|
|
Fair
Housing Book Club
Books We've Read to Date:
The
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
by Kevin Boyle
According to www.schulerbooks.com, this National Book Award winning read
tells the electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided
the City of Detroit and ignited the civil rights struggle. In 1925, Detroit
was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights.
The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to
compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK
in ascendance and rising violence. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor—grandson
of a slave—had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of
his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival
to his new home, a mob gathered outside and shots rang from inside and
out. Tragedy struck: Sweet, or one of his friends, had accidentally killed
one of the whites that were threatening their lives and homes.
And so it began—a chain of events that brought America’s greatest
attorney, Clarence Dorrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a
controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police
investigation and courtroom drama of Sweet’s murder trial into an
unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile
America of the 1920’s and movingly re-creates the Sweet family’s
journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class.
Ossian Sweet’s story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is
an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his era’s changing
times.
Author Kevin Boyle was born in 1960 and grew up in Detroit. He received
a bachelor’s degree from the University of Detroit Mercy and a graduate
degree from the University of Michigan. He is currently a professor of
history at Ohio State University.
A
Stronger Kinship: One Town’s Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith
by Anna-Lisa Cox
In the heartland of the United States 150 years ago, where racism and
hatred were common, a community decided there could be a different America.
Here schools and churches were completely integrated, blacks and whites
intermarried, and power and wealth were shared by both races. But for
this to happen, the town's citizens had to keep secrets, break the laws
of the world outside, and sweep aside fear and embrace hope. In a historical-detective
feat, Anna-Lisa Cox uncovers the heartening story of this community that
took the road untaken. Beginning in the 1860s, the people of Covert, Michigan,
attempted to do what then seemed impossible: love one's neighbor--regardless
of skin color--as oneself. Drawing on diaries, oral histories, and contemporary
records, Cox gives us intimate glimpses of Covert's people, from William
Conner, the Civil War veteran who went on to become Michigan's first black
justice of the peace, to Elizabeth Gillard, who, shipwrecked and washed
onto Covert's shores, ultimately came to love the unusual community she
would call home. In bringing these and other stories of this small town
to light, Cox presents a vision of what our nation might have been, and
could be. (www.astrongerkinship.com)
Seven Laurels: A Novel by Linda Busby Parker
About Seven Laurels (on www.amazon.com): Set in a small community between
Montgomery and Birmingham, this first novel brings home the historic struggle
for civil rights through the personal story of one man and his family
from the 1950s onward. Brewster McAtee hears all about the political ferment
of the times--the protests, sit-ins, and assassinations--but he just wants
to buy his own land, make a success of his woodcraft business, and raise
his family.
No
Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement
by Joseph Shapiro
From Publishers Weekly (on www.amazon.com): Shapiro, social policies writer
for U.S. News & World Report , centers his empathetic review of our
society's relations to its disabled population on the 1992 passage of
the Americans with Disabilities Act. He documents the political progress
of the issue with stories about several of the nation's estimated 35 million
disabled people. Included are polio-afflicted activists, Special Olympics
competitors, armed services veterans and elderly people who owe their
survival to medical and technological advances. While the author cites
encouraging signs of progress made in the advance of their rights, he
notes that disabled people still struggle to be accepted on equal, independent
terms without being patronized, segregated or victimized in an antiquated
social services system and a prejudiced society.
Them
by Nathan McCall
From Publishers Weekly (on www.amazon.com): The embattled characters who
people McCall's trenchant, slyly humorous debut novel (following the 1994
memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler and a 1997 essay collection) can't escape
gentrification, whether as victim or perpetrator. As he turns 40, Barlowe
Reed, who is black, moves to buy the home he's long rented in Atlanta's
Old Fourth Ward, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr. His timing is
bad: whites have taken note of the cheap, rehab-ready houses in the historically
black neighborhood and, as Barlowe's elderly neighbor says to him, They
comin. Skyrocketing housing prices and the new neighbors' presumptuousness
anger Barlowe, whose 20-something nephew is staying with him, and other
longtime residents, who feel invaded and threatened. Battle lines are
drawn, but when a white couple moves in next door to Barlowe, the results
are surprising. Masterfully orchestrated and deeply disturbing illustrations
of the depth of the racial divide play out behind the scrim of Barlowe's
awkward attempts to have conversations in public with new white neighbor
Sandy. McCall also beautifully weaves in the decades-long local struggle
over King's legacy, including the moment when a candidate for King's church's
open pulpit is rejected for linguistic lapses... unbefitting of the crisp
doctoral eloquence of Martin Luther King. McCall nails such details again
and again, and the results, if less than hopeful, are poignant and grimly
funny. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed
Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The
Tortilla Curtain by T.C.
Boyle
From the Publisher (on www.amazon.com): Men and women with brown faces
and strong backs who risk everything to cross the Mexican border and invade
the American Dream are the Okies of the 1990s. Two of them, Candido and
America Rincon, have come to Southern California and are living in a makeshift
camp deep in a ravine, fighting off starvation. At the top of Topanga
Canyon, Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered
sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a
sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. And from the moment
a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, the
two couples and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes
a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.
