What is "One Book, One Campus?"

The goal of this program is to get everyone on the UMF campus to read A Lesson Before Dying, the bestselling novel by Ernest J. Gaines.  

Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940's, A Lesson Before Dying is the moving and inspiring story about the friendship of two black men - one wrongly condemned to die and one who reluctantly forces him to search for pride and dignity. Jefferson is an innocent party to a robbery in which three men are killed and is sentenced to die in the electric chair. Grant Wiggins has reluctantly returned to the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and Jefferson's godmother persuade him to visit Jefferson in his cell. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they seek answers to age old-questions of respect, dignity, and cultural identity.
 
"A Lesson Before Dying is about the ways in which people insist on declaring the value of their lives in a time and place in which those lives count for nothing. It is about the ways in which the imprisoned may find freedom even in the moment of their death. As such, Gaines's novel transcends its minutely evoked circumstances to address the basic predicament of what it is to be a human being, a creature striving for dignity in a universe that often denies it."   -- Random House.

By having everyone reading the same book at the same time, we hope to get the campus excited about reading and talking to one another - to bring our diverse campus together with a shared common reading experience.  We want to provide our campus community with the opportunity to interact with one another while increasing our awareness of and appreciation for people whose backgrounds and traditions may not be the same as ours.

The Mantor Library's PRISM committee is very excited about the opportunity to offer this program to the UMF and local community.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Mantor Library -- 116 South Street Farmington, Maine, 04938
Phone: (207) 778-7210   FAX: (207) 778-7223   TDD: (207) 778-7000
E-mail contact: web-mantor@umf.maine edu

Last updated December 20, 2004