Reading has always been a political act, a communion with ideas and a journey of perspective-taking that challenges superficial categories and transcends social hierarchies, all the more so when we read together. The following readings are designed to inspire and welcome you into our intellectual community at the Kroc School. Both books are required for your Foundations course this fall — all of The Nickel Boys and portions of the Lost Children Archive. The summer reading salons below are optional, but we encourage all of you to participate. There’s much to discuss in these books. We can’t wait to meet you and get the conversation started!
Questions for the salons will not be pre-circulated. We will welcome the full range of opinions and reactions for the discussions. AND, will begin with a highly-structured discussion, so read carefully, take notes, track down references and think hard!
Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys (New York: Doubleday, 2019).
In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning #1 New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.
When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.
Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.
Reviews and Context
- Anna Deavere Smith, The New York Review of Books
- Frank Rich, New York Times
- Aminatta Forna, The Guardian
- Ingrid Rojas Contreras, San Francisco Chronicle
How to get it
*The paperback should be out this summer, and it would appear to be paginated the same as the hardback and thus either should work.
- List of Black-owned Bookstores to support
- Penguin Random House – includes links to various sellers and e-books
- The Last Bookstore (Los Angeles, CA)
- Powell’s Books (Portland, OR)
- The Seminary Co-op, 57th Street Books (Chicago, IL)
Optional Summer Salon
Wednesday, July 15, 2020 // 4- 6 PM PDT // via Zoom
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Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019).
In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.
Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way.
A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive—a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.
Reviews
- Gaiutra Bahadur, New York Times
- Helen Mcalpin, NPR
- James Wood, The New Yorker
- Claire Messud, The New York Review of Books
How to Get It
- List of Black-owned Bookstores to support
- Penguin Random House – includes links to various sellers and e-books
- The Last Bookstore (Los Angeles, CA)
- Powell’s Books (Portland, OR)
- The Seminary Co-op, 57th Street Books (Chicago, IL)