Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday Nov. 23, 2019. Nine of us met and all agreed that this was a hard book to digest. Even though we talked for nearly two hours, we didn't have time to comment on all of it. Laura said these "were such horror stories, there's an overall feeling of danger lurking." The eight stories collected in the book are: " The Rockpile " " The Outing " " The Man Child " " Previous Condition " " Sonny's Blues " " This Morning, This Evening, So Soon " " Come Out the Wilderness " " Going to Meet the Man " Most of the stories seem to end with no resolution at all. I think that we're used to stories having some kind of satisfying ending, which Baldwin does not give. The other thing is that when Baldwin used flashbacks, there wasn't really any transitional phrase to cue the reader that what's being describ...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series met Saturday Aug. 25 with nine participants. We discussed Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.   It was a very timely discussion, since the book consists of eight articles Coates wrote for The Atlantic magazine, and has just announced his departure from the magazine to pursue other writing options.   The eight articles were written throughout the presidency of Barack Obama, one article for each year President Obama was in office. Although the “eight years of good Negro government” in this book refers to the presidency of Barack Obama, it also refers to the “good Negro government “ that took place during Reconstruction, a period in which the history books tell us that was riddled with corruption. More former slaves learned to read during this period, although it had been illegal for them to be taught to read just a few years before. More former slaves voted during this period, and more f...