"Love in a Cold Climate" and Other Cures for the Winter Blahs

Suggestions for winter reading survived winter on the Hanover

Winter is such an important part of the Dartmouth experience that we sometimes overlook the fact that some folks in New England don't care much for the season. "Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen," wrote author Willa Cather. Ulysses S. Grant told the New England Society in 1880 that "they [the Pilgrim Fathers] fell upon an ungenial climate, where there were nine months of winter and three months of cold weather."

Certainly there are many winter days when the "Montreal Express drops a package of air so cold on the doorstep of the Hanover Plain that all the mercury in the thermometer huddles for warmth in the little bulb at the bottom. On those days, few bother leaving the house unless they must. The rest of us wait until the mercury reaches a more amicable level, say about 0 degrees F. In the meantime, we've got plenty of time for reflection, introspection, and reading. When the sun sets at 4:30 in the afternoon, you can't do much more than toss another log on the fire and curl up in an overstuffed armchair with a good book.

And why shouldn't you? The woodshed is full, the pantry wellstocked, and the bookshelves are sagging under the weight of a score of summer book purchases that went unread because the garden needed weeding and the eaves called for fresh paint.

With the thoughts of New England's literary and intellectual heritage in the back of our minds, and a weather-eye on the calendar, the Alumni Magazine asked some of Dartmouth's faculty and administrators what books they planned to read this winter. Before you read their replies, please keep in mind this thought from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Never read any book that is not a year old."

From Fred Berthold, Professor of Religion:

Richard Fox; Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (Pantheon Books).

Having read portions of this book in manuscript form, I know that it is wellwritten and reliable. It gives a moving account of perhaps the greatest religious thinker in American history - certainly in recent times. Niebuhr had a great influence not only upon theologians but upon politicians. His "Christian realism" contains much wisdom on American ideals and on the political issues we face as a nation.

From Young Dawkins, Associate Director of Capital Giving:

Louise Erdrich; The Beet Queen (HenryHolt and Company).

This winter I will surely read The BeetQueen, Louise Erdrich arid Michael Dorris' latest effort. I already managed to look through the first few chapters of a printer's copy, but my wife, Jane, absconded with the volume and read it herself until it had to be returned.

I will also reread some of the poetry of Robert Frost, Cleopatra Mathis, and others to sustain me as I attempt to complete my thesis for the Dartmouth Master of Arts in Liberal Studies degree.

From Henry Eberhardt, Alumni Fund Director:

Tom Clancy; The Hunt for Red October(Naval Institute Press).

It's great! A thriller about the chase for a fictitious, top-secret Russian missle submarine. I couldn't put it down.

From Colin D. Campbell, Professor of Economics:

Robert Skidelsky; John MaynardKeynes, Volume One, Hopes Betrayed,1883-1920 (Viking Penguin Inc.).

This is an absorbing biography of one of the most prominent economists of our century. As the first of two volumes, it ends in 1920, just after Keynes published his first bestseller, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Skidelsky's biography of Keynes is based on a very large number of published and unpublished sources (some newly available) and is documented with interesting quotations from letters and memoirs. Keynes' boyhood as the son of a Cambridge University professor, his years at Eton, the Cambridge intellectual environment when he was a student and professor there, life with the Bloomsbury group, and his participation in the Paris Peace Conference make fascinating history.

James M. Buchanan; Liberty, Marketand State, Political Economy in the1980s (New York University Press).

This is a collection of essays by 1986's Nobel laureate in economics. Buchanan's writings are literary rather than mathematical and are broader in scope than most work in economics. In this book, he explains the new public choice analysis of politics, his contrary views compared with many economists on the public debt, and the basis for his belief that the size of government has become excessive. Buchanan's views are often provocative. The book is recommended for those with a philosophical bent.

From Peter Smith, Historian of the Dickey Presidency:

Sidney Cox; Indirections for ThoseWho Want to Write (Godine Press).

There's absolutely no question for me about which unread volume I am most looking forward to getting to: in a mail-order catalogue I found a listing recently for Sidney Cox's Indirections a book I had been told was out of print. When I think of how much Professor Cox was admired by many of the most brilliant Dartmouth alumni of the twenties and thirties, and of how often I have been told that this is one of the best books ever written on the subject of writing, I know why my appetite is as keen as it is.

