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Behind the
Beautiful Forevers
Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
By Katherine Boo
As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi, a
makeshift settlement near the Mumbai airport, are electric
with hope. Abdul sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the
recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a
woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route
to the middle class. Even the poorest children feel themselves
inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely
accused in a shocking tragedy, and suppressed tensions over
religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, carries the reader headlong
into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
“[An] exquisitely
accomplished first book.
Novelists dream of defining
characters this swiftly and
beautifully, but Ms. Boo is
not a novelist. She is one of
those rare, deep-digging
journalists who can make
truth surpass fiction, a
documentarian with a
superb sense of human
drama. She makes it very
easy to forget that this
book is the work of a
reporter. . . . Comparison to
Dickens is not
unwarranted.”
—Janet Maslin,
The New York Times
“This book belongs on
reading lists as a work that
allows high schoolers to
see the incredible
hardships of life in a
developing country.”
—School Library Journal,
“Adult Books 4 Teens”
2
H AWARDS H
In the prologue, we are introduced to Abdul, who is hiding after
being accused of attempted murder. He is Muslim, a religious
minority in the largely Hindu slum of Annawandi.
• What are the two reasons Abdul is fearful of
his neighbors?
• Discuss the role religion plays in initiating this conflict.
In Chapter 3, the reader is introduced to twelve-year-old Sunil
Sharma, a Hindu garbage scavenger who has
essentially raised himself.
• Describe his upbringing to this point.
• What experiences have given him the skill of
seeing through people’s actions to the motives
behind these actions?
Winner of the National
BookAward
The PEN/John Kenneth
Galbraith Award
The Los Angeles Times
Book Prize
The American Academy of
Arts and Letters Award
The New York Public
Library’s Helen Bernstein
Book Award
Named one of the
10 best books of the year by
The New York Times
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (cont’d)
“There is a lot to like about this book:
the prodigious research that it is
built on, distilled so expertly that we
hardly notice how much we are
being taught; the graceful and vivid
prose that never calls attention to
itself; and above all, the true and
moving renderings of the people of
the Mumbai slum called Annawadi.
Garbage pickers and petty thieves,
victims of gruesome injustice – Ms.
Boo draws us into their lives, and
they do not let us go. This is a
superb book.”
—Tracy Kidder, author of
Mountains Beyond Mountains
and Strength in What Remains
“Kate Boo’s reporting is a form of
kinship. Abdul and Manju and Kalu
of Annawadi will not be forgotten.
She leads us through their unknown
world, her gift of language rising up
like a delicate string of necessary
lights. There are books that change
the way you feel and see; this is one
of them. If we receive the fiery spirit
from which it was written, it ought to
change much more than that.”
—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author
of Random Family
“I couldn’t put Behind the Beautiful
Forevers down even when I wanted
to – when the misery, abuse and
filth that Boo so elegantly and
understatedly describes became
almost overwhelming. Her book,
situated in a slum on the edge of
Mumbai’s international airport, is
one of the most powerful indictments of economic inequality I’ve
ever read. If Bollywood ever decides
to do its own version of The Wire,
this would be it.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of
Nickel and Dimed
In Chapter 10, Sunil, Rahul, Zehrunisa and Mr.
Kamble all pass by a scavenger crying for help while
lying in the mud of an airport thoroughfare. The
scavenger’s leg has been mangled – probably from
being run over by a vehicle.
• Describe each individual’s reason for not
lending a hand. Are these reason’s valid?
• Ask your students what they would
have done for this man. Would their
responses be different if they subsisted
as the Annawadians do?
After watching Kalu’s corpse being packed into
a police van, Sunil walks back to Annawadi –
past the “Beautiful Forever” advertising splayed
against the wall that blocks airport patrons’
views of the slum.
• Have your students describe what the
concept of beauty means to them.
• What dimensions of beauty are
represented in the book?
The lives of ordinary women are an important part of
Behind the Beautiful Forevers.
• Do women like Zehrunisa and Asha have
more freedom in the urban slum then they
would have had in the villages where they
were born?
• What freedoms do they still lack,
in your view?
• Compare the experiences of the Annawadi
women and girls to the experiences of their
American counterparts.
“
As jobs and capital whip around the planet,
students will graduate into a world where
economic instability and social inequality are
increasing and geographic boundaries matter
less and less. Unfortunately, globalization and
social inequality remain two of the most
over-theorized, under-reported issues of our age.
My book is an intimate investigative account of
how this volatile new reality affects the young
people of an Indian slum called Annawadi. Like
young people elsewhere, the Annawadians are
trying to figure out their place in a world where
temp jobs are becoming the norm, adaptability is
everything, and bewildering change is the one
abiding constant.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers took me three
hard years to report, and one thought that
sustained me was that I had a unique
opportunity to show American readers that the
distance between themselves and a teenaged boy
in Mumbai who finds an entrepreneurial niche
in other people’s garbage is not nearly as great as
they might think. In the two decades I’ve spent
writing about poverty and how people get out of
it, I’ve come to believe that there are deep
connections among individuals that transcend
specificities of geography, culture, religion or
class.
By the last page, I’d like to believe that some
young readers will also find themselves wrestling
with essential questions of our time: about how
opportunity is distributed across the world;
about what an individual should be willing to
give up to get ahead; about the interconnections
between, say, the collapse of investment banks in
Manhattan and the price Mumbai waste-pickers
receive for their empty plastic water bottles;
about whether it is possible to be good and
moral in a society that is not good and moral;
and about the ultimate value of a human life.
