Hope Jahren is a geobiologist, a writer, a teacher, and an extraordinarily interesting person. In 2016 she wrote Lab Girl, a personal and professional memoir that rightfully garnered all manner of awards. It’s a beautiful, carefully crafted work that I would like to encourage you to read – and for you to recommend to anyone…
Category: Reviews
Reviews of books, articles, and the like
One Determined Engineer & the Creation of the Taconite Industry
The drive from Chicago to Ely, Minnesota, goes northwest through Wisconsin, crossing into Minnesota at Duluth. Route 53 winds up steep terrain through the city, heading into Duluth Heights and Hermantown. It’s pretty much due north past the Duluth Airport as signs of human activity thin out. Rice Lake Road winds north and east through…
Housing, Dollars & Racism
One of the recurring themes of thedigitalquad is the intersection of academic scholarship and the “real” world. Academic presses may not sell all that many books, but without them – and the hard work of scholars and faculty across higher education – we would, in many ways, be clueless. Why is so much of American…
You Can’t Unsee Misogyny After Manne
Kate Manne’s outstanding book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, is a powerful, beautifully argued work that could rightly have a warning its cover. Once you read it and think it through, it is impossible not to see gender relations in a new way. Manne’s nominal focus, misogyny, opens up realizations about greater issues of…
The Big Ten: What History Does and Does Not Do
The Supreme Court recently issued an important ruling on college athletics, limiting the power of the NCAA to prevent student athletes from receiving compensation and other benefits. The 9-0 vote was a long time coming. Many athletes, scholars and politicians have argued that the NCAA’s attempts at preserving “amateur” status for college athletes to be…
Haunted Schools: From Memories to History
The best scholarship conveys more than theory, notes and data. It crafts stories and arguments that give one pause, that interrupt the expected and make you stop, wonder and think. Eve L. Ewing‘s Ghosts in the Schoolyard is that sort of work. It’s an award-winning book that is even better than anticipated. Ewing weaves together…
Rowing Can Be Beautiful
Reading A Most Beautiful Thing is a moving experience. It’s a book about the country’s first All-Black High School rowing team, a group of young men from Manley High School on the West Side of Chicago who made history in the 1990s. It is a first-person account by one of the rowers, Arshay Cooper, and…