Jan - Feb 2001 Issue

 

  We asked Jerry Eidenier at Duke's Gothic Bookshop to compile last semester's listing of best- selling books. Here's the top ten, combining fiction and nonfiction, in order of sales:

The roots of the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory, the Duke-based facility that trained Los Alamos Nuclear Lab director John Browne Ph.D. '69, can be traced back to the first controlled nuclear chain reaction, which took place at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field.

On a rainy September Tuesday, in the atrium of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the air tingles with celebrity as movie stars, aristocrats, and Nobel Peace Prize laureates take to an understated stage for a press conference. They have come together to mark the publication of a book, Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World.

She called him "Wolffie." And he called her "Hillary." But the road Howard Wolfson A.M. '91 traveled to such intimacies with the First Lady of the United States, as communications director for her New York U.S. Senate campaign, was pitted with potholes from the start.

In his fast-forward-to-the-future book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil estimates that in a century's time, an average citizen's net worth will be $149 billion. That financial projection promises quite an altered reality-endless money-making potential in an information-hungry world where human-machine interfaces make us all (humans and machines) smarter.

 

My two great loves are physics and desert country," J. Robert Oppenheimer once told a friend. "It's a pity they can't be combined."

 

   

     

 Baugh: Duke's thirtieth winner of the coveted award.

  

 In December, Duke's board of trustees approved construction of a $26-million expansion of the Fuqua School of Business Keller Center, an $18-million football building, and a $3.5-million renovation of the Biological Sciences Building.

 

 The Edwin A. Morris Charitable Foundation of Durham and Greensboro has made its largest single gift ever, a million-dollar commitment to the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center. The gift will combine with an additional $1 million from the Morris Endowment to establish the Morris Center for Urologic Research.

  The 1979 announcement that Duke's English department needed a "fiction writer/Shakespearean" might as well have had my two noms de plume on it. I'd published a novel, Eelgrass, as Joe Ashby Porter, and a scholarly study, The Drama of Speech Acts: Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy, as Joseph A. Porter.