History of the Program

With our 2008 book, The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle, Champlain College's Community Book Program will mark its tenth anniversary. The program began with an idea and generous support from friends of the college and, in particular, Dr. John W. Heisse.

For six years, we were sponsored by a significant grant from the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, which seeks to encourage a liberal arts perspective among students in diverse settings. We now receive generous support from various academic and student life areas of the college. From the beginning, the Community Book Program has provided Champlain students, faculty, and staff with an opportunity for person to person contact with writers of national and international stature.

Most recently, in 2007, we welcomed Dave Eggers to our campus to discuss his novel What Is The What, a story that chronicled the long, horrific trek of the Sudanese "lost boys" from Sudan, through Ethiopia and Kenya, and finally to the United States. The story is a true testament to the human power of survival and hope. [visit Champlain's 2007 CBP site]

In 2006, Julie Otsuka described her own family's experiences during World War II, which were the basis for her novel When the Emperor Was Divine.

In 2005, Khaled Hosseini mesmerized 1000 people, over two evenings, by sharing his life story as it related to his bestselling novel The Kite Runner.

The choice for 2004 was Eric Schlosser's widely acclaimed Fast Food Nation, an investigative writing that helped us better understand the far reaching impacts of fast food on our nation.

Our 2003 author, Helen Fremont, shared her family's experience with the Holocaust. Blending family stories (and secrets) with personal research and a writer's imagination, Fremont recreated a time in world history, and in her family's, that engaged both minds and hearts.

For our 2002 book, we took a trip back in time. E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime provided transportation back to the America of the year 1906. Here, within a story of injustice and rapid social and technological change, we discovered the beginnings of forces we still feel working among us today.

Tim O'Brien charmed Champlain audiences in 2001 with his casual attire and carefully thought out answers to our questions. He amazed us by knowing his Vietnam era novel The Things They Carried so well that he only occasionally glanced at his book as he "read."

In 2000, we read A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines, the story of the wrongful execution of a young black man in Louisiana who spends the last days before his death learning to read and write. This moving story is told from the point of view of the teacher who, in spite of himself, manages to break through the young man's despair to give him a feeling of dignity in the face of injustice and death.

We began in 1999 with an overflowing audience in Alumni Auditorium listening to author Julia Alvarez talking about her life and the research that resulted in her best-selling novel In the Time of the Butterflies. She brought her talk, "Chasing the Butterflies," alive with slides of the Dominican Republic and of the Mirabal sisters, real life heroines in the struggle against the Trujillo dictatorship.