Let’s Talk About It : Full Series List
Across Cultures & Continents: Literature of the South Asian Experience
A series developed for MHC by Professor Deepika Marya of the University of Southern Maine.
- A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
- Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
- Bricklane by Monica Ali
- Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee
- Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
After Frost: Poetry in New England
Explore the variety and vitality of the region's poetry, using Robert Frost as a touchstone. A specially created anthology begins with Frost's work and includes thirty more recent poets representing a diversity of cultural points of view.
The American Revolutionary Generation
Explore the fascinating people, events, and ideas behind the American Revolution
- The American Revolution: A History by Gordon S. Wood
- Benjamin Franklin by Edmund S. Morgan
- The Minutemen and their World by Robert Gross
- Women of the Republic by Linda Kerber
- Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution by John Ferling
The American Sporting Experience
How can sport serve as a metaphor for the American experience in shaping the individual, community, and the national identity? Facilitator and site choose 5 books for a series.
- Uncommon Waters: Women Write About Fishing by Holly Morris
- The Natural by Bernard Malamud
- Laughing in the Hills by Bill Barich
- My Old Man and the Sea: A Father and Son Sail Cape Horn by David Hays and Daniel Hays
- Jesse Owen: An American Life by William Baker
- A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
- The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe
- Women on Hunting by Pam Houston
- On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates
- Friday Night Lights by H. G. Bissinger
- In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle by Madeleine Blais
- Winterdance by Gary Paulsen
American Traditions/American Innovations: American Poetry of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
We are pleased to offer this poetry series developed by former Maine Poet Laureate Baron Wormser in response to many requests for a follow up to our popular After Frost series!
- Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (J.D. McClatchy, editor)
- Nineteenth-Century American Poet (Penguin Classics)
Becoming American: Struggles, Successes, Symbols
The quest for ethnic identity.
- Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
- Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
- An Orphan in History by Paul Cowan
- The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday
- Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
Behind the Headlines: An Introduction to the Middle East
This is a special Let’s Talk About It program developed in response to many requests we have received for a series focusing on the Middle East. The series was developed by Mahmud Faksh, a professor of political science and an expert on the Middle East at the University of Southern Maine.
The format will be a little different from our normal Let’s Talk About It programs. Groups will meet 3 times with a facilitator/scholar who specializes in the Middle East. The readings for both sessions will be from The Contemporary Middle East, edited by Karl Yambert, a new, accessible anthology of writings by leading scholars incorporating historical, cultural, and political perspectives of the region. To provide participants with background and context, each session will begin with a 45-minute presentation by the facilitator, followed by approximately an hour and a quarter of facilitated discussion and questions.
For more information, please see Special Programs.
The Civil War: Biographies
An in-depth, personal view of life during the Civil War era.
- My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass
- With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen Oates
- Collected Black Women's Narratives ed. Anthony G. Barthelemy
- Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate by Eli Evans
- Portraits of American Women ed G.J. Barker-Benfield and Catherine Clinton
The Civil War: Fiction
Beginning with the novel that was credited with causing the conflict, this series explores the drama of the Civil War and its aftermath.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
- Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Civil Wars by Rosellen Brown
Consider the Source: Old Tales Retold — I
The romantic paradigm: our culture's myths about romance and happy endings.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
- Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
- Transformations by Anne Sexton
- Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
Consider the Source: Old Tales Retold — II
The social function of myths: how a society uses its traditional stories to hold itself together.
- Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston
- Grendel by John Gardner
- The Life and Loves of a She Devil by Faye Weldon
- Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
Crossing Over: Works by Contemporary American Indian Writers
In these works, American Indian writers blend western writing techniques with oral tradition to mediate between two cultures. Libraries can select 5 titles.
- Fools Crow by James Welch
- Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
- Tracks by Louise Erdrich
- The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie, and the film Smoke Signals
- The Sharpest Sight by Louis Owens
- Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi'Kmaq Poet by Rita Joe, Lynn Henry
Defining Wilderness: Defining Maine
This series, developed for MHC by historian Candace Kanes, examines the Maine wilderness, how various people have experienced it and written about it, and how those accounts have influenced Maine and shaped its identity. It raises questions about what constitutes wilderness, the relationship between humans and the natural environment, about conservation and ecology, and not least about our personal relationship to the wilderness.
- The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau
- The Wilderness from Chamberlain Farm: A Story of Hope for the American Wild by Dean Bennett
- Fly Rod Crosby: the Woman Who Marketed Maine by A. Hunter and Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr.
