Book Discussion Group Meeting, Saturday, June 2, 2018, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead was born in 1969 and grew up in Manhattan. He graduated from Harvard and worked for the Village Voice. He has published five novels in addition to The Underground Railroad, plus a volume of essays and one work of nonfiction. Whitehead is no stranger to this group. In 2011, we discussed his memoir of the 1980s, Sag Harbor. Here's a link to a post I did at the time of that group discussion. It provides an opportunity to see Whitehead when he was almost 10 years younger.

The more mature Whitehead can be seen in this video of a talk he gave at Google headquarters about The Underground Railroad.

Links to Reviews

Here are a couple of links to thoughtful reviews of The Underground Railroad (and other novels about slavery and the "underground railroad"): From The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker.

Book Discussion Group Meeting, Saturday, May 5, 2018, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter 

According to the only online source I could find that mentioned an actual birth date, Georgia Hunter was born  about 1978 (maybe). She grew up in Attleboro, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island and attended the University of Virginia.

When Hunter was 15 years old, she interviewed her grandmother for a school history project, and it was then that she found out about her family's Jewish heritage and history of Holocaust survival, but it wasn't until 2000 at a family reunion that she realized how large and far-flung her family was. Researching her family history morphed into her book of historical fiction, We Were the Lucky Ones, which was published in 2017. She currently lives in Connecticut with her husband and young sons.

Ms. Hunter's homepage contains a link to the blog that she kept at the time she was researching and writing her novel and also a page of advice for people who may be considering researching their own family history, particularly those whose families were affected by the Holocaust.

The Kurc family of Radom, Poland, in the early 1930s

In the video below, Georgia Hunter talks about how she researched her family history, what she found, and why she decided to turn her research into a novel instead of straightforward history.



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