NEMESIS

Editor Carolyn Yoder, sent me a heads-up email that Philip Roth will be on NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED this afternoon.  

Turns out he's releasing a new book today - The Nemesis.

In this case the nemesis is polio.  The time is 1944.  The place is Newark, NJ  - 622 miles from Hickory, North Carolina where another polio epidemic rages at the exact same time!

Contrasting communities.  Roth's character lives in a Jewish neighborhood in the city.  Mine lives in a mostly Christian rural area.  It's easy to imagine the differences.

But there were so many similarities - fear, change of plans, the challenges of the WWII homefront, and guilt.
Lives changed by disease with all its attending emotions.


I, for one will be reading THE NEMESIS.  If you read and blog it, can you do me a favor and mention BLUE at the same time?   It's geared toward a younger audience but is deeply and widely appreciated by adults.

I suspect these two books would complement each other very well. (If I do say so myself!)

DIGITAL STORYTELLING: You can do it!

Teachers in the vicinity of Catawba Valley Community College (Hickory, NC)  might want to enter this contest.  Winners get free registration to a digital storytelling summer workshop. 

A digital story is an intensely engaging, brief (3 – 4 minute) movie created on the computer with affordable software. A digital story features audio recording of student writing that is teamed with carefully chosen images and music to illustrate the point of the story. Many digital stories utilize a central metaphor to express the narrative point. Often these stories are powerful tales of personal transformation. However the range of content covered by these stories is as diverse as today’s students.

The whole idea is to learn a skill that you can share with your students. Deadline to register is May 1. Better get crackin'!