California State University, Fresno
General Catalog
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Reading List



You are in the official 2001-2002 General Catalog
for California State University, Fresno.

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Reading List

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Read a Good Book

Our campus is committed to advancing excellence in liberal education and fostering the individual's bond to lifelong learning.

Good books make significant experiences. Page by page, they take us into their worlds and deliver to us experiences that we might not otherwise live, thoughts that we might not otherwise realize, environments that we might not otherwise visit. They are, as Jonathan Swift called them, the "children of the brain."

Reading is the vehicle that empowers the images of others' thoughts in our own. It is the wise person who learns from the experiences of others; even wiser is the person who does so by the magic of a good book.

Students and prospective students should read the books listed in the far left column. Faculty members often reference these books in courses taught on campus. We encourage members of the university community to read these books and to watch for and attend events sponsored in support of this program.

 

Reading List -- Compiled by Faculty and Staff

  1. Aronson, Elliot. The Social Animal
  2. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring
  3. Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield
  4. Franklin, John Hope. Three Negro Classics
  5. Fuentes, Carlos. The Old Gringo
  6. Krotkin, Joel and Yoriko Kishimoto. America's Resurgence in the Asian Era
  7. Piercy, Marge. Woman at the Edge of Time
  8. Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
  9. Riding, Alan. Distant Neighbor
  10. Thomas, Lewis. The Lives of a Cell
  11. Voltaire. Candide
  12. Womack, Jones and Roos. The Machine That Changed the World

Business

  • Getting to Yes by Fischer and Ury
  • Head-to-Head by Lester Thurow
  • Making a New Science by James Gleick
  • Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith
  • The Aladdin Factor by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen
  • The Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver
  • The Work of Nations, by Robert Reich
  • Triad Power by Kenichi Ohmae
  • Working with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

 

History, Politics, Biography

  • A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
  • Cadillac Desert by Mark Reisner
  • Churchill, a Life by Martin Gilbert
  • Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
  • Life of Pericles by Plutarch
  • Lincoln by David Donald
  • The Face of Battle by John Keegan
  • The Fall of Constantinople by Stephen Runciman
  • The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
  • The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw

 

Literature and Fine Arts

  • Antigone by Sophocles
  • Candide by Voltaire
  • David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
  • Emma by Jane Austen
  • King Lear by William Shakespeare
  • Middlemarch by George Eliot
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • Tartuffe by Moliere
  • The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  • The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill
  • The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
  • The Odyssey by Homer
  • The Physicist by Bertold Brecht
  • The Woman at Otowi Crossing by Frank Waters
  • Victory by Joseph Conrad

 

Science

  • An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks
  • Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal
  • Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett
  • Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science by Martin Gardner
  • Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
  • Phantoms in the Brain by V. S. Ramachandran
  • Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
  • The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
  • The Double Helix by James D Watson
  • The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
  • The Flying Circus of Physics by Jearl Walker
  • The Science Course You Wish You Had
  • The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

 

Social Science and Education

  • An Unquiet Mind by Kay R. Jamison
  • Educating for Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility
  • by Thomas Lickona
  • Beyond Culture by Edward Hall
  • Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
  • Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences by Howard Gardner
  • Greater Expectations by William Damon
  • Left Back by Diane Ravitch
  • Principles of Behavior Modification by Albert Bandura
  • Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol
  • Social Learning and Personality Development by Albert Bandura and R. Walters
  • The Battered Woman by Lenore Walker
  • The Force of Character and the Lasting Life by James Hillman
  • The Hurried Child by David Elkind
  • The Process of Education by Jerome Bruner
  • Violence in American Schools by Elliott, Hamburg and Williams
  • White Collar by C. Wright Mills
  • Politics, Crime Control & Culture by Stuart Scheingold
  • Culture and Commitment by Margaret Mead

 

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