{"id":2800,"date":"2015-05-09T14:00:41","date_gmt":"2015-05-09T19:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/?p=2800"},"modified":"2018-08-09T13:24:59","modified_gmt":"2018-08-09T18:24:59","slug":"more-titles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/2015\/05\/09\/more-titles\/","title":{"rendered":"More titles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"worldgoneby\"World Gone By: A Novel<\/b>
\nBy Dennis Lehane
\nWilliam Morrow 2015<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading Dennis Lehane for a long time: A Drink Before the War<\/em>, Gone, Baby, Gone,<\/em> Mystic River<\/em>, and others. So I was excited when Priscilla came home with this novel. She has great taste in books.<\/p>\n

Stephen King calls World Gone By<\/em>, \u201cThe best gangster novel since The Godfather.\u201d He might be right, but then I can\u2019t think of many other gangster novels.<\/p>\n

World Gone By <\/em>is set in 1940s Tampa, with a side excursion to Cuba at the end. Joe Coughlin is a gangster. He used to run a gang, but now he\u2019s a consigliere<\/em>, a nod towards respectability. He\u2019s a suit, a guy who is invited to tony social events, has his picture taken with politicians, goes to church every Sunday.<\/p>\n

The problem with that is that he is still immersed in a world of crime, exploitation, violence, corruption \u2014 you name the sin. A single father, he loves and cares for his son. He wants to do the right thing, if that\u2019s possible in a world full of people doing the wrong thing. But he\u2019s haunted by what he has done, what he does, what he will do.<\/p>\n

Turns out it\u2019s not possible to do the right thing in a world full of people doing the wrong thing. But I don\u2019t want to give any more away.<\/p>\n

This is a novel with taut prose, great noir similes, and moral complexity. Highly recommended.<\/p>\n

\"confessions\"Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen<\/b>
\nBy Mary Norris
\nW. W. Norton & Company 2015<\/p>\n

This is an interesting and funny book written by a woman who was a copy editor at The New Yorker<\/em> for over thirty years.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of talk about style generally, grammar specifically, and punctuation even more specifically in Confessions of a Comma Queen<\/em>, but as the word \u201cConfessions\u201d in the subtitle suggests, it\u2019s not a book about grammar. If you need to know how to punctuate a restrictive clause, go to Strunk and White\u2019s Elements of Style<\/em> or Fowler\u2019s Modern English Usage<\/em> (though, if you search long enough you will find that information in this book, too).<\/p>\n

Instead this book reads more like a book by Bill Bryson. It\u2019s partly a memoir, the story of the author\u2019s childhood in Cleveland, college years in New Jersey, a stint working at the Cleveland Costume Company, and lots of great stories about working at The New Yorker<\/em>. But the pleasure of the book lies in the way the narrative gets distracted and heads off into a long, fascinating, funny digression about almost anything. A reference to the kind of pencil she used when working as a copy editor, for example, leads to stories about attending a pencil party in New York (who knew there was such a thing?) and her visit to the Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum in Logan, Ohio.<\/p>\n

A chapter putatively about the hyphen leads to a discussion of \u201cthe holiest hyphen in literature . . . the hyphen in Moby-Dick<\/em>, which in turn leads to the story of a visit to Melville\u2019s house in the Berkshires, which leads to a short, interesting look at Melville\u2019s life before coming back to the original subject, the hyphen.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a good read. As you enjoy it, this book will also teach, or remind, you about the conventions of English punctuation. That\u2019s a good thing.<\/p>\n

\"BeingBeing Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End<\/b>
\nBy Atul Gawande
\nHenry Holt and Company 2014<\/p>\n

This is a wise, moving, important book. Everyone should read it, but it is especially important for anyone who \u2014 because of their own situation or the situation of someone they love \u2014 is coming up against the limits our mortality imposes upon us.<\/p>\n

This book is a critique of the way medicine responds to the challenges of aging, a critique written by a physician based upon the treatment his patients have received and upon his experience of his own father\u2019s decline and death. Gawande argues that, \u201cWe\u2019ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.\u201d In other words, doctors, their patients, and the patients\u2019 families and loved ones, need to be purposeful about deciding when their attempts to stave off death result in a life not worth living.<\/p>\n

Gawande\u2019s thinking about this topic leads him through stories of the end-of-life experiences of patients he has treated, an illuminating short history of elder care, and passages of memoir about his own experience as a son. Gawande is a thoughtful and literate writer, and he does a wonderful job of knitting these disparate threads into a powerful argument about what matters most in the closing years of life.<\/p>\n

I find myself thinking more and more about well-being, how to define it and how to achieve it. As a college president, I mainly think about how St. Olaf can help students to achieve well-being and how we can measure our success at doing so. This book is a reminder that the quest for well-being is life-long and that our definition of that state may change as we age and our circumstances change.<\/p>\n

