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Global Summer Reading
World View Staff Picks for 2014 

Each summer the staff of World View recommends favorite books that were read in the past year. These compelling books either highlight the story of a character living or born outside of the United States, or focus on a global issue or region of the world. We hope you enjoy your summer and consider borrowing, purchasing, or downloading one (or all!) of these books the next time you head to a bookstore or an online bookseller.
  

 

 

  

Alexandria recommends...
The Interpreter

by Suki Kim

Picador Press, 2004

 

In The Interpreter, Suki Kim blends intrigue and heartache in a murder mystery underscored by cultural disparity. Kim's protagonist, Suzy Park, is a young Korean American who works as an interpreter for the New York City court system. Her detached lifestyle keeps her closed off from those around her, and disunity reigns in her family after the brutal murder of her parents and subsequent feud with her sister. When a clue about her parents' murder jars her out of ambivalence, Suzy must confront the painful ghosts of her past as she attempts to uncover the truth. At times both thrilling and heart wrenching, Kim takes readers on a winding journey through the Korean American experience and ultimately offers more questions than answers as she pieces together the mosaic portrait of an immigrant family.

Charl� recommends

 
Long Walk to Freedom
 
by Nelson Mandela
Little, Brown and Company, 1994
 

Long Walk to Freedom is a page turning autobiography of Nelson Mandela. In this book Mandela chronicles his life story, engaging his readers in his humble upbringing and commitment to making peaceful change in his home country of South Africa. As one can imagine, it is inspiring and at times overwhelming to read his personal life story and see the world of the ever- changing South Africa through his eyes. As a great world leader who triumphed through personal struggle under a regime of   apartheid and imprisonment, Mandela served others as a great moral role model. In his own words he faces and confronts insurmountable odds and stares down adversity. The autobiography, although lengthy, is a narrative that is so very compelling it is hard to put down. This book could serve educators in many ways and excerpts highlighted in class could easily translate into lessons of resilience, perseverance, integrity and commitment to social justice. A must read!  


Julie recommends...

Americanah

 

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Knopf, 2013

 

Award winning author and MacArthur genius Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently released her latest novel. Americanah is the story of the young Ifemelu and her journey from Nigeria to America in search of a new life. She leaves her home and her first love, Obinze. Life in America is not what she expected as the smart and self-assured Ifemelu realizes what it means to be black for the first time.  At the same time, the love of her life is not able to join her in post 9/11 America and he ends up living an ocean apart in London.  Fast forward fifteen years and Ifemelu and Obinze are together again in Nigeria and the story unfolds as they start a new life together again.

 

Through the pages we learn of both Ifemelu and Obinze's struggles with race, identity, money, politics, hair, blogs, and more in America, England, and Nigeria. However, Adichie goes much further and deeper.  According to Mike Peed's New York Times review "Americanah is witheringly trenchant and hugely empathetic, both worldly and geographically precise, a novel that holds the discomfiting realities of our times fearlessly before us. It never feels false."  Through this beautifully written novel, educators will read an account of life in Nigeria under military rule, the challenges and opportunities of immigration, and more about Nigeria as a democratic nation.  The book is one The New York Time's Ten Best Books of the Year and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. 

Juliet recommends...
Love in the Time of Cholera 

 

by Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez
Alfred A. Knopf, 1988
 
In honor of the late Nobel prize-winning author who passed away in April, Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez's, Love in the Time of Cholera, is an essential read for anyone who believes that first loves remain with you always.
 
Florentino Ariza meets Fermina Daza as a young man in the late 1800s.  He is a romantic, and falls hopelessly and passionately in love. Fermina's affection warms and grows and the two share a bond in the innocence of their youth.  When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated.  Fermina and Florentino live very separate and different lives, but while he creates a successful business career and collects hundreds of lovers, he reserves his heart for Fermina.  Florentino waits patiently, never losing touch of beautiful Fermina.  When her husband passes away, he is finally able to declare - fifty years, nine months, and four days later - that his love for her never wavered.
 
