Thirteen of us met on Saturday February 8 th to discuss Medgar & Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story that Awakened America by Joy-Ann Reid. This non-fiction book, published in February 2024, chronicles the courtship and marriage of Medgar and Myrlie Evers. At the time of their meeting, he was a WWII veteran who was returning to college after his time in the military. She was a 17-year-old college freshman who was majoring in Education. Myrlie’s aunt and grandmother, who raised her, discouraged her from dating an “older man” who just back from Europe, and was ready to be treated like a man by white Mississippians. Barb L. started us out, saying, "It was the early chapters of their lives and of their romance, it was beautiful but then for me it just got harder and harder, the granular details of what it was like in Mississippi and all of the terrible things that happened." Robin added, "I think the book was really beautifully done and easy to read. I c...
The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series met for the last session of 2024 by discussing Henry Threadgill’s Easily Slip into Another World . This was a greatly detailed biography of Threadgill’s life as a musician and composer. His music, while sounding strictly improvisational, is atctually written ; Threadgill makes the point that this is serious music composition. He studied at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. He plays various instruments himself and has created bands over the years which he performed with all over the world. The bands he formed include Air, The Henry Threadgill Sextett (with two t’s on the end,) and Zooid. The book covers years and years of Threadgill’s life. He was born in 1944 . In the early 1970s he played in the Army Concert Band in Vietnam and in 2016 he won the Pulitzer Prize for music. There were only eight of us in our discussion this time, several of our members were still away for the holidays. Marian starte...