”
—Katherine Boo
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3
The Black Count
Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the
Real Count of Monte Cristo
By Tom Reiss
General Alex Dumas is a man almost unknown today, yet his
story is strikingly familiar – because his son, the novelist
Alexandre Dumas, used his larger-than-life feats as inspiration
for such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The
Three Musketeers. But hidden behind General Dumas’s
swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret:
he was the son of a black slave – who rose higher in the white
world than any man of his race would before our own time.
Alex Dumas rose to command armies at the height of the
Revolution – until he met an implacable enemy he could not
defeat.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
“Tom Reiss wrings plenty of
drama and swashbuckling
action out of Dumas’
strange and nearly
forgotten life, and more:
The Black Count is one of
those quintessentially
human stories of strength
and courage that also
sheds light on the flukey
historical moment that
made it possible.”
—Time
“Tom Reiss has literally
drilled into locked safes to
create this masterpiece….
His portrait of a man who
was arguably our modern
age’s greatest unknown
soldier is remarkable.”
—James Bradley, author
of Flags of Our Fathers
and Flyboys
4
H AWARDS H
Compare the theme, plot and characters from
The Count of Monte Cristo with the life of General Dumas.
• What elements of his father’s story did Alexandre Dumas
incorporate into the story of Edmond Dantes?
• Compose a thorough literary analysis that examines the
text as it relates to Dumas’ biography.
Reiss writes: “To remember a person is the most important thing
in the novels of Alexandre Dumas. The worst sin anyone can
commit is to forget.”
• Consider the role that memory plays in our lives.
• Have your students compose a detailed personal narrative
of a specific memory that has impacted their life. They
should include a reflection that examines how the
memory shaped them.
Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer
Prize for Biography
Winner of the 2013
PEN/Jacqueline Bograd
Weld Award for Biography
A Finalist for the
2012 National Book
Critics Circle Awards
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (cont’d)
“It’s hard to imagine a more
colorful or engaging subject
than the man who inspired
The Count of Monte Cristo
and The Three Musketeers.
In the wonderful hands of
Tom Reiss, Alex Dumas
comes to vivid life,
illuminating far-flung
corners of history and
culture. This is a terrific
book.”
—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer
Prize-winning author of
American Lion and
Franklin and Winston
“The Black Count is a
dazzling achievement. I
learned something new
virtually on every page. No
one who reads this
magnificent biography will
be able to read The Count of
Monte Cristo or any history
of slavery in the New World
in the same way again.”
—Henry Louis Gates Jr.,
director of the W.E.B.
Du Bois Institute,
Harvard University
“Tom Reiss can do it all:
gather startling research and
write inspired prose; find
life’s great stories and then
tell them with real brilliance.
In The Black Count the
master journalist-storyteller
opens the door to the truth
behind one of literature’s
most exciting stories, and
opens it wide enough to
show the delicate beauty of
the lives within.”
The Code Noir was King Louis XIV’s decree that had dramatic
effects on both free and enslaved Negroes in the French
empire.
• What were the specific rules the Code Noir
put in place?
• Under what circumstances was a mixed-race child
considered legitimate?
• Explain how this provision might provide a “route
to social mobility for people of color.”
The Revolutionary leader Jacques-Pierre Brissot believed that
the French military had a moral responsibility to launch a
“crusade for universal freedom.”
• Should a nation’s military be used only
for defense, or do governments have the
right to use military force to promote their
political ideology?
• At what point, if ever, should the military
become involved in foreign conflicts that do not
immediately threaten national security?
In the Epilogue, Reiss discussed the fact that the biography
of General Dumas published in 1808 differs from an
earlier version in that it neglects to mention the racial
components of his story.
• How important was Dumas’ racial identity
in the context of his biography?
• Contrast the role that race played in Dumas’
life with the role that it plays today.
• To what extent does race continue to
define identity?
“
I’ve always loved exploring history. It’s
like an uncharted hemisphere, and when
you look at it closely, it has a tendency to
change everything about your own time. I
often feel like a kind of detective hired to
go find people who have been lost to
history, and discover why they were lost.
Whodunnit?
In this case, I found solid evidence that,
of all people, Napoleon did it: he buried
the memory of this great man – Gen.
Alexandre Dumas, the son of a black
slave who led more than 50,000 men at
the height of the French Revolution and
then stood up to the megalomaniacal
Corsican in the deserts of Egypt. Letters
and eyewitness accounts show that
Napoleon came to hate Dumas not only
for his stubborn defense of principle
but also for his swagger and stature –
over six feet tall and handsome as a
matinee idol – and for the fact that he
was a black man idolized by the white
French army.
[R]ecovering the life of the real man
behind these stories was the ultimate
historical prospecting journey for me: I
learned about Maltese knights and
Mameluke warriors, the tricks of
eighteenth-century spycraft and glacier
warfare, torchlight duels
in the trenches and portable guillotines
on the front. I discovered the amazing
forgotten civil rights movement of the
eighteenth century – and its unraveling
– though the most amazing thing about
this story of a black man in a white
world was how little race stood in his
way.
