For over 25 years Jeff Aronson has led humanities programs in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts. His enthusiasm, humor, subject knowledge and ability to connect with participants have made him a popular choice for libraries, colleges and schools throughout New England.
The following is a selection of the themes and books of the series that Jeff has led in Maine [information courtesy of the Maine Humanities Council].
Across Cultures & Continents: Literature of the South Asian Experience
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Bricklane by Monica Ali
Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
The American Revolutionary Generation
Explore the fascinating people, events, and ideas behind the American Revolution
The American Revolution: A History by Gordon S. Wood
Benjamin Franklin by Edmund S. Morgan
The Minutemen and their World by Robert Gross
Women of the Republic by Linda Kerber
Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution by John Ferling
The American Sporting Experience
Uncommon Waters: Women Write About Fishing by Holly Morris
The Natural by Bernard Malamud
Laughing in the Hills by Bill Barich
My Old Man and the Sea: A Father and Son Sail Cape Horn by David Hays and Daniel Hays
Jesse Owen: An American Life by William Baker
A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe
Women on Hunting by Pam Houston
On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates
Friday Night Lights by H. G. Bissinger
In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle by Madeleine Blais
Winterdance by Gary Paulsen
Becoming American: Struggles, Successes, Symbols
The quest for ethnic identity.
Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
An Orphan in History by Paul Cowan
The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday
Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
The Civil War: Biographies
An in-depth, personal view of life during the Civil War era.
My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass
With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen Oates
Collected Black Women's Narratives ed. Anthony G. Barthelemy
Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate by Eli Evans
Portraits of American Women ed G.J. Barker-Benfield and Catherine Clinton
The Civil War: Fiction
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Civil Wars by Rosellen Brown
Consider the Source: Old Tales Retold — I
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Transformations by Anne Sexton
Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
Consider the Source: Old Tales Retold — II
Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston
Grendel by John Gardner
The Life and Loves of a She Devil by Faye Weldon
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
Crossing Over: Works by Contemporary American Indian Writers
Fools Crow by James Welch
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
Tracks by Louise Erdrich
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie, and the film Smoke Signals
The Sharpest Sight by Louis Owens
Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi'Kmaq Poet by Rita Joe, Lynn Henry
Defining Wilderness: Defining Maine
The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau.
The Wilderness from Chamberlain Farm: A Story of Hope for the American Wild by Dean Bennett
Fly Rod Crosby: the Woman Who Marketed Maine by A. Hunter and Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr.
Campfires Rekindled by George S. Kephart
We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich
Defining Wilderness: Defining Maine, Collected Readings
Detective Fiction in the 20th Century: A Notion of Evil
The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion (Paperback) by Friedrich Durrenmatt (Author), Joel Agee (Translator)
Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayres
The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker
"A" is for Alibi by Sue Grafton
Destruction or Redemption: Images of Romantic Love
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Morgan's Passing by Anne Tyler
A Mother and Two Daughters by Gail Godwin
Lolita by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Entering Nature: Contemporary Views of the Human Self in the Natural World
The Tree by John Fowles
Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
Ethnic Americans in Maine: Making a Life, Shaping an Identity
Tales of Gluskap the Trickster
Song of Rita Joe; Autobiography of a Mi’Kmaq Poet by Rita Joe and Lynn Henry
Turnip Pie by Rebecca Cummings
Papa Martel by Gerard Robichaud
The Clear Blue Lobster-Water Country (Book Three) by Leo Connellan
The Girl Who Would Be Russian by Willis Johnson
Maine Speaks: An Anthology of Maine Literature
Fear and Hope: Writing from the Great Depression of the 1930s
Since Yesterday: the Nineteen-Thirties in America by Frederick Lewis Allen
The Disinherited by Jack Conroy
Tender is the Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today?
The Devil and the White City by Erik Larson
The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells
Poland Spring: A Tale of the Gilded Age by David Richards
Going to Sea: A Variety of Voices
"The Seafarer" 10th-century poem
"Youth" by Joseph Conrad
Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
"Dauber" by John Masefield
The Log of the Skipper's Wife by James Balano
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Individual Rights and Community in America
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
The Republic by Plato
Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Journey Inward: Women's Autobiography
One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty
Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinor Pruitt Stewart
Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston
My Life by Isadora Duncan
Blackberry Winter by Margaret Mead
The Land of Norumbega: Maine in the Age of Exploration and Settlement
Maine in the Age of Discovery: Christopher Levett's Voyage, 1623-1624.
The Indian Peoples of Eastern America by James Axtell
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
The Land of Norumbega (exhibition catalog)
Landscapes of the Western Mind: Exploring the Frontier
Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
Dutchman's Flat by Louis L'Amour
Cogewea, the Half Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range by Mourning Dove
This House of Sky by Ivan Doig
Making a Difference: How Love And Duty Change Lives
Mountains Beyond Mountains : The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, the Man Who Would Cure the World by by Tracy Kidder
Plainsong by Kent Haruf
The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri
The Late George Apley by J.P. Marquand
Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
Lying Awake by Mark Salzman
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Making a Living, Making a Life:Work and Its Rewards in a Changing America
Growing Up by Russell Baker
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
The Professor's House by Willa Cather
Working by Studs Terkel
Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy
The Mirror of Maine: The Maine Community in Myth and Reality
A Maine Hamlet by Lura Beam
Wildfire Loose by Joyce Butler
Salem's Lot by Stephen King
Twelve Journeys in Maine by Wesley McNair
The Weir by Ruth Moore
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Maine Speaks: An Anthology of Maine Literature
Modern Times in Maine and America, 1890-1930
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
As the Earth Turns by Gladys Hasty Carroll
Not For Children Only
The Classic Fairy Tales by Iona and Peter Opie
Tatterhood by Ethel Johnston Phelps
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor
I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
Opening Windows: Women's Stories from Different Cultures
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Kehinde by Buchi Emecheta
The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat
The Passage of Time, The Meaning of Change: Perspectives by Five Writers From Maine
The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
Collected Lyrics by Edna St. Vincent Millay
One Man's Meat by E. B. White
As We Are Now by May Sarton
The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute
Refreshing the Whodunit: Moving Beyond Christie and Doyle
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie King
Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman
The Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison
A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow
Murder at the Nightwood Bar by Katherine V. Forrest
Inspector Morimoto and the Japanese Cranes: A Detective Story Set in Japan [alternate text, may be substituted for one of the above titles] by Timothy Hemion
Rebirth of a Nation: Nationalism and the Civil War
Two Roads to Sumter by William & Bruce Catton
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Ordeal by Fire, Volume II: The Civil War by James M. McPherson
Reconstruction: After the Civil War by John Hope Franklin
The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries edited by C. Vann Woodward
So Near & So Far: An Exploration of Cuban Literature
Biography of a Runaway Slave (Esteban Montejo) by Miguel Barnet
The Chase by Alejo Carpentier
In the Cold of the Malecon & Other Stories by Antonio Jose Ponte
Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia
Havana Red by Leonardo Padura Fuentes
Telling the Truth: The Subject of Autobiography
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy
The Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives by Carolyn Kay Steedman
In My Mother's House by Kim Chernin
Thoughtful Giving: Philanthropy as Civic Engagement
The Way We Were, The Way We Are: Seasons in the Contemporary American Family
This House of Sky by Ivan Doig
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansbury
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
"The Stone Boy" by Gina Berriault,
"A&P" by John Updike, and "The Five-Forty-Eight" by John Cheever in Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories ed. Moffett & McElheny
During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase
What America Reads: Myth Making in Popular Fiction
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Shane by Jack Schaefer
From Here to Eternity by James Jones
A Tan and Sandy Silence by John D. MacDonald
What Are Our Kids Reading These Days?
Two Old Women by Velma Wallis
Dogsong by Gary Paulsen
Holes by Louis Sachar
Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli
Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
Where Am I? The Individual & the Community
Choice I :
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
The Commitments by Roddy Doyle
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
Climbing the God Tree: A Novel in Stories by Jaimee Wriston Colbert
Choice II :
Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing edited by Bell Gale Chevigny
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Yankees and Strangers: the New England Town from 1636-1992
"Symbolic Landscapes: Some Idealizations of American Communities," by D.W. Meinig "Town Commons of New England, 1640-1840" by John D. Cushing "Another City Upon a Hill: Litchfield, Connecticut, and the Colonial Revival"
A New England Town: The First Hundred Years by Kenneth Lockridge
A New England Girlhood by Lucy Larcom
Amoskaeg: Life and Work In a New England Factory City by Tamara Hareven
"Happy Times in Mill City" by Ann Sullivan
Without a Farmhouse Near by Deborah Rawson
