NEWTON, NC – For several years, incoming college freshmen have been required to read a particular book before they start college. “One college, one book” programs are designed to promote critical thinking and provide a common experience for students. Faculty and administrators believe the exercise encourages a sense of community between students.

Critics, on the other hand, contend that the chosen books are selected to promote a moral and political agenda of academicians. Meatier classics should be assigned, they say, citing that students other than English majors rarely encounter solid literature after that first freshman read.

Who’s correct?

You be the judge. Following is a sampling of area freshman reads available through the Catawba County Library System.

Catawba Valley Community College: Plant Life by Pamela Duncan, a semiautobiographical treatise about life in a Carolina textile town. You may remember Duncan from her appearance at the Main Library back in 2006.

Appalachian State University: Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson recounts his efforts to create schools in the remotest parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan to promote peace with books, not bombs.

Duke University: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. This Pulitzer Prize winner tells the story of an unusual family’s epic journey across international and cultural boundaries.

Lenoir-Rhyne University: The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, a memoir of the author’s dysfunctional family in the 1970s and 80s.

N.C. State University: Colors of the Mountain by Da Chen. A coming-of-age story set during the Cultural Revolution of 1960s China.

UNC-Asheville: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. A classic science fiction tale a future world in which firemen start fires to burn books.

UNC-Greensboro: My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student by Rebekah Nathan. An anthropology professor becomes a college freshman and conclude that choice, individualism and materialism define today’s students.

UNC-Chapel Hill: A Home on the Field, by the university’s own journalism professor, Paul Cuadros, explores class and ethnic conflict through the story of a Latino high school soccer team in Siler City.

UNC-Wilmington: A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah A 12-year-old is abducted into the horrors of civil war in Sierra Leone

For more information about these and other books within the library system, check the website at http://www.catawbacountync.gov/library/.