Freshman Reading Project (required)
Each year the Honors Program selects a book to be read by all incoming first-year Honors students. The Freshman Reading Project promotes community through the common experience of reading and discussing a thought-provoking text. Please read the book before arriving at Baylor. Once on campus, you will engage in a discussion with other students about the themes and ideas gleaned from your reading. Completion of the Freshman Reading Project is required.
This year’s reading is How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, the recent bestseller written by David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times. From the publisher:
As David Brooks observes, “There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.”
And yet we humans don’t do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person’s story should you pay attention to?
Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity and his determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to human connection. How to Know a Person helps readers become more understanding and considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception.
You can purchase How to Know a Person at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and a variety of other book retailers.
David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House, 2023)
ISBN-13: 978-0593230060
