2009 Summer Reading

Each student is asked to read the school-wide reading selection, Skinned. The subject of merging humans and technology is one South Kent is going to examine closely this year. We will discuss this book in that context during a school town meeting in September.

Skinned

by Robin Wasserman

(ISBN 1416936343, hardcover)

Skinned is Lia Kahn’s story. This is one set in the future where families have “credit” to pay for all of life’s expenses. Lia is one of the fortunate ones – rich, beautiful and popular. She is used to things going her way. In her world clothes are custom made to her body shape. She can “link in” to the net with the blink of an eye literally.

Except when she’s involved in a car accident, she loses control over many things in her life. Her controlling father decides he can’t let her go and opts for a computerized version of his eldest daughter. She becomes a “skinner,” a machine inside what looks like human skin. Except, everyone can see that she’s not the same – not a human any longer.

Author Robin Wasserman takes us on a journey of looking at what it means to be human and what ethical dilemmas technology presents to us. Should we be creating immortal beings that cannot die, but are programmed to “feel” emotion and carry on their lives like their organic prior selves?

Lord of the Flies

by William Golding

(ISBN 0399501487)

This classic tale about a group of English schoolboys, who are plane-wrecked on a deserted island, is as chilling and relevant today as when it was first published in 1954. In the beginning, the stranded boys cooperate, attempting to gather food, make shelters, and maintain signal fires. But their cooperation starts breaking down and their newly formed community starts falling apart as the trappings of civilization continue to fall away.

This Boy's Life

by Tobias Wolff

(ISBN 0802136680, paperback)

This is an autobiographical story of 10-year-old Toby Wolff and his journey toward adulthood. As he grapples with perennial issues of growing up, needing to be accepted, learning what is "right," and changing his behavior to meet the differing expectations of peers and family, he comes to new understandings about himself and his place in the world. The story is pretty grim: Teenaged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed. Deception, disguise, and illusion are the weapons the young man learns to employ as he grows up – not bad training for a writer-to-be. Somber though this tale of family strife is, it is also darkly funny and so artistically satisfying that most readers come away exhilarated rather than depressed.

The Andromeda Strain

by Michael Crichton

(ISBN 0345378482, paperback)

This story is an interesting one of biochemistry. Some biologists speculate that if we ever make contact with extraterrestrials, those life forms are likely to be – like most life on earth – one-celled or smaller creatures, more comparable to bacteria than little green men. And even though such organisms would not likely be able to harm humans, the possibility exists that first contact might be our last.

The story line is that a Nobel-Prize-winning bacteriologist, Jeremy Stone, urges the president to approve an extraterrestrial decontamination facility to sterilize returning astronauts, satellites, and spacecraft that might carry an “unknown biologic agent.” The government agrees, almost too quickly, to build the top-secret Wildfire Lab in the desert of Nevada. Shortly thereafter, unbeknownst to Stone, the U.S. Army initiates the “Scoop” satellite program, an attempt to actively collect space pathogens for use in biological warfare. When Scoop VII crashes a couple years later in the isolated Arizona town of Piedmont, the Army ends up getting more than it asked for. The Andromeda Strain follows Stone and rest of the scientific team mobilized to react to the Scoop crash as they scramble to understand and contain a strange and deadly outbreak.

Kaffir Boy

by Mark Mathabane

(ISBN 0684848287, Paperback)

This autobiography is the true story of a black man coming of age in apartheid South Africa and his ultimate journey to America. Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university. This extraordinary memoir of life under apartheid is a triumph of the human spirit over hatred and unspeakable degradation. For Mathabane did what no physically and psychologically battered "Kaffir" from the rat-infested alleys of Alexandra was supposed to do – he escaped to tell about it.

Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow

(ISBN 0765319853, hardcover)

Free download at author’s web site:

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works – and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time

by Greg Mortenson

(ISBN 0143038257)

Near the top of the New York Times best-seller list for over two years, Three Cups of Tea is the true story of a young mountaineer who, in 1993, “drifted into an impoverished Pakistan village in the Karakoram mountains after a failed attempt to climb K2. Moved by the inhabitants’ kindness, he promised to return and build a school.”

The book tells of his heroic efforts to fulfill that promise, the result of which is currently 55 schools in the same rugged area of Pakistan where the Taliban started. He was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain villagers and promised to build them a school. Over the next decade he built the schools – especially for girls – that offer a balanced education in one of the most isolated and dangerous regions on earth. His quest brought him into conflict with both enraged Islamists and uncomprehending Americans. This story combines adventure with a celebration of the humanitarian spirit.