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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Book Discussion Group Meeting, Saturday, April 7, 2018, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami

Introduction to Laila Lalami (lifted from Wikipedia as usual):

Laila Lalami was born and raised in Rabat, Morocco, where she earned her BA in English from Mohammed V University. In 1990, she received a British Council fellowship to study in England and completed an MA in Linguistics at University College, London. After graduating, she returned to Morocco and worked briefly as a journalist and commentator. In 1992 she moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California, from which she graduated with a PhD in Linguistics.

Lalami began writing fiction and nonfiction in English in 1996. Her literary criticism, cultural commentary, and opinion pieces have appeared in The Boston Globe, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere. In 2016, she was named both a columnist for The Nation magazine and a critic-at-large for The Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Her first book, the collection of short stories Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published in 2005. Her second book, the novel Secret Son, was published in 2009 and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. The Moor's Account, Lalami's third book, was published by Pantheon Books in September 2014. The novel is told from the perspective of Estebanico (or Estevanico), a Moroccan slave who was part of the ill-fated Narváez expedition, and who later became the first black explorer of America. The Moor's Account won the American Book Award., the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Lalami has received an Oregon Literary Arts grant, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was selected in 2009 by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader.

She is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

In the following video, Laila Lalami talks about The Moor's Account at the 2016 National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

If you want to visit Ms. Lalami's blog, which the interviewer refers to in the above video, click on this link here.

Based on a True Story

The Cathedral in Seville

As she mentioned in the interview, Ms. Lalami structured her story around the facts of the Narvaez expedition as related by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca in his statement to King Carlos V of Spain after returning from his adventures. She admits that the timeline of the original doesn't make much sense, but as best can be determined, this is the route that the expedition (and ultimate four survivors) took.

Sorry the red line delineating the route is hard to see. Here's another interpretation of the route showing the Dorantes/Estebanico expedition, the one in which Estebanico was reported to have been killed.

In 1990, a joint Spanish/Mexican movie was released about the ill-fated journey, which I have long believed had been nominated for a "Best Foreign Language Film" Academy Award, but apparently I was wrong. Be that as it may, it was one of my favorite movies from that era. Here are the first eight minutes of it that I was able to find on YouTube.



And just because Mustafa (AKA Estebanico) never made it back to Azzemour, I thought I'd take you back to where it all might have begun.

Azzemour Old City — photo by Ggia

Book Discussion Group Meeting, Saturday, March 3, 2018, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

Ivory-billed woodpecker (the Good Lord bird)

James McBride was born September 11, 1957. His father, Andrew was a Christian minister, and his mother, Ruth was a Polish Jewish immigrant who converted to Christianity upon her marriage. He was raised in Brooklyn's Red Hook housing projects and was the last of eight children Ruth had from her marriage to Rev. Andrew McBride, who died of cancer at age 45. Ruth eventually remarried and had four more children.

James McBride earned an undergraduate degree in music composition from Oberlin College in 1979, after which he earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. He went on to work for The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, the Wilmington News Journal, and People magazine. He also wrote pieces for Rolling Stone magazine, Us magazine, the Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Essence magazine, The New York Times, and others.

In 1995, McBride published his first bestseller, a memoir, The Color of Water, which dealt with the story of his family life and his relationship with his mother. Other novels included Miracle at St. Anna (2002), which was made into a movie by Spike Lee, and Song Yet Sung (2008). In 2013, he released The Good Lord Bird, for which he won the National Book Award for fiction. On September 22, 2016, President Barack Obama awarded McBride the 2015 National Humanities Medal "for humanizing the complexities of discussing race in America. Through writings about his own uniquely American story, and his works of fiction informed by our shared history, his moving stories of love display the character of the American family."

McBride is also an accomplished tenor saxophonist and has written songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Pura Fé, and Gary Burton. He was awarded the American Music Festival's Stephen Sondheim Award in 1993, the American Arts and Letters Richard Rodgers Award in 1996, and the inaugural ASCAP Richard Rodgers Horizons Award in 1996.

He is currently a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University. He has three children and lives between New York City and Lambertville, New Jersey.

The above biographic facts were plagiarized wholesale from Wikipedia as usual, but McBride's official biography is also worth a look. In it you will learn that:

... James has other talents. He's the worst dancer in the history of African Americans, bar none, going back to slavetime and beyond. He should be legally barred from dancing at any party he attends. He dances with one finger in the air like a white guy. He has other skills too. Like when he takes off his hat, fleas fly out. Stuff like that. Little things. Little talents.

In the following video, also on his biography page, James McBride talks about The Color of Water, his memoir about his mother, which sounds like a really good book.

In this second video, McBride talks about The Good Lord Bird, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, writing, and gentrification.

