Capital Area Reads One Book Archive
Our annual reading project is designed to encourage discussion and spark the exchange of ideas across Ingham County.
2010
Heart in the Right Place by Carolyn Jourdan
By turns poignant and hilarious, Heart in the Right Place chronicles the ultimate case of “downsizing,” recounting the author’s experience leaving a high-powered career as a Washington, D.C., attorney and returning to her East Tennessee hometown, where she had agreed to help her father in his medical practice while her mother recovered from a heart attack.
Find out more about the programs and resources related to Heart in the Right Place.
Library Resources | Discussion Questions & Groups
2009
Song Yet Sung by
James McBride
Filled with rich history and told in McBride’s signature lyrical style, Song Yet Sung brings into view a world long misunderstood in American fiction: the haunting choices that slavery forces upon both blacks and whites.
It tells the highly charged story of an escaped female runaway slave in 1850, who desperately eludes a skilled slave catcher through the treacherous swamps of Maryland’s eastern shore.
Find out more about Song Yet Sung and James McBride.
Library Resources | Online Resources | Discussion Questions
2008
An Inconvenient
Truth by Al Gore
“With the emerging consensus on global warming today, Mr. Gore's passionate warnings about climate change seem increasingly prescient. He has revived the slide presentation about global warming that he first began giving in 1990 and has…turned that presentation into a book and a documentary film, both called An Inconvenient Truth…
Mr. Gore shows why environmental health and a healthy economy do not constitute mutually exclusive choices, and he enumerates practical steps that can be taken to reduce carbon emissions to a point below 1970's levels. As a user-friendly introduction to global warming and a succinct summary of many of the central arguments, An Inconvenient Truth is lucid, harrowing and bluntly effective.” –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
2007
Ordinary Heroes by Scott Turrow
“All parents keep secrets from their children…”
Stewart Dubinsky knew his father, David, had served in World War II. And he'd been told how David had rescued Stewart's mother from the horror of the Balingen concentration camp. But when he discovers, after his father's death, a packet of wartime letters to a former fiancée, and learns of his father's court-martial and imprisonment, he is plunged into the mystery of his family's secret history.
In reconstructing the terrible events and agonizing choices his father faced on the battlefield, in the courtroom, and in love, Stewart gains a better understanding of his own heritage and of the brutal nature of war itself.
2006
An Unfinished Life by Mark Spragg
A Wyoming family’s struggle to forgive one another and to heal old wounds forms the heart of this poignant story. Miramax released the film version of the novel in September 2005, starring Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman and Jennifer Lopez.
2005
The Watsons Go To Birmingham--1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis
Kenny's family is known in Flint, Michigan, as the Weird Watsons, for lots of good reasons. Younger sister Joetta has been led to believe she has to be overdressed in the winter because Southern folks (their mother is from Alabama) freeze solid and have to be picked up by the city garbage trucks. Kenny, the narrator, does well in school and tries to meet his hard-working parents' expectations. After a string of misdeeds, Mr. and Mrs. Watson decide that tough guy, older brother Byron must be removed from the bad influences of the city and his gang. They feel that his maternal grandmother and a different way of life in Birmingham might make him appreciate what he has. Since the story is set in 1963, the family must make careful preparations for their trip, for they cannot count on food or housing being available on the road once they cross into the South. -School Library Journal
2003
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
The Garcías—Dr. Carlos (Papi), his wife Laura (Mami), and their four daughters, Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—belong to the uppermost echelon of Spanish Caribbean society, descended from the conquistadores. Their family compound adjoins the palacio of the dictator’s daughter. So when Dr. García’s part in a coup attempt is discovered, the family must flee.
They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Dominican Republic. Papi has to find new patients in the Bronx. Mami, far from the compound and the family retainers, must find herself. Meanwhile, the girls try to lose themselves—by forgetting their Spanish, by straightening their hair and wearing fringed bell bottoms. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating being caught between the old world and the new, trying to live up to their father’s version of honor while accommodating the expectations of their American boyfriends. Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez’s brilliant and buoyant first novel sets the García girls free to tell their most intimate stories about how they came to be at home—and not at home—in America. -Publisher