The
Help by Kathryn Stockett
From Publishers Weekly (on www.amazon.com): What perfect timing for this
optimistic, uplifting debut novel set during the nascent civil rights
movement in Jackson, Miss., where black women were trusted to raise white
children but not to polish the household silver. Eugenia Skeeter Phelan
is just home from college in 1962, and, anxious to become a writer, is
advised to hone her chops by writing about what disturbs you. The budding
social activist begins to collect the stories of the black women on whom
the country club sets relies and mistrusts, enlisting the help of Aibileen,
a maid who's raised 17 children, and Aibileen's best friend Minny, who's
found herself unemployed more than a few times after mouthing off to her
white employers. The book Skeeter puts together based on their stories
is scathing and shocking, bringing pride and hope to the black community,
while giving Skeeter the courage to break down her personal boundaries
and pursue her dreams. Assured and layered, full of heart and history,
this one has bestseller written all over it. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed
Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Levittown:
Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's
Legendary Suburb by David Kushner
From Publishers Weekly (on
www.amazon.com): Migration
to suburbia has long been an American ambition, but its allure was never
stronger than in the post-WWII years, when the fantasy of a dream house
played to the imagination of millions of Americans, especially returning
veterans. Already waiting for many of them was a model community on the
North Shore of Long Island called Levittown, the brainchild of Abraham
Levitt and his sons, William and Alfred, the nation’s first real
estate tycoons. But Levittown came with its own set of requirements: perfectly
manicured lawns, no fences and no black families. In 1957, as the Levitts
- by now massively successful and nationally lauded - had already expanded
to a second model city, two families challenged the segregationist policy:
one, a white Jewish Communist family, secretly arranged for the other,
a black family, to buy the house next door. In an entertaining round-robin
format, Kushner relays each party’s story in the lead up to a combustible
summer when the integration of America’s most famous suburb caused
the downfall of a titan and transformed the nation. Copyright © Reed
Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Annie's
Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret
by Steve Luxenberg.
From Booklist (on
www.amazon.com):
Throughout her life, Luxenberg's mother, Beth, reveled in her status as
an only child. Then, a few years before her death in 1999-and utterly
out of the blue-she admitted to having a mentally and physically disabled
younger sister named Annie, who died in 1972. Beth's failing health precluded
Luxenberg and his siblings from learning any more. After Beth's passing,
Luxenberg set out in search of answers. His dual roles as reporter and
son proved both blessing and curse; the journalist dug furiously for facts,
while the son wondered if long-buried secrets were best kept that way.
His questions were many: What prompted Annie's commitment, at age 21,
to Eloise Hospital, southeastern Michigan's sprawling psychiatric facility?
Why was there next to no record of her early years? Most baffling of all,
why did Beth, two years Annie's senior, refuse for so long to acknowledge
her sibling's existence? Armed with superb investigative skills and relentless
determination, Washington Post senior editor Luxenberg tracked down remaining
family and friends and interviewed an exhaustive list of experts who might
shed light on Annie's plight. Part memoir, part mystery, part history
of the mental-health movement, Annie's Ghosts is a fascinating account
of a life lived in the shadows and a family beset by despair. --Allison
Block
The
Memory Keepers Daughter by Kim Edwards
From Publishers Weekly (on
www.amazon.com):
Edwards's assured but schematic debut novel (after her collection, The
Secrets of a Fire King) hinges on the birth of fraternal twins, a healthy
boy and a girl with Down syndrome, resulting in the father's disavowal
of his newborn daughter. A snowstorm immobilizes Lexington, Ky., in 1964,
and when young Norah Henry goes into labor, her husband, orthopedic surgeon
Dr. David Henry, must deliver their babies himself, aided only by a nurse.
Seeing his daughter's handicap, he instructs the nurse, Caroline Gill,
to take her to a home and later tells Norah, who was drugged during labor,
that their son Paul's twin died at birth. Instead of institutionalizing
Phoebe, Caroline absconds with her to Pittsburgh. David's deception becomes
the defining moment of the main characters' lives, and Phoebe's absence
corrodes her birth family's core over the course of the next 25 years.