Garc�a M�rquez was born in Columbia.  Although the exact setting is never named, it is believed that the story is set in a port town near the Caribbean Sea and the Magdalena River, where Garc�a M�rquez spent his youth.  His imagination is vivid and the brilliancy of the people and places is felt on every page.  Known equally for his opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garc�a M�rquez takes the reader on a powerful voyage.  Take a book vacation with him this summer to experience the beauty of this culture and this love story.
Justin recommends...

Open City

 

by Teju Cole

Random House, 2011

   

If you require tight plot with uncomplicated characters and scenes, moments of clarity and met expectations, Teju Cole's debut novel Open City is not for you. However, if you are drawn to a finely tuned novel that reads like a journal, a seemingly stream of consciousness creatively displayed and fantastically written, I recommend this book. The reader follows the novel's main character, Julius, a psychiatry student living in Manhattan, "the strangest of islands," through wandering encounters and reflections as he strolls through the multicultural and complicated landscape. Such a plot, if one might call it such, sounds a bit mundane. But,  "the central conflict of the book, Cole explains, is what happens to a mind that takes things in - and one that's sensitive to what's going on around it" (NPR, 2011). In the multicultural metropolis, Julius listens to and observes what might first appear to be uninteresting snapshots of people's lives and his own, while revealing the environment around him. But, in the context of Cole's novel, they are integrated into a larger spatial story about immigrant experience, culture, identity, racism, and the politics of everyday life.  By the end, the reader may find themselves profoundly confronting the implicit question, "how would you respond/encounter these stories, these experiences of trauma and raw life, this 'open city' and the lives that wander it?"
Katharine recommends...
The Zookeeper's Wife

 

by Diane Ackerman

W.W. Norton & Company, 2007

 

The Zookeeper's Wife reads like a novel, but it is actually a historical non-fiction account of World War II. The story is based on the lives of Polish zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski, whose zoo was bombed during the war. After the bombing, they managed to save over three hundred Jews from the Nazis by hiding people in empty animal cages. Interestingly, the Zabinski's role as zookeepers helped them act as unlikely heroes. Apparently, the Nazis fixated on rare and beautiful animals, seeking to increase their existence in Germany the same way they sought to exterminate people who they did not deem to be worthy of life. The Nazi's obsessive desire to control life and death gave the zookeepers a certain status and level of autonomy.

  

Educators who are interested in World War II will benefit from reading this perspective on the war. Author Diane Ackerman uses a previously unpublished diary as the basis for the detailed and heroic account. The ways in which she combines historical evidence with imagined events and detailed imagery is unique and thoughtful.

Neil recommends...
One Illness Away:
 

Why People Become Poor and How They Escape Poverty

 

by Anirudh Krishna

Oxford University Press, 2010

   

This remarkable book is the first large-scale study of why people fall into poverty and how they escape it, looking at 35,000 households across five countries and four continents.

 

Dr. Krishna challenges many long-held beliefs about poverty.  One of the most important is that, as he writes, "poverty is not an undifferentiated mass living beneath some theoretical or statistical line." Large numbers of people escape poverty, but at the same time large numbers fall into poverty.  A 25-year study in the state of Andhra Pradesh showed 14 percent of households escaping poverty while another 12 percent became poor.  Overall, there was a 2 percent reduction in the poverty rate, but 26 percent of households had seen their status change.  This discovery has important policy implications. As a professor of public policy and political science at Duke University, he has also studied poverty dynamics in North Carolina and found remarkable similarities with the developing world.

 

He also illustrates the major role played by illness in creating poverty, with costly medical bills starting "chains of negative events" that lead into economic hardship.

 

Along with outstanding analysis and policy recommendations, this book is a moving journey through the life stories of people who fell into abject poverty and others who managed to escape this simple twist of fate.

Ragan recommends...
Novel Without a Name
 

by Duong Thu Huong
William Morrow, 1995

  

Novel Without a Name, by Duong Thu Huong, comes from one of Vietnam's most prolific dissidents and author of the first book from Vietnam published in the United States, Paradise of the Blind. It is a war story very similar to American novels about the war in Vietnam, conveying the sense of desperation and defeat that the narrator, 28-year-old Quan, suffers as a result of spending the last decade of his life in the North Vietnamese Army.
 

 

The novel is particularly poignant because the reader hears first-hand about the profound loss that Quan has experienced in his short life.  Forced into the army by his father, he was once a young man with idealist views who looks back over his brief existence and mourns. Interspersed with grim depictions of battle are more personal and  visceral narratives about the joy of his childhood, followed by the death of his father and brother, the loss of a life with his true love, the loss of friends, and of limbs, and most importantly the loss of his innocence.

 

Quan acknowledges his own naivet� and a realization of the government's propaganda that destroyed so many families and maimed a beautiful county. Novel Without a Name is replete with insight and hindsight.  Quan poetically summarizes his experience, and perhaps the experience of any who have suffered through war, by saying, "We never forget anything, never lose anything, never exchange anything, never undo what has been. There is no way back to the source, to the place where the pure, clear water once gushed forth. The river had cut across the countryside, the towns, dragging refuse and mud in its wake."  
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symposia
 World View's 2014 Fall Symposiums

K-12 SYMPOSIUM
Global Education:
Moving North Carolina Forward
October 22-23
   

COMMUNITY COLLEGE SYMPOSIUM
The Global Economy
November 12-13
 
  
Location:
The Friday Center for Continuing Education, Chapel Hill, NC
  
Cost: (NC Educators): $175 per person per seminar or $325 for both seminars. A team of four is $600 (save $100) per seminar.
 
1.5 CEUs will be offered. For more information, please visit our website.
 


buncombe
World View's
Partners' Program
 
"Transforming Learning Environments: A One Day Program on Global and STEM Education"
 
 
Co-sponsored by 
Buncombe County Schools
 
August 13, 2014
A.C. Reynolds Middle School
Asheville, NC
  
Featured Speaker Jennifer Ho
Associate Professor
English & Comparative Literature
UNC at Chapel Hill

Concurrent sessions will include reaching English language learners, multicultural literature, international arts in the classroom, and student service-learning.

Limited space is available for non-Buncombe County partners. For more information or to register, please


online
World View's 2014
Fall Online Course
 
Global Education and 21st Century Skills
 
October 9 - November 20
  

This course immerses educators from all disciplines in an exploration of global topics such as the economy, the environment, diverse populations, and the U.S.'s place in the world. Participants will discuss the importance of cultivating 21st century skills as they relate to K-12 education. Educators will gain hands-on experience with web-based resources for teaching about global issues in the classroom.

 

Four CEU credits are offered for successful completion of the course.

   

For more information, please visit our website.

 



globaled
Free online Global Education Courses for Teachers

 Two free, online companion global competency courses will be offered in August and September through LEARN NC. Educators will reflect on and develop global competencies using The Globally Competent Teaching Continuum, an interactive online tool for professional growth and resource repository. This course is open and relevant to K-12 educators, administrators, and support staff who teach all subject areas. One is not required to take both courses, but it is highly encouraged.      

 

Course 1: Preparing to Teach for Global Competence 

 

July 30 - August 26, 2014

This course focuses on the depositions and knowledge that characterize globally competent teachers.   

For more information or to enroll in the course, please contact  


 

Course 2: Globally Competent Teaching in Action

 

September 3 - 30, 2014

The course will assist teachers in enhancing their skills in enhancing students' global competence.

  

For more information or to enroll in the course, please contact 

Hillary Parkhouse.



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summerfesNC Summer Festivals


 

Eastern Music Festival 

Greensboro

June 23-July 26, 2014  

 

MacRae Meadows (Linville)

Grandfather Mountain

July 10-13, 2014
 

Folkmoot USA

Western North Carolina

(various sites)

July 18-27, 2014 

 

Waldensian Festival 

Valdese, NC, 

August 8-9, 2014
 

 

Roanoke Island American Indian Cultural Festival and Pow Wow

Manteo, NC

August 9-10, 2014

   

Goombay!

Downtown Asheville

August 12-14, 2014 

 

The 29th International Festival of Raleigh 

Raleigh Convention Center

September 19-21, 2014

 

International Folk Festival 

Fayetteville, NC

September 26-28, 2014