The Mandarins (1954) by Simone de Beauvoir 

The Middlemarch or War and Peace of the mid-20th century—an incredible novel about Paris intellectuals trying to remake the world along better lines after the Second World War, based on the lives of the existentialist circle. It features a love affair based on Beauvoir’s real-life relationship with the American writer Nelson Algren.—Keri Walsh

Devil’s Teeth (2006), The Wave (2011), and The Underworld (2023) by Susan Casey

Susan Casey, a popular science writer specializing in the ocean, is a fantastic writer who I use for writing exercises. With her vivid descriptions of undersea life and skillful integration of sources, she is a great example of the mid-range of expository prose that’s not academic but notches above Wikipedia and Reddit. Her three best books are Devil’s Teeth (about great white sharks), The Wave (about waves and surfing), and The Underworld (about deep-sea exploration).—Martin Northrop

Salvage: Readings from the Wreck (2024) by Dionne Brand

This book is an important read for anyone, especially for literary scholars, and especially as we encourage people from all different backgrounds to join the English department. Brand rereads classic English novels, pointing out that “learning to read English literature involved learning not to notice who, or what, was missing.”—M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon

The Demon of Unrest (2024) by Erik Larson

Earlier this fall, I read Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, which looks at the four months in 1860-61 between Abraham Lincoln’s election and his inauguration (which back then, was held in March). It’s about the growing secessionist crisis leading to the firing on Fort Sumter, and the new president’s response to it.

Larson manages to tell some of the critical moments of the Fort Sumter siege almost like a “tick tock” (to use an old journalist’s phrase). It’s hour by hour at some points, as telegrams fly and emergency meetings are hurriedly convened (and recorded). You really feel like you’re at a cabinet meeting in the White House, or sitting nervously behind an artillery battery in Charleston harbor. And the narrative is told through the eyes of about seven individuals from the north and south, including Lincoln. And it’s all seamlessly woven together. 

I mentioned it to my students as a wonderful example of creative nonfiction, in the sense that it’s well-researched history, but told in a creative, artful way.—John Hanc

An Authentic Life (2024) by Jennifer Chang

An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang is filled with poems that I needed these last few months, not only because their topics—ranging from patriarchy to war to school shootings to religious doubt to marriage—seemed crucial, but because of the sublime way Chang mixes syntactical care with the precise wielding of wild imagery.—Meghan Dahn

The Copenhagen Trilogy (2022) by Tove Ditlevsen

This Danish novel is quite close to a memoir: like the protagonist, Ditlevsen grew up poor in Denmark during the early 20th century, and despite many obstacles, found a way to become a writer. It’s a beautiful, melancholy short trilogy (all in one volume), with poverty, political engagement, and the world wars on the margins of a very special coming-of-age story. I read it last winter and it has stuck with me all year. The scenes of her bicycling around Copenhagen are glorious. A beautiful book. —Anne Fernald

Counternarratives (2016) by John Keene 

A fascinating, richly layered collection of stories and novellas about the history of colonialism in the Americas. Wildly experimental and electric historical fiction. For anyone interested in immersing themselves in the intricate entanglements of the multi-century encounters of colonial crisis.—Shonni Enelow

My Struggle, Books 1-6 (2013-2019) by Karl Ove Knausgaard 

I’m finally reading this six-volume series from the 2010s––one of the defining works of that decade, along with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Like those, Knausgaard’s books are consuming, addictive, and kind of manic––unlike them, they are fundamentally non-dramatic, all about the banal details of the everyday that he manages to make totally compelling.—S.E. 

An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth (2024) by Anna Moschovakis 

Full disclosure: I haven’t read this yet, but I’m so excited to. I love Moschovakis’s writing: it’s sparse, elegant, and strange. And––another full disclosure––my book, A Discourse on Method, apparently makes a cameo in it!—S.E.

Book recommendations were edited for clarity.

Why add another book to those bulging shelves?

Because the six-month lead-up to D-Day illuminates Eisenhower’s singular diplomatic skills, Paradis writes in The Light of Battle, and his “underappreciated role in America’s rise as a superpower.”

Paradis—a human rights lawyer, historian, and fellow at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School—does this by focusing on the six months leading up to the invasion, starting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s decision to select Eisenhower over General George C. Marshall as supreme allied commander.

Paradis draws on deep archival research and newly found letters to build a compelling portrait of Eisenhower’s character and capabilities. The future U.S. president’s “most fateful choices” were diplomatic, Paradis writes, as he tactfully navigated the political and logistical difficulties of planning such a high-risk, high-reward operation. He managed to double the size of the planned invasion and persuade Winston Churchill and the British, among other international leaders, to go along with the plan.

In vivid, humanizing detail, Paradis brings out the roiling drama centered around Eisenhower, who often had to project optimism even when he knew the venture was on the verge of collapse.

“By avoiding the grandiosity associated with great power,” Paradis writes, and beaming American openness and opportunity, “Eisenhower made it easy to believe that there was nothing to fear. He wore his ambition lightly … [in]service to a cause greater than himself.”

Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car

New York City has one of the most extensive public transportation systems in the world. Yet—from congestion pricing snafus to debates over how much space to allocate to parking—it can often feel like the car is king when it comes to policy decisions. 

In Movement, Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor to its City Journal, and a regular columnist for the New York Post, goes beyond the mid-20th century ideological battles between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs and examines the long history of automobiles dictating the conversation around urban planning in New York.  

“Starting a century ago, the automobile changed the world—and helped drive New York City (and other cities) to the brink of irrevocable urban decline,” Gelinas writes in the book’s introduction, setting the tone for the rest of the book as a battle cry of sorts for renewed investment in public transportation and a rethinking of the city’s streetscape. 

Gelinas brings the conversation squarely into the present, arguing that moving away from car dependency is a key to New York’s long-term recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic toll.   

