Brazos Valley Reads – 2015
Brazos Valley Reads (BVR) is a community effort organized by Texas A&M University’s Department of English with extensive support from various groups in the University and the community. The program was started in 2005 to encourage bridge building between Texas A&M’s students and staff and the Brazos Valley community at large. For the past several years, BVR has invited internationally recognized authors including Ernest Gaines, Sandra Cisneros, Tim O’Brien, Sherman Alexie, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Julia Alvarez to College Station for a public reading and to meet with members of the community. Students at College Station High School and Bryan Collegiate High School will join in reading the featured novel this year. Major co-sponsors for the BVR 2015 include the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and Blinn College.
Want to find out about our reading selections from previous years? Visit our Previous BVR Events page to learn more about those authors and books.
The Department of English at Texas A&M University is pleased to present the 2020 book selection
for Brazos Valley Reads:
Geraldine Brooks
March 2015
Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Brooks will read from her novel
on Tuesday, April 14, 2015
at 7:00 p.m.
in the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center
College Station, Texas
Brooks will meet with readers and sign books following the event.
March and other novels by Brooks will be available for purchase at the event.
This event is free & open to the public.
The Brooks visit and related events are co-sponsored by the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and Blinn College.
Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist. She began her career at The Sydney Morning Herald before moving to the United States to attend the journalism master’s program at Columbia University in New York City. She then spent 11 years as correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, where her beats included some of the world’s most troubled areas, including Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East.
For her second novel, March, Brooks was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the American Civil War, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history.
From Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, March, who has gone off to war leaving his wife and daughters. To evoke him, Brooks turned to the journals and letters of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father, a friend and confidant of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
In Brooks’ telling, March emerges as an idealistic chaplain in the little known backwaters of a war that will test his faith in himself and in the Union cause as he learns that his side, too, is capable of acts of barbarism and racism. As he recovers from a near mortal illness, he must reassemble his shattered mind and body, and find a way to reconnect with a wife and daughters who have no idea of the ordeals he has been through.
From the vibrant intellectual world of New England and the sensuous antebellum South, March adds adult resonance to Alcott’s optimistic children’s tale and portrays the moral complexity of war, a marriage tested by the demands of extreme idealism, and by the temptations of a powerful forbidden attraction.
The reading is free and open to the public—a book signing will follow the reading.
Information and images courtesy of Penguin Speaker’s Bureau http://www.prhspeakers.com/speaker/geraldine-brooks/ and geraldinebrooks.com. Brazos Valley Reads 2015 is sponsored by the Texas A&M English Department, in partnership with Blinn College and the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research.