college teachers

Manuel, a forty something history professor in Spain, seduces Luc?a, a seventeen-year-old Latin American-born orphan attending a Catholic boarding school in Madrid, as he tells her the story of Juana of Castile, a queen who, after the death of her husband, was imprisoned by his family for allegedly being mentally unstable.

Von Igelfeld is quite pleased with his role as a visiting scholar at Cambridge, even if his English colleagues can be difficult to comprehend. They frequently speak in metaphors and make peculiar assumptions, saying such odd things as "I take it your journey went well," when that is not the case at all. But von Igelfeld settles in the best he can, and is soon deeply embroiled in some shady political scheming at the university. After returning to the comfort of his perfectly rational Germany, von Igelfeld is invited to Colombia for a special fellowship. But while there, he gets caught up in some decidedly unscupulous behavior.

Invited to lecture in America, von Igelfeld envisions a visit to California or New York. Instead, he finds himself at the University of Arkansas. Still, in von Igelfeld's view, one American state is very like the other. An expert philolgist, von Igelfeld prepares to deliver a talk on verbs, until he makes a grim discovery--he has been mistaken for a German master of veterinary science who has recently passed away.

Von Igelfeld is the world's leading scholar on Portuguese irregular verbs, having written a majestic, nearly 1,200-page book on the subject. As one review says, "There is nothing more to be said on this subject. Nothing." But in other matters, von Igelfeld is not nearly so skilled. Whether haplessly playing tennis against an equally dreadful opponent, or committing his friends to swordfighting duels without their knowledge, von Igelfeld is somewhat naive in the ways of the world. Yet that does not stop him from having a go at life, and the results are always humorous.

This book is a largely autobiographical account of the author's life as one who fell in love first with physics and then with teaching physics to students. "You have changed my life" is a common refrain in the emails the author receives daily from fans who have been enthralled by his video lectures about the wonders of physics. "I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics colored eyes, " wrote one such fan. When the lectures were made available online, he became an instant YouTube celebrity, and The New York Times declared, "Walter Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube's greatest hits." For more than thirty years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he honed his singular craft of making physics not only accessible but truly fun, whether putting his head in the path of a wrecking ball, supercharging himself with three hundred thousand volts of electricity, or demonstrating why the sky is blue and why clouds are white. Now, as Carl Sagan did for astronomy and Brian Green did for cosmology, the author takes readers on a journey in this book, opening our eyes as never before to the amazing beauty and power with which physics can reveal the hidden workings of the world all around us. "I introduce people to their own world, " he writes, "the world they live in and are familiar with but don't approach like a physicist yet." Could it be true that we are shorter standing up than lying down? Why can we snorkel no deeper than about one foot below the surface? Why are the colors of a rainbow always in the same order, and would it be possible to put our hand out and touch one? Whether introducing why the air smells so fresh after a lightning storm, why we briefly lose (and gain) weight when we ride in an elevator, or what the big bang would have sounded like had anyone existed to hear it, he never ceases to surprise and delight with the extraordinary ability of physics to answer even the most elusive questions. Recounting his own exciting discoveries as a pioneer in the field of X-ray astronomy, arriving at MIT right at the start of an astonishing revolution in astronomy, he also brings to life the power of physics to reach into the vastness of space and unveil exotic uncharted territories, from the marvels of a supernova explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud to the unseeable depths of black holes. "For me, " he writes, "physics is a way of seeing the spectacular and the mundane, the immense and the minute, as a beautiful, thrillingly interwoven whole." His ways of introducing us to the revelations of physics impart to us a new appreciation of the remarkable beauty and intricate harmonies of the forces that govern our lives.

Eighteen-year-old Grace, raised in a fundamentalist home, makes a bid for personal freedom by becoming involved in an affair with a much older college professor, and soon learns she has traded in one kind of prison for another.

Amish farmer Enos Erb asks history professor Michael Branden to investigate the death of his brother, which he believes was a murder, and the amateur sleuth finds links between the Amish case and the apparent suicide of a college student.

A Russian-born professor struggles to cope with American idioms and idiosyncrasies at a university in upstate New York.

College teacher Nicholas Baran's attempts to expose the contamination by industrial pollution that he believes caused fatal cancer in himself and others cause him to become the most hated man in town and force him to question his own motives.