- Campfires Rekindled by George S. Kephart
- We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich
- Defining Wilderness: Defining Maine, Collected Readings
Detective Fiction in the 20th Century: A Notion of Evil
An exploration of evil through the lens of mystery writers of the past 100 years. (Libraries can select 5 titles)
- The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion (Paperback) by Friedrich Durrenmatt (Author), Joel Agee (Translator)
- Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
- Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers
- The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker
- "A" is for Alibi by Sue Grafton
Destruction or Redemption: Images of Romantic Love
One of the most universal and yet puzzling features of the human condition. (Libraries can select 5 titles)
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
- The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
- Morgan's Passing by Anne Tyler
- A Mother and Two Daughters by Gail Godwin
- Lolita by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Entering Nature: Contemporary Views of the Human Self in the Natural World
Contemporary writings that address in interesting and distinctive ways the affinities that unite and the distances that separate the human and the non-human.
- The Tree by John Fowles
- Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
- Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
- Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
Ethnic Americans in Maine: Making a Life, Shaping an Identity
Literature from Maine's ethnic communities. (Libraries can select 5 titles)
- Tales of Gluskap the Trickster
- Song of Rita Joe; Autobiography of a Mi’Kmaq Poet by Rita Joe and Lynn Henry
- Turnip Pie by Rebecca Cummings
- Papa Martel by Gerard Robichaud
- The Clear Blue Lobster-Water Country (Book Three) by Leo Connellan
- The Girl Who Would Be Russian by Willis Johnson
- Maine Speaks: An Anthology of Maine Literature
Exploring Human Boundaries: Literary Perspectives on Health Care Providers and Their Patients
A disease or a sick person? Health care professionals do not always focus on what is most important to the patient and the patient's family. These classic 20th-century accounts of illness, death, and dying dramatically illuminate these complex issues.
- The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
- The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- The Plague by Albert Camus
- The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
- W;t by Margaret Edson
Family and Self: Readings in Twentieth Century Japanese Fiction
The family is an important social unit in any society. In Japan, with its strong legacy of Confucian values and traditional emphasis of group over the individual, the family plays an exceptionally important role. The traditional Japanese family, called the ie, experienced significant transformations and challenges during the tumultuous years of the twentieth century. Growth of industry, movements of rural populations to industrial centers, legal reforms and the importation of Western ideas of individualism and the notion of “love marriages” undermined the authority of the family structure. This series explores five novels—two authored by women and three by men—each engaged with issues of both family and self in a changing Japan, but from widely differing perspectives.
- The Waiting Years by Enchi Fumiko
- The Makioka Sisters by Tanizaki Junichirô
- The Setting Sun by Dazai Osamu
- A Personal Matter by Nobel laureate Ôe Kenzaburô
- Good-bye Tsugumi by Yoshimoto Banana
Fear and Hope: Writing from the Great Depression of the 1930s
An exploration of the feelings of hope and uncertainty surrounding Great Depression.
- Since Yesterday: the Nineteen-Thirties in America by Frederick Lewis Allen
- The Disinherited by Jack Conroy
- Tender is the Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald
- Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today?
This series will examine one the most pivotal yet most neglected eras of United States history, one that began to define the parameters of the modern world in which we live. Rising out of the carnage of four years of civil war and a failed attempt both to reconstruct the South and reconcile race relations, Americans turned their attention during the last quarter of the nineteenth century from political debates over the nature of the nation and moral considerations of civil rights to economic projects of physical expansion and material wealth. The people of principle—of states rights versus federal union, of popular sovereignty versus free soil, of slave power versus abolition—became the people of progress—of railroad building, corporate trusts, street-car suburbs, and social and geographic mobility. In addition to industrialization, urbanization, and migration, the modernization of the United States brought with it the rise of a leisure class and a new therapeutic consumer culture.
- The Devil and the White City by Erik Larson
- The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells
- Poland Spring: A Tale of the Gilded Age by David Richards
Going to Sea: A Variety of Voices
What is going to sea really like? We'll learn about it from a variety of viewpoints and genres.
