All School Read
In order to encourage our students to cultivate an appreciation of literature, as well as to expose them to contemporary writers, each summer the English Department features a new text written by a living author. In the following academic year, that author visits campus, attends classes, and speaks to the student body so that our community may engage with the assigned text in a new and dynamic manner.
The all school read will be the assigned text for all students in all forms. All students will be assessed on the summer reading during the fall term.
US History Honors (HI355) & American Studies (HI375)
The HPRSS department will be assigning An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz for U.S. History Honors/ American Studies (click the link above to view). Students should read pages 1-132 of Dunbar-Ortiz’s book (aka chapters 1-7). You will be assessed on the book in the opening weeks of the fall term.
Kohler Environmental Center (KEC)
Students entering the Environmental Immersion Program at the KEC in the 2023-2024 academic year are required to read THREE books (click the link above to view) in addition to the All School Read.
All School Read
World of Wonders, In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and other Astonishments, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
World of Wonders, Nezhukumatathil’s first nonfiction book, is an illustrated collection of nature essays told in the context of her unusual childhood growing up on the grounds of mental institutions in rural America and navigating the parent-push towards science while finding herself drawn toward language—all unfolding through detailed and delightful observations about the oddities and fascinations of our planet.
The check out period for the All School Read is 60 days.
Students taking US History Honors (HI355) or American Studies (HI375)
An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.
In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them.
Additional Required Readings for Students at the Kohler Environmental Center (KEC)
Students entering the Environmental Immersion Program at the KEC in the 2023-2024 academic year are required to read ALL THREE of the books listed below.
The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, J. Drew Lanham
J. Drew Lanham explores the connection between trees and family trees, birds and brethren, and most importantly of all, the place where mother nature and human nature meet.
In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a remarkable meditation on nature and belonging, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today.
Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal, Mark Bittman
In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, trusted food authority Mark Bittman offers a panoramic view of how the frenzy for food has driven human history to some of its most catastrophic moments, from slavery and colonialism to famine and genocide—and to our current moment, wherein Big Food exacerbates climate change, plunders our planet, and sickens its people. Even still, Bittman refuses to concede that the battle is lost, pointing to activists, workers, and governments around the world who are choosing well-being over corporate greed and gluttony, and fighting to free society from Big Food’s grip.
Under a White Sky: the Nature of the Future, Elizabeth Kolbert
In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation.