Common Reading Book - Library Resources: Previous Common Reading Books

The essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it. * "Jahren asks the central question of our time: how can we learn to live on a finite planet?" --Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction "The voice that science has been waiting for." --Nature Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet. In concise, highly readable chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions--from electric power to large-scale farming to automobiles--that, even as they help us, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like never before. She explains the current and projected consequences of global warming--from superstorms to rising sea levels--and the actions that we all can take to fight back. At once an explainer on the mechanisms of global change and a lively, personal narrative given to us in Jahren's inimitable voice, The Story of More is "a superb account of the deadly struggle between humanity and what may prove the only life-bearing planet within ten light years" (E. O. Wilson).

In Be Different, New York Times bestselling author of Look Me in the Eye shares a new batch of endearing stories about his childhood, adolescence, and young adult years, giving the reader a rare window into the Autistic mind.   In his bestselling memoir, Look Me in the Eye, John Elder Robison described growing up with Autism Spectrum Disorder at a time when the diagnosis didn't exist. He was intelligent but socially isolated; his talents won him jobs with toy makers and rock bands but did little to endear him to authority figures and classmates, who were put off by his inclination to blurt out non sequiturs and avoid eye contact. By the time he was diagnosed at age forty, John had already developed a myriad of coping strategies that helped him achieve a seemingly normal, even highly successful, life. In each story, he offers practical advice for anyone who feels "different" on how to improve the weak communication and social skills that keep so many people from taking full advantage of their often remarkable gifts. With his trademark honesty and unapologetic eccentricity, Robison addresses questions like: * How to read others and follow their behaviors when in uncertain social situations * Why manners matter * How to harness your powers of concentration to master difficult skills * How to deal with bullies * When to make an effort to fit in, and when to embrace eccentricity * How to identify special gifts and use them to your advantage Every person has something unique to offer the world, and every person has the capacity to create strong, loving bonds with their friends and family. Be Different will help readers and those they love find their path to success.

Junaluska is one of the oldest African American communities in western North Carolina and one of the few surviving today. After Emancipation, many former slaves in Watauga County became sharecroppers, were allowed to clear land and to keep a portion, or bought property outright, all in the segregated neighborhood on the hill overlooking the town of Boone, North Carolina. Land and home ownership have been crucial to the survival of this community, whose residents are closely interconnected as extended families and neighbors. Missionized by white Krimmer Mennonites in the early twentieth century, their church is one of a handful of African American Mennonite Brethren churches in the United States, and it provides one of the few avenues for leadership in the local black community. Susan Keefe has worked closely with members of the community in editing this book, which is based on three decades of participatory research. These life history narratives adapted from interviews with residents (born between 1885 and 1993) offer a people's history of the black experience in the southern mountains. Their stories provide a unique glimpse into the lives of African Americans in Appalachia during the 20th century--and a community determined to survive through the next.

This "ingenious reckoning with the past" (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family's wartime history in Nazi Germany. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family's involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn't dare to as a child.

Rising is both a highly original work of lyric reportage and a haunting meditation on how to let go of the places we love. With every passing day, and every record-breaking hurricane, it grows clearer that climate change is neither imagined nor distant--and that rising seas are transforming the coastline of the United States in irrevocable ways. In Rising, Elizabeth Rush guides readers through some of the places where this change has been most dramatic, from the Gulf Coast to Miami, and from New York City to the Bay Area.

A Conversation with author, Elizabeth Rush: A YouTube Livestream Event

A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice--from one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time.

Video recording of TED Talk featuring Bryan Stevenson

On October 7, 1998, a young gay man was discovered bound to a fence in the hills outside Laramie, Wyoming, savagely beaten and left to die in an act of hate that shocked the nation. Matthew Shepard’s death became a national symbol of intolerance, but for the people of Laramie the event was deeply personal, and it’s they we hear in this stunningly effective theater piece, a deeply complex portrait of a community.

Late afternoon sun sneaks through the windows of a passport and visa office in an unnamed American city. Most customers and even most office workers have come and gone, but nine people remain. A punky teenager with an unexpected gift. An upper-class Caucasian couple whose relationship is disintegrating. A young Muslim-American man struggling with the fallout of 9/11. A graduate student haunted by a question about love. An African-American ex-soldier searching for redemption. A Chinese grandmother with a secret past. And two visa office workers on the verge of an adulterous affair. When an earthquake rips through the afternoon lull, trapping these nine characters together, their focus first jolts to their collective struggle to survive.

For the past three years, Jon Ronson has traveled the world meeting recipients of high-profile public shamings. The shamed are people like us - people who, say, made a joke on social media that came out badly, or made a mistake at work. Once their transgression is revealed, collective outrage circles with the force of a hurricane and the next thing they know they're being torn apart by an angry mob, jeered at, demonized, sometimes even fired from their job.

In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he'd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts.

Living and working in Rugby, Virginia (population 7), retired rural mail carrier Wayne Henderson is a true American original, making America's finest instruments using little more than a pile of good wood and a sharp whittling knife. There's a 10-year waiting list for Henderson's heirloom acoustic guitars--and even a musical legend like Eric Clapton must wait his turn.

Video recording of 2014 App State Convocation featuring Wayne Henderson

A young Pakistani boy, whose parents left the fundamentalists behind when they came to America, finds transformation and a path to happiness through a family friend, Mina, who shows him the beauty and power of the Quran.

