TO: One Campus, One Book Committee

FROM: Alexis Diaz, ENC 3250 Professional Writing Student

DATE: September 18, 2015
SUBJECT: Recommendation Report For One Book, One Campus Committee
This is in response to your request for book recommendations to be read by all first year students
at Florida Gulf Coast University who will be enrolling in fall 2016. After some research I have
been able to find three books, The Soloist, The Stop: How the Fight for Good Food Transformed
a Community and Inspired a Movement, and Memory of Water.
Based on FGCUs mission and guiding principles, and after looking at other universities choices
such as Florida State, and California State University, for One Book, One Campus, I was able to
narrow down my recommendation to these three books.
Refer to the table below:

Title/Author
The Soloist, by
Steve Lopez

Publisher/Publicatio
n Date
Published by Putnam
Adult/ April 17th 2008

The Stop, by
Nick Saul and
Andrea Curtis

Published by Random
House Canada/ March
19th 2013

Memory of
Water, by
Emmi Itaranta

Published by Harper
Voyager/ June 10th
2014.

ISBN

Cost/Number
Brief Summary
of Pages
0399155066 $11.27/ 273
When Steve Lopez, a writer for L.A. Times
pages
first see Nathanial Ayers playing the violin
on Skid Row, he is immediately drawn. Later
he learns that Ayers was once a promising
student at Julliard, and lost his ability to
function due to a mental illness. Lopez sets
out to save Ayers from his rough life, but
along the way he realizes that his own life
has been changed as well.
0307360784 $13.02/ 320
This book is about the transformation of a
pages
food bank to a successful community food
center with a mission to revolutionize our
food system. It aims to help fight hunger and
poverty and argues that everyone deserves a
dignified and healthy place at the table.
0062326155 $12.69/ 266
pages

Global Warming has caused water to be an

extremely scarce resource. Wars and politics
are waged over water and it has effected
everything. 17 year-old Noria is preparing to
follow in her fathers footsteps and become a
tea master, a very important position with
hug secrets. When the army starts to watch
her town and her she must choose between

her safety and striking out between

knowledge and kinship.
I believe any of these books would be great for the OBOC project as each of them are themed
around adversity, leadership, diversity and community based partnerships. FGCUs mission is to
emphasize innovation, embrace diversity, and cultivate habits of lifelong learning. I feel that
these books would fit right into that mission and the principles of the university. I feel that first
years would be excited to read any of these books mostly because they are about events that have
the possibility of happening in reality. I think if students were to sit down and read either of these
recommended books they would learn a lot of different lessons.
Please let me know what you think of these recommendations. I hope to hear back soon. I look
forward to hearing back from you soon.