Summer Reading 2022: Upper School

"The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled" -- so opens John Berger's revolutionary million-copy bestseller on how to look at art. John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures." By now he has.

Peter Jahrling, the top scientist at Usamriid, a wry virologist who cut his teeth on Ebola, one of the world’s most lethal emerging viruses, has ORCON security clearance that gives him access to top secret information on bioweapons. His most urgent priority is to develop a drug that will take on smallpox-and win. Eradicated from the planet in 1979 in one of the great triumphs of modern science, the smallpox virus now resides, officially, in only two high-security freezers-at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and in Siberia, at a Russian virology institute called Vector. But the demon in the freezer has been set loose. It is almost certain that illegal stocks are in the possession of hostile states, including Iraq and North Korea. Jahrling is haunted by the thought that biologists in secret labs are using genetic engineering to create a new superpox virus, a smallpox resistant to all vaccines. Usamriid went into a state of Delta Alert on September 11 and activated its emergency response teams when the first anthrax letters were opened in New York and Washington, D.C. Preston takes us into the lab where Jahrling is reawakening smallpox and explains, with cool and devastating precision, what may be at stake if his last bold experiment fails.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family--past and present--is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

A powerful and poignant translation of Vergil's epic poem, newly equipped with introduction and notes "Ruden set the bar for Aeneid translations in 2008, and has raised it now with this revision. I am confident it will be a long time before a translator exceeds the standard that she has set."--A.M. Juster, Athenaeum Review This is a substantial revision of Sarah Ruden's celebrated 2008 translation of Vergil's Aeneid, which was acclaimed by Garry Wills as "the first translation since Dryden's that can be read as a great English poem in itself." Ruden's line-for-line translation in iambic pentameter is an astonishing feat, unique among modern translations. Her revisions to the translation render the poetry more spare and muscular than her previous version and capture even more closely the essence of Vergil's poem, which pits national destiny against the fates of individuals, and which resonates deeply in our own time.   This distinguished translation, now equipped with introduction, notes, and glossary by leading Vergil scholar Susanna Braund, allows modern readers to experience for themselves the timeless power of Vergil's masterpiece.   Praise for the First Edition:   "Fast, clean, and clear, sometimes terribly clever, and often strikingly beautiful. . . . Many human achievements deserve our praise, and this excellent translation is certainly one of them."--Richard Garner, The New Criterion   "Toning down the magniloquence, Sarah Ruden gives us an Aeneid more intimate in tone and soberer in measure than we are used to--a gift for which many will be grateful."--J. M. Coetzee   "An intimate rendering of great emotional force and purity. . . . The immediacy, beauty, and timelessness of the original Latin masterpiece lift off these pages with gem-like originality."--Choice  

La casa de Bernarda Alba constituye un exponente más de la capacidad de Federico García Lorca para aunar la tradición y la vanguardia por medio de un teatro simbólico de índole muy personal que le sitúa entre los valores más destacados del canon internacional. El autor granadino continúa en el camino de la experimentación con temas, personajes y géneros de la tradición teatral, a los que presenta desde inusitadas perspectivas y filtra por el tamiz de unas modernas técnicas expresivas deudoras de las más renovadoras vanguardias del momento, junto con una profundización en las posibilidades connotativas de los símbolos.

Umami es el debut literario de Laia Jufresa y Publishers Weekly ya lo considera uno de los hot books del 2015. Ana quiere plantar una milpa en su traspatio, en pleno Distrito Federal. Pero en la tierra hay altos contenidos de plomo y la casa donde vive está plagada de ausencias. Su hermana murió, sus papás están de luto y sus hermanos de campamento; su única amiga se fue a buscar a quien la abandonó cuatro años atrás. Menos mal que queda Alfonso. Alfonso es un antropólogo especializado en alimentación prehispánica. Es viudo y dueño de la pequeña urbanización Campanario. Él mismo la diseñó a partir de un esquema de la lengua humana y dio a las casas el nombre de cada uno de los cinco sabores que percibimos: Dulce, Salado, Amargo, Ácido y Umami. En duelo, los habitantes de la comunidad desearían echar el tiempo atrás. Tejida al revés, esta novela se lo permite. Mientras Ana remueve la tierra y clava las semillas, sus vecinos hurgan en el pasado. Pero el traspatio de la memoria está minado con preguntas: ¿quién fue mi mujer? ¿Por qué se fue mi mamá? Y, ¿cómo es posible que se ahogara una niña que sabía nadar? ENGLISH DESCRIPTION Shortlisted for the Best Translated Fiction Book Award, 2017 "Ms. Jufresa: Where the f*#! did you learn to tell a story so well?" --Álvaro Enrigue, award-winning author of Sudden Death As heard on NPR's Weekend Edition with Scott Simon It started with a drowning. Deep in the heart of Mexico City, where five houses cluster around a sun-drenched courtyard, lives Ana, a precocious twelve-year-old who spends her days buried in Agatha Christie novels to forget the mysterious death of her little sister years earlier. Over the summer she decides to plant a milpa in her backyard, and as she digs the ground and plants her seeds, her neighbors in turn delve into their past. The ripple effects of grief, childlessness, illness and displacement saturate their stories, secrets seep out and questions emerge -- Who was my wife? Why did my Mom leave? Can I turn back the clock? And how could a girl who knew how to swim drown? In prose that is dazzlingly inventive, funny and tender, Laia Jufresa immerses us in the troubled lives of her narrators, deftly unpicking their stories to offer a darkly comic portrait of contemporary Mexico, as whimsical as it is heart-wrenching.