Random House 2013-2014 First Year & Common Reading® Catalog

A SPECI A L A DV ERT I SING SUPPLEM ENT TO T H E CH RONICLE OF H IG H ER EDUCAT ION THE CROWN PUBLISHING GROUP Broadway Paperbacks Crown Archetype Crown Business Crown Forum Crown Publishers Harmony Books Hogarth Image Catholic Books Ten Speed Press Three Rivers Press WaterBrook Multnomah Watson-Guptill THE RANDOM HOUSE PUBLISHING GROUP Ballantine Books Bantam Dell The Dial Press Del Rey & Spectra Modern Library One World Random House Spiegel & Grau RANDOM HOUSE PUBLISHER SERVICES Archie Comics Beacon Press Blue Apple Books Candlewick Press DC Comics Egmont USA Hatherleigh Press Kodansha Comics Kuperard Mark Batty Publisher Melville House Publishing The Monacelli Press National Geographic New York Review Books North Atlantic Books Osprey Publishing Other Press powerHouse Books Prometheus Books Quercus Books Quirk Books Random House Canada Random House Mondadori Rizzoli USA Sasquatch Books Seven Stories Press Shambhala Publications Smithsonian Books Soho Press Steerforth Press Titan Books Verso Books Vertical, Inc. Welcome Books Wizards of the Coast RANDOM HOUSE DIGITAL Books on Tape Fodor’s Living Language Princeton Review Random House Audio RANDOM HOUSE CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Includes: Best Practices & Adoption Timeline TM

2013-2014

First-Year Common Reading New & Recommended Books

RANDOM HOUSE, INC.

S www.commonreads.com

___________________________ FEATURING ___________________________ N e w

F a v o r i t e s

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Dear Common Reading Director: Within these pages, you will find a broad selection of engaging fiction and nonfiction that will initiate reflection and discussion among your students, helping them form their own opinions, engage in social issues, and develop into better citizens of the world. As your students prepare to discuss the stories of others, they will ultimately become more comfortable with sharing their own.

Whatever your needs and interests, we are confident that you will be able to find the ideal book for your program. If you are a professor or a member of a common reading program, you may order examination copies of any of these titles. Simply follow the instructions on our Examination Copy page: www.randomhouse.com/acmart/requests.

Many of our authors are available to visit college campuses as part of a first-year program.

Please email me at mgentile@randomhouse.com for more information.

Sincerely,

Michael D. Gentile Director, Academic Marketing Random House, LLC A Penguin Random House Company Tel. (212) 782-8387 ) mgentile@randomhouse.com www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldgentile

PS: We invite you to stay connected with us by linking to any one of our social media channels or downloading our app (see bottom of facing page). We often give away free books through these outlets— so you will want to stay connected and check in often.

Photos from the 2013 First-Year Experience®Random House Author Event

MEET THE RANDOM HOUSE COMMON READING ADVISORY BOARD Random House Common Reading Advisory Board Elizabeth Bracher, Boston College Rebecca Campbell, Northern Arizona University Tara Coleman, Kansas State University Steven Girardot, Georgia Institute of Technology Jennifer Latino, Campbell University Jeanne Leep, Edgewood College l. to r., back row: Michael Gentile (RH), Jared Tippets (Purdue University), Jeanne Leep (Edgewood College), Elizabeth Bracher (Boston College), Steven Girardot (Georgia Institute of Technology), Tara Coleman (Kansas State University) Karen Weathermon (Washington State University) front row: Skip Dye (RH), Rebecca Campbell (Northern Arizona University), Jennifer Latino (Campbell University), Daphne Rankin (Virginia Commonwealth University)

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Daphne Rankin, Virginia Commonwealth University Jared Tippets, Purdue University Karen Weathermon, Washington State University

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CONTENTS Life Stories—Memoir, Biography, and Autobiography ....................................12 Fiction to Talk About ............................................................................................32 History and Society ..............................................................................................38 Life & College Guides ..........................................................................................54 Social Action ..........................................................................................................60 Index........................................................................................................................62 Order Form ............................................................................................................63 LEGEND HC: Hardcover • TR: Trade Paperback • MM: Mass Market • NCR: No Canadian Rights : Audio : Author Available : Discussion Guide : eBook

Available in Español

: Spanish Language Edition Available

EXAMINATION COPIES Examination copies are available to instructors seeking titles to review for adoption consideration. The exam copy prices are as follows: $3.00 for each paperback priced under $20.00, and 50% off the retail price for all hardcovers and paperbacks priced at or over $20.00.

Examination copies are limited to ten per instructor per school year and can only be mailed to valid U.S. addresses.

To order, use the order form at the back of this Advertising Supplement. Examination copies must be prepaid with a check or money order made payable to Random House, LLC, or order online at www.randomhouse.com/acmart/requests. Offer only valid in the United States. All requests are subject to approval and availability. Please allow 2–4 weeks for delivery.

Stay Connected with Random House Common Reads Social Media Common Reads connects freshman year and common reading committees to: • Exclusive author content • Peer feedback on titles • Running program selection news • Free promotional giveaways ™

Read Our Blog:

www.commonreads.com AT&T

/CommonReads

/commonreads

@CommonReads

Download our App: road.ie/common-reads

Random House, LLC, A Penguin Random House Company • Academic Dept. • 1745 Broadway • New York, NY 10019

) commonreads@randomhouse.com

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RANDOM HOUSE, INC.

SUPPORTS YOUR PROGRAM

S

electing the right title is only the first step toward making your First-Year Reading program a success; publisher support is also essential. The Random House, Inc. Academic Marketing Department is here to ensure that your program runs

smoothly and successfully, and that your needs and requests are handled in a thorough and efficient manner.

WE ARE PLEASED TO HELP YOU WITH THE FOLLOWING:

AUTHOR APPEARANCES We’ll promptly channel your author requests to the appropriate speaker’s bureau or lecture agency to ensure they are attended to quickly.

ANCILLARY MATERIALS Should you need author photos or additional content and materials, we will research the available options and assist you as best as we can.

DISCUSSION GUIDES We continue to develop and make available discussion guides, which may be used as tools by your discussion leaders. Many of these free guides are available in print, and all may be easily downloaded from our website.

DESK COPIES Depending upon the method of your order, you are entitled to one complimentary copy of a book per twenty student copies ordered. These complimentary copies are often allocated to group discussion leaders.

CUSTOMIZED COPIES Want to include a letter from your dean or college president? Imprint the cover with a specialized seal? Or modify the book in some other way? We will connect you to our Premium Sales Department to process your request (please note these orders are not for resale).

ORDERING Although Random House, Inc. does not sell directly to schools or libraries, we will assist you in placing your order, whether through your bookstore, a local wholesaler, or our in-house Premium Sales Department.

QUESTIONS? MICHAEL D. GENTILE Director, Academic Marketing

Random House, LLC A Penguin Random House Company 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019 Tel. (212) 782-8387

u commonreads@randomhouse.com www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldgentile

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RANDOM HOUSE COMMON READING

Book Post-Adoption

TIMELINE

This timeline provides a helpful outline of the steps that compose a successful common reading program

BOOK IS SELECTED

BOOK PURCHASE

Students will purchase their own copy of book

How do students obtain the book?

Contact your campus bookstore/distributor to order directly.

What is the estimated length of time between order and delivery?

Allow 3–4 weeks for delivery.

PROGRAMMING

University is purchasing books to gift to students (e.g., during Orientation)

Will you need a custom version? We can print customized editions with your college logo and/or letter from your President.

No customization

Who should the institution contact to obtain a price quote?

Contact jlipman@randomhouse.com or 1.800.800.3246 for a price quote. Have available the book title, ISBN, quantity, delivery date and “ship to” information.

How much time does customization take? Normal delivery time for custom editions is 6–8 weeks from order to delivery.

What is the estimated length of time between order and delivery?

Allow 2–4 weeks for delivery.

Author visit?

Many of our authors are represented by the Random House Speakers Bureau. To request an author, contact 212.572.2013 or rhspeakers@ randomhouse.com.

When contacting the RH Speakers Bureau, please know your available budget, desired date of visit, audience size and type, program description, and if there will be book signing opportunities.

Other programming ideas (see our Best Practices and Programming Ideas on pages 6-7)

Visit www.commonreads.com to access an online version of this timeline

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BEST PRACTICES AND

Tips from the Random House

3 LAUNCHING A PROGRAM Relax, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Take advantage of the many resources available to learn about other reading programs. A good starting point is a monograph published by the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience® and Students in Transition, Common Reading Programs: Going Beyond the Book. In addition, there are a number of campuses with well-established and successful reading programs, and the professionals who run these programs are usually very happy to share advice and tips (as well as opinions on books they have used in the past).

When starting a program, it’s important to include various stakeholders on campus. When it is time to select a book, you will most likely want some type of campus selection committee. The committee should comprise members of a variety of constituencies, including faculty, student services and academic affairs administrators, as well as students.

Think carefully about the scope, mission, learning outcomes, and assessment of your program. For example, will the program be a first-year/new student reading program or a campus-wide (common) reading program? What will be the purpose of the program (this may influence the type of books you will be considering)? How will you inform students about the program and when will they be expected to read the book? Again, take advantage of the numerous resources available to help answer these questions.

3 SELECTING A BOOK Think about the following questions when considering eligible books for your program: Does the book tell a good story?

Is the book accessible? Will a variety of students at different reading levels and with different interests be able to engage with the book? To this point, consider page count. A good rule of thumb is the “300 Rule”: if possible, choose a book with 300 pages or less.

Does it feature a protagonist students can relate to? They might be the same age or be dealing with similar life situations (change, challenge, adversity).

Does the book touch on teachable themes, such as inclusiveness/diversity, global engagement, etc.?

Do the themes of the book correspond to your university’s strategic mission? Campus engagement and resources will be easier to secure if you make this relationship clear.

If having the book’s author speak is part of the plan for your reading program, it is important to consider author availability during the book selection process. Speaking fees and availability can vary considerably. You don’t want to go through all the work to select a book, only to find out that the author’s speaking fee will not work for your budget, or s/he is not available to speak on the dates you need!

3 ENGAGING STUDENTS Use digital and social media to your advantage. Use your university’s existing social media webpage or account (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), or create a dedicated page for your common reading program to create a community around the book selection, author visit, and other programming activities. Many authors, publishers, and lecture agencies have existing material that can be posted to your community page.

Get students prepared. Consider introducing the book during the spring or summer prior to the next academic year. For example, if first-year students receive the book during Orientation, the Orientation Leaders and various speakers can advertise the program and build a feeling of community around the reading of the text. Also, think about having students turn in questions for the author as part of an assignment and have a moderator pose the questions to the author. This will incentivize students to come up with more original questions, will save on time during the Q&A, and will avoid dreaded “dead air.” Make the questions a contest, such as: “Can you stump the author?”

Have students create materials in advance of the author’s visit. Essay collections are a great idea. You may also consider multimedia approaches—such as blogs, videos, or website. Students tend to share more on a personal level when they are not

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Have questions for the Advisory Board?

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PROGRAMMING IDEAS Common Reading Advisory Board

in an open forum and the medium can be anonymous. Another idea is to have students autograph and annotate the author’s book. In addition to brief messages to the author, annotations can call attention to the passages of the book students find most compelling or personally resonant. Authors appreciate different perspectives on and reactions to their work, and they can take home the annotated book as a memento to commemorate the event!

Organize campus-wide discussion groups. Some campuses use faculty, some use upperclass students, and some use a combination of faculty, staff, and students to facilitate these discussions. Again, this is a good way for the first-year student to feel that they are a part of the university community.

Link the book to as much existing campus programming as possible. Can the Film Studies Department co-sponsor a viewing of a film related to your book? Are there plays, arts exhibits, or other speakers coming to campus that you could tie into? Perhaps Student Activities can help as well? Reach out to faculty who teach courses relevant to your book selection, provide them with review copies of the book, invite them to events, and ask them to embed the book in their syllabi and courses. Your book selection committee will be a great resource in making these connections.

3 HOSTING AN AUTHOR Is the author represented by an agency or speaker’s bureau? Most authors will have an agent, and that will be the person to contact about speaking fees and availability. Often, the book’s publisher will have this information.

Encourage as many faculty and students as possible to read the book in advance of the author visit. In addition to having more enthusiastic readers on campus to help you spread the good word about the book and your program, people who have already read the book will have more interesting questions for the author, making for a more intelligent and productive discussion.

Assign a faculty member or administrator to host the author. While one of the benefits of an author visit is for students to engage with the author, it is important to have a faculty member or administrator act as the dedicated host. It is important to have someone who has the authority to assertively manage appearances—to turn down requests or move an author to the next location, for example.

Sharing is caring! Encourage university departments and divisions to coordinate in advance. Perhaps events may be cosponsored so the author isn’t pulled in too many directions, and departments can share space, time, money, and other resources.

Consider having one large campus talk that is required of all students. This makes the best use of both your programming time and the author’s time on campus. Many authors say that different departments and disciplines actually tend to have questions that are more similar in nature than they are different. Even if that is not the case, a diversity of questions is a good thing; it offers a richer conversation when different interests come together, and students learn more.

Mix up the formats of events. The most successful visits offer the author and participants a variety of events to keep things fresh and engaging. Have the author speak at a podium for one event, do an on-stage sit-down Q&A at another, and participate in a group interview with faculty at a third.

When hosting an author Q&A, it’s important to appoint a moderator to move the discussion along. The moderator can address basic factual questions upfront, to allow for a more in-depth exchange during the Q&A. The moderator can also be the person who introduces the author.

Following a large campus-wide talk, arrange for smaller, more intimate discussions with faculty and students, in which the author and participants can delve more deeply into topics mentioned in the campus-wide talk. All participants should have attended the larger campus talk so that they come to the breakout sessions with at least a basic knowledge of the book.

Give authors “a break” (or two)! In order to provide your participants with the best experience possible, foster an environment that makes the author comfortable, and one that allows them to put their best foot forward. Schedule breaks in between sessions and offer some meals “off.” Arrange to have snacks, water, coffee, and meals available as appropriate. If the author is the key attraction at a meal, make sure he or she has ample time to eat.

Don’t take it personally. When negotiating your author’s visit to campus, there may be many requirements on the part of the agency for travel, lodging, and “down time.” These are based on the agency’s standard contractual obligations designed to cover a wide variety of celebrities, athletes, and other speakers. However, most agencies and authors understand that you have state and university policies that may constrain what you can offer, and will work with you to meet your needs. Schedule ample time for planning and negotiation. You should also verify with the author’s agent whether events or speaking engagements may be videotaped or recorded. They often have provisions for what is allowable.

Email us at commonreads@randomhouse.com

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Need a speaker for your next university event?

The Random House Speakers Bureau can help!

Who We Are The Random House Speakers Bureau is a full-service lecture agency whose primary focus is to help you find the best speaker for your event. Our dynamic roster includes Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winners, New York Times bestselling authors, business leaders, journalists, medical luminaries, and many others.

How We Can Help We work with universities year-round in helping them fulfill their lecture needs. We book authors for college common reads, panel discussions, lecture series, writing festivals, and a host of other university events. In addition, we help coordinate book signings for every event, from ordering direct through the signing itself.

Here is a sample of five recent university events we have provided speakers for: n

Charles Duhigg’s journalistic accomplishments have made him an in-demand speaker for organizations from MIT to the UCLA School of Management and the National Association of Science Teachers. He is a prize-winning investigative reporter for the New York Times and is a frequent contributor to This American Life, NPR, PBS NewsHour, and Frontline. In lectures, he can discuss the science behind habits and willpower from his bestselling book, The Power of Habit (page 54). He is a graduate of the Harvard Business School and Yale College.

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Donovan Campbell is a decorated military officer and a young executive whose lessons about leadership and teamwork have inspired and motivated audiences at Harvard Business School, the Air Force Academy, and Wake Forest University, among others. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Joker One (page 60), which was named one of “The Best Military Books of the Decade” by Military Times. He teaches audiences how to apply principles learned in the military—a humble servant-leader mentality, a willingness to shoulder responsibility, and an understanding of personal sacrifice—in their own lives for positive change.

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Kristen Iversen, author of Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (page 42) (a 2012 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and winner of the Reading the West Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Colorado Book Award for Non-Fiction), is the director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Memphis University. A seasoned speaker on the secret nuclear plant that was once designated, “the most contaminated site in America,” she has been selected to speak at Fort Lewis College, St. Bonaventure University, Michigan Technological University, Madisonville Community College, and California State University, Sacramento, among other venues.

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Jerry McGill is a writer, artist, activist, and inspiration speaker who engages audiences with his triumphant story of courage and perseverance, and “rebellious optimism,” filled with compassion and abundant humor. He has appeared at both high schools and universities to discuss his memoir Dear Marcus: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me (page 20) and was a featured speaker at the 2013 Random House FYE® luncheon. He holds a BA in English literature from Fordham University and an MFA in Education from Pacific University in Oregon.

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Téa Obreht is a National Book Award Finalist for The Tiger’s Wife (page 36), Orange Prize-winner, and the youngest writer on The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list. She attended the University of Southern California and received her MFA from Cornell. She has spoken at Georgetown University and Villanova.

Contact Us

To book a speaker for your next event, please call us at 212-572-2013 or email us at rhspeakers@randomhouse.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

www.rhspeakers.com • ) rhspeakers@randomhouse.com 8

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Meet Our Authors

RANDOM HOUSE, LLC Make Your One Book Count

The 33rd Annual Conference on The First-Year Experience® Meeting

FEBRUARY 15–17, 2014 Manchester Grand Hyatt, San Diego, CA | Location To Come

COCKTAILS & CONVERSATIONS Sunday, February 16: 6:00 pm–7:00 pm

Book Description: tiny.cc/mc2gyw

GUY P. HARRISON

ALEXA VON TOBEL

GuyPHarrison.com

LearnVest.com

Book Description: tiny.cc/bd2gyw

THE 10TH ANNUAL RANDOM HOUSE LUNCHEON

©Jen Dessinger

Monday, February 17: 11:45 am–1:30 pm

JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN Book Description: tiny.cc/2d2gyw

JenniferBoylan.net

SAMPSON DAVIS

SHERI FINK

DrSampsonDavis.com

SheriFink.net

Book Description: tiny.cc/itm2zw

Book Description: tiny.cc/ak6gyw

COLUM MCCANN

DAVID LEVITHAN Book Description: tiny.cc/fp6gyw

DavidLevithan.com

Book Description: tiny.cc/2n6gyw

ColumMcCann.com

To RSVP: Email commonreads@randomhouse.com with your name, title, and school.

If reserving for others, please include their full name and school affiliation.

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2014 FIRST-YEAR EXPERIENCE® PRESENTING AUTHORS Book Summaries & Author Biographies THE 10TH ANNUAL RANDOM HOUSE LUNCHEON SHE’S NOT THERE: A Life in Two Genders

By Jennifer Finney Boylan She’s Not There is the unconventional memoir of a person who changes genders, a portrait of a loving marriage that withstands a radical change, and a revealing look at society’s folly in over-emphasizing the importance of fixed gender roles.

