• About the Summer Reading Program
• 2006 Reading Selection
• Fall semester events
• Editorial Reviews from Amazon.com

About the Freshman Summer Reading Program

Each freshman at SUNY College at Brockport participates in the Summer Reading Program. The purpose of this program is to help orient new students to the Brockport academic community by having a common reading experience with fellow classmates and faculty members. First-year students receive a copy of the book with support materials and additional information about the program in early July.

The summer reading project is a valued experience at SUNY Brockport and continues to be part of our involvement in the American Democracy Project for Civic Engagement, a national, multi-campus initiative that seeks to foster informed civic engagement in the United States. The project seeks to create a greater intellectual understanding and commitment to participate in the civic life of the United States. Students will be asked to react to the book during the Orientation weekend and throughout the semester. They will also take part in discussions, projects and lectures debating noteworthy themes generated by the book.

Fall Semester Events

• Art Exhibit – Drake Memorial Library – Main Floor Display Area
  August 25 – October 31, 2006
• Tuesday, September 12 – Showing of Da Cam 7 PM 100 Edwards
  A Vietnamese American returns to Vietnam to document the tales of those who are believed to have been affected by Agent Orange. The documentary will be hosted by Dr. Kenneth Hermann from the Department of Social Work and Brockport students and/or alumni who have participated in the study abroad program in Vietnam.
• Wednesday, September 20 – Panel of war veterans 7 PM 100 Edwards
  A panel of veterans meet to discuss their experiences during and after the wars.
• Tuesday, September 26 - HEARTS AND MINDS 7 PM 100 Edwards
  1974 documentary about the Vietnam War, hosted by Mark Rice.
• Thursday, October 5 – Lecture by author Tim O’Brien in the Seymour Union Ballroom 7:30 pm – Open to the public
• Monday, October 9 – Discussion on the similarities and differences between the Iraq and Vietnam wars. 7 PM 100 Edwards

The Things We Carried is an exhibition of art, photography and artifacts carried by Vietnam veterans in combat, inspired by the novel, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien.  Things We Carried is an interactive educational exhibit from the National Vietnam Veterans Museum in Chicago for visitors to experience and feel the physical and emotional weight carried by soldiers in Vietnam.

The exhibit is being held in conjunction with SUNY Brockport's First Year students' reading of O’Brien’s The Things We Carried.  It allows visitors the opportunity to view combat gear, artifacts and items carried by soldiers in the field. This exhibit illustrates specific chapters of the book to provide a closer look at experiences as portrayed in the novel. Things We Carried opens August 26, 2006 and runs through October 20, 2006 in Drake Memorial Library Lobby. This event is sponsored as part of SUNY Brockport’s American Democracy Project.

For more information, see: http://www.brockport.edu/adp

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com

"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."

A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

For More Information

For additional questions about the summer reading, please call (585) 395-5346 or e-mail mesler@brockport.edu.