Odyssey Online

One of the great pleasures of life in the North Country is a summer walk.  Morning walk with aspirations of high prayer, evening walk with aspirations of ice cream cone.  Here is a list of books on walk, by no means limited to walking in northern places, but books that comment on the place of the meditative walk in human life:

• Walk’s in Nature’s Empire: Exploring the Nature Conservatory’s Preserves in New York State by Scott Edward Anderson
• Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate
• Lost Art of Walking: History, Science, Philosophy and Literature of Pedestrainism by Geoff Nicholson
• Walking to Vermont: From Time Square to the Green Mountains–A Homeward Adventure by Christopher Wren
• The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac’s City by Bill Morgan
• On Foot:  A History of Walking by Joseph Amato
• Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans by Roy Blount Jr.
• Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness of Everyday Places by John Stilgoe

…title says it all.  To celebrate a recent string of games in the Bronx here are nine (like the lineup!) new-newish titles on baseball:

• Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game by John Thorn
• Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: the Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime by Jason Turbow and Micheal Duca
• 100 Baseball Icons from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Archive by Terry Heffern
• Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball by Bill Madden
• Venezuelan Bust Baseball Boon: Andres Reiner and Scouting on the New Frontier by Milton Jamail
• Cheater’s Guide to Baseball by Derek Zumsteg
• Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball by Norman Macht
• Jews and Baseball by Burton and Benita Boxerman
• Knuckler: My Life With Baseball’s Most Confounding Pitch by Tim Wakefield and Tony Massarotti

…happened to have read Donald Hall’s book Life Work over the weekend, and was reminded just what a fine writer and think Hall is (he’s alive and well at age 82).  Spending the early summer reading Hall would be a June well spent, here is an overview of recommended titles by Hall that we have here in ODY:

• The Best Day the Worst Day: A Life with Jane Kenyon
• Fathers Playing Catch with Sons: Essays on Sports (Mostly Baseball)
• Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected
• Old and New Poems
• Painted Bed
• Life Work
• White Apples and the Taste of Stone, Poems, 1946-2006
• Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry

With Reunion Weekend upon us here at St. Lawrence, here are a sampling of recent books on the state of American colleges and universities at this moment in history.  Hopefully a start on the literature of higher education, of the critiques and defenses of the enterprise we are all about:

• Nature of College: How a New Understanding of College Life Could Change the World by James Farrell
• Degrees of Inequality: Culture, Class, and Gender in American Higher Education by Ann Mullen
• The Moral University by Maurice Berube and Claire Berube
• The Great American University: It’s Rise to Preeminence, It’s Indispensable National Role, and Why It Must be Protected by Jonathan Cole
• Unmaking the Public University: A Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class by Christopher Newfield
• How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low Wage Nation by Marc Bousquet
• University of Google: Higher Education in the (post) Information Age by Tara Brazbazan
• Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University by William Clark