”
—Darin Strauss, National
Book Critics Circle
Award–winning author
of Half a Life
—Tom Reiss
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5
Everything I Never Told You
By Celeste Ng
“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this
exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in
1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn
and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will
fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s
body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that
has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed,
tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of
family, secrets and longing, Everything I Never Told You is
both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait,
uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers
and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to
understand
one another.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
“What emerges is a deep,
heartfelt portrait of a family
struggling with its place in
history, and a young woman
hoping to be the fulfillment of
that struggle. This is, in the
end, a novel about the burden
of being the first of your kind
– a burden you do not always
survive.”
H AWARDS H
Discuss the relationships between Nath, Lydia and Hannah
and how the siblings both understand and mystify one another.
• Ask your students to discuss why Lydia is the favorite
child of James and Marilyn. How does this pressure affect
Lydia, and what kind of impact do they think it has on
Nath and Hannah?
• Do they think it is more difficult for Lydia to be the favorite, or for Nath and Hannah, who are often overlooked by
their parents?
—The New York Times
Book Review
“Wonderfully moving…
Emotionally precise…A
beautifully crafted study of
dysfunction and grief…[This
book] will resonate with
anyone who has ever had a
family drama.”
—Boston Globe
6
Everything I Never Told You has much to say about the
influence our parents can have on us.
• Discuss with your students if they think the same
issues will affect the next generation of Lees?
• Have your students write a short essay on how
their parents influence their childhood.
A 2015 Alex Award Winner
A 2014-2015 Asian/Pacific
American Award for
Literature in Adult Fiction
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (cont’d)
“A subtle meditation on
gender, race and the weight of
one generation’s unfulfilled
ambitions upon the shoulders
– and in the heads – of the
next… Ng deftly and
convincingly illustrates the
degree to which some
miscommunications can never
quite be rectified.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Cleverly crafted, emotionally
perceptive… Ng sensitively
dramatizes issues of gender
and race that lie at the
heart of the story… Ng’s
themes of assimilation are
themselves deftly interlaced
into a taut tale of ever
deepening and quickening
suspense.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“Ng is masterful in her use of
the omniscient narrator,
achieving both a historical
distance and visceral intimacy
with each character’s struggles
and failures… In the end, this
novel movingly portrays the
burden of difference at a time
when difference had no
cultural value…Compelling.”
—Los Angeles
Review of Books
“So part of him wanted to tell Nath that he knew:
what it was like to be teased, what it was like to never fit in.
The other part of him wanted to shake his son,
to slap him. To shape him into something different. . . .
When Marilyn asked what happened, James said merely,
with a wave of the hand, ‘Some kids teased
him at the pool yesterday. He needs to learn to
take a joke.’”
• Have your students discuss how they reacted to the
“Marco Polo” pool scene with James and Nath. How
did they feel about James’s decision?
• Have them write an essay about a situation in which
they felt like an outsider.
“It struck her then, as if someone had said it aloud: her
mother was dead, and the only thing worth remembering
about her, in the end, was that she cooked. Marilyn thought
uneasily of her own life, of hours spent making breakfasts,
serving dinners, packing lunches into neat paper bags.”
• Have your students discuss the relationship Marilyn
and her mother have to cooking and their roles as
stay-at-home mothers. Do thry think one is happier
or more satisfied?
• How do the members of the Lee family deal with
being measured against stereotypes and others’ perceptions?
There’s so much that the characters in the novel
keep to themselves.
• What do your students wish the characters had
shared with one another?
• Do they think an ability to better express
themselves would have changed the outcome
of the book?
• Have your students write a short essay about something they kept to themselves and how that affected
their life.
“
Everything I Never Told You is the story
of the Lees, a Chinese American family
living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Marilyn
and James are determined that Lydia, the
middle and favorite child, will fulfill the
dreams they were unable to pursue.
When Lydia’s body is found in the local
lake, the delicate balancing act that has
been keeping the Lee family together is
destroyed.
Although the novel takes place in the
1970s, many of the issues the characters
face are just as relevant today. Those who
are different – racially, culturally, or in
any other way – still find themselves
pressured to be someone they’re not.
Many more routes are open to women
today, especially in medicine and science,
but women still wrestle to balance careers
and personal lives, trying to align what
their families need and what they
themselves want – as well as society’s
expectations of what women, wives and
mothers should be. And, of course,
parents yearn to make a better life for
their children while the children
themselves often feel defined (and
confined) by their parents’ dreams.
In writing Everything I Never Told You, I
was surprised to remember how different
things were just a generation or two ago
– and how much they’ve stayed the same.
Why do we keep secrets, even from those
we love most? How well do we ever really
know each other? What do we expect of
our children, and of our parents? And
what holds families together, even in the
face of unthinkable tragedies?
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”
—Celeste Ng
7
How We Got to Now
Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
By Steven Johnson
In this illustrated history, Steven Johnson explores
the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets
of modern life (refrigeration, clocks and eyeglass
lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists,
amateurs and entrepreneurs to their unintended
historical consequences. Filled with surprising stories
of accidental genius and brilliant mistakes – from the French
publisher who invented the phonograph before Edison but
forgot to include playback, to the Hollywood movie star who
helped invent the technology behind Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
– How We Got to Now investigates
the secret history behind the everyday objects of
contemporary life.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
“An unbelievable book…it’s an
innovative way to talk about
history.”
