Division of Student Affairs

The 2008-2009 academic year featured the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and CWRU planned a series of programs and activities to celebrate the Darwin Bicentennial. In keeping with this theme, the 2008 Common Reading Selection Committee selected David Quammen's fascinating and intimate story of Charles Darwin. In his book, Quammen sketches a vivid life portrait of naturalist Charles Darwin and Darwin's reluctance to publish his controversial theory of evolution. Quammen begins his story after Darwin's return from his round-the-world journey on the Beagle and traces the 21 years that passed before Darwin was prepared to share his theory of natural selection in The Origin of the Species.

View the list of 2008 finalists.

As David K. Shipler makes clear in this study, the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideology - hard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: low paying, dead-end jobs; the profound failure of government to improve upon decaying housing, health care, and education; the failure of families to break the patterns of child abuse and substance abuse. Shipler exposes the interlocking, problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poor - white and black, Asian and Latino, citizens and immigrants. We encounter them every day, for they do jobs essential to the American economy." We meet drifting farmworkers in North Carolina, exploited garment workers in New Hampshire, illegal immigrants trapped in the steaming kitchens of Los Angeles restaurants, addicts who struggle into productive work from the cruel streets of the nation's capital - each life another aspect of a confounding, far-reaching urgent national crises. And unlike most works on poverty, this one delves into the calculations of some employers as well - their razor-thin profits, their anxieties about competition from abroad, their frustrations in finding qualified workers.

View the list of 2007 finalists.

With The Soul of a Chef, Ruhlman lays bare the vigorous competition necessary to become a Certified Master Chef at the CIA, a process in which the chef spends ten consecutive sixteen-hour days cooking in styles ranging from contemporary Asian to classical French, under relentless scrutiny. This intense, almost bizarre cooking test - ultimately an attempt to define an objective truth of great cooking - begins Ruhlman's journey into the dark heart of the profession and soul of a chef." "Ruhlman observes, cooks with, and writes about three distinctive chefs of different stripes - Brian Polcyn of the Five Lakes Grill in Milford, Michigan; Michael Symon, a rising star at Cleveland's Lola Bistro; and Thomas Keller, proprietor of Napa Valley's the French Laundry, and, the author argues, one of the best American chefs working today." "Ruhlman attempts to understand what makes one chef, and restaurant, successful and another not; when cooking rises to the level of art; why one should cook in the first place; and what, in the end, is the source of America's ravenous hunger for knowledge about food and cooking.

View the list of 2006 finalists.

At the center of Mountains Beyond Mountains stands Paul Farmer. Doctor, Harvard Professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical school found his life's calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. This book shows how radical change can be fostered in situations that seem insurmountable, and it also shows how a meaningful life can be created, as Farmer - brilliant, charismatic, charming, both a leader in international health and a doctor who finds time to make house calls in Boston and the mountains of Haiti - blasts through convention to get results.

View the list of 2005 finalists.

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

View the list of 2004 finalists.

Neurological patients, Oliver Sacks once wrote, are travelers to unimaginable lands. An Anthropologist on Mars offers portraits of seven such travelers - including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who cannot decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior. These are paradoxical tales, for neurological disease can conduct one to other modes of being that - however abnormal they may be to our way of thinking - may develop virtues and beauties of their own. The exploration of these individual lives is not one that can be made in a consulting room or office, and Sacks has taken off his white coat and deserted the hospital, by and large, to join his subjects in their own environments. He feels, he says, in part like a neuroanthropologist, but most of all like a physician, called here and there to make house calls, house calls at the far border of experience. Along the way, he shows us a new perspective on the way our brains construct our individual worlds. In his lucid and compelling reconstructions of the mental acts we take for granted - the act of seeing, the transport of memory, the notion of color - Oliver Sacks provokes anew a sense of wonder at who we are.

Hunger Of Memory is the story of a Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum.

Here is the poignant journey is a "minority student" who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation - from his past, his parents, his culture - and so describes the high price of "making it" in middle class America.

Provocative in its positions on affirmative action and bilingual education, Hunger Of Memory is a powerful political statement, a profound study of the importance of language... and the moving, intimate portrait of a boy struggling to become a man.