1.24.2008

Reading across R. I. Kite Runner

From Reading across Rhode Island, 2005 Really good resources in this list, lots of interviews.

1.21.2008

articles about book-choosing process & results

NYTimes August 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/education/08books.html?_r=1&_r1&oref=logiin&pagewant&oref=slogin
“Summer reading programs straddle the book-club phenomenon, in which people enjoy talking about books, not critically, and academic reading, which students approach very differently,” said Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus. “I think summer books used to be more for self-understanding and individual growth, and lately they’ve shifted more into global understanding.”

The Kite Runner is one of three mentioned as popular choices (The Things They Carried, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) along with...
This year’s hands-down winner seems to be Tracy Kidder’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World,” an account of a single-minded doctor’s fight against multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in Haiti, Peru, Cuba and Russia.

Duke's process, 2007
http://library.duke.edu/magazine/2007/04/duke-summer-reading-mission-impossible/

Universities using Kite Runner as their freshman read

About the Kite Runner and discussion questions: http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/kite_runner.html

California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo – 2005
http://www.preface.calpoly.edu/2005/index.html

Michigan State University “One Book, One Community” – 2005
http://www.onebook.msu.edu/OneBookOneCommunity-MichiganStateUniversity.html

The following using the Kite Runner from this web page: http://homepages.gac.edu/~fister/onebook.html

College of the Redwoods -(2007)
Creighton University - The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini; My Freshman Year by Rebekah Nathan; Surely You're Joking by Richard Feynman; Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (2007); instructors choose one of the four for their section of a first term seminar

Niagara University(2007)

University of North Carolina, Wilmington -
The Kite Runner (2007) .pdf on how to use it in the classroom

UNC Wilmington events fall 2007

1.18.2008

Kite Runner film outlawed in Afghanistan

Hmmm...only in pirated copies can Afghans see this film. From the NYTimes today:

"There has long been concern about angry reaction in Afghanistan to the screen adaptation of the novel, particularly a pivotal scene in which a boy is raped. In late November, Paramount Pictures, the film studio that released “The Kite Runner,” spirited the film’s four young actors out of Kabul to the United Arab Emirates for their own safety.

Mr. Ahmadi said the novel, by the Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, had not been banned. The novel is written in English, which most Afghans cannot read."

the Kite Runner

We read this in our book group a couple years ago. Now we're considering it as a summer read for our peer educators at Rollins College. Since I read it, the movie has come out... so there's even more buzz than there used to be. I'm going to collect resources about this book and the movie and the author here.

Here's the beginning of a NYT review of the book from 2003. It hints at the breadth of issues emanating from the compelling story.

The Servant, by Edward Hower (professor at Ithaca College, former Fulbright lecturer in India)

"THIS powerful first novel, by an Afghan physician now living in California, tells a story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love. Both transform the life of Amir, Khaled Hosseini's privileged young narrator, who comes of age during the last peaceful days of the monarchy, just before his country's revolution and its invasion by Russian forces.

But political events, even as dramatic as the ones that are presented in ''The Kite Runner,'' are only a part of this story. A more personal plot, arising from Amir's close friendship with Hassan, the son of his father's servant, turns out to be the thread that ties the book together. The fragility of this relationship, symbolized by the kites the boys fly together, is tested as they watch their old way of life disappear."