“It’s time to stop blaming Moses, a man who has been dead for more than four decades,” she writes, “and look to our current generation of leaders to give us the city we need.”

–By Mary Bly, English department chair, with Fordham News

Our Shared Storm tells the overlapping stories of four characters as they play out in five different future scenarios. Each of the five parts of the book takes place in the year 2054 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Conference of the Parties—better known as the COP—as a superstorm approaches. The characters’ roles, motivations, and actions differ, though, as a result of how their worlds have dealt or failed to deal with the effects of climate change.

There’s Diya, whose job is different in each story, but who is consistently a power player within the world of climate negotiations. There’s Luis, a Buenos Aires local who exists around the periphery of the conference, from being a driver in one story to a kidnapper in another. There’s Saga, a climate activist (and in one story, a pop star) whose level of pessimism—and comfort—in dealing with government delegates oscillates from part to part. And then there’s Noah, whom Hudson described as his “personal id,” a mid-level U.S. delegate (or, in the same story as pop star Saga, an exploitative entrepreneur) who has limited control over his country’s commitments but who does what he can to grease the diplomatic wheels.

“I got this idea of these four characters and figured out how to sort of remix them each time,” Hudson said. “It’s really fun to do [that], to take your characters and rethink who they are in all these different ways. One thing you can do then is try to find these moments of opportunity and figure out where your characters swerve, and then figure out what that says about the different worlds.”

In a blurb for Our Shared Storm, the celebrated science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson wrote that Hudson succeeded in finding creative ways to explore those swerves and the worlds that led to them.

“Hudson has found a way,” Robinson wrote, “to strike together the various facets of our climate future, sparking stories that are by turns ingenious, energetic, provocative, and soulful.”

Negotiating the Future

The book’s futures are based on a set of climate-modeling scenarios called the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, or SSPs, which were developed by climate experts in the 2010s and used in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report in 2021. The scenarios range from “Sustainability,” in which aggressive climate goals are met and a more utopian future takes shape, to “Middle of the Road,” a continuation of current trends of inequality and consumption, to three more dire possibilities—“Regional Rivalry,” “Inequality,” and “Fossil-Fueled Development”—each of which would bring its own variety of high-level threats.

Hudson came across the SSP framework after starting the master’s degree program in sustainability at Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation in 2017 and realized that it laid out scenarios for the future much in the same way that so much speculative fiction does, and in this case, with the explicit backing of scientific research.

“As soon as I read about [the SSPs], I was like, ‘Oh, these are science fiction stories,’” he recalled.

After visiting the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, which houses the SSP database, and meeting with scholars there to talk further about their research, Hudson realized that by writing five futures set in the same time and place with the same characters, he could eliminate variables and make it a kind of experiment.

“Originally,” he said, “a big part of the way I framed it as a master’s thesis was, ‘I’m going to do practice-based research to analyze my own experience writing these stories and figure out just how hard or easy it is to create literature based on scientific models and rigorous ideas about the climate.’”

Then, in December 2018, a member of his thesis committee at ASU, Sonja Klinsky, arranged for him to be part of the university’s observer delegation at COP24 in Katowice, Poland. Attending the conference, and thinking about the storytelling possibilities of a hypothetical climate event affecting that kind of event, helped him flesh out the book’s structure.

“When I talked with IIASA, we had thought, ‘How does each scenario handle a climate shock?’” Hudson said. “What could show how, [if]a superstorm hits, each scenario handles it differently based on the investments they’ve made?”

In the book, the storm is very strong and causes damage in each scenario, but local and global communities’ ability to deal with that damage—and the levels of suffering and violence that go with it—vary widely.

An Intellectual Journey and a Speculative Movement

Hudson grew up in St. Louis and moved to New York City to enroll at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where he majored in political science with a minor in creative writing. He also was the opinions editor for the The Observer, the award-winning student newspaper at the Lincoln Center campus.

“The Observer, doing the opinions page, writing a column—all those things definitely were steps on my intellectual journey … of being really keen on stories about arguments,” Hudson said. “And I think discovering that I liked talking to people about their writing was a big discovery that happened there.”

After graduating in 2009, he spent a year working as a journalist in India, where he had studied abroad as a Fordham undergrad, and when he got back to the States, he became a reporter at the St. Louis edition of Patch. From there, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he did freelance writing and political and nonprofit consulting.

In 2015, Hudson wrote an essay called “On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk,” which laid out the practical implications of an aesthetic movement that portrays a utopian future in which solar energy is harnessed creatively to build beautiful, sustainable cities and communities. Like the dystopian cyberpunk genre before it, solarpunk is more than just an art movement—it was meant to portray real possibilities for how the world might look in the future.

When trying to define the term in the essay, Hudson wrote, “Let’s tentatively call it a speculative movement: a collaborative effort to imagine and design a world of prosperity, peace, sustainability, and beauty, achievable with what we have from where we are.”

Hudson met, around that time, another writer and futurist thinker, Adam Flynn, who in 2014 had written an essay on solarpunk. The two co-wrote a short story, “Sunshine State,” that won the first Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest sponsored by ASU’s Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative. Seeing the work that was taking place there led Hudson to apply to the university’s sustainability master’s program, from which he graduated in 2020. In addition to his work as a fiction writer, Hudson has stayed on as a fellow at the Center for Science and the Imagination’s Imaginary College, which partners with individuals and groups “advancing [the] mission of fresh, creative, and ambitious thinking about the future.” The college counts Robinson among its resident philosophers, along with other notable writers like Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling.

And while Our Shared Storm began as his master’s thesis, with its publication by Fordham University Press, Hudson hopes that it can help a wider audience see that we still have options for what our climate future will look like.

Science Fiction as an Impetus to Action

While Hudson does believe that speculative fiction can help people imagine a brighter future, he said stories alone can’t save the world.

“I think they’re a necessary, if not sufficient, part of the process, [and] we need a huge tidal wave of mobilization that includes a huge amount of culture making. We’re going to need art. We’re going to need music. We’re going to need TV shows that do for solar panels what TV and movies did for cars back in the ’50s and ’60s, [making] car culture cool. We’re going to have to do that for these technologies of sustainability.”

But without massive organizing and political action, Hudson believes, “we could figure out how to communicate this to the public in a really effective way and still lose.”

Our Shared Storm touches on the conflicts that often arise when people and communities want to effect change—is it easier to accomplish goals through established political systems or through grassroots work that doesn’t rely upon state action?

Hudson has described solarpunk as a countercultural movement. “It should not be about the people in power,” he said recently. “It should be about the people who are not in power, who are sort of challenging those systems.” But after witnessing firsthand—and writing about—the geopolitical mechanisms that dominate spaces such as the annual COP meetings, he has come to appreciate the need to work within traditional political and diplomatic systems.

“I think learning how the institutions work—the national, local, and state governments that are trying to implement the treaties—and then kind of inserting yourself into those processes can be really powerful,” he said. “The stories are there to help people understand these dynamics and institutions, and help them get a little smarter about policy, get a little more strategic about where they put their efforts, [so they’re] not going to get taken for a ride.”

In Our Shared Storm’s most optimistic story, a strong labor movement is key to influencing government policy, and while he acknowledged that there is no one easy solution, Hudson believes that the working class uniting—and pushing for things like a Green New Deal through general strikes—has the potential to positively shape the path ahead.

So, with the scenarios laid out, and with some ideas about the actions necessary to avoid the worst-case ones, what kind of climate future does Hudson see us moving toward? That kind of prognosticating, he insisted, is not part of his project.

“What I was interested in was how we’re shaped by opportunities and material conditions,” Hudson said, harking back to his characters’ changing circumstances and swerving fates.

“All these things that I think end up shaping our lives—those were kind of the pivot points that I wanted [to show readers]. The point being that climate and the investments we make to deal with it are going to be a big factor in shaping those pivot points for billions of people.”

“It’s common for historians and the general public to say that there are little to no sources about women from the past. There’s actually a ton of material, but it hasn’t been integrated into the way that we tell the history of the city,” said Gribetz, an associate professor of theology who was recently awarded a $60,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to work on her book. 

“I want to shift our focus away from the usual suspects—King David, Emperor Constantine, Sultan Salah ad-Din—and toward the many women who made contributions to the city,” she said. 

Jerusalem: A Feminist History will serve as a historical account of the city from Biblical times to the present—a period that spans more than 3,000 years. Instead of focusing on the city’s male leaders, it will highlight women from all social classes, from the queens of Jerusalem to enslaved women and servants from wealthy households, said Gribetz. 

A Heroine from the First Century

Among the featured women will be Helena of Adiabene, a first-century queen. A native of modern-day Iraqi Kurdistan, Helena converted to Judaism and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When she arrived, the city was suffering from famine. She used her wealth to import figs and other agricultural products from nearby countries. Thanks to her philanthropic efforts, she became a beloved figure in Jerusalem, said Gribetz.

“Helena is a woman from outside of the city who becomes a hero within Jerusalem. In the many centuries after her death, Jews and Christians continue to tell stories about her,” Gribetz said. “She’s actually a relatively minor character in the first century, but she helps us see new things about the city’s history.”

The city of Jerusalem itself is often personified as a woman and depicted in feminine terms, Gribetz said. 

“In our earliest written sources about Jerusalem, people imagine the city as a sister, mother, partner, or widow. That personification of Jerusalem often happens when the city is in danger of coming under foreign rule or destruction in times of war,” Gribetz said. 

New Insights From Tombstones and Old Records

Gribetz said the inspiration for her book emerged during her first years at Fordham, when the Center for Medieval Studies asked her to teach a course on medieval Jerusalem. 

“I kept noticing women in ways that I had never thought about, in terms of Jerusalem’s history,” said Gribetz, who taught the course for several years, beginning in 2016. “At a certain point, I realized that the way I constructed my syllabus was in line with this very standard narrative of Jerusalem’s history, but there were many other ways to tell that history.”

In the following years, she received research grants and support from Fordham, including the theology department’s Rita Houlihan grant, which allowed her to research topics that led to her book. She is currently living in Jerusalem, where she is interviewing scholars and locals, participating in city tours, and studying texts at libraries, museums, and archives. The texts include funerary inscriptions on tombstones from the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods, as well as other archaeological remains, including from synagogues, churches, and mosques. 

“Our literary sources often focus more on men than women, so we have to get creative with the kinds of sources that we use to reconstruct history,” said Gribetz. “But there are still many ways to find traces of these women.” 

‘This History Belongs to Many Different People’

Through her book, Gribetz said she aims to push back against the idea that we’re limited in the kinds of stories we can tell. 

“If we’re creative with the questions we ask and the sources that we use, then we can tell history in a way that incorporates the stories of a much broader segment of the population, whether it’s in Jerusalem or in other cities or contexts,” said Gribetz, who has also written Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2020). 

Gribetz will spend the coming few years writing the book, which will be published by Princeton University Press. In addition to exploring the history of women in Jerusalem, Gribetz said she also hopes that her book weaves together the stories of Jews, Christians, and Muslims and shows that the city’s diversity is a strength, rather than a liability. 

“I would like to think that my book may help encourage people in all these different communities to appreciate what a beautiful thing it is to share such a deep history with the city, rather than to compete over who has exclusive claims to it,” Gribetz said. “I hope that my book conveys how complicated, interesting, and beautiful this history is, and that this history belongs to many different people.”

That is the question that led Olivia Greenspan, FCRH ’19, and Zanagee Artis to write A Kid’s Book About Climate Change.