- "The Seafarer" 10th-century poem
- "Youth" by Joseph Conrad
- Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
- "Dauber" by John Masefield
- The Log of the Skipper's Wife by James Balano
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Growing Up Between Cultures
A series developed by Kathleen Ashley, University of Southern Maine
Issues of cultural, ethnic or national identity—once considered relatively simple and unproblematic—move to the foreground in this reading series that includes memoirs, a novel, and essays. Whether the setting is colonial and post-colonial Africa, the American Southwest in the 1940’s and 1950’s, post-World War II Poland, the intellectual scene of New York City, the class conscious Caribbean, or political Washington D.C., all of the central characters in these books wrestle with questions about their own individual identity, questions complicated by their experiences growing up among multiple cultures.
- Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller
- The Names: A Memoir by N. Scott Momaday
- Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language by Eva Hoffman
- Anna In-Between by Elizabeth Nunez
- The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker by Eric Liu
Individual Rights and Community in America
Examines the tension between individual rights and demands of living within a community.
- Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
- The Republic by Plato
- Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
- The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Invisible New England: The Real New England?
The words “New England” often conjure up an image of neat houses clustered picturesquely around a village green. Its inhabitants, in keeping with its name, are of Anglo-Saxon stock. Taciturn, frugal, and hardworking, the typical Yankee is thought to have a staunch character molded by tilling a hard and rocky soil or battling an uncertain sea.
- The Living is Easy, by Dorothy West, is about the life of a middle class black family in Boston, inspired by West's own experiences and her observations about social class in the black community in the early 20th century.
- Like Lesser Gods, by Mari Tomasi, is a novel about a community of Italian immigrant stonecutters living in a small Vermont town during the 1920s.
- The Family, by David Plante, is an autobiographical novel about a Francophone family in a French-Canadian enclave of Providence, Rhode Island in the 1950s.
- All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, by Michael Patrick MacDonald. This memoir takes us into the projects of South Boston in the 1970s and 1980s, where poverty, drugs and violence besiege a predominantly Irish Catholic community.
- The Wooden Nickel, by William Carpenter, is a novel about the struggles of a contemporary Maine lobsterman to survive in a world he no longer understands.
The Journey Inward: Women's Autobiography
Insights from the quest for identity.
- One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty
- Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinor Pruitt Stewart
- Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston
- My Life by Isadora Duncan
- Blackberry Winter by Margaret Mead
The Land of Norumbega: Maine in the Age of Exploration and Settlement
"Norumbega" was the name given to an area around Maine's Penobscot River by early explorers and cartogaphers. Like 'El Dorado", Norumbega was a place that drew explorers and adventurers.
- Maine in the Age of Discovery: Christopher Levett's Voyage, 1623-1624.
- The Indian Peoples of Eastern America by James Axtell
- The Tempest by William Shakespeare
- The Land of Norumbega (exhibition catalog)
Landscapes of the Western Mind: Exploring the Frontier
Views of the American West — both real and imagined.
- Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
- Dutchman's Flat by Louis L'Amour
- Cogewea, the Half Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range by Mourning Dove
- This House of Sky by Ivan Doig
Liberating Imaginations: Readings in Modern Irish Fiction
From the growing pains of de-colonization and independence, through the insular conservatism of mid-century, to the recent roaring prosperity of the so-called Celtic Tiger, Irish writers have, as Joyce?s Stephen Dedalus describes, forged the ?uncreated conscience? of Ireland.
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, published in 1916, the year the Easter Rising initiated Ireland?s war for independence, represents Joyce?s own manifesto of intellectual and artistic liberation.
- The Country Girls by Edna O?Brien, brought Edna O?Brien early literary success and international acclaim; it also gave her much notoriety in Ireland when it was banned by the Catholic censorship board for its bold treatment of sexual and religious themes.
- The Collected Stories by John McGahern most of these masterful stories are set during the author?s upbringing in the 1940s and 50s, in the conservative, agrarian Ireland of the de Valera years.
- Antarctica by Claire Keegan this debut collection from one of Ireland?s most exciting new fiction writers received the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish literature in 2000.
- A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle bringing the series full circle to 1916, A Star Called Henry takes a gritty look at the Easter Rising and subsequent War of Independence through the upbringing of its title character, Henry Starr, a boy who seems part mythic hero, part self-inspired tall tale.
Making a Difference: How Love And Duty Change Lives
This series was developed by Margery Irvine, writer and Professor of English at the University of Maine.
- Mountains Beyond Mountains : The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, the Man Who Would Cure the World by by Tracy Kidder
- Plainsong by Kent Haruf
- The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri
- The Late George Apley by J.P. Marquand
- Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
- Lying Awake by Mark Salzman
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
This special series is supported by Thoughtful Giving: Philanthropy As Civic Engagement, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Making a Living, Making a Life:Work and Its Rewards in a Changing America
An examination of work-related issues: women in the work force, a changing workplace, employment as identity, the puritan work ethic and the American Dream.
