{"id":62,"date":"2019-05-28T11:05:12","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T15:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/firstreading2019\/?page_id=62"},"modified":"2026-04-15T17:28:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T21:28:37","slug":"past-readings","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/firstreading2019\/past-readings\/","title":{"rendered":"Past Readings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

2018<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City<\/a><\/em><\/strong> by Matthew Desmond. In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the $20 a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup after her hours are cut. All are spending almost everything they have on rent, and all have fallen behind. The fates of these families are in the hands of two landlords: Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher turned inner-city entrepreneur, and Tobin Charney, who runs one of the worst trailer parks in Milwaukee. They loathe some of their tenants and are fond of others, but as Sherrena puts it, \u201cLove don\u2019t pay the bills.\u201d She moves to evict Arleen and her boys a few days before Christmas. Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare. But today, most poor renting families are spending more than half of their income on housing, and eviction has become ordinary, especially for single mothers. In vivid, intimate prose, Desmond provides a ground-level view of one of the most urgent issues facing America today. As we see families forced into shelters, squalid apartments, or more dangerous neighborhoods, we bear witness to the human cost of America\u2019s vast inequality\u2014and to people\u2019s determination and intelligence in the face of hardship. Based on years of embedded fieldwork and painstakingly gathered data, this masterful book transforms our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a devastating, uniquely American problem. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2017<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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The Tsar of Love and Techno<\/a> <\/em><\/strong>by Anthony Marra is a collection of dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art. This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts. In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2016<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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My Beloved World<\/a> <\/em><\/strong>by Sonia Sotomayor. Sonia Sotomayor was the first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court. In My Beloved World<\/em> Sotomayor recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench. Her childhood was precarious. She had an alcoholic father (who would die when she was nine) and a devoted but overburdened mother. It was not until Sotomayor was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes that she recognized she must ultimately depend on herself. She would learn to give herself the insulin shots she needed to survive and soon imagined a path to a different life. With only television characters for her professional role models, and little understanding of what was involved, she determined to become a lawyer, a dream that would sustain her on an unlikely course, from valedictorian of her high school class to the highest honors at Princeton, Yale Law School, the New York County District Attorney\u2019s office, private practice, and appointment to the Federal District Court before the age of forty. Along the way she was shaped by her invaluable mentors, a failed marriage, and the modern version of extended family she has created from cherished friends and their children. America\u2019s infinite possibilities are envisioned anew in this classic of self-invention and self-discovery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2015<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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The New Jim Crow<\/a> <\/em><\/strong>by Michelle Alexander is the account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status\u2014denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. The New Jim Crow tells a truth our nation has been reluctant to face. Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an extraordinary percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prisons or trapped in a parallel social universe, denied basic civil and human rights\u2014including the right to vote; the right to serve on juries; and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. Today, it is no longer socially permissible to use race explicitly as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways in which it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once labeled a felon, even for a minor drug crime, the old forms of discrimination are suddenly legal again. Basically, the racial caste in America never ended; it was merely redesigned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2014<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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Oil & Water<\/a> <\/em><\/strong>is the story of two boys coming of age as they confront one of the world\u2019s worst toxic disasters. Hugo Lucitante and David Poritz \u201912 were born on opposite ends of the oil pipeline. Hugo comes to America to fight for the survival of his Cofan tribe in the Ecuadorian Amazon, while David goes to Ecuador to launch the world\u2019s first company to certify oil as \u201cfair trade.