Read. Watch. Listen. introduces you to the personal side of our faculty, staff and alumni. Participants are asked to answer three simple questions about their reading, viewing and listening habits – what one book or newspaper/magazine article is grabbing your attention; what one movie or television show has caught your eye; and what album/song, podcast or radio show are you lending an ear to.
Geoff Read is Provost and Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, at Huron University College.
Today, he takes a turn on Read. Watch. Listen.
* * *
Read.
I’ll suggest a non-fiction book, William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857. It’s a wonderful example of a book that combines scholarly rigour with compelling narrative and writing. Dalrymple has a great gift for setting the historical context and making the vicious events of the Great Mutiny or First War for Indian Independence (depending on your perspective) come alive.
Watch.
Saloon Media’s documentary Cheating Hitler: Surviving the Holocaust is very powerful. It focuses on the stories of three individuals who survived the Holocaust as children and it seeks to answer questions they still have about what happened to their friends and relatives. The results are spectacular, revealing, surprising, and deeply moving. As a bonus the film is being shown at the London Jewish Community Centre on March 5.
Listen.
If you haven’t listened to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. – preferably on vinyl – you need to. It’s a wonderfully organic and textured album that audiophiles are bound to love.
* * *
If you have a suggestion for someone you would like to see in Read. Watch. Listen., or would like to participate yourself, drop a line to inside.western@uwo.ca.