Amy Kind
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
    Cedric Jennings, an intelligent and strong-willed African-American student at Ballou Senior High in crime-infested Washington, D.C., dreams of making it to an Ivy League school. Through intelligence, hard work, unwavering support from his single mother, and faith, he manages to overcome his surroundings and gain admission to Brown. Life at Brown, however, turns out to be far different from anything he imagined. A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind (Broadway Books, 1998), which grew out of a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles in the Wall Street Journal, tells Cedric's remarkable story. The book is at times inspirational and at times deeply discouraging, but it is throughout a gripping read.

Ward Elliott
Professor of Government
    One could spend a whole summer reading great books by CMC's faculty. Peter Skerry's most recent, Counting on the Census?—Race and the Evasion of Politics (Brookings, 2000), is best summarized by this quote from his 1999 New Republic article on the same subject: "The only group that [census] adjustment would truly empower would be the demographers and statisticians directly involved with it." In The Art of Political Warfare (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), Jack Pitney sets about systematically to see how military examples and strategies can help shed light on political tactics and strategy. Lastly, Hadley Arkes tells us that Harry Jaffa's award-winning Crisis of the House Divided (1959) "could rank as the 'first book' of American political science." He lauds its sequel, A New Birth of Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), as well: "It is a sublime work, advancing and deepening the first."

Ed Haley
Professor of Government
    At the head of the list are Taylor Branch's two volumes on the history of the civil rights movement—Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1964-1965 (Touchstone Books, 1989) and Parting the Waters (Simon & Schuster, 1998). They are deeply moving—the violence and injustice appalling, the courage inspiring, the narrative masterful and profoundly revealing on all sides—and are the two best books I have read on American politics since the American library edition of Abraham Lincoln's speeches and letters came out several years ago.

David Sadava
Professor of Biology
    "Horse racing is the perfect sport of capitalism," says one of the characters in Jane Smiley's Horse Heaven (Ivy Books, 1998), a novel set in the world of thoroughbreds and the people who care for them, own them, and bet on them. Smiley, who in her previous book, Moo (Ballantine, 1996), captured the essence of faculty politics at a university, is right on the mark in her unsentimental descriptions of the owners, trainers, jockeys, "equine investors," and, especially, the horses that occupy this world. I have long thought that one of the great advantages of working at CMC is being close to one of the world's great race tracks, Santa Anita.

Jack Pitney
Professor of Government
    While commuting, I listen to books on tape. Some months ago, I heard one that was so perceptive that as soon as the last cassette had played, I started it over again. The book was G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy (Harold Shaw, 1908). It is not only an account of the author's faith, but a rebuke of scholars who try to reduce life to equations. "The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens," he writes. "It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits." Though Chesterton wrote the book in 1908, it is an antidote to much of the "social science" of the 21st century. And it has one of my favorite sayings: "A characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly."