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If you could only take 10 books

Kenneth Dauber, professor and chair of the Department of English, surveyed more than 2,100 of his fellow faculty members at UB this past summer, asking them to list the 10 literary works they would most like their own children to have read by the time they finished college.

The top 10 works on the reading list are Freud's Interpretation of Dreams; Darwin's The Origin of Species; the Bible; Shakespeare's Hamlet; Dickens' Great Expectations; Plato's Republic; Homer's Iliad or Odyssey; Herman Melville's Moby Dick; a unit combining the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers; and a yet-to-be-selected Tolstoy novel.

Dauber, who is teaching an undergraduate English course incorporating the list, says the responses to his survey indicated an unexpected passion for novels and a strong sense of shared culture.

Read on!
Books by UB faculty & alumni

The Tyranny of the Normal: Essays on Bioethics, Theology, and Myth
(Lincoln, Mass.: David R. Godine, 1996) is the latest book by Leslie Fiedler, a giant in the field of literary and cultural criticism and Samuel L. Clemens Professor in the UB Department of English. "No other writer is a more courageous defender of 'difference' in an age that has yet to realize that you do not have to be the same to be equal and that justice is not served by treating different cases alike," wrote Richard A. Shweder in the New York Times Book Review.

The Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996) features contributions by eight UB faculty members and four alumni. According to Booklist, the four-volume work "defines the field of cultural anthropology, covering all approaches, methods, concepts and topics" of significance in the last decade of the 20th century.

UB faculty contributors are David Banks, Donald Pollock, Phillips Stevens Jr., William Stein, Ann McElroy, Keith Otterbein and Barbara Tedlock, all professors in the anthropology department. Alumni contributors are David Levinson, Ph.D. '79, the project's coeditor; Deborah Crooks, Ph.D. '92, the University of Kentucky; and William Divale, Ph.D. '74, York College, CUNY. Gay Kang, Ph.D. '78, an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, coauthored an entry with Tai S. Kang, UB associate professor of sociology.

Subject Guide to U.S. Government Reference Sources
(Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1996), by Gayle J. Hardy-Davis, associate librarian in the reference department of Lockwood Library, and Judith Schiek Robinson, associate professor in the School of Information and Library Studies, allows one to locate thousands of U.S. government publications in both print and electronic form and on a wide variety of topics, from aging, aquaculture and astronomy to demographics, stamp collecting and taxes.