Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

  The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City by Nicholas Dawidoff                                                             The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued August 26 th . Sixteen of us met to discuss this disturbing non-fiction book. The Other Side of Prospect begins with the murder of Pete Fields, a senior citizen on a residential street in New Haven and an innocent teenager named Bobby being charged with the murder and serving nine years in prison.   The author describes the world of this neighborhood, called Newhallville, starting with the Black people who came to New Haven from South Carolina during the Great Migration, the good-paying jobs they were able to get at the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, the properties they bought, and the community they...

  Notes from Book Discussion Mar. 4, 2023   Angela Davis, an Autobiography ©1974, 1988, 2021   Fourteen of us met on Saturday March 4 th to discuss Angela Davis: An Autobiography . This is the newest edition of her autobiography and the prefaces to the first, second, and now third editions are included at the beginning.   I admitted to the group that I had a little trouble reading this book . I’m sure that I read the autobiography when I was younger and remember harboring some ingrained prejudice against communism , due to indoctrination, not at all by my own logic or reasoning.   I think when I was very young and I read this I was like “ Communists , Oh my God ! ” I was a lso a little put off by the structure. I started our discussion by having the group turn to the Table of Contents and review each section.   Part One is “ Nets, ” Nets begins when she was underground in New York as a result of what had happened when she was in California . The ...