(Top Shelf Productions)
The Vermont Humanities Council has selected the graphic novel (ahem, comic book) “March: Book One” as the book for Vermont Reads 2019.
Vermont Reads is a statewide one-book community reading program that began in 2003. VHC provides books for free to communities through an application process as well as resources for developing community book-related activities. Since the beginning of the program, Vermont Reads events have taken place in over 200 Vermont towns.
“March: Book One” is the first of a trilogy written by civil rights icon John Lewis, in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and award-winning graphic artist Nate Powell. Book One tells of Lewis’s childhood in rural Alabama, his desire as a young man to be a preacher, his life-changing interactions with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the nonviolent sit-ins he joined at lunch counters in Nashville as a means of undermining segregation.
Lewis was chairman of the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was considered one of the “Big Six” leaders of the civil rights movement. He has served in the US Congress since 1987 and was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2011.
Top 10 books
From Jenny Lyons at The Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury
1. Becoming, by Michelle Obama
2. The Origin of Others, by Toni Morrison
3. Educated: A Memoir, by Tara Westover
4. Going Up the Country: When the Hippies, Dreamers, Freaks, and Radicals Moved to Vermont, by Yvonne Daley
5. Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance, by Bill McKibben
6. Calypso, by David Sedaris
7. The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai
8. The Last of the Hill Farms: Echoes of Vermont’s Past, by Richard Brown
9. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, by Robin DiAngelo
10. A Coming of Age: My Journey into the Eighties, by Madeleine Kunin