EMU Common Reads
Topic outline
-
An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui (Abrams ComicArts, 2017)
This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.
At the heart of Bui’s story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent—the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home.
In what Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “a book to break your heart and heal it,” The Best We Could Do brings to life Thi Bui’s journey of understanding. -
Based on the rankings from the survey earlier this semester, the intellectual life committee has chosen Emmi Itaranta's book, Memory of water as the 2016-17 Common Read. Itaranta's Memory of Water is a speculative narrative set in a world waring over water. China controls Europe, and water sources are controlled by the military. The young protagonist, Noria, is learning to be a tea master like her father and must choose how to steward a secret water source as her village struggles with dehydration and occupation by the army."water doesn't care for human sorrows. It flows without slowing or quickening its pace in the darkness of the earth, where only stones will hear."You can read a sample here:The library has several copies available for check-out. Books will be made available through the Provost's office later this year.Emmi Itaranta was born and raised in Finland. She has an MA in Drama from the University of Tampere and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Kent, UK. Memory of Water is her first novel, was completed in both Finnish and English, and originally published as Teemestarin kirja. Since then, it has been translated and sold in more than 17 territories. In 2011, the novel won the Fantasy and Sci-fi Literary contest organized by Teos, a Finnish publishing house. Itaranta has worked as a columnist, theater critic, dramaturge, scriptwriter and press officer. She currently lives in Canterbury where she is completely a second novel.Listen to the author speak about climate change and her book.
-
Events:
Author Emily Raboteau will speak in Chapel (10 am, Lehman) and Colloquium (4pm, Main Stage theater), Oct 21,
Related Events:
TGIW, 4 pm, first wed of the month in Common Grounds- snacks served!
Dave Brubaker- What is our organizational culture? March 2
Dee Weikle: Exposing hidden bias Feb 3Colloquium: Tobin Miller - Shearer Jan 20
Suggested movies to pair with the book:
Do the Right Thing
Selma
Author Resources
http://canadapodcasts.ca/podcasts/EnochPrattFree/3473751
http://www.emilyraboteau.com/
http://www.groveatlantic.com/#page=isbn5599-anyguide
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/06/my_search_for_creflo_dollar/
About the book
At the age of twenty-three, Emily Raboteau traveled to Israel to visit her childhood best friend. While her friend appeared to have found a place to belong, Raboteau could not yet say the same for herself. As a biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, she’d never exactly felt at home in America. But as a reggae fan and the daughter of a historian of African-American religion, Raboteau knew of “Zion” as a place black people yearned to be. She’d heard about it on Bob Marley’s album, Exodus and in the speeches of Martin Luther King. She understood it as a metaphor for freedom, a spiritual realm rather than a geographical one. Now in Israel, the Jewish Zion, she was surprised to discover black Jews. More surprising was the story of how they got there. Inspired by their exodus, Raboteau sought out other black communities that left home in search of a Promised Land. Her question for them is same she asks herself: have you found the home you’re looking for?
On her ten-year journey back in time and around the globe, through the Bush years and into the age of Obama, Raboteau wanders through Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the American South to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of Black Zionists. She talks to Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews, Katrina transplants from her own family—people that have risked everything in search of territory that is hard to define and harder to inhabit. Uniting memoir with historical and cultural investigation, Raboteau overturns our ideas of place and patriotism, displacement and dispossession, citizenship and country in a disarmingly honest and refreshingly brave take on the pull of the story of the Exodus. – From the author’s website
About the Author
Emily Raboteau is the author of a novel, The Professor’s Daughter (Henry Holt) and a work of creative nonfiction, Searching for Zion (Grove), named a best book of 2013 by The Huffington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle, a current finalist for the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, grand prize winner of the New York Book Festival, and winner of a 2014 American Book Award. Her fiction and essays have been widely published and anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best American Non-required Reading, The New York Times, Tin House, The Guardian, Guernica, VQR, The Believer and elsewhere. Honors include a Pushcart Prize, The Chicago Tribune’s Nelosn Algren Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. An avid world traveler, Raboteau resides in New York City and teaches creative writing in Harlem at City College, once known as “the poor man’s Harvard.” – From the author’s website.
