Eye Mind Heart: A View of Amherst College at 200
Eye Mind Heart: A View of Amherst College at 200 is the signature book of Amherst College’s bicentennial.
In her mission to write the College’s history, author Nancy Pick ’83 wondered what it was actually like to be at Amherst at different times in the past. What classes did students take in 1821? What were admissions requirements in 1921? What did students protest about in 1971? The result is Eye Mind Heart: A View of Amherst College at 200, a beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated book that aims to be as entertaining as it is illuminating.
Based on years of research, the book shares the familiar as well as the untold stories of the people of the College—the poets, the Nobel Prize winners, the groundbreakers, and the controversies. “When I took on this project in 2015, my assignment from the College was to write the book I’d want to read,” said Pick, a former newspaper journalist and the author of three previous books about history.
In her afterword, President Biddy Martin wrote, “Pick’s witty and imaginative book reads like a conversation she is having with her readers about the people, traditions, and intellectual feats that attach us to Amherst.” Eye Mind Heart also has a foreword by Cullen Murphy ‘74, former College trustee chair and editor at large for The Atlantic magazine.
“I’ll say this much,” Pick said, reflecting on the daunting nature of the project: “No other college has ever published a book like Eye Mind Heart. Especially not Williams.”
Eye Mind Heart: A View of Amherst College at 200
By Nancy Pick
239 Pages
Binding: Hardcover
Subject: Nonfiction, General
About the Author
Nancy Pick, a former reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun, is the author of several books. Her first book, The Rarest of the Rare (HarperCollins/Scala Arts), about the treasures of Harvard’s natural history collections, was named one of the best science books of the year by Discover magazine.
In 2018, her book Les Ombres de Stig Dagerman (The Writer and the Refugee), written together with Lo Dagerman, was published in France by Maurice Nadeau.
A graduate of Amherst College, she lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, the writer and law professor Lawrence Douglas.