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One Book – One Lincoln – 2011 – Finalists

One Book - One Lincoln One Book – One Lincoln
Here are the three finalists for 2011!
Winning title to be announced September 6th!

 

Would you like to be kept up-to-date on One Book – One Lincoln news, and receive reminders about upcoming One Book – One Lincoln programming events? Would your book group or organization like a library staff member to facilitate a One Book – One Lincoln discussion?

If your answer to either of these questions is “yes,” then please visit our sign-up form, and check off the appropriate boxes. Or, you may call the Lincoln City Libraries’ One Book – One Lincoln staff contact at 441-8529.

You can also add the One Book – One Lincoln blog to your RSS feeds to receive updates about One Book events, and to participate in online discussions about the One Book title(s) and special programming events.




Discussion Opportunities and Promotional Spots

Preview discussions are being held at various Lincoln locations during June and July, featuring members of the One Book – One Lincoln Selection Committee. Committee members and a Lincoln City Libraries staff member will be on hand to talk about their experience serving on the committee, and about the three finalists. Ballots will be available so that attendees can submit their vote for the 2011 One Book – One Lincoln selection. Dates and locations will be listed below:

  • The University Bookstore – Lower Level Nebraska Union, 14th and “R” St., Tuesday, June 28, 12:30 p.m.
  • A Novel Idea Bookstore – 118 N. 14th St., Thursday, July 7, 7:00 p.m.
  • Barnes & Noble Booksellers – 50th and “O” St., Friday, July 15, 7:00 p.m.
  • Barnes & Noble Booksellers – Southpointe Pavilions Shopping Center, Sunday, July 24, 2:00 p.m.

The One Book finalists were discussed by library staff on the following radio stations and dates:

  • 1240 AM – KFOR Problems and Solutions – “Book Chat” episode, Thursday, June 16, 9:00 a.m.

Library staff will also be at the market booths at the following outdoor Lincoln events, answering questions about One Book – One Lincoln, the Summer Reading Programs and other library topics:

    • Jazz in June, Tuesday, June 7, 5:00 – 8:45 p.m.
    • Jazz in June, Tuesday, June 28, 5:00 – 8:45 p.m.


Earlier this year, we accepted your nominations for our tenth annual One Book – One Lincoln title, via drop boxes at all the libraries and here on this Web site. All of your suggestions were forwarded to a special One Book – One Lincoln committee, comprised of representatives throughout the community, which evaluated all the 125 nominated titles to choose the group of three finalists below — two fiction, one non-fiction. This group of finalists was announced at a live event at The Mill in the Haymarket on May 30th, as well as on the library web site. This year, you can attend preview discussions of the three finalists and vote (through July 31st, both online and at the libraries) for which book you’d like to see as this year’s selected One Book – One Lincoln title. In the meantime, the libraries have ordered additional copies of all of these titles, and we encourage you to read any or all of the three finalists and watch the Lincoln Journal Star, Facebook and this web site for further developments on One Book – One Lincoln – 2011.

And the three finalists for 2011 are…

Zeitoun
by Dave Eggers [Biography Zeitoun]

The true story of one family, caught between America’s two biggest policy disasters: the war on terror and the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun run a house-painting business in New Orleans. In August of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approaches, Kathy evacuates with their four young children, leaving Zeitoun to watch over the business. In the days following the storm he travels the city by canoe, feeding abandoned animals and helping elderly neighbors. Then, on September 6th, police officers armed with M-16s arrest Zeitoun in his home. Told with eloquence and compassion, Zeitoun is a riveting account of one family’s unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water.

A New York Times Notable Book • An O, The Oprah Magazine Terrific Read of the Year • A Huffington Post Best Book of the Year
 • A New Yorker Favorite Book of the Year • A Chicago Tribune Favorite Nonfiction Book of the Year • A Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year • A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year • An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Decade

[Zeitoun is available in the following formats: Book, Book Club in a Bag, Book-on-CD and Downloadable E-book.]



The History of Love
by Nicole Krauss

A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother’s loneliness.