—Jon Stewart
“Mr. Johnson, who knows a
thing or two about the history
of science, is a first-rate
storyteller.”
—The New York Times
“Through a series of elegant
books about the history of
technological innovation,
Steven Johnson has become
one of the most persuasive
advocates for the role of
collaboration in innovation….
Mr. Johnson’s erudition can be
quite gobsmacking.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Johnson is a polymath… [It’s]
8
H AWARDS H
The book details a number of different creators, their successes
and setbacks, and the circumstances that gave rise to their
innovations. Johnson notes, “The art of human invention has
more than one muse.”
• What were some of the needs, observations and conditions that inspired the many innovators
discussed in the book? What common threads
can you locate?
• Consider Johnson’s discussion of “time travelers.” Can you
think of several past and present innovators, other than
those mentioned in the book, who also deserve this title?
• How does the book challenge the assumption
that innovation commonly originates from the
solitary genius?
Companion book to
How We Got to Now,
a six-part television
series on PBS.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (cont’d)
exhilarating to follow his
unpredictable trains of
thought. To explain why some
ideas upend the world, he
draws upon many disciplines:
chemistry, social history,
geography, even ecosystem
science.”
—Los Angeles Times
“[Johnson’s] point is simple,
important and well-timed:
During periods of rapid
innovation, there is always
tumult as citizens try to make
sense of it....Johnson is an
engaging writer, and he takes
very complicated and
disparate subjects and makes
their evolution understandable.”
The book details how different innovations have provoked
a variety of unexpected changes, which Johnson calls
the “hummingbird effect”: “An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong
to a different domain altogether.”
• Which of Johnson’s modern innovations had
the most interesting, and unexpected,
historical influence?
• In what ways have various innovations enabled political and social paradigm shifts?
Johnson’s work implies that an examination of history can
inspire insightful analysis of the present: “This is a history
worth telling, in part, because it allows us to see a world we
generally take for granted with fresh eyes.”
• Why is it important to examine modern
technologies that have become commonplace?
—The Washington Post
“You’re apt to find yourself
exhilarated…Johnson is not
composing an etiology of
particular inventions, but
doing something broader and
more imaginative…I
particularly like the cultural
observations Johnson
draws along the way…[he] has
a deft and persuasive touch…
[a] graceful and compelling
book.”
—The New York Times
Book Review
• Describe Johnson’s “long zoom” approach to history.
How does it reveal aspects of modern
existence, and its origins, that remain largely
unexamined?
Have students choose one contemporary technology not
mentioned in the book and examine its development through
the “long zoom” conceptual lens.
Study Questions by Chris Gilbert
Excerpt from the Introduction
This book is then partially about
these strange chains of influence, the
“hummingbird effect.” An innovation, or
cluster of innovations, in one field ends
up triggering changes that seem to
belong to a different domain altogether.
Hummingbird effects come in a variety of
forms. Some are intuitive enough: orders-of-magnitude increases in the sharing of
energy or information tend to set in motion a
chaotic wave of change that easily surges over
intellectual and social boundaries. (Just look
at the story of the Internet over the past thirty
years.) But other hummingbird effects are
more subtle; they leave behind less conspicuous causal fingerprints. Breakthroughs in our
ability to measure a phenomenon – time,
temperature, mass – often open up new
opportunities that seem at first blush to be
unrelated. (The pendulum clock helped
enable the factory towns of the industrial
revolution.) Sometimes, as in the story of
Gutenberg and the lens, a new innovation
creates a liability or weakness in our natural
toolkit, that sets us out in a new direction,
generating new tools to fix a “problem” that
was itself a kind of invention. Sometimes new
tools reduce natural barriers and limits to
human growth, the way the invention of
air-conditioning enabled humans to colonize
the hotspots of the planet at a scale that
would have startled our ancestors just three
generations ago. Sometimes the new tools
influence us metaphorically, as in the robot
historian’s connection between the clock and
the mechanistic view of early physics, the
universe imagined as a system of
“cogs and wheels.”
—Steven Johnson
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9
Immigrant Voices
Volume Two
By Gordon Hutner
Filled with moving narratives by authors from around
the world, Immigrant Voices: Volume II delivers a global and
intimate look at the challenges modern immigrants confront.
Their stories, told with pride, humor, trepidation, candor and a
touch of homesickness, offer rarely
glimpsed perspectives on the difficult but ultimately rewarding
quest to become an American. From the humorous experiences of Firoozeh Dumas, author of Funny in Farsi, to the
poignant struggles of Oksana Marafioti, author of American
Gypsy, this collection
travels from Burundi to Afghanistan, Egypt to Havana,
and Cambodia to Puerto Rico, to present incredible contemporary portraits of immigrants and illustrate
that America is, and always will remain, a fresh and ever-changing melting pot.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Contributors List
10
André Aciman
Anchee Min
Tamim Ansary
Shoba Narayan
H.B. Cavalcanti
Elizabeth Nunez
Firoozeh Dumas
Guillermo Reyes
Gustavo Pérez Firmat
Marcus Samuelsson
Reyna Grande
Esmeralda Santiago
Le Ly Haslip
Katarina Tepesh
Aleksander Hemon
Gilbert Tuhabonye
Rose Ihedigbo
Luong Ung
Oksana Marafioti
Kao Kalia Yang
Several autobiographers come from comfortable backgrounds, not the tired, poor and
huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the “wretched refuse” of other nations that the
Statue of Liberty welcomes.