The two first connected a few years ago, after Greenspan read a New York Times article about Artis and his fellow co-founders of Zero Hour, a youth climate action group. Greenspan, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior at the time, had been involved with environmental work on campus and in her native Connecticut, where she helped establish TILL, a community-based real estate development company focused on rehabilitating brownfield sites.

Over the next two years, they discussed how children learn about climate change and decided they wanted to provide parents and teachers with an effective way to reach young kids. Greenspan came across A Kid’s Company About, which had recently started a series of books to help young people understand tough topics, including racism. While she was reading A Kid’s Book About Cancer in a Connecticut train station, she was approached by a woman who said her husband’s oncologist had recommended the book for their grandchildren.

“That was a moment for me where I was like, ‘OK, this company understands that kids are capable of understanding a lot more than we give them credit for,’” Greenspan said.

She reached out to the company, and founder Jelani Memory told her they’d been wanting to publish a book on climate change. In Greenspan and Artis, Memory found authors with experience organizing communities, especially young people, to address climate change.

Action as an Antidote for Anxiety

A Kid’s Book About Climate Change, published last April and marketed as being for children ages 5 to 9, is sleekly designed and includes the kind of information that adults may find both eye-opening and useful in talking about the topic with kids.

It arrived amid growing concern about how climate change is affecting kids’ mental health, with studies showing young people struggling to cope with anxiety about climate change and a sense that governments aren’t doing enough to counteract it.

In the book, Greenspan and Artis trace how 250 years of industrial living have affected the Earth’s climate, using a metaphor of sickness to help kids understand those ill effects. And while they don’t shy away from the enormity of the problems caused by climate change, they also lay out some concrete ways that young readers can help alleviate those problems, offering visions of what a more climate-friendly future could look like, from alternative energy to a robust high-speed rail infrastructure.

“There’s definitely a through line in the book about ways to take action and reasons to be hopeful, and learning about actual solutions to the crisis,” said Artis, who is currently a senior at Brown University. “It’s about ways that kids can think about solutions on their own and ways that they can influence others to take action on solutions. And there’s a quote at the very end that I really like, which is that ‘the best antidote for anxiety is action.’ We really believe that.”

Greenspan noted that she and Artis had a climate scientist who works with youth, as well as a licensed mental health practitioner, review the manuscript to help them ensure it strikes the right tone for their audience.

Now, the two have their sights set on a slightly older audience. In November, they launched 1 Point 5, a podcast on climate justice. Greenspan said the 12-episode series, produced by A Kid’s Company About, will cover three main topics: what climate change is, intersectionality and climate injustice (i.e., how issues of race, gender, class, and other forms of identity affect and are affected by climate change), and solutions. They plan to interview activists, climate scientists, and policymakers, and they hope to reach teens and tweens, in particular.

“It’s just such a great challenge,” Greenspan said, “because I’m always trying to become a better communicator about climate science and climate justice, and there’s no greater challenge than trying to condense really complex information to the simplest possible language. It’s really teaching me a lot.”

An Economic Perspective on Environmental Work

While working on the book and podcast, Greenspan, who majored in economics and minored in psychology at Fordham, has also been working a full-time job as a performance analyst at Paradigm Capital Management and serving as a climate fellow at Martini Education & Opportunity Trust, founded by Fordham graduate Brent Martini, GABELLI ’86.

Greenspan met Martini a few years ago, when he was an executive in residence at the Gabelli School of Business and she was a member of Fordham’s Social Innovation Collaboratory, a network of students, faculty, alumni and others working to promote social innovation. The group instilled in her “great values of collaboration and teamwork,” she said.

Greenspan added that while some might think economics an unlikely major and finance an unlikely career choice for someone with a passion for environmental justice, the two fields have given her a valuable perspective on how to address climate issues.

“Majoring in and working in those fields gives me credibility and a great lens through which to look at problems like climate change,” she said. “At the end of the day, it has helped me in getting into rooms and meeting people who have helped me on my climate journey.”

Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, said she plans to read Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks, (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2021) alongside The Other Black Girl (Simon & Schuster, 2021), a thriller by Zakiya Dalila Harris. She said she heard Dalila Harris speak on WNYC’s Get Lit program, which she highly recommends for summer reading ideas.

Auricchio’s summary of the plot: “The narrator’s a Black woman who has been working at this publishing firm for a long time—which is unfortunately still pretty rare. They hire another Black woman and then bad things start happening to the narrator, who suspects it could be the new hire,” she said. “I saw the book described as Get Out meets Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and I was so intrigued by the author in the interview on WNYC, I thought the book would be compelling.”

Gregory Acevedo, Ph.D., associate professor of social work, plans to spend some time this summer finishing Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity, (Oxford University Press, 2021).

“This book adopts a counter-intuitive argument that recontextualizes government and bureaucratic decision-making and their effects on persons living in poverty,” he said.

He also plans to read Dear Committee Members (Anchor, 2015), a satiric academic novel written by Julie Schumacher. The book presents itself as a series of recommendation letters written by an irritable English professor.

“The story is a fun way to laugh at ourselves as academics,” said Acevedo.

Here are a few more suggestions, both light and not so light, from Fordham faculty and staff:

Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., Dean of the Gabelli School of Business

•  A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman (Washington Square Press, 2015)
• The Plot, by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon Books, 2021)
• Love As A Business Strategy, by Mohammad F. Anwar, Frank E. Danna, Jeffrey Ma F. Chris Pitre (Mohammad Anwar, 2021)
• Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, by Adam Grant (Penguin, 2021)
• Leadership: In Turbulent Times, Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster, 2019)
• Wolf, by Becky Bloom (Scholastic, 1999)

“There are so many nuggets of wisdom in Think Again that I find myself reading it again and again. For example, think like a scientist and treat your ideas as if they are hypotheses—you’ll be much more open to change. The Plot is a quick read filled with unexpected twists and turns. Korelitz also has some fun with her portrayal of writers. Wolf, a children’s book, is a beautiful depiction of the power of reading and knowledge to empower and transform behavior. I read it every summer. A Man Called Ove is a beautiful story of love, friendship, and acceptance. There are many takeaways but It demonstrates the power of kindness to overcome prejudice.” (Read more about Dean Rapaccioli’s summer reading suggestions in her Monthly Mindfulness blog post.)

