Recharge with Reading
Building community & culture of enjoyment in reading
Recharge with Reading is a year-long, university-wide reading project to get people reading and talking about what they read. Join Academic Affairs and The Cannon Memorial Library for events all year long. Celebrate Banned Books Week, join a Reading Challenge where you read books selected by members of the Saint Leo Community (click on the Reading Challenge tab above), hear Pulitzer Prize winning writer Jack E. Davis speak this fall, hear from Saint Leo authors, and join us for a spring reading festival. Check back often by clicking on the Events tab to see more of what is ahead for Recharge with Reading.
Sign up for a reading group with your favorite facilitator here.
More info on each facilitator and their reading selections.
Now Available: Click Here to View the Recording of Dr. Davis' Lecture and Reading
Special Offer!
|
Purchase a SIGNED copy of Jack Davis' Pulitzer-Prize winning book, The Gulf, by calling the Saint Leo University bookstore at 352-588-8344 (M-F, 8:00-4:00) or by visiting in person. Orders placed by phone ship free! UPDATE 11/7/20: A few copies are still available--order yours today.
Click here for bookstore hours and address. |
Author Bio: Jack E. Davis is a professor of history and the Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities at the University of Florida, where he specializes in environmental history and sustainability studies. In 2018, his book The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in history.
Before joining the faculty at UF in 2003, Davis taught at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Eckerd College, and in 2002 was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Jordan in Amman. Upon joining the faculty at UF, he founded the department’s student journal, Alpata: A Journal of History. His Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930 won the Charles S. Sydnor Prize for the best book in southern history published in 2001. His next book, An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century (2009), received a gold medal from the Florida Book Awards. In 2014, he was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, where he worked on The Gulf, which the New York Times Book Review described as a “beautiful homage to a neglected sea.” The Gulf was a New York Times Notable Book for 2017 and made several “best of” lists for the year, including those of the Washington Post, NPR, Forbes, and the Tampa Bay Times. The Gulf was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and winner of the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.
Davis has written for the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Tampa Bay Times, Orion, and other publications. With his former student Leslie Poole (UF PhD 2012), he coedited The Wilder Heart of Florida, a collection of personal essays and poems about natural Florida that will be published in March 2021. In 2019, he was one of thirty-two recipients nationwide of an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, awarded to support the writing of his latest book, Bird of Paradox: How the Bald Eagle Saved the Soul of America.
As Davis told the selection committee for the Carnegie, he grew up in major bald eagle state, Florida, but did not see one in the wild until the 1980s, when he was still listening to music by the Eagles, wore clothes from American Eagle Outfitters, and lost a five-dollar bet when the Oakland Raiders defeated the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl. He has met several Eagle Scouts but was never a scout himself, and he has never put Goodyear Eagle tires on his cars or trucks, or, most especially, been inclined to own or drive an AMC Eagle.
Jack divides the seasons between two “villes”: Gainesville, Florida, and Harrisville, New Hampshire.
Reasons for banning the Harry Potter Series:
Anti-family, occult/Satanism, religious viewpoint, violence.
http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequently
challengedbooks/top10#toptenlists
Available as an eBook.
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's 1962 novel has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Now in a new deluxe edition with a foreword by Chuck Palahniuk and cover by Joe Sacco, here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them all imprisoned.
Reason: pro-communism ideas, sexuality
Available for pickup at Saint Leo University Cannon Memorial Library.
Faced with the difficulties of growing up and choosing a religion, a twelve-year-old girl talks over her problems with her own private God.
Available as an eBook.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother's side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age--and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors ("I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare") will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.
Devil in the Grove by 