Summer+Reading+Materials

[[file:2012 Summer Reading AP Lang and Comp.pdf]]
1. Read [|How to Mark a Book] by Mortimer Adler

[[file:professor_assignment.pdf]]
3. Create your blog using [|Blogger]- **Remember** your blog is governed by Hoban, so the content must be appropriate for school at all times. 4. Choose a novel from the table below to read and post about on your blog. More specific instructions can be found here. Choose one that interests you! 5. Complete the newsmagazine/editorial assignment on your blog.


 * **Title** || **Author's Last Name** |||| **Brief Summary** (Purloined from Amazon.com) ===Choose ONE of the following to read over the summer. You will be responding to your book on your blog.=== ||
 * //In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex// || Philbrick || In 1819, the 238-ton //Essex// set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage to hunt whales. Fifteen months later, the unthinkable happened: in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, the //Essex// was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale. Fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, the 20-man crew set out in three small boats for South America. If the story sounds familiar, it should – this true story was Herman Melville’s inspiration for his famous novel //Moby-Dick//. Warning: People die. ||
 * //In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the// U.S.S. Indianapolis //and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors// || Stanton || Given the stringent precision of the U.S. Navy and military during wartime, how could a WWII battleship carrying over 1,000 men be torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sink, leaving the survivors to bob in the Pacific Ocean at the mercy of elements and predators, without anyone realizing the loss for more than four days? Warning: People die violently. ||
 * //Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster// || Krakauer || This is the definitive account of the deadliest season in the history of Everest, and Jon Krakauer was there to tell the story. Warning: People die. Contains some profanity. ||
 * //Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith//   || Krakauer || In //Under the Banner of Heaven//, Jon Krakauer tells the story of two killers and their crime, but he also explores the shadowy world of Mormon fundamentalism from which the two emerged. Caution: This is a highly controversial book with a destructive bias against many organized faiths, especially Mormonism. ||
 * //Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer// || Swanson || Hearing Lincoln's April 10 victory speech, famed actor and Confederate die-hard John Wilkes Booth turned to a friend and remarked with seething hatred, "Now, by God, I'll put him through." On April 14, Booth did just that. What happened to him after that? This book tells you. Mild Warning: People die, but this is still innocuous. (IF you didn’t know that Lincoln died… transfer to another class.) ||
 * //Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World// || Kidder || Paul Farmer: doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, and world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical school found his life’s calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. Warning: This is an inspirational book, but there is some mild profanity. ||
 * //Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West// || Sides || Sides eloquently paints the landscape and history of the 19th-century Southwest, combining Larry McMurtry's lyricism with the historian's attachment to facts. Inevitably, Sides's main focus is the virtual decimation of the Navajo nation from the 1820s to the late 1860s. Sides depicts the complex role of whites in the subjugation of the Navajos through his portrait of Kit Carson—an illiterate trapper, soldier and scout who knew the Native Americans intimately, married two of them and, without blinking, participated in the Indians' slaughter. (624 with pics) Warning: Violent deaths are detailed. ||
 * //Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin// || Sides || It's bold to start an account of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. without a single mention of the killer’s name. But in //Hellhound on His Trail//, Ray's absence is essential--in his place, Hampton Sides traces the alter egos the killer created after escaping from prison and beginning his haphazard journey toward Memphis. Sides meticulously constructs parallel portraits of two very different men--one, the larger-than-life figurehead of the Civil Rights movement; the other, a nondescript loner with a spurious and violent history, whose identity was as fluid as his motives. The narrative builds to the staggering and heartbreaking moment of King's assassination, then races on through the immediate fallout: the worldwide manhunt led by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.. Sides's storytelling packs a visceral punch, and in //Hellhound on His Trail//, he crafts an authoritative and riveting account of two intersecting lives that altered the course of American history. Warning: MLK died. ||
 * //Columbine// || Cullen || On April 20, 1999, two boys left an indelible stamp on the American psyche. Their goal was simple: to blow up their school, Oklahoma-City style, and to leave "a lasting impression on the world." Their bombs failed, but the ensuing shooting defined a new era of school violence-irrevocably branding every subsequent shooting "another Columbine." When we think of Columbine, we think of the Trench Coat Mafia; we think of Cassie Bernall, the girl we thought professed her faith before she was shot; and we think of the boy pulling himself out of a school window -- the whole world was watching him. Now, in a riveting piece of journalism nearly ten years in the making, comes the story none of us knew. In this revelatory book, Dave Cullen has delivered a profile of teenage killers that goes to the heart of psychopathology. He lays bare the callous brutality of mastermind Eric Harris, and the quavering, suicidal Dylan Klebold, who went to prom three days earlier and obsessed about love in his journal. The result is an astonishing account of two good students with lots of friends, who came to stockpile a basement cache of weapons, to record their raging hatred, and to manipulate every adult who got in their way. They left signs everywhere, described by Cullen with a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, thousands of pages of police files, FBI psychologists, and the boy's tapes and diaries, he gives the first complete account of the Columbine tragedy. In the tradition of HELTER SKELTER and IN COLD BLOOD, COLUMBINE is destined to be a classic. A close-up portrait of hatred, a community rendered helpless, and the police blunders and cover-ups, it is a compelling and utterly human portrait of two killers-an unforgettable cautionary tale for our times. ||
