LEE WITTERS
Biochemistry & Biological Sciences

Favorite book to teach:
The Discovery of Insulin, by Michael Bliss

Must-read books in your field:
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Child Who Never Grew, by Pearl Buck

Favorite pleasure read:
The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes

Currently reading:
Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American, by Robin Kelley

Bliss tells the historical tale of one of the most important discoveries in 20th-century medicine that opened the door to molecular medicine and literally transformed the lives of diabetics. As he writes: “With the discovery of insulin, the stone was rolled away and diabetes became a matter of life and not death.”

Middlesex, a Pulitzer-winning novel, details the life of an individual with a common enzymatic deficiency that causes anatomic gender confusion. It explores the fundamental question of what is a man and what is a woman. It’s not an easy answer.

Buck’s book tells the poignant tale of her daughter, who had an intellectual disability due to phenylketonuria, a disease unknown at the time of her birth. Written after Buck had for years hidden her daughter from public view, this book helped to lift a veil of secrecy around a disability that was not spoken of.

CAT NORRIS
Psychological and Brain Sciences

Favorite book to teach:
Descartes’ Error, by Antonio Damasio

Must-read book in your field:
Philosophical Foundations of Social Neuroscience, by M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker

Favorite pleasure reads:
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk
Lullaby, by Chuck Palahniuk

Currently reading:
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Descartes’ Error is an example of a really good popular-press book about the brain and emotion. I tend to not use textbooks to teach in our field. I believe that students learn more from reading and thinking critically about original research articles.

The field of social neuroscience is relatively new but has roots in many other research areas. When students come to me and ask how they can learn more about this relatively new field, I always recommend Foundations, a volume of previously published articles.

JOHN PFISTER
Psychological and Brain Sciences

Favorite book to teach:
50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior, by Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio and Barry L. Beyerstein

Must-read books in your field:
Why People Believe Weird Things, by Michael Shermer
The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century, by David Salsburg

Favorite pleasure read:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

Currently reading:
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick

I love 50 Great Myths and used it in my winter seminar. This should be on every psychologist’s shelf.

Shermer delivers a great discussion and a terrific analysis of the things that make us believe in alien abduction or ESP. There is humanity in a science like statistics. Any field is filled with intrigue, scoundrels, scandals, cads, bounders and geniuses alike.

Salsburg’s book is a reminder that statistics is not a dull subject.

My oldest son and I read Haddon’s book together several years ago and still talk about it. It is one autistic boy’s journey of discovery about himself and how others respond to him. My son and I still greet one another with the main character’s distinctive handclasp.

CHARLES WHEELAN ’88
Economics

Favorite book to teach:
Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? by James J. Heckman and Alan B. Krueger

Must-read book in your field:
The Economist, the magazine

Favorite pleasure read:
The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham

Currently reading:
Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Martin Indyk

Inequality is an in-depth look at an important public policy issue. The authors come to the conclusion that education—and preschool education in particular—plays a crucial role in determining life success. That’s a pretty intuitive finding, but the authors substantiate that view with a lot of interesting empirical data. The result is a book that is both highly relevant and academically rigorous. I also enjoy teaching the book because both Heckman and Krueger were professors of mine in graduate school, so I feel there is some kind of continuity from my former professors to my current students. I always invite my Dartmouth students to my home once during the term for dinner because Krueger did the same when I was in his class, and I like to be able to pass that tradition along.

The Razor’s Edge is about a guy who forgoes a conventional career in finance to travel the world seeking enlightenment. I first read the book in high school and it was one of the things that motivated me to travel around the world after I graduated from Dartmouth. I read the book again 20 years later when I was taking my children around the world, and it still spoke to me. There are pressures at any stage in life to do the conventional thing. I think it’s always healthy to challenge those choices, or at least reflect on them.

MELANIE BENSON
Native-American Studies

Favorite book to teach:
Bleed Into Me, by Stephen Graham Jones

Must-read book in your field:
Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko

Favorite pleasure read:
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner

Currently reading:
Flight, by Sherman Alexie

Bleed Into Me is a collection of stories that offers a diverse, dynamic and painful panorama of Native life in America today, one that looks nothing like the befeathered and moccasined tableau that many expect; indeed, Jones often denies us any explicit markers of “indigenous” identity at all. But he also writes like a poet, and the more we excavate his transcendently beautiful prose, we find a stunning collection of tropes and ideas that uncover how deeply and often irreversibly a Native past haunts even the most contemporary urban or suburban scenes.

