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Eye Mind Heart: A View of Amherst College at 200
By Nancy Pick '83
Eye Mind Heart: A View of Amherst College at 200 is one of three signature books commissioned in celebration 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 board 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."