Students in my LA&S Senior Seminar this semester had an interesting idea: What if we asked faculty to suggest five books graduating seniors should read some day, if they haven't already.  I asked full-time faculty in Arts and Sciences, and their responses are printed below.  The students had the notion that such a list would be a "gift" to the graduating class, but it seems worth sharing with others in our Dominican University learning community.   Happy reading!

Dean, Rosary College of Arts and Sciences

Clicking on the title will show a record giving a description of the book, location, and call number.

Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 

Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers

William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing 

The Bible
Jonathan R. T. Hughes, The Vital Few: The Entrepreneur and American Economic Progress

Michael Guillen, Bridges to Infinity: The Human Side of Mathematics

Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark 

Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, The Black-White Test Score Gap

Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

James Carse, Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote of the Mancha

Federico García Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba

John Hersey, Hiroshima

Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine

Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage

James Burke, The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible

James Reston, Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade

Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essay on Self-Reliance

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

H.S. Moorhead, The Meaning of Life: According to Our Century’s Greatest Writers and Thinkers

Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments

Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity

Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons       

Helen Barolini, Umbertina                       

Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Physicists   

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Norman Mailer, The Fight

Paul Theroux, Saint Jack

David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama

Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

Ray Carney, Cassavetes on Cassavetes

James Joyce, Ulysses

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

Beryl Markham, West with the Night

Susan Minot, Evening

William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust

Homer, The Odyssey

Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov  

Plato, The Republic

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method

Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers    

Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter        

Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand   

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March  

Donald Miller, City of the Century 

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Vincent van Gogh, Letters to Theo
James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait
Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, “The Grand Inquisitor”  

Plato, Republic, Book 7

Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars

Barry Stevens, Don’t Push the River

Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Ann Morrow Lindberg, Gift from the Sea

The New Testament

Piers Plowman

William Shakespeare, Sonnets

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime & Punishment

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis

Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express

Todd G. Buchholz, New Ideas from Dead Economists

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault

Wallace Stegner, The Angle of Repose

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Winston Churchill, The History of the English Speaking People

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov  

Michael Frayn, Copenhagen

C. S. Lewis, Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength

C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

Brent Curtis & John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance: Drawing Closer to the Heart of God

A.W. Tozer, Pursuit of God

E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

Simon Garfield, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World

Thomas More, Utopia

Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

Ernst Troeltsch, Social Teaching of the Christian Churches

Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination

Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution

Saint Augustine, Confessions

Homer, The Odyssey

Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man
Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

Caroline Myss, Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential

Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

Norton Hunt, The Natural History of Love

Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly

James Welch, The Heartsong of Charging Elk

The Bible
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov  

Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Homer, The Odyssey

Thucydides, Peloponnesian War

Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (Oxford translation)

George Eliot, Adam Bede

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

James Michener, Space

Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life

Jane Austen, Emma 

John Keats, poetry selections

Ronald Rolheiser, Holy Longing

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf Nor Dog

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

G. K. Chesterton, Everlasting Man

James Burke, The Knowledge Web: From Electronic Agents to Stonehenge and Back - And Other Journeys Through Knowledge

Charles Handy, The Hungry Spirit - Beyond Capitalism: A Quest for Purpose in the Modern World 

Eliyahu Goldratt, The Goal - A Process of Ongoing Improvement  

Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information 

Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball - A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

William J. Lederer & Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American

E. J. Dionne, Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics

Albert Camus, The Stranger

Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy

Huston Smith, The World’s Religions

Sophocles, Antigone

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Mario Vargas Llosa, The War of the End of the World

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Jean Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Ben Hamper, Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line   

Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920

Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed

Sam Smith, Sam Smith’s Great American Political Repair Manual: How to Rebuild Our Country So the Politics Aren’t Broken and   the Politicians Aren’t Fixed 

Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe 

Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy

Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors: The Baron in the Trees, The Nonexistent Night and the Cloven Viscount

Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince

Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Carl Jung, Undiscovered Self

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Plato, Republic

Bible: Genesis

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Marrk Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man 

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Life

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter

Rollo May, The Courage to Create

The New Testament

Maya Angelou, Life Doesn’t Frighten Me, Poem by Maya Angelou/Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Douglas Wood, Old Turtle and the Broken Truth, Story by Douglas Wood/Watercolors by Jon J. Muth

Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach

Jon Scieszka, The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by A. Wolf (as told to Jon Scieszka)
Eve Bunting, Smoky Night, Story by Eve Bunting/Illustrations by David Diaz

Beowulf

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Thomas Malory, Morte Darthur

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

Benedict Andersen, Imagined Communities

Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History

Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Ian McEwan, Atonement

Susan Howatch, Penmarric

Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter

José María Gironella, The Cypresses Believe in God

Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing

The Bible

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov  

Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Sigmund Freud, The Future of An Illusion

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The Gospel According to John
St. Augustine, Confessions

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools

Albert Camus, Caligula

Marguerite Duras, Moderato Cantabile

André Gide, L’Immoraliste

André Malraux, La Condition humaine (Man’s Fate)

Aeschylus, The Oresteia

Gerald Dickler, On Trial: History-Making Trials from Socrates to Oppenheimer 

Gail Tsukiyama, Samurai's Garden

John Knowles, A Separate Peace

Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper

Last update:  May 28, 2004
Comments: kgiles@dom.edu