Volume Two, Puzzle Me the Right Answer to That One, which will be published at the end of November, deals with European literature and the longer analytical essay, in a course offered to seniors. Students read Great Expectations, The Plague, Crime and Punishment, as well as Hamlet, Frankenstein, Mrs. Dalloway. They consider poets like Seamus Heaney (the title is from his poem “Casualty”), Wordsworth, Milosz, Eliot, Yeats. Plays, from Sophocles, Euripides, and modern playwrights like Michael Frayn also get considered. The course offers a reading of literature that focuses on the struggle for human rights and the concept of moral action.

Both volumes assert that high school students are quite capable of considering powerful intellectual and emotional matters from the literature they read. This book seeks to honor the noble humanity of young people, despite the many assaults on their dignity in our culture. 

PUZZLE ME ... TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR VOLUME TWO

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO THIS VOLUME AND FIRST CLASSES “This” by Czeslaw Milosz, “Women and Horses” by Maxine Kumin, poems by Seamus Heaney

CHAPTER 2 WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH THAT? “What Are You Going to Do with That?” by Mark Danner, and “If We Fail to Act” by Paul Farmer

CHAPTER 3 SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL IN ANCIENT GREECE The Bacchae by Euripides, translated by David Greig

CHAPTER 4 THE STRUGGLES OF A SURVIVOR Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

CHAPTER 5 HOW THEY DID POLITICS WAY BACK IN THE DAY Oedipus the King by Sophocles, translated by Robert Fagles

CHAPTER 6 HOW TO RESPOND TO EVIL Strength in What Remains, a Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness by Track Kidder

CHAPTER 7 AMERICAN SILENCE selections from The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperowitz

CHAPTER 8 WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE 20 CENTURY TH “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality” by Timothy Synder and “What Have We Learned, if Anything? By Tony Judt

CHAPTER 9 A VIGILANCE THAT MUST NEVER FALTER The Plague by Albert Camus

CHAPTER 10 GLIMPSES AT THE TRAGEDY THAT HAS LED TO A CURRENT REVOLUTION “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx, selections from Homosexuality and Civilization by Louis Crompton, and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

CHAPTER 11 SOME REMARKS ABOUT SENIOR ESSAYS

CHAPTER 12 TO RUSSIA, WITH LOVE AND POETRY “First Loves” by Michael Ignatieff and selected poems of Anna Akhmatova

CHAPTER 13 THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST WITH CULTURE Review of and selections from Radical Hope, Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, by Jonathan Lear

CHAPTER 14 AFTERWARDS, HOW DO YOU LIVE A LIFE? Beloved by Toni Morrison

CHAPTER 15 DO WE DARE? The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare

CHAPTER 16 HOW CAN THIS MURDERER BE UNDERSTOOD? Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

CHAPTER 17 A PORTRAIT OF A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN AND A MADMAN, IN LONDON, IN 1923 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

CHAPTER 18 NOW, WHO’S THE MONSTER HERE? FRANKENSTEIN, 1818 edition, by Mary Shelley

CHAPTER 19 AN ENGAGED INTELLECTUAL, CAUGHT BETWEEN TWO PEOPLES selections from Once Upon a Country A Palestinian Life by Sari Nusseibeh and a review of the book by Amos Elon

CHAPTER 20 THOUGHTS ON SENIORITIS AS AN ENVIRONMENTAL DISEASE AND THE GLORIES OF A HIATUS IN A YOUNG PERSON’S LIFE

CHAPTER 21 AMBIGUITY AND OUR DECISIONS IN HISTORY Copenhagen, a play by Michael Frayn

CHAPTER 22 OUR LANGUAGE’S FIRST STORY Beowulf a new verse translation with an introduction by Seamus Heaney

CHAPTER 23 FROM A BIT OF READING, A BIG IDEA Brief selections from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Samuel Putnam, and, indirectly, “The Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote” by Simon Leys

CHAPTER 24 LOVE AND VIOLENCE AMONG THE YOUNG Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

CHAPTER 25 SOME POETS AND POEMS “Tintern Abbey” by William Wordsworth, “Easter, 1916" and “Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats, “East Coker” by T.S. Eliot, poems by Wislawa Szymborska

CHAPTER 26 HOW TO DEAL WITH PUSHY PARENTS

CHAPTER 27 TEACHING AS BOTH A POSSIBLE AND IMPOSSIBLE JOB

CHAPTER 28 DEALING WITH TERRIBLE EVENTS

CHAPTER 29 CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT AND ITS ILLS

CHAPTER 30 TEACHERS, STUDENTS AND MENTAL ILLNESS

APPENDIX 1 ESSAY TOPICS

APPENDIX 2 SYLLABUS

APPENDIX 3 SOME WORKS PUT ASIDE