"Novella Carpenter loves cities-the culture, the crowds, the energy. At the same time, she can't shake the fact that she is the daughter of two back-to-the-land hippies who taught her to love nature and eat vegetables. Ambivalent about repeating her parents' disastrous mistakes, yet drawn to the idea of backyard self-sufficiency, Carpenter decided that it might be possible to have it both ways: a homegrown vegetable plot as well as museums, bars, concerts, and a twenty-four-hour convenience mart mere minutes away.

Videorecording: Appalachian Perspective featuring Novella Carpenter

"Full of incredible characters, amazing athletic achievements, cutting-edge science, and, most of all, pure inspiration, Born to Run is an epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt?"

Videorecording: "Born to Run" author Christopher McDougall

This prize-winning novel is storytelling at the height of its powers: the ache of wrongs not yet made right, the fierce attendance of history made real (Barbara Kingsolver), as men and women from two families become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.

Videorecording: Meet Author Hillary Jordan

A book about one man’s determination to change the lives of young school-age children by building schools in remote Afghanistan and Pakistan. Three Cups of Tea combines adventure with a celebration of the humanitarian spirit.

Videorecording: Convocation Speaker, Greg Mortenson, Sept. 10, 2009

In The Glass Castle, Walls describes growing up in the desert of the American Southwest and then in a West Virginia mining town with her three siblings and the brilliant, unorthodox, irresponsible parents who manage at once to neglect them, love them, and teach them to face their fears.

Videorecording: Convocation Speaker, Jeannette Walls, Sept. 4, 2008

In his new book A Home on the Field, reporter Paul Cuadros chronicles one town's decision to start up a soccer team in its increasingly Hispanic public school — and how that team struggled not only to win acceptance among the Anglo establishment but also on a playing field dominated by white soccer organizations who looked at them as interlopers.

Videorecording: Convocation Speaker, Paul Cuadros, Sept. 6, 2007

In Freakonomics (written with Stephen J. Dubner), Levitt argues that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don't need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections.

Videorecording: Convocation Speaker, Stephen J. Dubner, Sept. 7, 2006

This anecdotal record of a young man's encounter with the Chinese and their way of life offers unique insights to readers. Salzman had majored in Chinese literature at Yale, and his first job after graduation in 1982 was teaching English to students and teachers at Hunan Medical College in Changsha. He met this considerable challenge with sensitivity, humor, and imagination, and was quickly regarded with respect and affection.

Videorecording: Convocation Speaker, Mark Salzman, Sept. 8, 2005

At Ballou Senior High, a school in Washington, D.C., honor students have learned to keep their heads down. Like most inner-city kids, they know that any special attention in a place this dangerous can make you a target of violence. But Cedric Jennings will not swallow his pride, and with unwavering support from his mother, he studies and strives as if his life depends on it--and it does. The summer after his junior year, at a program for minorities at MIT, he gets a fleeting glimpse of life outside, a glimpse that turns into a face-on challenge one year later: acceptance into Brown University, an Ivy League school.

Videorecording: Convocation Speaker, Cedric Jennings, Sept. 2, 2004

Author, essayist and social reformer Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover to investigate the plight of the working poor in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota. In Nickel and Dimed she chronicles the experiences of millions of women who have been thrown into the labor market by welfare reform and who are trying to survive on the wages for unskilled jobs.

Videorecording: Convocation Speaker, Barbara Ehrenreich, Sept. 4, 2003

A collection of stories about the Vietnam war with a fictional character reappearing as a thread of continuity, it was acclaimed as the most powerful fiction to come out of the Vietnam War. O'Brien writes for a contemporary audience that shares his Vietnam experience, but he is also writing for those who will have only the story.

Videorecording: Convocation Speaker, Tim O'Brien, Sept. 5, 2002

In a small Cajun community in 1940s Louisiana, a young black man is about to go to the electric chair for murder. A white shopkeeper had died during a robbery gone bad; though the young man on trial had not been armed and had not pulled the trigger, in that time and place, there could be no doubt of the verdict or the penalty.

Videorecording: Convocation Speaker, Ernest J. Gaines, Sept. 6, 2001

Rodney Barker's book, And the Waters Turned to Blood, details the latest plague to visit our shores: Pfiesteria piscicida, the "cell from hell," an aquatic microorganism that causes sufferers to exhibit symptoms similar to Alzheimer's or multiple sclerosis. As it follows the fortunes of Dr.JoAnn Burkholder, one of the first scientists to recognize the danger of Pfiesteria, Barker's book reads like a cross between science fiction and conspiracy theory.

Videorecording: Convocation Speaker, JoAnn Burkholder, Sept. 7, 2000

Oral History (1983) remains one of Lee Smith's most ambitious works. She uses multiple points of view to tell the story of the Cantrell family, a story that spans the better part of a century. The Cantrells are a mountain family who inhabit the hills and environs of Hoot Owl Holler. Jennifer, a citified descendant of the Cantrells, arrives to record an "oral history" of her family for a college course, and all the old stories unscroll.

Videorecording: Convocation Speaker, William Friday, Sept. 9, 1999

Penetrating and powerful, as personal as The Diary Of Anne Frank, Night awakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again.

Videorecording: Convocation Speaker, Elie Wiesel, Sept. 15, 1998

Based on actual events--the death of three sisters on November 25, 1960--the novel immerses us in an epoch in the life of the Dominican Republic. The "Butterflies," as they were known, lived daringly and dangerously under a regime that imprisoned, tortured, and killed with impunity.

Videorecording: Convocation Speaker, Julia Alvarez, Sept. 4, 1997