We hope the book will appeal to students with a wide range of academic and personal interests and passions.”Įach year since 2002, the university’s common reading book serves as a basis for programs and discussions for first-year students from orientation through fall semester. “It is also carefully researched, both in terms of social-historical context and in its engagement with radio technology and related sciences. “Not only is it a beautifully written and engaging story,” said Timothy Beal, the Florence Harkness Professor of Religion, chair of the Department of Religious Studies and also of the common reading program. The novel made more than a dozen year-end lists, including Barnes & Noble,, NPR’s Fresh Air, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, Kirkus, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor. The awarding Pulitzer committee described the work as “an imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.”Īnd from The New Yorker: “A meditation on fate, free will and the way that, in wartime, small choices can have vast consequences.” The instant New York Times bestseller, which chronicles the parallel and eventually intersecting lives of two European children in World War II, has been chosen as Case Western Reserve University’s 2016 common reading selection for first-year undergraduates. That novel, All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel (Scribner, 2014)-which took Doerr a decade to research and write-was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. “I decided I wanted to tell a story set in a time when the magic of this kind of long-distance communication was not taken for granted-when hearing the voice of a stranger or loved one in your ear was magical….When I learned how Hitler and the entire Nazi party used it as a tool for propaganda, I knew I would set the novel in World War II.” “I began asking myself, ‘How did we all get to the point where we take for granted that this technology will work?’” he explained years later to an Ohio Magazine writer. Photo by Todd Meier.Īuthor Anthony Doerr was on a train to New York City to meet with his book publisher in 2004, when the man riding in front of him lost his mind over a dropped cellphone call as they passed through a tunnel approaching Manhattan.

Author and fall convocation speaker Anthony Doerr.

All the light we cannot see cover