Only a few months after receiving their acceptance letters, incoming Northwestern undergraduates will open the mail over the summer to a different type of correspondence: a copy of the 2010-11 selection for the One Book One Northwestern project, Tracy Kidder’s biography “Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World.”

The Center for Civic Engagement is coordinating this year’s One Book, an annual project that engages new students by sending a copy of the year’s book selection over the summer and hosting related events throughout the academic year.

Kidder’s narrative about Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist known for his role in promoting global health equity, is a good match for both the One Book program and the center, said center Director Dan A. Lewis. Farmer co-founded Partners In Health, the nonprofit health care provider and advocacy group that gained recent renown for its long-standing presence in Haiti.

“Kidder does a wonderful job of explaining how Paul Farmer went from being a college student to a humanitarian reformer,” Lewis said.

Lewis said the recent earthquake in Haiti partly influenced the book choice, but the story about Farmer’s life was also chosen because it touches on a broader theme: “How do you live an engaged, morally relevant life?”

Farmer’s ability to drive students toward these questions singles him out as an ideal voice for students, GlobeMed Executive Director Jon Shaffer said. GlobeMed, a network of college students devoted to global health disparities, hosted Farmer as the keynote speaker at its March Global Health Summit on the NU campus.

“The book resonates with our generation,” said Shaffer, McCormick ’09. “How do we, as relatively wealthy college students, engage in and do productive work on these inequities?”

The 2010-11 One Book project aims to not only provide new students with an interesting book to read, but also to push them to engage with their community and open a conversation, Lewis said. Event planning will involve significant input from current students and will aim to connect new students with upperclassmen, Lewis said.

Parv Santhosh-Kumar, a civic engagement fellow at the Center for Civic Engagement, is leading the effort to get more upperclassmen engaged with the project. She is currently looking for students to serve as One Book “ambassadors”-the people who will link this project to the entire NU community.

Santhosh-Kumar, a Weinberg senior, said the book choice is ideal because of its message about spreading community and active engagement.

“(The book) reaches at this larger issue of leading a purposeful life,” she said. “And it doesn’t just have to be about changing the world by giving up something for something else-it’s just about finding a way that you can make your life meaningful.”

The One Book project is not intended as just another academic exercise, Santhosh-Kumar said. This year’s theme will “move beyond the academic and be more than just a book that freshmen get and maybe read over the summer,” she said.

The 2009-10 One Book project, coordinated by the Initiative for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern, worked to stimulate a conversation about environmental issues and was centered on Thomas L. Friedman’s book “Hot, Flat, And Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution-and How It Can Renew America.” The program culminated April 22 with a lecture by environmentalist Jean-Michel Cousteau on oceanic ecosystems.

Weinberg freshman Amy Bour said she attended the lecture because it sounded interesting, but said the event did not leave a permanent imprint about the One Book program.

“I didn’t really know what the whole goal of the program was,” Bour said. “It was supposed to build community. … I didn’t really feel that, but I feel like they did do a lot of interesting things.”

This year’s project seeks to go beyond a series of individual events and give the entire NU community a window into what their larger role is in the world, Lewis said.

“There’s going to be a strong ‘doing’ aspect to the year as well as a thinking aspect of it,” he said. “We want to connect people’s heads and hearts.”[email protected]