“Beautifully crafted, fearless, painfully honest, inspiring and extremely witty. Jennifer Finney Boylan is an exquisite writer with a fascinating story and this combination has resulted in one of the most remarkable, moving, and unforgettable memoirs in recent history.”

—Augusten Burroughs, author of Running with Scissors JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN is the New York Times bestselling author of twelve books, including most recently, Stuck in the Middle With You. She is a regular contributor to the op-ed page of the New York Times and a professor of English at Colby College in Maine. www.JenniferBoylan.net Broadway | TR | 978-0-385-34697-9 | 352pp. | $14.95/$17.95 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 • e-Book: 978-0-385-34698-6 | $11.99/$13.99 Can.

LIVING AND DYING IN BRICK CITY: An E.R. Doctor Returns Home

By Sampson Davis; With Lisa Frazier Page Working as an emergency room physician in an impoverished section of his hometown of Newark, New Jersey, author Sampson Davis bears witness to the growing health care crisis plaguing inner-city communities. Weaving a personal narrative that gives a voice to those most devastated by this medical crisis, Sampson offers a critical overview of urban health care and issues a call to heal U.S. communities.

SAMPSON DAVIS was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. He is a board certified emergency medicine physician and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Pact, We Beat the Street, and The Bond. He is the youngest physician to receive the National Medical Association’s highest honor, the Scroll of Merit. He is a recipient of Essence and BET humanitarian awards and was named by Essence as one of the forty most inspirational African Americans.

He is a founder of the Three Doctors Foundation and practices medicine in New Jersey. www.DrSampsonDavis.com Spiegel & Grau | HC | 978-1-4000-6994-1 | 256pp. | $25.00/$29.95 Can. | Exam Copy: $12.50 • e-Book: 978-0-679-60518-8 | $12.99/$14.99 Can.

©Jen Dessinger

FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

By Sheri Fink Author Sheri Fink reconstructs five days at Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and draws students into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and to maintain life amidst chaos. In a voice both involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are in the U.S. for the impact of large-scale disasters—and how we can do better.

SHERI FINK’s reporting has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the Overseas Press Club Lowell Thomas Award, among other journalism prizes. Most recently, her coverage of Hurricanes Sandy and Isaac received the Mike Berger Award from Columbia University and the Beat Reporting Award from the Association of Healthcare Journalists. Fink, a former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, received her MD and PhD from Stanford University. Her first book, War Hospital, is about medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. www.SheriFink.net Crown | HC | 978-0-307-71896-9 | 432pp. | $26.00/$30.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $13.00 Audio CD: 978-0-8041-2809-4 | $40.00/$46.00 Can. • Audio DL: 978-0-8041-2810-0 | $20.00/$23.00 Can. • e-Book: 978-0-307-71898-3 | $12.99/$14.99 Can.

EVERY DAY

By David Levithan Every morning, A wakes in a different person’s body, a different person’s life. A has made peace with that, or so he thought, until he finds himself in love with someone he wants to be with— day in, day out, day after day.

Award-winning author David Levithan has written a captivating story that grasps the complexities of life and love, asking if you can truly love someone who is destined to change every day.

DAVID LEVITHAN is a children’s book editor in New York City, and the author of several books for young adults, including Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares (co-authored with Rachel Cohn); Will Grayson, Will Grayson (co-authored with John Green); and Every You, Every Me (with photographs from Jonathan Farmer). www.DavidLevithan.com Ember | TR | 978-0-307-93189-4 | 336pp. | $9.99/$10.99 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Audio CD: 978-0-449-01520-9 | $37.00/$44.00 Can. • Audio DL: 978-0-449-01521-6 | $19.00/$22.00 Can. • e-Book: 978-0-307-97563-8 | $9.99/$9.99 Can.

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2014 FIRST-YEAR EXPERIENCE® PRESENTING AUTHORS Book Summaries & Author Biographies TRANSATLANTIC: A Novel

By Colum McCann Two aviators in 1919 Newfoundland set course for Ireland as they attempt the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

On a lecture tour in Dublin in 1845, Frederick Douglass found the Irish people sympathetic to the abolitionist cause—despite the fact that the poor suffer from hardships that are astonishing even to an American slave.

One century later, Senator George Mitchell left behind a young wife in New York in 1998, and departed for Belfast, where it has fallen to him to shepherd Northern Ireland’s notoriously bitter and volatile peace talks to an uncertain conclusion.

TransAtlantic weaves together seemingly separate stories in a profound meditation on identity and history.

COLUM MCCANN is the internationally bestselling author of many novels including Let the Great World Spin.

He has received many honors, including the National Book Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and others. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review, he teaches in the Hunter College MFA Creative Writing Program. www.ColumMcCann.com Random House | HC | 978-1-4000-6959-0 | 320pp. | $27.00/NCR | Exam Copy: $13.50 Audio CD: 978-0-307-87800-7 | $40.00/NCR • Audio DL: 978-0-307-87801-4 | $20.00/NCR. • e-Book: 978-0-679-60459-4 | $12.99/NCR

COCKTAILS & CONVERSATIONS THINK: Why You Should Question Everything

By Guy P. Harrison Think shows students how to better navigate through the maze of biases and traps that are standard features of every human brain. These innate pitfalls threaten to trick us into seeing, hearing, thinking, remembering, and believing things that are not real or true. Guy Harrison’s straightforward text will help them trim away the nonsense, deflect bad ideas, and keep both feet firmly planted in reality.

With an upbeat and friendly tone, Harrison shows how it’s in a student’s best interest to question everything. He brands skepticism as a constructive and optimistic attitude—a way of life that anyone can embrace. This accessible guide to critical thinking is an antidote to nonsense and delusion.

GUY P. HARRISON is an award-winning journalist and the author of 50 Simple Questions for Every Christian, 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True, 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God, and Race and Reality: What Everyone Should Know about Our Biological Diversity. www.GuyPHarrison.com Do not order before 11/5/2013.

Prometheus | TR | 978-1-61614-807-2 | 300pp. | $16.95/$18.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 e-Book: 978-1-61614-808-9 | $11.99/$11.99 Can.

FINANCIALLY FEARLESS The LearnVest Program for Taking Control of Your Money

By Alexa Von Tobel In Financially Fearless, Alexa von Tobel, Founder and CEO of LearnVest, puts forth her 50/20/30 plan, which refers to the percentage breakdown of how to spend take-home pay each month: The 50 gets the essentials out of the way, the 20 sets a foundation for the future, and the 30 is left to spend on the things that bring happiness to our lives. Assured and empowering, Financially Fearless presents students with their own personal financial planner on the page and sets them up for a secure, worry-free future so they can start living their richest life.

ALEXA VON TOBEL, CFP® is the founder and CEO of www.LearnVest.com, an award-winning financial planning site. A Certified Financial Planner™ who attended Harvard Business School, Alexa has been featured as a financial expert in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Forbes, InStyle, Glamour and on the Today show, Good Morning America, Anderson, Katie, ABC News, Bloomberg News, and more. Her speaking engagements include Maria Shriver’s Women’s Conference, SXSW, Fortune Most Powerful Women’s Conference, and TEDxWallStreet, and she is a columnist for Cosmopolitan, Inc. Magazine, and Ladies Home Journal. www.LearnVest.com Crown Business | HC | 978-0-385-34761-7 | 256pp. | $19.99/$22.95 Can. | Exam Copy: $10.00 Audio CD: 978-0-8041-6404-7 | $40.00/$46.00 Can. • Audio DL: 978-0-8041-2852-0 | $17.50/$20.50 Can. • e-Book: 978-0-385-34762-4 | $11.99/$11.99 Can.

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LIFE STORIES—MEMOIR, BIOGRAPHY, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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IMPERFECT

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An Improbable Life

By Jim Abbott and Tim Brown

O

Ballantine | TR | 978-0-345-52326-6 | 320pp. $14.00/$17.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also Available: Audio CD: 978-0-307-99051-8 | $35.00/$41.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-307-99052-5 | $20.00/$24.00 Can. e-Book: 978-0-345-52327-3 | $9.99/$11.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Selected for Common Reading: Archbishop Ryan High School (Philadelphia, PA) Disciplines: Physical Education; Sports Themes: Inspiration; Perseverance/Personal Strength

n an overcast September day in 1993, Jim Abbott took the mound at Yankee Stadium and threw one of the most dramatic no-hitters in major-league history. The game was the crowning achievement in an unlikely success story, unseen in the annals of professional sports. In Imperfect, the one-time big league ace retraces his remarkable journey.

Born without a right hand, as a boy Jim Abbott dreamed of being a great athlete. Raised in Flint, Michigan, by parents who saw in his condition not a disability but an extraordinary opportunity, Jim became a two-sport standout in high school, then a star pitcher for the University of Michigan.

But his journey was only beginning.

As a nineteen-year-old, Jim beat the vaunted Cuban National Team.

By twenty-one, he’d won the gold medal game at the 1988 Olympics and—without spending a day in the minor leagues—cracked the starting rotation of the California Angels. In 1991, he would finish third in the voting for the Cy Young Award. Two years later, he would don Yankee pinstripes and deliver a one-of-a-kind no-hitter.

It wouldn’t always be so good. After a season full of difficult losses—some of them by football scores—Jim was released, cut off from the game he loved. Unable to say good-bye so soon, Jim tried to come back, pushing himself to the limit—and through one of the loneliest experiences an athlete can have.

But always, even then, there were children and their parents waiting for him outside the clubhouse doors, many of them with disabilities like his, seeking consolation and advice. These obligations became Jim’s greatest honor.

In this honest and insightful memoir, Jim Abbott reveals the insecurities of a life spent as the different one, how he habitually hid his disability in his right front pocket, and why he chose an occupation in which the uniform provided no front pockets. With a riveting pitch-by-pitch account of his no-hitter providing the ideal frame for his story, this unique athlete offers readers an extraordinary and unforgettable memoir.

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About the Author: Jim Abbott JIM ABBOTT was a major league pitcher with the Los Angeles Angels and the New York Yankees, among other teams. Born in 1967, he was an All-American at Michigan; won a gold medal with the 1988 Olympic baseball team; and threw a no-hitter at Yankee Stadium in 1993. He retired in 1999.

Abbott has worked with the Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy, has been a guest pitching instructor for the Los Angeles Angels, and has appeared as a motivational speaker. He lives with his wife and two children in Anaheim.

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Excerpt from Imperfect They were shy and beautiful, and they were loud and funny, and they were, like me, somehow imperfectly built. And, like me, they had parents nearby, parents who willed themselves to believe that this accident of circumstance or nature was not a life sentence, and that the spirits inside these tiny bodies were greater than the sums of their hands and feet.

The letters began in spring training, a couple at a time. Soon, there were requests from kids to come to camp, and we’d schedule 15 minutes a day. By the time we got to Anaheim, a couple letters would become dozens, and during the season, hundreds. [Angels executive] Tim Mead and I answered every one, because I knew how far a little boy or girl could run with 50 words of reassurance.

The letters became lines of families at the doorways of clubhouses from Fenway to Comiskey to the Kingdome, and tiny, quiet tears in dugouts from Arlington Stadium to the SkyDome to Anaheim.

So I would find my glove and go into the dugout, where another family was waiting with another story. The parents would be appreciative, and their little boy would stare with wide, yearning eyes, and he would be missing an arm, so one sleeve of his baseball jersey would flop all over, and it wouldn’t seem to bother him at all.

“Hey,” I’d say, “you play baseball?”

“Yeah.”

“Show me how you do your glove.”

And the little boy would hoist this massive glove head high, waiting for an imaginary throw, determination spread across his face.

“What position do you play?”

“Pitcher, like you.”

“Aw, don’t be a pitcher,” I’d say. “Be a shortstop. They get to play every day. All right, now show me how you hold the bat.”

The parents would laugh along. I know they wanted to know: How had I made it work? How could they? How would their boy grow up to be whatever he wanted to be?

I would tell them about my parents. They’d made me feel special for what I was, and yet treated me like every other kid. I would tell them about my frustration, and my parents’ words: “This is something to be lived up to.” I would ask them to see that amazing things could happen. My parents had done that for me, and they could do the same for their boy.

Some kids came with their own tales of achievement. They were playing baseball. They were playing hockey.

They were getting straight A’s, or learning to drive, or playing in the band. They wanted me to know they were doing great, too.

There was a boy I met, maybe 14. His arm was about to be amputated. He wanted to come see me pitch, but when he was healthy enough to visit the ballpark, I wasn’t healthy enough to pitch. I was on the disabled list. We just missed each other. He was a good kid, and scared.

Tim Mead called on a Saturday morning. The boy had suffered a stroke. I drove to Anaheim and together we went to the hospital. The boy, ashamed that I would see him hurt and vulnerable, began to cry. His mother began to cry. I couldn’t help but cry. I sat on the bed and we talked about courage, about getting better, and about believing in himself.

We left him in that room. Then, in silence, we drove back to Anaheim.

Tim left me at my car, climbed the stairs to his office, and pulled the door closed. Then he began to cry. There were so many others out there like that boy. I was inspired. They pushed me back onto the field and into my own battles. I was going to be just like them.

Excerpt from Imperfect by Jim Abbott and Tim Brown. Published by Ballantine, a division of Random House, LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. ©2012 by Jim Abbott. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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LIFE STORIES—MEMOIR, BIOGRAPHY, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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HOW TO LIVE Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Website: www.SarahBakewell.com

By Sarah Bakewell Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography Named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine

H

ow to get along with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing a loved one—such questions arise in most people’s lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: How does one live? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, considered by many to be the first truly modern individual. He wrote free-roaming explorations of his thoughts and experience, unlike anything written before.

More than four hundred years later, Montaigne’s honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom, and entertainment—and in search of themselves. An award-winning and inventive biography, How to Live will engage and inspire students to discuss the most essential questions, such as: Just what is—and how does one live— a good life?

“This charming biography shuffles incidents from Montaigne’s life and essays into twenty thematic chapters. . . . Bakewell clearly relishes the anthropological anecdotes that enliven Montaigne’s work, but she handles equally well both his philosophical influences and the readers and interpreters who have guided the reception of the essays.”

—The New Yorker Other Press | TR | 978-1-59051-483-2 | 416pp. $16.95/NCR | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: e-Book: 978-1-59051-426-9 | $15.95/NCR

ADOPTION NOTES: Discipline: Philosophy Themes: Ethics/Decision Making; Inspiration

“Serious, engaging, and so infectiously in love with its subject that I found myself racing to finish so I could start rereading the Essays themselves. . . . It is hard to imagine a better introduction—or reintroduction—to Montaigne than Bakewell’s book.”

—Lorin Stein, Harper’s Magazine “Ms. Bakewell’s new book, How to Live, is a biography, but in the form of a delightful conversation across the centuries.”

—The New York Times “So artful is Bakewell’s account of [Montaigne] that even skeptical readers may well come to share her admiration.”

—The New York Times Book Review “Extraordinary . . . a miracle of complex, revelatory organization, for as Bakewell moves along she provides a brilliant demonstration of the alchemy of historical viewpoint.”

—Boston Globe

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About the Author: Sarah Bakewell SARAH BAKEWELL was a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library before becoming a full-time writer, publishing her highly acclaimed biographies The Smart and The English Dane. She lives in London, where she teaches creative writing at City University and catalogues rare book collections for the National Trust.

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©Tundi Eugenia Haulik

LIFE STORIES—MEMOIR, BIOGRAPHY, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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A Message from the Author Why I Wrote How to Live Why did I write about Montaigne? Mostly because I wanted to keep on reading him.

Ever since my early twenties, when I picked up his Essays by chance, wanting a good book for a long train journey, he has never really left me. My first response to his work on that train was one of astonishment. How could someone who wrote in the 1500s sound so familiar, so conversational, so like me? It was like having a friend or a traveling companion sitting opposite me as we whizzed through the landscape. For years after that, Montaigne was never far from my side. And I discovered that practically everything else I read had the power of leading me back to him in some way—for Montaigne is the first truly modern author, the great hidden presence behind four hundred years of literature, and indeed behind much of philosophy, politics, and social theory over those centuries.

This is mainly for one simple reason: No one before Montaigne had written so honestly and minutely about the inner world of a human being. He followed every twist and turn of his psyche, believing that every individual is worth writing about at such length, for “each man bears the entire form of the human condition.” But he also paid plenty of attention to the world outside. He was interested in everything; he traveled widely, held offices as magistrate and mayor, ran diplomatic missions for kings and princes, and tried his best to end the religious civil wars that tore apart the France of his day. These experiences led him to a deep fascination with human variety and difference. We share our essential humanity, he knew, but each of us has a radically different cultural, historical, and personal perspective, and that is just as fundamental.

Human variety is the great paradox in his work; it’s also the great paradox facing us today.

How can a plural, democratic society accommodate difference, and even extremism, without sacrificing its deepest principles? How can we resist violence without becoming violent? How can we defend ourselves yet remain open? Montaigne gave us no simple answers, but he certainly taught us to ask the questions.

I set out to write about Montaigne’s life, but I ended up wanting to write about much more—and especially about the experience of reading itself, that is, the experience of encountering a mind distant in time that opens itself to us, perhaps not entirely, but in part.

What does it mean to pick up a book published in 1588 and recognize ourselves and our world in it? How can we engage critically with such a book and understand it on its own terms while also making it our own? What can be learned from someone who died more than four hundred years ago? Why is the past so strange and so familiar at the same time? To ask these questions is to investigate the very essence of what culture is—and it is why reading a book is such an exciting thing to do.

Many people will ask these questions for the first time in their college years, and I envy your students this; it will happen while they are with you. Others experience it earlier, and some, later. Whenever it happens, it changes you. Afterward, the habit of questioning gets into your soul—and then the whole world opens up.

Sarah Bakewell

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MY ORANGE DUFFEL BAG

Website: www.MyOrangeDuffelBag.com

A Journey to Radical Change

By Sam Bracken; With Echo Garrett

D

espite being abandoned at age fifteen and suffering unspeakable abuse, Sam Bracken overcame the odds to change his life and earn a full-ride football scholarship to the Georgia Institute of Technology. When he left for college, everything he owned fit in an orange duffel bag. In My Orange Duffel Bag, Sam tells his harrowing story of homelessness, poverty, and abuse and how he was able to reinvent himself. He also shows students how they can turn their lives around by sharing his rules for the road: everything he learned about radically changing his life and how anyone can create positive, lasting change.

Harmony | HC | 978-0-307-98488-3 | 200pp. $23.00/$26.95 Can. | Exam Copy: $11.50 Also available: Audio DL: 978-0-449-01000-6 | $12.00/$14.00 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Selected for Common Reading: Louisburg College Disciplines: Psychology; Physical Education/Sports Themes: Inspiration, Leadership & Motivation, Perseverance/Personal Strength Campus Visits: Alternative Formats: Also Available

MY ROADMAP A Personal Guide to Balance, Power, and Purpose by the Authors of My Orange Duffel Bag

“I spent five years with Sam Bracken at a time of transformation for him. His is a stunning story of courage, resiliency, and servantleadership. He told a 1,000-page story in exactly 66 pages. The format, the sincerity, and yes, the agony that leaps off the pages is palpable and transforming. There are two pains in life—the pain of discipline and the pain of regret . . . we all choose every day. The difference in Sam and those who are gobbled up by our sick society is that he usually chose wisely. He took our team’s messages to heart in tangible ways. We would all do well to read, and heed, his powerful message.”

