UC Berkeley reading list full of doom and gloom

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Jun 12, 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 freshman than a primer on well, bad things?

It's time again for the annual UC Berkeley Summer Reading List, mailed annually to all incoming 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 built 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."

-Karen Munro, a UC Berkeley 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 drought, 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' 'City of Quartz,' you may not sleep for a few nights," Munro said. "But at its root this is a hopeful book."

-Physics professor Bob Jacobson suggested Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich's 1968 classic "The Population Bomb."

-"A Canticle for Leibowitz," by Walter M. Miller Jr., the 1960 post-apocalyptic novel, was suggested by Steven Botterill, professor of Italian.

Botterill adds a second selection: William Golding's 1954 epic, "Lord of the Flies," about the self-destruction of youthful survivors of a plane crash.

- "77 Dream Songs," by John Berryman, was suggested by College Writing Programs lecturer Kaya Oakes, who says, "I know claiming 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."

Find the 2007 list and lists going 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.