Geraldine Brooks Delivers 2011 Boyer Lectures: “The Idea of Home”
Every year, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation airs a series of talks by a prominent Australian. Geraldine’s first lecture explores our duty to our only home, this planet. The second and third examine how Brooks’s ideas were shaped by the progressive ethos of her Australian childhood and her years abroad as a foreign correspondent. In the final lecture, she reflects on her ultimate home in literature as a writer of historical fiction.
First Wampanoag degree from Harvard College in over 300 years
Last May, Tiffany Smalley of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/Aquinnah became the first Martha’s Vineyard Wampanoag since Caleb to receive an undergraduate degree from Harvard College. In recent years, two other Vineyard Wampanoag, Tobias Vanderhoop and Carrie Anne Vanderhoop, have earned degrees from Harvard University’s graduate schools of government and education.
New York Times book review of Caleb’s Crossing
Jane Smiley reviews Caleb’s Crossing for the New York Times books review. The full review will appear on May 15th.
“…The triumph of Caleb’s Crossing is that Bethia succeeds as a convincing woman of her time, and also in communicating across centuries of change in circumstance, custom and language. She tells a story that is suspenseful and involving. It is also a story that is tragically recognizable and deeply sad….
…Caleb’s Crossing could not be more enlightening and involving. Beautifully written from beginning to end, it reconfirms Geraldine Brooks’s reputation as one of our most supple and insightful novelists…”
Interview in The Australian
Below is a short excerpt from Geraldine’s interview. You can read the full article here.
When Brooks, who had been living in Virginia, moved to Martha’s Vineyard in 2006, she started reading about the island’s history. She learned that the first Native American graduate of Harvard University, across the Nantucket Sound in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a local: Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, class of 65.
“My mind jumped to what I knew, the civil rights era, the 1960s, and I wondered if I would bump into this Caleb at the local market,” she says. She missed him by three centuries: Caleb graduated in 1665, just three decades after Harvard was established, when Cambridge was, as Brooks puts it in the novel, “an unlovely town” where “the air reeks” and the ground was covered in “steaming piles of clutter and muck”. The settlers may have been Puritans, but they weren’t clean.”
Caleb’s Crossing review in Bookseller & Publisher
Portia Lindsay reviews Caleb’s Crossing.
Read More»In 1665 a young man from Martha’s Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. This fragment of history is the basis for the latest novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks.
Geraldine’s tour dates published
The dates for the Caleb’s Crossing book tour have been posted up on the website. Visit the events page or to add the appearances RSS feed to your readers click here.
Geraldine to edit The Best American Short Stories
This year’s collection is to be edited by Geraldine Brooks. With Brooks picking the best of the best, America’s oldest and best-selling story anthology is sure to satisfy this year.
Caleb’s Crossing
Geraldine’s new novel, Caleb’s Crossing, was published by Viking in May 2011. It is available in hardcover, audio and ebook. You can find out more about the book here.
Catherine Zeta Jones and People of the Book
Catherine Zeta Jones has acquired film rights for People of the Book.
