A few weeks back I caught a short segment on the Baltimore metro area evening television news about Baltimore Raven, Michael Oher, and his book entitled I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness to the Blind Side and Beyond. It turns out that Oher made a personal visit to Severna Park High School in April 2012 to participate in a discussion about his book with students and faculty.

My hat is off to librarian Marianne Fitzgerald who selected the book to be part of the school’s 2012 “1 Book 1 School 1 Star” initiative and who helped facilitate the book club discussion.

See http://www.aacps.org/admin/anmviewer.asp?a=1478&z=62 for details.

I hope that public libraries in the Baltimore area are taking note of this and would consider holding book discussions about I Beat the Odds. Perhaps they could even invite Oher to make a visit to their libraries to help hold the discussion. I believe that such an effort would be a great way to get patrons excited about their local library system.