SUNY at Buffalo (home of the Kelley Collection) has issued a list of “48 Good Books.” The idea is that an undergraduate student would have this list to inspire them to read a book per month for their 4-year stay. The details on the selection process and the complete annotated list can be found here. Here’s just the stripped-down list:
1. Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times by Paul Rogat Loeb
2. Stars in Their Courses: The Gettysburg Campaign, June-July 1863 by Shelby Foote
3. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. He, She and It by Marge Piercy
6. The Frugal Superpower: America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era by Michael Mandelbaum
7. Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris
8. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher
9. Bread Givers: A Novel: A Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New by Anzia Yezierska
10. Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie by O. E. Rolvaag
11. Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya
12. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
13. The Dark Child by Laye Camara
14. The Physician by Noah Gordon
15. The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat
16. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
17. Confessions by Bishop of Hippo Saint Augustine
18. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
19. Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
20. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
21. Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
22. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
23. The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne
24. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
25. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
26. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
27. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
28. The Aeneid by Virgil
29. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
30. Farm hands: Hard Work and Hard Lessons from Western New York Fields by Tom Rivers
31. Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston by Ernest Callenbach
32. Ain’t No makin’ it: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood by Jay MacLeod
33. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
34. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
35. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
36. Darkness Spoken: Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann by Ingeborg Bachmann
37. A Dog’s Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron
38. Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995 by Margaret Atwood
39. Madame Curie, A Biography by Eve Curie
40. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
41. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
42. The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
43. The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
44. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah
45. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Phillips Feynman
46. The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
47. Austerlitz by Winfried Georg Sebald
48. The Death of Woman Wang by Jonathan D. Spence
The Sisters Brothers will divert you with its edgy energy. GRADE: B
I’m not a soccer fan, but I admit I did watch the U.S. Women’s Soccer team come back from the dead and tie Brazil last week. Abby Wambach’s amazing header with 30 seconds left in the game was one of the more unlikely goals I’ve ever seen. Then, in the shoot-out, the U.S. Women’s soccer team’s goalie, Hope Solo (great name!), made a key save that allowed the U.S. to win. I watched the dull game against France where the U.S. women came to sudden life near the end of the game to score a 3-1 win. Now, the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team is one win away from a world title. I’ll be watching again this afternoon to see if this group can overcome the Japanese team. I don’t think soccer will ever be a major sport in the U.S. It’s too tedious. Americans love scoring. Watching any sporting event for 90+ minutes with little or no scoring is not going to gain a large viewership in this country.
Hugh Pentecost (aka, Judson Philips) wrote over a 100 crime and mystery novels. In 1973, Pentecost was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. Pentecost’s first story, “Room Number 23,” was published in 1925. Pentecost went on to a long, prolific career that ended with his death in 1989. Of all of Pentecost’s various series, I enjoy those about Pierre Chambrun, the manager of a luxury hotel, the best. And, one of the best Chambrun mysteries is Walking Dead Man. Walking Dead Man features an assassination attempt on the second richest man in the world in Pierre Chambrun’s penthouse. Plenty of devious plotting and surprises follow. Although Hugh Pentecost is pretty much forgotten now, his fine mysteries deserve to be read. Here’s a list of the books in Pentecost’s Pierre Chambrun series:
Christopher B. Krebs’ A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich starts with an SS raid in Italy in 1943. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, wanted an original manuscript of Tacitus’s Gemania to put to use in the Nazi cause. Fortunately, the rare document had already been spirited away. Krebs tells the story of how Tacitus’s text on Germany was lost, then found, then altered, then collected, and finally became the object of forgery. Along the way, Krebs describes what happened to Germana during the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, the Enlightenment, and finishes his story with the Third Reich. Along the way, a myriad of political leaders use Tacitus’s text to promote their political agendas. If you’re a fan of bibliographic history filled with twists and turns, you’ll certainly enjoy A Most Dangerous Book as much as I did. GRADE: A 
I’ve read all 12 of Paul Theroux’s travel books. But in The Tao of Travel, Theroux doesn’t just provide dazzling excerpts from his own travel books, Theroux manages to assemble a guide to the best travel books ever written. If you love lists, you’re really going to love this book. Theroux is clever enough just to give the reader a nugget from a classic travel book like Evelyn Waugh’s When the Going Was Good and leave it to the reader to want to read more. You can open The Tao of Travel anywhere and find fascinating prose. This book is a browser’s delight! GRADE: A
