2023 Book Club List

November:
The Personal Librarian
Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
The remarkable, little-known story of Belle da Costa Greene -- J.  P. Moran's personal librarian -- who became one of the most power women in New York despite the dangerous secret she kept.  An African American of lighter complexion, Greene preserves her "white" identity to make her dreams come true in a racist world. 

October:
What Happened to You?:  Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing
Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey

Through deeply personal conversations, Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”  It is an approach to trauma that allows us to understand our pasts in order to clear a path to our future.

September: 

Their Eyes Were Watching God 
Zora Neale Hurston

Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person -- no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.  

August: 

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
Gaia Vince

Not enough of us are confronting one of climate change's biggest and most present consequences: a total reshaping of the earth's human geography.  As Vince points out, global migration has doubled in the past decade, on track to see literal billions displaced in the coming decades.  She tells us how the changes already in play will transform our food, our cities, our politics, and much more.  Her findings are answers we all need, now more than ever.  

July:

Kindred
Octavia E. Butler

Dana, a modern Black woman, is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him.  Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time is more dangerous, until it is uncertain whether Dana's life will end. 

June:

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
Imani Perry

This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life. Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other.

May:
As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
Dino Gilio-Whittaker

Through the unique lens of "Indigenized environmental justice," Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. The Standing Rock protest put a national spotlight on Indigenous activists. Ultimately, she argues, modern environmentalists must look to the history of Indigenous resistance for wisdom and inspiration in our common fight for a just and sustainable future.

April: 
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
Marjane Satrapi

In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity.



March:
The  Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times
Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams

In a world that seems so troubled, how do we hold on to hope? In The Book of Hope, Jane focuses on her “Four Reasons for Hope”: The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit. Filled with engaging dialogue and pictures from Jane’s storied career, The Book of Hope is a deeply personal conversation with one of the most beloved figures in today’s world.


February:
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane
Lisa See
In their remote mountain village, Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. When Li-yan has a baby out of wedlock she leaves her, wrapped in a blanket with a tea cake tucked in its folds, near an orphanage in a nearby city. Her daughter, Haley, is raised in California by loving adoptive parents. Over the course of years, each searches for meaning in the study of Pu’er, the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for centuries.
    and
The Island of Sea Women
Lisa See
Set on the Korean island of Jeju, The Island of Sea Women follow Mi-ja and Young-sook as they work in the sea with their village's all-female diving collective. Over many decades, including the Japanese colonialism of the 1930s and 1940s, World War II, and the Korean War, forces outsides their control push their relationship to the breaking point. 


January:

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
Patrick Radden Keefe

The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions: Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis. Empire of Pain is a compelling masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing.

2022 Book Club List

November:
Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships
Nina Totenberg 

Celebrated NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg delivers an extraordinary memoir of her personal successes, struggles, and life-affirming relationships, including her beautiful friendship of nearly fifty years with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

October:
Tastes Like War 

Grace M. Cho

Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would evolve for the rest of her life. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia, learning to cook dishes from her parent’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present. 

September:
The Seed Keeper
Diane Wilson

Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of the Dakota people. One morning, Ray doesn't return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato.  After spending 28 years on her white husband's farm which had been threatened by drought and a predatory chemical company, she returns to her childhood home as a widow. The Seed Keeper weaves together the voices of four indelible women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools.

July and August:
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
Nikole Hannah-Jones

In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa, the start of an American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years, and the source of so much that still defines the United States.
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story builds on The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project." It weaves together eighteen essays along with poems and fiction that reveal a new origin story for the United States, one that helps explain not only the persistence of anti-Black racism and inequality in American life today, but also the roots of what makes the country unique.

June:
The Ungrateful Refugee
Dina Nayeri

To be a refugee is to grapple with your place in society in a new, unfamiliar home, all while bearing the burden of gratitude in your host nation. Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother, eventually gaining asylum in America. She offers a new understanding of refugee life, calling attention to the harmful way in which Western governments privilege certain dangers over others. Here are real stories of what it is like to be forced to flee your home, and to journey across borders in the hope of starting afresh.

May:
The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: a Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore 

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future.  Bringing the latest ecological research together with the histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other uprisings, Patel and Moore propose a way of understanding and reclaiming the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.

April:
The Girl with the Louding Voice
Abi Dare' 

The unforgettable inspiring story of a teenage girl growing up in a rural Nigerian village who longs to get an education so that she can find her "louding voice" and speak up for herself, The Girl with the Louding Voice is a simultaneously heartbreaking and triumphant tale about the power of fighting for your dreams.   

March:
Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil
Deborah Rodriguez 

Soon after the fall of the Taliban, in 2001, Deborah Rodriguez went to Afghanistan as part of a group offering humanitarian aid. A hairdresser and mother of two from Michigan, Rodriguez was eagerly sought out by Westerners for good haircuts by Afghan women. with a long and proud tradition of running their own beauty salons. With the help of sponsors, the Kabul Beauty School is born, an extraordinary community of women who come together and learn the arts of perms, friendship, and freedom.

February:
Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months that Transformed the Supreme Court
Linda Greenhouse

At the end of the Supreme Court's 2019-20 term, the center was holding. By the end of the 2020-21 term, the right-wing supermajority had cemented Donald Trump's legacy on American jurisprudence. Greenhouse, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her Supreme Court coverage, gives us unique insight into a court under stress, providing the brilliant analysis readers of her work in The New York Times have come to expect. Ultimately, she asks a fundamental question: Is this still John Roberts's Supreme Court, or does it now belong to Donald Trump?

January:
Our Time Is Now
Stacey Abrams

Celebrated national leader and bestselling author Stacey Abrams offers a blueprint to end voter suppression, empower our citizens, and take back our country. Abrams chronicles a chilling account of how the right to vote and the principle of democracy have been and continue to be under attack. Abrams would have been the first African American woman governor, but experienced these effects firsthand, despite running the most innovative race in modern politics as the Democratic nominee in Georgia. The book compellingly argues for the importance of robust voter protections, an elevation of identity politics, engagement in the census, and a return to moral international leadership.

2021 Book Club List

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality
Danielle Allen

Allen finds new meaning in Jefferson's understanding of equality, detailing the Declaration’s case that freedom rests on equality. The contradictions between ideals and reality in a document that perpetuated slavery are also brilliantly tackled by Allen, whose cogently written and beautifully designed book “is must-reading for all who care about the future as well as the origins of America’s democracy” (David M. Kennedy).

American Dirt

2020 Book Club List

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech