HarperAcademic

Today’s daily desk copy request: Rob Dunn’s The Wild Life of Our Bodies for a class on genetics, evolution, and human health.

We evolved in a wilderness of parasites, mutualists, pathogens, and predators, but we no longer see ourselves as being part of nature and the broader community of life. In the name of progress and clean living, we scrub much of nature off our bodies and try to remove whole kinds of life to allow ourselves to live free of wild danger. As Dunn reveals, our modern disconnect from the web of life has resulted in unprecedented effects—Diabetes, autism, allergies, many anxiety disorders, autoimmune diseases, and even tooth, jaw, and vision problems—which are increasingly plaguing bodies that have been removed from the ecological context in which they existed for millennia. 

Assign The Wild Life of Our Bodies and encourage your students to smash their economy-size tubs of hand sanitizer, emerge from their suburban panic rooms, and transcend the incubator-like existence that stifles modern man. In short, get back to nature.

Today’s daily desk copy request: Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for a class on exploration and discovery.

Rejection hurts. Some people just handle it better than others. The other day, I entered a lottery to win a Caribbean cruise. Did I win it? No. And it felt like a monstrous personal affront. I was holed up in my room contemplating my worth as a human being for what felt like years (2-3 minutes), then weathered an acute bout of hubris (“That cruise would be LUCKY to have me!”), which led (as always) to drowsiness.

But luckily some people are made of stronger stuff, and Robert Pirsig is one of them. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance literally holds the record for being the most rejected bestselling book. It was rejected by 121 publishers until it was finally accepted by William Morrow. Then it sold 5 million copies. Perseverance, man, perseverance.

Today’s daily desk copy request: Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 for a class on the history of Europe since 1914.

I did my junior year abroad in London in the fall of 2010, and I remember being very surprised by the cultural obsession with World War I. On November 11—Armistice/Remembrance Day—I walked outside to find almost everyone wearing “remembrance poppies” to commemorate the soldiers who died in the War. In my literature class that day, we read works by the War Poets (including Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” which inspired the remembrance poppies). But it wasn’t just that day. Almost everything I read in my English class touched on World War I. When I came back to the States, I had so fallen in love with the literature from that period that I jumped at the chance to take a course on English modernism, which became my favorite class I took in college.

All throughout my early schooling, World War II was the war that we studied in depth. And this makes sense—the US had a much bigger stake in the Second World War. But I’m really happy to see more and more books coming out about The Great War, where whole countries had to grapple with violence on a new, terrible, and almost unfathomably large scale.

Instead of focusing on the battles of World War I, The Sleepwalkers masterfully examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks. It is a dramatic and authoritative chronicle of Europe’s descent into a war that tore the world apart, sure to captivate your students who have followed the pop-cultural resurgence of this period that began with Downton Abbey, along with those who are coming to it in depth for the first time.

Today’s daily desk copy request: Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman for a class on the elements of inquiry.

The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary—and literary history. Begun in 1857, the compilation of the OED was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.

So it comes as no surprise to me that the OED was formed in part by a madman, because honestly, what is the OED if not CRAZY COOL? Where else will you find such a massive collection of insults, culled from the greatest minds of the English speaking world? And they’re perfect for classroom use! Just take the OED entry for “crazy”…

Say your students can’t sit still:

“Remove not from the place where you be, sithence you are weake and crasie.”—Abraham Fleming from Panoplie Epist, 1576

A student asks if they can hand in their final paper in July:

“Lord child…are you crazy?”—Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania Gazette, 1732

No better way to get your message across than to drop some Benjamin Franklin on them! Students love him—he’s like the Justin Bieber of the Founding Fathers, a true Renaissance Man.

Today’s daily desk copy request: The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson for a class on the history of the English language.

With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson brilliantly explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can’t), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world’s largest growth industries.

I remember sitting in my high school French class, trying to recall the correct conjugation of regular “er” verbs, thinking, ”Languages are hard! I’ll never remember this!” If you’ve ever been in this situation, I’ve got a trick to perk you up: remember all the poor souls out there who must learn to conjugate the English verb “to be,” who question its staggering irregularity and are met with the super helpful response, ”It just FEELS right.” Or those non-native speakers who will have to distinguish between bow (hair ribbon), bow (bend at the waist), bow (stick used to play string instruments), bow (weapon that shoots arrows), bow (front of a ship), bow (sign of deference), and bough (branch of a tree). Oh, how you will laugh at your folly! You thought you had it bad!

Today’s daily desk copy request: Eco Barons: The New Heroes of Environmental Activism for an environmental studies course (did you see that one coming?).

