Summer Reads 2022

Need something new on your nightstand? Looking for a summer escape? Or need your next book club selection? We've got you covered. It's all the pleasures of a reading list, without the book report.

We asked some of Duke's most admired faculty members to contribute to our popular Lifelong Learning summer reading list. Each book includes five questions to consider while reading, direct purchase links, and an introduction video from the author.

Miss American Pie

Nonfiction Memoir

5 Questions to Consider While Reading

  1. Proust had his madeleines; Margaret has her diaries; most of us have snapshots and videos - how is it that we recall our childhoods and is there such a thing as a "true story" of our early lives?
  2. Some aspects of Margaret's family and social life are specific to the 1970s. Are there issues that still resonate for teenagers today?
  3. Margaret's keen watchfulness translated into keeping diaries from an early are. Is Margaret a typical adolescent in this regard or is she unusual? Is there such a thing as an autobiographical impulse that we all share?
  4. Margaret idolizes her cousin Angela and notes "it's scary how much I love her." Yet Margaret and Angela become astranged as adults. Are there relationships in your own life that resemble this one?
  5. Margaret's world is populated by a number of vivid characters - from her irrespressible mother and practical father to her trusted friend Tommy and her nemesis at school, the cheerleader Bonnie Dell. How does Margaret's world compare to your own as a teenager?

Biography

Margaret Sartor's eight books include: Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum 1897–1922 (2019), William Gedney: Only the Lonely, 1955-1984 (2017), What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney (1999), and the New York Times best-selling memoir Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing up in the 1970s (2006). Sartor’s photographs have been exhibited widely and appeared in numerous publications, including: In Their Mother’s Eyes: Women Photographers and Their Children (2001), A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South (1996), Aperture, DoubleTake, Esquire, and The New Yorker. Her work is in permanent collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Ogden Museum of Art, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. She lives with her husband, Duke Professor Emeritus Alex Harris, in Durham, NC.

The Beauty of Dusk

Nonfiction Memoir

5 Questions to Consider While Reading

  1. Frank, facing an untreatable eye disorder, decided to enroll in a painful clinical trial of an unproven drug. Would you have?
  2. What misimpressions did you have, before reading "The Beauty of Dusk," about blind people?
  3. Are you more trusting of, and deferential toward, doctors than you should be?
  4. What main contribution do you think Regan, Frank's dog, made to his perserverance?
  5. If you were told you might go blind, which aspects of Frank's reaction to that news would you want to emulate and which not?

Biography

Frank Bruni has been a prominent journalist for more than three decades, including more than twenty-five years at The New York Times, the last ten of them as a nationally renowned op-ed columnist who appeared frequently as a television commentator. He was also a White House correspondent for the Times, its Rome bureau chief, and, for five years, its chief restaurant critic. He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers. In July 2021, he became a full professor at Duke University, teaching media-oriented classes in the school of public policy. He continues to write his popular weekly newsletter for the Times and to produce occasional essays as one of the newspaper’s official Contributing Opinion Writers

The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson

Nonfiction Memoir

5 Questions to Consider While Reading

  1. What does it mean to be a godparent?
  2. What is a virtue?
  3. What is the relation between friendship and the virtue?
  4. What politics informs these letters?

Biography

Stanley Hauerwas has sought to recover the significance of the virtues for understanding the nature of the Christian life. This search has led him to emphasize the importance of the church, as well as narrative for understanding Christian existence. His work cuts across disciplinary lines as he is in conversation with systematic theology, philosophical theology and ethics, political theory, as well as the philosophy of social science and medical ethics. He was named "America’s Best Theologian" by Time magazine in 2001. Dr. Hauerwas, who holds a joint appointment in Duke Law School, delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectureship at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland in 2001.