Photo courtesy of Dr. Heitzmann’s family. Featured in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Professor, coach, academic adviser, and all-around Wildcats booster,” Dr. Ray Heitzmann, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Education and Counseling at Villanova, passed away on July 11, 2020. Author of more than 50 books, Dr. Heitzmann was a faculty member at Villanova University for 40 years. Celebrating Dr. Heitzmann’s life and legacy, the Villanova community is invited to a memorial mass on Friday, Oct. 22 at 12:05 p.m. in St. Thomas of Villanova Church. A reception will follow in the East Lounge of Dougherty Hall.

Dr. Heitzmann‘s obituary can be found here.

Explore some of Dr. Heitzmann’s works at Falvey Memorial Library: 

• Educational Games and Simulation (1983)
• Opportunities in Sports and Fitness Careers (2003)
• Opportunities in Sports and Athletics (1985)
• Careers for Sports Nuts & Other Athletic Types (1997)
• Student Teaching, Classroom Management, and Professionalism (1974)
• Opportunities in Sports Medicine Careers (1992)
• Opportunities in Marine and Maritime Careers (1988)
• “Case Study Instruction in Teacher Education: Opportunity to Develop Students’ Critical Thinking, School Smarts and Decision Making” (2008)
• “Writing for Publication in Social Studies Education” (2008)
• “10 Suggestions for Enhancing Lecturing” (2010)
• “Instructional Strategies Recommended in Social Studies Methods Textbooks: A Historical Perspective” (2013)
• “Target HOMEWORK to Maximize Learning” (2007)
• “Ten Commandments for Enhancing Lecturing in History” (2009)

Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Memorial Library.

Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov, at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1944.

By Shawn Proctor

This month marks the centenary of the birth* of one science fiction’s founding figures, Isaac Asimov.**

His prose and letters not only set the direction for the genre’s fiction, but Asimov’s mind also popularized scientific concepts that have become central to science fiction across all media, including how we think of robotics, physics, and astronomy. If you’re a Simpsons fan, for example, the robot Killhammad Aieee in season 15 operated by Asimov’s laws of robotics. If you’re a cinephile, alas, you might agree that most of his adaptations (see: I, Robot with Will Smith) have been shades of so-so mixed with a dash of meh.

Still, Asimov’s literary shadow looms over so much that it’s understandable if his oeuvre seems intimidating. Asimov, who was a Professor of Biochemistry at Boston University, wrote or edited an estimated 500 books, in addition to hundreds of short stories. (A search of Falvey’s catalog yields over 100 novels and books of criticism, and almost 18,000 articles and essays!)

Required Reading: Where to begin?

For the deepest of dives into the most essential Asimov, tackle the first three books in the “Foundation Series,” which won a Hugo Award. They were written by young Asimov and offer a solid look at his intellectual acumen and workmanlike prose, which was common to early genre writers.

Up next? If this leaves you wanting stronger prose, check out Ray Bradbury. If you’re more interested in the science side of SF, then continue reading the “Foundation” books, jump to Asimov’s Robot series (I, Robot) or pick up Arthur C. Clarke (2001.)

Perhaps you aspire to snack on a mere Asimov appetizer, just to get the flavor. Then grab his short story “Nightfall.” Not to be confused with the longer adaptations of the same name, including a novel and novella, which offers the main idea stretched very thin, “Nightfall” is a short, potent exploration of the wonder/terror of glimpsing the unknown. It is dramatized in “Nightfall” by a planet of people that has yet to experience darkness finally seeing the cosmos beyond their world.

Extra Credit: Book a Space

For your own glimpse of space’s wonder, schedule a visit to Villanova’s public observatory on the top floor of Mendel Hall.  It is currently open Monday through Thursday, 7-9 p.m., when classes are in session.

*Note: Asimov’s actual birth date is unknown. It was sometime between October 1919 and January 1920, according to his own recollection in In Memory Yet Green.

**Note 2: In the past several years, and especially during this milestone year, many in the writing community are reexamining Asimov’s behavior toward female fans and writers. His legacy as an author is secure, but Asimov the man was well known for unwanted touching and kissing.

In short, he was a problematic person and did much to make Science Fiction and Fantasy a hostile space for women, a legacy that lingers even today. Read JSTOR’s account here.

 

Shawn Proctor is Communication & Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library.

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, a new biographical film about the Nobel Prize-winning author premiers in select theaters Friday, June 21. Whether you’re familiar with Morrison’s narratives, looking to re-experience her storytelling before the film, or new to the author’s work, Falvey Memorial Library has a number of Morrison’s novels for you to explore:

• • The Bluest Eye (1972) The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlover—a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others–who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different.
  • Sula (1973) Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies.
    
  • Song of Solomon (1977) With this brilliantly imagined novel, Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars, and assassins…inhabitants of a fully realized black world.
  • Tar Baby (1981) The place is a Caribbean island. In their mansion overlooking the sea, the cultivated millionaire Valerian Street, now retired, and his pretty, younger wife, Margaret, go through rituals of living, as if in a trance.
  • Beloved (1987) Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is considered to be Toni Morrison’s greatest novel and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade.
  • Jazz (1992) This passionate, profound story of love and obsession moves back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life.
  • Paradise (1997) In prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem, Morrison challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present. 
  • Love (2003) A Faulknerian symphony of passion and hatred, power and perversity, color and class that spans three generations of black women in a fading beach town.
  • A Mercy (2008) Reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter—a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
  • Home (2012) The story of a Korean war veteran on a quest to save his younger sister. Frank Money is an angry, broken veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. He is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from that he’s hated all his life.
  • God Help the Child (2015) A tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult. At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love.

Kallie Stahl, MA ’17 CLAS, is communication and marketing specialist at Falvey Memorial Library. Her favorite Toni Morrison novel is The Bluest Eye.