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The Assist: Hoops, Hope & the Game of Their Lives Swidey Jack O’Brien is a high school basketball coach extreme in both his demands & his devotion. He has built a powerhouse program that wins state championships year after year while helping propel players to college. He does this as a white suburban guy working exclusively with African-American city boys who make the daily trek across Boston to attend Charlestown High School. The Assist is a gripping, surprising story which
follows the players on their hunt for a state title. But it also stays with them, to see how young men who seldom get second chances survive without their coach hovering over them—and how he survives without them. READ MORE: |
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The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. Obama Obama discusses themes raised in his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, shares personal views on faith and values and offers a vision of the future that involves repairing a "political process that is broken" and restoring a government that has fallen out of touch with the people. READ MORE: |
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Bang! Flake. Following the death of his six-year-old son in a ghetto shooting, Mann's father made every effort to toughen up his surviving son: "If he's gonna be a man, he's gonna have to learn to chew nails and hold a gun in his hand." Approximating an African coming-of-age ritual, he abandons Mann and his friend Kee-Lee at a distant campsite. Will Mann respond by spiralling into a street thug's existence, or will he become someone who "takes trouble and makes something good out of it"? READ MORE: |
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Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Gladwell. Blink is about snap judgements, the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on
the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, Gladwell persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious" which provides us with instant information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea. READ MORE: |
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The Book Thief. Zukas Narrarated by Death & set during World War II in Nazi Germany, the Book Thief is the powerful story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read
and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. This is an unforgettable story about the ability of books to feed the soul. Multiple award winner. READ MORE: |
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The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Boyne. Some of the most thought-provoking Holocaust books are about bystanders, including those who say they did not know what was happening. This first novel tells the bystander story from the viewpoint of an innocent child. Bruno is nine when his family moves from their luxurious Berlin home to the country. Lost and lonely, the child hates the upheaval. Bruno
can see a concentration camp in the distance, but he has no idea what is going on, even when he eventually meets and makes friends with Shmuel, a boy from Cracow, who lives on the other side of the camp fence. READ MORE: |
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The Boys of Winter. Coffey Not just for hockey fans. In this well-written story of the 1980 Olympic gold-medal winning hockey team, there are interesting personalities and breathtaking action on the ice. Using coach Herb Brooks as his focal point, the author shows how Brooks, a devoted student of the game, used both psychological tactics and a groundbreaking system predicated on speed and constant motion to defeat the Soviets, a team of highly trained, older & bigger professionals who had dominated the
international competition for decades. READ MORE: |
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Breaking Dawn. Meyer In Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final installment in Twilight series, Bella’s, story plays out in some unexpected ways. Be sure you have also read the first three books (Twilight, New Moon & Eclipse) in the series. READ MORE: |
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DaVinci Code. Brown A murder in the silent after-hour halls of the Louvre museum reveals a sinister plot to uncover a secret that has been protected by a clandestine society since the days of Christ. READ MORE: |
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The Devil Wears Prada. Weisberger. Charmingly unfashionable Andrea Sachs, upon graduating from Brown, finds herself in this precarious position: she's an assistant to the most revered-and hated-woman in fashion, Runway editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly. The self-described "biggest fashion loser to ever hit the scene," Andy takes the job hoping to land at the New Yorker after a year. As
the "lowest-paid-but-most-highly-perked assistant in the free world," she soon learns her four years spent memorizing poems and examining prose will not help her in her new role of "finding, fetching, or faxing" whatever the diabolical Miranda wants READ MORE: |
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Fight Club. Palahniuk An underground classic since its first publication in 1996, Fight Club is now recognized as one of the most original and provocative novels published in this decade. This darkly funny novel tells the story of a young man who discovers that his rage at living in a world filled with failure and lies cannot be pacified by an empty consumer culture. Relief for him and his disenfranchised peers comes in the form of secret after-hours boxing matches held in the basements of
bars. READ MORE: |
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Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19 Year Old GI. Smithson. Ryan Smithson joined the Army Reserve when he was seventeen. Two years later, he was deployed to Iraq as an Army engineer. In this extraordinary and harrowing memoir, readers march along one GI's tour of duty. It will change the way you feel about what it means to be an American. READ MORE: |
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A Great & Terrible Beauty. Bray Sixteen-year-old Gemma Doyle is different from the other girls at the London boarding school where she has lived since her mother died a tragic and strange death in India. In addition to not having the conformist mentality that girls of her class and station are trained to have, Gemma has a deep, dark problem that she does not know how to control. She has
visions of tragic things that come true and has the magic key to enter an alternate place called the Realms, where every desire -- as well as every nightmare -- can come true. READ MORE: |
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Hot Shots & Heavy Hits: Tales of an Undercover Drug Agent. Doyle The author's memoir of his years as an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Agency on the streets of Boston, infiltrating the narcotics underworld, cultivating informants, and going up against some of the country's most dangerous drug dealers. It might not have been the most pleasant lifestyle, but it sure does make for exciting reading. Doyle tells his story as though he were writing a novel, packing it with dialogue, action scenes, and
suspense. But this stuff actually happened. READ MORE: |
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The Hunger Games. Collins Rather less 1984 and rather more Death Race 2000, this is a gripping story set in a postapocalyptic world where a replacement for the United States demands a tribute from each of its territories: two youths to be used as gladiators in a fight to the death on a reality TV show. Katniss, from what was once Appalachia, offers to take the place of her sister in the Hunger Games, but after this ultimate sacrifice, she is entirely focused on survival
