Announcing the 2022-2023 Community Read Book: Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood is a funny, honest collection that details the popular comedian’s coming of age in South Africa as apartheid ended. The son of a black mother and a white father, Noah regularly had to acclimate to a variety of fraught situations, forcing him to think critically about race and the country’s legacy of racism and colonialism. Throughout these experiences, Noah remained anchored by his mother, Patricia, whose aspirations for her son guaranteed that he would be able to rise above his meager beginnings. Ultimately, Noah’s text is a thoughtful account of what it means to forge one’s complex identity in a country that is grappling with its own attempts to come to terms with its legacy of injustice.
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Fitchburg Community Read 2021-2022
The 2021-2022 Community Read is Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder.
“From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon’s CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, these invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming a growing community of nomads.
On frequently traveled routes between seasonal jobs, Jessica Bruder meets people from all walks of life: a former professor, a McDonald’s vice president, a minister, a college administrator, and a motorcycle cop, among many others—including her irrepressible protagonist, a onetime cocktail waitress, Home Depot clerk, and general contractor named Linda May.
In a secondhand vehicle she christens ‘Van Halen,’ Bruder hits the road to get to know her subjects more intimately. Accompanying Linda May and others from campground toilet cleaning to warehouse product scanning to desert reunions, then moving on to the dangerous work of beet harvesting, Bruder tells a compelling, eye-opening tale of the dark underbelly of the American economy—one that foreshadows the precarious future that may await many more of us. At the same time, she celebrates the exceptional resilience and creativity of these quintessential Americans who have given up ordinary rootedness to survive. Like Linda May, who dreams of finding land on which to build her own sustainable ‘Earthship’ home, they have not given up hope.” —Norton
“At once wonderfully humane and deeply troubling, the book offers an eye-opening tour of the increasingly unequal, unstable, and insecure future our country is racing toward.”
Program Archive
Nomadland: A 2022 Community Read Exhibit by Seniors at Fitchburg High
Over the course of the school year, students in Professor Garrett Zecker's classes at Fitchburg High School read Nomadland and completed several projects that explore themes in the book. Their work can be found in the online exhibit Nomadland: A 2022 Community Read Exhibit by Seniors at Fitchburg High. Read the poetry they wrote on diversity, explore their Earthship designs and watch their speeches on Defensive Architecture
Investigate: How Journalists Shed Light on Life and Influence Public Policy— April 5, 2022
Houselessness and the Search for “Home”—March 20, 2022
Click the image above to access the document of resources provided during our 3/10/2022 event at the Leominster Public Library.
The American Dream: Housing (In)Security and Older Adults—February 16, 2022
Click this link to access the video recording of this session.