We have two years worth of news about the Campus Community Book Project: the featured book for 2015-16 and the topic for 2016-17 (including the call for nominations).

Coming this fall

The book for the 2015-16 academic year is The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi, a regular contributor to Rolling Stone magazine.

Taibbi and the featured book for 2015-16

NEXT STEPS

• Program proposals for 2015-16 — The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi
• Program planning committee for 2015-16, to convene in July.
• Book nominations for 2016-17 — Topic: poverty/hunger/food security. Deadline for nominations: Aug. 14, 2015.
• Book selection committee for 2016-17 — To read the nominated books this summer and into the fall. The selection team will convene in late August.

Contact: Mikael Villalobos, associate chief diversity officer, Office of Campus Community Relations

• Phone — (530) 752-2071 
• Email — mbvillalobos@ucdavis.edu

GET YOUR COPY

Look for The Divide in UC Davis Stores next week — a shipment of paperbacks is expected to arrive some time around Thursday (July 16). The paperback will sell for $11.95, about a 30 percent discount off the list price (and less than the Amazon price!).

But wait! UC Davis Stores also placed an order for several hundred copies of The Divide in hardcover, and they will also sell for $11.95. The hardcovers are expected to arrive around the end of the month.

Now comes program development, said Mikael Villalobos, who heads up the book project for the Campus Council on Diversity and Community, and the Office of Campus Community Relations.

The sponsors encourage faculty members and others to incorporate Taibbi’s book into the curricula where possible, and to develop other book-related events such as lectures, workshops and panel discussions, and art exhibitions and film screenings.

Villalobos said he will assemble a planning committee this summer to develop the program of related events, which will culminate in the author’s talk on Wednesday, Feb. 3, as part of the Mondavi Center’s Speakers Series.   

Have a programming idea? Interested in serving on the planning committee? See “Next Steps” box.

Community conversation

The annual book project, begun in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, promotes respectful discussion among the university’s diverse population, around a subject that students, faculty and staff are all reading about. See all the books, 2002-14.

Each year’s book selection process starts with a topic — it’s “structural inequality” for 2015-16.

In The Divide, published in 2014, Taibbi ponders a “bizarre statistical mystery” two decades in the making: Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles.

And, he says, not one of the new prisoners is among the rich whose fraud wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth.

He describes a “new despotism” hidden in the “thousands of arbitrary decisions that surround our otherwise transparent system of real jury trials and carefully enumerated suspects’ rights.”

“Most people understand this on some level, but they don’t really know how bad it has gotten, because they live entirely on one side of the equation. If you grew up well off, you probably don’t know how easy it is for poor people to end up in jail, often for the same dumb things you yourself did as a kid.

“And if you’re broke and have limited experience in the world, you probably have no idea of the sheer scale of the awesome criminal capers that the poweful and politically connected can get away with, right under the noses of the rich-people police.”

Timothy Noah, in his review of the book for The New York Times, said Taibbi’s “deeply reported, highly compelling mininarratives of dysfunction within the American justice system” make The Divide “as infuriating as it is impossible to put down.”

Taibbi’s other books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History (2011) and The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics and Religion (2009). He received the National Magazine Award for commentary in 2008.

Next topic: Poverty-hunger-food security

The Campus Council on Community and Diversity recently began the 2016-17 book cycle by choosing a topic, poverty-hunger-food security, and calling for nominations. Here are the general criteria:

• Compelling and thought-provoking to engage us in dialogue about contemporary controversial issues and to raise questions that have many possible answers.
• Well-written, accessible and engaging to a general audience.
• Short enough to be read within the timeframe usually allotted for coursework.
• Provocative and intriguing to as many members of the community as possible, to invite diverse participation and integration into discussion groups and courses across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
• In print in paperback (by spring of the year before the project) and affordable.
• Written by an author who is still living and an engaging public speaker, available to give an author’s talk during the span of the project, and who would be a campus guest.

Nominations are welcome from anyone in the campus community, with a deadline of Aug. 14, 2015. Please include title, author and a short description of the book, plus an explanation of why it complements the topic and represents a worthy selection.

Villalobos will assemble a selection committee in early August to read the nominated books through the summer and into the fall. Interested in being on the committee? See “Next Steps” box.

Follow the UC Davis Campus Community Book Project on Facebook and Twitter, and use the hashtag #ccbp2015.

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