—Bill Curry, NCAA football coach, and former NFL player “Sam Bracken’s remarkable emergence from a life of poverty, mental illness, abuse and hardship is told with compelling honesty.

It offers young people a set of accessible tools to support resilience and promote self-growth.”

—Irene S. Levine, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine

The Orange Duffel Bag Foundation The Orange Duffel Bag Foundation, inspired by the book, mentors at-risk youth. Their program has been used by the state of Georgia to mentor foster kids.

The foundation has been featured in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and on CNN, and has high-profile sponsors like Xerox, Wells Fargo, and AT&T. For more information, visit the website at www.orangeduffelbagfoundation.org

Crown Archetype | TR | 978-0-307-95586-9 | 128pp. $9.99/$11.99 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00

About the Authors: Sam Bracken and Echo Garrett SAM BRACKEN serves as the national spokesperson for The Orange Duffel Bag Foundation and is general manager of FranklinCovey Media Publishing. He graduated Georgia Tech with honors and received his MBA from Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Management.

ECHO GARRETT is president and cofounder of The Orange Duffel Bag Foundation.

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MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

By Tracy Kidder

Website: www.TracyKidder.com Author Video: tiny.cc/xflbrw To view the author’s talk at the 2009 First-Year Experience® Conference, go to: tiny.cc/etf4qw

An ALA Notable Book; A New York Times Notable Book A Popular College Common Reading Selection

I

Random House | TR | 978-0-8129-7301-3 | 352pp. $16.00/$19.00 | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: Audio DL: 978-1-4159-1801-2 | $20.00/$26.00 Can. e-Book: 978-1-58836-334-3 | $11.99/$13.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES:

n medical school, Paul Farmer found his life’s calling: to cure infectious diseases and bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy Kidder’s magnificent account shows how one person can make a difference in solving global health problems through a clear-eyed understanding of the interaction of politics, wealth, social systems, and disease.

Kidder shows how one person can effect global progress against seemingly impossible problems—TB, AIDS, poverty—with creativity, knowledge and determination.

Mountains Beyond Mountains takes students from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication to the philosophy that “the only real nation is humanity”—a philosophy that is embodied in the small public charity he founded, Partners In Health. At the heart of this book is the example of a life based on hope, and on an understanding of the truth of the Haitian proverb, “Beyond mountains there are mountains:” as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too.

“Kidder, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, writes clearly and engagingly. . . . This book is being widely used in freshman seminars at colleges across the United States, and it will likely stir debates on such wide-ranging issues as the politics of health care, the role of government funding, and ethics. Highly recommended.”

—Choice (American Library Association)

Selected for Common Reading at more than 100 colleges including: Mount Holyoke College; University of Washington; and Virginia Tech.

To view the complete list, go to tiny.cc/gbqfrw.

Also available in a Young Readers Edition:

Disciplines: Humanitarianism; Sociology

The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man who Would Cure the World

Themes: Science & Society; Service; Social Justice

By Tracy Kidder Adapted for Young People by Michael French

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Delacorte Books for Young Readers| HC | 978-0-385-74318-1 | 288pp. $16.99/$18.99 Can. | Exam Copy: $8.50 Audio CD: 978-0-8041-2167-5 | $35.00/$41.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-8041-2168-2 | $20.00/$24.00 Can. e-Book: 978-0-307-98088-5 | $10.99/$12.99 Can..

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MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS

About the Author: Tracy Kidder TRACY KIDDER graduated from Harvard, studied at the University of Iowa, and served as an army officer in Vietnam. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and many other literary prizes. He lives in Massachusetts and Maine.

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Also by Tracy Kidder

STRENGTH IN WHAT REMAINS Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award In Strength in What Remains, Kidder presents the story of one man’s inspiring American journey and of the ordinary people who helped him, providing brilliant testament to the power of second chances.

Selected for Common Reading at more than 12 colleges including: Caldwell College; Stanford University; and Western Michigan University. To view the complete list, go to tiny.cc/dgqfrw.

Random House | TR | 978-0-8129-7761-5 | 304pp. | $16.00/$19.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also Available: Audio DL: 978-0-7393-8338-4 | $20.00/$23.00 Can. e-Book: 978-1-58836-851-5 | $11.99/$13.99 Can. Themes: Genocide • Global Citizenship • Human Rights • Perseverance/Personal Strength

First Year Seminar

A Message from the First Year Seminar Director at the University of Delaware Dear Colleagues, The University of Delaware chose Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains as its First Year Common Reader in 2010. Strength in What Remains is the story of Deogratias (Deo), a young medical student from the Central African nation of Burundi, who fled the ethnic violence in Burundi and genocide in Rwanda and was transported to New York City. Deo succeeded against all odds, graduating from Columbia University, and subsequently returned to Africa. A truly remarkable story of survival, despair, determination, evil, and kindness, the book was chosen by an advisory committee comprised of faculty, students, advisors, and Student Life staff who believed that it would provide a unique opportunity for students to consider issues related to that part of the world and to begin addressing questions about personal meaning, transition, and passion. The committee also felt that the book would encourage our students to consider what it means to be a global citizen.

The choice proved extremely popular among the first year students, and the entire University of Delaware community engaged in a number of events related to the book. Author Tracy Kidder and the book’s hero Deo visited our campus to share their vision of hope and renewal with our freshman class.

Following their visit, a graduate of the University of Delaware Honors Program spoke to the freshman class via Skype from the Village Health Works Clinic in Burundi. Discussing how she had used her Delaware experience as a bridge to help others achieve a better life in places that the rest of the world seems to have overlooked, her talk complemented Kidder and Deo’s visit.

Strength in What Remains proved not only to be a popular choice, but to provide a unique opportunity for our students to learn about another part of the world and to begin to understand the complexities and interrelationships of the global landscape.

Sincerely, Avron Abraham, Ph.D. Faculty Director First Year Seminar and Common Reader Program www.fys.udel.edu

University of Delaware students line up to have books signed by Deo

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LIFE STORIES—MEMOIR, BIOGRAPHY, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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DEAR MARCUS A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me

By Jerry McGill

Author Video: tiny.cc/tje4qw To view the author’s talk at the 2013 First-Year Experience® Conference, go to: tinyurl.com/knswuay

W

hen Jerry McGill was growing up in the housing projects on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s, his future seemed bright: Though times were tough for a family led by a single mother, McGill was a charming, precocious teenager, already excelling as an athlete and a dancer. But everything changed one night when he was thirteen. Walking home from a New Year’s party with a friend, McGill was shot in the back by an unknown assailant, who was never caught. Soon after, he learned that he would be wheelchair-bound for life.

Spiegel & Grau | TR | 978-0-8129-8316-6 | 192pp. $14.00/$17.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: e-Book: 978-0-679-64460-6 | $9.99/$11.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Selected for Common Reading: Morgan State University Disciplines: African American Studies; Philosophy; Sociology Themes: Social Justice; Identity; Perseverance/Personal Strength Campus Visits:

Written as a letter to the man who shot him, whom he decides to call Marcus, Dear Marcus is a reflection on McGill’s childhood, the event that changed his life in an instant, the challenges of living with a disability, and the importance of optimism, forgiveness, and making the most of one’s gifts. In this direct and intimate attempt to explain to his attacker the repercussions of his deeds—how one man’s random decision radically altered the course of another’s life—McGill takes the reader to the streets of New York City in the 1980s, to the hospital where he spent six months recovering, and on his journey to make the most of his new life. He recounts the joys he has experienced traveling the globe and mentoring disabled children, the love and support he has received over the years, and the strengths he has been able to find within himself that he may never have discovered had his life turned out differently.

By turns brutally honest and funny, both full of rage and full of heart, Dear Marcus is an inspiring book about the moments in life that shape people—the ones that catch them by surprise, that blindside them, but that present them with opportunities for growth, reflection, compassion, and forgiveness. At some point— to greater or lesser degrees—everyone will be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The challenge, though, as Dear Marcus shows, is not to wallow in despair or blame other people, but to rise up and find strengths within.

“As I started reading Dear Marcus, I found I couldn’t put it down.

This is a compelling marriage of remembrance and forgiveness, absolution and compassion, cynicism and understanding.”

—Wes Moore, author of The Other Wes Moore

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About the Author: Jerry McGill JERRY MCGILL is a writer, artist, activist, and inspirational speaker. He received a BA in English literature from Fordham University in the Bronx and a master’s degree in education from Pacific University in Oregon. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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©Jerry McGill

LIFE STORIES—MEMOIR, BIOGRAPHY, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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A Message from the Author Last year I retired from a profession that was probably the most challenging, the most frustrating, and in many ways the most rewarding profession that I’ve ever had. When I rolled my wheelchair out of my high school English classroom for the last time, I had to take a moment to recognize and honor all that I had gained from the experience. My reasons for choosing not to return to the classroom are complex and varied, but one thing is without doubt: to watch a student read, process, and discuss a work of literature is a thing of beauty.

I recall so well my freshman class’s heartfelt reactions to the suffering of young Elie Wiesel as we became immersed in the story of Night. Class discussions revolved around the cruelty of humankind and the necessity of hope, and their journals reflected just how engrossed they were in the journey.

They experienced a similar reaction when the students (who were, like the school, about 92 percent Caucasian) dove into the life of Richard Wright and his shocking experience of growing up in the Jim Crow South in Black Boy. During our conversations we explored topics such as the use of the “N word,” poverty, racism, religion, and, of course, the cruelty of humanity.

Those conversations fed me, and as we went on to read works by Maya Angelou, Frank McCourt, and Amy Tan, a small part of me couldn’t help but wonder: How would my students react to Dear Marcus, my self-published memoir about being shot in the back when I was thirteen? I had sworn never to bring up my book in class, believing it was best to maintain a “professional distance.” Despite my students’ constant prodding (“Are you married, Mr. McGill? Do you have kids? Were you in a car accident?”), I always respectfully declined discussions about my personal life.

Then a funny thing happened. Students being students, many of them “googled” me and, lo and behold, discovered that the life story of their mysterious teacher was right there for the entire world to read. Many found ways to purchase my memoir, and soon word about it spread.

Whether it was between classes, during lunch break, or in study hall, students would find me and, clutching their copy of my book, would then ask me questions about it. Their questions were soon followed by the inevitable demand that I autograph their copy. Not long after the first students read it, a fellow teacher doing a unit on the African American experience in America asked if I would come speak to two of her classes. When word got out that I had agreed to do it, the teacher had to move the event to an auditorium because so many other students wanted to join the discussion.

At first I was apprehensive that disclosing so much about myself would be harmful to the studentteacher relationship, but much to my pleasure it had the opposite effect. Even students whom I knew clear well didn’t like me (I was a pretty demanding teacher and could be a harsh grader) came up to me after the talk to tell me how moved or fascinated they were by my story. In the weeks that followed, I had an untold number of healthy conversations with students about my life and about their own, and about the broader themes that my book touches on: poverty, class, faith, family, loyalty, trust, and destiny—topics that we may not have had a chance to explore in such depth otherwise. For the first time, I began to think, Well maybe, just maybe, someday there could be a place for Dear Marcus on a curriculum. . . .

I am so pleased that Dear Marcus will now be available for a wider audience, and it is my sincere hope that educators will find it worthy of sharing with their students. Though it is my own story, it addresses issues of race, class, disability, inner-city violence, the importance of education, the repercussions of our actions on other people’s lives, and, most of all, the importance of hope and perseverance—issues that are relevant and that warrant classroom discussion. Ultimately, I hope that Dear Marcus will help young people see the beauty in their own lives while reminding them that even if things don’t go the way that they expect, they are in control of their futures.

Jerry McGill

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MUCK CITY Winning and Losing in Football’s Forgotten Town

Website: www.BryanMealer.com

By Bryan Mealer

T

he loamy black “muck” that surrounds Belle Glade, Florida, once built an empire for Big Sugar and provided much of the nation’s vegetables, often on the backs of roving, destitute migrants.

Many of these were children who honed their skills along the field rows and started one of the most legendary football programs in America. Belle Glade’s high school team, the Glades Central Raiders, has sent an extraordinary number of players to the National Football League—27 since 1985, with five of those drafted in the first round.

Three Rivers Press | TR | 978-0-307-88863-1 | 336pp. $15.00/$17.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also Available: e-Book: 978-0-307-88864-8 | $12.99/$14.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Disciplines: Physical Education/Sports; Sociology Themes: Coming of Age; Leadership/Motivation; Perseverance/Personal Strength; Regional: Florida Campus Visits: Alternative Formats:

The industry that gave rise to the town and its team also spawned the chronic poverty, teeming migrant ghettos, and violence that cripples futures before they can ever begin. Muck City tells the story of quarterback Mario Rowley, whose dream is to win a championship for his deceased parents and quiet the ghosts that haunt him; head coach Jessie Hester, the town’s first NFL star, who returns home to “win kids, not championships”; and Jonteria Willliams, who must build her dream of becoming a doctor in one of the poorest high schools in the nation. For boys like Mario, being a Raider is a one-shot window for escape and a college education.

Without football, Jonteria and the rest must make it on brains and fortitude alone. For the coach, good intentions must battle a town’s obsession to win above all else.

Beyond the Friday night lights, this book is an engrossing portrait of a community mired in a shameful past and uncertain future, but with the fierce will to survive, win, and escape to a better life.

“This is another version of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights (1990), and since both are less about football than they are about family, community, and the horrific struggle to rise above poverty, each boasts a unique set of characters who are well worth knowing. A heartbreaking look at poverty in America, with some football on the side.”

—Booklist (starred review)

About the Author: Bryan Mealer BRYAN MEALER is the author of Muck City: Winning and Losing in Football’s Forgotten Town and the New York Times bestseller The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which he wrote with William Kamkwamba, in addition to the children’s book of the same title. He’s also the author of All Things Must Fight to Live, which chronicled his years covering the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo for Harper’s and the Associated Press. His work has appeared in the anthology Best American Travel Writing and was chosen for an Overseas Press Club Award Citation. He and his family live in Austin, Texas.

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Excerpt from Muck City The Man Who Came Home: The Rise and Fall of an Ordinary Star (A profile of Jessie Hester) A study conducted by Sports Illustrated revealed that 78 percent of all NFL players are either bankrupt, broke, or divorced two years after leaving the game. As we know, many of those same athletes suffer even greater calamities. Their broken lives have more or less come to define professional football’s post-retirement: the arrests, lawsuits, and court hearings, and more recently, the onslaught of concussion-related dementia, depression, and suicides.

The other side of this story is Jessie Hester. For most of his life, Hester had managed to avoid becoming a statistic, first by surviving a brutal childhood as a migrant worker in one of the poorest, most violent corners of America. Nicknamed “Jet,” his speed made him a standout wide receiver in high school and accelerated his escape. He was All American at Florida State, then drafted in the first round by the LA Raiders in 1985. After a decade in the league, Hester managed to avoid the post-retirement traps. He started a business in Belle Glade, and spent the next ten years engrossed in the puttering routines of raising a family.

All the while, Hester remained the town’s most beloved son, the man who first shone the light on the talent-heavy region and opened the door for hundreds of other young athletes.

Thirty players from Belle Glade had followed Hester into the NFL, a staggering number in a high school of only a thousand students. But out of all those who’d left and achieved wealth and fame—Santonio Holmes, Fred Taylor, Louis Oliver, to name a few—only Jet had come home. In 2008, when he accepted the job to coach his old team, the Glades Central Raiders, his sainthood in the muck was complete.

Much of Hester’s job involved buffering the team against Belle Glade’s myriad negative forces: the hopelessness and poverty, the gang violence that left two of his players shot, and the entitlement that had crippled the program after decades of success. In three seasons, he coached the Raiders to a stellar 36-4 record and helped send twenty-six players to Division I college programs.

But days after losing their second back-to-back state championship game, Hester was fired.

Despite his status as the town’s great survivor, the humble son whose allegiance had never swayed, Jessie the Jet was dethroned and rendered a pariah. In a town where football was more than “a religion,” but salvation itself, it seemed the only thing that mattered was winning.

Chasing Rabbits Makes Them Fast (and Other Myths about Glades Football) While reporting Muck City, I’d often ask people in Belle Glade and Pahokee what made their kids so athletic. What made them so dominant at track? What explained the twelve football titles between the two schools, the hundreds of former players over the years who have gone to Division I college programs, and the more than sixty who have reached the NFL since the 1980s, including the Jets’ Santonio Holmes and Baltimore’s Anquan Boldin. More often than not, I’d get the same frustrating answer: “We get fast by chasing rabbits.”

Excerpted from Muck City by Bryan Mealer Copyright © 2012 by Bryan Mealer. Excerpted by permission of Crown Archetype, a division of Random House, LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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LIFE STORIES—MEMOIR, BIOGRAPHY, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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THE OTHER WES MOORE One Name, Two Fates

Website: www.TheOtherWesMoore.com Author Video: tiny.cc/y5f4qw

By Wes Moore Winner, American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Literary Award A Booklist Top 10 Black History Nonfiction Book

I

Spiegel & Grau | TR | 978-0-385-52820-7 | 272pp. $15.00/$17.00 | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: Audio CD: 978-0-307-87713-0 | $35.00/$41.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-307-73602-4 | $15.00/$17.50 Can. e-Book: 978-1-58836-969-7 | $11.99/$12.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Selected for Common Reading at more than 30 colleges including: Florida State University; Gustavus Adolphus College; and University of Akron.

To view the complete list, go to tiny.cc/s112nw

n December 2000, The Baltimore Sun ran a short article about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a headline-grabbing story about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers.

One of the brothers was also named Wes Moore.

Rhodes scholar and The Other Wes Moore author, Wes just couldn’t shake off the unsettling coincidence or his inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same newspaper. After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he wrote a letter to the other Wes, a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen?

That letter led to a correspondence and relationship that lasted for several years. Over dozens of letters and prison visits, author Wes discovered that the other Wes had experienced a life not unlike his own. Both had grown up in similar neighborhoods and had difficult childhoods. Both were fatherless. They’d hung out on similar corners with similar crews, and both had run into trouble with the police. At each stage of their young lives they had faced similar moments of decision, yet their choices would lead them to astonishingly different destinies.

Told in dramatic alternating narratives that take readers from heartwrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.

Also available in a Young Readers Edition:

Disciplines: African American Studies; Sociology Themes: Coming of Age; Identity, Leadership & Motivation; Perseverance/Personal Strength; Regional: Baltimore/ The Northeast; Service Campus Visits: Alternative Formats:

DISCOVERING WES MOORE

By Wes Moore Delacorte Books for Young Readers | HC | 978-0-385-74167-5 | 176pp. $15.99/$18.99 Can. | Exam Copy: $8.00 Audio CD: 978-0-8041-2191-0 | $30.00/$35.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-8041-2192-7 | $15.00/$17.00 Can. e-Book: 978-0-375-98670-3 | $10.99/$11.99 Can.

