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CLSC Book
Club
(Chautauqua
Literary & Scientific Circle)
"Education, once the
peculiar privilege of the few, must in our best earthly estate
become the valued possession of the many." These are the words of Bishop John
Heyl Vincent, cofounder with Lewis Miller, of the Chautauqua
Institution. They are from the opening paragraphs of his book,
The Chautauqua Movement, and represent an ideal he had
for Chautauqua.
To further his Chautauqua
ideal and to disseminate it beyond the physical confines of the
Chautauqua Institution, Bishop Vincent conceived the idea of
the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC), and founded
it in 1878, four years after the founding of the Institution.
At its inception, the CLSC
was basically a four-year course of required reading. The original
aims of the CLSC were twofold:
- To promote habits of reading
and study in nature, art, science, and in secular and sacred
literature, and …
- To encourage individual
study, to open the college world to persons unable to attend
higher institutions of learning.
On August 10, 1878, Dr.
Vincent announced the organization of the CLSC to an enthusiastic
Chautauqua audience. Over 8,400 people enrolled the first year.
Of those original enrollees, 1,718 successfully completed the
reading course, the required examinations and received their
diplomas on the first CLSC Recognition Day in 1882.
Now the CLSC is the oldest
continuous book club in America and has remained a leader in
adult education through quality programming. Each season the
authors of the year's CLSC book selections address the weekly
CLSC Roundtable/Lectures in the Hall of Philosophy. The CLSC
has brought many Pulitzer Prize and National Book Club award
winners to Chautauqua.
2008 Book List
|
Week |
Title & Author |
|
1 |
Cor van den Heuvel
Baseball Haiku
Thursday, June 26 - 3:30 pm
 Haiku poet Cor van den Heuvel, co-editor of Baseball
Haiku will be joined by other contributing poets to the collection
for the Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle program.
As van den Heuvel writes in the introduction, “Haiku and
baseball were made for each other: While haiku give us moments
in which nature is linked to human nature, baseball is played
in the midst of the natural elements – on the field under
an open sky; and as haiku happen in a timeless now, so does baseball,
for there is no clock ticking in a baseball game – the game’s
not over until the last out.”
This remarkable collection, which includes
poems from both America and Japan, captures perfectly the thrill
of baseball – a double play, a game of catch, or the hushed
pause as a pitcher looks in before hurling his pitch. Featuring
the work of Jack Kerouac, who penned the first American baseball
haiku, and Alan Pizzarelli, a major American haiku poet, the
collection also includes Masaoka Shiki, one of the four great
pillars of Japanese haiku, who was instrumental in popularizing
baseball in Japan during the 1890s.
Cor van den Heuvel’s career in haiku
has spanned nearly 50 years. He is widely considered the architect
of the development of haiku in North America. He has talked about
haiku on “The Charlie Rose Show,” and written about
the form for The New York Times Book Review, and Newsweek.
A past president of the Haiku Society of America, van den Heuvel
was the United States representative to the International Haiku
Symposium in Matsuyama in 1990. He has written numerous chapbooks
of haiku, and is also the editor of The Haiku Anthology,
now in its third edition, which remains the most highly respected
collection of American and Canadian haiku and senryu. |
|
2 |
John Harwood
Pennsylvania Avenue: Profiles
in Backroom Power
Thursday, July 3 - 3:30 pm
 John
Harwood, Chief Washington Correspondent for CNBC television and
a political writer for The New York Times, will present
his new book Pennsylvania Avenue: Profiles in Backroom Power
for the Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle.
Pennsylvania Avenue, the 1.2-mile stretch
between the White House and the Capitol, is where the influential
and ambitious congregate. Through stories of party strategists,
money men, policy-makers, fixers, socialites, lobbyists, spinners,
deal-makers, and more, Harwood and co-author Gerald Seib explore
the great political transformations that have fundamentally altered
the relationship between Americans and their government.
Mr. Harwood joined the Wall Street Journal
in 1991 as a White House correspondent. He subsequently covered
Congress and national politics, and became National Political
Editor in 1997. In 2006 he joined CNBC and a year later began
writing for The New York Times. He offers political analysis
on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and PBS’s “Washington
Week in Review” among other programs. Previously, Mr. Harwood
worked for the St. Petersburg Times as state capital correspondent,
Washington correspondent and political editor.