Just after finishing this book I read a moving essay in The Wall Street Journal<\/em> by Fay Vincent, the former Commissioner of baseball called \u201cLife as the Ninth Inning Nears.\u201d It\u2019s a reflection on what matters most to him in his last years. \u201cI only want to be at peace and in normal discomfort. Age makes life simple until it does not.\u201d Gawande would have ended that last sentence after the word \u201csimple.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Winter Girl: A Novel<\/b>
\nBy Matt Marinovich
\nDoubleday, 2016<\/p>\n

This is another in the series of novels I have been reading about dysfunctional marriages between really terrible people that end very badly. (Including Gone Girl<\/em> and The Silent Wife<\/em>, discussed elsewhere on my bookshelf, and Hausfrau<\/em>, which I haven\u2019t commented on.) There wasn\u2019t a plan to go down this path: it just started with Gone Girl<\/em> and one thing led to another.<\/p>\n

The Winter Girl<\/em> is narrated in the first-person by Scott, a failed wedding photographer, married to Elise, a speech therapist who doesn\u2019t like her work. Elise\u2019s father is dying, and the couple has moved from their apartment in Brooklyn into his house in the Hamptons to be near him. Elise spends most of her time at the hospital.<\/p>\n

Scott has time on his hands, and that\u2019s not a good thing. There is a vacant house next door that attracts his curiosity. Curiosity leads to breaking and entering. The act of opening the doors of that vacant house also opens the doors of some terrible family secrets that, once they see the light of day, lead to brutal consequences. You could call this novel a thriller, except that you get too creeped out by the events that are meant to create drama.<\/p>\n

The pleasure of reading a novel with a first-person dramatized narrator lies in watching the extent to which the narrator understands what is happening and takes responsibility for his part in the action. Scott doesn\u2019t do well at either of those things.<\/p>\n

The Winter Girl<\/em> is not for the faint-hearted, so if you read it be prepared for some gruesome scenes and some appalling behaviors.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Guise of Another<\/b>
\nBy Allen Eskens
\nSeventh Street Books, 2015<\/p>\n

Allen Eskens is a criminal defense attorney turned detective novelist. The Guise of Another<\/em>, his second novel, is set in Minnesota, and readers familiar with the Twin Cities metro will recognize many of the settings where its action occurs.<\/p>\n

The novel begins with a couple having reckless sex while the man is driving through the warehouse district. Surprise! They lose control and crash head-on into a Porsche driven by one James Erkel Putnam, who dies. But it turns out that the driver of that Porsche is not James Erkel Putnam. It was someone who had assumed his identity. Who had done that? And why?<\/p>\n

The man seeking answers to these questions is Alexander Rupert, a detective on the Minneapolis Police Force. Alexander is not doing well. He was a member of the Force\u2019s elite Narcotics Task Force, but the Task Force is under investigation by a Grand Jury for corruption, and he has been subpoenaed to testify. Meanwhile, he\u2019s reassigned to the Forgery and Frauds Unit, where \u201cHe wore this new job like a suit one size too small, a suit he swore he would never claim as his own.\u201d He\u2019s treated as a pariah by the other members of the unit, who assume he\u2019s dirty because he was with the Narcotics Task Force. Moreover, it\u2019s pretty clear that his wife is having an affair. Frustrated at work and humiliated at home, he\u2019s certain that even is he is exonerated by the Grand Jury, \u201cthat exoneration would not completely pull him out of the hole he\u2019d fallen into.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he\u2019s a detective, so when he is presented with the death of a person who assumed someone else\u2019s identity he sets to work to figure out what is going on. Lots, it turns out, involving a multinational corporation doing sub rosa security work for the government, an alluring blonde, and a deadly assassin, not to mention the continuing drama in Rupert\u2019s personal life, which becomes more and more entangled with the investigation.<\/p>\n

This novel is a great example of a crime novel where the detective is flawed \u2014 Rupert\u2019s troubles are of his own making \u2014 and where the arc of the narrative not only leads you to the solution to the crime but also answers the question whether the detective will square up or not.<\/p>\n

Highly recommended.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Bullet<\/b>
\nBy Mary Louise Kelly
\nGallery Books, 2015<\/p>\n

I wish I could report that books I receive as gifts from family and friends are usually on topics like the subtle interplay of light and shade in seventeenth-century French landscape painting or pragmatism in the philosophical works of William James. They aren\u2019t. My family and friends know how much pleasure I derive from reading thrillers and crime fiction, and that\u2019s what they tend to give me. (The exception would be my wife, Priscilla, as noted in my comments on books she has given me elsewhere on this bookshelf.)<\/p>\n

