New Berkeley Book List Profiles the Liberal Arts

By Genevieve Shiffrar, December 5, 2003

One of the great strengths of the College of Letters & Science is the intellectual curiosity of its extraordinary faculty. A new resource makes accessible this asset, not just for Berkeley students, but for anyone with a love of books.

In this inaugural year of the Berkeley Book List, several L&S faculty recommend nearly 100 of their favorite books for everyone to enjoy. Individual faculty select from two to 12 books and describe briefly ways in which each book is special to them.

As a collaborative project between Berkeley's Office of Public Affairs and the College, the L&S deans nominated the participating faculty. The selections represent the Arts & Humanities, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences — crossing the span of the liberal arts.

Some faculty select books that played pivotal roles in their own lives; others recommend books that describe well their discipline; yet others offer books that captured recently their own imaginations.

In the introduction of the Berkeley Book List, L&S Executive Dean Ralph Hexter describes a key way in which the liberal arts education is reflected in the list: "The liberal arts have always consisted of a broad variety of fields. What makes the liberal arts a basis for an education is how all of us combine, for our students on campus and, here, for you, various expertises and interests, sparking connections that no one has ever seen before."

Connections abound—connections the readers make; connections the faculty make; connections the authors make explicit. Like a bridge, a trail or a river, connections open new worlds to us, as examples below make clear.

• English Professor Anne Cheng narrowed her choices to books that changed the way she thought about writing. Her selection invites one to compare and contrast the work of Charlotte Brontë and Joseph Conrad; Toni Morrison and Change-rae-Lee. She describes the influence of poet Robert Hass's early work as making her "mind and soul's tectonic plates shift."

• World renowned geologist Walter Alvarez recommends books that describe precisely how tectonics plates shift, a concept that forever changed his discipline. Together, his book choices reveal ways in which "the history of the Earth is written in the rocks," as geology first was understood in the 17th century, through today, and as the future may likely write it.

• Integrative Biology Professor David Lindberg's choices often connect the earth sciences with the biological, but all take as their starting point Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection. One book considers "the rise of evolutionary thought from the vantage of some critical rocks off the coast of South America." Others explore the lives and debates of evolutionists, from Darwin's time to today.

• History and Classics Professor Erich S. Gruen crosses terrain quite far from the Galapagos, but often just as rocky. His choices reflect his interest in "cultural borrowings and ethnic appropriations among various people of antiquity: Jews, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans." He sums up, "I am drawn to books that cross geographical divides and encompass the interchange and overlap of peoples and nations."

The geological is just one of thousands of connections made possible through the Berkeley Book List. You are encouraged to explore your own. In the words of Dean Hexter, "I hope you will be intrigued and inspired to explore many of the books described, in some cases reading all the recommendations of one faculty member, in other cases making your own anthology by picking books from several different lists. You cannot possibly go wrong."