Published in 1977, Ceremony was one of the first novels to be taken seriously as a Native-American text. It is considered canonical, and for good reason. It presents a bleak, evocative portrait of postwar reservation anomie and despair, of mixed-blood angst and dissipating tradition, of addiction and desperation, and of the ineluctable ways that American Indians were absorbed by mainstream American culture with all the violence and loss that process entailed. In the end, Silko provides a message of cultural survival through ceremony, of which storytelling is an integral part. It’s very difficult to begin a conversation about Native-American literature without starting here and assessing both the strides and the limitations that Silko’s work represents.

Alexie keeps us all talking—and that is the most important thing we can be doing.

JULIE KALISH
Institute for Writing and Rhetoric

Favorite book to teach:
Griswold v. Connecticut, a Supreme Court case

Must-read book in your field:
The United States Constitution, by We, the People of the United States and a handful of other guys

Favorite pleasure reads:
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Call it Sleep, by Henry Roth
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling

Currently reading:
The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Democracy in America, by Alexis De Tocqueville

I love teaching Griswold for all of its concurring opinions, and Roe v. Wade for its highly unusual historical portion and systematic constitutional analysis. I like that students have heard of Roe v. Wade, but almost none has actually read it; they are often surprised by what’s really said in the opinion. Supreme Court cases are the most fun to teach because they tend to be about really interesting questions that are societally and personally important to students, and they are pure argument—there’s no right and wrong answer; there’s merely argument, every piece of which is up for rhetorical analysis and debate. You can teach absolutely everything using these cases: writing, logic, argumentation, rhetoric, social issues, substantive law, ethics, government responsibility, and theory of law and government and on and on.

ADRIAN W.B. RANDOLPH
Art History

Favorite book to teach:
Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, by Michael Baxandall

Must-read book in your field:
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien), by Jacob Burckhardt

Favorite pleasure read:
Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters

Currently reading:
2666, by Roberto Bolaño

Written in the early 1970s, Baxandall’s creative interpretations of Italian Renaissance painting have never been surpassed. Baxandall’s limpid prose reveals complex analyses of how individuals may have understood their visual culture. Students are always fascinated by his emphasis on the materials of paint and gold, the cultural foundations of linear perspective and his easy command of a variety of sources.

One can still learn much from Burckhardt’s study and see how the Renaissance was framed by modern concerns.

LESLIE BUTLER
History

Favorite book to teach:
Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin

Must-read book in your field:
Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America, by Kathleen Brown

Favorite pleasure reads:
Harry Potter, by J.K. Rowling
The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis

Currently reading:
William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, by Robert Richardson

Baldwin’s collection of essays is one of the most probing and beautifully written meditations on identity in 20th-century America. He wrote most of these essays while living as an expatriate in France and Switzerland, thus continuing a long tradition of American writers and intellectuals who found that being abroad gave them fresh perspective on the problems of home.

Brown’s new, prize-winning book examines ideas of cleanliness in early America and how they have changed over time. Through imaginative and exhaustive research, Brown, a Penn professor, demonstrates how “body care” has been bound up with religious ideals, the rise of a market economy, the formation of a middle class and changes in gender roles.

MICHAEL BRONSKI
Film, Women’s and Gender Studies

Favorite book to teach:
Anti-Semite and Jew, by Jean-Paul Sartre

Must-read book in your field:
The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture, by Terry Castle

Favorite pleasure read:
Any collection of film criticism by Pauline Kael

Currently reading:
When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and her Circle of Female Spectators, by Lisa Merrill

Although written in 1948, Sartre’s analysis of anti-Semitism is an amazing work that really gets to the heart of how we create outside social groups and demonize them. Sartre gets into the psychology and the sexual fantasies of others and even today the book is highly instructive. I use it in “Jews and Hollywood: The Making of American Dreams” to discuss what Jewish immigrants faced when they came to this country. It is also useful in “Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies.”

Kael’s film criticism, which she began writing in the early 1960s and continued until her death a few years ago, is some of the best writing in American journalism and art criticism. She is funny, insightful, combative, highly knowledgeable and always entertaining. I go back to these reviews again and again, not just for the pleasure of reading them but to learn or remember how to write clearly and concisely and to make a point with vigor and wit.