Christmas 2015 brought Mary Louise Kelly\u2019s second novel, The Bullet<\/em>. The protagonist, Caroline Cashion, is a professor French literature at Georgetown. She is an introvert. She lives alone. She spends time with her family, two brothers and two loving parents. She likes tea. \u201cI read with my legs tucked beneath me, in a soft, blue armchair in a sunny corner of my office nook on the fourth floor. Most nights you will also find me there, sipping tea, typing away, grading papers.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m inwardly groaning as I read this sentence on the first page of the novel. I don\u2019t have much \u2014 or any \u2014patience with the genteel strand of crime fiction, what some people call \u201ccozies.\u201d A tea-drinking protagonist who likes soft armchairs and sunny nooks\u2014not my kind of novel.<\/p>\n

But everything changes suddenly when Professor Cashion, who has been experiencing pain in her right wrist, has an MRI. It discloses that there is a bullet in her neck, lodged up against her spine. She has spent her life drinking tea and reading in soft armchairs placed in sunny nooks. How could this be?<\/p>\n

The search for an answer to that question brings sudden and dramatic changes to her life. For example, she learns that the parents who raised her are not her birth parents. Her biological parents were murdered in the kitchen of their home in Atlanta when she was three years old, and she was there when it happened. Her past has been kept secret from her all these years, and the discovery of it changes her. Those changes are manifest in the things she thinks, says, and does in the rest of the novel, which tells how she uncovered what happened that morning in an Atlanta kitchen and what she does with that knowledge.<\/p>\n

The Bullet<\/em> is a good read. I recommend it.<\/p>\n

\"David<\/a>David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants<\/b>
\nBy Malcolm Gladwell
\nLittle, Brown and Company, 2013<\/p>\n

I think Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most interesting commentators on modern life writing today. He\u2019s like David Brooks, the New York Times<\/em> columnist: each new book takes on an important topic, looks at it from an original viewpoint, and leaves the reader with fresh approaches to and new insights into common topics.<\/p>\n

David and Goliath<\/em> starts off with the familiar Old Testament story. Although David appears to be the underdog\u2014young, slim, untrained in the arts of war, armed only with a slingshot \u2014 in fact he entered into combat with Goliath, the heavily armored giant, as the favorite because David fought in a new way and with new weapons. Gladwell concludes, \u201cThere is an important lesson in [this story] for battles with all kind of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.\u201d The rest of this book elaborates on that insight.<\/p>\n

The most interesting chapter of the book for me was the chapter on the assumptions that go into college selection. Gladwell tells the poignant story of Caroline Sacks, a young woman who loved science, studied hard, excelled in high school, and gained admission to both Brown University and the University of Maryland. She chose Brown for the prestige and the promise of an exciting opportunity for intellectual growth. It didn\u2019t work out. Disappointed at her failure to achieve in science courses at Brown at the same level as other students, she left the sciences, despite her passion for them and her demonstrated ability.<\/p>\n

It turns out that there is a scholarly literature on the topic of whether it\u2019s better to be a big fish in a little pond or a little fish in a big pond. The answer, at least as far as persisting in college goes, is that it\u2019s better to be a big fish in a little pond. Gladwell shows that, \u201cThe more elite an educational institution is the worse students feel about their own academic abilities,\u201d because they are measuring themselves against other very gifted students. This affects your desire and ability to persist in your course of study because when your self-concept takes a beating every day in class, so does your \u201cwillingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks.\u201d Gladwell quotes a psychologist who wryly observed that, \u201cif you want to see the positive effects of elite schools on self-concept … you should be measuring the parents.\u201d<\/p>\n

This book will unsettle you if you are in a position, or if you work at an institution that is in a position, of privilege and power. If you are a striver, or at a striving institution, you will find it energizing. Either way, I recommend it highly.<\/p>\n

\"committee_members\"<\/a>Dear Committee Members: A Novel<\/b>
\nBy Julie Schumacher
\nDoubleday, 2014<\/p>\n

This is a very funny book.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a satire of academics, in the tradition of Kingsley Amis\u2019s hilarious Lucky Jim<\/em>, Richard Russo\u2019s Straight Man<\/em>, and David Lodge\u2019s Trading Places<\/em> and Small World<\/em>. Unlike those titles, this is an epistolary novel, which means that it is told entirely through letters. They are letters of recommendation, all written by Jason T. Fitger (he sounds like a pill already, doesn\u2019t he?), Professor of Creative Writing and English at the fictional Payne University.<\/p>\n

Fitger published one novel two decades ago that received a lot of attention and, subsequently, two that did not. He\u2019s not writing anything now. Instead, from the safety of his tenured position, he is devoting himself to expressing his frustration with the world, with his students, with his colleagues, with administrators at Payne University (it\u2019s a pain to teach there?), and ultimately with himself. But he does it with a kind of joyous anger and beautifully expressed frustration that makes you glad he\u2019s so unhappy.<\/p>\n

