Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America
by Sharon Davies
It was among the most notorious criminal cases of its day. On August 11,1921, in Birmingham, Alabama, a fiercely xenophobic Methodist minister named Edwin Stephenson shot and killed a Catholic priest, James Coyle, in broad daylight and in front of numerous witnesses. The killer's motive? The priest had married Stephenson's eighteen-year-old daughter Ruth to Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican migrant and practicing Catholic.
Having all but disappeared from historical memory, Sharon Davies's Rising Road resurrects the murder of Father Coyle and the trial of his killer. As Davies reveals with novelistic richness, Stephenson's crime laid bare the most potent bigotries of the age: a hatred not only of Negroes, but of Catholics and "foreigners" as well. In one of the case's most unexpected turns, the minister hired future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to lead his defense. Through registered later in life as a civil rights champion, in 1921 Black was just months away from donning the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, the secret order that financed Stephenson's defense. Entering a plea of temporary insanity, Black defended the minister on claims that the Catholics had robbed Ruth away from her true Protestant faith, and that her Puerto Rican husband was actually a Negro—an unparalleled attack on the dominant religious and racial hierarchies of the day—to persuade the jury to condone the priest's murder.
Placing the story in social and historical context, Davies brings this heinous crime and its aftermath back to life, in a brilliant and engrossing examination of the wages of prejudice and a trial that shook the nation at the height of Jim Crow.
Religious, economic, political and ethnic divisions around the world are dramatically illuminated using the world's most popular sport as a lens and metaphor. A groundbreaking work.
Soccer is much more than a game, or even a way of life. In fact, it's a perfect window into the cross–currents of today's world, with all of its joys and sorrows. Soccer clubs don't represent geographic areas; they stand for social classes and political ideologies. And unlike baseball or tennis, soccer is freighted with the weight of ancient hatreds and history. It's a sport with real stakes –– one that is capable of ruining regimes and launching liberation movements.In this remarkably insightful, wide–ranging work of reportage, Franklin Foer takes us on a surprising tour through the world of soccer, shattering the myths of our new global age. Instead of destroying local cultures, as the left predicted, globalization has revived tribalism. Far from the triumph of capitalism that the right predicted, it has entrenched corruption. From Brazil to Bosnia, and Italy to Iran, this is an eye–opening chronicle of how a beautiful sport and its fanatical followers can highlight the fault lines of a society, whether it's terrorism, poverty, anti–Semitism, or radical Islam –– issues that now have an impact on all of us. Filled with blazing intelligence, colourful characters, wry humour, and an equal passion for soccer and humanity, How Soccer Explains the World is an utterly original book that makes sense of our troubled times.
Alright, get to voting, people and we'll meet sometime at the end of July...say Tuesday the 27th?
"Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant in the blink of an eye - that actually aren't as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?" In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple: the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of "blink": the election of Warren Harding; New Coke; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police. Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing" - filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.
At age thirty-five, Cami Walker was burdened by a battle with multiple sclerosis, a chronic neurological condition that made it difficult for her to walk, work, or enjoy her life. Seeking a remedy for her depression after being hospitalized, she received an uncommon prescription from an African medicine woman: Give to others for 29 days.29 Gifts is the insightful story of the author’s life change as she embraces and reflects on the naturally reciprocal process of giving and receiving. Many of Walker’s gifts were simple —a phone call, spare change, a Kleenex. Yet the acts were transformative. By Day 29, not only had Walker’s health and happiness improved, but she had created a worldwide giving movement.
The book also includes personal essays from others whose lives changed for the better by giving, plus pages for the reader to record their own journey. More than a memoir, 29 Gifts offers inspiring lessons on how a simple daily practice of altruism can dramatically alter your outlook on the world.
Go on and get your votes in. How's about we aim to meet May 18? I'm out of town the following week, so if not then, could we meet at the beginning of June? If we did that, we could have icebox cake, as my birthday is actually in June. Booyah.
The Bham Bluestockings
A "bluestocking" is defined as:
a woman with considerable scholarly, literary, or intellectual ability or interest.
maybe? perhaps? too cheesy? thoughts?
It is typical of Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez that it will be many pages before his narrative circles back to the ice, and many chapters before the hero of One Hundred Years of Solitude, BuendÃa, stands before the firing squad. In between, he recounts such wonders as an entire town struck with insomnia, a woman who ascends to heaven while hanging laundry, and a suicide that defies the laws of physics:
A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the BuendÃa house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
"Holy Mother of God!" Úrsula shouted.
The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by José Arcadio BuendÃa and occupied by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor's name: his sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons, Aureliano José, Aureliano Segundo, and José Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the women--the two Úrsulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar--who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years of Solitude does the trick. Civil war rages throughout, hearts break, dreams shatter, and lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow's outlines bleeding through the vibrant colors of GarcÃa Márquez's magical realism. Consider, for example, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, whom José Arcadio BuendÃa has killed in a fight. So lonely is the man's shade that it haunts BuendÃa's house, searching anxiously for water with which to clean its wound. BuendÃa's wife, Úrsula, is so moved that "the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the stove she understood what he was looking for, and from then on she placed water jugs all about the house."
With One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez introduced Latin American literature to a world-wide readership. Translated into more than two dozen languages, his brilliant novel of love and loss in Macondo stands at the apex of 20th-century literature.
"Well, one time she fell in love; the next minute - in an apparently unrelated event - an unprecedented short person played with a roller skate on the floor. Without this new one (and presumably his ilk) she had absurdly considered her life full. When Petie was young, she assumed Petie would make his life around her--were they not miraculously, deliriously as one? Then the next minute this same one propped his own boggling-new, hitherto-nowhere child in his arms to display to her as if she had never seen such a thing. Who had? It was as if the tide came in under the door."
Emmett O'Neal Library Annual Book Sale
Friday, February 26
10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Saturday, February 27
10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Sunday, February 28
1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
that's right. 8 books (including 3 hardback) for $20. i highly recommend it.
(of course, if you are going to look for our new book club book there, i am sorry but i purchased the only one...:))
A Valentine's
Event!
Saturday, February 13
Join us for a
Cookie-Decorating
Happy Hour
From 5:00pm to 7:00pm
Bring your friends or a date!
Go home with 6 decorated cookies
$20 per person/BYOB
Sign up by Friday, February 5th
