First Year Book Program

First Year Book Info

The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America's Coastal Cities by Mike Tidwell
check out the companion website for this year's selection

Information for Faculty: do you want to use the First Year Book in your class?

First Year Book Archives

books and activities from previous years

2005 Thurgood Marshal: American Revolutionary by Juan Williams

2004 The Stakes by Dr. Shibley Telhami

2003 Dead Man Walking by Sister Helen Prejean

2002 The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman

2001 Blessing the Boats by Lucille Clifton

2000 Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson

1999 The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

1998 The Control of Nature by John McPhee & Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

1997 The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

1996 Einstein's Dreams by Alan P. Lightman

1995 The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

1994 The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass

1993 Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Willis

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office for undergraduate studies

ARCHIVES: Einstein's Dreams (1996-97)

In this book, Alan Lightman has created a series of vignettes that describe some dreams that Einstein could have had while trying to understand the mysteries of relativity, space, and time. Each vignette contains a world that behaves according to a particular model or perception of time and space, inhabited by people who have evolved behaviors and philosophies as a consequence of this paradigm.

Memphis, Tennessee, was the birthplace of Mr. Alan Lightman in 1948. He graduated in physics in Princeton and went on to earn his Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics from Caltech in 1974. Between 1976 and 1988 Lightman taught astronomy and physics at Harvard, moving to MIT in 1989 as a physicist and as the director of the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. In 1996 he was given the Andrew Germant Award of the American Institute of Physics, presented to persons responsible for linking physics to humanities and the arts.	A. Lightman
For more on Alan Lightman: * Prof. Lightman's Website at MIT * University of Winsconsin Website about Einstein's Dreams
Events on Campus
News Release (Abril 11, 1997) Einstein's Dreams Author Alan Lightman Visits the University of Maryland

[ Last updated on November 7, 2007 ]