At some early age, I came up with a motto that pretty well characterizes my life. It states that "I live my life in defiance of dullness." Things have certainly worked out that way. For one example, when I was in the registrar's office in graduate admissions at the University of Colorado, he looked at my transcript from Dartmouth and told me that I'd just wasted four years of my life. The professor of geology who was to be my graduate adviser agreed, and said that I'd need to take math, physics, and chemistry and at the same time bring my gentleman's C+ grade average from Dartmouth (a result of too much guitar playing, too much rockclimbing, and too little studying) up to an honor grade level. I didn't think so, and so I took undergraduate Chinese instead. I got an A in every Chinese course I took there and got into Harvard with a full scholarship. I didn't like the department there, so I transferred back to geology, but had to quit after a year and a half because of a nervous collapse. I then became a professional skier in the winters and a park ranger in the summers. After a few years of that, I decided to go back to Harvard, but they told me I'd have to take the graduate record exams. I took them and got the highest score in the world (840) in geology. It took me a year to finish the master's degree, but I didn't go on to the PhD because I felt it would drive me into a narrow specialty. Nevertheless, the Harvard master's was enough to secure college teaching positions at two good universities. As I was leaving Harvard, the chairman of the Department of Applied Chemistry there wrote me a recommendation at my request. Among other nice things, it said, "In a place that's crowded with geniuses, David Laing stands above the crowd." One man's opinion, I suppose, but it made me happy and set the stage for further exploits, most of which, together with earlier ones, are recounted in this book.which I irreverently call "My Orterbyogriffy."

Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize “This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways...African American authors have written about animals. In Bennett’s analysis, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and others subvert the racist comparisons that have ‘been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration.’...An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post For much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself, prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark—in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity. Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene. “A gripping work...Bennett’s lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read.” —LSE Review of Books “These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed ethics.” —Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog “Tremendously illuminating...Refreshing and field-defining.” —Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery

An account of a Dartmouth student's experiences pledging Sigma Alpha Epsilon and how his promising college life soon became a dangerous cycle of binge drinking and public humiliation.

Seventy-one varied pieces on twentieth-century college life.

Provides an account of the murders of popular Dartmouth College professors Half and Susanne Zantop by two high school students in 2001 who committed the crime in an effort to get money to travel to Australia.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

Broken Man on a Halifax Pier is a tale of one man’s shipwrecked life and an unlikely crew of rescuers hoping to save not only him but also themselves.

This “irresistibly absorbing” true crime investigation uncovers the brutal murder of two Dartmouth professors by a pair of students in 2001 (Publishers Weekly). On a cold night in January 2001, the idyllic community of Dartmouth College was shattered by the discovery that Half and Susanne Zantop, two of its most beloved professors, had been hacked to death in their own home. Investigators searched helplessly for clues linking the victims to their murderers. Weeks later, in the nearby town of Chelsea, Vermont, they sought out a pair of high school seniors for questioning. Then Robert Tulloch and his best friend, Jim Parker, fled. Suddenly, two of Chelsea’s brightest and most popular sons had become fugitives, wanted for the murders of Half and Susanne Zantop. Authors Mitchell Zuckoff and Dick Lehr provide a vivid explication of a murder that captivated the nation, as well as dramatic revelations about the forces that turned two popular teenagers into killers. Judgement Ridge conveys the devastating loss of Half and Susanne Zantop, while also providing a clear portrait of the killers, their families, and their community—and, perhaps, a warning to any parent about what evil may lurk in the hearts of boys.

This spellbinding novel narrates the many-layered recollections of a hallucinating man in devastated Beirut. The desolate, almost surreal, urban landscape is enriched by the unfolding of the family sagas of Niqula Mitri and his beloved Shamsa, the Kurdish maid. Mitri reminisces about his Egyptian mother and his father who came back to settle in Beirut after a long stay in Egypt. Both Mitri and his father are textile merchants and see the world through the code of cloth, from the intimacy of linen, velvet, and silk to the most impersonal of synthetics. Shamsa in turn relates her story, the myriad adventures of her parents and grandparents who moved from Iraqi Kurdistan to Beirut. Haunting scenes of pastoral Kurds are juxtaposed against the sedentary decadence of metropolitan residents. Barakat weaves into her sophisticated narrative shreds of scientific discourse about herbal plants and textile crafts, customs and manners of Arabs, Armenians, and Kurds, mythological figures from ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, and Arabia, the theosophy of the African Dogons and the medieval Byzantines, and historical accounts of the Crusades in the Holy Land and the silk route to China.