Luther College faculty Amy Weldon releases a new book

Using anecdotes from her personal life to encourage readers to become actively engaged citizens and human beings, Luther College Associate Professor of English Amy Weldon has released a new book, “The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and Save the World.”

Released in late February 2018, the book is available from major retailers, wipfandstock.com and the Luther College Book Shop.

The book is designed to wake readers from a technologically driven reverie, encouraging them to be critical thinkers in the present moment. Divided into six chapters, each chapter’s title is a one-sentence snapshot of advice to the reader.

The first chapter, “Consider what technology is doing to your life, without your consent,” digs into how truly addicted people are to technology. In it, Weldon muses about foreboding totalitarian patterns in society. She writes that we have a “human tendency to surrender control of and responsibility for our actions and environments to systems of our own making”¦allowing ourselves to believe those systems are somehow inevitable, operating according to laws as inviolate as those of nature itself.”

In another chapter titled “Ask for more from your education by asking for more from yourself””before and after graduation,” Weldon comments on complications 21st century college students face, from financial issues to understanding what critical thinking entails. Rather than college being strictly a means to getting a well-paying job, Weldon asserts that “college, like education in general, is about becoming a self with something constructive to say.”

Scott Russell Sanders, professor emeritus of English at Indiana University, wrote that it’s invigorating to read Weldon’s “feisty, full-throated defense of the human capacity for learning”¦Readers who are seeking a right path through thickets of technology, money-worship and consumerism will find here a wise and appealing guide.”

Other short fiction, scholarly work and creative non-fiction by Weldon appear in publications such as Orion, The Common, About Place, Midwestern Gothic, The Hopper, Bloom, The Millions, Los Angeles Review of Books, Intersections, The Carolina Quarterly, and many more. Weldon also teaches overseas, having recently led the fourth incarnation of her January Term course, “In Frankenstein’s Footsteps: The Keats-Shelley Circle in London, Geneva, and Italy.”

Weldon received her Bachelor of Arts in English and journalism from Auburn University. She completed a Master of Arts and Ph.D. in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A national liberal arts college with an enrollment of 2,050, Luther offers an academic curriculum that leads to the Bachelor of Arts degree in more than 60 majors and pre-professional programs. For more information about Luther, visit the college’s website: http://luther.edu.