About the Author: Wes Moore WES MOORE is a Rhodes Scholar and a combat veteran of the war in Afghanistan. As a White House Fellow he worked as a special assistant to Secretary Condoleezza Rice at the State Department. He was a featured speaker at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, was named one of Ebony magazine’s Top 30 Leaders Under 30 (2007), and most recently, was dubbed one of the top young business leaders in America in Crain’s New York Business. He works in New York City.

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A Message from the Author I am living proof that a support system of family, mentors, and educators is critical for success and, as such, have the most tremendous respect for those of you who give tirelessly of yourselves to improve the future of a child. I would like to humbly thank all of you for being heroes to so many of your students, for inspiring them in ways you probably cannot even fathom yet, and for teaching them character and personal responsibility in addition to academics. It is your example, your belief in them, along with the preparation you give them in the classroom, that will unlock doors of opportunity.

I am a grandchild of a retired schoolteacher who taught in the Bronx public school system for over twenty years, the son-in-law of a New York City public elementary school teacher of over twenty years, and a proud advocate for schools and the kids they serve. I have grown up hearing the stories of redemption and disappointment, of joy and pain, and of the success and failure of so many kids who find themselves in a system that currently works for some, but doesn’t for too many others. Like a captain on the front lines in Afghanistan, you are the front-line soldiers in the most important battle our nation faces now: the battle to educate and prepare our next generation of leaders.

Just as we need to mobilize leaders and resources around our battles overseas, the same must be done to help our children navigate their journeys into adulthood.

We are all familiar with the disturbing statistics of low graduation and high dropout rates in our nation’s public schools. And with more than 50 percent of marriages failing in today’s society, and single-parent households the norm in many inner-city communities, children lack the guidance that the family structure once provided. I am sure we are all alarmed that, in today’s world, young men of color are more likely to be in prison than in college. For too many in our nation, particularly those who live in our most precarious areas, a broken school system serves as a precursor to entry into the juvenile justice system. But I believe this is a problem we can—and must—tackle.

Studies show that students from low-income communities can and do achieve at high levels when they are given the resources and attention they deserve. And there are amazing educators and civic leaders who are already leading the charge with impressive steam. I know the fixes aren’t simple, nor are they cheap. But there are a few things to remember: The answer isn’t simply spending more money; it is to spend money wisely with a focus on the children we intend to serve. The costs of inaction are unbearably high when you consider that it costs nearly $200,000 to incarcerate someone in New York, while a recent Columbia University study shows that cutting the dropout rate in half would yield $45 billion annually in both new federal tax revenues and cost savings.

Promising reforms that embrace alternative teaching platforms, teacher pay systems based on performance, and the inspired $4.35 billion in “Race to the Top” funds that the Obama administration has allocated are tremendous, but a national embrace of innovation and policy change is imperative.

We will need fortitude and ingenuity as we embark on the education reform battle of our lifetime.

The chance to raise expectations, the opportunity for our children to do better than their parents, and the need to translate the experience of young students into the dreams of a nation must now drive us all.

Just as it was imperative for my fellow soldiers and I to win our fights, the same can be said for you and the work you are doing. As President Obama recently expressed, “The future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens.” I could not agree more.

Wes Moore

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LIFE STORIES—MEMOIR, BIOGRAPHY, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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ENRIQUE’S JOURNEY The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother

Website: www.EnriquesJourney.com Author Video: tiny.cc/r8f4qw

By Sonia Nazario A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age hen Enrique was just five years old, his mother Lourdes, seeing no other way out of their poverty in Honduras, decided to make the hazardous trek north. Enrique and his siblings struggled without their mother, until Enrique finally made his way from the rough streets of Tegucigalpa, through Mexico, and across the dangerous Texan border. Journalist Sonia Nazario’s expert reporting allows students to encounter each setback alongside Enrique, and the result is as suspenseful and harrowing as it is informative.

Enrique’s Journey is a timely account of one anguished family’s experience with an issue of international scope and urgency— illegal immigration—but it is also the timeless, mythic story of a dangerous journey undertaken to make a broken family whole.

W

“This portrait of poverty and family ties has the potential to reshape American conversations about immigration.”

—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

ADOPTION NOTES:

“A stirring and troubling book about a magnificent journey . . .

Joseph Campbell would recognize Enrique’s Journey. It’s the stuff of myth . . . [but] Enrique’s Journey is true. . . . A microcosm of the massive exodus pouring over the borders of our nations . . .

Enrique’s suffering and bravery become universal, and one cannot fail to be moved by the desperation and sheer strength of spirit that guides these lonely wanderers. . . . Enrique’s Journey is about love. It’s about family. It’s about home. . . . The border will continue to trouble the dreams of anyone who is paying attention. . . .

Enrique’s Journey is among the best border books yet written.”

—The Washington Post Book World

Selected for Common Reading at more than 100 colleges including: Texas A&M University; University of North Carolina, Charlotte; and University of Wisconsin, Madison.

To view the complete list, go to tiny.cc/5212nw

“Gripping and harrowing . . . a story begging to be told . . . readers fed up with the ongoing turf wars between fact and fiction, take note: Here is fantastic stunt reporting that places this sometimes hard-to-believe story squarely in the realm of nonfiction.”

—The Christian Science Monitor

Disciplines: Ethnic Studies—Latin American; Sociology

Also available in a Young Readers Edition:

Random House | TR | 978-0-8129-7178-1 | 336pp. $16.00/$19.95 | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: e-Book: 978-1-58836-602-3 | $11.99/$13.99 Can.

Themes: Coming of Age; Immigration; Social Justice Campus Visits: Alternative Formats:

ENRIQUE’S JOURNEY The True Story of a Boy Determined to Reunite with His Mother

By Sonia Nazario

Available in Español

Delacorte Books for Young Readers | HC | 978-0-385-74327-3 | 288pp. $16.99/$18.99 Can. | Exam Copy: $8.50 e-Book: 978-0-307-98315-2 | $10.99/$12.99 Can.

About the Author: Sonia Nazario SONIA NAZARIO has spent twenty years reporting and writing about social issues, most recently as a projects reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her stories have addressed some of this country’s most intractable problems: hunger, drug addiction, and immigration. She has won numerous national journalism and book awards. Nazario is a graduate of Williams College and has a master’s degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

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A Message from the Author This story began with a conversation I had in my kitchen with Carmen, who came to clean my house twice a month.

I asked Carmen: did she want to have more children? Carmen, normally happy, suddenly fell silent and started sobbing.

She told me she left four children behind in Guatemala. Struggling as a single mother, most days she couldn’t feed her children more than once, maybe twice a day; at night they would cry with hunger.

So she left them with their grandmother, came to work in the U.S., and sent money home. She hadn’t seen them in twelve years.

I soon learned Carmen’s story was incredibly common; millions of single mothers had left children behind when they came to the U.S. I also learned that, after five or ten years of absence, a small army of these children was heading north alone every year, in search of their mothers.

I wrote about this through the true story of Enrique, who hadn’t seen his mother in eleven years.

Like most of these children, Enrique went on a modern-day odyssey to reach the U.S., crossing Mexico on top of freight trains, braving bandits, gangsters, corrupt cops, and more, in a desperate bid to reach his mother. To tell Enrique’s story, I spent half a year retracing his journey, riding through Mexico on top of seven freight trains.

Since its publication, educators have been drawn to this story in ways I could have never imagined.

Thus far, nearly fifty universities and scores of high schools have used Enrique’s Journey as their common read. Educators say the story is compelling, a page-turner, and students often say, “This is the first book I have read cover to cover. I couldn’t put it down.” Students see Enrique in themselves because, in coming to college, many have left their families for the first time. They relate to a boy who steels himself with great determination to get through difficult circumstances.

Professors teaching the book in disciplines as diverse as Sociology, Spanish, English, History, and Mathematics tell me that Enrique’s story provides the most intense cross-disciplinary discussions they have had in their classrooms. The book broaches critical values: family, love, survival, diversity, racism, violence, drugs, redemption, and determination. It shows students that an issue often presented in black and white is instead highly complex, with many shades of grey.

A student in Arizona told me he was raised a white supremacist in South Africa and a skinhead in Arizona. He said he had known little about immigrants before, but he hated them. Enrique’s Journey and class discussions had changed his views. I get emails from students with similar stories every week.

The greatest testament to students’ engagement is that so many of them become determined to better the situation described in Enrique’s Journey. They resolve to address what pushes so many migrants to leave their home countries. They start micro-loan programs. They build schools. They change their personal buying habits, purchasing fair trade coffee and clothing. Some students and staff members even change career paths to dedicate their lives to helping people like Enrique. One Indiana University staffer was so moved to help that she quit her job and opened a café in Honduras to create jobs for ten people there.

Through a simple narrative, Enrique’s Journey engages both students and staff to think more globally, promotes active discussion, and prompts action. One Texas student might have stated this most clearly when he said, “Never has a non-fiction book so strongly engaged my imagination and emotions. Never before has a book inspired me to use what talent I do possess . . . to make a difference in the world.”

Sonia Nazario

www.CommonReads.com

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Spotlight on: John Elder Robison JOHN ELDER ROBISON is the author of two previous books, Look Me in the Eye and Be Different, and he lectures widely on autism and neurological differences. An adjunct professor at Elms College, he also serves on committees and review boards for the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and Autism Speaks. A machinery enthusiast and avid photographer, Robison lives in Amherst, MA with his family, animals, and machines.

RAISING CUBBY A Father and Son’s Adventures with Asperger’s, Trains, Tractors, and High Explosives

J

ohn Elder Robison has openly and humorously engaged readers about his Asperger’s syndrome in his previous books (Look Me in the Eye, Be Different).

In this memoir, he writes about parenting as an adult with Asperger’s—and coming to the realization that his son, Cubby, also has Asperger’s, as Robinson’s past experiences of rebellion against authority and resistance to school are acted out once again by Cubby. Together, father and son learn to navigate the world around them, despite how inscrutable it can seem to them at times. This is a unique perspective on Asperger’s syndrome across generations and within families.

Crown | HC | 978-0-307-88484-8 | 384pp. | $26.00/NCR | Exam Copy: $13.00 Also available: Audio CD: 978-0-307-88135-9 | $40.00/$46.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-307-88136-6 | $20.00/$24.00 Can. • e-Book: 978-0-307-88486-2 | $12.99/NCR Discipline: Psychology Themes: Discovering Differences • Identity

LOOK ME IN THE EYE: My Life with Asperger’s

A

ccording to author John Elder Robison, Look Me in the Eye is about “growing up with Asperger’s syndrome—a high-functioning form of autism—overcoming my limitations, and ultimately becoming a successful adult.”

“John Robison’s book is an immensely affecting account of a life lived according to his gifts rather than his limitations. His story provides ample evidence for my belief that individuals on the autistic spectrum are just as capable of rich and productive lives as anyone else.”

—Daniel Tammet, author of Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant Selected for Common Reading at Defiance College; Moncalm Community College; SUNY Potsdam; and others.

Broadway | TR | 978-0-307-39618-1 | 320pp. | $14.95/$16.95 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: Audio DL: 978-1-4159-4246-8 | $22.50/$29.95 • e-Book: 978-0-307-40572-2 | $11.99/$13.99 Can. Discipline: Psychology Themes: Coming of Age • Discovering Differences • Identity

Also by John Elder Robison

BE DIFFERENT My Adventures with Asperger’s and My Advice for Fellow Aspergians, Misfits, Families, and Teachers Broadway | TR | 978-0-307-88482-4 | 304pp. | $14.00/NCR | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: Audio CD: 978-0-307-88131-1 | $32.00/$37.00 Can. • Audio DL: 978-0-307-88132-8 | $17.50/$19.50 Can. e-Book: 978-0-307-88483-1 | $11.99/NCR Discipline: Psychology • Themes: Discovering Differences • Identity

Websites: www.JohnRobison.com • www.JERobison.blogspot.com www.facebook.com/JohnElderRobison • www.twitter.com/JohnRobison/John-Robison To view the author’s talk at the 2009 First-Year Experience® Conference, go to: tiny.cc/2k6kkw

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A Message from the Author The Loch Ness Monster isn’t real. Dinosaurs are extinct. And no, kids can’t fly. That’s the sort of thing we all got from our parents. Every time we heard something fun and imaginative, it seemed like Mom or Dad was there to pop our balloon.

What if that didn’t happen? What if Dad agreed with every childhood fantasy and offered to go hunt Nessie in a boat, with a harpoon? That’s exactly what I decided to do when I got a shot at parenthood with a six-pound tyke I named Cubby. When my little boy began asking questions, I kept my mind open to the possibilities and seized every fun and interesting opportunity that came our way.

We hunted dinosaurs, talked to penguins, and drove freight trains and tugboats all over New England. I told him stories about nuclear horses, pine demons, and dragons. We even went cruising in Chairman Mao’s Mercedes-Benz limousine.

As I showed Cubby time and again, things are not always as they seem. That moving speck in the sky . . . it might be an airplane. But it could also be a bird. It might even be a giant flying lizard, far, far away. Cubby and I talked about the world as it was, and as we imagined it. My son learned to question what he saw and what people told him. He became his own person—an independent thinker—at a very early age.

Cubby and I both have Asperger’s syndrome—a form of autism. Some call autism a different way of being, and the way I raised Cubby might be the ultimate embodiment of that. We think differently, we act differently, and we raise kids differently. The proof is in my new book, Raising Cubby, which tells the story of how I went about being a dad. I’m willing to bet it’s very different from any other parenting memoirs you’ve read.

Of course, the book tells Cubby’s story too. By the time he was seventeen my son had parlayed his thinking skills into what one scientist called “a post-doctoral understanding of the physics of explosives.” He dropped out of high school because the courses weren’t interesting, and enrolled in college where he could study chemistry. A few months later, Cubby’s love of science led to a visit from the ATF after video of his experiments attracted unfavorable attention online. As they were carrying chemicals out of his lab, the Federal agent in charge turned to me and said, “Mister Robison, the U.S. government has no criminal interest in your son. We just want to clean this up and make it safe.

Somewhere in the U.S., every year, we find a Boy Scout genius with a chemistry set, and this is your year.”

If only it had ended there. Unfortunately, a publicity-hungry prosecutor saw a chance to make a name for herself, saving the community from a so-called terrorist, even though the only terrorist was the one she’d dreamt up in her mind. Before long, Cubby had been charged with multiple felonies and faced up to sixty years in prison when, as far as I could see, his only “crimes” had been inquisitiveness and not thinking through how his actions might appear to others. The good news is that when Cubby’s case went to trial, the community rallied round him, and the courtroom overflowed with friends and supporters. Their support buoyed us through five long days of trial, after which my son walked out of the courthouse with his head held high and a bright future ahead.

I hope Raising Cubby will inspire students to see that there are many paths to success, and that oddball traits or interests might in fact lead to our best opportunities. I also hope it will inspire communities to embrace their misfits and understand how much they have to offer. For a very long time, neither Cubby nor I ever quite fit in. We dealt with other people in odd ways, had interests that verged on obsession, and we often didn’t have a clue how others perceived us. This is the story of how each of us found his place in the world, how we came to see ourselves as different rather than defective, and of how we discovered that even those of us on the autism spectrum have something unique to offer.

John Elder Robison

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OUTCASTS UNITED An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make a Difference

By Warren St. John

Website: www.OutcastsUnited.com Author Video: tiny.cc/4fg4qw To view the author’s talk at the 2010 First-Year Experience® Conference, go to: tiny.cc/khg4qw

O

utcasts United is the story of a refugee soccer team, a remarkable woman coach, and a small southern town turned upside down by the process of refugee resettlement.

In the 1990s, that town, Clarkston, Georgia, became a resettlement center for refugees and a modern-day Ellis Island for scores of families from war zones in Liberia, Congo, Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The town also became home to Luma Mufleh, an American-educated Jordanian woman who founded a youth soccer team to help keep Clarkston’s boys off the streets. These boys named themselves the Fugees—short for refugees.

Outcasts United follows a pivotal season in the lives of the Fugees, their families, and their charismatic coach, as they struggle to build new lives in a fading town overwhelmed by change. Theirs is a story about resilience in the face of extraordinary hardship, the power of one person to make a difference, and the daunting challenge of creating community in a place where people seem to have so little in common.

Spiegel & Grau | TR | 978-0-385-52204-5 | 336pp. $15.00/$18.95 | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: Audio CD: 978-0-7393-6617-2 | $29.95/$34.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-1-4159-4893-4 | $20.00/$23.00 Can. e-Book: 978-0-385-52959-4 | $13.99/$13.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Selected for Common Reading at more than 50 colleges including: Georgia Institute of Technology; Springfield College; and University of Florida.

To view the complete list, go to tiny.cc/barfrw Disciplines: Humanitarianism; Physical Education/Sports; Sociology

“I had several requests off-line to share my experiences using Outcasts United by Warren St. John with our freshman seminar course. As this book just came out this year, Georgia Tech was one of the first universities to use it, so I am happy to share my thoughts. . . . I would HIGHLY recommend this book for use in a first-year seminar or reading program. The response from our students and faculty was incredibly positive, and Warren’s presentation to our students was outstanding.”

—Steven P. Giradot, Director, Office of Success Programs, Georgia Institute of Technology “Not merely about soccer, St. John’s book teaches readers about the social and economic difficulties of adapting to a new culture and the challenges facing a town with a new and disparate population. Despite their cultural and religious differences and the difficulty of adaptation, the Fugees came together to play soccer.

This wonderful, poignant book is highly recommended . . . ” —Library Journal, starred review

Themes: Discovering Differences; Group Dynamics; Immigration

Also Available in a Young Readers Edition:

OUTCASTS UNITED The Story of a Refugee Soccer Team That Changed a Town

Campus Visits: Discussion Guide Available: Alternative Formats:

By Warren St. John Delacorte Books for Young Readers | HC | 978-0-385-74194-1 240pp. | $16.99/$19.99 Can. | Exam Copy: $8.50 e-Book: 978-0-375-98880-6 | $10.99/$10.99 Can.

About the Author: Warren St. John WARREN ST. JOHN is a reporter for the New York Times and the author of the national bestseller Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer.

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A Message from the Author For the better part of a hundred years, Clarkston, Georgia—a community of 7,100 on one square mile of land east of downtown Atlanta—was a mostly white town where little of interest happened. In the early 1990’s, the town was designated as a resettlement center for refugees from around the world, and refugees poured in from Southeast Asia, the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East. In less than a decade, little Clarkston, Georgia transformed into one of the most diverse communities in the country.

Outcasts United is the story of this town, told through the lens of a soccer team of refugee boys called the Fugees, a team founded and coached by an American-educated, Jordanianborn volunteer named Luma Mufleh. The team and its remarkable coach ultimately provide the rest of us with powerful lessons about how to create community in places where everyone is different.

The Fugees are a paradigm of the modern-day freshman class or student body. A group of boys from an extraordinary range of backgrounds have come together in a new place and face the challenge of forging alliances and creating a new community. But through lessons taught by the coach and derived from their own experiences, the boys manage to identify common goals that override their significant cultural differences.

A nuanced and realistic approach to discussing diversity. The drama of the Fugees’ soccer season offers a way into a more complex and nuanced discussion about diversity that is not doctrinaire or simplistic. The book does not gloss over the challenges posed by diverse communities, but does offer positive, real-world examples in which people in Clarkston have turned diversity into an asset.