Maura Mast, Ph.D., Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill

• Lonely Planet Iceland by Alexis Averbuck, Carolyn Bain, Jade Bremner, Belinda Dixon (Lonely Plant Global, Ltd., 2019)
• Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny (St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2019)
• Microaggressions in Everyday Life, Derald Wing Sue and Lisa Spanierman (Wiley, 2020)
• Mathematics of Social Choice: Voting, Compensation, and Division, by C. Börgers (SIAM, 2010)
• Mathematics for Social Justice: Resources for the College Classroom, by Gizem Karaali and Lily Khadjavi (eds) (American Mathematical Society, 2019)
• The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (Harper Collins, 2017) 

“I’m taking a real vacation this summer and heading to Iceland with my family.  It’s a new country for me and there’s so much to experience there, so I’ll be reading Lonely Planet Iceland. I’m also a big fan of mystery novels from the UK.  My sister recommended the Inspector Gamache series and I absolutely love the books. Kingdom of the Blind is one of the newest ones and I’ve been saving it to read on my vacation,” she said.

“One of the associate deans took part in a workshop with Dr. Sue and recommended Microaggressions in Everyday Life. It’s a riveting, eye-opening read and is aligning well with the anti-racism efforts that the Arts and Sciences deans have been leading. The Hate U Give is the common read for incoming students.  I’m looking forward to reading it and participating in discussions with our students about the book and its relevance to our times.”

David Gibson, Director, Center on Religion and Culture

• Kierkegaard: A Single Life by Stephen Backhouse (Zondervan, 2016)
• By the Lake by John McGabern (Vintage, 2002)

“Summer vacation, for me, means time spent at a lake in a cool Northern climate. It’s a locale that in my warmest memories recalls an episode of Schitt’s Creek, but in reality, like any other place, it has darker shades to life—just like By the Lake, a tale of a rural Irish village by the late novelist John McGahern. That’s my fiction selection for this summer, and it is proving as worthy as the reviews promised when it was published nearly 20 years ago. McGahern does what a novel, and a summertime book in particular, needs to do, which is to create an entire world that I can slip into, leaving behind news cycles and social media feeds. Ordinary miseries, and joys, have never felt so real, or so welcome.”

Marco Valera, Vice President for Administration

• In the Kingdom of Ice, by Hampton Sides (Knopf, 2014)
• American Rebels: How the Hancock, Adams, and Quincy Families Fanned the Flames of Revolution, by Nina Sankovich (St. Martin’s Press, 2020)
• How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi (One World, 2019)
• Sailing True North, Admiral James Stavridis (Penguin, 2019)
• The Little Ice Age, Updated Edition, by Brian Fagan(Basic Books, 2019)
• Dune, by Frank Herbert (Herbert Properties, 1965; 2020)

“This summer I am going back to a book I last read more than 40 years ago, Dune by Frank Herbert, a science fiction classic. I am interested to see how this 412-pager has held up over the years and if I still enjoyed it as much as the first time.”

Vincent DeCola, S.J., assistant dean, Gabelli School of Business

• The Person You Mean to Be, by Dolly Chugh (Harper Business, 2019)

“This is the book what we have the incoming first-year students reading, and I just finished it and thought it was a terrific framing of the key issues and categories to help one navigate conversations around racial justice and other structural power dynamics involving gender and ethnicity,” said Father DeCola. “Through every chapter, she tells stories about real people she knows who have grown and learned important lessons—and these reveal the wisdom contained within.”

Innita Jones, Fire and Life Safety Director, Martino Hall

• The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (Doubleday, 2019)
  Yellow Crocus by Laila Ibrahim (Lake Union, 2014)
  Alex Cross, Run by James Patterson (Little, Brown, and Company, 2013)
  The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (Random House, 1994)
• Conception: Birth of ‘The Phoenix’ (Harmsworth House, 2019)

“Birth of ‘The Phoenix’ is about a young man who had a really rough upbringing. After his daughter is killed he becomes a psychopath who believes everyone has done him wrong. Over the course of 20 years he becomes a serial killer seeking revenge. He lives in an impoverished part of London. I feel that basically everyone says that London is so great, but in the book, you see that it’s just like any other city. It has its ups and downs, its impoverished and its rich. I also liked the detective; the chase was thrilling.”

John Cunningham, S.J., Associate Professor of Physics

• Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth by Adam Frank (Norton, 2019)
• The Fallen by David Baldacci (Grand Central Publishing, 2018)
• They Called Us River Rats by Macon Fry (University Press of Mississippi, 2021)
• Montalbano’s First Case by Andrea Camilleri (Penguin, 2016)
• Dorothy Day Selected Writings edited by Robert Ellsberg (Orbis, 2005)

“I make a hobby of reading books on science directed to the public. Science textbooks and journals are so technical, and I am curious how complicated scientific topics are explained to non-scientists. Light of the Stars begins with the premise of finding ‘alien worlds’—places in the universe where intelligent life may reside—but then goes on to speak of what makes Earth so conducive for the flourishing of life. The book steps into areas of climate change and how we humans may destroy this paradise. It’s paradoxical: The planet that allowed us to emerge may be left inhabitable, for humans, by us.”

