Book Club: What are you reading?

[Sunshine]

Ok, that’s good, because I couldn’t figure out why it won awards. Clearly it speaks to lots of readers. I might be in the minority.!

[Sunshine]

I am reading a great book, All Over But the Shoutin by Rick Bragg
I highly recommend it. He grew up in soul crushing poverty in Alabama and honors his mother for her strength and fortitude. He became a famous journalist, write for the NYT, beautiful essays on the forgotten , the traumatized, on his time in Haiti, on the South etc.

Anyway, I can imagine him writing a story about many of us here. Who struggle but maintain their honor and dignity.

Someone once said Bragg lent dignity to his subjects. He refuted it and he essentially said he highlighted the dignity that was already there.

I highly recommend the book, if you like to read. It’s in my Top Ten books I’ve read in the last 20 years.

[Lazarus]

Earning The Rockies by Robert Kaplan. ( How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World.). He is telling the story of America’s power in this non fiction readable journey through the country..So far, that’s what I got! Impressive.

This is what I copied from the PBS website about the book:

It “is a mix of road trip, memoir, history and political analysis by Robert D. Kaplan, a geopolitical thinker and bestselling author of 18 books on foreign affairs and travel. Through the lens of landscape, the book examines where we’ve been as a country, where we are today and where we may be going.

In a review of the book in The New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote that “Earning the Rockies” was written prior to the 2016 election, but “there is more insight here into the Age of Trump than in bushels of political-horse-race journalism.”

In the coming days, we’ll post discussion questions for the book, an annotated excerpt, and writing advice from the author.

[agate]

13 Stradomska Street: A Memoir of Exile and Return by Andrew Potok.


I had read another book by this author years ago. At the time the Seattle-area Talking Books library had its own radio station, and you could get a radio on loan from them and listen to its programming. Sometimes books were read. You'd listen each day at a certain time for the next installment of whatever books you were interested in. Or maybe it was Dick Estell, whose book readings were offered on a local radio station each evening, who read this book. In any case I had read (=listened to) another book by this author back then--Ordinary Daylight : An Artist Comes to Terms with Loss of Sight. He tells about his experiences with his diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa, a rare genetically related disorder that causes a slow decline into blindness.

In 13 Stradomska Street, written when the author was 85, he discusses his involvement in a piece of real estate in Poland that should have been his. His family had left Poland (or stayed to face concentration camps) during the Holocaust. The real estate issue is far less important in the book than is his account of his life and his reflections on many different topics. This book has been well worth reading.

Some information about him here:

https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/ed...ok-andrew-1931

[ssusan]

Loving ,’Cutting for Stone’ By Abraham Verghese

[Lazarus]

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Loving ,’Cutting for Stone’ By Abraham Verghese

Great ."I read it and liked it a lot too.

[Sunshine]

People call it one of the great books. I tried it, but couldnt get into it. Strange to have such different reading likes!