Voting for this Book Club is Closed. Come see what we chose on our Announcement Post, and join us on June 14. It is time once again friends to decide what book we want to tackle as a group. Following a great discussion, if not great reading, for our Fantasy pick, it’s time to head in a new direction, west you might say – and fall into some Non-fiction about the history of Hollywood. Below you will find our four choices, which cover different times […]
Lamar said the sink was broken. Sherrena said he broke the sink.
I don’t read enough non-fiction, but this came so highly recommended by the world at large that I didn’t hesitate to pick it up, and man, oh man am I equal parts happy to have read it, and completely ruined by it. Matthew Desmond embedded himself in the slums (if you will) of Milwaukee for a long time, built relationships with a number of people on various sides of the complex polyhedron that is the American landlord/tenant dynamic, and in this book, reports on them […]
Thirteen Nightmares in One Book
Surviving Justice is not so much one integrated story of wrongful conviction and exoneration as it is thirteen completely distinct ones. Thirteen individuals tell their stories in their own words, using their own language and perspectives. They were all given long sentences, or even death. Their convictions were all very serious – murder, rape, child molestation. They were all exonerated, most with the help of the Innocence Project. There were some truly horrific anecdotes (a man arrested for child molestation as he walked to the […]
A Warrior Armed With Words
Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (published in 1976) is known for its feminism and for giving voice to the experience of being first generation Asian American. It is an intersectional masterpiece that is part factual memoir and part “talk-story,” i.e., creative storytelling, not just about Hong Kingston’s childhood but also about her female relatives. Through these women, we see the juxtaposition of strength and powerlessness, of warriors and ghosts, of Chinese and Chinese-American. For Hong Kingston, being able to use one’s voice meant being […]