The Center for Diversity and Inclusion’s book club, sponsored by Cross-Cultural Connections, highlights books by a diverse array of authors. Open to students and staff, in April, we will be reading Saving Five: A Memoir of Hope by Amanda Nguyen. Our goal is for students to use book club as a way to understand the importance of and demonstrate verbal, written, and non-verbal/body language abilities. Our book club leaders also provide information from a diverse set of sources and individuals about the author, culture, and themes represented. In our book club discussion, students will build on their communication skills and listen carefully to others, taking time to understand and ask questions. Please contact pendley@wustl.edu to receive a copy! We meet in the CDI Conference Room in DUC 150.
Skills our book club works to strengthen:
Critical Thinking
Communication
Engaging with a diverse array of perspectives
About Saving Five: A Memoir of Hope: A revelatory and powerful memoir by the Nobel Peace Prize nominee Amanda Nguyen, detailing her tumultuous childhood and groundbreaking activism in the aftermath of her rape at Harvard.
At a Harvard fraternity party in 2013, the trajectory of Amanda Nguyen’s life was changed forever when she was raped.
The American-born child of Vietnamese refugees, Nguyen had long dreamed of attending Harvard, and it had become a place of refuge from a childhood filled with turmoil and trauma. Determined to not let her rape derail the life she’d worked so hard to create, she opted for her rape kit to be filed under Jane Doe, knowing that an active court case tied to her name could hurt her odds of working for NASA after graduation, a goal she’d been working toward for years.
But she was shocked to learn this choice meant she had only six months to take action before the state of Massachusetts destroyed her kit, rendering any future legal action impossible. Nguyen knew then that she had two options: surrender to a law that effectively denied her justice, or fight for a change—not only for herself but for survivors everywhere.
A deeply affecting memoir of grief, survival, and hope, Saving Five details Nguyen’s winding journey of recovery and action, which ultimately led her to create the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights, one of the only unanimously passed laws in the history of the United States. Both a tribute to resilience and a lesson on healing, Saving Five is an inspirational story for the ages.