\u201d Together they explore what could be a more just future, not just for the Cofan, but for the marginalized people of oil-rich nations everywhere. Shot over the span of six years, Oil & Water was produced and directed by Laurel Spellman Smith and Francine Strickwerda for PBS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2013<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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Beautiful Souls<\/em><\/a> <\/strong> by Eyal Press shows that the boldest acts of dissent are often carried out not only by radicals seeking to overthrow the system but also by true believers who cling with unusual fierceness to their convictions. Drawing on groundbreaking research by moral psychologists and neuroscientists, this deeply reported work of narrative journalism examines the choices and dilemmas we all face when our principles collide with our duties and loyalties. The book focuses on four different individuals and what led them to make the decisions they made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2012<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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Sons of Providence<\/a><\/em><\/strong>: Incoming first-year and transfer students, in 2012, read Sons of Providence<\/em><\/a> by Charles Rappleye as part of the year\u2019s First Readings program. Sons of Providence<\/em> is the biography of John and Moses Brown, two brothers caught at opposite ends of the slavery debate in the early beginnings of colonial America. The story spans a century, from John\u2019s birth in 1736, through the Revolution, to Moses\u2019 death in 1836. The brothers were partners in business, politics, and the founding of Brown University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2011<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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Factory Girls<\/a><\/em><\/strong>: In 2011, incoming students explored Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China<\/a> <\/em>by Leslie T. Chang. This book is told primarily through the lives of two young women, whom Chang follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China\u2019s Pearl River Delta. A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls<\/em> demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America\u2019s shores remade our own country a century ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2010<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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The Dew Breaker<\/a><\/em><\/strong>: The First Readings selection for 2010 was The Dew Breaker<\/a><\/em> by Edwidge Danticat. This work of fiction explores the life of a \u201cdew breaker\u201d\u2014a torturer\u2014a man whose brutal past in Haiti lies hidden beneath his the new life he found in America. The Dew Breaker<\/em> is the winner of The Story Prize, a PEN\/Faulkner Award Finalist, and a Washington Post Book World<\/em> Notable Book.The San Francisco Chronicle<\/em>, Chicago Tribune<\/em>, and Detroit Free Press<\/em> honored it as Best Book of the Year,<\/em> and it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2009<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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The Beak of the Finch<\/a><\/em><\/strong>: The text for 2009\u2019s First Readings was The Beak of the Finch<\/a><\/em> by Pulitzer prize-winner 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 \u2014 especially the size and shape of their beaks \u2014 influenced his first ideas about evolution and natural selection. The Grants\u2019 research extends Darwin\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2008<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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The Places in Between<\/a><\/em><\/strong>: In 2008, incoming students read Rory Stewart\u2019s<\/a> The Places in Between<\/em>, which relates the author\u2019s journeys through Asia between September 2000 and March 2002. Stewart\u2019s original plan was to walk a more or less direct route from Iran to Nepal, but he changed course when the Taliban barred his entry into Afghanistan. Restarting his journey in Pakistan, he reached eastern Nepal in December 2001, where he learned that the Taliban had fallen. He then decided to retrace his steps, covering the ground he had missed in his first walk. His journey through Afghanistan\u2014\u201dthe place,\u201d as he put it, \u201cin between the deserts and the Himalayas, between Persian, Hellenic, and Hindu culture, between Islam and Buddhism, between mystical and militant Islam\u201d\u2014turned out to be the most compelling walk of all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2007<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
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How Proust Can Change Your Life<\/em>: The text chosen for First Readings\u2019 inaugural year was Alain de Botton\u2019s How Proust Can Change Your Life<\/em>. Marcel Proust was a Parisian writer who lived at the turn of the twentieth century. His literary reputation emerged from a single work that took a lifetime to finish\u2014A La Recherche de Temps Perdu<\/em>, which translates as \u201cin search of lost (or wasted) time.\u201d De Botton\u2019s book is not about Proust per se, but rather uses Proust\u2019s observations to provide modern readers with a \u201cHow to\u2026\u201d guide to life. Readers of de Botton\u2019s book learn\u2014among other things\u2014how to love, how to take their time, and how to suffer successfully, all while getting a fascinating glimpse into Proust\u2019s character and life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2018 Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the $20 a month she has left after … Past Readings<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":96,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-full-width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-62","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/firstreading2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/firstreading2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/firstreading2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/firstreading2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/96"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/firstreading2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/firstreading2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/firstreading2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/62\/revisions\/122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/create\/firstreading2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}