Along with Edwin Booth, Cushman was perhaps the most famous Shakespearean actor of the 19th century. She was also, for the time, completely open about her romantic affairs with women. Her relationship with Matilda Hayes was so renowned that no less an expert on romantic love than Elizabeth Barrett Browning called their relationship a “female marriage” and found it more perfect than that between a man and a woman. The title of the book refers to the fact that one of her most famous roles was Romeo, which she played against her sister’s Juliet.

ANNELISE ORLECK
History, Jewish Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies

Favorite books to teach:
Coming of Age in Mississippi, by Anne Moody
Sisterhood is Powerful, a 1970 anthology edited by Robin Morgan

Must-read books in your field:
I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, by Charles Payne
Voices of Protest, by Alan Brinkley

Favorite pleasure read:
History, by Elsa Morante

Currently reading:
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon

I particularly enjoy teaching primary sources that vividly evoke the consciousness of a particular group at a particular time. Coming of Age and Sisterhood are books that spark engaged and emotional discussions, forcing students to reckon with the passions of two very different political moments.

There are far too many truly great books in U.S. history to narrow down the field to one. I have taught often and greatly admire Charles Payne’s civil rights movement study and Brinkley’s 1930s study of Huey Long and Father Coughlin.

RUSSELL RICKFORD
History

Favorite books to teach:
I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, by Charles Payne
Revolutionaries to Race Leaders, by Cedric Johnson
Up South, by Matthew Countryman

Must-read books in your field:
Race Rebels, by Robin Kelley
Race Against Empire, by Penny Von Eschen
Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, by Barbara Ransby
American Babylon, by Robert Self
Local People, by John Dittmer
Black Marxism, by Cedric Robinson

Favorite pleasure reads:
Cane, by Jean Toomer
Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown

Currently reading:
Defying Dixie, by Glenda Gilmore
Bloody Lownde, by Hasan Kwame Jeffries

My favorite books to teach compel us to think carefully and critically about the process of self-liberation, about structural racism, about the practice of freedom. They tend to deal with the black freedom struggle of the 1960s and 1970s. They emphasize elements of black self-determination and institution building within that struggle. They emphasize the politics and ethics of democratic pedagogy within social movements, and they affirm the dignity of struggle.

My must-read books all help us to rethink the black freedom struggle in some fundamental way. They help to re-center and historicize black radicalism as a logical, effective force for progressive social change in the United States and beyond.

YORKE BROWN
Physics and Astronomy

Favorite book to teach:
The Cosmic Perspective, by Jeffrey Bennett, Megan Donahue, Nicholas Schneider, Mark Voit

Favorite pleasure reads:
Endurance, by Alfred Lansing
The Conquest of Everest, by John Hunt

Currently reading:
The Trouble With Physics, by Lee Smolin

Teaching astronomy is a great way for me to help students who are not specializing in science to gain a greater appreciation for how science works and why scientists experience as much beauty in the exploration of the natural world as, say, artists do in expressing the essentials of humanity. Over the course of history our scientific understanding of astronomy has profoundly affected culture and our basic understanding of ourselves; studying astronomy today brings a student face to face with the basis of his or her own values, beliefs and outlooks. The Cosmic Perspective does a great job of leading students through this process. The authors provide an elegantly unified and cogent account of our current state of understanding of the universe, reveling in our accomplishments, the remaining deep mysteries and the sheer physical beauty of the cosmos itself. The book forms a solid foundation for my approach to teaching astronomy.

BRUCE SACERDOTE ’90
Economics

Favorite book to teach:
The Big Short, by Michael Lewis

Must-read book in your field:
Naked Economics, by Charles Wheelan

Favorite pleasure reads:
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling
Blue at the Mizzen, by Patrick O’Brian

Currently reading:
John Adams, by David McCullough

Lewis tells a great story about the mortgage meltdown. Wheelan’s book is a great illustration of economic principles, and Potter is a classic tale of good versus evil and Blue at the Mizzen is a compelling tale of a person’s triumphs and challenges throughout a career. In John Adams you get a great understanding of the founders and our history and of New England’s history.

DONALD PEASE
English

Favorite book to teach:
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Must-read book in your field:
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

Favorite pleasure read:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

Currently reading:
The Case of Peter Pan, by Jacqueline Rose

I have taught and re-read Moby Dick from the year I began teaching at Dartmouth in 1973. No matter the angle of vision I bring to Melville’s rendering of his characters and events, I do not feel I have begun to do them justice. Passages like the following begin to explain the challenge Melville poses: “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.” But the gratification that arises from our shared need to respond to Melville’s novel has continued to inspire me and two generations of Dartmouth students.

