Summer Reading

Editor’s note: In anticipation of our summer vacation, Academe’s book review editor, William Tierney, asked three AAUP colleagues what they might recommend for academic leisure reading at the beach. Here are their recommendations.

Reviews by Catharine R. Stimpson, Daniel P. Tompkins, Paula A. Treichler, and Cary Nelson

Iris Murdoch: A Life

Peter J. Conradi.
New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2001
Reviewed by Catharine R. Stimpson

Suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, Iris Murdoch died in England in 1999. Thanks to the memoir of her widower, John Bayley, and to the film, Iris, adapted from it, these facts are familiar. However, anyone who cares about literature, philosophy, and universities should know much more about her. In Iris Murdoch: A Life, Peter Conradi, a novelist and literary critic, and a friend of Murdoch and Bayley, has written a major biography. Murdoch was a brilliant student at Oxford and Cambridge and a teacher at Oxford. Her novels are often set in academic and intellectual circles, and, more important, take up profound questions that ought to compel academic and intellectual interest. What is the nature of "the good"? Of love? Of power?

Temperamentally, Murdoch was an original, proud of her Irish ancestry, discreetly yet openly bisexual and capable of great sweetness, friendship, and attentiveness to other people. An author of fiction and philosophical essays, she was fluent and prodigiously productive, but her life was not circumscribed by her desk and the Oxonian common room. Not only did she work in European refugee camps after World War II, but her friendships and love affairs comprise an intellectual history of mid- to late-twentieth-century Europe and England.

Creatively, Murdoch was also an original, an immensely important writer. She found in fiction a magic, terror, and "enticing mystery of the unknown" that she believed much academic and philosophical work lacks. Although her novels have recurrent patterns and themes, each bears the stamp of a unique and illuminating talent. She told an interviewer, "Once I’ve finished a novel it, not I, is telling its story, and one hopes that it will . . . go on beaming its message, its light, for some time." Iris Murdoch is the story of a lightmaker.

Catharine Stimpson is university professor and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University.  

Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism

Roxanne L. Euben.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999
Reviewed by Daniel P. Tompkins

Reading in the summer, we can move outside our fields and study topics of general importance. I’ve chosen to emphasize Islam in my reading this summer. We teach increasing numbers of Muslim students, increasingly see Islam in the news, and repeatedly encounter instant experts on television, so there is every reason to educate ourselves in this area.

Of recent books on Islam, Euben’s has the most appeal. The fundamentalism she describes is a hot topic right now, but the book has deeper utility, too. It presents the Egyptian thinker Sayed Qutb in a way that makes us want to read more. Qutb reacted to modernism in much the same way that the European conservatives described by Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim did in the nineteenth century. Euben shows how and why Qutb moved from accommodation to antagonism and from belief in earthly sovereignty to insistence on divine sovereignty, rejecting all speculative philosophy—even Islamic philosophy—as an arrogant encroachment on divine authority along the way and insisting on the importance of community and unity.

Qutb’s surprising similarity to Western thinkers makes Euben’s book doubly worthwhile, and doubly appealing to the general reader. Tactfully but firmly, Euben shows how his critique of alienation, of "the impoverishment of meaning, and the demise of civic virtue" recalls the work of Western sociologists and philosophers Daniel Bell, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Bellah, and Charles Taylor. These shared commitments make Qutb seem less "alien" and more like a participant in an international response to the Enlightenment. Focusing on this response, Euben tries to build a dialogue "engaging fundamentalist ideas on their own terms" rather than a "mechanical response to structural pressures." This approach, she insists, makes Qutb’s beliefs believable, accounts for changes within Islamic practice, and justifies the case for "comparative political theory."

Daniel Tompkins is professor in the department of Greek, Hebrew, and Roman classics and director of the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple University.

Ice Bound: A Doctor’s Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole

Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty and the Price We All Pay

Michael Dubson, ed.
Boston: Camel’s Back Books, 2001

Reviewed by Paula A. Treichler and Cary Nelson

Better than air-conditioning to offset summer’s heat is Ice Bound by Jerri Nielsen. Accurately subtitled A Doctor’s Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole, Nielsen’s story got widespread media coverage when she—while serving as a research station’s only physician during the winter of 1999—diagnosed and treated her own breast cancer by way of satellite and e-mail communication with experts back in the continental United States. Living in the totally isolated research community of the "Dome," with outside temperatures of a hundred degrees below zero and twenty-four-hour-a-day darkness, Nielsen knew that for eight months no one could get in or out. Indeed, it was in part the risk inherent in this stark and absolute fact that led her to become the "American ice doctor." Ultimately, two extraordinary rescue fighters saved her life: first, an unprecedented air drop delivered critical supplies and medicines, then, as the cancer aggressively returned, a massively complex airlift carried her to New Zealand during a brief break in the winter storm season.

While it was the breast cancer and rescue drama that caught the media’s attention and ultimately motivated Nielsen to write her book, her story is not really a tale of "triumph over disease." Rather, it is an adventure story—for all genders—of physical and psychological transformation, of becoming "of the ice," and of learning to endure mundane experience under radically weird climatic conditions. There is no textbook for practicing medicine at the South Pole, for example, where the whole community routinely suffers from hypothermia and chronic oxygen starvation. "Common medical supplies such as adhesive bandages were useless here," Nielsen writes, so doctors learned to improvise. "Duct tape sometimes worked, electrical tape was great, because it stretched." When skin on the hands dried and cracked "into deep, hard fissures that refused to heal," superglue was the only thing that closed them and kept them closed. In the end, it was the joy of adventure that she loved, the unique community, the beauty and "staggering emptiness" of Antarctica: "its waves of ice in a hundred shades of blue and white, its black winter sky, its ecstatic wheel of stars."

Of course, if global warming has not yet reached your neighborhood—and if you want to turn the academic temperature up this summer—we have another book to recommend: Michael Dubson’s edited collection, Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty and the Price We All Pay. It is a gathering of twenty-five essays by adjunct faculty and constitutes a ruthlessly honest collective cultural manifesto and personal confession. The essays are a mix of re-portage, personal narrative, institutional interrogation, and reflection on the present and future of higher education. They mix cold analysis with both wit and rage, as some of the titles indicate: "Adjuncts Are Not People," "We Only Come Out at Night," "The Censorship of Part-Timers," "The Witch and the Wimp," "A Lover’s Complaint," "Farewell to Teaching." This is the first book devoted fully to adjuncts telling their own stories in their own words. It makes for compelling reading, and it ad-dresses the single most serious problem in higher education. Its audience is every-one concerned about American higher education. We cannot think of a more important book for all of us to read.

Paula Treichler is director of the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Cary Nelson, a member of Academe’s editorial advisory board, teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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