On Books

by President Thomas E. Cronin

Anyone who loves to read, as I most assuredly do, thrives working at a liberal arts college. Colleagues, librarians, and students regularly talk about what they are reading and often recommend books they have especially enjoyed.

Some seniors recently recommended and even gave me a copy of their favorite book, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (Henry Holt & Company, 1999), now also a Hollywood movie. It’s a strange book; yet it has a certain underground appeal. Other students have loaned me John Irving’s entertaining A Prayer for Owen Meany (Random House, 1990). A first-year student suggested I read a book he read over the December holidays, and I have done so with interest. This was Ken Wilber’s The Marriage of Sense and Soul (Random House, 1998).

I often ask our visiting speakers about what books they read and recommend. Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist Jared Diamond, who lectured here February 1, responded that there are two books he rereads every five years: Thoreau’s Walden and the Greek historian Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War.

Former Whitman College trustee Ancil Paine sent me a copy of David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (Touchstone Books, 2000). The “bobos” in the title refer to bourgeois bohemians. I highly recommend the book for its writing and for its incisive and wry commentary.
Whitman English professor John Desmond recommended a book of poems by current national poet laureate Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random House, 2001). His accessible and enjoyable poems are well worth a couple of hours of reading and his “Schools-ville” (pages 18-19) is alone worth the price of the volume.

Here are a few other books I have read recently and a brief comment or two on each.

* Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God (Ballantine Books, 2000) is an impressive and compelling account of fundamentalism in all the major religions. David McCullough’s John Adams (Simon and Schuster, 2001) is an excellent biography of a talented statesman who becomes admirable if not necessarily likeable.

* Jill Ker Conway’s A Woman’s Education (Knopf, 2001) is a wonderfully personal account of her 10 years as the first woman president of Smith College. I recommend it for its beautiful writing and for the way she captures the distinctive spirit of a vibrant liberal arts community.

* Richard Light’s Making the Most of College (Harvard University Press, 2001) is a review of ideas from students and others on how colleges and universities can encourage effective undergraduate learning. Anyone who teaches or works closely with students will learn from it.

* I learned too from Jim Collins’s Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t (Harper Business Books, 2001). It is not easy reading; yet it is an instructive analysis of factors that characterize high performance companies of varying size.

* Jack Welch’s self-indulgent Jack: Straight from the Gut (Warner Books, 2001) tells of his 20 years as head of General Electric. He was known in business circles as an effective, relentless, driven, and often ruthless executive, and he proudly admits to such characterizations in this memoir.

* Robert D. Kaplan’s Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (Random House, 2002) cele-brates Churchill, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Thucydides, and others. It is a chilling and disturbing, lengthy essay; yet it poses a set of important and highly debatable propositions.

* I also recommend Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Little, Brown, 1999) by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins. It is full of suggestions of how capitalism and environmentalism can converge and create needed breakthroughs.

* I strongly recommend two investment books, Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (Random House, 2000) and the revised edition of Burton G. Malkiel’s best-selling investment treatise A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc., 1990).

* Two biographies worth reading are retired U.S. senator Mark Hatfield’s Against the Grain: Reflections of a Rebel Republican (White Cloud Press, 2001) and Katharine Graham’s Person-al History (Vintage Books, 1998), the prize-winning memoir by a University of Chicago grad who unexpectedly had to take over and run The Washington Post and Newsweek and did so with great journalistic and business success.

* Add to your reading list, too, books written by Whitman faculty members and alumni. By one recent count nearly two dozen Whitman professors authored or coauthored books in the past four or five years. All of us here at Whitman recommend our colleague professor of history emeritus Tom Edwards’s recently published second volume of Whitman’s history.

Hundreds of our alumni have written books, ranging from Craig Lesley’s widely read novels about life in the Northwest to medical textbooks, cookbooks, and Montana state auditor John Morrison’s splendid book on progressive Montana political leaders. In fact, rarely a month goes by that my office or Penrose Library doesn’t receive at least one new book from one of our alumni. Katie Ford, ’97, will have her first book of poetry, titled Deposition, published later this year by Graywolf Press.

I want to remind alumni, parents, and friends of Whitman that the College welcomes the donation of collections and libraries from personal holdings. Retired Stanford University history professor Gordon Wright (Whitman class of 1933) recently left in his estate plans some 4,000 of his books, which will greatly strengthen our European history holdings.

Do send us your lists of recommended reading. Do consider, too, sending us a box or two of books from your attic or office that just may be needed at Penrose Library. Whitman librarians Henry Yaple and Joe Drazen regularly trade duplicate books to Powell’s in Portland or other book dealers in exchange for books our library needs.

Meanwhile, keep on reading!

President Tom Cronin

Jared Diamond, left, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, visits with President Cronin before presenting a lecture in Cordiner Hall. Diamond's book takes the reader on a trip through human history exploring the reasons some societies grow dominant while others fade into extinction.

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Whitman’s Penrose Library currently holds 350,000 books, more than 300,000 government documents, thousands of videos, and more than 2,000 journal subscriptions. Through our ORBIS electronic borrowing program with other Northwest libraries we enjoy access to another nearly eight million books. Moreover, Penrose Library’s book collection grows by about 12,000 to 14,000 books a year.

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