GO ASK ALUMNI
Last winter, we asked alumni of the College what treasured book from their undergraduate days they still keep on their bookshelves. Chicago alumni, we learned, form strong attachments to their books and speak about them vividly. Here are just a few answers from among the many we received.
"Members of the College classes from '66, '67,
and '68 love Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis so much
that we had a Lucky Jim party this summer. Sayre
Van Young, AB'66, wrote a Lucky Jim trivia quiz,
which Paul Silver, AB'67, won handily. I hosted
the party at my house in Berkeley, and Eric Van
Young, AB'67, even came up from San Diego for
the event. The book must have been assigned in
Humanities I—no one could remember exactly
how we discovered it—but we all recite long passages
from the book to each other and those of us
who remained in academics find it particularly
endearing every time we reread it. We showed a
videotape of the movie and had an authentic British
breakfast, complete with spotted dick."
Lois Schwartz, AB'67, AM'72, AM'90
"For many years I kept—and often referred to—the two-volume set of The People Shall Judge. In the early 1950s, the Hutchins College syllabi for all courses were comprised of original source material. The People Shall Judge was the text for Social Sciences I and included the basic documents influencing the creation and maintenance of the United States. I particularly recall rereading parts of 'The Federalist Papers' when I felt that elected officials and legislators were running roughshod over our Constitution. Having moved to smaller quarters a few years ago, the two volumes are in the basement, safely packed away until needed to reinforce my belief in the ultimate wisdom of our Founders.
"Parenthetically, I disposed of my basic and cost
accounting books immediately upon completing
those courses at the Graduate School of Business.
Lord, were they repellent examples of text material."
Stephen Appel, AB'54, MBA'59
"The text that I refer to and think of most often
is, without doubt, The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism by Weber, which I read in my
first quarter of Social Sciences in my first year. I
enjoyed the text at the time, but I don't think I
could have guessed that I would end up going
back to it and finding it so compelling later on. As
an economist, I reflect perhaps more than the
average person on why some countries have developed
more market-oriented economies than
others, and what underlies not just differences in
economic growth across countries, but differences
in susceptibility to growth. Of course, a true
believer economist would not look to Weber for
explanations. But having lived in Paris for the last
five years and having spent a lot of time in different
countries, I have found Weber's old text to
have a lot of relevance in explaining the cultural
and economic differences I see from country to
country. Living outside of the U.S., I have become
more conscious of American 'exceptionalism,' and
I find Weber's explanation to be pretty compelling
at the end of the day."
Faye Steiner, AB'95
"As one of two students in the New Collegiate Division's Tutorial Studies, I spent a year studying Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in tandem with Piaget and Inhelder's The Child's Conception of Space. I feel that I have moved well beyond these theories in my current research and teaching. But hardly a term goes by that I don't make reference to one or the other or both together, such as at the faculty seminar I was in just a week ago. They have accompanied me through all my many moves, readily accessible, if infrequently touched. They symbolize much that was good, and much that was trying, about my experience in the College.
"Having struggled mightily for months and not
gotten beyond page 60 of Kant's Critique, I will
never forget the total awe I felt when a classmate
actually finished the whole book, climbed to the
top of his dorm (Hitchcock, I think), and triumphantly
stomped out in the snow on the roof for
all to see: QED!"
Linda May Fitzgerald, AB'71, MA'74, PhD'90
"I still have on my shelf the 1942 University of Chicago Press paperback version of David Grene's translations of Prometheus Bound, Oedipus the King, and Hippolytus. (Grene later published final versions of these and a number of other translations in trade editions.) I was struck on first reading Prometheus by its distillation of what it means to be human: to have an intellect, to treasure knowledge even in the face of great adversity, and thus to achieve human dignity.
"Many years later, when I was director of the
General Honors Program at California State University,
Long Beach, I taught a capstone course for
seniors modeled very largely on the Organizations,
Methods, and Principles of the Sciences course
that I had taken in my last undergraduate year at
Chicago, with the brilliant Henry Rago as instructor.
Grene's Prometheus was the first reading in the
course, and I was delighted to see it evoke the
same responses in my students that it had evoked
in me some three decades earlier."
Lawrence S. Lerner, AB'53, SM'55, PhD'62
"There are several books from College courses
that I still keep on my shelves, but the first one
that came to mind when I read your question was
House of Mist by Maria Luisa Bombal, read for the
Latin American Literature course Paper Dolls &
Spider Women. I think that this text sticks out in
my mind more than the many others, in part
because of the legend of the author that accompanied
our reading of the text. Reading a book that
utilized magical realism, written by an author who
had allegedly disappeared after the book was published,
made the book itself have a magical quality
that held my intrigue over the many years.
Although the legend of the disappearing author
turned out to be false (as I discovered in casual
research years later), the book still holds a special
place on my bookshelves and remains the only
book in my collection that I no longer lend out,
for fear of this special, first edition novel not finding
its way home."
Aletheia V.P. Allen, Esq., AB'01