Expands students’ horizons. Though set in Clarkston, Georgia, Outcasts United traces the origins of the conflicts that caused the refugees of Clarkston to flee their homes in the first place, in order to contextualize the refugee experience. Students learn about conflicts in Liberia, Bosnia and Kosovo, Burundi and Congo, among others. In addition, students gain valuable insights into the struggle of other young people to assimilate into a new culture.

The importance and rewards of service. The example of Coach Luma proves the adage that one person can make a difference. With no formal training in social work and with little outside support, she identified a profound local need and single-handedly took the initiative to help meet it. In the process, she found herself with a new family that valued and appreciated her for her efforts and kindness.

Strong female role model. Luma herself offers a powerful role-model for female students.

A lone female coach in a league of male coaches, she is determined—sometimes stubborn— clever and, above all, passionate on behalf of her players and their families. And through force-of-will she takes on local prejudices and political intransigence that works against the refugees.

Having already been selected by several universities and communities within just the first year of its publication, Outcasts United has already spoken to thousands of students. I hope to have the opportunity to bring the book’s message to your school as well.

Warren St. John

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LIFE STORIES—MEMOIR, BIOGRAPHY, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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READY PLAYER ONE

Website: www.ReadyPlayerOne.com Author Video: tiny.cc/2ng4qw To view the author’s talk at the 2013 First-Year Experience® Conference, go to: tinyurl.com/mf5qowk

A Novel

By Ernest Cline

Winner of the ALA Alex Award A School Library Journal “Best Adult Book 4 Teens”

I

t’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place. Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where one can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is part quest and part love story, and is filled with informative trivia on the trends and fashions of the 1980s. It is ideal for freshmen students as they, like Wade, begin their own college quests.

Broadway | TR | 978-0-307-88744-3 | 384pp. $14.00/$17.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: Audio CD: 978-0-307-91314-2 | $40.00/$45.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-307-91315-9 | $22.50/$25.50 Can. e-Book: 978-0-307-88745-0 | $9.99/$9.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Selected for Common Reading: Kansas State University; University of Massachusetts Amherst; and One Book One Middletown (Connecticut) Discipline: Literature Themes: Fiction; Coming of Age Campus Visits:

“An exuberantly realized, exciting, and sweet-natured cyber-quest.

Cline’s imaginative and rollicking coming-of-age geek saga has a smash-hit vibe.”

—Booklist (starred review) “Ernie Cline emerged from a Back to the Future DeLorean to the thunderous applause of over four thousand freshmen at UMass Amherst’s Convocation this year. His address to the Class of 2016 was an entertaining combination of self-depreciating humor and personal reflection. Ready Player One, the chosen common read book for this year’s new students at UMass Amherst, dealt with the allure of the virtual world of video games and its benefits but also the irreplaceable authenticity of human exchanges in reality. Later on, hundreds of freshmen engaged in common read discussions of this book in small groups with university faculty, discussing everything from the dystopian future to eco-sustainability. Ready Player One is more than a paperback adventure story; it unites the past and present under an overarching concern about technology’s place in our future.”

—Jeanne Horrigan, Director of New Students Orientation, University of Massachusetts Amherst

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About the Author: Ernest Cline ERNEST CLINE is a spoken-word artist, screenwriter, and unrepentant geek best known for creating the cult film Fanboys. Ready Player One is his first novel.

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A Message from the Author The reception my novel Ready Player One has received has been, quite simply, beyond any debut author’s wildest dreams. Much to my amazement, the book spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, showed up on several Best of 2011 lists, and is even in development as a big-budget movie with Warner Bros.

But the facet of Ready Player One’s success I’ve found the most surprising—and gratifying—is how much younger readers love the book. More precisely, they seem to be enjoying it not just as a big dumb adventure story. They’re actually thinking about the chewier issues I was thinking about as I wrote it.

You see, Ready Player One is in part a love letter to the books, video games, movies, TV shows, and music of my childhood. Although I knew these artifacts would resonate with readers of my generation, I was never sure how younger readers (with no memory of the Big Hair Decade) would respond to them, or if they would respond to them at all.

But since last August, I’ve found dozens of wonderful messages in my inbox from teenage readers who tell me Ready Player One is their new favorite book. I’ve been equally thrilled to hear that Ready Player One was a 2012 Alex Award winner, and that it was been selected as the common read for the 2012 freshman class at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

For some of the teenage readers I’ve heard from, the eighties pop culture in the book seems to work a lot like the references to ancient mythology in an Indiana Jones movie—you don’t have to be familiar with them to enjoy the quest. But better still, many of them read the book with a Web browser open, looking up the references as they go. And it seems that for every teen who gets excited about the Atari 2600 or sticks Ladyhawke in her Netflix queue as a result, there’s another who comes across my loving references to authors like Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K. Dick and gets inspired to pick up a classic and, you know, actually read it.

I have a confession to make here: while I never thought it would actually happen, I did always secretly hope that teenage readers would get Ready Player One. I wrote it as the kind of classic good-vsevil, underdog-triumphs-over-all adventure story that I loved reading as a teen. And—also in emulation of my favorite books—I tried to make it touch on some more serious themes too. In short, I tried to write the kind of book I wish I’d been assigned back when I was wearing pegged acid-washed jeans—a book that picks you up and grabs you with spaceships or wizards, with great action or an amazing love story, but sneakily manages to leave you with something more meaningful to chew on as well.

Ready Player One takes place in a near future where all-too-plausible social horrors like poverty, disease, and energy crises have run rampant, and I think—or hope—there’s something thoughtprovoking about seeing our futures portrayed that way. Its hero is a loner who’s pretty much given up on the ugliness he sees in the real world and taken refuge in a virtual one—but by the end of the book, he learns that escapism isn’t the panacea he thinks it is, which is a lesson I figured out the hard way growing up. And at the very center of the story is the role technology plays in our modern lives and how it shapes modern identity. I think that subject in particular really resonates with readers who, in the course of growing up themselves, are finding their own identities increasingly defined by the virtual worlds of Facebook, Twitter, and the Web. If I had a time-traveling DeLorean, the first thing I’d do with it is head back to 1986 Ohio and give a copy of Ready Player One to my own teenage self, because the truth is, I really wrote it for him. Sadly, the flux capacitor on my DeLorean isn’t operational, so the closest I can come to fulfilling that dream is asking you to consider the book for your incoming freshman’s FYE. Ernest Cline

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THE DINNER A Novel

By Herman Koch

S

ince its initial publication in Holland in 2009, Herman Koch’s psychologically astute and philosophically challenging The Dinner has become a much-discussed international best-seller.

Two couples meet for dinner at a high-end restaurant in Amsterdam to address a tragic event: a terrible crime has been committed, and it seems the two fifteen-year-old sons of the two couples are implicated. A police investigation is under way, and the comfortable, insulated worlds of the families are coming apart at the seams. Over the course of the meal, and the novel, civility and friendship disintegrate, as the parents make clear what they are willing to do to protect their children from the consequences of their actions.

This controversial tale of families struggling to make the hardest decision of their lives exposes philosophical and social hypocrisies in which we are all, to a degree, complicit. The popularity of the book speaks to the universal nature of the ethical dilemmas it examines: How far would you go to protect a loved one, even if he or she has committed an unspeakably horrible act?

Hogarth | HC | 978-0-7704-3785-5 | 304pp. $24.00/$28.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $12.00 Do not order paperback before 11/5/2013.

Hogarth | TR | 978-0-385-34685-6 | 304pp. $14.00/$16.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also Available: e-Book: | 978-0-385-34684-9 | $11.99/$12.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Disciplines: Literature; Psychology

The book is relevant to adolescent readers in that it explores the dark side of connectivity, including YouTube and texting, as well as the generation gap between young people and their parents.

The book ultimately forces the reader to confront his or her own deeply held convictions and moral values.

“This chilling novel starts out as a witty look at contemporary manners . . . before turning into a take-no-prisoners psychological thriller. . . . With dark humor, Koch dramatizes the lengths to which people will go to preserve a comfortable way of life . . . this is a cunningly crafted thriller that will never allow you to look at a serviette in the same way again.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Themes: Fiction; Literature; Philosophy (Ethics) Alternative Formats:

About the Author: Herman Koch HERMAN KOCH is the author of seven novels and three collections of short stories. The Dinner, his sixth novel, has been published in 25 countries, and was the winner of the Publieksprijs Prize in 2009.

He currently lives in Amsterdam.

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©Mark Kohn, Hollandse Hoogte

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Excerpt from The Dinner

I looked at my wife. In my thoughts I egged her on, to deliver my brother the coup de grâce. He had set it up, and she could knock it in, as they say. It was just too ghastly, the way he tried to inject his own party platform into a normal discussion about people and the differences between them. Improvement . . . a word, nothing more: crap dished up for the constituency. “I’m not talking about improvement, Serge,” Claire said. “I’m talking about the way we—Dutch people, white people, Europeans— look at other cultures. The things we’re afraid of. If a group of dark-skinned men was coming toward you down the sidewalk, wouldn’t you feel a stronger urge to cross the street if they were wearing baseball caps, rather than neat clothing? Like yours and mine? Or like diplomats? Or office clerks?”

“I never cross the street. I believe we should approach every one as equals. You mentioned the things we’re afraid of. I agree with you about that. If we would just stop being afraid, then we could go on to cultivate more understanding for each other.”

“Serge, I’m not some debating partner you need to wow with hollow terms like improvement and understanding. I’m your sister-in-law, your brother’s wife. It’s just the four of us here now. As friends. As family.”

Copyright © 2012 by Herman Koch. From the book The Dinner published by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Reprinted with permission.

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FICTION TO TALK ABOUT

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THE TIGER’S WIFE

Website: www.TeaObreht.com Author Video: tiny.cc/nthbrw

A Novel

By Téa Obreht

Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction National Book Award Finalist A New York Times Notable Book (“10 Best”) A Library Journal Best Book (Top Ten) A School Library Journal ”Best Adult Book 4 Teens” An ALA Notable Book for Adults (Fiction)

W

Random House | TR | 978-0-385-34384-8 | 368pp. $15.00/$17.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: Audio: 978-0-307-87700-0 | $40.00/$45.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-307-87701-7 | $22.50/$25.50 Can. e-Book: 978-0-679-60436-5 | $11.99/$12.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Selected for Common Reading: Georgetown University and New York University Disciplines: History; Literature Themes: Fiction; Identity; Regional: Balkans Campus Visits:

eaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker’s twenty best American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation. In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia Stefanovi, a young doctor, is offering medical care to the children in an orphanage when she is informed of her grandfather’s sudden death. She is distraught, given that she had a particularly close relationship with her grandfather, and the circumstances surrounding his death are shrouded in mystery and uncertainty.

She crosses the border to visit the place he died, and begins to think back on the tales he often told her of the village he grew up in.

Some of these tales are of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man,” who never seems to age. But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—how, after being bombed by the Germans in 1941, the zoo of a nearby city was destroyed, and its resident tiger escaped, eventually befriending a deaf-mute woman trapped in an abusive marriage. This narrative, evolving and weaving its way across the novel, is the legend of the tiger’s wife.

The Tiger’s Wife is a meditation on family, history, and how families bear the weight of myth, memory, and trauma across generations.

“Ms. Obreht creates an indelible sense of place, a world, like the Balkans, haunted by its past and struggling to sort out its future, its imagination shaped by stories handed down generation to generation; its people torn between ancient beliefs and the imperatives of what should be a more rational present. In doing so, Ms. Obreht has not only made a precocious debut, but she has also written a richly textured and searing novel.”

—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

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About the Author: Téa Obreht TÉA OBREHT was born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia in 1985 and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 Under 35. Téa Obreht lives in New York.

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©Beowulf Sheehan

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A Note from Georgetown University

In August, Téa Obreht was honored as this year’s Marino Family International Writers’ Academic Workshop author at Georgetown University. The Marino Family International Writers’ Academic Workshop has been taking place at Georgetown since 1995 and has featured authors such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Margaret Atwood, Dinaw Mengestu (a Georgetown alumnus), and Orhan Pamuk. The Workshop serves as students’ introduction to the academic life at Georgetown and is an integral part of the freshman experience. It affirms Georgetown’s commitment to the highest academic standards and adds a significant international cultural dimension to the academic formation of Georgetown students.

Obreht’s talk with the Class of 2016 during New Student Orientation included thoughts about her writing process. Though her debut novel The Tiger’s Wife officially took her three years to write, she said, she realized that she had been writing the book her entire life. She discussed how her own stories, drawn from her childhood in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious household and from the many places she had lived, impacted her writing. Through her writing process, she came to understand that a narrative arc occurs in life as well as in writing, and that everything is connected, even if the connections aren’t immediately apparent.

Her lecture was followed by a lively question and answer session with the students, who were interested in learning more about everything from the meaning of the symbols in the book, to the origin of the mythological characters, to how the story relates to Obreht’s own experiences. Many of the questions focused on the actual mechanics of writing The Tiger’s Wife: How do you separate your fiction from your own life? Why do even minor characters have such detailed histories? How do you write such a neutral novel about an area so rife with political and ethnic tensions? Obreht’s candid responses provided valuable insights to the class of young scholars, which surely included a few aspiring novelists.

After the lecture, the students broke into small discussion groups led by faculty mentors to comment on and debate the novel’s premises, challenge one another’s interpretations, and discuss their questions. To the pleasure of a handful of lucky students and faculty members, Obreht attended a few of the discussion sections to meet the students and answer a few more questions. Students and mentors alike were thrilled with the selection of The Tiger’s Wife and Obreht’s presentation.

Jennifer Smith, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University

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BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

By Katherine Boo

Website: www.BehindTheBeautifulForevers.com Author Video: www.BehindTheBeautifulForevers.com/video

Winner of the National Book Award; National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist; Named One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, The Washington Post, among others; and an ALA Notable Book n this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter— Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”

But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.

With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.

I

Random House | HC | 978-1-4000-6755-8 | 288pp. $27.00/$32.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $13.50 Do not order paperback before 1/28/2014.

Random House | TR | 978-0-8129-7932-9 | 288pp. $16.00/$18.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: Audio CD: 978-0-307-93405-5 | $35.00/$41.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-307-93406-2 | $17.50/$20.50 Can. e-Book: 978-0-679-64395-1 | $13.99/$15.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Selected for Common Reading: Michigan State University; Northeastern University; Skidmore College; and University of Delaware Disciplines: Journalism; Political Science; Sociology Themes: Group Dynamics; Human Rights; Regional: India Campus Visits: Discussion Guide Available: Alternative Formats:

“I couldn’t put Behind the Beautiful Forevers down even when I wanted to—when the misery, abuse and filth that Boo so elegantly and understatedly describes became almost overwhelming. Her book, situated in a slum on the edge of Mumbai’s international airport, is one of the most powerful indictments of economic inequality I’ve ever read.”

—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed “There is a lot to like about this book: the prodigious research that it is built on, distilled so expertly that we hardly notice how much we are being taught; the graceful and vivid prose that never calls attention to itself; and above all, the true and moving renderings of the people of the Mumbai slum called Annawadi. Garbage pickers and petty thieves, victims of gruesome injustice—Ms. Boo draws us into their lives, and they do not let us go. This is a superb book.”

—Tracy Kidder, author of Mountains Beyond Mountains and Strength in What Remains

About the Author: Katherine Boo KATHERINE BOO is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post. She is the winner of a MacArthur “genius” award, a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and the Pulitzer Prize. She has divided her time between the U.S. and India for 10 years. This is her first book.

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©Helen Welvaart

HISTORY AND SOCIETY

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A Message from the Author As jobs and capital whip around the planet, college students will graduate into a world where economic instability and social inequality are increasing and geographic boundaries matter less and less. Unfortunately, globalization and social inequality remain two of the most over-theorized, under-reported issues of our age. My book is an intimate investigative account of how this volatile new reality affects the young people of an Indian slum called Annawadi.

Like young people elsewhere, the Annawadians are trying to figure out their place in a world where temp jobs are becoming the norm, adaptability is everything, and bewildering change is the one abiding constant.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers took me three hard years to report, and one thought that sustained me was that I had a unique opportunity to show American readers that the distance between themselves and, say, a teenaged boy in Mumbai who finds an entrepreneurial niche in other people’s garbage, is not nearly as great as they might think. In the two decades I’ve spent writing about poverty and how people get out of it, I’ve come to believe, viscerally, that there are deep connections among individuals that transcend specificities of geography, culture, religion, or class. The problem is that, in a time of high walls and security gates, it’s getting harder for people of means to grasp the struggles of less privileged people.

Behind one such high wall, near the increasingly glamorous Mumbai airport, a sensitive girl is studying Othello in a makeshift hut by a vast sewage lake and dreading an arranged marriage that might send her to a rural village. A convention-defying disabled woman is longing to be acknowledged as a valid human being. A smart teenaged boy named Mirchi is resisting the garbage-recycling work that is his family trade. Instead he dreams of being a waiter at a fancy hotel, sticking toothpicks into cubes of cheese. “Watch me,” he snaps at his mother one day. “I’ll have a bathroom as big as this hut!” Over the course of time, as Mirchi and the other residents of the slum apply their imaginations to overcoming corruption and injustice and making better lives for themselves, the broader contours of the market-global age are gradually revealed.

Although I’m elated when readers join me in thinking about how to build a fairer world for people, I don’t consider didactic lectures an effective way to engage people—particularly young people—in questions about fairness and justice. Nor do I think young people want mawkishly sentimental or sensationalized nonfiction. Stereotypes put them off, and they know when they’re being manipulated. What they want, in my experience, is good, concrete information from which they can work out what they think for themselves.

With a combination of extensive observation and documents-based reporting, I try to pull the reader in close to the lives and dilemmas of the poor while unfolding a story that is powerful and honest enough to keep readers turning the pages. By the last page, I’d like to believe that some young readers will also find themselves wrestling with essential questions of our time: about how opportunity is distributed across the world; about what an individual should be willing to give up to get ahead; about the interconnections between, say, the collapse of investment banks in Manhattan and the price Mumbai waste-pickers receive for their empty plastic water bottles; about whether it is possible to be good and moral in a society that is not good and moral; and about the ultimate value of a human life.

Katherine Boo

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HISTORY AND SOCIETY

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HISTORY AND SOCIETY

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QUIET The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

By Susan Cain

Website: www.ThePowerOfIntroverts.com Author Video: tiny.cc/qpi4qw To view the author’s talk at the 2013 First-Year Experience® Conference, go to: tinyurl.com/mdsnajt

An ALA Notable Book for 2012 Named a “Best Book of 2012” by Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal

A

Broadway | TR | 978-0-307-35215-6 | 368pp. $16.00/$18.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: Audio CD: 978-0-7393-4124-7 | $40.00/$46.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-1-4159-5913-8 | $20.00/$24.00 Can. e-Book: 978-0-307-45220-7 | $11.99/$13.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Selected for Common Reading: Case Western Reserve University and Rice University Disciplines: Business; College Success Studies; Education; Psychology & Counseling; Sociology Themes: Communication; Discovering Differences; Inclusion; Success Campus Visits: Discussion Guide Available: Alternative Formats:

t least one-third of the people we encounter are introverts.