Trevor Burridge; Clement Attlee: APolitical Biography (Jonathan Cape).

A biography I intend to get to soon is Trevor Burridge's recent account of the life of one of my heroes - Clement Attlee, the man who led the quiet revolution in post-war Britain which made it more of a land of opportunity than it had ever been before, which isn't saying much.

Laurence Olivier; On Acting (Simonand Schuster).

I hope to see whether Laurence Olivier explains the inexplicable and describes the indescribable in his book OnActing with any greater success than all the other people who have tried to get down on paper the essence of the most ephemeral of the arts.

Evan Connell; Son of the Morning Star(North Point Press).

When it comes to fiction, I know that it is really time that I read Evan Connell's Son of the Morning Star, just as it's time that this magazine reviewed it, and the College gave this illustrious son an honorary degree!

From Leo Spitzer, Professor of History:

Art Speigelman; Maus: A Survivor'sTale (Pantheon Books).

Using the comic-strip form (the Jews are mice, the Nazis cats), cartoonist Speigelman has created a powerful visual document about a son's attempt to come to terms with his father.

William and Brendan Kennedy; Charlie Malarkey and the Belly-Button Machine (Atlantic Monthly Press).

Focusing on a subject long neglected in literature the belly button - this funny and beautifully illustrated children's book, written by a father and his teenage son, has become our children's favorite bedtime story. I have practically memorized it.

From Skip Sturman, Director of Career and Employment Services:

Larry McMurtry; The Lonesome Dove(Simon and Schuster).

The story follows a group of former Texas rangers on a cattle drive. Larry McMurtry also wrote Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show.

From David Wykes, Professor of Eng- lish:

Books that can push winter out of mind always meet for me a list of idiosyncratic criteria. Personal classics are: 1) not work: since I'm a professor of English, much of my reading is work, and its pleasure is the pleasure of work. The personal classic has to be a book of pleasure that I can't write about (by definition, I'm doing violence to any book I list here); 2) readable aloud: an even harder test; and 3) contrary to prejudice: every personal classic has overcome the prejudices with which I first came to it. Two from the list:

Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart; Happy Odyssey (Jonathan Cape).

The memoirs of Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart V.C., K.B.E., C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O. With a foreward by the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, O.M. Generals' memoirs are usually self-serving, and generals who started army life as cavalrymen are particularly inhuman, like Martial Houyhnhnms. Carton De Wiart shows how human a man can be while being utterly different from the mass of man- kind. He loved war, even the First World War, and reading him makes one feel that civilization is lucky to have some men who do love war. His book's flavor comes through, perhaps, in two extracts. "With his black eye- patch and empty sleeve, Carton de Wiart looked like an elegant pirate and he became a figure of legend, an 'absolute non-ducker,' utterly without sentimentality but full of fine-drawn sentiments. His pleasures were simple, his contempts obvious. ... He might have ridden out with Prince Rupert over Magdalen Bridge on a May morning in the sunshine. He was unusually quick and so was his temper. He bore himself magnificently, loathed humbug, and detested meanness."

That is from the Dictionary of National Biography. And this is the general himself, from the First World War: "One day Holmes (his batman) annoyed me considerably by letting off his rifle in my ear at some passing plane, and I thereupon seized his rifle and from that day forward he was armed only with my blanket and my primus stove. I never carried a revolver, being afraid that if I lost my temper I might use it against my own people, so my only weapon was a walking stick. Holmes and I must have made a quaint-looking couple advancing into battle." In one of these battles he won the Victoria Cross. His courage was clearly preternatural, like a sixth sense, but he stresses only the enjoyment of its exercise. Yet he can say that all of his life he had been afraid of the dark. He was married and had two daughters, but his family goes quite unmentioned in Happy Odyssey.

Nancy Mitford; The Pursuit of Love(Modern Library) and Love in a ColdClimate (Random House).

Nancy Mitford's twin novels toppled my prejudice against the Mitford family, as ghastly in its own way as the Bloomsbury group. Nancy's two sagas of the Radlett family transmute selfadoration and madness and loony politics into one of the funniest and most inventive novels about family life I know.