Listen to the UVA Today Radio Show report on this story by Anne Bromley:

February 16, 2010 — The University of Virginia Bookstore will host a reading by U.Va. professor emeritus Paul Gaston, author of a new memoir, "Coming Of Age In Utopia," at 5 p.m. on Feb. 23. The event will take place in the bookstore's mezzanine and is free and open to the public.

In "Coming of Age in Utopia: The Odyssey of an Idea," Gaston describes his deep Southern roots growing up in the Fairhope community in Mobile Bay, Ala. Then he turns his attention to his days in Charlottesville, his time at the University and his participation in the Civil Rights Movement in Virginia and worldwide.  
 
Historian Ed Ayers, president of the University of Richmond and former dean of U.Va.'s College of Arts & Sciences, writes that Gaston "has been a witness to, and a maker of, profound and humane Southern change. An enduring love of the South shines through in every act and in every sentence."