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  2021 Common Book Selection: Factfulness

  Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling, and Ola Rosling

  Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends--what percentage of the world's population lives in poverty; why the world's population is increasing; how many girls finish school--we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers.
  
  In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective--from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse).
  
  Our problem is that we don't know what we don't know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn't mean there aren't real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.
  
  Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future.

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  2020 Common Book Selection: Dreamland

  Sam Quinones

  With a great reporter's narrative skill and the storytelling ability of a novelist, acclaimed journalist Sam Quinones weaves together two tales of capitalism catastrophically run amok. The unfettered prescribing of pain medications during the 1990s reached its peak in Purdue Pharma's campaign to market OxyContin, its new, expensive--extremely addictive--miracle painkiller. Meanwhile, a massive influx of black tar heroin--cheap, potent, and originating from one small county on Mexico's west coast, independent of any drug cartel--assaulted small towns and midsize cities across the country, driven by a brilliant, almost unbeatable marketing and distribution system. Together these phenomena continue to lay waste to communities from Tennessee to Oregon, Indiana to New Mexico.

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  2019 Common Book Selection: A Different Kind of Daughter

  Maria Toorpakai and Katharine Holstein

  A DIFFERENT KIND OF DAUGHTER tells of Maria's harrowing journey to play the sport she knew was her destiny, first living as a boy and roaming the violent back alleys of the frontier city of Peshawar, rising to become the number one female squash player in Pakistan. For Maria, squash was more than liberation was salvation. But it was also a death sentence, thrusting her into the national spotlight and the crosshairs of the Taliban, who wanted Maria and her family dead. Maria knew her only chance of survival was to flee the country.
  
  Enter Jonathon Power, the first North American to earn the title of top squash player in the world, and the only person to heed Maria's plea for help. Recognizing her determination and talent, Jonathon invited Maria to train and compete internationally in Canada. After years of living on the run from the Taliban, Maria packed up and left the only place she had ever known to move halfway across the globe and pursue her dream. Now Maria is well on the way to becoming a world champion as she continues to be a voice for oppressed women everywhere.

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  2018 Common Book Selection: The Underground Railroad

  Colson Whitehead

  Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
  
  In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, which initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
  
  Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time and space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share. (www.nationalbook.org)

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  2017 Common Book Selection: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

  Bryan Stevenson

  In his memoir, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Stevenson tells the stories of those he has defended when they did not have adequate defense. Stevenson is an attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, a "private, nonprofit organization that challenges poverty and racial injustice, advocates for equal treatment in the criminal justice system, and creates hope for marginalized communities"

  We encourage you to watch this short video of Bryan Stevenson to give you some insight into his perspective and of the conversations this book will include.

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  2016 Common Book Convocation: Full Body Burden

  Kristen Iversen

  Full Body Burden is the nonfiction work of Kristen Iversen’s experience growing up in Arvada, Colorado near Rocky Flats. Rocky Flats, once designated “the most contaminated site in America,” was a secret nuclear weapons plant responsible for the assembly of over 70,000 of plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs between 1952-1989. Full Body Burden follows Kristen’s life in Colorado and the lives of those impacted by the hidden truths of what was actually happening inside the Rock Flats facility.

  We encourage you to watch this short video introduction of the book.

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  2015 Common Book Convocation: Jeanne Marie Laskas, author of "Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make this Country Work"

  Jeanne Marie Laskas

  In Hidden America, award-winning journalist Jeanne Marie Laskas dives deep into her subjects and emerges with character-driven stories about the people who make our lives run every day—and yet we barely think of them

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  2014 Common Book Convocation: Naomi Benaron, author of "Running the Rift."

  Naomi Benaron

  Naomi Benaron earned an MFA from Antioch University and an MS in earth sciences from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She teaches creative writing through UCLA Writers Extension and is a writing mentor for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project. An advocate for African refugees in her home community of Tucson, Ariz., she has also worked with genocide survivor groups in Rwanda. She won the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction for her collection, Love Letters from a Fat Man. She is a marathon runner and an Ironman triathlete.

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  2013 Common Book Convocation: Conor Grennan, author of "Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal."

  Conor Grennan

  Little Princes is the epic story of Conor Grennan’s battle to save the lost children of Nepal and how he found himself in the process. Part Three Cups of Tea, part Into Thin Air, Grennan’s remarkable memoir is at once gripping and inspirational, and it carries us deep into an exotic world that most readers know little about.