Book Reviews

I'm on this reading committee and we're in charge of selecting a book for our yearly first year reading experience. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, in the world of Higher Ed, the answer is always "it depends". Why, do you ask? Because we've been meeting since LAST September to select a book for 2010-2011, and still haven't found one and we were supposed to be done last spring. We do have a good excuse... the theme we choose is a really hard one, and we're a bunch of hard-headed stubborn folk who won't change our theme. So we're still reading. Here is my year in review recap of the book's we've read:

Theme: Environmental Responsibility

Book: The World Without Us
Awesome book and it really helps you think about what you're actions right now, or the actions of your grandfather, mean and how long it would take for those actions to reverse. Why we didn't choose this book even though a lot of us liked it: The language was a bit difficult and we felt it would be over the heads of most (not all) of our school's freshmen. It would, however, be a good companion to whatever we choose. Definitely a must read if you're interested in your personal environmental impact. I'd highly recommend the chapter on cities, buildings, and houses, and the chapter on plastics.

Book: In Defense of Food
Stretching our theme quite a bit to include human health and nature, we all read this book and really liked it. I personally, did not like it. I felt it was a bit too much whack science, but others in the group disagreed. While we really like the book, it was a bit too much outside of the environmental responsibility theme and would require too much stretching to connect the dots for the freshmen. Our student member of the committee also felt it was too boring.

Book: Unbowed
This book is also great and discusses one woman's effort to try and re-plant vegetation in her native country that's been over developed by humans. It's really good and demonstrates what someone can do even if they come from the lowest of poverty levels. However, we didn't choose the book because it catered a bit more to the female point of view, the narrative takes place in Africa and wouldn't be as relevant to our incoming students. Also, it didn't fit just right with our theme because it focused more on the vegetation aspect of environmental responsibility and on the aspect of social injustice.

More book reviews to come (maybe next week?).