(I once had a Dean who remarked that English professors were the hardest faculty to deal with because they were so gifted at expressing their discontent.)<\/p>\n

Many epistolary novels contain letters between two people, or among more than two. All of the letters in this book are written by Fitger, and they are all letters of recommendation, though to different people. He writes more than once to his ex-wife (who works at the Law School at Payne), to the woman he had a dalliance with (who works in Financial Aid), and to the other alumni of The Seminar, a course they all took in graduate school. Elements of a plot do emerge from these and other letters, but this isn\u2019t a novel you read for the plot: you read it to find out what new thing exasperates Fitger and how brilliantly and how funnily he will express that exasperation.<\/p>\n

Fitger isn\u2019t all bile. His letter of recommendation for Oliver Postiglione, an undergraduate who is applying for a summer job at Flanders Nut House in Glass Lake, Wisconsin, evokes a sweet and melancholy memory of Fitger\u2019s own youthful summer of employment there: \u201cI recommend him to you warmly and without hesitation, in part because writing letters of reference such as this one allows me to reinhabit, if only fleetingly, the pensive, knock-kneed person I once was and to advocate for that former version of myself.\u201d But, being Fitger, he can\u2019t help but add, \u201cI hope for the sake of Mr. Postiglione\u2019s dignity your establishment no longer requires its most junior employee to dress as a human cashew.\u201d<\/p>\n

Julie Schumacher won the Thurber Award for American Humor for this novel, the first woman to win the award. It was well-deserved.<\/p>\n

\"Headhunters\"<\/a>Headhunters: A Novel<\/b>
\nBy Jo Nesb\u00f8
\nTranslated by Don Bartlett
\nVintage Crime\/Black Lizard, 2011<\/p>\n

This is a creepy novel. I couldn\u2019t put it down.<\/p>\n

When people think of Jo Nesb\u00f8, they most likely think of the Harry Hole novels, a series about a police detective in Oslo who drinks too much coffee, smokes too much, has disastrous relationships, and basically makes the American hard-boiled detective look like the Easter Bunny.<\/p>\n

Headhunters<\/em> is nothing like those novels. The first-person narrator is Roger Brown, who is a headhunter \u2014 i.e. he runs an executive search firm. I predict that you will count him among the most memorable first-person narrators you have ever encountered. He is absolutely vile, but what makes him so creepy is that it\u2019s not clear that he recognizes that fact. He is absolutely candid about his vile motives, plans, strategies, and actions. But it\u2019s all matter-of-fact, whether he\u2019s talking about what a great head of hair he has, about his sensitivity about being short in stature (when he introduces someone he first tells you how tall that person is), about how he refuses to \u201cgive his wife a baby,\u201d about his mistress, about the kind of suits he wears, about manipulating his clients and job seekers \u2014 you get the idea. He is so unaware of any hierarchy of moral considerations that he seems ultimately clueless.<\/p>\n

Brown is an art thief on the side. He gets wind of a recently discovered painting by Rubens that, if he could steal it, would bring him a vast sum. Its owner is the former CEO of a company who Brown wants to recruit to a CEO position he has been hired to fill. He proceeds to try to accomplish both of those jobs, and that unleashes a world of troubles \u2014 murder, infidelity, dead dogs, hiding in the tank underneath an outhouse, and mutilating corpses \u2014 among other things. (If you\u2019re squeamish, you might give this novel a pass.) It turns out that he is not clueless; in fact, he is extraordinarily resourceful. It helps to have no moral sense of any kind.<\/p>\n

You want to watch first-person narrators very carefully. Sometimes they completely misunderstand the significance of the events they are reporting, sometimes they deliberately color the narrative to serve their own ends, and sometimes they play tricks on you. Brown is this third kind of first-person narrator. Don\u2019t trust him.<\/p>\n

But do read this book, both to find out what happens (an excellent reason to read any book) and to meet a narrator you won\u2019t soon forget.<\/p>\n

\"Missoula:<\/a>Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town<\/b>
\nBy John Krakauer
\nDoubleday, 2015<\/p>\n

This is a harrowing but important book about widely held myths about rape that color how the justice system treats victims and perpetrators of rape. The book pursues that topic by focusing on a series of sexual assaults at the University of Montana between 2010 and 2012. They were so egregious, and they were handled so badly by the University, the campus police, the Missoula police department, and the county attorney\u2019s office, that the Department of Justice finally had to intervene.<\/p>\n

Overlaid on the topic of sexual assault generally and of sexual assault on campuses particularly is a third element: the presence of an athletic culture at the University and in greater Montana generally that vastly complicated an already highly problematic environment. Members of the football team were implicated in a number of the sexual assaults described in the book, and football fans and boosters constituted a chorus that played an important role in the resolution of those cases.<\/p>\n