FAQs re: the Common read
Where can I get a copy of the book? The copies purchased by the provost's office have all been distributed. There are several copies in the library and each UG dept has one to share- check with your chair.
How is the book chosen? A short list of book is chosen by a sub-committee of the Intellectual Life Committee. Book suggestions are encouraged. Please submit them to Tara Kishbaugh. The entire committee chooses the book based on fit with EMU's, relevance to the current issues, and likelihood to host the author on campus.
-
“The question, really, isn’t whether people can still read or write the occasional book. Of course they can. When we begin using a new intellectual technology, we don’t immediately switch form one mental mode to another… The more profound shifts [in our brains] play out more slowly, over several generations, as the technology becomes ever more embedded in work, leisure, and education-in all the norms and practices that define a society and its culture. How is the way we read changing? How is the way we write changing? How is the way we think changing? Those are the questions we should be asking-“ p.199
So if we are changing, what does this mean for EMU as we ask students to “pursue their life calling through scholarly inquiry, artistic creation, and guided practice”? How we will be “a learning community marked by academic excellence, creative process, professional competence, and passionate Christian faith”?
- How do we use the internet and related technology well?
- How do we opt out of cultural changes that aren’t life giving?
- How do we retain the ability to read and engage the ‘long-form’ book?
- What does academic excellence mean in an age of The Shallows?
Nicholas Carr's website, his blog, his writing in the Atlantic, npr story about The Shallows, at a bookstore (see below) talking about The Shallows; a response to the Shallows.
Related work:
- New Yorker Article: How the internet gets inside us
- Chronicle of Higher Education Article: You're Distracted. This professor can help.
- PBS Frontline Show: Digital Nation.
- Sherry Turkle Ted Talk: Connected but Alone
Schedule of events related to The Shallows
Tuesday Luncheon Responses to the The Shallows with Jerry Holsopple, Walt Surratt, Dee Weikle, October 28
Siva Vaidhyanathan November 11, 7pm The Googlization of Everything
Dan Willingham November 19, 4 pm, Main Stage Theater, Are new technologies changing the way kids think?
What is the impact of new digital technologies on reading, and the teaching of reading? I’ll examine data from three perspectives: direct effect, indirect effects, and broad effects. Bydirect effects, I mean ways that digital tools can be used to teach reading (e.g. instructional software) and to read text (i.e., eReaders). By indirect effects, I mean the possibility that the things students tend to do with digital technologies-- text messaging, gaming, watching videos, and communicating via social networks—might affect reading indirectly, for example by affording reading practice during these activities. By broad-based effects I mean that digital technologies may have far-reaching consequences for cognition; for example, surveys show that teachers think these technologies have shortened kids attention spans. I will conclude that most of what has been reported—good and bad--regarding the effects of digital technologies is overstated or misleading.
Daniel Willingham earned his B.A. from Duke University in 1983 and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Harvard University in 1990. He is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1992. Until about 2000, his research focused solely on the brain basis of learning and memory. Today, all of his research concerns the application of cognitive psychology to K-16 education. He writes the “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” column for American Educator magazine, and is the author of Why Don't Students Like School?, When Can You Trust the Experts?, and Raising Readers in an Age of Distraction (forthcoming). His writing on education has appeared in thirteen languages. A blog post by Dr. Willingham on Reading Critically. Dan Willingham on Va Insight.
February 2 Faculty Assembly
February 4 TGIW Follow-up Conversation from the Faculty Assembly, Common Grounds, 4pm
Writer's Read with Mark Bauerlein February 5th, 6 pm, Common Grounds
Tuesday Luncheon with Jennifer Ulrich March 10, noon, What is scholarly communication?