They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking, reading to partying; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over brainstorming in teams. Although they are often labeled “quiet,” it is to introverts we owe many of the great contributions to society—from Van Gogh’s Sunflowers to the invention of the personal computer.

Passionately argued, impressively researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet shows how dramatically we undervalue introverts, and how much we lose in doing so. Susan Cain charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal over the twentieth century and explores its far-reaching effects—how it influences everything from how parishioners worship to who excels at Harvard Business School. And she draws on cutting-edge research on the biology and psychology of temperament to reveal how introverts can modulate their personalities according to circumstance, how to empower an introverted child, and how companies can harness the natural talents of introverts. This extraordinary book has the power to permanently change how we see introverts, and, equally important, how they see themselves.

“Cain’s intelligence, respect for research, and vibrant prose put Quiet in an elite class with the best books from Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Pink, and other masters of psychological non-fiction.”

—Teresa Amabile, Professor, Harvard Business School “Susan Cain’s Quiet is superb. Based on meticulous research, it is a compelling reflection on how the Extrovert Ideal shapes our lives and why this is deeply unsettling. It will open up a new and different conversation on how the personal is political.”

—Brian R. Little, Ph.D., Distinguished Scholar, Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, Cambridge University “The talk Susan Cain gave at our school was the best that I have heard in my fifteen years as Dean of two leading business schools.

She also drew a record number of attendees. I have used Quiet in all the classes I teach, and one year, in my graduation remarks as well. It is also frequently referenced by nearly all the members of our administrative team.”

—Mark Zupan, Dean of Simon Graduate School of Business at the University of Rochester

About the Author: Susan Cain SUSAN CAIN is a writer whose articles on introversion and shyness have appeared in the New York Times; The Atlantic; on Time.com; and on PsychologyToday.com. Her 2012 TED talk has been viewed more than three million times. Cain graduated with honors from Princeton University and Harvard Law School.

For Cain’s TED talk, go to: tiny.cc/qpi4qw.

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A Message from the Author I first thought about the powers and challenges of introversion some twenty-six years ago, when I began my freshman year at Princeton University.

From the minute I set foot on campus, I saw that college could be an extraordinary place for introverts and extroverts alike. A place where you were expected to spend your time reading and writing. A place where it was cool to talk about ideas. A place where you could create your own brand of social life. If you were an introvert, you could find friends with common interests and enjoy their company one-on-one or in small groups; if you were an extrovert, the social possibilities were endless, just the way extroverts like them.

I was an introvert, and I thrived.

Not that it was always easy. At Princeton, as on many campuses, many social and academic structures seemed designed for extroverts. I wondered why the cafeteria was arranged so that the large circular tables, where the most gregarious students sat, were located near the sunny windows, while the booths for quieter chats were off in the shadowy margins of the room. I wondered whether any of my classmates longed to munch on a sandwich behind a newspaper as I did, instead of being expected to participate in a social free-for-all three times a day. I learned to participate in Princeton’s excellent seminars, but privately I preferred lectures where you could soak up knowledge and think your own thoughts instead of having to perform them out loud.

Today, after interviewing hundreds of current and former college students, I know I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Not by a long shot.

Did you know that one-third to one-half of the population is introverted? That’s one out of every two or three students on campus. But most schools, workplaces, and religious institutions are organized with extroverts in mind—even though many of the achievements that have propelled society, from the theory of evolution to The Cat in the Hat, came from people who were quiet, cerebral, and sensitive.

Even in less obviously introverted occupations, like finance, politics, and activism, some of the greatest leaps forward were made by introverts: Eleanor Roosevelt. Al Gore. Warren Buffett. Gandhi.

This is no coincidence. There are specific physiological and psychological advantages to being an introvert and I’ll share them with your students through the lens of my book, Quiet. I’ll tell your students how we can all learn from the introverts among us, including how to be more creative, think more carefully, love more gently, and organize our schools and workplaces more productively. Quiet also challenges contemporary myths of human nature, including the belief that creativity is fundamentally collaborative, and our preference for charismatic leaders.

But Quiet offers insights and advice for extroverts too, and it gives all students the license to talk about a social dynamic they’ve been living and breathing but have never given voice to.

Introversion/extroversion is as fundamental a difference between people as gender, yet until now we’ve lacked the vocabulary—and the cultural permission—to talk about it. I’ve never presented the ideas in Quiet without getting people buzzing about whether they and their friends are introverts or extroverts, and what that means for their relationships, career choices, and life paths.

Quiet is sure to spark animated discussions across campus, from the psychology and social-science classroom to the dorm room and dining hall.

©George Wang

I look forward to continuing these discussions around campuses nationwide, as part of your Freshman Experience Programs. Please contact me through my blog, ThePowerofIntroverts.com, to discuss opportunities.

Susan Cain

Susan Cain with University of Waterloo students

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HISTORY AND SOCIETY

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FULL BODY BURDEN Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

Website: www.KristenIversen.com Author Interview: tiny.cc/pp4wqw • Author Video: tiny.cc/5nhbrw To view the author’s talk at the 2013 First-Year Experience® Conference, go to: tinyurl.com/jww9ay9

By Kristen Iversen An ALA Notable Book; Named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of 2012; Named one of The Atlantic’s Best Books about Justice ull Body Burden is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction about a young woman, Kristen Iversen, growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated “the most contaminated site in America.” It’s the story of growing up in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and—unknown to those who lived there— tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.

It’s also a book about the destructive power of secrets—both family and government. Her father’s hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what they made at Rocky Flats—best not to inquire too deeply into any of it.

But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions. And as this memoir unfolds, it also reveals itself as a brilliant work of investigative journalism—a shocking account of the government’s sustained attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic and radioactive waste released by Rocky Flats, and of local residents’ vain attempts to seek justice in court.

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Broadway | TR | 978-0-307-95565-4 | 432pp. $15.00/$18.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: Audio CD: 978-0-449-00966-6 | $45.00/$52.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-449-00967-3 | $24.00/$28.00 Can. e-Book: 978-0-307-95564-7 | $11.99/$13.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Selected for Common Reading: California State University at Sacramento; Fort Lewis College; Madison Community College; Michigan Tech University; St. Bonaventure University; Virginia Commonwealth University Disciplines: Environmental Studies; Sociology Themes: Coming of Age; Environment; Regional: Colorado; Science & Society Campus Visits: Alternative Formats:

“Full Body Burden is a page-turner, a beautifully lucid intertwining of memoir and careful research. Who knew that the way that America waged the Cold War would produce such severe domestic casualties: the corruption of our own government and the radioactive poisoning of so many of our own citizens? Full Body Burden is a courageous life work.”

—Hank Lazer, Professor of English, University of Alabama “Full Body Burden reads like a mystery thriller.Yet its stark reality makes it all the more frightening because of secrets within and outside the home: alcoholism, nuclear fallout, mysterious illnesses.

Iversen’s nimble prose and smart structure creates a powerful memoir. This is a must read for journalism, creative writing, and ecocritical students.”

—Amelia María de la Luz Montes, Associate Professor of English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln “Dazzles with its literary versatility and astounds with its revelations about the nexus of greed, fear, and indifference that created, and continue to create, a culture of silence surrounding Rocky Flats.

Painstakingly researched for over ten years— but arguably a lifetime in the making—Full Body Burden subverts expectations of genre by combining elements of memoir, journalism, physics, environmentalism, history, social activism, and politics—all artfully fused in Iversen’s fluid and beautiful prose. With potential appeal to so many varied disciplines, this book is an ideal text for Freshman Year Experience or One Book Programs. Readers are sure to be informed, outraged, moved.”

—Joshua McKinney, Professor of English, CSU Sacramento

About the Author: Kristen Iversen KRISTEN IVERSEN grew up in Arvada, Colorado and received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver. She is Director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Memphis and also Editor-in-Chief of The Pinch, an award-winning literary journal. She is also the author of Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, winner of the Colorado Book Award for Biography and the Barbara Sudler Award for Nonfiction. Iversen has two sons and currently lives in Memphis.

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©Jay Adkins

HISTORY AND SOCIETY

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A Message from the Author I grew up in Arvada, Colorado, just a few miles from the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, which secretly produced more than seventy thousand plutonium triggers for bombs. Of course, I didn’t know about plutonium then. I didn’t know that a single microgram—a dot on the head of a pin, a flea in a cathedral—is considered a potentially lethal dose. Our house was next to a lake, with a backdrop of the Rocky Mountains. My siblings and I played in the backyard, swam in the lake, and rode our horses in the fields around the plant. No one knew the land had been seriously contaminated, and none of us understood what was happening at the factory down the road. Cold War secrecy was the rule.

For decades, Rocky Flats had been releasing toxic and radioactive elements into the air, water, and soil, but it had been covered up. The government, Dow Chemical, and later Rockwell International, one of the nation’s largest industrial corporations, assured Coloradans that Rocky Flats was safe, despite constant leaks and fires. There were strange childhood cancers and livestock deformities in my neighborhood, and we all wondered if it was related to what went on at the plant. But no one talked openly about Rocky Flats.

In 1995, when I was a single parent with two young sons, working my way through graduate school, I went to work at Rocky Flats. Many of the kids I grew up with had ended up working there because the pay and benefits were so good. I needed the job, and I was keen to learn what actually happened at the plant.

The weekly reports that I typed as part of my job described problems with toxic and radioactive waste storage, leaking drums, fires, and other environmental problems. I learned strange acronyms like MUF, meaning “material unaccounted for,” a bland way of saying that thousands of pounds of plutonium had been lost. I became familiar with the history and problems of the plant, including some of the details of the 1989 FBI raid after which plutonium operations ceased, and I felt stunned by what I had not known all those years— and what the public did not know. The day I learned that I was literally working next to 14.2 metric tons of plutonium—much of it unsafely stored—was the day I knew I had to quit, and that someday I would write a book about Rocky Flats.

More than ten years of research went into the writing of Full Body Burden. I read hundreds of pages of documentation; conducted extensive interviews; pored over newspaper articles, photographs, and previously classified information; and reconnected with many of the people I grew up with. Some of the people I interviewed suffered from illnesses that were likely the result of exposure to toxic substances; several have died within the last year or two.

And yet, with a half-life of 24,000 years, plutonium on and near the Rocky Flats site will persist long after we—and our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, and the many generations beyond—are gone.

Kristen Iversen

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Spotlight on: Jonathan Kozol JONATHAN KOZOL is the National Book Award–winning author of Savage Inequalities, Death at an Early Age, The Shame of the Nation, and Amazing Grace. He has been working with children in inner-city schools for nearly fifty years.

FIRE IN THE ASHES Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America

Website: www.JonathanKozol.com For more books by Jonathan Kozol, go to: tiny.cc/zp5kkw

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ire in the Ashes is the culmination of the decades that teacher and author Jonathan Kozol (Amazing Grace, Savage Inequalities) has spent studying and interacting with a group of low-income children, who have come of age in one of the poorest communities in the nation, and who are now well on their way to adulthood. Some of them have not been able to overcome the incredibly high odds stacked against them; others have managed to achieve victories and successes that offer a glimmer of hope not only for these individuals, but also for our society as a whole.

“An engaging look at the broader social implications of ignoring poverty as well as a very personal look at individuals struggling to overcome it.”

—Booklist (starred) Broadway | TR | 978-1-4000-5247-9 | 368pp. | $16.00/$18.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: Audio: 978-0-449-01259-8 | $40.00/$46.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-449-01260-4 | $22.50/$26.50 Can. e-Book: 978-0-7704-3595-0 | $13.99/$15.99/Can. Discipline: Sociology Themes: Coming of Age • Perseverance/Personal Strength • Social Justice

Also available by Jonathan Kozol

AMAZING GRACE

ORDINARY RESURRECTIONS

SAVAGE INEQUALITIES

The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

Children in the Years of Hope

Children in America’s Schools

Broadway | TR | 978-0-7704-3567-7 | 416pp. $16.00/$19.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 e-Book: 978-0-307-81588-0 | $11.99/$13.99 Can. Themes: Coming of Age Perseverance/Personal Strength Social Justice

Broadway | TR | 978-0-7704-3568-4 | 336pp. $15.00/$18.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 e-Book: 978-0-7704-3666-7 | $11.99/$13.99 Can. Themes: Coming of Age Perseverance/Personal Strength Social Justice

Broadway | TR | 978-0-7704-3566-0 | 336pp. $15.00/$18.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 e-Book: 978-0-7704-3665-0 | $11.99/$13.99 Can. Themes: Coming of Age Perseverance/Personal Strength Social Justice

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A Message from the Author Over the past five years, I’ve returned to the New York neighborhood in which I met the children whom I first described in Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, and other books I published in the 1990s. The neighborhood is called Mott Haven. It’s the poorest section in all of the South Bronx, which is the poorest Congressional district in America.

I wanted to answer the questions many readers ask: What happened to these children? How many were unable to prevail against the obstacles they faced? How many have survived? And, among the ones who did survive, what were the ingredients of character—and what were the opportunities provided by their schools—that made it possible for them to win some glorious and unexpected victories?

Not surprisingly, easy access to good books—and, more to the point, a plentitude of books to satisfy the curiosities and stir the latent interests of the very wide variety of children that I met—turned out to be decisive. And this, of course, is where libraries come in.

In my new book, Fire in the Ashes, I catch up with all those kids, many of whom I came to know when they were only six or eight years old. They talked to me about the struggles they went through, which were often hardest in their adolescent years. Most are in their twenties now. As they look back on their formative years, they speak repeatedly of books that first awakened their appetite for reading—by which I mean real books, books that children read for pleasure, as opposed to the mind-dulling textbooks and those dreadful pit-pat phonics books, “aligned,” as the experts compulsively remind us, with state examinations. Most of the kids found those books immaculately boring.

No matter their level of education, the most successful of these children had, I think, much better taste than those adults who set the rigid standards that have been imposed upon our public schools (and with the most severity, upon our inner-city schools)—standards that require emotionless and robotic modes of learning but don’t open children’s minds to our culture’s treasures.

These kids instinctively rebelled against the narrow test-prep regimen that, even before No Child Left Behind, had started crowding out a love of learning for its own sake. Few of them did well on state-imposed exams, but many read voraciously, and became proficient writers as a consequence; the books they loved, however, weren’t the ones mandated by the number crunchers who were caught up in the labyrinth of the testing mania.

This is my answer: No matter what the economic ups and downs may be at any given moment, public school libraries in destitute communities need not just sufficient but extravagant funding. If there’s a single thing our state and federal governments could do to stir up a love of learning in our poorest children, it would be to take a good big chunk of the massive sum of money that’s now being wasted on the testing industry and use it, instead, to flood our students’ lives with the joys and mysteries of authentic culture— and not only Western culture but, in the case of, for instance, Hispanic children, their culture, too.

“Well, of course,” the bureaucrats will say (they’ve said this of me many times before), “Jonathan’s a dreamer. He thinks that poor kids ought to get what the sons of presidents and daughters of important business leaders get when they go to private schools like Andover and Exeter. He thinks that inner-city kids deserve that kind of money. He thinks they’ll dig into those books and be excited by the opportunity to read them.”

It’s true. That’s exactly what I feel. I don’t think this nation plans to give that kind of opportunity to more than a handful of the children of poor people at any time in the near future. It would take a sweeping change of attitude about potential, and too easily unobserved precocity, among the children who are viewed today as outcasts of American society. It’s just a dream, and I frankly doubt that I will see it realized in my lifetime. Still, I like to fantasize that someday we will turn that dream into reality.

Jonathan Kozol This article, condensed from the original article, is reproduced, with permission from School Library Journal © Copyright 2012 Library Journals LLC a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. The entire article can be found at: tiny.cc/bt7kkw

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IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

Website: www.ErikLarsonBooks.com

By Erik Larson A New York Times Notable Book

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n 1933 William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered history professor from Chicago, was chosen by Roosevelt to be the U.S.’s first ambassador to Nazi Germany. At first he and his family are entranced by the “New Germany,” and Dodd’s daughter Martha has several affairs, including with the first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. The Dodds’ experience of excitement and romance morphs into horror when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition.

Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness view of events as they unfold in real time, revealing what it was like for those living there, without the perspective of history neatly delineating their judgments. The result is a compelling tale that explores why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.

Broadway | TR | 978-0-307-40885-3 | 480pp. $16.00/$19.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: Audio CD: 978-0-307-91457-6 | $45.00/$51.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-307-91458-3 | $22.50/$25.50 Can. e-Book: 978-0-307-88795-5 | $11.99/$13.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Disciplines: History; Literature Themes: Ethics; Genocide; Perseverance/Personal Strength Campus Visits:

“Larson captivated our community when he came here to speak about his book, the creative process, and how to weave history and fiction into one brilliant and bone-chilling masterpiece. He answered the many questions our students had about his work, and provided them with valuable and insightful information into the writing process.” —Sanford J. Ungar, President, Goucher College “By far his best and most enthralling work of novelistic history. . . .

Powerful, poignant . . . a transportingly true story.”

—The New York Times “Larson has meticulously researched the Dodds’ intimate witness to Hitler’s ascendancy and created an edifying narrative of this historical byway that has all the pleasures of a political thriller . . . a fresh picture of these terrible events.”

—The New York Times Book Review Also by Erik Larson

THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY

Discussion Guide Available:

Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America National Book Award Finalist Vintage | TR | 978-0-375-72560-9 | 464pp. | $16.00/$19.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00

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THUNDERSTRUCK Broadway | TR | 978-1-4000-8067-0 | 480pp. |$16.00/$18.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00

About the Author: Erik Larson ERIK LARSON is the bestselling author of Isaac’s Storm, Thunderstruck, and The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, which won the 2004 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is a former writer for The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine. Larson has taught nonfiction writing at San Francisco State, the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and the University of Oregon. He lives in Seattle.

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Excerpt from In the Garden of Beasts Once, at the dawn of a very dark time, an American father and daughter found themselves suddenly transported from their snug home in Chicago to the heart of Hitler’s Berlin. They remained there for four and a half years, but it is their first year that is the subject of the story to follow, for it coincided with Hitler’s ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant, when everything hung in the balance and nothing was certain. That first year formed a kind of prologue in which all the themes of the greater epic of war and murder soon to come were laid down.

I have always wondered what it would have been like for an outsider to have witnessed firsthand the gathering dark of Hitler’s rule. How did the city look, what did one hear, see, and smell, and how did diplomats and other visitors interpret the events occurring around them?

Hindsight tells us that during that fragile time the course of history could so easily have changed. Why, then, did no one change it? Why did it take so long to recognize the real danger posed by Hitler and his regime?

Like most people, I acquired my initial sense of the era from books and photographs that left me with the impression that the world of then had no color, only gradients of gray and black. My two main protagonists, however, encountered the flesh-and-blood reality, while also managing the routine obligations of daily life. Every morning they moved through a city hung with immense banners of red, white, and black; they sat at the same outdoor cafés as did the lean, black-suited members of Hitler’s SS, and now and then they caught sight of Hitler himself, a smallish man in a large, open Mercedes. But they also walked each day past homes with balconies lush with red geraniums; they shopped in the city’s vast department stores, held tea parties, and breathed deep the spring fragrances of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s main park.

