Doom, gloom and survival: Welcome to UC Berkeley

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Jun 6, 2007 | by William Brand

BERKELEY - The globe warms. Icepacks are melting. Terrorists abound. Suicide bombers strike. It's indeed a gloomy time on Earth. So how better to prepare the University of California, Berkeley's incoming frosh than a primer on well, bad things.

It's time again for the annual UC Berkeley Summer Reading List, the list is mailed to all new freshmen. It's not required reading, but the subject this year is Disaster! Books are selected by Berkeley faculty and staff members.

"As soon as we finish one list, we start thinking about next year," said Steve Tollefson, director of the Office of Educational Development, who founded the list a quarter-century ago with UC Berkeley associate librarian Elizabeth Dupuis. "One day Elizabeth said, 'How about survival?' "

Why not? They added the exclamation point deliberately, he said. "You don't go one day without hearing something about global warming on the news," Tollefson said. "There's also TV - 'Lost' and "Survivor.' But what we didn't want was a lot of knockoffs of Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth,'" he said.

"So they asked the Cal community for tales of survival.

And what a list it is. For example:

--- Kathleen R. Ryan, assistant professor of plant and microbial biology, went right to the heart of the matter, suggesting "Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster," by Mike Davis, 1998. "It's about how Los Angeles is situated and build in such a way as to maximize the social consequences of any natural disaster," she said. "Honestly, I don't like nonfiction much, but I loved this," she said.

--- Karen Munro, a UC Berleley librarian, suggested "The Parable of the Sower," by Octavia Butler, Written in 1993, Munro said she read it one hot summer in Iowa. "It's set in a frightening, falling- apart California of the future, a place where drught, pollution, drugs and violence have made life almost impossible outside of gated communities," she said.

The prophecy for California's environmental and social future is bleak and scarily accurate - if you read this alongside Mike davis's "City of Quartz," you may not sleep for a few nights," Munro said. "But at its root this is a hopeful book," she said. --- Other selections include , Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich's 1968 classic "The Population Bomb," suggested by physics professor Bob Jacobson and "A Canticle for Leibowitz," Walter M. Miller, Jr,., the 1960 post-apocalyptic novel, suggested by Steven Botterill, Professor of Italian.

Botterill adds a second selection: William Golding's 1955 epic, "Lord of the Flies," about the self-destruction of youthful survivors of a nuclear war.

--- "77 Dream Songs," by John Berryman, 1964, suggested by College Writing Programs Lecturer Kaya Oakes, who says, "I know claiming that a book by a suicidal, alcoholic poet has anything to with survival is dubious...This is an angry, bewildered, funny, tragic book by a man who managed to survive his own demons long enough to write some of the most fascinating and compelling poetry of the 20th century," she said.

Find the 2007 list and lists back as far as 1985 at http:// reading.berkeley.edu/ . This year there's a blog attached, so readers and anyone, for that matter, can add comments.

Contact Staff Writer William Brand at bbrand@oaklandtribune.com.