Truly knotty complicated questions rarely fall into tidy categories. This fundamental truth challenges deans, departments, faculty and students, for disciplines only go so far and then it is necessary to find different perspectives. Marjorie Garber is a literary scholar who has consistently and successfully strayed beyond English. She has served as Director of the Humanities Center…
Category: Reviews
Reviews of books, articles, and the like
Cities, Sustainability, and Schools – An Educated Guess About an Urban Future
To get a really clear view of the uneasy tension between what makes us feel good and what makes ecological sense, tour residential college campuses. Most likely you will need a car to reach the college of your choice, and once you arrive, you probably will have to hunt for the appropriate parking lot in…
Animal Studies and Ody’s Journey
I grew up with dogs, cats and fish. I rode horses. My mother’s relatives in Ohio had farms. I like animals, and for whatever reason, most animals seem to like me. My first job as a teenager was working as a kennel assistant in a local animal hospital. I loved it and it was extraordinarily good…
Cheap – A Liberal Arts Challenge
Ellen Ruppel Shell, Boston University journalism professor and author, is a smart and informed writer. In her latest book, Cheap: the high cost of discount culture, Shell looks at the rise of discount culture – discount shops, outlet malls, and the proliferation of the cheap. Cheap, she takes pains to point out, is not the…
Necessary Lies
A well-crafted history arranges space and time into a set, frames a proscenium for our viewing, and knows when to raise the curtain and when to let it fall. It crafts order out of chaos; it conjures up beginnings, middles and ends where none exist, boxing up time, processing it and rendering it digestible. History…
Lost in Transition and Translation
Capturing attention and fears with the ominous subtitle “The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood,” Christian Smith’s Lost in Transition is a sociological study of 18-23 year old Americans. These are the early “emerging adults” discussed by many social scientists. Emerging adults have some of the traits of the adults of earlier generations, but are marked by delayed settling down,…
Tony Judt – difficult to forget
The 26 April 2012 issue of the London Review of Books contains a fascinating one-page piece on Tony Judt by Eric Hobsbawm. Amid the many remembrances, criticisms, and encomiums, Hobsbawm finds something different to say about Judt. Likening Judt to a crusading attorney or a bruising intellectual barrister, Hobsbawm’s characterization situates Judt’s intellectual journey. It…