Summer Reading Program

Previous Summer Reading Books

Freakonomics book cover2007 - “A Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America”, by Paul Cuadros

“A Home on the Field” is published by HarperCollins. Kirkus Reviews wrote that the book was, “A worthy social commentary and biographical portrait. . . . the author’s description of (the team’s) victories is nicely balanced with a broad overview of Latinos’ relatively recent migration to the American South, with a conclusion infused with cautious optimism.”

Publisher’s Weekly wrote, “The team’s struggles bring the town conflicts into sharp relief and give Cuadros a sturdy framework for exploring meaty issues of class and ethnic conflict. In alternating terse and tender prose, he delves into his players’ backstories and captures their buoyant camaraderie to shape an inspiring underdog’s tale without romanticizing the team’s painful immigrant realities.”

Cuadros has written about issues of race and poverty for more than 15 years. He worked for The Chicago Reporter, where he won several awards for his reporting on housing, health care for the poor, and immigration issues. While working for the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., he helped write the books “The Buying of the Congress” and “The Cheating of America, How the Rich Cheat on their Taxes.”

In 1999, Cuadros won an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship and moved to Pittsboro to write about the impact of the large numbers of Latino poultry workers in rural towns in the South.

Following his fellowship, Cuadros joined TIME magazine as a freelance reporter. In 2002, he won the National Association of Hispanic Journalist’s online award for his special series for Time.com on an unaccompanied minor who had crossed the U.S. and Mexico border and had been detained by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for more than a year. The series helped to get the minor released from detention.

Cuadros also was a member of a team of radio journalists from North Carolina Public Radio WUNC-FM that won the Alfred I. duPont Columbia Journalism Award in 2005 for the series “Understanding Poverty.”

He has received the Inland Press Association Award sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Pew Charitable Trust Award for health care reporting and the National Association of Hispanic Journalist award for on-line reporting.

Cuadros is a freelance writer for TIME, and he continues to write and track the lives of the high school players as they grow up and enter the greater society. He is currently working on a new project involving Latinos in the South and the justice system.

He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Appalachian’s summer reading program began in 1997 to help freshmen establish a common experience with other new students and develop a sense of community in their new environment. The program also introduces new students to the academic life and expectations at Appalachian.

For more information about Cuadros or the book, visit www.ahomeonthefield.com.

[about the author] [supplemental materials]

 

Freakonomics book cover2006 - “Freakonomics”, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Review from “The New York Times Magazine”, August 3, 2003

The most brilliant young economist in America-the one so deemed, at least, by a jury of his elders-brakes to a stop at a traffic light on Chicago's south side. It is a sunny day in mid-June. He drives an aging green Chevy Cavalier with a dusty dashboard and a window that doesn't quite shut, producing a dull roar at highway speeds.

But the car is quiet for now, as are the noontime streets: gas stations, boundless concrete, brick buildings with plywood windows.

An elderly homeless man approaches. It says he is homeless right on his sign, which also asks for money. He wears a torn jacket, too heavy for the warm day, and a grimy red baseball cap.

The economist doesn't lock his doors or inch the car forward. Nor does he go scrounging for spare change. He just watches, as if through one-way glass. After a while, the homeless man moves along.

"He had nice headphones," says the economist, still watching in the rearview mirror. "Well, nicer than the ones I have. Otherwise, it doesn't look like he has many assets."

Steven Levitt tends to see things differently than the average person. Differently, too, than the average economist. This is either a wonderful trait or a troubling one, depending on how you feel about economists.

[about the author] [supplemental materials]

A Hope in the Unseen2005- “Iron and Silk,” by Mark Salzman
Salzman captures post-cultural revolution China through his adventures as a young American English teacher in China and his shifu-tudi (master-student) relationship with China's foremost martial arts teacher.

Review from the School Library Journal:
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.

Salzman had studied martial arts since he was 13, and he continued his practice in Changsha, where one of China's foremost experts, Pan Qingfu, accepted him as a pupil. Readers will become aware of the many styles of the sport, and, incidentally, the real meaning of "kung fu.'' The personalities encountered range from Salzman's students and teachers to calligraphers, peasants, fishermen, and bureaucrats. Each fascinating episode illuminates the way to a deeper understanding of Chinese culture and character.

[about the author] [supplemental materials]

A Hope in the Unseen2004- A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League,” by Ron Suskind
At Ballou Senior High, a crime-infested 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.

Nickel and Dimed bookcover2003 - Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Essayist and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich has always specialized in turning received wisdom on its head with intelligence, clarity, and verve. With some 12 million women being pushed into the labor market by welfare reform, she decided to do some good old-fashioned journalism and find out just how they were going to survive on the wages of the unskilled--at $6 to $7 an hour, only half of what is considered a living wage. So she did what millions of Americans do, she looked for a job and a place to live, worked that job, and tried to make ends meet. Ehrenreich brings the invisible poor out of hiding and, in the process, the world they inhabit--where civil liberties are often ignored and hard work fails to live up to its reputation as the ticket out of poverty. --excerpt from Lesley Reed, Amazon.com's Best of 2001

[About the Author | Fast Facts on Poverty  |  Poverty in North Carolina | Discussion Questions | Timeline of Social Welfare Legislation in the U.S.

Book Cover2002 - The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.
 They carried pictures, love letters, malaria tablets, Bibles, dope, a rabbit's foot, and each other. And, if they made it home alive, they carried unrelenting images of a controversial war that history is only now beginning to absorb. The Things They Carried is the story of Alpha Company. It is the story of how men lived and died fighting in Vietnam, but it's also the story of how men survived the brutality to ultimately "carry on," to find sympathy and kindness in a world full of hurt and deception. This is more than a war novel; it is an exploration of what it means to be human. Since it was first published, it has become a classic work of American literature and a profound study of men at war that illuminates the capacity, and the limits, of the human heart and soul.

[Tim O'Brien Biography | Questions for The Things They Carried]