Many passages of this book are difficult to read because they provide detailed descriptions of sexual assaults, but the most harrowing passage \u2014 which presents the core of the problem Krakauer is writing about \u2014 comes from Chapter Ten, which describes research conducted by means of interviews, that reveals that male college students who had committed rapes \u201chad absolutely no sense of themselves as rapists,\u201d because they think of a rapist as someone who jumps out from behind a bush wearing a ski mask, not someone who, for example, takes advantage of an incapacitated person at a party. One of the students interviewed described a practice of his fraternity: look out for attractive first-year women, invite them to a party making it sound like a special honor to be selected, serve them sweet drinks with lots of alcohol with the goal of making them incapacitated, and when they are incapacitated to have sex with them. This student, the researcher reports, \u201chad no idea that what he was describing … were acts of rape.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of the many figures in this book who failed the victims of rape were probably acting as best they could in light of what they knew or believed they knew. Krakauer\u2019s contribution in this book is to disrupt common beliefs about such matters as what constitutes rape, who rapes, who are the victims, and what are the effects of rape.<\/p>\n

Readers familiar with Krakauer\u2019s other books, especially Into Thin Air<\/em> may be surprised by what I would describe as a lower octane prose style in Missoula<\/em>. Significant portions of the book consist of transcript or summaries of legal and extra-legal proceedings, interviews, and summaries of research findings. But there is a gathering sense of urgency as you read that gives the book its own narrative energy.<\/p>\n

I recommend this serious and important book.<\/p>\n

\"Cooking<\/a>Cooking on the Line: From Food Lover to Professional Line Cook<\/b>
\nBy Wayne Cohen
\nHarper Collins, 2011<\/p>\n

This is another in the series of books I\u2019ve been reading by working cooks. (See Sous Chef<\/em>; Yes, Chef<\/em>; Back of the House<\/em>; Knives at Dawn<\/em>; Blood, Bones, and Butter<\/em>; and Heat<\/em>, all previously discussed on my bookshelf.)<\/p>\n

Occasionally I fantasize that I could make it as a line cook in a professional kitchen. Then I read one of these books and confront reality: I\u2019m a decent home cook, but I\u2019m not ready for prime time.<\/p>\n

Wayne Cohen was a college football player, an executive at a software company, an entrepreneur, and then the president of a cookie company. He was at a point in his life when he could do what he wanted, which was to be a line cook in a restaurant. It\u2019s interesting that a guy who was obviously accustomed to independence and to leadership roles didn\u2019t want to be the chef: he wanted to cook on the line, be the guy who received the orders from the servers, cooked the hot items, and sent them to the expediter to be plated and served. He wanted to be the guy who responds \u201cYes, Chef\u201d to commands from the boss of the kitchen.<\/p>\n

Cohen started in a German restaurant in Chicago and eventually made it to some of the best-known kitchens in that city, including Coco Pazzo and Piccolo Sogno. This book details that journey. It\u2019s full of the kitchen drama that\u2019s a staple of books like this: there\u2019s a rush of customers, someone on the kitchen staff has a melt down, everybody gets behind, pans are flying everywhere, \u201cWe\u2019re in the weeds!\u201d and so forth. Lots of fun.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also fun to read Cohen\u2019s take on how kitchens are run. As a business executive he garnered a fair amount of administrative experience and organizational know-how. There are wonderful cooks in the food and beverage business, but apparently there are also lots of feckless people, and Cohen is always thinking \u201cWouldn\u2019t it be better if we did it another way?\u201d<\/p>\n

Reading this book will make you hungry, but that\u2019s okay, because it has lots of recipes. Enjoy!<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The Road to Character<\/b>
\nBy David Brooks
\nRandom House, 2015<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve long admired David Brooks as a columnist, a commentator on The PBS Newshour<\/em>, and as an author, so I was excited to be given a copy of his new book by my wife, Priscilla, who gives me so many good books.<\/p>\n

This is a serious book. It\u2019s not that Brooks\u2019s previous books have been lightweights \u2014 they haven\u2019t \u2014 but there is a gravity and gravitas<\/em> to The Road to Character<\/em> that sets it apart from his previous works and from most other books written for the general public.<\/p>\n

