To find a complete listing of events and other exciting news about the commemoration, please visit the official website.

Email us for a complimentary copy of Campfire’s graphic adaptation of Oliver Twist.

Browse other editions of Dickens’s work from Bantam Classics, Everyman’s Library, and The Modern Library.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

We are proud to announce that Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, Roland Merullo’s The Talk-Funny Girl, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and Daniel Wilson’s Robopocalypse were four of the ten titles awarded a 2012 Alex Award. Bestowed by the American Library Association, Alex Award winners are recognized as books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18.

For a complete list of our past winners, click here.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

I knew that my novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, was making its way onto high school reading lists when curious emails began popping up in my inbox. They tended to go something like this:

“Um, you know, your book, Motel on the Corner of Sweet and Sour—dude, it’s like m favorite novel of all time!! And I’m kinda wondering if you could, like, answer these twelve questions for me?” (In my mind, I always hear this question coming from a nasally, voice-cracking, pre-pubescent 14-year-old boy wearing a Hot Topic hoodie with his ear buds in, listening to “Bring Me the Horizon”).

And just like that, I was suddenly someone’s homework. Right up there with Of Mice and Men, the Pythagorean Theorem, and building dioramas out of old shoe-boxes and craftpaper.

To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure how my novel would be received.

So then I asked myself why so many students embrace books like The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird—because they’re amazing novels? Sure. But moreover, these are books with young protagonists. They offer voices that are readily absorbed by the intrepid imaginations of young adults.

Now that I’ve given talks at dozens of schools—from inner-city New York high schools to well-heeled, private academies in tony California suburbs—I’m convinced that students relate well to grown-up problems and ethical dilemmas.

But would my young characters be able to navigate those neural, critical, Twitter-worthy pathways? In talking to students, in person, via email, Skype, and on Facebook, the consensus seems to be: LIKE. Which is no small honor.

And now I get emails like this:

“This is the first time that I actually enjoyed a book I was forced to read.”

“This is my all-time favorite novel. ”

Or the occasional, “I cried my eyes out. (Sob!)”

Who knew that modern teenagers would relate so well to a Chinese boy falling in love with a Japanese girl during WWII, or that a story about the Japanese Internment would affect a generation that has grown up in a post-9/11 world? The notion still amazes me—it’s something that I never planned or anticipated. But it’s a joy to behold, requests for homework help and all.

If you have specific questions, you can always reach me at jamieford.com or at twitter.com/jamieford.

Editors and teachers participating in this intensive one-day workshop are tasked with developing new anthologies to make Dr. King’s own writings accessible for the 21st Century curriculum.  The summit is to be held in Random House, Inc’s headquarters in midtown Manhattan.  To learn more about “The King Legacy” series, go to: http://www.thekinglegacy.org/. 

Beacon Press is distributed by Random House Publisher Services.

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

I am delighted to tell you about my book Nothing to Envy because I wrote it with students in mind. I was, at the time, on a fellowship at Princeton University where I also taught an undergraduate journalism course called “Covering Repressive Regimes.” My students were curious about North Korea, a country they knew almost nothing about.

When I started telling them the stories—about a country where televisions and radios were locked on government propaganda, where you couldn’t travel to the next town without a permit, where you were required to wear the portrait of the founder Kim Il Sung at all times on your clothing and that you celebrated the birthdays of the leadership rather than your own—the students were incredulous. It was not that they doubted my word; they were unable to grasp that a state as repressive as this one could persist into the 21st century.

Born in the mid-1980s, they didn’t remember the Berlin Wall or the Soviet Union. Totalitarianism was a subject of history books and of works of literature like George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. When they asked for recommendations for reading about North Korea, or about Korea in general, I was stumped. I knew many suitable books about China, Iraq, Bosnia, Vietnam, Rwanda. But Korea? The military histories were too long and dense for my busy, multi-tasking students; many other books got bogged down in the great polemic debates of the Cold War period, reading like anti-Communist screeds or else denunciations of U.S. policy in Asia.

My students needed a book that was even-handed enough to let them make their own judgments. I wanted to engross students with people they could relate to. Could they imagine themselves like Hyuck, losing their parents, roaming alone in a city gripped by famine, scrounging for food to steal? Would they identify with Jun-sang, the indecisive intellectual, torn between his infatuation with a young woman and his father’s desire for him to join the Workers’ Party to succeed? And what about his girlfriend, Mi-ran? Should she confide in him her most dangerous secret, her plans to escape from North Korea?

