dieting
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Required reading: Habits of Empire, Walter Nugent.
In this sweeping narrative history, acclaimed scholar Walter Nugent explores this fundamental American contradiction by recounting the story of American land acquisition since 1782 and shows how this steady addition of territory instilled in the American people a habit of empire-building. |
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Recommended reading: Dominance By Design: Technological Imperative and America’s Civilizing Mission, Michael Adas.
Dominance by Design explores the critical ways in which technological superiority has undergirded the U.S.’s policies of unilateralism, preemption, and interventionism in foreign affairs and raised us from an impoverished frontier nation to a global power. |
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Recommended reading: The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000, Anderson and Clayton.
The Dominion of War offers a startling new perspective on American history. By moving America’s forgotten conflicts—its imperial wars—to center stage, the authors explain how war, above all else, has been the primary means by which people of North America have defined American society for the last half-millennium. |
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Recommended reading: The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon and the Mexican, David Pletcher.
The Haiku Handbook is the first book to give readers everything they need to begin appreciating, writing, or teaching haiku. |
How Women Are Changing Africa: a Film Series
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Required reading: The Challenge for Africa, Wangari Maathai.
The troubles of Africa today are severe and wide-ranging. Yet, too often, they are portrayed by the media in extreme terms connoting poverty, dependence, and desperation. Here Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, offers a refreshingly unique perspective on these challenges, even as she calls for a moral revolution among Africans themselves.
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Recommended reading: The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence, Martin Meredith.
Martin Meredith has revised this classic history to incorporate important recent developments, including the Darfur crisis in Sudan, Robert Mugabe’s continued destructive rule in Zimbabwe, controversies over Western aid and exploitation of Africa’s resources, the growing importance and influence of China, and the democratic movement roiling the North African countries of Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan. |
Mahler Made the Tragic Beautiful
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Required reading: Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World, Norman Lebrecht.
Lebrecht, host of a BBC interview series on the arts, has a keen interest in Gustav Mahler dating back at least to his Mahler Remembered (1988), a collection of remembrances of Mahler by his contemporaries. Here Lebrecht leads readers through the composer’s turbulent personal life, the anti-Semitic European political milieu in which he moved, and the music of his time, concluding with an examination of Mahler’s 10 symphonies (one unfinished) and songs.
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More Science Fiction
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Required reading: The Best of the Best, 20 years of the years’s best science fiction, Gardiner Dozois, editor.
With work spanning two decades, The Best of the Best stands as one of the ultimate science fiction anthologies ever published.
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Recommended reading: Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the 20th Century, Orson Scott Card, Editor.
An overview of the best science fiction short stories of the 20th century as selected and evaluated by critically-acclaimed author Orson Scott Card. |
The Bill of Rights in American Life
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Recommended reading: The Bill of Rights, Amar.
Akhil Reed Amar not only illuminates the text, structure, and history of the 1789 Bill but also argues that its present character owes more to antislavery activists of the Reconstruction era than to the Founding Fathers who created the Bill.
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The Crusades: Their History & Legacy
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Required reading: The New Concise History of the Crusades, Thomas F. Madden.
From Palestine and Europe's farthest reaches, each crusade is recounted in a clear, concise narrative. The author gives special attention as well to the crusades' effects on the Islamic world and the Christian Byzantine East. |
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Recommended reading: The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095-1274, Jonathan and Louise Riley-Smith.
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Recommended reading: The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, Jonathan Riley-Smith.
With this book, Jonathan Riley-Smith returns to the actual story of the Crusades, explaining why and where they were fought and how deeply their narratives and symbolism became embedded in popular Catholic thought and devotional life. |
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Recommended reading: The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, Carole Hillenbrand.
This book discusses a group of themes designed to highlight how Muslims reacted to the alien presence of the Crusaders in the heart of traditional Muslim territory. Ideological concerns are examined and the importance of the jihad is assessed in the context of the gradual recovery of the Holy Land and the expulsion of the Crusaders. |
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Recommended veiwing: The Kingdom of Heaven, DVD
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From Ridley Scott, the visionary director of Black Hawk Down and Gladiator, comes this spectacular epic of courage, honor and adventure. Orlando Bloom stars as Balian, a young Frenchman in Medieval Jerusalem during the Crusades, who, having lost everything, finds redemption in a heroic fight against overwhelming forces to save his people and fulfill his destiny as a knight. |
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Recommended veiwing: History Channel Presentation of the Crusades, DVD.
THE CRUSADES: CRESCENT & THE CROSS presents the epic battle between two Middle Age superpowers: the Christian Crusaders and the Muslims. Fought over two centuries, the conflict decided the fate of the Holy Land of the Middle East. Only a tiny strip of land, just a few hundred miles long, it contained the ultimate prize, the city of Jerusalem. |
The First Americans: Then & Now
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Recommended reading: Native American History for Dummies, Lippert.
This straightforward guide breaks down their ten-thousand-plus year history and explores their influence on European settlement of the continent. You'll gain fresh insight into the major tribal nations, their cultures and traditions, warfare and famous battles; and the lives of such icons as Pocahontas, Sitting Bull and Sacagawea. |
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Recommended reading: Walking With Grandfather, Marshall.
In Walking with Grandfather, authentic Lakota lineage holder and award-winning storyteller Joseph M. Marshall breaks this silence with the very best from a lifetime of lessons passed on to him by his grandfather. |
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Recommended reading: The Utes Must Go, Decker.
This is truly an impressive and important accomplishment of documentation and narrative. Decker's biographical sketches of the key players in the drama -- from Ute leaders Ouray and Captain Jack to hapless Indian agent Nathan Meeker, to Interior Secretary Carl Schurtz, are masterly in themselves. |
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Recommended reading: The Sand Creek Massacre, Hoig.
This account of the massacre investigates the historical events leading to the battle, tracing the growth of the Indian-white conflict in Colorado Territory. |
The Meaning of Life, A Very Short Introduction
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Required reading: The Meaning of Life, A Very Short Introduction, Terry Eagleton.
In this spirited Very Short Introduction, famed critic Terry Eagleton takes a serious if often amusing look at the question and offers his own surprising answer.
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Write to Save Your Life: Beginning Memoir Writing
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Required reading: Writing Your Life, Lou W. Stanek.
We all have stories to tell -- of a rapturous first kiss, a life-altering moment of choice, or the shocking revelation of a long-guarded secret. And these stories are often as distinctive, fascinating, exciting and entertaining as those found in the memoirs and autobiographies that currently top the nation's bestseller lists. We just need to know how to tell them best. |
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Recommended reading: How to Write the Story of Your Life, Frank Thomas.
How to Write the Story of Your Life shows writers how to mine the depths of their experience to write an engaging and saleable memoir. Frank P. Thomas gives readers the instruction they need to write the stories of their lives, including: The five Rs essential to the completion and publishing of a life story; research, remembering, 'riting, reading and reproduction Hundreds of memory sparkers to get readers started Organizational techniques for developing a writing plan and how to work with photos and documents Memories and the author's expert guidance are all writers need to leave a legacy for generations to come. |
