Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

  The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series resumed on Saturday Dec. 5th. There were 13 of us on the session. This book: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You , is a YA version of an Ibram X. Kendi book called Stamped From the Beginning . This time, Jason Reynolds used the material from  Ibram X. Kendi's book to present a book that's more readable for teens. One of our members, Laura, shared that she had never read YA (Young Adult) before and she was unfamiliar with some of the words and phrases that mostly young people use. She called this a generation gap.  I found out so many facts in this book and asked the group if there were things they didn't know which were revealed in this book as well. Barbara shared with us that she didn't realize that one of the main reasons the colonies revolted against England was so that they could keep slavery. This is a good place to re-emphasize that this YA edition is a scaled-down version of the original. Whereas Stamped From ...

  The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday Oct. 17th. Eleven of us met over Zoom. This amazing book begins in 1830 when 11 year-old George Washington Black is a field slave on a sugar plantation called Faith in Barbados. His caretaker, a field slave herself, is the indomitable Big Kit. One night he and Big Kit are called upon to serve dinner at the master's house, something highly unlikely, since field slaves never go into the Master's House.  While serving this dinner, the master's brother Christopher examines "Wash" and decides he's just the right size to assist him on his "cloud-cutter," a kind of hot air balloon and implores his brother to let the child become his assistant. Christopher tells Wash to call him "Titch," and encourages him to read, to draw, and to find various plants and animals for study. But he's also a servant. Titch likes to act the part of the great abolitionist but it's questiona...

  Brother by David Chariandy  Book Discussion of Brother by David Chariandy   The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday September 12. Thirteen of us met over Zoom to discuss Brother by Canadian author David Chariandy.  We all were struck so much with the poetic and multi-sensory language of the book, while telling a story that’s so heartbreaking. Two brothers, Michael and Francis are growing up in a housing complex with their single mom in Toronto. It’s implied that their father still lives in the same city but has nothing to do with them. The mother regularly strings together three jobs just so they can have groceries. Their mom is a Trinidadian immigrant who warns her sons repeatedly to take advantage of education and not become “hardened” so that they can be able to have a better life.   Michael is in love with a girl from his school named Aisha who is extremely smart. She actually wins a  university scholarship. But ...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower , a science fiction novel written in 1993. The setting for the novel begins in 2014 when the main character, Lauren Olemina is only 15 years old. She and her family live in a walled community surrounded by horrors going on right outside of her neighborhood that eventually spill in.   Although Lauren’s dad is a Baptist minister, Lauren creates a religion called Earthseed that becomes her guiding principal. She wrote a Bible called Earthseed: The Books of the Living. All that you touch You Change All that you Change Changes you. The Only Lasting Truth is Change. God Is Change. When forced to travel by foot from Southern California to Northern California, Lauren becomes a leader of a small group traveling with her. She also suffers a condition called “hyperempathy” which makes her feel the physical pain of others. All of us in our discus...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued via Zoom during the COVID 19 shutdown! Eleven us met on a Zoom conference and I must say that it was a very beneficial meeting! The man at the center of the book, William "Juneboy" Outlaw III logged in and answered all of our questions while giving us background on his life that wasn't included in the book. Outlaw had been one of the biggest drug dealers and gang leader in New Haven and is now a community activist and motivational speaker. He works with the group: CT VIP (Connecticut Violence Intervention Program. The book is amazingly narrative, reading almost like a best-selling novel. Charles Barber of Wesleyan University is the author, but this is truly Juneboy's story. He said it took five years to write the book and the publishers edited out a great deal of material. There is talk of a movie project in the works! Outlaw expressed his disappointment with the publisher's decision to leave out ...

In honor of National Poetry Month, our selection for The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series  is   Good Woman:  Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980,   by Lucille Clifton .   A work that consists of her first four published collections and her 1976 memoir.  This combined manuscript was published in 1987 by BOA Editions. and is accessible through hoopladigital.com. Lucille Clifton was bo rn Thelma Lucille Sayles in 1936 and passed away in 2010. Clifton was an African- American poet, children’s book author, and educator from Buffalo ,   New York.   From 1979 to 1985 she was  Poet Laureate of Maryland and was nominated twice in the same year as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.   Although Lucille Clifton went on to publish six more manuscripts after   good woman , this particular book was chosen because it includes both her early poetry and her memoir.  The memoir,entitled   Generations ...

A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Louisiana parrish where the people live on the same plantations that they had lived as slaves one hundred years before. The setting is 1948. The main characters are Jefferson, who gets sentenced to the electric chair, Grant Wiggins, the teacher who wishes he could escape from the parish, Reverend Ambrose, Grant's Aunt (Tante Lou), and Jefferson's godmother (Miss Emma), who convinces Grant to visit her godson in jail and to make a man out of him before he dies. Another character in the book is Vivian, a married (but working on a divorce) teacher who Grant loves. The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday Feb. 22 with a discussion of this work by Ernest J. Gaines. We began the meeting by watching an eight minute video segment of Mr. Gaines being interviewed for the National Endowment for the Arts. There were sixteen of us, men and women, Black and white. A Lesson Before Dying was published in 1993 and won t...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued with a conversation about the book Black is the Body: Stories From My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time and Mine . We met on Saturday Jan. 11 and again on Monday Jan. 13. This was our first time having the same book discussion on the Monday after for those who couldn't make it on Saturday. The book is a collection of 12 essays written during the course of many years that have recently been published together as a loosely comprised memoir. The book begins with the author being stabbed in 1994 and all the health problems that have been the result of the stabbing. She, along with six others in a coffee shop, was randomly attacked by a stranger. Over the years since this incident, the author has attempted to tell the story of race, specifically how the stabbing of a Black woman by a white man can be used as a metaphor for the violence suffered by her ancestors by whites in this country.  Dr. Bernard is a prolif...