Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

  Book Discussion May 16, 2026   Jackson, Ketanji Brown: Lovely One: a Memoir  2024   The title Lovely One is the English translation of Justice Jackson’s African name: Katanji Onyika. Justice Jackson is the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court. Her book is a true autobiography, describing her grandparents, her parents, and she and her brothe r growing up.   She goes into great detail about her school years on the Debate Team and the visits to her grandparents' house fo llowing church services on Sundays. She describes her college life at Harvard , her years in musical theatre and performance oration, and the many jobs in the legal profession . It also chronicles her family life as an adult with a husband and two children.      Only five of us met this time, there seemed to be a lot of family obligations/celebrations going on this weekend, since it’s graduation season and class reunion season .    One of our regular at...

Book Discussion of Never Far from Home Feb. 10, 2024   Fifteen of us met on Saturday Feb. 10th for our first book discussion of the year. We talked about Never Far from Home: My Journey from Brooklyn to Hip Hop, and the Law by Bruce Jackson. Bruce Jackson is a managing attorney at Microsoft. His story began in Brooklyn, then to the Amsterdam Housing Projects in Manhattan, and on to Georgetown Law School. He worked a while in entertainment law, and after music began to be delivered over a digital platform, Jackson decided he needed to learn all he could about the digital world, a decision that led him to Microsoft.  Barb M. Started off our talk by saying, “He started getting all these epiphanies. The thing I felt most threatened by, yet impressed by, while reading this, is that he was just a hair away from being a tragedy, and I think that's a common story and not an unusual story.   Barb L. reminded us of how he hid his musical theater activities from his street f...