Humanities Summer Program Spotlight:

Buckeye Book Community 2006: A Book and a Promise!

How do you introduce 6,000 incoming freshmen to the rich intellectual life they will soon experience on campus, encourage them to take advantage of the many scholarly and co-curricular activities available to them, prepare them to participate as vital members of the campus community and ensure they have something in common with one another? Buckeye Book Community! Once the dust settles from the whirlwind of orientation when first-quarter freshmen meet faculty, administrators, upper-class student leaders and each other, new students are encouraged to take up a complimentary copy of the Buckeye book selection of the year in the calm, dog days of summer to read, relax, and contemplate the rewards and challenges that lie ahead.

Associate Professor of English, Michelle Herman, herself an accomplished author and recipient of numerous literary honors, welcomes new Colleges of the Arts and Sciences (ASC) students with “the gift of a book and the promise that thousands of other freshmen are reading it too!” Under her direction incoming freshmen in ASC autumn 2006 will participate in the Common Book Community having read Old School by critically-acclaimed author, Tobias Wolff. Old School is a compelling fictional memoir of an aspiring young writer, away from home for the first time, who becomes enveloped in the competitive literary atmosphere of his private school and nearly loses himself in the process. Michael Upchurch of the Seattle Times says Old School is "A compact marvel of a book, with its tale of a paradise gained and lost, its study of a young man's emerging character and mind, and its look at the . . . slippery nature of truth and fiction, honesty and dishonesty, sound judgment and seductive delusion."

Tobias Wolff will visit OSU November 2-3 and appear at events including a book signing, faculty-led discussions, expert panels, a screening of the film version of his memoir, This Boy’s Life, and an exploration of the process of turning the book into film.

Other recent Buckeye Book Community selections include The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon, The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, Rocket Boys by Homer H. Hickam, Jr., The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, and Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser.

For more details visit: http://fye.osu.edu/book.html