Common Reading
Office of First-Year Programs
Ben Trapanick, Director, First-Year Programs
Dwight Hall Room 116
1-508-626-4905
E-mail: btrapanick@framingham.edu
Lauren O'Donoghue, Assistant Director, First-Year Programs
Orientation Coordinator
Dwight Hall Room 116
1-508-626-4637
E-mail: lodonoghue@framingham.edu
Each year a new title is selected to be the Common Reading for that academic year. Discussions that take place assist students in their transition by helping them understand the new cultural expectations of being a college student, the expected level of work and how that may differ from their experiences in high school. Discussions are led by faculty members and administrators during Black and Gold Beginnings as well as in courses that have adopted the book as part of their curricula. Students are expected to have read the selection and be prepared to discuss it when events about it take place. Additionally, multiple events will take place during the fall semester that will allow members of the FSU community to learn more about topics raised in this book. A listing of events will be posted in the coming weeks.
The selection for the Class of 2015 is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
About the book-
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells–taken without her knowledge–became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb; helped lead to important advances in cloning, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions, with devastating consequences for her family.
Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia–a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo–to East Baltimore today, where Henrietta’s children, unable to afford health insurance, wrestle with feelings of pride, fear, and betrayal.
Description taken from Random House Publishers website description:
http://www.randomhouse.com/acmart/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400052189
