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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
2020 Common Book Selection: Dreamland, Sam Quinones
2020 Common Book Selection: Dreamland, Sam Quinones
Common Book Program
With a great reporter's narrative skill and the storytelling ability of a novelist, acclaimed journalist Sam Quinones weaves together two tales of capitalism catastrophically run amok. The unfettered prescribing of pain medications during the 1990s reached its peak in Purdue Pharma's campaign to market OxyContin, its new, expensive--extremely addictive--miracle painkiller. Meanwhile, a massive influx of black tar heroin--cheap, potent, and originating from one small county on Mexico's west coast, independent of any drug cartel--assaulted small towns and midsize cities across the country, driven by a brilliant, almost unbeatable marketing and distribution system. Together these phenomena continue to lay waste to …
2019 Common Book Selection: A Different Kind Of Daughter, Maria Toorpakai, Katharine Holstein
2019 Common Book Selection: A Different Kind Of Daughter, Maria Toorpakai, Katharine Holstein
Common Book Program
A DIFFERENT KIND OF DAUGHTER tells of Maria's harrowing journey to play the sport she knew was her destiny, first living as a boy and roaming the violent back alleys of the frontier city of Peshawar, rising to become the number one female squash player in Pakistan. For Maria, squash was more than liberation was salvation. But it was also a death sentence, thrusting her into the national spotlight and the crosshairs of the Taliban, who wanted Maria and her family dead. Maria knew her only chance of survival was to flee the country.
Enter Jonathon Power, the first North …
2018 Common Book Selection: The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
2018 Common Book Selection: The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
Common Book Program
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and …
2015 Common Book Convocation: Jeanne Marie Laskas, Author Of "Hidden America: From Coal Miners To Cowboys, An Extraordinary Exploration Of The Unseen People Who Make This Country Work", Jeanne Marie Laskas
2015 Common Book Convocation: Jeanne Marie Laskas, Author Of "Hidden America: From Coal Miners To Cowboys, An Extraordinary Exploration Of The Unseen People Who Make This Country Work", Jeanne Marie Laskas
Common Book Program
In Hidden America, award-winning journalist Jeanne Marie Laskas dives deep into her subjects and emerges with character-driven stories about the people who make our lives run every day—and yet we barely think of them
2013 Common Book Convocation: Conor Grennan, Author Of "Little Princes: One Man's Promise To Bring Home The Lost Children Of Nepal.", Conor Grennan
2013 Common Book Convocation: Conor Grennan, Author Of "Little Princes: One Man's Promise To Bring Home The Lost Children Of Nepal.", Conor Grennan
Common Book Program
Little Princes is the epic story of Conor Grennan’s battle to save the lost children of Nepal and how he found himself in the process. Part Three Cups of Tea, part Into Thin Air, Grennan’s remarkable memoir is at once gripping and inspirational, and it carries us deep into an exotic world that most readers know little about.