Ramona Lumpkin, PhD Principal, Huron University College 2001 ...

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F A C U L T Y
‘Best Books’
A new and ongoing feature on books which Huron faculty and
staff have identified as important, informative and/or favourite
books in their lives.
Paul nesbitt-larking
If there is a single academic book that I return to again
and again, it is Anthony Giddens’s The Constitution of
Society. This detailed and finely-tuned book represents the
culmination of the theoretical life-work of a great social
scientist, and is foundational to much of what I try to do
in my own work. Throughout the book Giddens outlines
his Theory of Structuration, a necessarily incomplete but
masterful attempt to bring together the best of structuralism
with sociologies of human agency.
I love novels, particularly Victorian novels. My favourite is
George eliot’s Middlemarch. This is a novel that has always
held my close attention, from the first time I read it as an
undergraduate until the present. I admire the way that eliot
works up and down the scale from the closest intimacy to the
national political issues of the day on the public stage. As a
political psychologist, it has everything for me: struggles of
passion, intimacy and trust, the tension between duty and
fulfillment, the politics of institutions, petty greed and heroic
altruism, the crudeness of early democracy and the cruelties
of political life.
As a parent, I treasure special books that I have shared with
my children. Among my favourites is Kenneth Grahame’s The
Wind in the Willows. It works for me because it worked so
well for my children. They embraced its sense of warmth and
security balanced with just enough adventure and excitement
to be fun. I think the book works so well for kids because it
is close to their level, both literally - in the riverbank setting -
and metaphorically. And of course reading the book out loud
kept me in touch with my British background as I invested
each of the characters with a regional or class-based accent.
Dr. Paul Nesbitt-Larking, Department of Political Science,
Huron University College.
Theresa Hyland
Books are the stuff that my dreams are made of. I imagine
plays, I sing music but the scenes that lull me to sleep at night
are embedded in those pieces of prose that explore the rich
emotional and ethical complexities that are for me the true
jewels of life.