Paley’s many books sold rapidly at this conference, but I also found on the sales table, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination by Robert Coles, which was published just over twenty years ago.  Anyone who is a fan, as I am, of the reading and discussion programs of the Maine Humanities Council would enjoy this testimony to the power and pleasure of ideas in books to transform lives. Coles depicts how his psychiatric practice was transformed when he was a resident in training at Harvard and a supervisor makes a plea for “more stories, less theory.”  He began to visit regularly with William Carlos Williams and became influenced by his view of stories, “yours, mine‑it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.”

Coles also shares what he learns from his wife, a high school English teacher with strong conviction about literature’s central role in our lives. Describing teachers as the “intermediary” in helping students take stories deeply into their understanding of their own lives, Coles recounts his family’s move to Atlanta in the midst of school desegregation, when they tried to engage high school students in discussion about their experience of this challenging time.  It isn’t until they started talking about a student’s reading assignment of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that the conversation became deeply reflective and revelatory. Part memoir, part persuasive argument, Coles takes us along a reader’s path strewn with treasured classics— title by title, author by author — from  Catcher in the Rye, to Middlemarch, to the stories of John Cheever and Tillie Olsen—telling his story of the power that lies within a good book to connect us, through conversation, to our deeper selves and to deeper relationship with others.

Recommended by Denise Pendleton