Geoff Snell, Ph.D., Lecturer on Art and Architecture, Fordham in London

• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (Penguin, 2019)
• A Right Royal Face-Off by Simon Edge (Lightning Books, 2019)
• Stoner by John Williams (New York Review Books Classics, 2006)
• The Bone People by Keri Hulme (Penguin, 1986)
• Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (Penguin, 2002)

“A Right Royal Face-Off delves into the fierce artistic rivalry between 18th-century portrait painters Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds as well as present-day art-world shenanigans centered around a supposedly ‘lost’ portrait. It’s like the most fun art history class ever—I couldn’t put it down.”

If you’re worried you’ve exhausted all your Netflix options, look no further. Fordham News asked faculty and staff members for updated suggestions on the best things to read, watch, and listen to for the upcoming winter months. (In case you missed it, check out our last list of faculty recommendations here.)

Films

Jennifer Moorman, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies

Vampires vs. The Bronx (2020), directed by Osmany Rodriguez
I know Halloween is over, but it’s always horror season for me! This one was actually recommended to me by a student in my Horror Film class, and I found it moving as well as fun. A horror-comedy focused on three boys battling vampires while simultaneously fighting off gentrification in their Bronx neighborhood (an issue that should concern all of us at Fordham), this film has so much heart. It has its share of cheesy moments and clichés, but overall it entertains while reminding us that Black lives matter, our communities are worth saving, and we are stronger together.
Available on Netflix

Bacurau (2019), directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles
This Brazilian riff on The Most Dangerous Game is a thrilling, powerful, anticolonial tour de force. Warning: It gets pretty graphic. But its messages about the dangers of globalization, imperialism, and white supremacy are as urgent as ever, and will hopefully inspire you to organize in your own community to fight the power. Its meditation on the ways that advanced technologies invade our lives and can hurt as much as they help is particularly relevant in this moment of ever-increasing dependency on digital (and specifically remote-learning) tech.
Available on Amazon

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), directed by Céline Sciamma
Arguably the greatest queer love story (or any love story, for that matter) of the 21st century thus far. Exquisitely shot, each frame is a painting. The compositions are breathtaking, the characters written and portrayed with unusual depth, and the story is incredibly moving and all too relatable for anyone who has a “one that got away.”
Available on Hulu

The Lighthouse (2019), directed by Robert Eggers
This is a great companion piece to Robert Eggers’ previous feature, The Witch (which I also highly recommend). It’s darker and more challenging, but also funnier. Its exploration of the horrors of isolation feels all the more relevant now than at the time of its release, and if you look beneath the surface, you’ll find a biting critique of capitalism and toxic masculinity (and some would say, also a homoerotic love story).
Available on Amazon

Beth Knobel, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies

Broadcast News (1987), directed by James L. Brooks
This is one of my favorite films about television news. It’s also filled with classic moments that speak to the nature of friendship, success, and love. I’ve shown it numerous times to my Fordham students to illustrate the power and limitations of broadcast journalism.
Available on Amazon

Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954-1965 (1987)
Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965-1985 (1990)
Produced by Henry Hampton
Everyone who wants to understand the roots of the American civil rights movement should spend the time to watch Henry Hampton’s monumental, prize-winning documentary series Eyes on the Prize. Its 14 parts, produced as two series, explore the major moments of the movement, from school desegregation, to the fight for voting rights, to the elections of Black politicians in major cities like Chicago. It’s engrossing and important.
Available on Amazon

Brandy Monk-Payton, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies

Time (2020), directed by Garrett Bradley
This award-winning experimental documentary by Garrett Bradley is a beautiful and intimate portrait of a Black family that follows Sybil “Fox Rich” Richardson as she fights for over 20 years to free her husband from his prison sentence. Using interviews as well as Rich’s own homemade videos, the film is a brilliant love story in an era of mass incarceration.
Available on Amazon

Television Shows

Brandy Monk-Payton

The Queen’s Gambit (2020)
Based on a 1983 novel of the same name, this limited series is a coming-of-age story about Beth Harmon, an orphan who also happens to be a chess prodigy. Set during the Cold War, Beth defies the odds as a female player who gains widespread public attention winning in a male-dominated sport, while also privately battling addiction. Watch for the mesmerizing scenes of chess play.
Available on Netflix

Grand Army (2020)
This gritty young adult drama series is set in Brooklyn and follows a multicultural ensemble of teenagers as they confront issues of identity at their prestigious public high school. At times difficult to watch due to its themes, the film has vivid characters and stellar performances by the young cast.
Available on Netflix

Jacqueline Reich, Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies

My Brilliant Friend (2018-present)
There are two seasons available of this amazing adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s four novel series set in Naples beginning in 1945. Most of the actors are non-professional, and there are wonderful echoes to Italian neorealism and other film traditions. It is compelling storytelling at its best, and when we can’t travel to Italy, the series transports us there.
Available on HBO

Borgen (2010-2013)
Borgen is probably one of the most highly praised international television series in recent memory, and Netflix subscribers can now see it for the first time. It revolves around the first Danish female prime minister and her family as she adapts to her new role. You will be riveted. Also along these lines on Netflix is The Crown, with Season 4 having just been released.
Available on Netflix

The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977)
One of the pioneering television series of the 1970s, Mary Tyler Moore plays Mary Richards, a single career woman living in Minneapolis. It was one of the first shows to feature work life and home life (modeled after The Dick Van Dyke Show, also starring Moore), and spawned several spinoffs (Rhoda, Phyllis, Lou Grant). I watched all seven seasons during the worst of the quarantine, and Mary’s sunny disposition and optimism were just what I needed. For a great companion read, I recommend the book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted by Jennifer Kieshin Armstrong, which tells the background story behind the scenes.
Available on Hulu

Clint Ramos, Assistant Professor of Design and Head of Design and Production

Alone (2015-present)I love it because it shows you how we really need socialization.
Available on Netflix

Street Food (2019)
It’s set both in Asia and Latin America. I love it because it’s not about the food, it’s about the people who make the food.
Available on Netflix: Asia and Latin America

Beth Knobel

Occupied (2015-2017)
This multilingual Norwegian three-season television series revolves around a Russian invasion of Norway over energy resources. As someone who spent 14 years living in Moscow, working as a journalist, I was glued to the edge of my seat by the portrayal of the Russians and the twists and turns in this biting political thriller.
Available on Netflix

Books

Heather Dubrow, Professor of English; John D. Boyd, S.J. Chair in the Poetic Imagination; and Director, Reading Series, Poets Out Loud

Detective fiction and crime fiction in general! Long-standing favorites include Sherlock Holmes and Ed McBain, especially the ones about the 87th precinct, which I enjoy not least because they are set in New York. 

