One Day University I‘m totally and utterly predictable... Every time I hear from a former student in college, my response is always the same: " I wish that I were in college." Now there's a solution to my situation. A fellow Tufts alum, Steven Schragis, got the idea for One Day University about four years ago when he was visiting his daughter, a freshman at Bard. There were about 700 parents there, Steve said, and they all had the same response that I have. One Day University is a Saturday or Sunday when four popular professors from top universities each present a 70 minute lecture. Registration includes a boxed lunch, coffee and cookies; there's no homework, no tests, and no admission essays. Read more... | Comments (0)

Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir by Wendy Burden Opening lines of books we want to read: It's a testament to his libido, if not his character, that Cornelius Vanderbilt died of syphilis instead of apoplexy. In 1794, a few miles from where his powdered bones eternally lie, within the eight-foot-thick walls of the largest tomb ever built in America, the origin of my family's fortune was born into what would prove to be a very material world. As the sixth of nine children, Cornelius was expected to pull his weight. At eleven he had dropped out of school, and at sixteen he was piloting his own small ferryboat. At nineteen he married his cousin Sophia Jackson (an act of consanguinity that arguably heralded the start of our genetic troubles) and set about fathering the first of thirteen children. By twenty-one the Vanderbilt name was on several schooners, and by thirty-five Cornelius has earned the sobriquet of commodore and controlled a network of steamboat routes that traveled up and down the East Coast. At seventy he had the wherewithal to switch from steamships to railroads. And at seventy-five he eloped to Canada to marry a thirty-one-year old woman named Frank.--Selected by Marilyn Dahl, Shelf Awareness Read more... | Comments (0)

PEN/Faulkner Award for War Dances Sherman Alexie's War Dances (Grove Press) won the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Al Young, who served on the panel of judges with Rilla Askew and Kyoko Mori, said, "War Dances taps every vein and nerve, every tissue, every issue that quickens the current blood-pulse: parenthood, divorce, broken links, sex, gender and racial conflict, substance abuse, medical neglect, 9/11, Official Narrative vs. What Really Happened, settler religion vs. native spirituality; marketing, shopping, and war, war, war. All the heartbreaking ways we don't live now--this is the caring, eye-opening beauty of this rollicking, bittersweet gem of a book." Read more... | Comments (0)

National Books Critics Circle Awards Announced! The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards were presented Thursday evening: And the winners are... Read more... | Comments (0)