-
EVENTS
Reading of Alexie’s work (Heidi Winters Vogel) September 10, 2013, Tuesday, 8 pm, Common Grounds
Graduate Student Book Study Sessions with Biomedicine, Counseling, and CJP
a. September 18, 2013, Wednesday, 6:30 p.m. Discipleship Center
b. October 16, 2013, Wednesday, 6:30 p.m. Discipleship Center
Tues luncheon with shared response essays by faculty: Beth Leaman & Nancy Heisey *Essays available on Moodle October 8, 2013, noon, West Dining Room
Mental Health/ Bullying (Pam Comer)- October 7, 2013, 8 pm, Common Grounds
Smoke Signals VaCA/CIE Film Fest, November 8-10, 2013
Nov 8, 8 pm, location TBA
Plot summary (1998; More at IMDbPro) Young Indian man Thomas is a nerd in his reservation, wearing oversize glasses and telling everyone stories no-one wants to hear. His parents died in a fire in 1976, and Thomas was saved by Arnold. Arnold soon left his family (and his tough son Victor), and Victor hasn't seen his father for 10 years. When Victor hears Arnold has died, Thomas offers him funding for the trip to get Arnold's remains, but only if Thomas will also go with him. Thomas and Victor hit the road. Sherman Alexie wrote the screenplay for Smoke Signals.
"Restoring Mohawk: History, Identity, Legacy, Family." Paulette Moore. TGIW- February 12, 2014, 4 pm, Main Stage theater or Common Grounds.
Samuel Cook March 26, 2014, 4pm Colloquium in Main Stage theater
PLECKER, POLITICS, AND PEOPLEHOOD: (RE)BIRTH OF THE MONACAN NATION
The 20th century was, arguably, one of the most turbulent epochs in the collective histories of Virginia‘s Indian nations. Eugenic policies designed to perfect the “pure” Anglo-Saxon race through selective breeding and forced sterilization treated Indians as a caste of virtual “untouchables,” by effectively outlawing legal or self-identification as “Indian.” This presentation examines the experiences and responses of the Monacan people to historic cycles of colonial contact, with the eugenic era marking the watershed of crisis and resistance. Particular emphasis is placed on the manner in which the Monacans have historically responded to colonial forces to sustain community cohesion, even in the face of immense cultural change. The Monacan experience beckons a unique test of the anthropological concept of Peoplehood given the fact that this group has suffered a great deal of loss in the conventional sense of traditional language, land, sacred historical knowledge, and ceremonial activity, but has nonetheless endured as a community of people who have consistently identified as a unique indigenous group. For instance, while there appear to be no fluent speakers of the Monacan language efforts to revitalize that language have become symbolic of cultural perseverance while other aspects of Peoplehood, particularly a connection to the land, have become more salient markers of Monacan identity and solidarity. Thus, the Monacans’ survival as a People, as well as the manner in which the contemporary Monacans have rearticulated their political and ethnic identity with the benefit of historical hindsight, constitutes a creative ethnogenetic process that may become more and more common in the 21st century as tribal cultures become more enmeshed with global forces.
Samuel R. Cook (http://www.sociology.vt.edu/people/Cook.html) received his Ph.D in cultural anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1997. His research interest in comparative political economy in Indian country and the rural South led to his long-term relationship with the Monacan Nation and other Virginia Indian nations. He is author of Monacans and Miners: Native American and coal Mining communities in Appalachia (University of Nebraska Press 2000), and numerous articles on the Monacan Nation and American Indian Studies program development. His current research focuses on indigenous natural resource management, permaculture, and community organization. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of sociology at Virginia Tech, where he serves as Director of American Indian Studies.
Critical responses to the author’s work (general)
- Berglund, J., & Roush, J. (2010). Sherman Alexie: a collection of critical essays. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
- Lewis, L. (2012). Sherman Alexie. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press.
-
Why the best kids books are written in blood
-
Nancy Heisey
Beth Leaman
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-