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About

First Readings is Brown's summer reading project for all new students. Now in its third year, the program provides first-year and transfer students with a common reading experience that introduces them to the University and to the pleasures and rigors of undergraduate academic life. The program is sponsored by the Dean of the College and Alumni Relations.

Students receive their first reading over the summer and write letters to their advisors on an aspect of it that they find particularly compelling, difficult, or curious. In this way, they begin a dialogue with their first-year advisors about their academic interests and their expectations for life at Brown. During Orientation, students meet in small groups for a First Readings Seminar, led by a member of the faculty or an upper-level administrator. These seminars afford students the chance to meet their peers and to begin conversations based upon their shared readings.

Learn more about the program in a letter from Dean Bergeron...

Cover, The Beak of the Finch

The Book

This year’s first reading is The Beak of the Finch, a Pulitzer prize-winning book by Jonathan Weiner. The book relates the story of Peter and Rosemary Grant, biologists who spent more than two decades on the Galapagos Islands, studying a dozen species of finches. These are the same finches that Charles Darwin discovered on the islands in 1831, and whose physical traits — especially the size and shape of their beaks — influenced his first ideas about evolution and natural selection. The Grants’ research extends Darwin’s thinking to a new century, and tells us a great deal about the power of close observation, the pursuit of knowledge, and the always surprising evolution of ideas.

Jonathan Weiner

The Author

Jonathan Weiner's books have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and many other honors. While working on His Brother's Keeper, he was writer-in-residence at Rockefeller University. Professor Weiner now teaches science writing at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in New York City with his wife, Deborah Heiligman, the children's book author, and their two sons.

For more information visit the author's website...

Other books by Jonathan Weiner

Did you enjoy The Beak of the Finch? Do you want to see what other books Professor Weiner has written? Click here to use the Brown University Library catalog, Josiah, to view other books by Professor Weiner that are part of the library collection.