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Common Reading

An Opportunity for Discussion

 

All new students entering MU in the Fall Semester are required to participate in a Summer Reading Experience.

In addition to many opportunities you will have to connect with your new classmates during Orientation, you'll also have chances to interact with faculty, staff and administration. The Common Reading Program held during orientation is one such opportunity. Faculty, staff and administration from all areas of campus volunteer to discuss the common reading that all incoming students are expected to complete before their arrival to campus in August. Consider the Common Reading Program as an introduction to academic life at Millersville University. It's your chance not only to meet new people but also to talk with members of the faculty, staff and administration in a meaningful discussion. It is also a chance to realize that a true education involves informal discussions as well as classroom lectures.

Common Reading Program Aims:

  • In the spirit of liberal learning, a common reading provides a shared intellectual experience for all members of the Millersville University Community.
  • To provide an opportunity for students to meet and interact with a member of the Millersville University faculty in an informal discussion, outside the boundaries of the classroom and formal academic requirements.

This year's Common Reading

 

A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah.

Book: A log way gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah In the fifty-plus conflicts now going on around the globe, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers.  Ishmael Beah, the author of this horrifying yet vitally important memoir, used to be one of them.

What is war life for a twelve- or thirteen-year-old soldier?  How does a child become a killer?  How does one stop?  Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have tried to imagine their lives.  But until now, there has been no firsthand account by someone who came through such hell and survived.

Riveting yet readable, unimaginable yet unforgettable, A Long Way Gone is sure to become a classic; a unique autobiography about the civil war in Sierra Leone, as recorded by one who took up an AK-47 at the age of twelve.  Now in his mid-twenties, Beah is both eloquent and perceptive in his account of fleeing attacking rebels, searching for his lost relatives, seeking out food and shelter in the bush, and wandering a land rendered unrecognizable by brutality and violence.  Yet once he’s been picked up and recruited by the government army, Beah, a gentle boy at heart, finds that he, too, is capable of truly terrible actions.  Told with real literary force, ample insight, and heartbreaking candor, A Long Way Gone is a rare, mesmerizing work that addresses a twenty-first-century, and international, nightmare: the collision of war and childhood.