A short book description: “Edward Humes offers readers an eye-opening look at the remarkable philanthropists and visionaries who are devoting their lives to saving the earth from overdevelopment and destruction. In Eco Barons, Humes gives us fascinating portraits of extraordinary men and women who are dedicated to humankind’s survival… . As the New York Times points out, ‘Humes’s urgent message is clear: We must all strive to become ‘eco barons’ in our own right if we are to save Planet Earth.’”

Given that most of us are just hell-bent on making it through the day free from the tyranny of fresh paper cuts (just me?),  these eco crusaders’ “dedication to humankind’s survival” is pretty damn noble. I mean, if I had that kind of money, you can bet I would do nothing of the sort. When probed for something nice about me, people would mutter, ”She was…eccentric.” My crowning acheivement, rather than saving humankind from extinction, would read: “She amassed an impressive collection of rare beanie babies, but died penniless and angry when their value depreciated, contrary to late 20th century speculation.”

What would you do if YOU had the money to spend?

Today’s daily desk copy request: Hal Herzog’s Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals for a college composition course.

This is one of our biggest books for Freshman Common Reads, and it’s one of our favorites in the department. Some We Love combines research from all over the globe in the emerging field of anthrozoology, the science of human–animal relations. Herzog is thoughtful, rational, and often funny as he shows students how illogical we are in our relationships with animals.

I mostly like it because I think it gives me a more Zen approach to the mice in my New York city apartment. I think if I repeat, “They’re just like puppies—your aversion is culturally constructed,” to myself enough times, I may lead a much happier life. The incessant talking to myself may be a bit worrisome, but that’s an issue for another day.

Today’s daily desk copy request: Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective by Judith Plaskow for a course on Judaism and gender.

Standing Again at Sinai is Judith Plaskow’s feminist critique of Judaism as a patriarchal tradition, and an exploration of the increasing involvement of women in naming and shaping Jewish tradition. While it was published in 1990, it’s more relevant than ever today. There’s been a lot in the news lately about Jewish women’s rights to pray at the Wailing Wall, one of Judaism’s most sacred sites. The Jerusalem District Court recently ruled that women could pray aloud in the main Western Wall plaza with prayer shawls, tefillin, and a Torah scroll—rights previously denied to them. While it’s unclear how long these liberties will be upheld, this was a big win for Israeli feminist group Women of the Wall, and combining such recent news stories with Plaskow’s criticism would undoubtedly make for a really interesting course.

Today’s daily desk copy request: Victor Cha’s The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future for a course on modern Korea.

This is the definitive account of the most secretive country in the world, written by the much-lauded professor and former White House Official, Victor Cha. The volume, published last year, explores how, in a world that has seen the collapse of the Soviet Union and its socialist satellites, North Korea has managed to maintain its tenuous hold. Filled with anecdotes from his time in North Korea, where he served as the US Deputy Head of Delegation for the Six Party Talks, Cha’s book is a comprehensive guide to modern North Korea, from its seemingly endless war with its southern neighbor, to its decimated economy, to its nuclear pursuits and threats. Cha ultimately warns of its regime’s potential collapse under Kim Jung-Un—a fall for which America and its allies may be woefully unprepared.

It’s odd that a country could be in the news so much, yet still be so seemingly inscrutable, and The Impossible State does a wonderful job combatting the mystery. Obviously, Cha’s book is very timely, especially with all the nuclear threats coming out of Pyongyang in recent months.

Bonus: the spine of the book features headshots of the Kim family dynasty. Place it near your bed, and let three generations of Kims lull you to sleep. You may wake up the next day overcome by the urge to buy blue-tinted sunglasses, reminiscent of Ricky Martin in the mid-1990s.  But those are a timeless addition to any personal wardrobe, so you really can’t go wrong.

Today’s daily desk copy request: Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 for a “Studies in Literary Themes” course.

This was the first book I read in my postmodern literature course in college, and it’s probably the most adopted of all Pynchon’s works (especially because its substantially shorted than, say, the 560 page whopper that is “V.”). When reading it, you will probably feel like an incompetent Maxwell’s demon, the theoretical being charged with sorting through ever-increasing entropy, or disorder, as Nefastis describes it to Oedipa in the novel. It’s kind of a wonderful introduction to postmodern literature in this regard, because it teaches students to approach these novels differently, and abandon information “sorting” as disorder and unreliability reign in the genre.

You may want to be cautious when assigning Pynchon, however, because his books can inspire a special kind of student-reader fanaticism. I know someone who, after finishing this book for a class, got the famous muted post horn tattooed on his forearm. You’ve been warned.

If you’re interested in teaching The Crying of Lot 49, you should definitely take a look at this video of Thomas C. Foster, author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, talking students through its first page.