Leo Gursky is just about surviving, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he’s still alive. But life wasn’t always like this: sixty years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. And though Leo doesn’t know it, that book survived, inspiring fabulous circumstances, even love. Fourteen-year-old Alma was named after a character in that very book. And although she has her hands full — keeping track of her brother, Bird (who thinks he might be the Messiah), and taking copious notes on How to Survive in the Wild — she undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With consummate, spellbinding skill, Nicole Krauss gradually draws together their stories.

This extraordinary book was inspired by the author’s four grandparents and by a pantheon of authors whose work is haunted by loss — Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, and more. It is truly a history of love: a tale brimming with laughter, irony, passion, and soaring imaginative power.

[The History of Love is available in the following formats: Book, Book Club in a Bag and Book-on-CD.]



Cutting for Stone
by Abraham Verghese

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.

Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.

[Cutting for Stone is available in the following formats: Book, Downloadable E-book and Book-on-CD.]



Because you asked…

The master list of suggested titles was whittled down to 9 before the final three (above) were selected. Because readers have been curious, here are the other six titles that made the top nine (in alphabetical order by author):

Little Bee cover image Little Bee
by Chris Cleave

A haunting novel about the tenuous friendship that blooms between two disparate strangers–one an illegal Nigerian refugee, the other a recent widow from suburban London.


Still Alice cover Still Alice
by Lisa Genova

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer’s disease.


Mudbound cover image Mudbound
by Hillary Jordan

In Jordan’s prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband’s Mississippi Delta farm—a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family’s struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura’s brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not—charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion.


The Angels' Game cover image The Angels’ Game
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

In this powerful, labyrinthian thriller, David Martín is a pulp fiction writer struggling to stay afloat. Holed up in a haunting abandoned mansion in the heart of Barcelona, he furiously taps out story after story, becoming increasingly desperate and frustrated. Thus, when he is approached by a mysterious publisher offering a book deal that seems almost too good to be real, David leaps at the chance. But as he begins the work, and after a visit to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, he realizes that there is a connection between his book and the shadows that surround his dilapidated home and that the publisher may be hiding a few troubling secrets of his own.


The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks cover image The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot [Biography Lacks]

Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of tobacco farmer Henrietta Lacks’ cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia — a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo — to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.


Oliver Kitteridge cover image Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout

At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her. At the edge of the continent, Crosby, Maine, may seem like nowhere, but seen through this brilliant writer’s eyes, it’s in essence the whole world, and the lives that are lived there are filled with all of the grand human drama–desire, despair, jealousy, hope, and love.


Which do you want as this year’s selection? [ Voting has now closed!! ]


For the second time in the history of the One Book – One Lincoln community reading project, readers were invited to help pick this year’s selected title. Votes were taken from June 1st through July 31st, 2011, and the winning title will be announced in early September, along with a slate of special events/activities and opportunities for readers to gather and discuss the selected title.


Book Club in a Bag!

Book Clubs and organizations now have the ability to check out several popular titles, including the five 2010 One Book finalists below, in a book club format. For each title, the Book Club in a Bag will contain 10 copies of that book as well as some starter discussion questions. Book Club in a Bag selections will be able to be checked out for 8 weeks but with no renewals. You can find out what additional titles are available in the Book Club in a Bag program by searching in the library catalog under Subject: Book Club in a Bag. New titles will be added to this service on a regular basis.



Interested in past years’ One Book – One Lincoln selections?

Visit our main One Book – One Lincoln archive site
See a master list of all the nominees for One Book – One Lincoln from 2002 to 2020 (in .pdf format)

A list of what other communities are reading for similar programs can be found on the One Book Reading Promotion Projects page on the Library of Congress Center for the Book Web site.


One Book – One Lincoln is a community reading program sponsored by Lincoln City Libraries. The program encourages all adults in Lincoln and Lancaster County to read and discuss the same book at the same time. The goal of the program is to encourage reading and dialogue by creating a community wide reading and discussion experience.

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