Over 15 years as a foreign correspondent, I learned that in order to interest American readers in faraway places with unpronounceable names (remember all the jokes about Bosnian and Slavic names having no vowels?), they needed to relate to the people. Writing for newspapers, I also worked under the assumption that readers had little or no prior knowledge, that each story had to contain all the information needed to comprehend the situation being covered. This is especially true of Korea. Not just students—many educated Americans draw a blank when you start talking about the divided Korean peninsula and the horrific war of 1950-1953 that set the stage for the conflict in Vietnam and decades of animosity between the United States and China. The Forgotten War is the apt title of one of the books on my shelf about the Korean War. My hope is to give students a pleasurable reading experience, while helping them to fill in the blanks.

Among the more gratifying emails I’ve received in recent months, one was from high school senior in El Segunda, California, who wrote to me that he had become obsessed with North Korea since reading Nothing to Envy. “The lives of all the people in your book were so fascinating. The way you described their stories makes me feel as if I have met them. The fact that such a strange and terrifying country exists baffles me!’’

—Barbara Demick

Outcasts United by Warren St. John

For the better part of a hundred years, Clarkston, Georgia—a community of 7,100 on one square mile of land east of downtown Atlanta—was a mostly white town where little of interest happened. In the early 1990’s, the town was designated as a resettlement center for refugees from around the world, and refugees poured in from Southeast Asia, the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East. In less than a decade, little Clarkston, Georgia transformed into one of the most diverse communities in the country.

Outcasts United is the story of this town, told through the lens of a soccer team of refugee boys called the Fugees, a team founded and coached by an American-educated, Jordanian born volunteer named Luma Mufleh. The team and its remarkable coach ultimately provide the rest of us with powerful lessons about how to create community in places where everyone is different.

The Fugees are a paradigm of the modern-day student body. A group of boys from an extraordinary range of backgrounds have come together in a new place and face the challenge of forging alliances and creating a new community. But through lessons taught by the coach and derived from their own experiences, the boys manage to identify common goals that override their significant cultural differences.

A nuanced and realistic approach to discussing diversity. The drama of the Fugees’ soccer season offers a way into a more complex and nuanced discussion about diversity that is not doctrinaire or simplistic. The book does not gloss over the challenges posed by diverse communities, but does offer positive, real-world examples in which people in Clarkston have turned diversity into an asset.

Expands students’ horizons. Though set in Clarkston, Georgia, Outcasts United traces the origins of the conflicts that caused the refugees of Clarkston to flee their homes in the first place, in order to contextualize the refugee experience. Students learn about conflicts in Liberia, Bosnia and Kosovo, Burundi and Congo, among others. In addition, students gain valuable insights into the struggle of other young people to assimilate into a new culture.

The importance and rewards of service. The example of Coach Luma proves the adage that one person can make a difference. With no formal training in social work and with little outside support, she identified a profound local need and single-handedly took the initiative to help meet it. In the process, she found herself with a new family that valued and appreciated her for her efforts and kindness.

Strong female role model. Luma herself offers a powerful role-model for female students. A lone female coach in a league of male coaches, she is determined— sometimes stubborn—clever and, above all, passionate on behalf of her players and their families. And through force-of-will she takes on local prejudices and political intransigence that works against the refugees.

Having already been selected by several schools and communities within just the first year of its publication, Outcasts United has already spoken to thousands of students. I hope to have the opportunity to bring the book’s message to your school as well.

—Warren St. John

Not Quite Adults by Richard Settersten and Barbara E. Ray

by Richard Settersten, co-author of Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone (Bantam, 2010)

One of the inescapable burdens of being an educator relates to this simple truth: We grow older, but our students are forever young. Yet, as new students file into our classrooms each year, we’re aware of a complementary truth: Just because our students are always young doesn’t mean they’re always the same. Recent years have brought a seismic shift in the kinds of students we face.

Anchored in nearly a decade of collaborative research conducted by an interdisciplinary team of scientists assembled by the MacArthur Foundation (myself included), Not Quite Adults provides an intimate look at today’s young people.