Brooks begins by distinguishing between \u201cr\u00e9sum\u00e9 virtues\u201d and \u201ceulogy virtues.\u201d The former are the \u201cskills that you bring to the job market and that contribute to external success\u201d; the latter are \u201cthe virtues that get talked about at your funeral, the ones that exist at the core of your being.\u201d He then, borrowing a phrase from Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, describes two \u201copposing sides of our nature\u201d: Adam I and Adam II. Adam I is the side that focuses on the r\u00e9sum\u00e9 virtues; Adam II focuses on the eulogy virtues. \u201cWhile Adam I\u2019s motto is \u2018Success,\u2019 Adam II experiences life as a moral drama.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brooks argues, and he is right, that \u201cwe live in a culture that nurtures Adam I, the external Adam, and neglects Adam II.\u201d In an unusually revealing passage, Brooks describes himself as naturally disposed towards shallowness and talks meaningfully about his struggle to elevate the Adam II side of his nature. \u201cI wrote this book not sure I could follow the road to character, but I wanted at least to know what the road looks like and how other people have trodden it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps you would like to argue with Brooks\u2019s contention that we live in a culture that nurtures Adam I. If so, I recommend the section of Chapter One called \u201cThe Shift.\u201d Here\u2019s an example of what you will encounter. In 1950 Gallup asked high school seniors whether they considered themselves to be important people. Twelve percent said yes. Asked the same question in 2005, 80 percent of high school seniors said yes.<\/p>\n

The book then proceeds to describe and comment upon the lives of people Brooks considers exemplary of individuals who have elevated the Adam II side of their nature and thus achieved and displayed what he calls \u201ccharacter\u201d: Frances Perkins, Dwight Eisenhower, Dorothy Day, George Marshall, A. Phillip Randolph, George Eliot, Augustine, Samuel Johnson. It\u2019s a fascinating list of historical figures, all of whom are the subjects of lengthy biographies, but the point of Brooks\u2019s analysis isn\u2019t to repeat the biographer\u2019s work. He tells you enough about the life so that you understand why this person is included in the book, but his focus is on the struggle that person engaged in on the road to character.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, his analysis praises as pathways to character traits that we don\u2019t often hear celebrated today: self-doubt, obedience, public-spiritedness, service, suffering, moderation.<\/p>\n

Brooks writes deeply and meaningfully about love in the chapter on George Eliot, about allegiance to institutions in the chapter on George Marshall, about ambition in the chapter on Augustine, and so on. Those meditations are the best part of the book. As a college president I often think about institutions, why they matter, how to care for them, how to build support for them. Brooks has written the best description of what it means to be institution-minded that I have ever read. Here\u2019s a part of it: \u201cLife is not like navigating an open field. It is committing oneself to a few of the institutions that were embedded on the ground before you were born and will be here after you die. It is accepting the gift of the dead, taking on the responsibility of preserving and improving an institution and then transmitting that institution, better, on to the next generation.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is an improving book. I recommend it.<\/p>\n

\"Red<\/a>Red Sparrow<\/b>
\nBy Jason Matthews
\nScribner, 2013<\/p>\n

I was driving somewhere and heard an interview with this author on NPR. The interviewer had high praise for the novel, it sounded interesting, so I read it.<\/p>\n

Red Sparrow <\/em>is a spy novel. It revolves around a cat and mouse game being played between America and Russia involving double agents. Thus, even though it\u2019s set in present times \u2014 Putin himself is a character \u2014 it has a Cold War feel to it. The intricate plotting will keep you engaged.<\/p>\n

Its most appealing feature is all of the \u201ctradecraft\u201d in the book. The author spent many years working for the CIA. That must be the source of the authentic-sounding details about everything from disguises to various approaches to following people without being noticed, to how to recruit counter-agents, and so on.<\/p>\n

Its author is often described as the new John Le Carr\u00e9. He\u2019s not. He is Le Carr\u00e9\u2019s equal in depicting tradecraft but not in exquisite psychological portraits of his characters. Perhaps it\u2019s attributable to the general coarsening of culture since LeCarr\u00e9 was in his prime, but this novel relies a lot more on physical and sexual violence than the Smiley novels ever did.<\/p>\n

A strange feature of this novel is its incorporation of recipes into the narrative. Every chapter refers in some way to food \u2014 the spies are eating in a restaurant, somebody remembers their grandmother\u2019s best dish, or whatever. Then, when you get to the end of the chapter, there is the recipe for that dish. It\u2019s odd that they just appear there without explanation or discussion, and even odder that the recipes don\u2019t include any amounts for the ingredients of the dish. What\u2019s up with that?<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere<\/b>
\nBy Kevin Carey
\nRiverhead Books, 2015<\/p>\n

Kevin Carey, smart, funny, and mean, directs the education policy program at the New America Foundation. The End of College<\/em> is an interesting book that I recommend to everyone. Part memoir, part history of higher education in America, and part jeremiad, it critiques the modern university on a host of grounds \u2014 cost, efficiency, quality of outcomes, to name a few \u2014 and offers a vision of a different and better way to do higher education.<\/p>\n

Carey locates the problem in what he calls the \u201chybrid university,\u201d the kind of institution that resulted from a failure in America to choose between the competing demands of practical training, research, and liberal arts education. \u201cInstead of choosing,\u201d Carey argues, \u201cAmerican universities decided to do all three things at once, with consequences that last to this day\u201d (p. 29). Among those consequences, the worst is the \u201chybrid\u201d university\u2019s lack of value for and attention to teaching undergraduates.<\/p>\n