Michael Connelly has been another favorite for some years—partly because of how the values of the detective are represented (he repeatedly evokes police work as a “mission”) and also because of how the relationship with his daughter has developed in the course of the series. But OK, I’ll let the cat out of the bag: I’m writing a critical article on Connelly, which demonstrates that I need to try harder to follow the advice I give my students about getting away completely from academic work occasionally. 

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
What an extraordinary eye and ear he has for English culture.

Seamus Heaney
Not surprisingly, I keep returning to Heaney, virtually any of his poetry books and prose too. 

Why I Am Not a Toddler by Cooper Bennett Burt
Given our troubled times I’d recommend for light reading, especially to people who enjoy some of the originals, the parodies of golden oldie poems Stephanie Burt claims were written by her infant son. One of my favorites there is in fact a riff on the Bishop poem that is itself one of my favorites, “One Art.” [Bishop’s compelling lament, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” becomes the kid’s “The art of mouthing isn’t hard to master . . . And look! my last, or / next to last, of three big crayons…”] 

Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America by Robert Bruegmann (Editor)
I love reopening and flipping through art books, including catalogues of exhibits to which I’ve gone. Art deco means a lot to me, and right now that bedside table also includes a book on deco mailboxes, a sub-sub genre of art deco design no doubt. And I often revisit a couple of books I have on the lacquer creations and other work of Zeshin—wow.

Music

Chuck Singleton, General Manager, WFUV

WFUV’s The Joni Project, which features artists covering songs by iconic singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell

Our Stress-Free Soundtrack pandemic playlist

The EQFM “Album ReCue” series, on landmark albums from women, which includes Spotify playlists of every album and Alisa Ali’s conversation with WFUV DJs

George Bodarky, News Director, WFUV

Everyone should have Nina Simone’s “O-o-h Child” on their playlist, especially now.

But really tapping into ’70s R&B has been uplifting, including “Shining Star” from Earth, Wind & Fire. 

Anne Fernald, Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Every summer, my family and I make a summer playlist. The rule is that it has to be brief enough to fit on a CD (so 100 minutes or so) and that it should capture the mood of the summer. We spend our summers up on the New York side of the Canadian border, listening to a lot of CBC 2. Their smooth-voiced nighttime DJ is a musician called Odario Williams, and his “Low Light (In This Space)” is a song that captures the hopes and aspirations coming out of #BlackLivesMatter.

Also on that playlist was Phoebe Bridgers’ “Kyoto,” which is both heart-breaking and inspiring and just grows and grows on me. 

And I am always charmed by the Swedish song “Snooza” by Säkert! It’s (apparently) about urging your lover to hang out and snooze a little longer. It’s a very cheerful pop song in a language I don’t speak and one of those gifts from the algorithm: a “you might like” song that I love. 

Reynolds was one of the keynote speakers at the Bronx Book Festival produced by The Bronx Is Reading, and co-sponsored by Fordham’s Office of the Chief Diversity Officer. The festival normally takes place on Fordham Plaza across the street from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, but this year it was held virtually on June 5 due to the pandemic.

For Reynolds’ session, he was in conversation with author Ibram X. Kendi, Ph.D., professor of history and international relations and the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. Bronx native Lovia Gyarkye, associate editor at New York Times Magazine Labs, moderated.

Kendi’s National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Bold Type Books, 2016) examines how racism shaped five historical figures—from abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to activist Angela Davis. The book portrays its subjects in the harsh light of truth, rather than a heroic glow.

In response to the need for middle school history books that address how racism shapes lives, Kendi tapped Reynolds to help in a retelling of his book for young people. The result was Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2020), which is described as a “remix and NOT a history book,” so as to not scare off young readers who might otherwise turn their nose up at a history lesson.

The adult book sets out to define the terms of where people land on the racism spectrum. There are three archetypes, writes Kendi: the segregationists, the assimilationists, and the anti-racists. In the young adult book, Reynolds calls them the haters, the likers, and the lovers.

“Everybody knows a hater,” said Reynolds. “But here, [the hater]is a racist that is overtly separatist due to the color of your skin. The likers are people who walk with you as long as you act like them. And the [lovers are]anti-racist people who believe that all people are equal, a basic level of equality for all humanity; these are the people who love us. This was the architecture to frame the discussion.”

Both authors said that they did not have the most engaging experiences as young people in history classes, in part because the text assumed that young people would be inherently interested, rather than doing the hard work of pulling the reader into the story.

“Jason liberated himself and the young readers by saying this is not a history book,” said Kendi.

Unvarnished Heroes

Both the adult and young adult versions also avoid a common trope in historic biographies by exposing the subjects’ human complexities.

“One of the things we do with ourselves and people we admire is we deny that we did wrong or our heroes did wrong,” said Kendi.

As it would turn out, some abolitionists could have been mere “likers.”

“We wanted to define terms of racism and looked for people who defined those terms, and even if it was someone who we admired, we were going to hold fast to that definition,” he said.

Humans, he said, have good qualities and not-so-good qualities.

