Audio Study Guides

Written by Fredrik Backman in 2017, Beartown is the first of a trilogy and is followed by the similarly hockey-themed novels, Us Against You (2017) and The Winners (2021). All three novels are set in the town of the same name, and Beartown focuses on the local junior hockey team, the in-game success or failure of which deeply impacts the economy of the town as a whole. As the town's intense focus on the sport... Read Beartown Summary

“Becoming a Learner: Realizing the Opportunity of Education,” Second Edition (2018) is an essay by Matthew L Sanders, who wrote it with incoming college freshman in mind. Its goal is to change the perspective that higher education prepares students for a profitable career. Instead, it teaches students to become learners.In the Introduction, Sanders writes: “The hardest thing for you to know is the thing you think you already know” (xi). Many people think they know... Read Becoming a Learner Summary

A 2017 New York Times bestseller, Lisa Wingate’s Before We Were Yours is a haunting and compelling work of historical fiction told in polyvocal form with two alternating principle voices narrating a story of complex family history. From chapter to chapter, the book goes back and forth between present day South Carolina (in settings of Southern power and prestige) and Tennessee in the late 1930s and early 1940s (in settings of squalor and abuse). In... Read Before We Were Yours Summary

Being Mortal, Atul Gawande's New York Times best seller, was published in 2014. Gawande, an American surgeon and public health researcher, has written a series of articles, essays, and books that probe the US health care industry. His first book, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and he followed it in 2007 with Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance. Throughout his work, Gawande offers his... Read Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and what Matters in the End Summary

Toni Morrison’s Beloved was published in 1987. It is inspired by the real story of an African American woman named Margaret Garner, who, while attempting to liberate herself and her children from enslavement, killed her own daughter to prevent her capture and enslavement. It tells the story of Sethe, a self-liberated, formerly enslaved woman who kills her daughter in the same manner. This daughter later returns to haunt the family. The novel is widely classified... Read Beloved Summary

Beowulf is an epic poem written in Old English by an anonymous author around the year 1000 CE. While most of the poem was discovered intact, some of it had been destroyed, likely burned in a fire. The surviving piece was generally regarded as of more interest to historians and anthropologists than to literary scholars until writer and academic J. R. R. Tolkien argued otherwise in a 1936 paper entitled "Beowulf: The Monsters and the... Read Beowulf Summary

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa presents the US-Mexico border as a space ripe for sociocultural, psychological, and historical deconstruction. Speaking from her own experiences growing up in South Texas, Anzaldúa redefines the boundaries between practice and theory, personal history and cultural critique, poetry and prose. Writing in both Spanish and English (and omitting translations at times), Anzaldúa writes as a Chicana woman, in the Chicano language, envisioning a new consciousness borne out... Read Borderlands La Frontera Summary

Born a Crime is a comedic autobiographical work chronicling Trevor Noah’s childhood growing up in South Africa during and after apartheid. Published in 2016, it became a New York Times bestseller, and it is currently being adapted into a film. Born a Crime doesn’t follow a linear timeline; rather, the narrative jumps in time, offering anecdotes from Noah’s past. Before each chapter begins, there is a prologue that’s related to the content of the upcoming... Read Born a Crime Summary

Written in 2013, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is a nonfiction book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The work examines modern botany and environmentalism through the lens of the traditions and cultures of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Through a series of personal reflections, the author explores the connection between living things and human efforts to cultivate a more sustainable... Read Braiding Sweetgrass Summary

Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a 2020 historical and narrative nonfiction work about the nature of inequality in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany. Wilkerson is a writer and former journalist, best known for her work in the New York Times, for which she received a Pulitzer Prize. She achieved further acclaim with her 2010 work, The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson has also taught journalism at many colleges and... Read Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Summary

Published in 2018, Circe retells the story of the eponymous Greek mythological figure. The novel is also popular among the online BookTok community. Although traditionally viewed as a heartless, savagely beautiful witch who lures sailors to their deaths, the Circe of Madeline Miller’s imagining is quite different. This Circe is a multidimensional, flawed, and empathetic character struggling to find meaning and worth in her immortal life. Through Miller’s detailed and honest first-person narrative, which takes... Read Circe Summary

Steve Bogira’s nonfiction work Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse was published in 2005. Bogira, as a Chicago native and long-time writer for the Chicago Reader, is a social justice advocate and focuses much of his work on poverty and segregation. The work addresses themes of The Injustices of the US Justice System, The Prison-Industrial Complex, and The Influences of Corruption and Politics on Criminal Courts.Content Warning: The source... Read Courtroom 302 Summary

The Inferno is the first book of Dante Alighieri’s great medieval epic, The Divine Comedy: a monument of world literature. Written between 1308 and 1320, the three-part poem charts Dante’s transformative journey through Hell and Purgatory to Heaven itself. The poem’s form—terza rima, an endlessly circling pattern of interweaving triple rhymes—reflects its major theme: the wisdom, power, and love of the trinitarian Christian God. Like every book of the Comedy, Inferno ends with the word... Read Dante's Inferno Summary

Dawn, a 1987 science fiction novel by Octavia Butler, is the first installment in the Xenogenesis (or Lilith’s Brood) trilogy. The story takes place in a near-future, postapocalyptic world. The protagonist, Lilith Iyapo, is one of the few human survivors left after a nuclear war and must help an alien race, the Oankali, repopulate Earth. The novel explores themes of Otherness as a Social Construct, Women of Color in Leadership Roles, and The Human Desire... Read Dawn Summary

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is a work of history and political philosophy published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840. Tocqueville embarked on his own political career in France but is best known for his contributions to history and political philosophy.The first volume is based on Tocqueville’s nearly yearlong sojourn in the United States, ostensibly to study its prisons and prison reform. In his introduction Tocqueville emphasizes that... Read Democracy in America Summary

Disappearing Earth (2019) is a debut novel by Julia Phillips published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, a division of Penguin Random House. This cross-genre novel combines elements of Mystery, Thriller, Women’s Fiction, and Literary Fiction. In 2019, it was a National Book Award finalist for fiction, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. New York Times Book Review named... Read Disappearing Earth Summary

Doubt: A Parable is a 2005 play by John Patrick Shanley that analyzes an instance of doubt and suspicion in a Catholic school in the Bronx in the 1960s. In nine scenes, the play tells the story of principal Sister Aloysius’s suspicions about an inappropriate relationship between a priest, Father Flynn, and a young male student.The play opens with Father Flynn giving a sermon, utilizing a parable about a young sailor whose ship sinks and... Read Doubt: A Parable Summary

Tara Westover’s 2018 memoir, Educated, tells the story of her journey to obtain an education. Westover is the youngest of seven children who grew up in the mountains of southwest Idaho in a radical Mormon family in the late 1980s and 1990s. From an early age, Westover knew that her family was not like other families because hers did not send the children to school, did not visit doctors’ offices or hospitals, and was not... Read Educated Summary

First published in 2010, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History is a work of historical nonfiction by S.C. Gwynne and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. The book narrates a history of the Comanche Nation through the lens of the Parker family, from whom the book’s central figure, Quanah Parker, descends. It explores themes... Read Empire of the Summer Moon Summary

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, written by Matthew Desmond, a tenured sociology professor at Princeton University, was published in 2016 and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2017. In this influential work, Desmond highlights the interconnected issues of extreme poverty and affordable housing in the United States, themes he continues to explore in his more recent book, Poverty, by America. Through an ethnographic study, he follows the experiences of eight... Read Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City Summary