Writing this book with my co-author, Barbara Ray, has changed how I teach and relate to my college students. Here are a few lessons that will be helpful for high school teachers, too:

• A slower path into adulthood is good. It pays off for young people to make careful, strategic choices and to build credentials and experiences that will carry them for the long haul.
• While a slower path is good for everyone, not everyone is doing it or doing it well. The futures of many young people are fragile, often because they’ve forgone or failed in higher education or because they’ve leapt too quickly into family responsibilities.
• As any teacher can attest, over-involved parents can be real nuisances. In our society, however, the support of parents is crucial in determining whether young adults sink or swim. Of course, those outcomes also rest heavily on the prior contributions of teachers like you and me.
• For students whose parents aren’t involved or don’t have the know-how, a strong adult mentor can make all the difference. These mentors are often teachers.
• College still pays. But there are important considerations to keep in mind. Among other things, students need to (1) finish (there are serious crises with retention and graduation), (2) take out debt in line with their potential earnings (students shouldn’t take out $60K if they’re going to be teachers or social workers), and (3) pick institutions and majors that are well aligned with their personalities and learning styles.
• When it comes to college, the Toyota may be just as good as the Mercedes. Students who have the skills and capacities to do well at top-tier institutions are likely to do equally well a rung or two down the institutional ladder.
• The “college for all” mantra dupes many students, who need frank advice about their prospects and a clear map for how to get there—or someplace else productive. This mantra equates outcomes other than college with failure.
• Volunteering and civic involvement can help young people build networks and learn about leadership and collaboration firsthand.
• Nurture boys and young men, who are at great risk for high school and college drop out, unemployment, and being disconnected from healthy relationships.

 It’s important to remember that the world we’re training our students for is dramatically different from the one we knew. One of the most dangerous things we can do is give advice based on a world that no longer exists. Not Quite Adults is not an apology for today’s young people. On the contrary, it is a big wake up call for all of us.

—Rick Settersten

How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less by Sarah Glidden

by Sarah Glidden, author of How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (Vertigo, 2011)

When I used to think about growing as a person, I visualized my life as a sort of graph: a steadily climbing, sometimes dipping line that would crawl forward over time until a certain age when the graph would plateau into a stable flatness. The way I looked at it, one’s teens and early 20s are all about discovering who you are and what you think about the world. At some point, all my opinions, beliefs, and values would become fixed into a solid identity that I would carry with me into the future like an amber shield.

This fantasy carried over into the way I approached other topics, such as history and politics. I had been interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for some time but felt fatigued by it; I was itching to just figure it out and then move on. I was familiar with the “two sides” of the conflict in American discourse. Conservatives blamed the Palestinians, calling them “terrorists” and “monsters,” while liberals maintained that the Israelis were occupiers and thus the real monsters. While I had always identified more with the latter camp, there was something unsettling to me about defining a conflict as a struggle of “good vs. evil.” I wanted to truly understand the mess in the Middle East. I had read plenty on the subject, had gone to lectures, and had watched many documentaries. The only step left was to visit the country to see it with my own eyes. The finish line was in Jerusalem somewhere, and all I had to do was to get there. 

Luckily, there was a free way for me to do this. Birthright Israel is a foundation that offers free ten-day tours of the country to anyone Jewish between the ages of 18 and 26. I was just about to turn 27 and my main connection to my Judaism was my love for my grandmother’s matzo ball soup, but I still qualified—barely. I decided to take the opportunity to see Israel, and then afterward I would stay on in the country and even travel into the West Bank. I was mindful that Birthright could be propagandistic and one-sided, but I had done my homework and was ready for whatever the group would try to tell me about the conflict. And anyway, I was planning to create a comic book about my trip. The more propaganda Birthright threw at me, the more material I would have for a book. Bring it on!

The idea that I could finally “understand” the conflict by going on a Birthright trip is, of course, absurd. Instead, I sunk deeper into the morass. As I traveled the country, I was able to see parts of Israel that don’t usually make it into the newspapers and to meet ordinary people who call this land of turmoil their home. At the same time, I was constantly worried I was being manipulated by my tour guides.

In the end, I didn’t flip to the “other side”; neither did I come back from Israel saying, “Yup, it’s true: they’re all monsters.” What I discovered through wrestling with the trip was that there are no easy or absolute answers when it comes to complex issues. There are very few situations in which one group is always “right” and the other is always “wrong.” The reality is that there is no finish line for understanding.

