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District List: SDP-2018 Summer Reading List for Grades 11-12
Description: School District of Philadelphia Summer Reading List for Grades 11-12 #sdp
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Outliers
by Malcolm GladwellIn this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?
His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.
Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band. Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.
A New York Times Bestseller
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas AdamsAt last in paperback in one complete volume, here are the five classic novels from Douglas Adams’s beloved Hitchiker series.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Seconds before the Earth is demolished for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised Guide. Together they stick out their thumbs to the stars and begin a wild journey through time and space.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Facing annihilation at the hands of warmongers is a curious time to crave tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his comrades as they hurtle across the galaxy in a desperate search for a place to eat.
Life, the Universe and Everything. The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky– so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals can avert Armageddon: mild-mannered Arthur Dent and his stalwart crew.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. Back on Earth, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription conspires to thrust him back to reality. So to speak.
Mostly Harmless. Just when Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life, all hell breaks loose. Can he save the Earth from total obliteration? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save his daughter from herself?
The Hot Zone
by Richard PrestonThe bestselling landmark account of the first emergence of the Ebola virus. A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.From the Paperback edition.
The Hate U Give
by Angie ThomasSixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.
Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr.
But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.
Winner of the 2018 William C. Morris award
A New York Times Bestseller
Buck
by M. K. AsanteA rebellious boy's journey through the wilds of urban America and the shrapnel of a self-destructing family--this is the riveting story of a generation told through one dazzlingly poetic new voice. MK Asante was born in Zimbabwe to American parents: a mother who led the new nation's dance company and a father who would soon become a revered pioneer in black studies. But things fell apart, and a decade later MK was in America, a teenager lost in a fog of drugs, sex, and violence on the streets of North Philadelphia. Now he was alone--his mother in a mental hospital, his father gone, his older brother locked up in a prison on the other side of the country--and forced to find his own way to survive physically, mentally, and spiritually, by any means necessary. Buck is a powerful memoir of how a precocious kid educated himself through the most unconventional teachers--outlaws and eccentrics, rappers and mystic strangers, ghetto philosophers and strippers, and, eventually, an alternative school that transformed his life with a single blank sheet of paper. It's a one-of-a-kind story about finding your purpose in life, and an inspiring tribute to the power of education, art, and love to heal and redeem us.Praise for Buck "Frequently brilliant and always engaging . . . It takes great skill to render the wide variety of characters, male and female, young and old, that populate a memoir like Buck. Asante [is] at his best when he sets out into the city of Philadelphia itself. In fact, that city is the true star of this book. Philly's skateboarders, its street-corner philosophers and its tattoo artists are all brought vividly to life here. . . . Asante's memoir will find an eager readership, especially among young people searching in books for the kind of understanding and meaning that eludes them in their real-life relationships. . . . A powerful and captivating book."--Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times"A story of surviving and thriving with passion, compassion, wit, and style."--Maya Angelou "The book's strength lies in Asante's vibrant, specific observations, and, at times, the percussive prose that captures them. The author's fluid, filmic images of black urban life feel unique and disturbing."--Kirkus Reviews "Asante's noir chronicle is imaginative, powerful, and electric, written with passion and conviction."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "This is an inspiring story about perseverance and finding purpose that is sure to appeal to readers interested in hip-hop, black studies, and American pop culture in general."--Booklist (starred review)"Buck takes the daily words of the American streets and forges something low and lovely. Angry, profane, and beautiful, it honors the best of hip-hop's literary canon by producing a work worthy of inclusion."--Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of The Beautiful Struggle "Buck sings a song that will force all of America to face what it has become and remember what it could be."--Eddie Huang, author of Fresh off the BoatFrom the Hardcover edition.
The hot zone
by Richard PrestonPreston chronicles human encounters with the Marburg and Ebola viruses, among the most lethal viruses known. He discusses the effects of the viruses on people infected with them, and suggests that they have emerged as the world's jungles and rain forests have been destroyed. He also describes outbreaks of the viruses, particularly an outbreak of a strain of Ebola among monkeys imported to the United States, and how the outbreak was contained. Strong language and explicit descriptions of violence. 1994.
Freakonomics
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. DubnerIn Freakonomics (written with Stephen J. Dubner), Levitt argues that many apparent mysteries of everyday life don't need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections. Economics can explain a lot of real world every day situations.
Dante's Divine Comedy
by Seymour ChwastThe "left-handed designer," Seymour Chwast has been putting his unparalleled take-and influence-on the world of illustration and design for the last half century. In his version of Dante's Divine Comedy, Chwast's first graphic novel, Dante and his guide Virgil don fedoras and wander through noir-ish realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, finding both the wicked and the wondrous on their way. Dante Alighieri wrote his epic poem The Divine Comedy from 1308 to 1321 while in exile from his native Florence. In the work's three parts (Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise), Dante chronicles his travels throughthe afterlife, cataloging a multitude of sinners and saints-many of them real people to whom Dante tellingly assigned either horrible punishment or indescribable pleasure-and eventually meeting both God and Lucifer face-to-face. In his adaptation of this skewering satire, Chwast creates a visual fantasia that fascinates on every page: From the multifarious torments of the Inferno to the host of delights in Paradise, his inventive illustrations capture the delirious complexity of this classic of the Western canon.
The Things They Carried
by Tim O'BrienA classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere--from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing--it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The Stranger
by Albert CamusThrough the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."