SLIS Dean Blaise Cronin's book Bloomington Days: Town and Gown in Middle America (2006) is a collection of 28 essays, and is dedicated to Ken Gros Louis (long-time Chancellor of Indiana University).

The AuthorHouse website has details about the book (see excerpts below):

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Bloomington is a quixotic mix of small-town life and larger-than-life campus, squirreled away in the flatlands of the mid-West. On the surface it is indistinguishable from all those other academic oases, Ann Arbor, Austin, Chapel Hill, where testosterone and youthful ambition are released in abundance yet mercifully out of parental sight. To the passing eye college towns have much in common; to the passing European eye they seem indistinguishable. I turned a blind eye to Bloomington's understated charms for years; still do when I'm of a mind. This is not a town that struts her stuff or favors gaudy; she's very much an acquired taste, a slow seducer. But she sometimes gets her man. Sometimes the man is a celebrated architect; I. M. Pei designed the university's angular Art Museum, a Wunderkammer in the wild.

How many times have you heard the phrase, "There's something about..."? Well, there is something about Bloomington, its smugness and parochialism notwithstanding, and this book is about that something. Much of that something is, of course, Indiana University (IU). Bloomington desperately needs IU, and IU wouldn't be IU without Bloomington. And, as I've come to learn, too, there's something very special about Old IU—"Hail to Old IU" is Indiana's official Alma Mater song—something that doggedly resists reductionism and the plow of official histories. Neither a panegyric nor pictorial record will suffice, hence this svelte volume of vignettes...

About the Author
Blaise Cronin was born and raised in Ireland. Trinity College Dublin and the Queen's University of Belfast graciously granted him the degrees necessary to avoid working for a living. He came to Middle America via London (England) and Glasgow (Scotland). In one sense, he has never looked back; in another, he has never stopped looking back.

See also: Dean Blaise Cronin to Receive ASIS&T National Award of Merit

Posted September 22, 2006