Best selling author will speak to FPU students about his novel
by Jessica Rehm
edited by Eric Hammett
New York Times best selling author William Landay will be speaking and discussing his novel Defending Jacob in Spagnuolo Hall on November 19th.
Landay was an assistant district attorney in Boston before he left to become a writer. He has written three novels.
After discussing his novel, there will be a Q&A for students, and a book signing. “It’s not that it leaves a lot of open questions, but there’s alot to really dig into and talk about, so I think they’ll ask a lot of questions, because the ending is very shocking, why did he come to that conclusion? Do we have any evidence to understand the book in a different way?” said professor Donna Decker, coordinator of the event. She thinks her students will have questions about both the writing process and the novel.
(photo: flickr.com)
Decker teaches this book to her Law and Literature class, and there was a lot of enthusiasm to have Landay come to campus and speak with the students. “It’s a very fast read, students really generally love it, even my students who don’t love reading are buzzing right through it because its fast paced and crazy things happen,” said Decker.
“I think it’s so important to have students go to readings, because most of my students have never been to a reading, or a talk by an author, and I think it’s much more engaging and exciting than students know,” said Decker.
There is a crisis of trust in journalism right now. Many Americans say they don’t trust the news media anymore, and poll after poll shows that they want newspapers to be more transparent about how the news is gathered.
This semester the Exchange is asking its reporters to describe what they did to report the facts, in what we’re calling a transparency statement. We ask our readers to feel free to use the comment boxes at the bottom of each article to call them out when the reporters may not have done enough and to compliment them when you think they’ve done a good job.
For this article I interviewed professor and coordinator of the event Donna Decker. Since this an advanced article, I wanted to make sure I got a lot of facts about the author and the event, so students would know more about it beforehand. I interviewed Decker in person so I prepared myself with questions that would help my readers understand what this event is about.