 * //A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier// || Beah || This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become 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 is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived. In //A Long Way Gone//, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how 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. Warning: If books had ratings, this would definitely be Rated R for violence. ||
 * //Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II// || Kurson || For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was more than a sport. Testing themselves against treacherous currents, braving depths that induced hallucinatory effects, navigating through wreckage as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselves to their limits and beyond, brushing against death more than once in the rusting hulks of sunken ships. But in the fall of 1991, not even these courageous divers were prepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in the frigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey: a World War II German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wasteland of twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bones–all buried under decades of accumulated sediment. No identifying marks were visible on the submarine or the few artifacts brought to the surface. No historian, expert, or government had a clue as to which U-boat the men had found. In fact, the official records all agreed that there simply could not be a sunken U-boat and crew at that location. Over the next six years, an elite team of divers embarked on a quest to solve the mystery. Some of them would not live to see its end. Warning: The book contains profane, bawdy language. ||
 * //Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman// || Krakauer || In May 2002, Pat Tillman walked away from his $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist in the United States Army. He was deeply troubled by 9/11, and he felt a strong moral obligation to join the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Two years later, he died on a desolate hillside in southeastern Afghanistan. Krakauer chronicles Tillman’s riveting, tragic odyssey in engrossing detail highlighting his remarkable character and personality while closely examining the murky, heartbreaking circumstances of his death. Infused with the power and authenticity readers have come to expect from Krakauer’s storytelling, //Where Men Win Glory// exposes shattering truths about men and war. Warning: This is a book about war and details violent deaths. ||
 * //The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America// || Larson || Author Erik Larson imbues the incredible events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with such drama that readers may find themselves checking the book's categorization to be sure that //The Devil in the White City// is not, in fact, a highly imaginative novel. Larson tells the stories of two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the fair's construction, and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a charming doctor. Warning: People die. Violently. ||
 * //Seabiscuit: An American Legend// || Hillenbrand || Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. Three men changed Seabiscuit’s fortunes: Charles Howard was a onetime bicycle repairman; Tom Smith was a mysterious mustang breaker from the Colorado plains. Smith urged Howard to buy Seabiscuit for a bargain-basement price, then hired as his jockey Red Pollard, a failed boxer who was blind in one eye, half-crippled, and prone to quoting passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Over four years, these unlikely partners survived a phenomenal run of bad fortune, conspiracy, and severe injury to transform Seabiscuit from a neurotic, pathologically indolent pony into an American sports icon. Note: Rated PG. Very well-written. ||
 * //Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time// || Mortensen Relin || Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute. I don’t recall any violent deaths or bawdy language. Note: Inspirational book. Recently debunked by Jon Krakauer, but I still think there’s some goodness in it. I have to believe that! ||
 * //Titanic's Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler// || Matsen || "//Titanic's Last Secrets// is a fresh, moving, and irresistible portrait of the doomed ship. Combining insightful character sketches, secret archives, forensic engineering, death-defying dives and suspenseful writing, Brad Matsen travels effortlessly between past and present and offers haunting new conclusions about Titanic: It did not have to happen this way. They did not have to die. I could not put this book down." Book Review by James L. Swanson; I don’t recall any bawdy language or violent deaths. PG. ||
 * //Undaunted Courage : Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West// || Ambrose || A biography of Meriwether Lewis that relies heavily on the journals of both Lewis and Clark, this book is also backed up by the author's personal travels along Lewis and Clark's route to the Pacific. Ambrose is not content to simply chronicle the events of the "Corps of Discovery" as the explorers called their ventures. He often pauses to assess the military leadership of Lewis and Clark, how they negotiated with various native peoples and what they reported to Jefferson. ||
 * //The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey// || Millard || The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron. After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever. ||
 * //The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story// || Preston || A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus. //The Hot Zone// tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, //The Hot Zone// proves that truth really is scarier than fiction. Warning: This is about Ebola. It’s bloody. ||
 * //Complications: A Surgeon’s Note on an Imperfect Science// || Gawande || In gripping accounts of true cases, surgeon Atul Gawande explores the power and the limits of medicine, offering an unflinching view from the scalpel’s edge. Complications lays bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is—uncertain, perplexing, and profoundly human. (I haven’t read this, so preview it carefully before selecting it.) ||
 * //Unbroken:// A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption || Hillenbrand || From Laura Hillenbrand, the bestselling author of //Seabiscuit//, comes //Unbroken//, the inspiring true story of a man who lived through a series of catastrophes almost too incredible to be believed. In evocative, immediate descriptions, Hillenbrand unfurls the story of Louie Zamperini--a juvenile delinquent-turned-Olympic runner-turned-Army hero. During a routine search mission over the Pacific, Louie’s plane crashed into the ocean, and what happened to him over the next three years of his life is a story that will keep you glued to the pages, eagerly awaiting the next turn in the story and fearing it at the same time. You’ll cheer for the man who somehow maintained his selfhood and humanity despite the monumental degradations he suffered, and you’ll want to share this book with everyone you know. Warning: This has a lot of brutal scenes from the Japanese POW camps during WWII. ||
