Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury by Drew Gilpin Faust

Title: Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

Author: Drew Gilpin Faust

Publication: Farrar Straus & Giroux, hardcover, 2023
Genre: Nonfiction/Memoir

Once upon a time, there was a little girl. Her official name was Catharine, but she never used it. Her father, though from a wealthy Ivy League background, wanted only to breed horses, so that was what he did. The girl grew up in rural, segregated Virginia in the fifties, reading Nancy Drew and pony books, riding horses, raising steers with the 4H Club, attending a small country school.

Would you be surprised to learn that she would become the president of Harvard?

Ice Cream at Harvard

Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard, has more of a sense of humor than I had realized - at an ice cream bash in the Yard earlier this month, she served ice cream flavors called Lamont Lemon, Cookie Endoughment, and Berry-tas.