• Discuss these memoirs in relation to the Emma Lazarus’s poem,
“The New Colossus” (1883).
• Ask students what are their previous associations with immigration, based on
their own family experiences or how immigration is represented in the media.
• How do these ideas match the experiences that they find in the individual
memoirs? What makes these testimonies similar to or different from the ones
that the students already know?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (cont’d)
From The Introduction
Immigration narratives have similarities, scenes that get repeated from memoir to memoir. One
is the preparation for leaving a home country, and another is the moment of arrival. Other
typical scenes include how the authors learn about their new home from a new neighbor or
classmate, or from a relative who has preceded them.
…When this country first understood itself
• What other kinds of scenes do students find repeated? Which ones do they consider
the most affecting?
• What do students imagine to be the hardest thing for an immigrant to give up?
as a nation of immigrants, it was probably true
that there really weren’t too many other places
where immigrants were welcomed, where their
lives might be improved and where they, in their
turn, might benefit
those countries. But now, more than two
centuries later, more nations see themselves as
heterogeneous and make room for immigrants
suffering from upheavals and economic distress
around the globe. Yet even as these nations are
Sometimes, immigrants are escaping repressive political regimes. That can be difficult for some
Americans to relate to.
• How is the search for political freedom related to the American dream, which so
often has the connotation of material success?
• Beyond the freedom to benefit materially, do these immigrants come to the US with
other dreams?
becoming more diverse, America remains the
refuge so many millions continue to seek,
certainly in its own hemisphere. The burden this
creates can sometimes seem unsustainable.
Perhaps, in the near future, another new law will
enable the country to strengthen its capacity to
bolster itself by absorbing new immigrants.
If so, as these autobiographies demonstrate again
and again, such a law will help to renew the
Because of changes in transportation and technology, immigrants today – as opposed to in the
nineteenth or most of the twentieth centuries--are able to maintain strong connections to their
homeland and to participate in both societies. One autobiographer (Perez Firmat) describes
“life on the hyphen,” meaning that the immigrant is always straddling the old world and new.
Another (Cavalcanti) seizes on this doubleness as a virtue and sees himself as a hybrid
American, a citizen of both old and new homes.
• Can an individual retain past connections to a previous life and still be an American? Discuss why or why not.
• Which kind of immigrant do students think they might be?
• What is the cost to the individual of giving up one’s old way – family, customs, values? Give examples from the text.
nation’s faith in itself and in its most treasured
resource. Once it does, new immigration
narratives will then be written, new memoirs
recording the rewards and consolations of
becoming Americans.
The memoirs selected for this volume are stories
we need to know, not just because they help us
understand the new challenges facing immigrants, which they do, and not just because they
familiarize us with an array of new countries and
the reasons immigrants come to the US, which
they also do. We read these new immigrant
autobiographies because the more familiar we
are with them, the more we understand this new
America, an America made different – better
and more fulfilled – as a result of immigration.
We read these stories to appreciate the United
States we are always in the midst of becoming.
—Gordon Hunter
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11
The Martian
A Novel
By Andy Weir
Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first
people to walk on Mars. Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person
to die there. After a storm forces his crew to evacuate while
thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded with no way
to signal Earth that he’s alive – and even if he could get word
out, his supplies would be gone before a rescue could arrive.
But Mark isn’t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity,
his engineering skills – and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit
– he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable
obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to
overcome the impossible odds against him?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
“Terrific stuff, a crackling
good read that devotees of
space travel will devour like
candy…succeeds on
several levels and for a
variety of reasons, not least
of which is its surprising
plausibility.”
H AWARDS H
In the first chapter of the book, Weir describes the mission that
stranded Mark watney on Mars. Examine the technology
mentioned in this chapter.
• What had kept the US from carrying out manned space
flights to Mars?
• Describe the requirements of this type of mission.
—USA Today
“A book I just couldn’t put
down! It has the very rare
combination of a good,
original story, interestingly
real characters and
fascinating technical
accuracy…reads like
“MacGyver” meets
“Mysterious Island.”
—Astronaut Chris
Hadfield, Commander
of the International
Space Station and
author of An
Astronaut’s Guide
to Life on Earth
“The Martian kicked my ass!
12
• How close are we to having the technology to send astronauts to Mars?
Watney uses a number of energy sources over the course of the
novel, including solar cells, ion engines and radioisotope
thermoelectric generators.
• Have the students research the various energy
sources. What are the risks associated with the
various sources of energy?
• What are the benefits?
Winner of a
2014 YALSA ALEX Award
Winner of a 2014 RUSA
reading List Genre Award
A 2014 School
Library Journal
“Best Adult Book 4 Teens”
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (cont’d)
Weir has crafted a relentlessly
entertaining and inventive
survival thriller, a MacGyvertrapped-on-Mars tale that
feels just as real and
harrowing as the true story of
Apollo 13.”
—Ernest Cline, author of
ALEX Award winner
Ready Player One
“Humankind is only as strong
as the challenges it faces,
and The Martian pits human
ingenuity (laced with more
humor than you’d expect)
against the greatest endeavor
of our time – survival on Mars.
A great read with an inspiring
attention to technical detail
and surprising emotional
depth. Loved it!”
