Monika Piazzesi
Professor of Finance and John Huizinga
Photo by Dan Dry
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston (J.B. Lippincott, 1937)
"I bought this book in an airport bookstore. I had not heard about it before but was immediately captivated by the characters' dialect. It's the story of a woman who is unhappy living her life according to the rules of the 1930s society around her. She eventually finds happiness when she falls in love with a much younger man-and breaks many rules at once. This is a wonderful book that I highly recommend."
Crossing: A Memoir, Deirdre N. McCloskey (University of Chicago Press, 1999)
"I like going to the campus bookstore and buying books by Chicago faculty. McCloskey used to be an economics and history professor at the U of C and is now at UIC. The book is about feeling trapped inside the wrong body and the author's journey of adopting another gender. It's a page-turner because the author-unlike many economists-is a wonderful writer."
Yucatan and Mayan Mexico, Nick Ryder (Cadogan Guides, 2005)
"I love to read travel books. To get ready for a bicycle trip through the Yucatan last summer, I read a bunch of books about Mayan culture and architecture and the early colonial history of Mexico. It is hard to pick one in particular, but I found this one helpful."
Robert Zeithammer
Professor of Finance and John Huizinga
Photo by Dan Dry
The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas
Llosa (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2000)
"This reportedly accurate historical
novel illustrates the anatomy of a society
ruled by a brutal dictator-Rafael
Trujillo of the Dominican Republic in
the 1950s.Vargas Llosa's dissection lets
the reader see inside the minds of several
Dominicans, both normal citizens
and members of government, all critical
of the dictator but hopelessly disabled
by fear of his violent thugs.Much of the
book is devoted to imagining exactly
what led to the eventual demise of
Trujillo, how regular people found the
courage to become assassins, and what
they must have been thinking as their
dreams evaporated in the reality of the
even-more-brutal regime of the dictator's
sadistic son. This book is not a
cheerful, light read, but it gave me a
better perspective for understanding
Latin America,much of which seems to
periodically self-destruct in convulsions
of malicious governments. I discovered
Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian writer, during
my visit to the Andes last year.He is a
local celebrity,who even ran for president
in the '90s, but now lives in London,
presumably because he fears for his life.
Several of his other books are translated
into English, and I enthusiastically
recommend all of them."
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond (W. W. Norton, 1999)
"This book starts by describing the well-known story of how Pizarro's 168 Spaniards defeated more than 80,000 Inca soldiers in 1532. Diamond points out that all of the conquests of the 'New World' by Europeans succeeded because of guns, steel, having more large mammals than the natives (such as horses), and potent germs. Then he turns his attention to more interesting questions such as, 'Why did the conquerors have these technologies while the conquered did not?' and,'Why didn't the Incas show up in Toledo and defeat the Spanish instead?' In a remarkably researched and vividly told 'history of pre-history,' Diamond, a geography professor, proposes that Europeans were simply lucky to be in a good climate endowed with many species of wild grass, on a continent oriented along the east-west axis, and with large wild mammals that were afraid of humans because they evolved alongside them. Diamond claims that Pizarro's victory could have been predicted even 13,000 years ago based on geography. Pick up this very popular book the next time your flight is delayed and see if you find this explanation of the roots of our civilization persuasive."-A.R.