- Growing Up by Russell Baker
- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
- The Professor's House by Willa Cather
- Working by Studs Terkel
- Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy
Making Sense of the Civil War (Coming in January, 2012)
is designed as a series of five conversations exploring different facets of the Civil War experience, informed by reading the words written or spoken by powerful voices from the past and present, as listed below:
- March by Geraldine Brooks
- Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam by James McPherson
- America’s War: Talking About the Civil War and Emancipation on their 150th Anniversaries, a new anthology edited by Edward L. Ayers and published by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association
Each session will address one of these topics: Imagining War, Choosing Sides, Making Sense of War, the Shape of War, and War and Freedom.
“Making Sense of the American Civil War” is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of its We the People initiative, which promotes scholarship, teaching, and learning about American history and culture.
The Mirror of Maine: The Maine Community in Myth and Reality
These books explore community life in Maine. What defines community? What values have been associated with community life in Maine, and how many of these values still exist today? What are the confinements or darker realities that exist in Maine communities? (Libraries can select 5 titles)
- A Maine Hamlet by Lura Beam
- Wildfire Loose by Joyce Butler
- Salem's Lot by Stephen King
- Twelve Journeys in Maine by Wesley McNair
- The Weir by Ruth Moore
- Empire Falls by Richard Russo
- Maine Speaks: An Anthology of Maine Literature
Modern Times in Maine and America, 1890-1930
Views of life during the enormous changes that took place in the early twentieth century. The series can be introduced by the specially produced video, Modern Times in Maine and America, that combines interviews, early moving pictures, rare photographs and great music to give an engaging picture of a changing world.
- The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
- Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
- As the Earth Turns by Gladys Hasty Carroll
Not For Children Only
An adult perspective on childhood favorites old and new.
- The Classic Fairy Tales by Iona and Peter Opie
- Tatterhood by Ethel Johnston Phelps
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
- Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
- Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor
- I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
Opening Windows: Women's Stories from Different Cultures
An exploration of storytelling traditions in novels by women from Japan, India, Africa, and the Caribbean.
- Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
- Kehinde by Buchi Emecheta
- The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat
Paradise Revealed: Readings In Caribbean Literature
This series examines the literature of the Caribbean archipelago, from the Lesser Antilles to the Greater Antilles, from Trinidad to Jamaica.
- The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories by Stewart Brown and John Wickham, ed. Oxford University Press, selected short stories.
- Wide Sargasso Sea (Dominica) by Jean Rhys. Offended by Charlotte Bronte?s reference to Mrs. Rochester as a ?Creole lunatic in the attic? in Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys, herself a Creole from Dominica (a person of European heritage born in the Caribbean), determined to explain how Mrs. Rochester came to be in the attic.
- Another Life (St. Lucia) by Derek Walcott. This book-long poetic account of the Nobel Prize winner?s early life is a highly evocative record of his life after his father?s early death.
- A Small Place (Antigua) by Jamaica Kincaid. Kincaid talks about her homeland of Antigua, the colonial and post-colonial relationship with England, and along the way, touches on most of the important concerns of the contemporary Caribbean.
- Caribbean Passion (Jamaica) by Opal Palmer Adisa. This is a collection of poems, written in both standard English and Jamaican patois, from an accomplished novelist, poet and storyteller.
- Krik? Krak! (Haiti) by Edwidge Danticat. This is a collection of short stories from a young Haitian writer whose subsequent first novel was an Oprah Book Club selection.
The Passage of Time, The Meaning of Change: Perspectives by Five Writers From Maine
Do change and the passage of time always lead to a rosy future?
- The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
- Collected Lyrics by Edna St. Vincent Millay
- One Man's Meat by E. B. White
- As We Are Now by May Sarton
- The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute
Refreshing the Whodunit: Moving Beyond Christie and Doyle
This Let’s Talk About It series provides new and experienced mystery and detective fans with an opportunity for in depth conversation about how this genre has incorporated the contemporary world’s globalism; dilemmas of race, gender, ethnicity and class; religious conflict; historical revision; and others.