—Daniel H. Wilson, author
of Alex Award winner
Robopocalypse
“An excellent first novel…Weir
laces the technical details
with enough keen wit to
satisfy hard science fiction
fan and general reader alike
[and] keeps the story
escalating to a riveting
conclusion.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
(starred)
“Weir combines the
heart-stopping with the
humorous in this brilliant
debut novel...by placing a
nail-biting life-and-death
situation on Mars and adding
a snarky and wise-cracking
nerdy hero, Weir has created
the perfect mix of action and
space adventure.”
Because of Watney’s creative modification of equipment in
order to survive, The Martian has drawn comparisons to the
true story of the Apollo 13 Mission.
• Have the students research the technology and engineering that was used in the Apollo 13
mission and rescue.
• Develop a workable plan or model that uses
components of an existing device for a
completely new function.
Watney faces a number of challenges in attempting to develop
agrictulutre on Mars.
• Have your students detail the challenges he faces. How
does Watney solve them?
• Why are bacteria a necessary component of soil used
for agriculture?
Throughout the novel, Mark finds numerous ways to modify
and utilize the crew’s EVA suits. Have your students research
the engineering of EVA suits.
• What purposes do they serve?
What materials are they constructed of?
• What unique challenges did scientists face when they
designed EVA suits?
• How have they changed with techonological
advances?
At one point, Mark figures out that there is a dust
storm on Mars.
• Explain how he works this out.
“
When I wrote The Martian, I didn’t
mean to craft a thriller that could
double as a science textbook – but
to some extent, that’s what
happened.
As a science dork, I wanted to make
sure everything in the book was as
accurate as it could be. I wanted to
back up Mark’s solutions with hard
numbers. As a result, many parts of
the book are basically deadly word
problems based on what Mark must
do to survive. I did a lot of work to
solve these problems in a physically
accurate way, and I really wanted
the reader to know. That balancing
act was the biggest challenge I
faced. And I think it turned out
alright
I love science for its own sake, but I
know I’m atypical. And I think – or
hope – that a book like The
Martian can provide a perspective
that helps students see just how
cool science can be. A physics or
chemistry puzzle that might be
boring in the abstract suddenly
becomes much more engaging once
it’s critical to saving someone’s life.
Science is a tool we use to solve
problems or make our lives better.
The allure is in what you can do
with it. I hope to make readers
enjoy science just as much as I do.
My favorite fan-mail is the kind
that says “I don’t usually like
science, but…”
• How does he use observation to determine the direction and speed of the storm? Why is this
information critical?
”
—Andy Weir
—Library Journal (starred)
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13
Station Eleven
By Emily St. John Mandel
One night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack
onstage during King Lear. EMT Jeevan Chaudhary is in the
audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten
Raymonde watches as Jeevan performs CPR, but Arthur is
dead. That same night, a terrible flu begins to spread that will
change life as we know it. Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an
actress with the Traveling Symphony. This small troupe moves
between the settlements of an altered world, performing
Shakespeare and music for survivors. A novel of art, memory
and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the
beauty of the world as we know it.
2014 National Book
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
“Station Eleven is so
compelling, so fearlessly
imagined, that I wouldn’t
have put it down for
anything.”
—Ann Patchett,
author of Bel Canto
“Station Eleven offers
comfort and hope to those
who believe, or want to
believe, that doomsday
can be survived, that in
spite of everything people
will remain good at heart,
and when they start
building a new world they
will want what was best
about the old.”
— Sigrid Nunez,
New York Times
Book Review
14
H AWARDS H
The novel begins with a passage from the poet Czeslaw Milosz
that serves as an epigraph. After your students have read the
entire novel, ask them to reread the epigraph.
• What does the epigraph mean?
• Why did Mandel choose it to introduce Station Eleven?
In a letter to his childhood friend, Arthur writes that he’s
been thinking about a quote from Yeats, “Love is like the lion’s
tooth.”
• What does this mean, and why is he thinking about it?
• How does the impending publication of those
letters affect Arthur?
Award Finalist
A Washington Post
Best Book of 2014
A Time Magazine
Best Book of 2014
A Chicago Tribune Best
Book of 2014
Winner of the 2015
Arthur C. Clarke Award
for Science Fiction
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (cont’d)
“In this unforgettable,
haunting, and almost
hallucinatory portrait of life
at the edge, those who
remain struggle to retain
their basic humanity and
make connections with
the vanished world
through art, memory and
remnants of popular
culture . . . a brilliantly
constructed, highly
literary, postapocalyptic
page-turner.”
—Library Journal
(starred)
“Once in a very long while
a book becomes a brand
new old friend, a story you
never knew you always
wanted. Station Eleven is
that rare find that feels
familiar and extraordinary
at the same time, expertly
weaving together future
and present and past,
death and life and
Shakespeare. This is truly
something special.”
—Erin Morgenstern, author
of The Night Circus
“A unique departure from
which to examine
civilization’s wreckage . . .
[a] wild fusion of celebrity
gossip and grim future . . .
Mandel’s examination of
the connections between
individuals with disparate
destinies makes a case
for the worth of even a
single life.”
Certain items turn up again and again, for instance the comic
books and the paperweight – things Arthur gave away before he
died, because he didn’t want any more possessions. And Clark’s
Museum of Civilization turns what we think of as mundane
belongings into totems worthy of study.
• What point is Mandel making in pointing out
these belongings?
• What is the metaphor of the Station Eleven
comic books?
