As Americans prepare to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is worth remembering the long tradition of poetry dedicated to national identity. The best of this poetry is both challenging and affirmative, declaring, as Walt Whitman does in “I Hear America Singing,” “the varied carols” of each person “singing what belongs to him and her.” Such literature beckons us to what Lincoln called a “more perfect union.”
Read More
To add to your summer reading, we are offering James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” as our latest text at work, a tale of an “everyman” who escapes from his daily life through elaborate fantasies of bravado and adventure. This story was recently part of a seminar at the Maple Heights City Schools in Maple Heights, OH. When discussing the story, program participants explored the role of fantasy in their own lives, realizing that Walter Mitty may not be as strange as he first appears.
Read More
Research shows that sharing books with children helps them learn about peer relationships, coping strategies, building self-esteem and general world knowledge. Our new Deputy Director, Jamie Simoneau, reflects on these ideas as she shares her own excitement about sharing her passion for reading with her young son.
Read More
Athletic victories do not come easily, as we all know. Performing requires countless hours of practice, conditioning, and hard work. In his 1854 Walden, Henry David Thoreau made an impassioned plea for what we might call the athletic reading of challenging books. For many people, Thoreau is remembered as the lone cabin-dweller enjoying direct contact with nature. If we remember Thoreau only for his ecological consciousness, however, we miss one of the most compelling defenses of active literacy in American literature.
Read More
We have a societal narrative that says that busy, working people have no interest in high quality literature, or in challenging themselves to explore complex texts. This narrative permeates the current national dialogue on education as a means to get a job rather than learning to become a better learner (and a better worker). It fuels the humanities “crisis” about which we read so much. Underlying these messages is the insidious belief that the liberal arts – literature, the arts, history and culture, the natural and the social sciences – belong not to the working classes but somehow to the leisure class and the leisure class alone, as if critical thinking, communication, intellectual debate and skills of analysis, resilience and reinvention should be rationed or parceled out to a narrow few.
Read More
“Likes” and “dislikes” are the currency of our digital world. But is “liking” a book a relevant question? Is it possible to gain meaning and value from a book that you do not like? Is there a better way to evaluate the impact of a book or a story?
Read More
In our recent discussions at Books@Work, we have been tossing around the term “ecosystem” to help us understand the many interconnected ways our program can make a difference. We are learning to see that every partner in a Books@Work program, from the individual participants to the companies and faculty, is connected to a whole network of relationships.
Read More
Why read philosophy? The short answer: philosophy helps us discover what it is we value and believe. This response may sound counterintuitive. After all, shouldn’t I already know my own thoughts? Aren’t they my beliefs? Undoubtedly. But values and beliefs are often like the air we breathe – we rely upon them to live without giving them much thought. Philosophy offers us a mechanism for paying closer attention, for seeing ourselves anew.
Read More
Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical, often dark and usually humorous novels are both popular and complex. His somber yet fantastical vision of the world was born out of harsh personal experience. Most notably, as a young man Vonnegut enlisted to fight in World War II, where he was captured by the German army. As a prisoner of war, he survived the fire bombing of Dresden. This experience would become the source material for Slaughterhouse Five, one of his most important works.
Read More
When we started Books@Work, a surprising number of people questioned the potential impact of professors in the workplace. “Won’t they be intimidating?” asked one skeptic. “Will people really want to read the stuff they want to teach?” worried another. “Aren’t professors too expert to be really open-minded about what adult learners would have to say?” The lack of confidence was frankly dispiriting.
Read More