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"The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri Length: 10 hours and 5 min. ISBN: 0-7393-0695-2 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

The Namesake follows the Ganguli family through its journey from Calcutta to Cambridge to the Boston suburbs. Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli arrive in America at the end of the 1960s, shortly after their arranged marriage in Calcutta, in order for Ashoke to finish his engineering degree at MIT. Ashoke is forward-thinking, ready to enter into American culture if not fully at least with an open mind. His young bride is far less malleable. Isolated, desperately missing her large family back in India, she will never be at peace with this new world.

Soon after they arrive in Cambridge, their first child is born, a boy. According to Indian custom, the child will be given two names: an official name, to be bestowed by the great-grandmother, and a pet name to be used only by family. But the letter from India with the child’s official name never arrives, and so the baby’s parents decide on a pet name to use for the time being. Ashoke chooses a name that has particular significance for him: on a train trip back in India several years earlier, he had been reading a short story collection by one of his most beloved Russian writers, Nikolai Gogol, when the train derailed in the middle of the night, killing almost all the sleeping passengers onboard. Ashoke had stayed awake to read his Gogol, and he believes the book saved his life. His child will be known, then, as Gogol.

Lahiri brings her enormous powers of description to her first novel, infusing scene after scene with profound emotional depth. Condensed and controlled, The Namesake covers three decades and crosses continents, all the while zooming in at very precise moments on telling detail, sensory richness, and fine nuances of character.

Tags: the namesake, jhumpa lahiri, education, fiction, k-12 educators, parents & family, students, india, mit, interpreter of maladies, boston, gogol

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"Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson Length: 8 hours and 59 min. ISBN: 1-59397-822-7 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civil War”, then, at age 50, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father, an ardent pacifist, and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend’s wayward son.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision, not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames’s soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.

Tags: gilead, marilynne robinson, education, fiction, higher education faculty, k-12 educators, parents & family, students, pulitzer, fathers and sons, vision, wisdom

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"Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood" by Koren Zailckas Length: 10 hours and 32 min. ISBN: 1-4001-5154-6 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, 24-year-old Koren Zailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young girls, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine, how it becomes “the usual”. With the stylistic freshness of a poet and the dramatic gifts of a novelist, Zailckas describes her first sip at 14, alcohol poisoning at 16, a blacked-out sexual experience at 19, total disorientation after waking up in an unfamiliar New York City apartment at 22, when she realized she had to stop, and all the depression, rage, troubled friendships, and sputtering romantic connections in between.

Zailckas’ unflinching candor and exquisite analytical eye get to the meaning beneath the seeming banality of girls’ getting drunk. She persuades us that her story is the story of thousands of girls like her who are not alcoholics (yet) but who use booze as a short cut to courage, a stand-in for good judgment, and a bludgeon for shyness, each of them failing to see how their emotional distress, unarticulated hostility, and depression are entangled with their socially condoned binging.

Like the contemporary masterpieces The Liars’ Club, Autobiography of a Face, and Jarhead, Smashed is destined to become a classic. A crucial book for any woman who has succumbed to oblivion through booze, or for anyone ready to face the more subtle repercussions of their own chronic over-drinking or of someone they love, Smashed is an eye-opening, wise, and utterly gripping achievement.

Tags: smashed: story of a drunken girlhood, koren zailckas, bios & memoirs, education, higher education faculty, nonfiction, story of a drunken girlhood, alcohol abuse, alcoholic, alcoholism, binge drinking, sorority, college

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"The Freedom Writers Diary" by The Freedom Writers and Erin Gruwell Length: 9 hours and 31 min. ISBN: New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

Straight from the front line of urban America comes the inspiring story of one fiercely determined teacher and her remarkable students.

As an idealistic 23-year-old English teacher at Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, Erin Gruwell confronted a room of “unteachable, at-risk” students. One day she intercepted a note with an ugly racial caricature, and angrily declared that this was precisely the sort of thing that led to the Holocaust, only to be met by uncomprehending looks. So she and her students, using the treasured books Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo as their guides, undertook a life-changing, eye-opening, spirit-raising odyssey against intolerance and misunderstanding. They learned to see the parallels in these books to their own lives, recording their thoughts and feelings in diaries and dubbing themselves the “Freedom Writers” in homage to the civil rights activists “The Freedom Riders.”

With funds raised by a Read-a-thon for Tolerance, they arranged for Miep Gies, the courageous Dutch woman who sheltered the Frank family, to visit them in California, where she declared that Erin Gruwell’s students were “the real heroes”. Their efforts have paid off spectacularly, both in terms of recognition (appearances on Prime Time Live and All Things Considered, coverage in People magazine, and a meeting with U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley) and educationally. All 150 Freedom Writers have graduated from high school and are now attending college.

With powerful entries from the students’ own diaries and a narrative text by Erin Gruwell, The Freedom Writers Diary is an uplifting, unforgettable example of how hard work, courage, and the spirit of determination changed the lives of a teacher and her students.

Tags: the freedom writers diary, the freedom writers and erin gruwell, education, k-12 educators, nonfiction, parents & family, how a teacher and 150 teens used writing to change themselves and the world around them, racism, education, tolerance

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"Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx Length: 1 hour and 4 min. ISBN: 0-7435-5010-2 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they’re working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer.

Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that’s what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it.

Tags: brokeback mountain, annie proulx, fiction, higher education faculty, parents & family, students, cowboy, homosexuality, gay