Eckerd College’s All Senior Reads: Boo, Frayn and Kidder

April 25, 2013 at 6:53 pm Leave a comment

Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida has adopted Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, and Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains for use in their fall 2013 course, Quest for Meaning.  The class, which is required for all seniors, will have approximately 400 students.  The course will be divided into 20 sections. 

Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers was the winner of the National Book Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.  It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award

Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, winner of the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play, has been selected for Common Reading at 10 schools including The Ohio State University, Lehigh University, The University of Pennsylvania, and Cleveland State University.

Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Pulitzer Prize Winner Tracy Kidder, is a New York Times and ALA Notable Book.  It has been selected for Common Reading at over 100 institutions of higher learning including Boston College, Dartmouth College and University of Connecticut, as well as numerous high schools.

Click here to read an excerpt from Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and here to download the teacher’s guide.

Click here to read an excerpt from Mountains Beyond Mountains, and here to download the teacher’s guide.

About the authors:

Katherine Boo is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post. Her reporting has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “Genius” grant, and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. For the last decade, she has divided her time between the United States and India. This is her first book.

Michael Frayn has written plays, novels, and screenplays, in addition to being a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and translator of Chekhov. His thirteen plays include Copenhagen, which was awarded the Tony Award for Best Play, as well as the Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk awards and, in the United Kingdom, the Olivier and Evening Standard awards. His novel Headlong was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Tracy Kidder graduated from Harvard and studied at the University of Iowa. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and many other literary prizes. The author of Mountains Beyond Mountains, My Detachment, Home Town, Old Friends, Among Schoolchildren, House, and The Soul of a New Machine, Kidder lives in Massachusetts and Maine.

Entry filed under: Career Planning, cultural studies, Ethics, Uncategorized. Tags: Behind the beautiful forevers, Eckerd College, Katherine Boo, mountains beyond mountains, Random House, tracy kidder.