About the Book
The Questioning Reader is an innovative, thematic freshman anthology that asserts the primacy of questioning and inquiry as strategies for gaining knowledge.
Because the vital give-and-take of conversation between a writer and a questioning reader lives in every good piece of writing, questioning infuses this reader's organization and pedagogy. Each thematic chapter title fixes an essential question for today's world. An introductory chapter, “Reading, Writing, and the Inquiring Mind,” guides students through the reading and writing process and lays out questioning strategies as the source for understanding a text and composing one. Also, penetrating pre- and post-reading questions with each selection challenge students and promote critical thinking, reading, and writing.
Table of Contents:
1.Reading, Writing, and the Inquiring Mind.
2.What Do We Mean by Family?
Joan Didion, On Going Home.
Will Haygood, Underground Dads.
Mary Cantwell, The Burden of a Happy Childhood.
Barbara Kingsolver, Stone Soup.
Deborah Fallows, Why Mothers Should Stay at Home.
Roz Chast, Bad Mom Cards (Cartoon).
David Gutman, The Paternal Imperative.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lament (Poem).
Alix Strauss, Joy of Funerals.
Cornell West and Sylvia Ann Hewlett, A World Upside Down.
3.What Is Education?
James Thurber, University Days.
Katie Roiphe, Campus Climate Control.
James Atlas, Making the Grade.
Barbara Lerner, Sometimes Spanking Can't Be Beat.
Nathan McCall, The World of White Folks.
Katherine Mansfield, Her First Ball (Story).
William Cronon, Only Connect…
Philip Brady, Teaching Tu Fu on the Night Shift.
Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Patterson Public Library.
Langston Hughes, The Kids in School with Me (Poem).
4.What Is the Meaning of Love, Marriage, and Fidelity?
Scott Russell Sanders, Looking at Women.
Irwin Shaw, The Girls in Their Summer Dresses (Story).
Sir Francis Bacon, Of Marriage and the Single Life.
William Shakespeare, When My Love Swears That She Is Made of Truth (Poem).
Harriet Jacobs, The Lover.
Thomas B. Stoddard, Gay Marriages: Make Them Legal.
How Men and Women Got Together (Blood Piegan Myth).
Elizabeth Joseph, My Husband's Nine Wives.
Cynthia Ozick, Lovesickness: The Author's Incurable Affliction.
5.How Does Work Mold Our Identity?
Richard B. Reich, The Middle Class Squeeze.
Linda Hogan, Waking Up the Rake.
Gary Soto, Black Hair.
Maya Angelou, Woman Work (Poem).
Kevin Baker, from Dreamland, The Shop on Division Street (Fiction).
John Updike, A Sense of Change.
Quentin Hardy, Showing Off.
Irving Kristol, Income Inequality without Class Conflict.
Henry Petroski, Invention Is the Adopted Child of Necessity.
6.How Does Language Define Us?
Sandy Cisneros, An Offering to the Power of Language.
Tony Earley, The Quare Gene.
Barbara Carton, Why Does “Everybody” Now Put “Everything” in Quotation Marks?
Sherwood Anderson, Queer (Story).
Mary McCarthy, Names.
Countee Cullen, Incident (Poem).
Woody Allen, Slang Origins.
Elizabeth Austin, A Small Plea to Delete a Ubiquitous Expletive.
Jesse Wegman, Six Days: On Learning a New Alphabet.
James Baldwin, If Black English Isn't a Language, Tell Me Then What Is?
7.How Does Gender Shape Our Destiny?
Katha Pollitt, Feminism at the Crossroads.
Reggie White, Women in the Locker Room.
Margaret Atwood, From Five Poems for Grandmothers (Poem).
Deborah Tannen, Listening to Men, Then and Now.
Matt Ridley, Why Should Males Exist?
Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare's Gifted Sister.
Oscar Hammerstein II, Soliloquy (Song).
James Joyce, Eveline (Story).
Maxine Hong Kingston, No Name Woman.
Art Spiegelman, Nature vs. Nurture.
David Leavitt, The Hate Epidemic.
Judy Brady, I Want a Wife.
8.How Do Law and Politics Affect Our Lives?
Susan Jacoby, A First Amendment Junkie.
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence.
Will Durst, Happy National Apathy Day.
O. Henry, The Cop and the Anthem (Story).
Sasha Abramsky, When They Get Out.
Amnesty International, Website: Selected Pages.
Niccolo Machiavelli, How Princes Should Keep Faith.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments.
Jules Feiffer, Op-Art (Cartoon).
9.How Do Science and Technology Affect Us?
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rappaccini's Daughter (Story).
Patricia Curtis, The Argument against Animal Experimentation.
Howard Markel, When Germs Travel.
Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer (Poem).
Ted Gup, The End of Serendipity.
Jim Windolf, A Nation of Nuts.
Scott Willis, The Growth Industry of the Next Millennium (Cartoon).
Clark County, Nevada, Health District, Take a Bite Out of Smoking (Restaurant Place Mat).
Pablo Rodriguez, The Doctor in the Bulletproof Vest.
Lewis Thomas, Humanities and Science.
10.How Do We Interact with Nature and the Environment?
Nancy Shute, Why Do We Age?
Arthur B. Robinson and Zachary W. Robinson, Science Has Spoken: Global Warming is a Myth.
Gail E. Christianson, Naysayers, Thriving in the Heat.
Stephen King, Leaf-Keepers.
Alexander Petrunkovitch, The Spider and the Wasp.
William K. Stevens, Full of Wiles: Coyotes Prove Near Invincible.
Seamus Heaney, Mint (Poem).
Maxine Hong Kingston, A City Person Encountering Nature.
Terry Tempest Williams, from Refuge, The Clan of One-Breasted Women.
Joy Williams, The Killing Game.
Herman Melville, The Lightning-Rod Man (Story).
11.How Do We Characterize Ethics and Values?
Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream (Speech).
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., Porn Again? An Industry Fantasizes about Respect.
Michael Novak, With Liberty and Prayer for All.
George T. Crane, Productive in His Own Way.
Sarah Teasdale, Barter (Poem).
George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant.
Robert C. Solomon, Is It Ever Right to Lie: A Philosophy of Deception.
Stephanie Ericsson, The Ways We Lie.
Alice Munro, Before the Change (Story).
Chris Offut, Home to the Hills.
Michael W. Cox, Little Soldiers.
