| |
Books faculty are reading
Colin Simpson | April 2007
Here is a short list of books that the faculty enjoys reading. Feel free to stop back periodically for a more up to date list.
Dr. M C Morgan likes to read
Wikinomics, by Tapscott and Williams
Web 2.0, social networking, and shared content lead to a consideration of how business fits into new ways of exchanging information. Naked Conversations, by Scoble and Israel, looked at the issues from a blogging perspective. Wikinimics looks at it from a collaborative perspective. I'm cynical enough to believe that neither blogs nor wikis nor YouTube nor del.icio.us is gonig to fundamentally change the relationship between businesses and customers, but it's good to listen to the dark side once in a while. |
 |
Ulysses, by James Joyce
I first puzzled my way throughn Ulysses as a senior in literature at St Cloud State. A year later, I visted Dublin - the Martello Tower, Davy Byrne's pub, Trinity College, O'Connell Street - and heard the accents, and it slowly started to make sense. The trick is to read it aloud. Since then, I've tipped into Ulysses at least once or twice a year, always reading a selected chapter on June 16: Bloomsday. If you want a sample, listen to The Sensual World, by Kate Bush. It's her reading of portions of the Molly Bloom soliloquy.
|
 |
Ms Susan Hauser likes to read
From the joy and anguish of her own experience, Sexton fashioned poems that told truths about the inner lives of men and women. This book comprises Sexton's ten volumes of verse, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Live or Die, as well as seven poems form her last years. |
 |
From Library Journal
This is a dense, extended study of Dickinson's life and poetry, the first attempting this perilous joining since Thomas Johnson's Emily Dickinson (1955). Wolff, expanding on Tate ("New England Culture and Emily Dickinson," 1932), deflects the peril by positing that the passion in the poetry arises from Dickinson's lifelong wrestling with an abandoning, vengeful God. This single perspective illuminates poetry Christian in idea or imagery but convolutes when applied to nonfaith poems. Biographical revelations arise from the reconsideration of known data, yielding a complex portrait and some plausible conjectures in a context profuse with family, ancestry, and social history. The rich interweaving of times, life, mind, and letters makes this a formidable addition to the canon of enduring Dickinson studies. |
 |
Sure, we all know Star Trek is fiction, but warp drives and transporters and holodecks don't seem altogether implausible. Are any of these futuristic inventions fundamentally outlawed by physics as we understand it today? The Physics of Star Trek takes a lighthearted look at this subject, speculating on how the wonders of Star Trek technology might actually work--and, in some cases, revealing why the inventions are impossible or impractical even for an advanced civilization. (Example: "dematerializing" a person for transport would require about as much energy as is released by a 100-megaton hydrogen bomb). The Physics of Star Trek deserves merit for providing a refresher course on topics such as relativity and antimatter, but let's face it: the reason most people will want to read this book is simply that it's fun to poke holes in the premises of their favorite science fiction shows!
|
 |
|