They knew Goebbels and Göring as social acquaintances with whom they dined, danced, and joked—until, as their first year reached its end, an event occurred that proved to be one of the most significant in revealing the true character of Hitler and that laid the keystone for the decade to come. For both father and daughter it changed everything.

This is a work of nonfiction. As always, any material between quotation marks comes from a letter, diary, memoir, or other historical document. I made no effort in these pages to write another grand history of the age. My objective was more intimate: to reveal that past world through the experience and perceptions of my two primary subjects, father and daughter, who upon arrival in Berlin embarked on a journey of discovery, transformation, and, ultimately, deepest heartbreak.

There are no heroes here, at least not of the Schindler’s List variety, but there are glimmers of heroism and people who behave with unexpected grace. Always there is nuance, albeit sometimes of a disturbing nature. That’s the trouble with nonfiction. One has to put aside what we all know—now—to be true, and try instead to accompany my two innocents through the world as they experienced it.

These were complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature.

Excerpted from In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, copyright © 2011 by Erik Larson. Originally published in hardcover by Crown Publishers in 2011 and subsequently in trade paperback by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, LLC, A Penguin Random House Company, in 2012. All rights reserved.

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SACRED GROUND Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America

Author Interview: tiny.cc/8y9hh To view the author’s talk at the 2011 First-Year Experience® Conference, go to: tiny.cc/n3alkw

By Eboo Patel

I

n the years following the attacks of 9/11, suspicion and animosity toward American Muslims has increased rather than subsided.

Alarmist, hateful rhetoric once relegated to the fringes of political discourse has now become frighteningly mainstream, with pundits and politicians routinely invoking the specter of Islam as a menacing, deeply anti-American force. In this timely new book, author, activist, and presidential adviser Eboo Patel says this prejudice is not just a problem for Muslims, but also a challenge to the very idea of America.

Sacred Ground shows us that Americans from George Washington to Martin Luther King, Jr. have been “interfaith leaders,” and it illustrates how the forces of pluralism in the U.S. have time and again defeated the forces of prejudice. Now a new generation needs to rise up and confront the anti-Muslim prejudice of our era. To this end, Patel offers a primer in the art and science of interfaith work, bringing to life the growing body of research on how faith can be a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division, and sharing stories from the frontlines of interfaith activism. Pluralism, Patel boldly argues, is at the heart of the American project. It is a responsibility all must share, and Patel’s visionary book will inspire Americans of all faiths to make this country a place where diverse traditions can thrive side by side.

Beacon Press | TR | 978-0-8070-7752-8 | 224pp. $15.00/$17.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: e-Book: 978-0-8070-7749-8 | $24.95/$28.95 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Disciplines: Religion; Sociology Themes: Discovering Differences; Inclusiveness; Youth Activism Campus Visits: Alternative Formats:

Also by Eboo Patel

ACTS OF FAITH The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation Acts of Faith is a remarkable account of growing up Muslim in America and coming to believe in religious pluralism, from one of the most prominent faith leaders in the United States. Eboo Patel’s story is a hopeful and moving testament to the power and passion of young people—and of the world-changing potential of an interfaith youth movement.

Selected for Common Reading at Amarillo College; Capital University; Colgate University; Franklin College; Loras College, Dubuque Iowa; Luther College; Marywood College; Saint Louis University; University of Saint Francis; and others.

Beacon Press | TR | 978-0-8070-0622-1 | 192pp. | $15.00/$17.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also Available: e-Book: 978-0-8070-0631-3 | $15.00/$16.25 Can. Themes: Discovering Differences • Inclusiveness • Youth Activism

About the Author: Eboo Patel EBOO PATEL is the founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core and the author of Acts of Faith. He was a member of President Obama’s inaugural faith council and is a regular contributor to the Washington Post, Huffington Post, CNN, and public radio.

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A Message from the Author

College changed me, and it made me want to change the world—especially regarding diversity. I entered as a freshman embarrassed by my brown skin, my strange name, and my mother’s food. I exited with a vision of a nation where people from diverse backgrounds live in equal dignity and mutual loyalty.

Sacred Ground is my Muslim eyes on the American project. The book highlights a dimension of America’s diversity that receives far too little attention: faith.

America is the most religiously diverse nation in human history and the most religiously devout nation in the West at a time of global religious conflict. We see far too many examples of faith as a barrier of division or a bomb of destruction. Sacred Ground tells a different story—faith as a source of inspiration and a bridge of cooperation. I weave together narratives of historical giants like George Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr. with stories of contemporary figures like Mayor Michael Bloomberg, highlighting how their courageous actions in times of religious crisis makes them interfaith heroes. Throughout the book are tales of college students and recent graduates—the next George Washingtons and Martin Luther Kings—who are building bridges of cooperation on their campuses and in their communities.

At a time when anti-Mormon, anti-Muslim, anti-gay, and anti-atheist messages are at a fever pitch, the message of Sacred Ground could not be more clear or urgent: Interfaith cooperation is an inspiring story throughout American history. We need a new generation of interfaith leaders to write the next chapter. College campuses are ideal ecologies to nurture this interfaith leadership; college students are ideal people to be these leaders.

This is a book aimed at college students and campus communities. I visit about twentyfive campuses a year, giving keynotes on interfaith leadership, and helping campuses design high-quality interfaith programs through partnerships with my nonprofit, Interfaith Youth Core (www.ifyc.org). I’ve spoken everywhere from Yale and Stanford to Luther College and Loyola University. I love them all because of how they change young people, and how those young people go on to change the world.

Eboo Patel

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STUFFED AND STARVED The Hidden Battle for the World Food System

Website: www.RajPatel.org Author Video: tiny.cc/8nharw

By Raj Patel

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n this completely updated and revised edition, Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel continues to be one of the most widely praised food books of recent years.

It’s a perverse fact of modern life: There are more starving people in the world than ever before, while there are also more people who are overweight.

To find out how things got to this point and what can be done about it, Raj Patel launched a comprehensive investigation into the global food network. It took him from the colossal supermarkets of California to India’s wrecked paddy fields and Africa’s bankrupt coffee farms, while along the way he ate genetically engineered soy beans and dodged flying objects in the protestor-packed streets of South Korea.

What he found was shocking, from the false choices given us by supermarkets to a global epidemic of farmer suicides, and the real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa.

Melville House | TR | 978-1-61219-127-0 | 432pp. $19.95/NCR | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: e-Book: 978-1-61219-128-7 | $19.95/NCR

ADOPTION NOTES: Selected for Common Reading: Skagit Valley College Disciplines: Business; Food Studies; Political Science Themes: Environment; Science & Society

Yet he also found great cause for hope—in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable, and joyful food system. Going beyond ethical consumerism, Patel explains, from seed to store to plate, the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of both farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance.

“For anyone attempting to make sense of the world food crisis, or understand the links between U.S. farm policy and the ability of the world's poor to feed themselves, Stuffed and Starved is indispensable.”

—Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire “A blistering indictment of the policies of multinational agribusiness conglomerates and charges that their drive for profit at any cost has left the developing world starving while wealthy countries like the United States are experiencing epidemic obesity rates and related health problems.”

—Newsweek

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About the Author: Raj Patel RAJ PATEL, a fellow at Food First, is a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies. He has worked for the World Bank, WTO, and the UN, and he’s also been tear-gassed on four continents protesting them. He is the author of The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy.

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A Message from the Author Why did I write Stuffed and Starved?

As first-year students just entering college, my friends and I were fired up by the big questions—questions of inequity, questions of basic fairness. Why do some people have so much, while others have so little? Why do some people go hungry, while others are obese? Is there really not enough food to feed the world?

Trying to answer those questions has been driving my research, and my life, ever since.

And finding real workable solutions seems more crucial now than ever. Globally, nearly a billion people are going hungry, while two billion are overweight.

When I was growing up, my parents said “eat up—there are children starving in Africa.”

So what do you think parents in Africa tell their children? “Eat up—there are children starving in India.” African parents have it right. India, the place where we imagine all the jobs have gone to people with Ph.D.s in computer science, is also a country with more hungry people than the entire continent of Africa, an epidemic of farmer suicides, and more people with type 2 diabetes than anywhere in the world.

Back here in the U.S., we are the most overweight country on earth, facing our own foodrelated problems. One in three kids born today will develop diabetes—and one in every two kids of color will. Yet fifty million Americans don’t have enough to eat, and we had our own wave of farmer suicides in the 1980s.

Trying to make sense out of these incongruities has taken me around the world—from the giant supermarkets of California to wrecked paddy fields in India and bankrupt coffee farms in Africa—and to some of the biggest issues of our day: the effects of climate change on food stability, a worldwide diabetes epidemic, dramatic new Chinese food policies, and something all governments fear: the return of the “food riot.”

Food—its availability, cost, quality, and quantity—is one of the biggest issues we face today. And though the stories and the statistics may be bleak, as I researched further I also found great cause for hope. People are working to create a more equitable food economy.

There are things to be done, and people are doing them.

We can take real, profound steps to regain control over the global food system. We can go beyond small acts of ethical consumerism. Together, we can create a more democratic, sustainable, and joyful food system.

I believe I have found some real answers to those early undergraduate questions, answers that go beyond the tired rhetoric of the news cycle, that have opened me up to worlds of science, letters, ideas, and action. If readers can take a fraction of the inspiration from Stuffed and Starved that I found in fields from Iowa to India, we’ll be well on our way to ending both hunger and obesity, forever.

Raj Patel

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THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

Website: www.RebeccaSkloot.com Author Video: tiny.cc/2jxbrw

By Rebecca Skloot Named by more than 60 critics as one of the best books of the year Winner of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine’s Communication Award for Best Book Winner of Wellcome Trust Book Prize Winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction Winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Young Adult Science Book Award

H

Broadway | TR | 978-1-4000-5218-9 | 400pp. $16.00/$18.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also available: Audio CD: 978-0-307-71250-9 | $35.00/$43.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-307-71251-6 | $20.00/$24.95 Can. e-Book: 978-0-307-58938-5 | $9.99/$9.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Selected for Common Reading at more than 150 colleges including: University of Arkansas; University of California–Santa Barbara; Spelman College; and Virginia Commonwealth University.

To view the complete list, go to tiny.cc/fusfrw.

Disciplines: African American; History; Journalism; Medical Ethics; Science Themes: Ethics/Decision Making; Human Rights; Science & Society; Social Justice Campus Visits: Discussion Guide Available: Alternative Formats:

er name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine.

The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb; helped lead to important advances in cloning, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions, with devastating consequences for her family.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes the reader on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where Henrietta’s children, unable to afford health insurance, wrestle with feelings of pride, fear, and betrayal.

“What is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks really about? Science, African American culture and religion, intellectual property of human tissues, southern history, medical ethics, civil rights, the overselling of medical advances? . . . The book’s broad scope would make it ideal for an institution-wide freshman year reading program.”—David J. Kroll, Professor and Chair, Pharmaceutical Sciences, North Carolina Central University “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was an excellent summer reading selection. Over 2,100 first-year students as well as faculty members, research professionals, and university staff took part in over 80 discussion groups during VCU’s Welcome Week. Her message inspired students to become passionate and engaged with both learning and inquiry. Throughout their first semester, the book continued to serve as an excellent model of research writing for our newest students.”

—Daphne L. Rankin, Ph.D., Associate Vice Provost for Instruction, Virginia Commonwealth University Visit the author’s Website at www.RebeccaSkloot.com for the latest book-related special features, teaching guide, and other classroom resources.

About the Author: Rebecca Skloot REBECCA SKLOOT has taught at the University of Memphis, New York University, and the University of Pittsburgh. She has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s RadioLab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; Columbia Journalism Review; and elsewhere.

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A Message from the Author I first learned about HeLa cells, and the woman behind them, as a teenager sitting in a freshman biology class. I knew only fragments of Henrietta’s story, but those fragments inspired me to start asking questions—about science and mortality, bioethics, and how I’d feel if my own cells were used in research. I didn’t yet know that her cells had launched a multibillion-dollar industry while her children lived in poverty, or that the cells had devastating consequences for the family.

Henrietta’s story captures the imagination of students in any number of disciplines, including the sciences, medicine, African American studies, sociology, philosophy, law, bioethics, journalism, and creative writing. I’ve spoken about HeLa at schools around the country, where students are transfixed by the story. I tell them that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown on a scale they would weigh more than one hundred Empire State Buildings, and that HeLa has been fused with mouse cells to create Henrietta-mouse hybrid cells. It’s the stuff of science fiction, but it’s true, and students love it.

Combine that with the story of Henrietta’s family—a tale about science, religion, race, and class—and students’ reactions are powerful.

During Q&As, the first question is usually: “Wasn’t it illegal to take her cells and use them in research without asking?” The answer is no—not in 1951, and not in 2011. Today, most Americans have their tissue on file somewhere through routine blood tests or biopsies. And since the late sixties, when testing newborns for genetic diseases became required by law, each baby born in the United States has had blood taken, and those samples are often stored and used by scientists. This means that the majority of college students in this country have tissues of their own being used in research, and neither they nor their parents likely realize it.

As a college professor, I always look for books that bring together the many disparate fields that students will study throughout their careers and that allow them to explore the real-world consequences of intellectual discoveries. Other professors tell me The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks does just that, bringing together health, community, family, ethics, religion, science, storytelling, history, business, law, and humanity.

Since spring 2010, I have talked about my book at more than one hundred schools nationwide. As a regular guest lecturer who’s also worked as a correspondent for radio and television, I understand the importance of being an engaging speaker, and my talks have been called “moving and engaging of both the heart and mind.” You can visit the events page of my website at RebeccaSkloot.com to see if I’ll be speaking at your school, and you can contact me through the site. I look forward to visiting even more schools as part of their Freshman Experience Programs.

As a college biology major, I couldn’t have imagined that Henrietta’s story would lead me to become a writer, or that writing this book would be a ten-year journey. There’s no telling what effect this story could have on students. I can’t wait to find out.

©Rebecca Skloot

©DePauw University

©DePauw University

Rebecca Skloot

Rebecca Skloot talks with students and signs books at DePauw University and University of Alabama

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HISTORY AND SOCIETY

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THE POWER OF HABIT Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

By Charles Duhigg

Website: www.CharlesDuhigg.com Author Video: tiny.cc/3mhbrw To view the author’s talk at the 2013 First-Year Experience® Conference, go to: tinyurl.com/l55xttn

I

n The Power of Habit, behaviorist Charles Duhigg takes us to the forefront of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

Along the way students will learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. At its core, The Power of Habit contains an intriguing argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work. As Charles Duhigg shows, habits aren’t destiny, and by harnessing this new science, students can change their habits and transform businesses, communities, and lives.

Random House | HC | 978-1-4000-6928-6 | 400pp. $28.00/NCR | Exam Copy: $14.00 Also available: Audio CD: 978-0-307-96664-3 | $40.00/$46.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-307-96665-0 | $20.00/$24.00 Can. e-Book: 978-0-679-60385-6 | $14.99/NCR

“The Power of Habit is a fascinating read, and Duhigg deftly pulls off exactly what one would expect of a polymath Times reporter: he effortlessly brings us from scene to scene, from finding to finding, from discipline to discipline, transforming a potentially dry subject into a series of peppy narratives—a very readable take on a subject that should matter to everyone.”

—Newsweek Daily Beast

ADOPTION NOTES: Selected for Common Reading: Babson College Disciplines: Business; Education; Psychology; Sociology Themes: Leadership & Motivation; Life Skills

“A fascinating exploration of our pathologically habitual society— we smoke, we incessantly check our BlackBerrys, we chronically choose bad partners, we always (or never) make our beds. Duhigg digs into why we are this way, and how we can change, both as individuals and institutionally.”

—The Daily

Campus Visits: Discussion Guide Available: Alternative Formats:

About the Author: Charles Duhigg CHARLES DUHIGG is an investigative reporter for the New York Times. A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Business School, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

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©Liz Alter

LIFE AND COLLEGE GUIDES

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A Message from the Author College saved my life. Or, more accurately, the good and bad habits I learned there saved my life.

And since then, nothing has been the same.

In 1993, I left Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Yale. Here is what I did not know at the time: that sheets should be washed more than once a semester; that if you stand in the rain for 40 minutes, a shower might be a wise idea; that when a professor says you need to read the book, you need to read the book; that I would develop the best—and worst—habits of my life, and they would shape every major decision over my next two decades.

At my freshman assembly, however, I had no idea that all of that was to come. The provost gave the assembled class three pieces of advice: if you are feeling tired, sleep. If you aren’t hungry, don’t eat. And if you are homesick, have a small piece of chocolate and remember that everyone else—no matter how confident they seem—feels the same way.

It was great advice. It was—though I didn’t know it at the time—a tutorial in how to create habits by choosing cues (I’m exhausted), routines (go to bed!), and rewards (ahhhh!).

And I, of course, ignored it all. Six months later, delirious with exhaustion and 10 pounds heavier, I was on the phone to my mother explaining that a transfer to the University of New Mexico—or maybe a year living in my old room—was a good idea.

Luckily, my parents ignored me. And the school slowly, painfully, taught me how to be an adult. Most importantly, my professors and administrators showed me how to shape my urges and passions, and eventually to become a reporter at the New York Times and an author.

Each lesson in The Power of Habit is embedded in a narrative—the story of how Tony Dungy led the Indianapolis Colts to the Super Bowl, how Starbucks teaches willpower habits, how Martin Luther King rallied Montgomery to the bus boycott—that seeks to help readers, including undergraduates, experience this same process of self-discovery.

There are a few chapters that, I think, would particularly appeal to college students: How to create willpower habits. For decades, we’ve suspected that willpower is like a muscle. But how is willpower strengthened? By making it into a habit. Starbucks, for instance, developed a training program to encourage willpower habits by identifying inflection points when self-discipline is likely to fail.

How people—and groups—create habits that change lives. A century ago, almost no Americans brushed their teeth. Then a canny advertising executive added a slight irritant to a toothpaste recipe, and Pepsodent launched a national habit. A 26-year-old clergyman named Martin Luther King, Jr. chose to nurture a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, by targeting the city’s social habits—and the contemporary civil rights movement was born.

The importance of service to others, and investing in a community. As one Dartmouth psychologist told me, “change occurs among other people. It seems real when we can see it in others peoples’ eyes.” The Power of Habit explains why the friends we choose, the organizations we join, and the contributions we make to our communities matter. Through stories about the Olympian Michael Phelps and the Outkast song Hey Ya!, it explores how communities shape our habits, and we, in turn, shape out communities.

Organizational habits, and administrators, professors, and communities. Organizations—like individuals— develop habits that guide how work gets (or doesn’t get) done. The Power of Habit explores why some habits, known as keystone habits, matter more than others and how they shape cultures within universities and companies.

I wish I had been exposed to these insights as a freshman. I would be honored if my book helps introduce your students to these ideas.

To read the full text of this essay, go to: tiny.cc/s2fomw.