 * //In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin// || Larson || //In the Garden of Beasts// is a vivid portrait of Berlin during the first years of Hitler’s reign, brought to life through the stories of two people: William E. Dodd, who in 1933 became America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s regime, and his scandalously carefree daughter, Martha. Ambassador Dodd, an unassuming and scholarly man, is an odd fit among the extravagance of the Nazi elite. His frugality annoys his fellow Americans in the State Department and Dodd’s growing misgivings about Hitler’s ambitions fall on deaf ears among his peers, who are content to “give Hitler everything he wants.” Martha, on the other hand, is mesmerized by the glamorous parties and the high-minded conversation of Berlin’s salon society—and flings herself headlong into numerous affairs with the city’s elite, most notably the head of the Gestapo and a Soviet spy. Both become players in the exhilarating (and terrifying) story of Hitler’s obsession for absolute power, which culminates in the events of one murderous night, later known as “the Night of Long Knives.” Erik Larson has crafted a gripping, deeply-intimate narrative with a climax that reads like the best political thriller, where we are stunned with each turn of the page, even though we already know the outcome. Note: Dodd is from Clayton, NC, and you will see a landmark for him on Hwy 70 at the red light near CVS and Clayton High. ||
 * //Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History// || Larson || Torqued by drama and taut with suspense, this absorbing narrative of the 1900 hurricane that inundated Galveston, Tex., conveys the sudden, cruel power of the deadliest natural disaster in American history. Told largely from the perspective of Isaac Cline, the senior U.S. Weather Bureau official in Galveston at the time, the story considers an era when "the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself." Most intriguingly, Larson details the mistakes that led bureau officials to dismiss warnings about the storm, which killed over 6000 and destroyed a third of the island city. Note: I haven’t read this, but it’s a classic nonfiction book. ||
 * //Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President// || Millard || James A. Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back. The unhinged assassin’s half-delivered strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured by civil war, and left the wounded president as the object of a bitter behind-the-scenes struggle for power—over his administration, over the nation’s future, and, hauntingly, over his medical care. A team of physicians administered shockingly archaic treatments, to disastrous effect. As his con­dition worsened, Garfield received help: Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, worked around the clock to invent a new device capable of finding the bullet. Meticulously researched, epic in scope, and pulsating with an intimate human focus and high-velocity narrative drive, //The Destiny of the Republic// will stand alongside //The Devil in the White City// and //The Professor and the Madman// as a classic of narrative history. Note: I haven’t read this one, but I desperately want to! ||
 * //Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage// || Lansing || In the summer of 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton set off aboard the //Endurance// bound for the South Atlantic. The goal of his expedition was to cross the Antarctic overland, but more than a year later, and still half a continent away from the intended base, the //Endurance// was trapped in ice and eventually was crushed. For five months Shackleton and his crew survived on drifting ice packs in one of the most savage regions of the world. Alfred Lansing's //Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage// is a white-knuckle account of this astounding odyssey. Note: Some businesses are using this book to teach professionals and students how to be great leaders. ||
 * //Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal// || Schlosser || Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled American cultural imperialism abroad. That's a lengthy list of charges, but here Eric Schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning. Schlosser's myth-shattering survey stretches from California's subdivisions where the business was born to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike where many fast food's flavors are concocted. Along the way, he unearths a trove of fascinating, unsettling truths -- from the unholy alliance between fast food and Hollywood to the seismic changes the industry has wrought in food production, popular culture, and even real estate. He also uncovers the fast food chains' disturbing efforts to reel in the youngest, most susceptible consumers even while they hone their institutionalized exploitation of teenagers and minorities. ||
 * //Fatal Forecast: An Incredible True Tale of Disaster and Survival at Sea// || Tougias || On the morning of November 21, 1980, two small boats set out for Georges Bank, a lucrative but perilous lobster fishing ground off the coast of Cape Cod. The National Weather Service had forecast typical fall weather, and the young, rugged crewmen aboard the //Sea Fever// and the //Fair Wind// had no reason to expect that this trip would be any different from the dozens they’d made earlier in the season. But the only weather buoy in the area was malfunctioning, and the National Weather Service had failed to reveal this critical detail. Tougias narrates this dramatic, pared-down account of what happened to a pair of small fishing boats caught in the path of the devastating November 1980 storm off the coast of Cape Cod. When the storm blew up, the Fair Wind and the Sea Fever—captained by Peter Brown, son of legendarily hard-nosed Bob Brown, owner of The Perfect Storm's //Andrea Gail//—were fishing for lobster on Georges Bank, a plateau on the Atlantic floor that provides some of the richest fishing in the area, but is also the kind of place where boats have a way of disappearing. ||
 * //The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks// || Skloot || Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, //The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks// captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences. ||
 * //Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America// || Ehrenreich || Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. //Nickel and Dimed// reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again. ||
 * //Outliers: The Story of Success// || 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. Brilliant and entertaining, //Outliers// is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate. ||