Carey enrolled in a MOOC \u2014 massive, open, on-line course \u2014 offered for free by MIT. It was a terrific course offered by a legendary instructor for free. Why would anybody pay for such a course when it can be had for free? Moreover, since at their best such MOOCs employ the discoveries of neuroscience and cognitive science to recognize how students are progressing in their learning and then use that information to adapt to their individual circumstances the information that they are given and the problems they are asked to solve, the learning outcomes are much better than for students in a large lecture course that they paid for at a university. And it\u2019s on-line, it\u2019s available any time to anyone, and it\u2019s free. It\u2019s the University of Everywhere.<\/p>\n

The university as we know it today, Carey, argues, is already obsolete but doesn\u2019t know it. It will be replaced by organizations that offer better learning outcomes for less cost, that create faster and more rational paths to the credential showing what students have learned, and that are innovative and adaptive to their environment.<\/p>\n

Much of Carey\u2019s critique of higher education generally in America is fair. Much of it is not relevant to liberal arts colleges like St. Olaf where, for example, there is a relentless focus on teaching undergraduates. So, it\u2019s easy while reading The End of College<\/em> to dismiss its argument not only because of Carey\u2019s penchant for broad generalizations but also because of his dismissive, arrogant tone.<\/p>\n

But that would be a mistake. This is a book to take seriously. After reading it, the best question to ask yourself would be, \u201cWhat can we learn from this critique?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Locus<\/a>Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education<\/b>
\nBy William G. Bowen and Eugene M. Tobin
\nPrinceton University Press, 2015<\/p>\n

This is an important book written by two important figures in American Higher Education.<\/p>\n

William Bowen is the former President of Princeton University and then of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the leading philanthropic institution providing guidance and support for liberal arts colleges; Eugene Tobin is the former President of Hamilton College and the leader of the Mellon Foundation\u2019s programs to support liberal arts colleges.<\/p>\n

American higher education is undergoing a dramatic re-thinking of most of its central tenets: What is a degree? How should progress towards the degree be measured? What is the return on investment in higher education, and how should that return be understood? Is the Federal government\u2019s huge investment in financial aid for students paying off? What should a college faculty look like? Is tenure still a good idea? How much should college cost? Most importantly, as these questions get debated, who gets to decide what at America\u2019s colleges and universities?<\/p>\n

Most of these questions have been burbling under the surface for years, but they have been forced into the open by economic pressures, policy concerns, and the concerns of students and their families. This book takes them on.<\/p>\n

The first part of the book might seem like inside baseball to readers who are not in higher education. It is a historical survey of the evolution of colleges and universities in American since their founding in the eighteenth century (mostly). The survey concludes that the means by which colleges and universities have been governed in America over time has varied depending upon the external environment. In short, there is no one right or wrong model of governance; instead, the challenge is to fine-tune governance to accommodate the realities of the world in which higher education operates at the moment.<\/p>\n

This argument will be unwelcome to those who think there is only one right model of governance. It will be welcome to those who seek to adapt governance models to the exigencies of the moment.<\/p>\n

The second part of the book then offers thoughts about how governance ought to look in 2015. The answer is that it should continue to be a model with shared opportunities for input into the discussion, that there needs to be clarity about where discussion ends and decisions get made, and by whom, and that higher education governance needs to be flatter, more nimble, and more adaptive to reality.<\/p>\n

\"tender\"<\/a>Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table<\/b>
\nBy Ruth Reichl
\nRandom House, 1998<\/p>\n

Ruth Reichl was editor-in-chief of Gourmet<\/em> magazine for ten years, and she is a terrific writer \u2014 not just about food. I read and loved her memoir Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table<\/em> some years ago, so when I was at loose ends for something to read recently I picked up Tender at the Bone<\/em>. It didn\u2019t disappoint.<\/p>\n

Reichl grew up in eccentric circumstances in New York. Her father was a quiet, self-effacing book designer, her mother a commanding and demanding presence who was afflicted with bipolar disorder, and she was in many ways left to raise herself. This is a book about growing up, not a book about food, but much of the narrative revolves around food and cooking: her mother\u2019s parties where the food was not properly cared for and everybody went home sick; learning to cook beside Aunt Birdie\u2019s cook Alice; hanging around the kitchen with her own family\u2019s cook, Mrs. Peavy; working in a restaurant in Berkeley early in her marriage, and so on.<\/p>\n

