Readers for Life

Readers for Life, edited by Sander L. Gilman and Heta Pyrhöhnen, is a superb and dazzling collection of unusual and insightful memoirs concerning the value of reading by notable writers such as Salman Rushdie, Peter Brooks, Cristina Sandu and others. At a time when illiteracy is mounting throughout the world, this book urgently recalls how reading still opens the minds of young people to deal with the conflicts they face, not with guns but with imagination. What a joy to read how these writers have profited from reading! * Jack Zipes, author of Speaking Out *
Readers for Life will prompt lifelong readers to cast their minds back to their earliest immersion in storyworlds, to beloved books and the people who recommended them. From the spines of the volumes on the shelf, to vivid illustrations, to the reverberation of language, to the mental impressions and ideas shaping their perceptions of experience, the reading recalled by Gilman and Pyrhönen's contributors opens realms of possibility, invites adventures of perspective-taking, and encourages returns to both refreshing and challenging books. * Suzanne Keen, author of Empathy and Reading *
This extraordinary book celebrates the rich array of experiences that reading offers, and the variety of responses that it nourishes. And it does so with individual gifts of grace in the form of essays from fourteen diverse and dedicated readers who bring together the wonders of the world and the worries of life. It shows how reading helps keep them in balance, and provides us with sometimes life-saving company when we are alone. And if we are ignorant, a book cannot laugh at us. * J. Edward Chamberlin, author of Storylines: How Words Shape Our World *