Some characters – like Clark – believe in preserving and
teaching about the time before the flu. But in Kirsten’s
interview with François Diallo, we learn that there are entire
towns that prefer not to.
• What are the benefits of remembering, and of
not remembering?
• Have your students write an essay in which they would
have to make the choice to remember or not and why.
Arthur remembers Miranda saying “I regret nothing,” and
uses that to deepen his understanding of Lear, “a man who
regrets everything,” as well as his own life.
• How do his regrets fit into the larger scope
of the novel?
• Other than Miranda, are there other characters
that refuse to regret?
An Except from Station Eleven
What was lost in the collapse: almost
everything, almost everyone, but there
is still such beauty. Twilight in the
altered world, a performance of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream in a
parking lot in the mysteriously named
town of St. Deborah by
the Water, Lake Michigan shining
a half mile away. Kirsten as Titania, a
crown of flowers on her close-cropped
hair, the jagged scar on her cheekbone
half-erased by candlelight. The
audience is silent. Sayid, circling her in
a tuxedo that Kirsten found in a dead
man’s closet near the town of East
Jordan: “Tarry, rash wanton.
Am I not thy lord?”
“Then I must be thy lady.” Lines of
a play written in 1594, the year
London’s theaters reopened after two
seasons of plague. Or written possibly
a year later, in 1595, a year before the
death of Shakespeare’s only son. Some
centuries later on a distant continent,
Kirsten moves across the stage in a
cloud of painted fabric, half in rage,
half in love. She wears a wedding dress
that she scavenged from a house near
New Petoskey, the chiffon and silk
streaked with shades of blue from a
child’s watercolor kit.
“But with thy brawls,” she
continues,” thou hast disturbed our
sport.” She never feels more alive than
at these moments. When onstage she
fears nothing.
—Publishers Weekly
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15
Unbroken
A World War II Story of Survival,
Resilience and Redemption
By Laura Hillenbrand
Louis Zamperini was an incorrigible delinquent who channeled his teenage defiance into running, a talent that had
carried him to the Olympics. When World War II began, he
became an airman and in 1943, his bomber crashed into the
Pacific Ocean. Against all odds,
Zamperini survived, adrift on a life raft. Ahead of him lay
thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, thirst and
starvation, enemy aircraft and, beyond, a trial even greater.
Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would
answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope;
brutality with rebellion. His fate would be suspended
on the fraying wire of his will.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
“Hillenbrand has once again
brought to life the true story of
a forgotten hero, and
reminded us how lucky we are
to have her, one of our best
writers of narrative history.
You don’t have to be a sports
fan or a warhistory buff to devour this
book – you just have to love
great storytelling.”
—Rebecca Skloot,
author of The
Immortal Life of
Henrietta Lacks
H AWARDS H
Unbroken is composed of a short preface, five parts and an
epilogue. Each section foreshadows the one that follows, and
each section’s cliff-hanger leas to the next’s resolution or
subsequent conflict.
• What is the author’s purpose in sectioning the
book in this way?
• What effect does it have on the reading experience?
Hillenbrand makes ample us of figurative language in the book.
For example: “In Torrance, a one-boy insurgency was born”;
“Stricken bombers began slipping behind, and the Zeros
pounced”; and “Louie walked upstairs and lay down on his old
bed. When he finally drifted off, the Bird followed him into his
dreams.”
• Discuss why the author might have chosen to use
such figurative language in a biography.
• Does it help or hinder the understanding of the themes
presented in Unbroken? Explain.
16
New York Times Bestseller
Time Magazine Top
Nonfiction Book of the Year
Winner of the
Los Angeles Times Book
Prize for Biography
Winner of Indies Choice
Adult Nonfiction Book of the
Year award
A 2012 American Library
Association Notable Book
for Adults (Nonfiction)
Finalist, 2011 Dayton
Literary Peace Prize for
Non-fiction
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (cont’d)
“Unbroken is too much book
to hope for: a hellride of a
story in the grip of the one
writer who can handle it. . . .
When it comes to courage,
charisma and impossible
adventure, few will ever
match ‘the boy terror of
Torrance,’ and few but the
author of Seabiscuit could
tell his tale with such
humanity and dexterity.
Hillenbrand has given us a
new national treasure.”
—Christopher McDougall,
author of Born to Run
“Extraordinarily moving . . .
a powerfully drawn
survival epic.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“A meticulous, soaring and
beautifully written account of
an extraordinary life.”
—The Washington Post
“Ambitious and powerful . . . a
startling narrative and an
inspirational book.”
—The New York Times
Book Review
Throughout Unbroken, the author describes the brutality of
Japanese prison personnel toward their captives.
• Compare this treatment with the Nazi treatment of
prisoners of war.
• Develop a position as to which Axis power was crueler.
Use examples from the book and other sources to
support your conclusions.
• When describing prison life, Hillenbrand explores
the concept of dignity as a basic need. Is dignity an
essential element to life? Explain your position using
examples from your own life.
Hillenbrand writes that Japanese POW accounts of abuses
“pushed the bounds of believability.”
• Considering Louie’s life story, does that push the
bounds as well?
• What importance does Hillenbrand place on the role
of providence in Louie’s survival?
“Six Word Memoirs” challenges students to condense their life
experiences into a six word statement.