For a variety of reasons, many of the people portrayed in this book aren\u2019t happy, Reichl among them, and as a result they face many challenges. You could think of it as a book about resilience: who has it and who doesn\u2019t and why. In the last scene in the book, Reichl is driving over the Bay Bridge in San Francisco with a friend, having just successfully beaten back a panic attack about driving over this big bridge. They are talking about her friend\u2019s victory over alcoholism. \u201cYou\u2019re amazing,\u201d Reichl tells her friend. \u201cOh, hon,\u201d the friend replies, \u201cNobody knows why some of us get better and others don\u2019t.\u201d That\u2019s a key subject this book explores.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t read it if you\u2019re only interested in mining it for recipes. It really is a memoir, not a food book. Nevertheless, there are some homey recipes you might want to try: Miriam Reichl\u2019s Corned Beef Ham, Aunt Birdie\u2019s Potato Salad, Alice\u2019s Apple Dumplings with Hard Sauce, Weiner Schnitzel, and Lemon Souffl\u00e9, and more. Read it instead for a candid, funny, often sad account of growing up around food.<\/p>\n

\"Cowboys<\/a>Cowboys and East Indians<\/b>
\nBy Nina McConigley
\nFiveChapters Books, 2013<\/p>\n

This excellent collection of short stories by an Ole (Class of \u201997) was a gift from my friend Dr. Maggi Murdock of the University of Wyoming, who met the author at a book signing in Wyoming and sent me an autographed copy that I am proud to have.<\/p>\n

Nina McConigley, born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming, is the daughter of an Irish father and an Indian mother. If you think this sounds like an interesting mix, you\u2019re right. The stories in this collection are about that mix, focusing particularly on the intersections of the India and Wyoming as lived out by Indians and Americans in both places.<\/p>\n

On the jacket cover of Cowboys and East Indians<\/em> author Kevin Wilson describes McConigley\u2019s stories as revealing \u201cgrace and understated power,\u201d and he adds that \u201cshe knows the exact moment to let wildness rush into the story.\u201d I think he captures these stories beautifully. They are quiet, understated, but at the same time relentless in their probing of the characters. Most of the characters in these stories aren\u2019t happy, successful, well-adjusted people. For a variety of reasons they tend to be on the outside looking in, whether an American in India or an Indian in America.<\/p>\n

McConigley can also be very funny. Perhaps \u201cwry\u201d is a better adjective. She sees the intentional and unintentional humor in the situations in which her characters find themselves. That perception is tempered by sympathy that makes these stories very moving.<\/p>\n

You should read them.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair<\/b>
\nBy Joel Dicker, Trans. Sam Taylor
\nPenguin Books, 2014<\/p>\n

Dr. Walt Carlson, a St. Olaf parent and a great reader, recommended this novel to me.<\/p>\n

Joel Dicker, a Swiss writer, first published this novel to international acclaim in 2012. Penguin brought out the English translation last year. The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair<\/em> is a story about a cold case. A famous writer \u2014 Harry Quebert \u2014 living in a big house in a small town in New Hampshire hires some landscapers to plant hydrangeas in his yard. When they dig the hole where the hydrangeas are to be planted, they uncover a skeleton and the manuscript of a novel. It turns out to be the remains of a fifteen-year old girl from the town who disappeared thirty-three years ago.<\/p>\n

The job of uncovering how she died and why she\u2019s buried with a manuscript falls to Marcus Goldman \u2014 the narrator, also a writer, and the prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Quebert \u2014 because the manuscript in the grave was written by Quebert, and it turns out that he and the girl \u2014 the daughter of a pastor in town and half Quebert\u2019s age \u2014 were in a relationship that was celebrated in the manuscript. Quebert is immediately reviled for as an adult having a relationship with a teenager and is arrested for the murder. Goldman, convinced of Quebert\u2019s innocence, begins an investigation into the girl\u2019s disappearance.<\/p>\n

But much of this novel is about writers, writing, and publishing, not about the cold case at all. Goldman was Quebert\u2019s student in college. After writing an acclaimed best seller he is imprisoned by writer\u2019s block and has come back to his college mentor for help. Through the course of the novel, which jumps back and forth in time, Goldman and Quebert go back and forth about what good writing is, what writers do, how they work, and why they write. Dicker has been compared to Nabokov, and I can see why. This is a novel about someone who wrote a different novel who is, in turn, the subject of another novel. It\u2019s very \u201cmeta\u201d as people would say now.<\/p>\n

The crime plot is compelling and the meta-discourse about writing engaging (though you have to put up with a lot of writerly self-importance). I recommend it.<\/p>\n

\"sheep\"<\/a>Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & the Way to a Meaningful Life<\/b>
\nBy William Deresiewicz
\nFree Press, 2014<\/p>\n

This is a book I should have loved, because it argues that the best kind of college education is precisely the kind we provide at St. Olaf College.<\/p>\n

After three chapters in which he excoriates the education provided at Ivy League universities (Deresiewicz used to teach at Yale), the author offers an ironic vision of what an undergraduate education ought to look like:<\/p>\n