John Brown  

One of the proudest possessions of the poet Langston Hughes was a shawl that belonged to his grandmother's first husband, Lewis Leary, who died in John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. In the 1920s, Hughes wrote this poem:

October 16: The Raid by Langston Hughes
Perhaps
You will remember
John Brown.
John Brown
Who took his gun,
Took twenty-one companions
White and black,
Went to shoot your way to freedom
Where two rivers meet
And the hills of the
North
And the hills of the
South
Look slow at one another—
And died
For your sake.
Now that you are
Many years free,
And the echo of the Civil War
Has passed away,
And Brown himself
Has long been tried at law,
Hanged by the neck,
And buried in the ground—
Since Harpers Ferry
Is alive with ghosts today,
Immortal raiders
Come again to town—
Perhaps
You will recall

To help you remember John Brown, a good historical account that was recently published is Midnight Rising by Tony Horwitz (our group read another book of his, Confederates in the Attic). I also found a good blog, John Brown the Abolitionist, maintained by Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., an associate professor of church history at Alliance Theological Seminary, whose particular passion is all things John Brown and who believes that Brown's image should be changed from terrorist to hero.

Book Discussion Group Meeting, Saturday, February 3, 2018, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly 

Ms. Shetterly's biography is taken from the usual unimpeachable source, Wikipedia. I could have done more research to verify if it is accurate, but I chose to accept it as gospel.

Margot Lee was born in 1969 in Hampton, Virginia. Her father worked as a research scientist at NASA-Langley Research Center, and her mother was an English professor at the historically black Hampton University. Lee grew up knowing many African-American families with members who worked at NASA. She attended Phoebus High School and graduated from the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce.

After college, Lee moved to New York and worked several years in investment banking: first on the Foreign Exchange trading desk at J.P. Morgan, then on Merrill Lynch's Fixed Income Capital Markets desk. She shifted to the media industry, working at a variety of startup ventures, including the HBO-funded website Volume.com. She married writer Aran Shetterly.

In 2005, the Shetterlys moved to Mexico to found an English-language magazine called Inside Mexico. Directed to the numerous English-speaking expats in the country, it operated until 2009. From 2010 through 2013, the couple worked as content marketing and editorial consultants to the Mexican tourism industry.

Shetterly began researching and writing Hidden Figures in 2010. In 2014, she sold the film rights to the book to William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, and it was optioned by Donna Gigliotti of Levantine Films. The Fox 2000 feature film was released in 2016, and stars Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, and Kevin Costner.

In 2013, Shetterly founded The Human Computer Project, an organization whose mission is to archive the work of all of the women who worked as computers and mathematicians in the early days of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

A Hidden Figures children's book will be released in January 2018. The book will be co-written by Shetterly and will be geared towards children four to eight years old.

The video below is from Al-Jazeera America and is a discussion about Hidden Figures and women in STEM with a panel including Margot Shetterly plus a mechanical engineering student and the first African American woman to get a degree in astrophysics from Yale.

Book Discussion Group Meeting, Saturday, January 6, 2018, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henriquez

Cristina Henriquez was born in Delaware in 1977. Her father was an immigrant from Panama. She received her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In addition to The Book of Unknown Americans, which was published in 2014, Henriquez has written two other books: The World in Half, a novel published in 2009; and Come Together, Fall Apart, containing a novella and eight short stories published in 2006. She has also written fiction and nonfiction for numerous periodicals and anthologies. She now lives in Chicago with her family.

In the video below, Henriquez talks about The Book of Unknown Americans, and what influenced her to write it. (You're probably going to need to turn your sound way up to hear this.)



Growing out of The Book of Unknown Americans, Cristina Hernandez has started an Unknown Americans tumblr page where immigrants to the US are invited to tell their unique stories.



You can visit the Unknown Americans Project here.

Book Discussion Group, Saturday, December 2, 2017, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman 

Antonina Zabinski and Friends

The Author: Diane Ackerman

From The Encyclopedia Britannica: Diane Ackerman was born as Diane Fink in Waukegan, IL, in 1948. She attended Penn State and Cornell and taught at the University of Pittsburgh and at Washington University in St. Louis. She was a staff writer on The New Yorker from 1988 through 1994. Much of her poetry and prose has been influenced by the natural world. Among her full-length works are A Natural History of the Senses (1990), A Natural History of Love (1994), and An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain (2004).

In the video below, Diane Ackerman discusses The Zookeeper's Wife and it's themes:



The Real-Life Story 

Magdalena Gross and one of her sculptures

As you will know from reading the book, there really was a bombed-out Warsaw Zoo, a zookeeper, and his wife and child who served the Polish version of the Underground Railroad, smuggling Jews out of Warsaw during the German occupation. On a site named "History versus Hollywood," there is a page devoted to comparing the 2017 movie based on the book to the real-life participants. I was also able to find another page, "The House Under a Wacky Star," that goes into more depth (with pictures) about the history of the zoo, the Zabinski family, and some of the zoo's wartime guests.

For those of you interested in seeing the movie, here is an official trailer: