Be Ready To Discuss This Fall

By Molly Worthen Sunday, June 08, 2003
    • A number of colleges are assigning homework before their freshmen even set foot on campus — mandatory summer reading. The schools typically choose one book that will spark debate, remind freshmen that there is life outside the undergraduate ivory tower — and not be too heavy to make it from the bookshelf to the beach. Here's a look at some books on incoming freshmen's reading lists for this summer.

    DUKE UNIVERSITY
    An expose of the extremes of wealth and poverty in America's public schools

    ITHACA COLLEGE
    The Color of Water, a memoir of growing up in a family of 12 children in New York City housing projects

    BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY
    The author's journey through a modern-day South still obsessed with the Civil War

    LAFAYETTE COLLEGE
    Michael Frayn's play about a fateful meeting between pioneers of the nuclear bomb

    U OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
    The best-selling, firsthand account of minimum-wage life in the U.S.