2026-2027 Feather River College - Book in Common:
A smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks and pitfalls of technology sold under this banner, and why it’s crucial to recognize the many ways in which AI hype covers for a small set of power-hungry actors at work and in the world.
Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?
The answer to these questions, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear, is “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.” This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.” Hype looks and smells fishy: It twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. In The AI Con, Bender and Hanna offer a sharp, witty, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across its many forms.
Bender and Hanna show you how to spot AI hype, how to deconstruct it, and how to expose the power grabs it aims to hide. Armed with these tools, you will be prepared to push back against AI hype at work, as a consumer in the marketplace, as a skeptical newsreader, and as a citizen holding policymakers to account. Together, Bender and Hanna expose AI hype for what it is: a mask for Big Tech’s drive for profit, with little concern for who it affects.
Purpose of Book in Common
Many colleges and universities adopt a common reading for the academic year. The purpose of a common reading is to create campus and community wide intellectual discussion about a significant current topic, social issue, or literary work. By presenting various opportunities to engage with the book, students, staff, faculty, and community can develop an understanding of the book within different contexts and points-of-view. Books, as repositories of knowledge, records of experience, and explorations of personal and cultural themes, foster deep and complex understanding and provide the basis for a healthy and vibrant society. The Book in Common is one way that FRC dedicates itself to giving students the tools to engage, comprehend, and shape the world around them.
2025-2026
The definitive--and by far the most popular--guide to the therapeutic Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, or the art and science of how trees can promote health and happiness
Notice how a tree sways in the wind. Run your hands over its bark. Take in its citrusy scent. As a society we suffer from nature deficit disorder, but studies have shown that spending mindful, intentional time around trees--what the Japanese call shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing--can promote health and happiness.
In this beautiful book--featuring more than 100 color photographs from forests around the world, including the forest therapy trails that criss-cross Japan--Dr. Qing Li, the world's foremost expert in forest medicine, shows how forest bathing can reduce your stress levels and blood pressure, strengthen your immune and cardiovascular systems, boost your energy, mood, creativity, and concentration, and even help you lose weight and live longer.
Once you've discovered the healing power of trees, you can lose yourself in the beauty of your surroundings, leave everyday stress behind, and reach a place of greater calm and wellness.
2024-2025
Award-winning poet Elaine Equi selects the poems for the 2023 edition of The Best American Poetry, “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).
Since its debut in 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents some of the year’s most striking and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves offering insight into their work.
For The Best American Poetry 2023 guest editor Elaine Equi, whose own work is “deft, delicate [and] subversive” (August Kleinzahler), has made astute choices representing contemporary poetry at its most dynamic. The result is an exceptionally coherent vision of American poetry today.
Including valuable introductory essays contributed by the series and guest editors, the 2023 volume is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series.
2023-2024
Shawna was overcome by the claustrophobia, the heat, the smoke, the fire, all just down the canyon and up the ravine. She was feeling the adrenaline, but also the terror of doing something for the first time. She knew how to run with a backpack; they had trained her physically. But that’s not training for flames. That’s not live fire.
California’s fire season gets hotter, longer, and more extreme every year ― fire season is now year-round. Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California’s blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews.
In Breathing Fire, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine. She has spent years getting to know dozens of women who have participated in the fire camp program and spoken to captains, family and friends, correctional officers, and camp commanders. The result is a rare, illuminating look at how the fire camps actually operate ― a story that encompasses California’s underlying catastrophes of climate change, economic disparity, and historical injustice, but also draws on deeply personal histories, relationships, desires, frustrations, and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting.
Lowe’s reporting is a groundbreaking investigation of the prison system, and an intimate portrayal of the women of California’s Correctional Camps who put their lives on the line, while imprisoned, to save a state in peril.
2022-2023
“This memoir feels not just created but also deeply lived."—The Washington Post
Before she began to work on The Best We Could Do in 2005, Thi Bui had never drawn a comic in her life. Twelve years later, the debut graphic memoir would be released to widespread acclaim from critics and literary heavyweights alike. An American Book Award winner, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, and an Eisner Award finalist in reality-based comics, Bui’s memoir traces her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Việt Nam in the 1970s and their effort to build new lives for themselves in America. Bui documents parental sacrifice, excavates family histories, and grapples with the inherited struggles of displacement and diaspora. “A stunning work of reconstructed family and world history” (Booklist Online). “Narratively intricate, intellectually fastidious, and visually stunning” (Vulture). Writes Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize winner and board member: “A book to break your heart and heal it.”
Thi Bui was born in Việt Nam three months before the end of the American War, and came to the United States in 1978 as part of the “boat people” wave of refugees from Southeast Asia. Her debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, 2017), has been selected as UCLA’s Common Book for 2017, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, an Eisner Award finalist in Reality Based Comics, and made several Best of 2017 book lists, including Bill Gates’s top five picks. Bui is also the Caldecott Honor-winning illustrator of A Different Pond, a picture book by the poet Bao Phi (Capstone, 2017). Her short comics can be found online at The Nib, Reveal News, PEN America, and BOOM California. She is currently researching and drawing a work of graphic nonfiction about how Asian Americans are impacted by incarceration and deportation, to be published by One World, Random House. Bui taught high school in New York City and was a founding teacher of Oakland International High School, the first public high school in California for recent immigrants and English learners. Since 2015, she has been a faculty member of the MFA in Comics program at the California College of the Arts. Thi Bui lives in the Bay Area.
2020-2021
All We Can Save illuminates the expertise and insights of dozens of diverse women leading on climate in the United States—scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, teachers, activists, innovators, wonks, and designers, across generations, geographies, and race—and aims to advance a more representative, nuanced, and solution-oriented public conversation on the climate crisis. These women offer a spectrum of ideas and insights for how we can rapidly, radically reshape society.
2020-2021
Ibram X. Kendi's book How to Be an Antiracist takes a close look at what could be called structural and social racism. Instead of wanting to lay blame or accuse individuals of racist views or behavior, Kendi is more interested in showing how our society has incorporated bias and prejudice into many of our ideas and behaviors which shape and support our society. He uses a combination of personal stories from his life as well as journalistic reporting and scholarly analysis to demonstrate his points.
2019-2020
Written by northern California author and graphic artist Brian Fies, A Fire Story tells about Fies’ experience with the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa in 2017. The author lost everything in the fire except his ability to draw and tell stories. A graphic memoir, Fies compellingly relates the events and their aftermath and recovery. Living with wildfire is a reality in California, and this book resonated with our community. Brian Fies visited Feather River College for two days in September 2019 to lecture, teach, and speak about his story, about writing and cartooning, and about the realities of wildfire.
2018-2019
Written by sociologist Matthew Desmond, Evicted explores the circumstances and difficulties of paying rent, owning land, and trying to get by in difficult circumstances. Thought the research was done in Milwaukee, Desmond brings out the common challenges and circumstances that many Americans face.
2017-2018
The Devil’ Highway tells the true story of a group of Latin American immigrants who cross the U.S. Border illegally guided by unscrupulous coyotes. Lost and suffering from thirst and heat stroke, many of the people die. Luis Alberto Urrea, a journalist and a novelist, goes into great detail offering multiple stories, multiple points of view, and many thoughtful themes.
2016-2017
Written by McArthur award winning lawyer Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy is a memoir about his career representing death-row inmates and those wrongfully convicted of crimes in the Deep South. The various stories and fates of people involved in the justice system offers many difficult questions about society, justice, and mercy.
2015-2016
Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert explores the meaning and consequences of the Anthropocene era—the epoch of earth’s history dominated by humankind. There had been five major extinctions of substantial portions of life in earth. The question of human influence of the environment and issues climate change are explored through a combination of science and journalism.
2014-2015
The Book Thief became an international best-seller after publication in 2005. The novel, narrated by Death, tells the story of a young girl, Liesel, who lives in Germany during World War II. The unusual viewpoint allows readers to think about personal values within morally ambiguous situations.
2013-2014
The Yellow Birds is a novel that uses a symbolic and metaphorical structure to tell the story of one U.S. soldier’s experience in the way in Iraq. The story follows Pvt. John Bartle as his life moves from realistic to surrealistic narrative. The book was based loosely on the author’s experience in the war.
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