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Peak Experience: Isserman Book in Pulitzer Race

When it comes to books on Himalayan mountaineering, Maurice Isserman isn't the first one to the summit. Most notably, Jon Krakauer's 1997 Into Thin Air made the best-seller lists, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won Time magazine's Book of the Year honors. But Krakauer's was a first-person account with the narrative pace of a thriller as it re-created a Mount Everest expedition-turned-disaster. Isserman and co-author Stewart Weaver have in many ways gone higher — and deeper — in Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes (Yale University Press, 2008). Isserman, the James L. Ferguson Professor of History, and Weaver, a professor of history at the University of Rochester, bring a disciplinary perspective and rigor to the topic that earlier books lacked. But the authors — both mountaineers and hikers themselves — also manage to capture the visceral excitement that accompanies a dizzying climb to the top of the world.

NSF Grant Aids Janack in Objectivity Study

Conventional wisdom tells us that our experience of the world is selective — that we only "see" what we have been taught to see. Is this true? And how does that relate to the way we experience the world? These are the issues Marianne Janack, the Sidney Wertimer Associate Professor of Philosophy, plans to examine while working on her project The Educability of Experience: Value, Theory and the Problem of ­Objectivity, funded with a $93,348 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Other Recent Grants

Natalia Connolly, assistant professor of physics, was awarded a $68,655 grant from the National Science Foundation for her project RUI: Developing New Computational Tools for the Study of Dark Energy.


Myriam Cotton, associate professor of chemistry, was awarded a $525, 000 grant from the National Science Foundation for her project CAREER: Molecular Recognition and Biological Function at Water-Bilayer Interfaces: Bridging Structure, Dynamics and Function in Antimicrobial Peptides.


Scott MacDonald, visiting professor of comparative literature, received a $4,000 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts for support of his program F.I.L.M: Forum for Image and Language in Motion.

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