Honors Program Book Recommendations

Below are some book recommendations from some of the Honors professors:

Dr. David Cochran, Politics

• Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
• Nobody’s Fool, Richard Russo
• Charming Billy, Alice McDermott
• Silence, Shasaku Endo
• The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler
• No God But God, Reza Aslan
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
• Any essay collections by George Orwell, Calvin Trillin, or David Sedaris

Dr. Gerald Eagleson, Biology

Recent Books:

• All Over but the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg (an excellent memoir)
• Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow (a good introduction to modern philosophy using biographies)
• The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson (a good book explaining our modern ecological predicament)

Favorite Classics:

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (more relevant to today because of the biological insights and political insights into how freedom and morality become compromised on the alter of the pursuit of happiness via Soma and possessed commodities (technologies)
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Still a major psychological and social classic)
• Ward Six by Anton Chekhov (The dangers of thinking that one “understands” his fellow person)

Dr. Kristin Anderson-Bricker, History

• Loeb, ed. The Impossible Will Take a Little While (motivation to work for change)
• David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity, Basic Books, 2000 (race in America through a history of anthropology)
• J.M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer and Jake Page, The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory, New York: Smithsonian Books, 2007 (interdisciplinary look at what we do and do not know about gender in the ancient past)
• Juan Williams, My Soul Looks Back in Wonder, 2005 (how and why social movements of the 1960s came about via oral history)

Dr. John Eby, Previous Honors Director, History

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
• Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty
• JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
• Beowulf
• Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
• Tanya Reinhard, Israel/Palestine
• Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
• Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
• John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra
• Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World
• Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation