Spring 2007 Alumnae Quarterly Web Extra

Special Editions: Book Recommendations from MHC Faculty

Members of the faculty are nothing if not critical readers and we thought it would be helpful and fun to ask a couple of them this question: what are five books you cannot go to your grave without reading? We gave them no limits—they could be books within or outside of their specialty. If Stuart Little rocked their world, we wanted to know.—Mieke H. Bomann

Eleanor Townsley, associate professor of sociology and gender studies

The Bone People by Keri Hulme
The Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber

The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Stan Rachootin, professor of biological sciences

Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity by Gregory Bateson
The Waste Books by Georg Lichtenberg
The Art of the Soluble by P.B. Medawar
To Begin With;: Being Prophylaxis Against Pedantry by Raymond Pearl

Period Piece, A Cambridge Childhood by Gwen Raverat

Donald Weber, professor of English

Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Zuckerman Novels by Philip Roth
Light in August by William Faulkner

Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer

Alan Durfee, professor of mathematics

Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert.
The big House: A Century of Life in an American Summer Home by George Howe Colt
Escape from Lucania: An Epic Story of Survival by David Roberts
My Detachment: A Memoir by Tracy Kidder
The PianoTuner by David Mason

Parsons’ Mill by Timothy Lewontin

I keep my campaign promises, but I never promised to wear stockings.
—
Ella T. Grasso ’40, former governor of Connecticut; first woman to become governor of a state in her own right