• Have students compose “Six Word Memoirs” based on
Louie’s experiences. Create one for each stage of his
life.
• Have students create “Six Word Memoirs” based on the
themes of Unbroken.
“Zamperini’s story is certainly
one of the most remarkable
survival tales ever recorded.
What happened after that is
equally remarkable.”
—Graydon Carter,
Vanity Fair
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An Except from Unbroken
The boy’s name was Louis Silvie Zamperini.
The son of Italian immigrants, he had come
into the world in Olean, New York, on
January 26, 1917, eleven and a half pounds
of baby under black hair as coarse as barbed
wire. His father, Anthony, had been living
on his own since age fourteen, first as a coal
miner and boxer, then as a construction
worker. His mother, Louise, was a petite,
playful beauty, sixteen at marriage and
eighteen when Louie was born. In their
apartment, where only Italian was spoken,
Louise and Anthony called their boy Toots.
From the moment he could walk, Louie
couldn’t bear to be corralled. His siblings
would recall him careening about,
hurdling flora, fauna and furniture. The
instant Louise thumped him into a chair
and told him to be still, he vanished. If she
didn’t have her squirming boy clutched in
her hands, she usually had no idea where
he was.
In 1919, when two-year-old Louie was
down with pneumonia, he climbed out his
bedroom window, descended one story
and went on a naked tear down the street
with a policeman chasing him and a crowd
watching in amazement. Soon after, on a
pediatrician’s advice, Louise and Anthony
decided to move their children to the
warmer climes of California. Sometime
after their train pulled out of Grand
Central Station, Louie bolted, ran the
length of the train and leapt from the
caboose. Standing with his frantic mother
as the train rolled backward in search of
the lost boy, Louie’s older brother, Pete,
spotted Louie strolling up the track in
perfect serenity. Swept up in his mother’s
arms, Louie smiled. “I knew you’d come
back,” he said in Italian.
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17
What We See
When We Read
By Peter Mendelsund
What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe
Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly,
Ishmael looked like? The collection of fragmented images on a
page – a graceful ear there, a stray curl, a hat positioned just so
– and other clues and signifiers helps us to create an image of a
character. But in fact our sense that we know a character
intimately
has little to do with our ability to concretely picture our
beloved – or reviled – literary figures. In this remarkable work
of nonfiction, Knopf ’s Associate Art Director Peter Mendelsund combines his profession, as an awardwinning designer; his first career, as a classically trained
pianist; and his first love, literature – he considers himself first
and foremost as a reader – into what is sure to be one of the
most provocative and unusual investigations into how we
understand the act of reading.
©George Baier IV
Picturing “Picturing”
If I said to you, “Describe Anna Karenina,” perhaps you’d mention her beauty. If
you were reading closer you’d mention her “thick lashes,” her weight, or maybe
even her little downy mustache (yes – it’s there). Mathew Arnold remarks upon
“Anna’s shoulders, and masses of hair,
and half-shut eyes…”
But what does Anna Karenina look like? You may feel intimately
acquainted with a character (people like to say, of a brilliantly described character,
“it’s like I know her”), but this doesn’t mean you are actually picturing a person.
Nothing so fixed-nothing so choate.
Most authors (wittingly, unwittingly) provide their fictional characters with more
behavior than physical description. Even if an author excels at physical descriptions, we are left with shambling concoctions of stray body parts and random
detail (authors can’t tell us everything). We fill in gaps. We shade them in. We
gloss over them. We elide. Anna: her hair, her weight – these are facets only, and
do not make up a true image of a person. They make up a body type, a hair color…
What does Anna look like? We don’t know – our mental sketches of character are
worse than police composites.
18
Anna Karenina, rendered by
police composite – sketch software
based on the description in
Tolstoy’s text.
Abstractions
Context
Do we visualize anything when we read? Of course,
When we read, we take in whole
we must visualize something…Not all reading is merely
eyefuls of words. We gulp them
abstract, the interplay of theoretical notions. Some of our
like water.
mental content seems to be pictorial.
A word’s context matters.
Try this thought experiment:
The significance of a word is
contingent on the words that
surround it. In this way, words are
like musical notes. Imagine a single tone…
It is like a word out of context. You might consider such a single pitch as one
might consider a noise (especially if the note is produced by, say, a car horn) –
1.
Think of the capital letter D.
2.
Now imagine it turning ninety degrees
counterclockwise.
3.
Now take it and mentally place it on top
of the capital letter J.
Now….what is the weather like, in your mind?
i.e., devoid of meaning.
Add another note and there is now some context
with which to consider the first. A chord is now
heard, even if one wasn’t intended.
Add a third note and meaning becomes further
narrowed. Mood is changed utterly by virtue of context.
So it is with words.
Belief
When reading To the Lighthouse, we
come across this sentence:
“While it drew from a long frilled strips
(We think “rainy” because we successfully construct
and manipulate mental pictures – and here we’ve demonstrated
the fact that we have done so.)
(We made a picture in our minds.)
of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of
salt and weeds…”
Can you smell this odor? When I read
this passage I imagined I did. Of course,
what I was “smelling” was the idea of a
smell. Not something visceral like a real
smell. Can we imagine smells? I posed
Of course, the picture
we made is a picture of two
symbols: letter forms. An
actual picture of an umbrella
is much harder to see…
this question to a neuroscientist, an
expert in how the brain constructs
“smell.”
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