Lawrence R. Jacobs

Lawrence R. Jacobs is the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the Hubert Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota.

His new book, co-authored with Lawrence D. Brown, is The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles.

I recently asked him what he was reading. His reply:

My eclectic recent reading list:

Julie Schumacher, Black Box
Richard Pious, Why Presidents Fail
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side

Learn more about Lawrence R. Jacobs' research and teaching at his faculty webpage.

Read more about The Private Abuse of the Public Interest at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen Hess

Stephen Hess' new book is What Do We Do Now?: A Workbook for the President-Elect.

Earlier this week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

A book I just finished and have already passed along to two colleagues is The Columnist (Harvest Book, 2001), a novel by Jeffrey Frank. It is the only Washington novel that I would dare call Swiftian. Brutally funny.

Stephen Hess is Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Brookings Institution. A veteran staffer of the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations and an advisor to Presidents Ford and Carter, he focuses on the presidency, the news media, and the political culture of Washington.

About What Do We Do Now?, from the publisher:

The period from Election Day to Inauguration Day in America seems impossibly short. Newly elected U.S. presidents have less than eleven weeks to construct a new government composed of supporters and strangers, hailing from all parts of the nation. This unique and daunting process always involves at least some mistakes—in hiring, perhaps, or in policy priorities, or organizational design. Early blunders can carry serious consequences well into a president’s term; minimizing them from the outset is critical. In What Do We Do Now? Stephen Hess draws from his long experience as a White House staffer and presidential adviser to show what can be done to make presidential transitions go smoothly.[read more]

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen Chance

Karen Chance is the author of the New York Times and USA Today bestselling Cassandra Palmer Series and other books and stories, including the recently released Midnight's Daughter.

Last week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I grew up reading whatever was lying around the house, usually what my mother was reading. As a result, I received some very strange looks in the fourth grade when the teacher asked everyone to list their favorite book. At the time, mine was Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (still a favorite).

My tendency toward eclectic reading didn’t change with age. I write urban fantasy, but I probably read more outside the genre than in it. My most recent obsession is Lindsey Davis’s charming Falco books. They are a great series for anyone interested in ancient Rome, but who prefers to learn about it the easy way—through a fictional narrative—rather than through a more traditional text book. Likewise, the Cadfael mysteries by Edith Pargeter [aka Ellis Peters] offer a wonderful glimpse into medieval England and Wales.

On the nonfiction front, I just finished Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World by John McNeill, Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser and The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an 18th-Century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts by Sian Rees.

Read an excerpt from Midnight's Daughter.

Visit Karen Chance's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Santopietro

Tom Santopietro is the author of Considering Doris Day, The Importance of Being Barbra, and the newly released Sinatra in Hollywood.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I usually am reading three books at a time: one work of fiction, one of non-fiction, and one for the subway that is usually a collection of essays. My recent choices:

1. Hope Dies Last by Studs Terkel. One of my literary heroes, and as happens with each book of Terkel's that I read, I find myself underlining multiple passages. Terkel's books contain wisdom in abundance. He will be sorely missed.

2. The Lion of Hollywood by Scott Eyman. A terrific biography of Louis B. Mayer that rescues Mayer from the cliched portrait of Hollywood moguls, and delves into his extraordinary drive and Horatio Alger-like life. A terrifically entertaining examination of exactly how much the Hollywood dream factories influenced American culture in the twentieth century.

3. Life Class by Pat Barker. I've been hooked on Barker's writing ever since the (award winning) "Regeneration" trilogy, and this is yet another arresting look at the horrors of World War I and how the foundations of our modern world came into being.

Among the early praise for Tom Santopietro's Sinatra in Hollywood:

"A terrifically lucid and entertaining look at Sinatra's achievement."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Santopietro directs his attention to Sinatra's film career with great success. This work is both highly readable and extensively researched... Santopietro ably fills a long-standing gap in Sinatra biography, and his book is highly recommended."
--Library Journal

Visit Tom Santopietro's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gina Athena Ulysse

Gina Athena Ulysse was born in Petion-Ville, Haiti. Trained as an anthropologist, she is also a poet/performer and multi-media artist.

Ulysse is also a professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Her first book, Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica, was published by the University of Chicago Press.

Earlier this week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

During the semester, my reading is almost always determined by my courses. This term, I am teaching a first year seminar "Haiti: Myths and Realities." So the last couple of weeks, I have been simultaneously re-reading The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat and Massacre River by René Philoctète-- two fictionalized accounts of the 1937 Trujillo ordered massacre of thousands of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. I am kicking myself for not having assigned either this time, choosing instead to use a significant social science text, Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic by Ernesto Sagas. That book offers a much more in-depth look at the historical development of what Sagas aptly calls Anti-Haitianism in the DR. My regret is that the visceral in the novels add a dimension to the tragedy that most structural analyses often miss. Next time, I will assign selections from all three.

For the junior seminar on contemporary anthropological theory, I am reading an epic ethnographic poem "The Coolie" by E. Valentine Daniel in the journal Cultural Anthropology. I am fighting with this poem because of its structure, terza rima, though I am enjoying it for its craft, rich references and secretly loving the fact that Daniel (one of my former profs at UM) is actually blurring genres.

A couple years ago, I made it a rule to not read anything work related before sleep or when I awake. On my bedside table, I have a stack of memoirs that I plan to get to (I am currently revising my own, Loving Haiti, Loving Vodou, Loving Myself), and lots of poetry that tend to rotate. Poetry for me is meditation. Right now, I am savoring Nikky Finney's Rice that a friend recommended and Michael Palmer's Company of Moths. I attended his reading at Wesleyan weeks ago. There are two staples, The Black Poets anthology edited by Dudley Randall and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, that never go back on the shelf. I often get a daily fix, reading random bits from both. I imagine the poets in conversation with each other. I might begin with James A. Randall's "Don't Ask Me Who I Am" or June Jordan's "Poem for My Family" and always end with a selection from Whitman's "Song of Myself." One of my favorite lines of all time, "I exist as I am and that is enough." After reading these, I usually feel like I can rule the world until the next day or night.

