2022 Book Club List
Currently reading for October 24:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.