Community Book Program

Welcome to your Community Book Program!

Each year, our committee of 20 or so faculty, staff, and students reads and discusses a variety of books, looking for one that's well-written and readable. At the same time, we want a book that will raise issues of importance in a variety of Champlainers' lives.

Once we've chosen a book we believe can be enjoyed both for itself and for its relation to a range of courses, we invite the author to campus to speak to us, read from the book, and add a personal dimension to our community reading experience.

Amy and David Goodman -- in person!
Sept. 25, 4-6 p.m., Alumni Auditorium

The Community Book Program (CBP) is alive and well! This year's title: Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times by Amy and David Goodman.

Thanks to a new partnership with the Burlington Book Festival and to the support of CCM Dean Jeff Rutenbeck and Core Dean Betsy Beaulieu, the CBP will host guest authors Amy and David Goodman for a presentation/book signing from 4 p.m.-6 p.m. on Friday, September 25, in our Alumni Auditorium. The event is free and open to members of the Champlain College community.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times profiles dozens of everyday Americans whose courageous acts have inspired movements for freedom, democracy, and social justice. With an emphasis on individuals who rebelled against various Bush administration edicts and policies, the book highlights such ordinary heroes as the following: high school students who defied administrators and staged a hard-hitting play about the horrors of the Iraq War, soldiers who took a bold stance against the war while still serving in the field, a community organizer who fought to save public housing in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, a NASA scientist who defied government censors in spreading the truth about global climate change, a psychologist who broke with colleagues to call torture by its name in U.S. military detention centers, and many others. The book also revisits historic acts of rebellion that, in retrospect, have proved influential in the course of world history: Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the GI anti-war movement during the Vietnam War era; the Soweto, South Africa, student uprising to end apartheid. The book concludes with a how-to on standing up to the madness and keeping democracy alive.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Amy Goodman is an internationally acclaimed journalist, syndicated columnist, and host of the daily grassroots global news hour Democracy Now!, which airs on nearly 800 radio and TV stations around the world and on www.democracynow.org. Democracy Now! Is the largest media collaboration is North American public broadcasting. Any has won many of the most prestigious awards in journalism, including the George Polk Award, the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting. She received the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, known as the "alternative Nobel Prize."

David Goodman is an award-winning independent journalist, the author of seven books, and a contributing writer to Mother Jones. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Outside, The Nation, and numerous other publications. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Fault Lines: Journeys into the New South Africa. He lives with his wife and two children in Vermont.