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Season's Readings

by Justin W. Ravitz
November/December 2007

Just in time for Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa, a lively interfaith coffee klatsch unfolds between Harvard Divinity grad Peter Bebergal and Scott Korb in The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God.

If presents are your manna from heaven, we recommend a few volumes suitable for dressing up bookshelves: The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, Maria Tatar’s foray into the Danish storyteller’s world of landlubbing mermaids and naked emperors, translated by Julie K. Allen; The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition, Second Edition, featuring an introduction by editor Stephen Greenblatt; and Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, nearly a quarter century of sublime work from John Ashbery.

From poetry to politics: Garrett M. Graff investigates the democratizing effect of the Internet on the 2008 election in The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House. Want more expensive goodies in 2008? Take advice from TV’s nutty investor in Jim Cramer’s Stay Mad for Life: Get Rich, Stay Rich (Make Your Kids Even Richer), co-written by Cramer’s nephew, Cliff Mason. Investors watching China rather than CNBC can get tips from Burton G. Malkiel in From Wall Street to the Great Wall: How Investors Can Profit from China’s Booming Economy. For a less materialistic guide to life, try Harvard Boys: A Father and Son’s Adventures Playing Minor League Baseball, by John Wolff and Rick Wolff, about two generations of baseball-obsessed Harvardians.

The protagonist of Ben Mezrich’s latest plays hardball in Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai, which tells of David Russo, a Brooklynite trying to establish an energy exchange in Dubai. In Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, Elizabeth Little leads a beguiling excursion into etymology and grammar.

To alleviate post-holiday depression, take two doses of fiction: John Burnham Schwartz takes on the voice of Haruko, Empress of Japan, in The Commoner, an imagined telling of her life; Sue Miller explores women’s lives and loves in The Senator’s Wife, about the friendship between a long-cheated-on political spouse and her neighbor, a naïve new wife.

Sue Nichols Miller, A.B. 1964 was incorrectly identified in our print edition as Sue Altman Miller, MAT 1962.