Charles Duhigg

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LIFE AND COLLEGE GUIDES

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THE START-UP OF YOU Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career

Website: www.TheStartupOfYou.com Author Video: tiny.cc/qxharw To view Ben Casnocha’s talk at the 2013 First-Year Experience® Conference, go to: tinyurl.com/kzcgdmb

By Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha

A

revolutionary new guide to thriving in today’s fractured world of work, The Start-Up of You provides strategies that will help individuals survive, thrive, and achieve the boldest professional ambitions and to take control of their future. Readers will learn how to: • Adapt career plans as they change, the people around them change, and industries change.

• Develop a competitive advantage to win the best jobs and opportunities.

• Strengthen their professional network by building powerful alliances and maintaining a diverse mix of relationships.

• Find the unique breakout opportunities that massively accelerate career growth.

• Take proactive risks to become more resilient to industry tsunamis.

• Tap their network for information and intelligence that help readers make smarter decisions.

Crown Business | HC | 978-0-307-88890-7 | 272pp. $26.00/$31.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $13.00 Also available: Audio CD: 978-0-307-97143-2 | $35.00/$41.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-307-97144-9 | $15.00/$18.00 Can. e-Book: 978-0-307-88892-1 | $13.99/$15.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Selected for Common Reading: Bentley University Discipline: Human/Career Development Themes: Leadership & Motivation; Life Skills; Transition Campus Visits:

“The Start-Up of You has resonated with me to such an extent that in addition to submitting a book request to my bookstore for my fall Career/Life Planning courses, I have touted this book to my fellow faculty members. I absolutely loved reading the book and view it as one of the most ‘on-the-mark’ and engaging narratives on how to best prepare/present oneself during a job/career/life search process. This book also served as my impetus to bring a project called Road Trip Nation Indie Trip to fruition. I truly believe (after 31 years of college teaching) that The Start-Up of You offers students of all college levels a realistic and straightforward life handbook that can also be read and re-read at each ‘pivot’ point in one’s career path.”

—Lavinia P. Zanassi, Faculty, Counseling Department, Skyline College “In times of change and uncertainty . . . adaptability creates stability. It is insights like this that make The Start-Up of You such a compelling new way to approach your life. Hoffman and Casnocha have distilled the essence of entrepreneurship into a potion for personal success, regardless of your career plans.”

—John Etchemendy, Provost, Stanford University

Discussion Guide Available: Alternative Formats:

About the Authors: Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha REID HOFFMAN is a world-renowned entrepreneur and investor. He is cofounder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, the biggest professional network in the world with 100+ million members.

Previously he was executive vice president and on the founding board of directors of PayPal. He is also a partner at Greylock, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm. He is an early investor in over 100 technology companies, including Facebook and Zynga.

BEN CASNOCHA is an award-winning entrepreneur and author. He has written for Newsweek and appeared on CNN, the CBS Early Show, and Fox News. BusinessWeek named him one of “America’s best young entrepreneurs.” He has spoken to more than ten thousand students and businesspeople in countries around the world.

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A Message from the Authors College graduates are joining the workforce at a difficult time. Technology and globalization are changing traditional career paths and undoing age-old assumptions about the world of work. Some reports suggest that more than half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in a column about The Start-Up of You, “This ain’t your parents’ job market anymore.”

How will you prepare your new students to acquire the skills, establish the mindset, and build the network that will help them succeed once they enter the real world?

Old premises that guided past generations have given way to new realities, and with new realities come new rules. We wrote The Start-Up of You to show young people how they can build a life and career in this global, competitive economy. To do so, we look to Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship for answers. Not because everyone can or should start a company. But because the uncertainty, competition, and constant reinvention that characterize the start-up process in Silicon Valley are the same forces everyone now faces when fashioning a career.

Entrepreneurs are nimble. They invest in themselves. They build networks. They take risks.

These are the same strategies every young person today needs to know to get ahead in his or her career.

Your students, whether they aspire to be doctors, lawyers, teachers, or engineers, are at the same time always at the helm of at least one start-up: their career.

Network-building is one of the key entrepreneurial strategies we discuss in the book. Life’s a team sport, and just as entrepreneurs build teams to grow their company, all students needs to learn how to build a team of allies to help them in their career. There’s no better time to start investing in your network than when you’re in school, surrounded by future colleagues and collaborators.

The Start-Up of You is not a workbook. Rather, it’s a practical, narrative manifesto on a new way of approaching the world. The mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker, called it a “profound book about self-determination and self-realization.” Nor is The Start-Up of You a job-hunting bible. Your students are probably not looking for full-time jobs, but they should absolutely be thinking about how they can start investing in themselves and establishing their professional competitive advantage.

Today, every student needs to become the entrepreneur of his or her own life. This is the playbook that shows them how.

Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha

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LIFE AND COLLEGE GUIDES

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LIFE AND COLLEGE GUIDES

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Spotlight on: Chip Heath and Dan Heath CHIP HEATH is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

DAN HEATH, a former researcher at Harvard Business School, is now a Senior Fellow at Duke University’s CASE Center, which supports social entrepreneurs.

Website: www.HeathBrothers.com

DECISIVE How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

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esearch in psychology has revealed that our decision-making suffers from consistent problems: We’re overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn’t. We get distracted by shortterm emotions. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn’t fix the problem. The question is: How can we do better? In Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath (bestselling authors of Made to Stick and Switch) reveal the four major principles that can be employed in order to make better, more informed, and more rational decisions in both the professional and personal realms.

Crown Business | HC | 978-0-307-95639-2 | 336pp. | $26.00/NCR | Exam Copy: $13.00 Also Available: Audio CD: 978-0-449-01111-9 | $40.00/$46.00 Can. Audio DL: 978-0-449-01112-6 | $20.00/$24.00 Can. e-Book: 978-0-307-95641-5 | $13.99/NCR Themes: Ethics/Decision Making • Life Skills

Also available by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

MADE TO STICK Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? Chip and Dan Heath tackle these vexing questions head-on. In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds—from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax, to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship, to a vision for a new product at Sony—draw their power from the same six traits. Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick reveals the vital components of winning ideas—and shows how everyone can make their own messages stick.

Random House | HC | 978-1-4000-6428-1 | 336pp. | $26.00/$32.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $13.00 Also Available: Audio CD: 978-0-7393-4134-6 | $29.95/$37.95 Can. • Audio DL: 978-0-7393-4135-3 | $15.00/$19.95 Can. e-Book: 978-1-58836-596-5 | $13.99/$15.99 Can. Themes: Group Dynamics • Leadership & Motivation • Life Skills

SWITCH How to Change Things When Change Is Hard This compelling narrative about the difficulty of bringing about genuine, lasting change in ourselves and in others—especially when one has few resources and no title or authority—is a riveting read that will change lives. Combining psychology, sociology, management, and case studies from a host of different fields, the authors tell countless stories of people and organizations that have successfully created significant change. They succeed, against the odds, by following a common ‘pattern’ of change, one that often starts by finding and studying their “bright spots”—the early signs of success that can give hope to a change effort.

Available in Español

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Crown Business | HC | 978-0-385-52875-7 | 320pp. | $26.00/NCR | Exam Copy: $13.00 Spanish Language Edition: Vintage | TR | 978-0-307-74235-3 | $15.95/$17.95 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also Available: Audio CD: 978-0-7393-7696-6 | $35.00/$40.00 Can. • Audio DL: 978-0-7393-7697-3 | $17.50/$19.50 Can. e-Book: 978-0-307-59016-9 | $14.99/NCR Themes: Group Dynamics • Life Skills • Social Justice

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Excerpt from Decisive

To read a full chapter, go to: tiny.cc/51korw

If you study the kinds of decisions people make, and the outcomes of those decisions, you’ll find that humanity does not have a particularly impressive track record.

Career choices, for instance, are often abandoned or regretted. An American Bar Association survey found that 44% of lawyers would recommend that a young person not pursue a career in law. A study of 20,000 executive searches found that 40 percent of seniorlevel hires “are pushed out, fail or quit within 18 months.” More than half of teachers quit their jobs within four years. In fact, one study in Philadelphia schools found that a teacher was almost two times more likely to drop out as a student.

Business decisions are frequently flawed. One study of corporate mergers and acquisitions—some of the highest-stakes decisions executives make—showed that 83% failed to create any value for shareholders. When another research team asked 2,207 executives to evaluate decisions in their organizations, 60% of executives reported that bad decisions were about as frequent as good ones.

On the personal front, we’re not much better. People don’t save enough for retirement, and when they do save, they consistently erode their own stock portfolios by buying high and selling low. Young people start relationships with people who are bad for them. Middle-aged people let work interfere with their family lives. The elderly wonder why they didn’t take more time to smell the roses when they were younger.

Why do we have such a hard time making good choices? In recent years, many fascinating books and articles have addressed this question, exploring the problems with our decisionmaking. The biases. The irrationality. When it comes to making decisions, it’s clear, our brains are flawed instruments. But less attention has been paid to another compelling question: Given that we’re wired to act foolishly sometimes, how can we do better?

Sometimes we are given the advice to trust our guts when we make important decisions.

Unfortunately, our guts are full of questionable advice. Consider the Ultimate Red Velvet Cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory, a truly delicious dessert, and one that clocks in at 1540 calories, which is the equivalent of three McDonald’s double cheeseburgers plus a pack of Skittles. This is something that you are supposed to eat after you are finished with your real meal.

The Ultimate Red Velvet cheesecake is exactly the kind of thing that our guts get excited about. Yet no one would mistake this guidance for wisdom. Certainly no one has ever thoughtfully plotted out a meal plan and concluded, I gotta add more cheesecake.

Excerpted from Decisive by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Copyright © 2013 by Chip Heath. Excerpted by permission of Crown Business, a division of Random House, LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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LIFE AND COLLEGE GUIDES

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THE LEADER’S CODE

Website: www.TheLeadersCode.com To view the author’s talk at the 2009 First-Year Experience® Conference, go to: tiny.cc/0el4qw To view the author’s talk at the 2013 First-Year Experience® Conference, go to: tinyurl.com/mzxhl7r

Mission, Character, Service, and Getting the Job Done

By Donovan Campbell

F

Random House | HC | 978-0-8129-9293-9 | 256pp. $27.00/$32.00 Can. | Exam Copy: $13.50 Also available: e-Book: 978-0-679-64420-0 | $13.99/$15.99 Can.

ADOPTION NOTES: Disciplines: Business; Leadership Studies; Military Studies Themes: Leadership & Motivation; Service Campus Visits: Alternative Formats:

rom the New York Times bestselling author of Joker One, Donovan Campbell, comes a unique book on character and leadership, inspired by the author’s training and experience in the United States Marine Corps.

America suffers from a leadership crisis. In business, politics, and popular culture, our leaders are consistently disappointing their constituents with immoral, unethical, or corrupt behavior. But we do have one national institution with a strong, clear leadership model that commands widespread respect and admiration. This institution is the United States military.

In The Leader’s Code, Donovan Campbell reveals how the training model of the U.S. Marine Corps can serve as a foundation for great leadership in business and beyond. Focusing on character as the most important quality in a leader, he identifies its six key attributes—humility, excellence, kindness, discipline, courage, and wisdom. Using military-inspired training techniques and stories from his own experience in the Corps, Campbell outlines how readers can develop these six qualities and use them to become great leaders. The Leader’s Code shows that success on both an individual and national level depends on the integrity of our future leaders in their pursuit of noble missions.

Also by Donovan Campbell

JOKER ONE A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood

By Donovan Campbell Selected for Common Reading at Niagara University; Siena Heights University; and The T. Boone Pickens Leadership Institute.

Random House | TR | 978-0-8129-7956-5 | 336pp. $16.00/$19.95 Can. | Exam Copy: $3.00 Also Available: e-Book: 978-1-58836-778-5 | $11.99/$13.99 Can. Themes: Ethics/Decision Making Group Dynamics • Leadership & Motivation

About the Author: Donovan Campbell DONOVAN CAMPBELL is a Fortune 500 executive and the bestselling author of Joker One: A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood. He graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Business School, finished first in his class at the Marines’ Basic Officer Course, and served three combat deployments. He was awarded the Combat Action Ribbon and a Bronze Star for Valor for his time in Iraq. After his combat tours he returned to Dallas, where he is now Senior Vice President of IntegraColor, a leading commercial printing company. His lecture appearances include Harvard Business School, the Air Force Academy, PepsiCo, and the Barbara Bush Celebration of Reading.

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©Wheeler Sparks

SOCIAL ACTION

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A Message from the Author To Redeem Leadership, Teach Virtue In 2009, I spent most of my time flying around America, visiting various geographies as a mid-level executive with a Fortune 500 company. Just one year beforehand, I had been flying around a very different country, Afghanistan, visiting various geographies as a mid-level officer supporting the Special Forces. As different as America and Afghanistan were, I noticed an even more profound difference when I came home.

It wasn’t a difference between Americans and Afghans; rather, it was a difference between Americans and Americans.

Watching junior military leaders make decisions overseas and watching senior business and political leaders make decisions back at home was like watching two different cultures in action. Overseas, I saw twenty-two-year-old squad leaders volunteer to walk point through bomb-laden streets in order to expose themselves to danger in advance of their teams. I watched nineteen-year-old team leaders shield their men with their own bodies, taking severe wounds so that their teams wouldn’t have to. Twenty-two-year-old lieutenants ran through fire while everyone else took cover, checking on their men to make certain they were safe. Back at home, I watched a different group of business and political leaders behave very differently—attempting to pin responsibility for failure on others, blaming circumstances for their mishaps, and trying all the while to extract as much personal gain as possible.

I wondered, “Why the difference?” And then it hit me. The two groups had two very different views of leadership. The latter group, by and large, seemed to view leadership as a top-down extractive exercise in which a leader’s role was to take as much as possible from the organization and their team. The soldiers, by contrast, viewed leadership as a bottom-up service exercise in which a leader’s role was to give as much as possible to their teams and their common mission.

From the moment that the soldiers entered basic training—usually at eighteen years old—they had been taught a servant-leadership framework grounded in clear, specific virtues that all members of their organization were expected to uphold. They were taught that real leadership means putting their teams and their shared mission first and their own personal welfare dead last. They were told that character underpins competence and that character is like anything else in life: it doesn’t just happen. If you want to be good at it, then you have to work at it. This basic training in virtue and service produced young leaders overseas who behaved markedly differently than their much older counterparts back home.

For most servicewomen and men, this profound character and leadership development begins at the same life stage in which their peers are entering their freshman year of college. Thus, teachers, administrators, program coordinators, and everyone else involved in this seminal college experience have the same tremendous opportunity to effect lifetime character and leadership development in their young charges as do their military counterparts. Though the circumstances are different, the outcome can be the same—young people instilled with the desire to become their best moral selves, to make an impact by serving others and bringing out the best in them.

For this outcome to happen, though, academic leaders must focus on instilling specific virtues, and a specific leadership model, rather than on vague concepts of character and leadership writ large. Most people believe that good character is a good thing—the problem is that the underpinnings of good character are rarely defined, and the ways in which to pursue it are rarely spelled out. Moreover, most young people are not given clear leadership frameworks that they can put into action in their own life. The Leader’s Code can help bridge this gap, for it defines the servant-leadership model in depth, lays out the virtues underpinning it, and provides clear ways in which to develop both virtue and leadership.

In an age where economic calamity has hit the entire world, where leaders seem to have failed on a global scale, and where many people believe that life will be worse for the next generation than it was for them, colleges have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to instill hope, purpose, and meaning in the lives of their young charges. They can do so by teaching anxious students that their worth as individuals does not depend on what they do, what they earn, or who they know. Rather, it depends on who they become, and who they become is entirely under their control if they will pursue virtue with discipline and intentionality. I am excited to see the impact that universities make in the lives of the next generation of leaders. If possible, I hope that The Leader’s Code can help in its own small way.

Donovan Campbell

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AUTHOR / TITLE INDEX

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT Abbott, Jim and Tim Brown ...............................................................12

Larson, Erik ........................................................................................46

ACTS OF FAITH: The Story of an American Muslim, in the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation ..........................................................48

LEADER’S CODE, THE: Mission, Character, Service, and Getting the Job Done..................................................................................60

AMAZING GRACE: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation ........................................................................................44

LOOK ME IN THE EYE: My Life with Asperger’s ....................................28

Bakewell, Sarah..................................................................................14 BE DIFFERENT: My Adventures with Asperger’s and My Advice for Fellow Aspergians, Misfits, Families, and Teachers ........................28 BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity ........................................................................38 Bracken, Sam......................................................................................16 Boo, Katherine....................................................................................38 Cain, Susan ........................................................................................40 Campbell, Donovan ............................................................................60 Cline, Ernest ......................................................................................32 DEAR MARCUS: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me ..............................20 DECISIVE: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work ....................58 DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY, THE: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America ......................................................46 DINNER, THE: A Novel ........................................................................34 DISCOVERING WES MOORE..................................................................24 Duhigg, Charles ..................................................................................54 ENRIQUE’S JOURNEY: A Boy’s Dangerous Journey to Reunite with His Mother ............................................................................26 FIRE IN THE ASHES: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America ......................................................................44 FULL BODY BURDEN: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats ....................................................................................42

MADE TO STICK: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die ..................58 McGill, Jerry........................................................................................20 Mealer, Bryan ....................................................................................22 Moore, Wes ........................................................................................24 MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World..................................................18 MUCK CITY: Winning and Losing in Football’s Forgotten Town ............22 MY ORANGE DUFFEL BAG: A Journey to Radical Change....................16 MY ROADMAP: A Personal Guide to Balance, Power, and Purpose ......16 Nazario, Sonia ....................................................................................26 Obreht, Téa ........................................................................................36 ORDINARY RESURRECTIONS: Children in the Years of Hope ................44 OTHER WES MOORE, THE: One Name, Two Fates................................24 OUTCASTS UNITED: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make a Difference ......................................30 Patel, Eboo ........................................................................................48 Patel, Raj ............................................................................................50 POWER OF HABIT, THE: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business..................................................................................54 QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking ......40 RAISING CUBBY: A Father and Son’s Adventures with Asperger’s, Trains, Tractors, and High Explosives ..............................................28 READY PLAYER ONE: A Novel ..............................................................32

Heath, Chip and Dan Heath ................................................................58

Robison, John Elder ............................................................................28

Hoffman, Reid and Ben Casnocha ......................................................56

SACRED GROUND: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America ....................................................................................48

HOW TO LIVE: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer......................................................14

SAVAGE INEQUALITIES: Children in America’s Schools ........................44

IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, THE ........................................52

Skloot, Rebecca ..................................................................................52

IMPERFECT: An Improbable Life..........................................................12

St. John, Warren ................................................................................30

IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin ............................................................................46

START-UP OF YOU, THE: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career ............................................................56

Iversen, Kristen ..................................................................................42

STRENGTH IN WHAT REMAINS ..........................................................19

JOKER ONE: A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood ..........................................................................60

STUFFED & STARVED: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System ..................................................................................50

Kidder, Tracy ......................................................................................18

SWITCH: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard ......................58

Koch, Herman ....................................................................................34

THUNDERSTRUCK ..............................................................................46

Kozol, Jonathan ..................................................................................44

TIGER’S WIFE, THE: A Novel ................................................................36

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