Read more about Downtown Ladies.

Visit Gina Athena Ulysse's website to learn more about her poetry and other projects.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Dunning

John Dunning has revealed some of book collecting's most shocking secrets in his bestselling series of crime novels featuring Cliff Janeway: Booked to Die, which won the prestigious Nero Wolfe award; The Bookman's Wake, a New York Times Notable Book of 1995; and the New York Times and Book Sense bestsellers The Bookman's Promise, The Sign of the Book, and The Bookwoman's Last Fling. He is also the author of the Edgar Award-nominated Deadline, The Holland Suggestions, and Two O'Clock, Eastern Wartime. An expert on rare and collectible books, he owned the Old Algonquin Bookstore in Denver for many years. He is also an expert on American radio history and author of On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio.

Recently, I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I'm re-reading The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw, and reading Books by Larry McMurtry.

Dunning's On the Air made Anthony Rudel's five best list of books about the "Golden Age of Radio."

Visit John Dunning's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marcello Simonetta

Marcello Simonetta is the author of The Montefeltro Conspiracy: A Renaissance Mystery Decoded.

Simonetta received his doctorate in Renaissance Studies from Yale. He has been featured on The History Channel, and in 2007 he curated an exhibition on Federico da Montefeltro’s library at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I have just read Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader, a delightful, short masterpiece about the pleasures and dangers of reading. The uncommon main character is none other than the Queen of England, who gets entangled in the intoxicating habit of book-tasting at the risk of compromising her own status. Surrounded by philistine prime ministers and dutiful clerks, by the end she convinces even the most unsympathetic reader that literature is the necessary cure against soulless politics.

Read an excerpt from The Montefeltro Conspiracy, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laurel Corona

Laurel Corona is the author of more than a dozen middle school books and is a professor of English and Humanities at San Diego City College.

Her new book is The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice.

Late last month I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I have to admit I’m putting down a fair number of books “for later” these days, not because I don’t find them interesting or well written, but because I’ve got the attention span of a fruit fly in the lead-up to the release of my debut novel, The Four Seasons. Top of the list of books to read is Sweetsmoke by David Fuller, once I have finished Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen. Sweetsmoke is set during the Civil War on the eponymously-named plantation, and involves the investigation by one slave of the murder of another. A quick leaf-through shows the protagonist, Cassius Howard, to be an intelligent, self-educated, and principled character, which should make for a nuanced plot.

The book I finished most recently is The Only Son by Stephane Audeguy, about an older brother Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentions only once in his Confessions. The book gives a fascinating look at Paris in the period of the French Revolution and Reign of Terror. I also picked up Tess Gerritsen’s tense historical murder mystery The Bone Garden in an airport recently, and didn’t put it down until I had finished. This summer, my pool reads were Lauren Willig’s fun and lighthearted The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, and Lauren Groff’s quirky The Monsters of Templeton. I highly recommend this one to lovers of early American literature and/or baseball, since it is set in a fictionalized version of Cooperstown NY, and weaves in real characters from the eras of both Abner Doubleday and James Fenimore Cooper.

I am currently reading a book called Thanks, by Robert A. Emmons. It’s part of the “positive psychology” movement, focusing on the important emotional and health benefits of what Emmons calls “practicing gratitude.” It makes complete sense to me that one of the key markers of mental health turns out to be the habit of pausing during our days to identify who and what helps us along our way, and being both outwardly and inwardly thankful. I think I am pretty well practiced at what he is talking about, having, as always, an extraordinary number of things about which to feel grateful. Including my job (I’m a professor of Humanities at San Diego City College), and right now, as unsexy as it sounds, what I really have to go read is that stack of midterms on my desk.

Visit Laurel Corona's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lennard Davis

Lennard J. Davis is Professor in the English Department in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he had also served as Head. In addition, he is Professor of Disability and Human Development in the School of Applied Health Sciences of the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as Professor of Medical Education in the College of Medicine. He is also director of Project Biocultures, a think-tank devoted to issues around the intersection of culture, medicine, disability, biotechnology, and the biosphere. He is the author of The Disability Studies Reader, My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness, and Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, among other books.

His new book is Obsession: A History.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I tend read a lot of books at once. Right now I'm reading Russell Shorto's The Island at the Center of the World, David Lodge's Deaf Sentence, Judith Butler's The Psychic Life of Power, and a book in French I just picked up in Paris from a show at the Rodin Museum about Freud and Rodin as collectors of antiquities. I'm also paging through the catalog from the Courbet show at the Met in NYC.

Visit Lennard Davis' website, and learn more about Obsession: A History at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Weiner

Jonathan Weiner's books include The Beak of the Finch, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science; Time, Love, Memory, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, and finalist for the Aventis Science Prize; and His Brother's Keeper, finalist for Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and many other newspapers and magazines. While working on His Brother's Keeper, he was writer-in-residence at Rockefeller University.

Now he teaches science writing at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

A few days ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I always have a stack of books on the night table, and more scattered around the apartment. I'm reading The Liberal Imagination, by Lionel Trilling. The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens. Just finished How Fiction Works, by James Wood; Jack Gance, by Ward Just; and Faceless Killers, by Henning Mankell.

In between, Auden's poems, Shakespeare's sonnets, Solomon's Proverbs.

Visit Jonathan Weiner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue