MacArthur Fellows 2008: Two Writers, and Many More Books

In the middle of book awards season (with the Booker, Nobel, and National Book Award all hitting in the next month or so), come the phone calls from the MacArthur Foundation, which lead to their recepients being called "geniuses" and cashing quarterly $25,000 checks for the next five years. They aren't book awards, but a few writers are always pulled into their golden net. This year two "writers" got the call:

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the young Nigerian novelist who now lives in Maryland, author of Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus.
• Alex Ross, New Yorker classical music critic and author of last year's big and acclaimed (by me among others) history of 20th-century art music, The Rest Is Noise. You can listen to our interview with him, and stop by his blog (which makes no mention of the award yet).

But that doesn't mean the other winners haven't written books (or had books written about them). Here's what I found from this year's 25:

• Will Allen, described by the MacArthurites as an "urban farmer": He published The War on Bugs last year, which "reveals how advertisers, editors, scientists, large scale farmers, government agencies, and even Dr. Seuss, colluded to convince farmers to use deadly chemicals, hormones, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in an effort to pad their wallets and control the American farm enterprise."
• Tara Donovan, sculptor: Tara Donovan, the catalogue from her first full-career exhibition, was released last week, including a conversation between Donovan and Lawrence Weschler, which to me is an even better badge of honor than the MacArthur nod. See some of her sculptures here.
• Andrea Ghez, astrophysicist: She has written You Can Be a Woman Astronomer, a book for elementary-grade readers about her career.
• Stephen Houston, anthropologist-epigrapher: His scholarly books on the Maya include The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience Among the Classic Maya and The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process.
• David Montgomery, geomorphologist: He's written two general-interest books on his work (both of which look pretty fascinating to me), Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, which argues that "soil is humanity's most essential resource" (and which led one customer reviewer, a friend of his, to mention that Dave is also "an entertaining pop-folk guitar[ist], who leads with guitar and vocals the local band 'Big Dirt.'"), and King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon.
• Peter Pronovost, critical care physician: I can't find a book by or about him, but you might remember him from Atul Gawande's profile of him in The New Yorker last December.
• Nancy Siraisi, historian of medicine: Among her books are History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning and Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine.

And you can also listen to two of the winners:

• Leila Josefowicz, violinist: I have no idea which ones to recommend, but the MacArthurs mentioned her recent Shostakovich recording in particular.
• Miguel Zenon, saxophonist: Awake (you can watch a behind-the-scenes video there), Jibaro, Ceremonial, and Looking Forward.

--Tom

Comments

[Robbins Mitchell on September 25, 2008 at 12:35 PM]

Well, see that yet again they have overlooked me...if I wasn't so scathingly brilliant,I would be offended

[Robbins Mitchell on September 25, 2008 at 12:36 PM]

Well, see that yet again they have overlooked me...if I wasn't so scathingly brilliant,I would be offended

[Robbins Mitchell on September 25, 2008 at 12:36 PM]

Well, see that yet again they have overlooked me...if I wasn't so scathingly brilliant,I would be offended

[Robbins Mitchell on September 25, 2008 at 12:36 PM]

Well, see that yet again they have overlooked me...if I wasn't so scathingly brilliant,I would be offended

[Robbins Mitchell on September 25, 2008 at 12:36 PM]

Well, see that yet again they have overlooked me...if I wasn't so scathingly brilliant,I would be offended

[Robbins Mitchell on September 25, 2008 at 12:36 PM]

Well, see that yet again they have overlooked me...if I wasn't so scathingly brilliant,I would be offended

[Robbins Mitchell on September 25, 2008 at 12:36 PM]

Well, see that yet again they have overlooked me...if I wasn't so scathingly brilliant,I would be offended

[almiller on September 25, 2008 at 12:40 PM]

You can get a genius grant for playing the S. violin concerto? No composer did a better job of conveying the smell of the cesspit that Shosty.

[Mooky on September 25, 2008 at 01:04 PM]

Why would we give grants to people without a valuable skill? Really who reads "literature"? Who's listening to violin concertos? Who gives a crap about that stuff? Give the money to a mathematic or science whiz...

[tim maguire on September 25, 2008 at 01:06 PM]

Well, Robbins, if impatiently hitting the post button were a genius qualification, you'd have my vote.

[Mister Snitch on September 25, 2008 at 01:22 PM]

Indeed Robbins, one would think your admirable persistence alone would have garnered you the honor.

[Robbins Mitchell on September 25, 2008 at 03:24 PM]

Heh....well,I may be a genius,but my computer is a blithering idiot

[AST on September 25, 2008 at 03:47 PM]

I liked the guy who thinks we're too hard on bugs and the one who says that "soil is humanity's most essential resource." If we're ever going to roll back the Industrial Revolution we've got to get back to the soil and the bugs.

I note that they left PETA off the list again, despite its having just called for Ben and Jerry's to produce ice cream from human breast milk and save the cows from slavery.

Next year, a scientist who argues that antibiotics are destroying the earth!

[MTR on September 25, 2008 at 04:53 PM]

Wow, so this is what qualifies as a "genius" nowadays? What exactly have these people done... aside from being popular to the NPR crowd? Oh never mind, guess that is enough these days.