Required Reading: choose one of the books below.

Devil in the White City Erik Larsen
Larson tells the story of the 1893 World’s Fair and its architect, Daniel H. Burnham, paired with H.H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a charming doctor. In a short period of time, Burnham had to overcome the death of his partner and numerous other obstacles to construct the famous "White City" around which the fair was built. The activities of the sinister Dr. Holmes, who is believed to be responsible for scores of murders around the time of the fair, are equally remarkable. / Stiff Mary Roach
Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery, cadavers have been making history in their quiet way.
King of the World David Remnick
On the night in 1964 that Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) stepped into the ring with Sonny Liston, he was widely regarded as an irritating freak who danced and talked way too much. Six rounds later Ali was not only the new world heavyweight boxing champion: He was "a new kind of black man" who would shortly transform America's racial politics, its popular culture, and its notions of heroism. / Unbroken Laura Hillebrand
On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.
Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert
Patricia Cornwell
Cornwell combines the rigorous discipline of twenty-first century police investigation with forensic techniques undreamed of during the late Victorian era to solve one of the most infamous and difficult serial murder cases in history. Cornwell reveals that Jack the Ripper was actually a respected painter of his day, an artist now collected by some of the world’s finest museums: Walter Richard Sickert. / Outliers Malcolm Gladwell Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lax
Rebecca Skloot
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings / The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story
Diane Ackerman
Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Polish Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who managed to save over three hundred people. Yet their story has fallen between the seams of history. Drawing on Antonina's diary and other historical sources, bestselling naturalist Diane Ackerman vividly re-creates Antonina's life as "the zookeeper's wife," responsible for her own family, the zoo animals, and their "guests" resistance activists and refugee Jews, many of whom Jan had smuggled from the Warsaw Ghetto.

Assessment:

Annotate or take notes, focusing on three or four main ideas and significant events in the books. You will be asked to share your observations the first week of school.

Where to find the texts:

All the texts are available in local libraries, bookstores, via audiobook (unabridged), and MP3 format online. Outliers is available in the Walt Whitman English Department bookroom.