Three panelists will provide insights and perspectives on Catawba College’s 2008 common reading selection, “We Are All the Same,” when they participate in the annual BookRevue on campus Tuesday.
Dr. Samuel Dansokho, an associate professor of religion and society at Hood Theological Seminary, Dr. Constance Rogers-Lowery, assistant professor of biology at Catawba College, and Tara Van Geons, M.A., who works at Greystone School in Misenheimer and is former case manager and service coordinator for Rowan County AIDS Task Force, will be part of a panel discussion at BookRevue. The event is slated at 7:30 p.m. in Hedrick Theatre and is free and open to the public.
“We Are All the Same” was written by Jim Wooten, an award-winning senior correspondent for ABC News and the recipient of a John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism. The book was the winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and is subtitled “A Story of a Boy’s Courage and a Mother’s Love.”
In “We Are All the Same,” the reader meets Nkosi Johnson, a Zulu, HIV-positive child with no hope for living, but whose life remains anything but hopeless.
The reader also meets the indefatigable, white South African Gail Johnson who becomes Nkosi’s foster mother. Johnson’s persistence as an advocate for children like Nkosi helps draw international attention to discrimination and personalizes the apartheid struggle in their country.
Members of Catawba’s Common Summer Reading Ad Hoc Selection Group recommended the book because it includes topics which may be addressed in first-year seminars, including cultural differences, heroism, vocation and helping, as well as political and social issues.
The book also will dovetail with a second semester course on globalization which all first-year students will also take. Author Jim Wooten will visit Catawba’s campus during the second semester and speak to first-year students about his book and his friendship with Nkosi. Wooten’s appearance, which will be free and open to the public, is slated for Tuesday, March 24, 2009.
“We Are All the Same” provides a starting point for Catawba’s first-year students and their faculty. After completing the common summer reading, first-year students arrive on campus ready to participate in and contribute to intellectual dialog on campus. The book also provides a common thread for intellectual discussion throughout new students’ first-year experience.
Catawba’s Common Summer Reading began in 2005 as a way to help first-year students become intellectually engaged when they initially arrived on campus. Past selections include Edward Tenner’s “Why Things Bite Back,” Khalid Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” and Tracy Kidder’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains.”
93-year-old publishes first novel
A 93-year-old British grandmother self-published her first novel with AuthorHouse in an effort to raise money for a home she’s buying in the English countryside. “A Dangerous Weakness,” has made Lorna Page a media darling in Britain ó until it was discovered the book is self-published and printed only on demand.
Still, Page has bought a house so she and her friends can live their lives out in comfort, rather than in a nursing home.
“I started writing as soon as I could hold a pencil,” reads the press release, “fairy stories, poetry, short stories, and my novel, a who-done-it, which my American daughter-in-law found locked away in a suitcase. Seems I’ve been writing for a hundred years and that’s practically true!”
With a steamy storyline, and the author’s own story, it’s bound to raise some funds.
During the Second World War Ms. Page helped to organize
the local branch of the Women’s Junior Air Corps, sewing the
uniforms herself. She stayed one lesson ahead of the class
she taught in Morse code, and drilled and marched the
young cadets around the village lanes, while rearing two
children in a cottage with no electricity or running water,
“where rats ran through the thatch overhead”. She says she
was one of the lucky ones to have a house at all. During that
period her writing took her away from the everyday life of
bomb shelters, gas masks, and air raid sirens.
Ms. Page’s book A Dangerous Weakness was published by
AuthorHouse this July. It begins when Marion Hemming
accepts an invitation to spend the Christmas holidays in
Switzerland with an old classmate from her boarding school
days, and is on the brink of doubting her marriage. She never
suspects that the seemingly innocent invitation is part of her
husband’s plan to involve her in a bitter power struggle which
includes unanticipated treachery and leads her into uncertain
partnerships and liaisons. From a luxurious, forbidding house
in the Swiss mountains to London’s room eleven on the
eleventh floor of a hotel, A Dangerous Weakness catches
Marion up in a chase which brings her full-circle to the
realities of love and one woman’s strength.
Lorna Page is busy at work on her next book, a collection of
short stories. “After all,” she says, “I’d have to buy a jolly big
house for all my friends I have who are alone and need a
family.”