David's undetected lie warps his marriage; he grapples with guilt; Norah
mourns her lost child; and Paul not only deals with his parents' icy relationship
but with his own yearnings for his sister as well. Though the impact of
Phoebe's loss makes sense, Edwards's redundant handling of the trope robs
it of credibility. This neatly structured story is a little too moist
with compassion. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division
of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
One
Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus
From Booklist (on
www.amazon.com):
An American western with a most unusual twist, this is an imaginative
fictional account of the participation of May Dodd and others in the controversial
"Brides for Indians" program, a clandestine U.S. government^-sponsored
program intended to instruct "savages" in the ways of civilization
and to assimilate the Indians into white culture through the offspring
of these unions. May's personal journals, loaded with humor and intelligent
reflection, describe the adventures of some very colorful white brides
(including one black one), their marriages to Cheyenne warriors, and the
natural abundance of life on the prairie before the final press of the
white man's civilization. Fergus is gifted in his ability to portray the
perceptions and emotions of women. He writes with tremendous insight and
sensitivity about the individual community and the political and religious
issues of the time, many of which are still relevant today. This book
is artistically rendered with meticulous attention to small details that
bring to life the daily concerns of a group of hardy souls at a pivotal
time in U.S. history. --Grace Fill
Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
From Publishers Weekly (on www.amazon.com): As the Age of the Genome begins
to dawn, we will, perhaps, expect our fictional protagonists to know as
much about the chemical details of their ancestry as Victorian heroes
knew about their estates. If so, Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides) is ahead
of the game. His beautifully written novel begins: "Specialized readers
may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, 'Gender Identity in
5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites.' " The "me" of
that sentence, "Cal" Stephanides, narrates his story of sexual
shifts with exemplary tact, beginning with his immigrant grandparents,
Desdemona and Lefty. On board the ship taking them from war-torn Turkey
to America, they married-but they were brother and sister. Eugenides spends
the book's first half recreating, with a fine-grained density, the Detroit
of the 1920s and '30s where the immigrants settled: Ford car factories
and the tiny, incipient sect of Black Muslims. Then comes Cal's story,
which is necessarily interwoven with his parents' upward social trajectory.
Milton, his father, takes an insurance windfall and parlays it into a
fast-food hotdog empire. Meanwhile, Tessie, his wife, gives birth to a
son and then a daughter-or at least, what seems to be a female baby. Genetics
meets medical incompetence meets history, and Callie is left to think
of her "crocus" as simply unusually long-until she reaches the
age of 14. Eugenides, like Rick Moody, has an extraordinary sensitivity
to the mores of our leafier suburbs, and Cal's gender confusion is blended
with the story of her first love, Milton's growing political resentments
and the general shedding of ethnic habits. Perhaps the most wonderful
thing about this book is Eugenides's ability to feel his way into the
girl, Callie, and the man, Cal. It's difficult to imagine any serious
male writer of earlier eras so effortlessly transcending the stereotypes
of gender. This is one determinedly literary novel that should also appeal
to a large, general audience. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information,
Inc.
To
Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Harper
Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the
deep South -- and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent
hatred. One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird
has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty
million copies worldwide, served as the basis of an enormously popular
motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth
century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching,
and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent
prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through
the eyes of a young girl, as her father -- a crusading local lawyer --
risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible
crime.
The
House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Told in a series of vignettes stunning for their
eloquence, The House on Mango Street is Sandra Cisneros's greatly admired
novel of a young girl growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. Acclaimed
by critics, beloved by children, their parents and grandparents, taught
everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country,
and translated all over the world, it has entered the canon of coming-of-age
classics. Sometimes
heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous, The House on Mango Street tells
the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities
and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn't want to belong -- not to her rundown
neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperanza's
story is that of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing for
herself what she will become. (From http://sandracisneros.com/major_works.php?work=house).
Stealing
Buddha's Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen
As
a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Bich Nguyen
is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity. In the pre-PC
era Midwest, where the devoutly Christian blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jennifers
and Tiffanys reign supreme, the barely conscious desire to belong transmutes
into a passion for American food. More exotic seeming than her Buddhist
grandmother’s traditional specialties—spring rolls, delicate
pancakes stuffed with meats, herbsm and bean sprouts, fried shrimp cakes—the
campy, preservative-filled “delicacies” of mainstream America
capture her imagination. And in this remarkable book, the glossy branded
allure of such American foods as Pringles, Kit Kats, and Tollhouse cookies
become an ingenious metaphor for her struggle to fit in, to become a “real”
American, a distinction that brings with it the dream of the perfect school
lunch, burgers and Jell-O for dinner, and a visit from the Kool-Aid man.
Beginning
with Nguyen’s family’s harrowing migration out of Saigon in
1975, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner is also a portrayal of a diverse
family—Nguyen’s hard-working, hard-partying father, pretty
sister, and wise and nurturing grandmother, and Rosa, their Latina stepmother,
the loving, no-nonsense foil to Bich’s gastronomical and materialistic
fixations. Add to this the mystery of Nguyen’s birth mother, unveiled
movingly over the course of the book. Nostalgic and candid, deeply satisfying
and minutely observed, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner is a unique vision
of the immigrant experience and a lyrical ode to how identity is often
shaped by the things we long for.Stealing
Buddha's Dinner is a vivid, funny, and viscerally powerful memoir about
childhood, assimilation, food and growing up in the 1980s.
(From http://www.bichminhnguyen.com/about-the-book/)
Find
out about our
Annual Fair Housing Luncheon & Workshop Series
20
Hall Street SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49507
Tel: (616) 451-2980, Toll Free: 1-866-389-FAIR
Fax: (616) 451-2657 email: contact-us@fhcwm.org
|