During the 2007 season, Mr. Harwood delivered
a 10:45 a.m. lecture during the week, “The Media and News:
Applied Ethics.” |
|
3 |
Roger Rosenblatt
Beet
Thursday, July 10 - 3:30 pm
 Nine-time
Chautauqua lecturer and two-time CLSC author Roger Rosenblatt
will join each of his five fellow writers and friends on stage
in dialogue to discuss their work and the craft of writing. An
occasional reading or two may be thrown in for good measure.
Roger is a journalist, author, playwright
and teacher. William Safire of The New York Times wrote
that his work represents “some of the most profound and
stylish writing in America today.” His television essays
for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS have won
a Peabody and an Emmy award. His essays for TIME magazine
have won two George Polk Awards, awards from the American Bar
Association, the Overseas Press Club, and others.
Roger's journalism career began in 1975
as literary editor of The New Republic. He has also been
a columnist and editor-at-large for Life magazine, the
editor of U.S. News & World Report, a columnist and
editorial board member of The Washington Post and editor-at-large
of TIME, Inc. His work has appeared in The New York Times
Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, Esquire and elsewhere.
He is the author of ten books, including
a collection of his writings, The Man in the Water; Coming
Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969, and the national
bestseller, Rules for Aging. His book Children of War
(1983) won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize and was a finalist
for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent book,
Lapham Rising (2006), his first novel, was loosely based
on the lecture he delivered on major trends of the 20th century
at Chautauqua in 2004.
Roger is currently a Professor in the English
Department at Stony Brook University where he teaches in the
Writing Program at Stony Brook Southampton. He was most recently
the Edward R. Murrow Visiting Professor of the Practice of the
Press and Public Policy at Harvard University and held the Parsons
Family Chair at the Southampton Graduate Campus of Long Island
University. |
|
4 |
Michael Sandel
The Case Against Perfection
Thursday, July 17 - 3:30 pm
 One
of Chautauqua’s most popular lecturers, Michael Sandel has
been a longtime advisor to the Institution during weeks focused
on applied ethics. This morning lecture is an addition to Sandel’s
participation in the CLSC program at 3:30 p.m. when he will present
his most recent book, The Case Against Perfection: Ethics
in the Age of Genetic Engineering.
Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass
Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught
political philosophy since 1980. His books include Liberalism
and the Limits of Justice; Democracy's Discontent: America in
Search of a Public Philosophy; and Public Philosophy: Essays
on Morality in Politics. His writings also appear in The Atlantic
Monthly, The New Republic, and The New York Times.
Sandel teaches graduate and undergraduate
courses in contemporary political philosophy, including “Ethics
and Biotechnology,” “Markets, Morals, and Law,”
and “Globalization and Its Discontents.” His undergraduate
course, “Justice,” has enrolled over 12,000 students.
In 1985, he was awarded the Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa
Teaching Prize, and in 1999 was named a Harvard College Professor
in recognition of his contributions to undergraduate teaching.
The recipient of three honorary degrees,
he has received fellowships from the Carnegie Corporation, the
National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and
the American Council of Learned Societies. From 2002 to 2005,
he served on the President's Council on Bioethics, a national
body appointed by the President to examine the ethical implications
of new biomedical technologies. |
|
5 |
Robert Morgan
Boone: A Biography
Thursday, July 24 - 3:30 pm
 Robert Morgan will present his most recent and
critically acclaimed book, Boone: A Biography, for the
Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle program. Boone was
selected as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Literary Award
in the “biography” category and was a “top 10
selection” in “A critic’s favorite books in 2007”
by the Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley.
Mr. Morgan is a professor of English at
Cornell University where he began teaching in 1971. He teaches
introductory creative and narrative writing, poetry workshops,
undergraduate and graduate courses in 19th century American poetry,
Whitman and Dickinson, Frost, Eliot and Stevens, contemporary
British and American poetry, American Short Story, Emerson and
Poe.
He began his career as a poet before turning
to fiction writing in the 1980s. His first book of short stories,
The Blue Valleys, was published 1989. Three more books
of poetry, a volume of stories, and a collection of essays and
interviews on poetry followed. His novel The Truest Pleasure
was listed by Publisher's Weekly as one of the notable
books of 1995.
His novel Gap Creek became a selection
of the Oprah Book Club. It was selected for the Southern Book
Critics Circle Award for Fiction for 2000, and was chosen as
Notable Book by The New York Times. His more recent books
include Topsoil Road, a book of new poems (2000) and the
novel, This Rock (2001.)
A widely anthologized author, his story
“The Balm of Gilead Tree” was included in the 1997
O. Henry Awards anthology, and recent poems have appeared in
magazines such as Poetry, Paris Review, The Atlantic, American
Poetry Review, and Kenyon Review. Mr. Morgan has received three
grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim
fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. |
|
6 |
David Oliver Relin
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's
Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time
Thursday, July 31 - 3:30 pm
 For two decades, award-winning journalist David
Oliver Relin has focused on reporting about social issues and
their effect on children, both in the U.S. and around the world.
In his best-selling and award-winning book,
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ...
One School at a Time, Relin tells the stirring tale of Greg
Mortenson, an American mountain climber and nurse who becomes
an unlikely champion of education through the accidental relationship
he developed with a village in a remote region of the Karakoram
of Pakistan while on his way home from a failed attempt to summit
K2. |
|
7 |
Chris Hedges
Losing Moses on the Freeway:
The 10 Commandments in America
Thursday, August 7 - 3:30 pm
 Journalist Chris Hedges will present Losing
Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America (published
in 2005) for the Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle
program. Inspired by Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski and
his ten-part film series “The Decalogue” (a series
of 10 films, each based on one of the commandments), Hedges writes
about lives, including his own, which had been consumed by one
of the violations or issues raised by a commandment.
Mr. Hedges is currently a senior fellow
at The Nation Institute in New York City and the Anschutz Distinguished
Fellow at Princeton University. He spent nearly two decades as
a foreign correspondence in Central America, the Middle East,
Africa, and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty
countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor,
National Public Radio, and The New York Times, where he
spent fifteen years. He was part of the Times team that won the
2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism.
In the same year he received the Amnesty International Global
Award for Human Rights Journalism.
The son of a Presbyterian minister, Mr.
Hedges earned his undergraduate degree in English Literature
and a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School. He was
a Niemen Fellow at Harvard University (1998 – 1999) and
has written for numerous publications including The Nation,
Foreign Affairs, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books,
and Granta. |
|
8 |
Molly O'Neill
American Food Writing: An Anthology:
With Classic Recipes
Thursday, August 14 - 3:30 pm
 Celebrated food writer Molly O'Neill will present
her recently published book American Food Writing: An Anthology
with Classic Recipes for the Chautauqua Literary & Scientific
Circle program. As the book’s editor, Ms. O’Neill has
gathered the very best from over 250 years of American culinary
history. A surprising range of subjects and perspectives emerge,
as writers address such topics as fast food, hunger, dieting,
and the relationship between food and sex. James Villas offers
a behind-the-scenes look at gourmet dining through a waiter's
eyes; Anthony Bourdain recalls his days at the Culinary Institute
of America; Julia Child remembers the humble beginnings of her
much-loved television series; Nora Ephron chronicles internecine
warfare among members of the “food establishment;”
Michael Pollan explores what the label “organic” really
means.
Originally trained as a chef, Ms. O'Neill
was food columnist for The New York Times for a decade
and host of the PBS series “Great Food.” She is the
author of three cookbooks, including A Well-Seasoned Appetite;
The Pleasure of Your Company; and the New York Cookbook
which won both the Julia Child and James Bear Awards. Her most
recent book is Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and
Baseball. |
|
9 |
Diane Ackerman
The Zookeeper's Wife
Thursday, August 21 - 3:30 pm
 Diane
Ackerman will present her most recent book of narrative nonfiction,
The Zookeeper’s Wife, for the Chautauqua Literary
& Scientific Circle. Published to acclaim in September, The
Zookeeper's Wife is the true story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski,
keepers of the famous Warsaw Zoo who saved hundreds of people
from Nazi hands following Germany’s occupation of Poland.
Based on Antonina’s diary, the book re-imagines one of the
most successful hideouts of World War II, a tale of people, animals,
and subversive acts of compassion.
Ms. Ackerman has written nine books of
non-fiction including An Alchemy of Mind; A Slender
Thread, about her work as a crisis line counselor; The
Rarest of the Rare and The Moon by Whale Light, in
which she explores the plight and fascination of endangered animals;
A Natural History of Love; and the bestseller A Natural
History of the Senses.
Her poetry has been published in leading
literary journals and in many books including Origami Bridges:
Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire. She has also written three
nature books for children: Animal Sense; Monk Seal Hideaway;
and Bats: Shadows in the Night.
Ms. Ackerman has received many prizes and
awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Burroughs
Nature Award, and the Lavan Poetry Prize, as well as being honored
as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. She also has
the rare distinction of having a molecule named after her --dianeackerone.
She has taught at a variety of universities, including Columbia
and Cornell Universities, and she hosted a five-hour PBS television
series inspired by A Natural History of the Senses.
Donna Seaman recently wrote in the Los
Angeles Times, “It is no stretch to say that this is
the book Ackerman was meant to write. Ever since A Natural History
of the Senses, she has been building a galaxy of incandescent
works that celebrate the unity and wonder of the living world.
But every rapturous hour she has spent communing with plants
and animals, every insight gleaned into human nature, every moment
under the spell of language is a steppingstone that led her to
Poland, the home of her maternal grandparents, and to the incomparable
heroes Jan and Antonina Zabinski. The result of her tenacious
research, keen interpretation and her own “transmigration
of sensibility” is a shining book beyond category.” |
 Download
the entire CLSC Book List (1878-2007)
(292 KB)
CLSC Alumni
The Alumni Association
of the CLSC was incorporated in 1893 to provide an organization
that encourages CLSC graduates to continue reading and study.
It occupies the first and part of the second floors of Alumni
Hall and maintains the valuable banners and artifacts contained
in that building and in Pioneer Hall. Alumni Hall rooms can be
rented both for meetings and private gatherings.
The Alumni Association
serves to support the many CLSC activities and programs conducted
by the Alumni Association-including the Brown Bag luncheons/Book
Reviews and Eventide programs. It is also the parent organization
for the graduated classes. Many of these classes are active for
several decades or more.
The Guild of Seven Seals
is the graduate degree of CLSC. There are four levels of reading
accomplishment within the Guild that are recognized by the awarding
of additional seals. The "Guild" operates under the
umbrella of the Alumni Association, and actively searches out
new books to recommend as CLSC selections.
The current Alumni Association
President is Dick Karslake. He is supported by six Vice Presidents:
Education, Building and Grounds, Membership, Activities, History
and Traditions, and Operations. There are also two Secretaries
and a Treasurer and many opportunities for volunteers on the
numerous committees.
Membership is available
to all CLSC graduates on either an Annual or Life Membership
basis. For more information on any of the above, please call
the desk at Alumni Hall during the Season at 716-357-9312. From
September to June you can write to:
CLSC Alumni Association
Box 1034
Chautauqua, NY 14722
Young Readers Program
The CLSC Young Readers
Program encourages the enjoyment of good reading. The books have
been chosen for their quality, the variety of styles and subjects,
and their appeal to young adult readers. A special program is
offered each Wednesday at 4:15 p.m. Book selections and program
information are fully described in the Young Readers brochure
available at the CLSC Veranda.
2008 Book List
|
1 |
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick |
|
2 |
Robert H. Jackson by Gail Jarrow |
|
3 |
Good Masters, Sweet Ladies by Laura Amy Schlitz |
|
4 |
Everything in a Waffle by Polly Horvath |
|
5 |
The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate Dicamillo |
|
6 |
Babe Didrikson Zaharias: The Making
of a Champion by Russell Freedman |
|
7 |
Horns and Wrinkles by Joseph Helgerson |
|
8 |
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White |
|
9 |
Whittington
by Alan Armstrong |
CLSC
Young Readers Past Selections (1994-2007) (87 KB)
Membership
Applicants pay modest membership dues and may purchase CLSC selections
at substantial savings when they register. Click here to
download the 2007 CLSC Membership Application and Order Form.
In order to graduate from
the CLSC, candidates must have paid four years of membership
dues (the years need not be consecutive), must have read and
reported any 12 titles from the CLSC historic booklist, must
have paid the initial year of class dues and, finally, must have
completed an application form for graduation.
Contact CLSC
The Director of the CLSC is Jeffrey Miller and the Veranda Manager
is Peg Snyder. For information during the season,
call the CLSC Veranda at 716.357.6293. From September to June,
write to:
Chautauqua Institution
Attn: Education Office/CLSC
PO Box 28
Chautauqua, NY 14722
or call the Office of Education
at 716.357.6255. |
