AP Social Studies Summer Reading List
2011-2012 School Year
AP Psychology
19 Minutes by Jodi Picoult
In this emotionally charged novel, Jodi Picoult delves beneath the surface of a small town to explore what it
means to be different in our society.
In Sterling, New Hampshire, 17-year-old high school student Peter Houghton has endured years of verbal and
physical abuse at the hands of classmates. His best friend, Josie Cormier, succumbed to peer pressure and now
hangs out with the popular crowd that often instigates the harassment. One final incident of bullying sends Peter
over the edge and leads him to commit an act of violence that forever changes the lives of Sterling’s residents.
Even those who were not inside the school that morning find their lives in an upheaval, including Alex Cormier. The superior court
judge assigned to the Houghton case, Alex—whose daughter, Josie, witnessed the events that unfolded—must decide whether or not
to step down. She’s torn between presiding over the biggest case of her career and knowing that doing so will cause an even wider
chasm in her relationship with her emotionally fragile daughter. Josie, meanwhile, claims she can’t remember what happened in the
last fatal minutes of Peter’s rampage. Or can she? And Peter’s parents, Lacy and Lewis Houghton, ceaselessly examine the past to see
what they might have said or done to compel their son to such extremes. Nineteen Minutes also features the return of two of Jodi
Picoult’s characters—defense attorney Jordan McAfee from The Pact and Salem Falls, and Patrick DuCharme, the intrepid detective
introduced in Perfect Match.
Rich with psychological and social insight, Nineteen Minutes is a riveting, poignant, and thought-provoking novel that has at its center
a haunting question. Do we ever really know someone?
Barron’s AP Psychology with CD ROM
Contact Ms. Lynn Pleiss @ lpleiss@dartmouthps.org if you have any questions.
AP Human Geography
In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
Food. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?
Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the
TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances”
— no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that
should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common
sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less
healthy we seem to become.
But if real food — the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food — stands in need of defense, from whom does it
need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread
confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the
professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker
and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.
Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating
words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient
approach — what he calls nutritionism — and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of
real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we
are part.
Pollan’s last book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating; now In Defense of Food
shows us how to change it, one meal at a time.
There is an assignment that goes along with this book that can be picked up in the guidance office.
Contact Ms. Elizabeth True @ etrue@dartmouthps.org if you have any questions.