- The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie King
- Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman
- The Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison
- A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow
- Murder at the Nightwood Bar by Katherine V. Forrest
- Inspector Morimoto and the Japanese Cranes: A Detective Story Set in Japan [alternate text, may be substituted for one of the above titles] by Timothy Hemion
Rebirth of a Nation: Nationalism and the Civil War
How did America first begin to define itself and develop into a nation-state?
- Two Roads to Sumter by William & Bruce Catton
- Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Ordeal by Fire, Volume II: The Civil War by James M. McPherson
- Reconstruction: After the Civil War by John Hope Franklin
- The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries edited by C. Vann Woodward
So Near & So Far: An Exploration of Cuban Literature
Explore Cuban culture and history through the voices of talented Cuban authors. The writing in this series is lyrical, compelling, and poetic.
- Biography of a Runaway Slave (Esteban Montejo) by Miguel Barnet
- The Chase by Alejo Carpentier
- Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia
- In the Cold of the Malecon & Other Stories by Antonio Jose Ponte
- Havana Red by Leonardo Padura Fuentes
Telling the Truth: The Subject of Autobiography
A variety of twentieth-century autobiographies lead us to consider how we define "truth" and who is capable of telling it.
- Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy
- The Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff
- The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
- Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives by Carolyn Kay Steedman
- In My Mother's House by Kim Chernin
Thoughtful Giving: Philanthropy as Civic Engagement
This series uses a lively selection of readings to approach a central and sometimes thorny issue in American society: philanthropy. Readings are drawn from a new anthology edited by Amy Kass entitled The Perfect Gift: the Philanthropic Imagination in Poetry and Prose and include short selections by Edith Wharton, O. Henry, Sarah Orne Jewett, C.S. Lewis, Aristotle, P.G. Wodehouse, George Eliot, Jane Addams, Rudyard Kipling, John O'Hara, His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, Woodrow Wilson, Shakespeare and Andrew Carnegie.
This special series is supported by Thoughtful Giving: Philanthropy As Civic Engagement, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Way We Were, The Way We Are: Seasons in the Contemporary American Family
For every human being, family life encompasses enduring seasons that form a cycle: growing up, breaking away or breaking down, making choices, looking back, surviving. Such categories may have little to do with age, economic status, or geographical location. But their commonality in American life, as reflected in these books, will challenge readers to define or redefine the meaning of “family” today and, in so doing, to discover something of themselves.
- This House of Sky by Ivan Doig
- A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansbury
- The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
- Ordinary People by Judith Guest
- "The Stone Boy" by Gina Berriault,
- "A&P" by John Updike, and "The Five-Forty-Eight" by John Cheever in Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories ed. Moffett & McElheny
- During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase
What America Reads: Myth Making in Popular Fiction
What best-sellers reveal about our national psyche.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- Shane by Jack Schaefer
- From Here to Eternity by James Jones
- A Tan and Sandy Silence by John D. MacDonald
What Are Our Kids Reading These Days?
The good news is that young adults are still reading, in school and at home. Their literature reflects the timeless theme of coming of age, but also reaches deeply into issues of culture and difference, of poverty and race, of human frailty and courage.
- Two Old Women by Velma Wallis
- Dogsong by Gary Paulsen
- Holes by Louis Sachar
- Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
- Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli
- Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
Where Am I? The Individual & the Community
The viewpoints of people on the inside and the outside of communities depicted in these writings — whether in a small Maine town, a prison, Dublin, Newfoundland, Nigeria, or plague-stricken England — can contribute to our understanding of what is fundamental to our nature as human beings.
Choice I :
- To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Empire Falls by Richard Russo
- The Commitments by Roddy Doyle
- The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
- Climbing the God Tree: A Novel in Stories by Jaimee Wriston Colbert
Choice II :
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
- Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing edited by Bell Gale Chevigny
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Yankees and Strangers: the New England Town from 1636-1992
An examination of the New England town in popular myth and the reality. What role did immigration and urbanization play in the idealization of the New American town? Are traditional town values a vital reality today, or only a nostalgic image? Both slides and reading available.
"Symbolic Landscapes: Some Idealizations of American Communities," by D.W. Meinig "Town Commons of New England, 1640-1840" by John D. Cushing "Another City Upon a Hill: Litchfield, Connecticut, and the Colonial Revival"
- A New England Town: The First Hundred Years by Kenneth Lockridge
- A New England Girlhood by Lucy Larcom
- Amoskaeg: Life and Work In a New England Factory City by Tamara Hareven
- "Happy Times in Mill City" by Ann Sullivan
- Without a Farmhouse Near by Deborah Rawson