I return to Whitman’s poetry whenever I need to renew my faith in the imagination’s power to restore hope to the world. Whitman gratifies that need in lines such as: “I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.”

This past year I wrote a book on Dr. Seuss that spurred my desire to design a course in children’s literature. In The Case of Peter Pan Rose spells out the problems attending such a project—with unparalleled wit and insight.

SIENNA CRAIG
Anthropology

Favorite book to teach:
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman

Must-read book in your field:
No Aging in India, by Lawrence Cohen

Favorite pleasure read:
Poetry by various authors—Pablo Neruda, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver

Currently reading:
Goat Song, by Brad Kessler

Fadiman’s book is a beautifully written and very well researched story about encounters of healing and medicine across cultures. In a nutshell, it is the story of a Hmong girl from Merced, California, who has what her biomedical doctors call epilepsy and what her Hmong family understands as the blessing and curse of someone who can become a great shaman. It is also a story about migration, social change and the culture of biomedicine. Since I’m a medical anthropologist the theme works well in a lot of my classes—from first-year seminars to large intro courses in cultural anthropology.

There are lots of must-read books in cultural anthropology. I picked Cohen because it is one of those ethnographies that is so dense and well researched on the one hand, but on the other reads like a good New Yorker article in places, fiction in others. The book is about conceptions of madness, senility and old age in India and the United States. The book also has a lot to say about the relationship between individuals and society, about the cultural construction of social norms and about the place of the ethnographer in the research and writing we do.

Poetry condenses meaning, touch, thought, human emotion in such amazing ways. I love the precision of poems, as well as their capacity for humility, grace, even sharp social criticism. The economy of words in poems moves me deeply and makes me think about how I use language.

JENNIFER LIND
Government

Favorite book to teach:
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, by John Mearsheimer

Must-read books in your field:
“E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” a study by Robert Putnam

Favorite pleasure read:
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

Currently reading:
Country Driving, by Peter Hessler

I assign Mearsheimer’s book to students in my “Introduction to International Politics” class. I love it because it is crisp, clear and powerful. One can make many criticisms of it and in class we certainly do, but it is a book to be reckoned with. Many times the students in my class are fresh out of high school and have the view that “if countries just talked about their problems, then they’d figure out how to get along.” Mearsheimer sledgehammers this idea. To see its effect on the students is an amazing experience: They begin questioning, wrestling, learning. Some students leave the class committed Mearsheimer-ites, with a dog-eared copy of his book next to their beds. Others reject his pessimistic view. However, thanks to the clarity that this book imposes, all students leave the class armed with far more intelligent arguments about conflict and cooperation in international politics.

I read Hessler’s writing in The New Yorker and am always entranced by it. This book details the author’s experience with a road trip around China and tells of his life in a small rural village. The book, like Hessler’s articles, shows China’s recent evolution from a poor backward society into a modern developed country. It puts names and faces and anecdotes to all of those statistics that we read about. I have students read his work in my East Asian international relations class.

REIKO OHNUMA
Religion

Favorite book to teach:
Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, translated by Barbara Stoler Miller

Must-read book in your field:
Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature, by Liz Wilson

Favorite pleasure read:
Oh the Glory of It All, by Sean Wilsey

Currently reading:
Motley Crue: The Dirt—Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band, by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx

The Gitagovinda is a hauntingly beautiful verse-text that lingers obsessively over every single emotion—joy, anxiety, ecstasy, doubt, jealousy, and fear—experienced over the course of a single night by a teenage couple in love. I love teaching this text because even though it’s a Hindu religious treatise that was composed in Sanskrit in twelfth-century northern India, it’s also a torrid love story that college-age students can immediately relate to and be swept up in.

Wilson’s Charming Cadavers fundamentally changed the way I think about such issues as gender and the role of women in South Asian Buddhism and has had a huge influence on my work. Its subject matter is gruesome, but it is written with wit, verve, and a wonderful sense of humor.

As for my current reading, what can I say? It’s a good beach book that is surprisingly thoughtful and well written. It manages to convince you that, in spite of all that excess and debauchery, Motley Crue was just four lost little boys searching for happiness and love.