In creating this book, I tried to remain honest about my own flaws as I embarked on an almost quixotic quest for knowledge. Combining simply drawn characters with painterly backgrounds, I bring my readers into the story so that they can feel as if they are right there experiencing all the interior battles and struggles, and getting inside my character’s imagination, daydreams, and doubts. I don’t let myself off lightly; my character succumbs to hurried judgment, reactive emotions, and irrational fears. But these are traits that we all share at times, and rather than something to be ashamed of, they should be recognized as the parts of us that help us to grow.

Sarah Glidden won the prestigious Ignatz Award for “Most Promising New Talent” as well as the Masie Kukoc Award for Comics Inspiration. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies. How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less is her first graphic novel. Born in 1980 in Boston, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Feel-Bad Education by Alfie Kohn

The four years that students spend in high school are excellent preparation for the real world—assuming that they plan to live in a totalitarian society. To the detriment of students as well as teachers, most American high schools continue to embody the sort of traditional, and antidemocratic, practices that I call into question in Feel-Bad Education: And Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling.

In this new book, as in my earlier work, I try to ask the radical questions—by which I mean those that get to the root of what we’re doing rather than looking for ways to tweak the status quo. For example, why do most 15-year-olds have less to say about how they spend their time in school (what they’re learning, and how, and when, and with whom) than do most 5-year-olds in kindergarten? Why do high schools seem designed to make sure that kids won’t feel part of a caring community and won’t really come to know, or be known by, any adults?

Why does learning in so many high schools mostly consist of memorizing facts for a test, passively listening to lectures, reading the predigested facts in huge soulless textbooks, filling out worksheets—and then beginning a second shift of these dreary tasks when students get home? And why is the push for “rigor” and “accountability” and “tougher standards” making things even worse? (What politicians refuse to learn—partly because teachers have been scapegoated and excluded from the national conversation about education—is that it’s possible to “raise the bar” and improve test scores … while making schools less intellectually stimulating and less appealing places.)

Where are the opportunities for students to integrate what different disciplines have to offer, to discover and explore, to understand ideas from the inside out, to learn actively and interactively, and to get excited while satisfying their curiosity about the world? How are teachers supposed to figure out how to be facilitators of learning rather than mere transmitters of information, how to be teachers of kids more than teachers of chemistry or history or literature? And even if they do figure out how to do it, where are they supposed to find the time?

If I had  simple answers to these questions, you would have heard about it by now. But in Feel-Bad Education I try at least to offer some different ways of responding to traditional schooling, some examples of places and people I think are on the right track, and a reminder that we need to make sure we’re asking the right questions. 

In the book, I talk, for example, about what it means to create more democratic classrooms even if that makes us a little uncomfortable to give up some control. (Kids learn to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.) I talk about the importance of making sure students know we care about them unconditionally, even when they screw up or fall short. I talk about the disturbing implications of those inspirational posters so commonly found on school walls, about the danger of national standards, about what we can learn about ourselves as educators when students cheat, about the dark side of rubrics and the whole “data” craze in education.

Personally, I’ve spent enough time teaching high school to emerge humbled about how hard it is to live up to one’s best impulses—and awed by the teachers I’ve watched over the years who manage to do amazing things despite the systems in which they work. This book is designed to support the kinds of systemic, not just individual, changes that can make it a little easier for teachers to take pride in what they do every day and to help their students do the same.

_____________________________

Copyright © 2011 by Alfie Kohn (http://www.alfiekohn.org/)

The Social Animal by David Brooks

Several years ago I did some reporting on why so many kids drop out of high school, despite all rational incentives. That took me quickly to studies of early childhood and research on brain formation. Once I started poking around that realm, I found that people who study the mind are giving us an entirely new perspective on who we are and what it takes to flourish.

We’re used to a certain story of success, one that emphasizes getting good grades, getting the right job skills and making the right decisions. But these scientists were peering into the innermost mind and shedding light on the process one level down, in the realm of  emotions, intuitions, perceptions, genetic dispositions and unconscious longings.

I’ve spent several years with their work now, and it’s changed my perspective on everything. In this book, I try to take their various findings and weave them together into one story. This is not a science book. I don’t answer how the brain does things. I try to answer what it all means. I try to explain how these findings  about the deepest recesses of our minds should change the way we see ourselves, raise our kids, conduct business, teach, manage our relationships and practice politics. This story is based on scientific research, but it is really about emotion, character, virtue and love.

We’re not rational animals, or laboring animals; we’re social animals. We emerge out of relationships and live to penetrate each other’s souls.