Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
2012 Common Reader
"Katherine Boo spent three years among the residents of the Annawadi slum, a sprawling, cockeyed settlement of more than 300 tin-roof huts and shacks in the shadow of Mumbai's International Airport. From within this "sumpy plug of slum" Boo unearths stories both tragic and poignant -- about residents' efforts to raise families, earn a living, or simply survive. These unforgettable characters all nurture far-fetched dreams of a better life. As one boy tells his brother: "Everything around us is roses. And we're like the s**t in between."Read more
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
2011 Common Reader
From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal LIfe of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951.Read more
2010 Common Reader
Fall 2010's common reader is Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder. Students are encouraged to read this book prior to the start of classes in the fall.Read more
2009 Common Reader
An exciting component of the First Year Experience will be a shared reading, by you and fellow freshmen, of Three Cups of Tea. The book, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, features a compelling personal account of how one man has worked to make a difference by building schools in the most remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Students are encouraged to read this book prior to the start of classes in the fall.Read more
