The Freshmen Summer Reading Program is one more way in which NAU provides undergraduate students with opportunities for academic growth and conversation.
This Program provides incoming freshmen with a common experience as they begin their educational journey. All first-year students are asked to read the same book before they arrive on campus for the Fall semester. Once on campus, students can use the book to initiate conversations and build community with their new classmates, roommates, and teachers. Between fifty and seventy faculty members, staff members, and administrators lead book discussions on campus during NAU’s Welcome Week, engaging students in an exploration of the book’s style, plot, themes, concerns, and implications. These discussions introduce first-year students to the pleasures and rigors of academic dialogue and give them an important opportunity to form connections with faculty and staff as well as with peers. The book and its issues may also be explored in several classes, within a mini-film series, in an essay contest, and through an on-campus lecture.
The summer reading program is integral to the first-year student’s transition to the college experience and has been a part of NAU for nine years.
Summer 2008 Book Selection
We are pleased to announce A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
New York City, 1998
My high school friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told
them the full story of my life.
“Why did you leave Sierra Leone?”
“Because there is a war.”
“Did you witness some of the fighting?”
“Everyone in the country did.”
“You mean you saw people running around with guns and shooting
each other?”
“Yes, all the time.”
“Cool.”
I smile a little.
“You should tell us about it sometime.”
“Yes, sometime.”
This is how wars are fought now: by children, traumatized, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become the soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. What does war look like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? But it is rare to find a first-person account from someone who endured this hell and survived. In A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a powerfully gripping story: At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. At sixteen, he was removed from fighting by UNICEF, and through the help of the staff at his rehabilitation center, he learned how to forgive himself, to regain his humanity, and, finally, to heal.This is an extraordinary and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.
Lecture
The Summer Reading Program, with the generous help of the Student Activity Council, Sun Entertainment, and the Office of the Vice Provost (among other departments and offices on NAU's campus), is very pleased to announce a presentation by Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.
Where: Audrey Auditorium
When: October 2, 2008
Time: 7:00pm to 8:30pm
The presentation will be free and open to the public; however, tickets for the event must be obtained in advance. Tickets may be obtained at NAU's Sun Entertainment box office. Please call 928-523-5638 or visit http://home.nau.edu/emsa/sun/default.asp in September 2008 for more information.
- Student Information
- 2008 Summer Reading Discussion Event (date, room assignments, etc); study guides; book information; author information.
- Faculty & Staff Information
- 2008 Summer Reading Discussion Event (date, room assignments, etc); book information; author information; discussion facilitator study guides; discussion facilitator workshops; teaching tools.
- Related Events
- NAU classes that are using A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier; film series; lecture series.
Previous Books
Contact Information
Anne Scott
Coordinator, Summer Reading Program
Assoc. Professor, English Dept.
Assoc. Director, Honors Program
Phone: 928-523-2441
Email: reading@nau.edu