at any cost. One of the best reviewed teen reads of the year. READ MORE: |
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It's Not About the Bike. Armstrong. This autobiography of the famous multiple winner of the Tour de France bicycle race, explores Armstron's grueling trip back to championship riding after nearly dying of cancer. READ MORE: |
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The Last Lecture. Pausch. "We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand." Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, but the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living. READ MORE: |
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A Lion Called Christian. Burke In 2008 an extraordinary two-minute film clip appeared on YouTube and immediately became an international phenomenon. It captures the moving reunion of two young men and their pet lion Christian, after they had left him in Africa with Born Free’s George Adamson to introduce him into his rightful home in the wild. A Lion Called Christian tells the remarkable story of how Anthony “Ace” Bourke and John Rendall, visitors to London from Australia in 1969, raised the boisterous lion cub they had bought in the pet department of Harrods. READ MORE: |
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The Long Gray Line. Atkinson. With novelistic detail, Atkinson tells the story of West Point's Class of 1966 primarily through the experiences of three classmates and the women they loved--from the boisterous cadet years and youthful romances to the fires of Vietnam, where dozens of their classmates died and hundreds more grew disillusioned, to the hard peace and family adjustments that followed. READ MORE: |
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My Most Excellent Year: A novel of Love, Mary Poppins & Fenway Park. Kluger. Dear Anthony: I appreciate your recent interest, but I’m not accepting applications at this time. Your letter will be kept in our files and someone will get back to you if there is an opening. Thank you for thinking of me. Respectfully, Alejandra Perez P.S. It’s not “Allie.” It’s “Ale.” Meet T.C., who is valiantly attempting to get Alejandra to fall in love with him; Alejandra, who is playing hard to get and is busy trying to sashay out from under the responsibilities of being a diplomat’s daughter; and T.C.’s brother Augie, who is gay and in love and everyone knows it but him. READ MORE: |
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Outliers. Gladwell In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are
from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band. READ MORE: |
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State of Fear. Crichton. Once again Michael Crichton gives us his trademark combination of page-turning suspense, cutting-edge technology, and extraordinary research. State of Fear is a superb blend of edge-of-your-seat suspense and thought provoking commentary on how information is manipulated in the modern world. From the streets of Paris, to the glaciers of Antarctica to the exotic and dangerous Solomon Islands, State of Fear takes the reader on a rollercoaster thrill ride, all the while keeping the brain in
high gear. READ MORE: |
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Sunrise Over Fallujah. Myers. Operation Iraqi Freedom, that's the code name. But the young men and women in the military's Civil Affairs Battalion have a simpler name for it: WAR. In this new novel, Walter Dean
Myers looks at the Iraq War with the same power and searing insight he brought to the Vietnam war of his classic, FALLEN ANGELS. These young soldiers soon find their definition of "winning" ever more elusive and their good intentions being replaced by terms like "survival" and "despair." Caught in the crossfire, they are just beginning to understand the true meaning of war in this powerful, realistic novel of our times. READ MORE: |
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Tale of Two Cities. Dickens This title available to Academic Decathalon Members only. They fled to London, seeking safety, and found each other--.But in Paris, the fires of revolution exploded in uncontrollable fury. The noble goals of freedom fighters became
the crazed bloodbath called the Reign of Terror. And when the three exiles returned home on an errand of mercy, they were trapped in a nightmare of mock trials and rage. READ MORE: |
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Thirteen Reasons Why. Asher. Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker–his classmate and crush–who committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah’s voice explains that there are thirteen reasons she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he’ll find out why. |
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Touching the Void. Simpson. Joe Simpson and his climbing partner, Simon Yates, had just reached the top of a 21,000-foot peak in the Andes when disaster struck. Simpson plunged off the vertical face of an ice ledge, breaking his leg. With a smashed, useless leg, he and his partner must struggle down a near-vertical face--and that's only the beginning of their troubles. How both men overcame the torments of those harrowing days is an epic tale of fear, suffering, and survival; a poignant testament to unshakable
courage and friendship. READ MORE: |
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Uglies. Westerfeld. Tally Youngblood lives in a futuristic society that acculturates its citizens to believe that they are ugly until age 16 when they'll undergo an operation that will change them into pleasure-seeking "pretties." Anticipating this happy transformation, Tally meets Shay, another female ugly, who shares her enjoyment of hoverboarding and risky pranks. But Shay also disdains the false values and programmed conformity of the society and urges Tally to defect with her to the Smoke, a
distant settlement of simple-living conscientious objectors. |
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Watchmen & additional readings. Moore The story of the Watchmen concerns a group called the Crimebusters and a plot to kill and discredit them. Moore's characterization is as sophisticated as any novel's. Packed with symbolism, important themes (arms control, nuclear threat, vigilantes) and intelligent social and political commentary, the fine pace of the writing and its humanity mean that Watchmen more than stands up--it keeps its crown as the best the graphic novel genre has yet produced. Additional short readings will be required with this choice. |
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Water for Elephants. Gruen Life is good for Jacob Jankowski. He's about to graduate from veterinary school and has met the girl of his dreams. Then his parents are killed in a car crash, leaving him in the middle of the Great Depression with no home, no family, and no career. Almost by accident, Jacob joins the circus. There he falls in love with the beautiful performer Marlena, who is married to the circus' psychotic animal trainer. He also meets the other love of his life, Rosie the elephant. This lushly
romantic novel travels back in forth in time between Jacob's present day in a nursing home and his adventures in the surprisingly harsh world of 1930s circuses READ MORE: |
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Watership Down. Adams A phenomenal worldwide bestseller for over thirty years, Richard Adams's Watership Down is a timeless classic and one of the most beloved novels of all time. Set in England's Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival follows a band of very special creatures on their flight from the intrusion of man and
the certain destruction of their home. Led by a stouthearted pair of brothers, they journey forth from their native Sandleford Warren through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society. |