“If we honor their legacy in its totality we have to look at the whole picture,” said Reynolds, “not just what they were doing then, but in our present history as citizens.”

Demonstrations and Examining the White Self

The authors then took the same approach when they discussed white people participating in present-day protests sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police.

“There’s something going on with white folks; I don’t pretend to know what it is, because I’m not white,” said Reynolds, stressing that conversations need to be had around self-interest. He said an underlying motivator for white demonstrators could well be the need to relieve shame and guilt.

He also stressed the need for white people to do the work and educate themselves about racism.

“You have to work for it,” Reynolds said, adding that the process should not be rushed. “Pace yourself, because if you want to do less harm, slow down. Don’t go trying to save the world. Slow down and save your family. Work on yourself and what’s happening in your household. Read with your spouses and your parents. Figure out how to have different conversations.”

Kendi added that through the demonstrations, white people were being radicalized by seeing first-hand the unchecked police aggression.

“They never had to feel what it is to be Black in this country, which is to be constantly terrorized by police violence, but white people went out there to demonstrate against police violence and they suffered police violence, so they came face-to-face with precisely what they were demonstrating against and then their parents came face-to-face with that, their friends came face-to-face with that, their whole community came face-to-face with that,” he said.

A Mexican State of Mind showcases the creative endeavors of Mexicans in New York City, many of whom are undocumented. How did you start working on this project?
I actually started it [as a graduate student]at Fordham. Even though I was studying English, [the program]gave me so much space to explore other interests, [so]I took a course on sociology and minorities, and for my final project I did an ethnography about Mexican hip-hop. After Fordham, I reworked it and presented it at a conference, and there was a lot of interest. And then I worked on it more, looking at graffiti and other art forms, while I was also working in restaurants amongst some of these same people, [the artists featured in my research]. And then I kept working on it for my Ph.D. at Yale. I just felt their stories needed to be told, and I was in a unique position to tell them.

So how did your identity as a Mexican-American poet play into that unique perspective?
I think I saw, as an artist and restaurant worker, how I was treated differently than undocumented people or people perceived as undocumented because of their skin color. But to me what was most amazing was, despite these hardships and marginalizations, they were fighting for creative lives. I think that’s what’s most important. There’s such a focus on what undocumented people lack—rights, health care, education, employment stability. But what do they bring to the world? Obviously they bring their labor, but beyond that—we need to think of them as three-dimensional human beings with creative lives and interests. They’re forming collectives, they’re forming sometimes transnational and multinational networks. They’re shaping and creating culture.

Two concepts you touch on in the book are how we view migrants versus immigrants, and the idea of a mobile borderlands. What do you mean by each of those?
I like to think about my subjects—many of whom are my friends now, I have tattoos done by them on my body—as migrants instead of immigrants. That’s because I want to emphasize two-way mobility, and movement as a human right. It also shifts the idea of immigrants as “invaders” just coming into a country. We’re all potential migrants. And for the borderlands piece, I wanted to take Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the U.S.-Mexico border as a wound that causes both pain and creativity out of the traditional Southwest borderlands where it originated and think of it in a New York context, where Mexicans are coming up against not just white people but some of the most diverse populations in the world. How does that multinational world change their creativity? I think it affects the type of culture they produce. They embrace, for example, the history of hip-hop in New York City as well as international sounds and people. It changes their interactions, their experience, and their creative work.

How did your subjects feel about being featured in the book?
They were all down for it. One of the things I always remember that one of them said was, “Dejamos una huella que estuvimos aquí,” or “We are leaving a mark that we were here.” And I think they saw I could help them leave that mark—because these are vulnerable populations; many of them could be deported at any time. And they care that there’s something to show for their time in New York. I did get some feedback on the book—I asked them how they felt about how I was representing them—and it was always positive. But they would say you could highlight this more, or this. It’s the most complicated thing I’ve ever written, with new ways to think about diaspora, transnationalism, Mexican studies … but I didn’t want it to be too academic-y. They helped me bring out some on-the-ground theory. I can’t wait to give them copies.

How do you create the same space for new voices in your classroom?
I think it’s really important for students to see themselves in the authors they’re reading. If students can see themselves in the curriculum, I hope they feel empowered by it. So I bring in a number of Latino or African American authors, many of them living authors, often from the Bronx. You have to widen the canon. But there’s also the canon within the canon. The Latino canon is marginalized within the American literature canon, but the Afro-Latino canon is marginalized within that. Many of these students experience racism within their own communities. There is colorism, or people think they’re not Latino because of the color of their skin. I want them to know there’s a body of literature that talks about these issues. And we’re not just talking about issues of race but also issues of sexuality. I want them to think on their own, to challenge ideas, to think of themselves as scholars who can have a voice about what the future of the canon is going to be.

How does your poetry address some of these same issues?
A lot of my poetry explores where I fit in. I don’t identify as fully white or fully Mexican, because each negates the other half. I will never give an identity to anybody else. I think we need to stop labeling people, and start letting people identify how they want to identify and let those identities evolve. Identity is transformable; it changes across generations and lifetimes. I’ve watched students who are half white like me read Latino literature in my own classroom and have that part of their identity become something very powerful for them. I want to create that space for people like that, and I hope my poetry does that as well. People feel out of place for different reasons, so I hope that can resonate for whoever feels like that.

What are you working on next?
I have a draft of my next poetry book, called Chingona Rules, that I’m editing. I’m working on a book about Afro-Latino literary history from the 1930s and 1940s, which also came out of my studies at Fordham. And then I’m working on a book with my husband, Tony Planas, about the psychological repercussions of long-term detention on children. He’s a reporter, so he will take the lead on interviews and I will take the lead on research. He’s also a photographer, and he’s taken pictures that I’ve written poems for. It’s cool, because this is a new way to collaborate for us. And to bring more voices to the forefront.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Alexandra Loizzo-Desai.