Bridging Differences Book Group

Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Our October 4th meeting (7-8:15pm at Malaprop's) will focus on living wage issues. We'll discuss Nickel and Dimed and be joined by Vicki Meath, the executive director of Just Economics, a Western NC nonprofit whose mission is to educate, advocate and organize for a just and sustainable local economy.

Tamar Jacoby, REINVENTING THE MELTING POT: The New Immigrants and What it Means to Be American

In Reinventing the Melting Pot, twenty-one of the writers who have thought longest and hardest about immigration come together around a surprising consensus: yes, immigrant absorption still works-and given the number of newcomers arriving today, the nation's future depends on it. But it need not be incompatible with ethnic identity-and we as a nation need to find new ways to talk about and encourage becoming American. In the wake of 9/11 it couldn't be more important to help these newcomers find a way to fit in. Running through these essays is a single common theme: Although ethnicity plays a more important role now than ever before, today's newcomers can and will become Americans and enrich our national life-reinventing the melting pot and reminding us all what we have in common.

About the Author

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Tamar Jacoby is a journalist formerly on staff at The New York Review of Books, Newsweek, and The New York Times, where she was deputy editor of the op-ed page. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, she writes frequently about race and other social issues for the The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Commentary, Dissent, and other publications.

Alex Kotlowitz, THERE ARE NO CHILDREN HERE

Here's a review of this month's book:

There Are No Children Here, the true story of brothers Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, ages 11 and 9 at the start, brings home the horror of trying to make it in a violence-ridden public housing project. The boys live in a gang-plagued war zone on Chicago's West Side, literally learning how to dodge bullets the way kids in the suburbs learn to chase baseballs. "If I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver," says Lafeyette at one point. That's if, not when--spoken with the complete innocence of a child. The book's title comes from a comment made by the brothers' mother as she and author Alex Kotlowitz contemplate the challenges of living in such a hostile environment: "There are no children here," she says. "They've seen too much to be children." This book humanizes the problem of inner-city pathology, makes readers care about Lafeyette and Pharoah more than they may expect to, and offers a sliver of hope buried deep within a world of chaos.

Leah Hager Cohen, TRAIN GO SORRY: Inside a Deaf World

During our April 5th gathering (Malaprop's, 7pm), we will discuss Leah Hager Cohen's Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World, joined by special guest, poet Laura Hope-Gill, director of Asheville WordFest a poetry festival which takes place in late April or early May and features authentic poets and humans and poetry as a form of citizen journalism.

Laura will explore with us the impact of her 60% hearing loss on her writing, as another way of exploring the "deaf world" about which Cohen writes. As she writes on her blog: "I am speech-deaf and have grown fond of deafness." 

In American Sign Language, "train go sorry" means "missing the boat." Leah Hager Cohen uses the phrase as shorthand for the myriad missed connections between the deaf and the hearing. The New York Times Magazine has said of it: "Eloquent...a stunningly emphathetic examination of [deaf people's] stories and a brilliant narrative of Deaf culture."

[image from here]

Literature from the "Axis of Evil"

Our February meeting was canceled because of snow.

We will reconvene on March 1st (Malaprop's, 7pm) and talk about our February book then: "Literature from the 'Axis of Evil': Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Other Enemy Nations.

"The book every American should read this year."—The Bloomsbury Review

Subject of a full-length segment on Morning Edition when it first appeared in hardcover, Literature from the "Axis of Evil"'s publication was celebrated by authors including Azar Nafisi and Alice Walker, and the Bloomsbury Review named it a "book of the year."

In thirty-five works of fiction and poetry, writers from countries Americans have not been allowed to hear from—until the Treasury Department revised its regulations recently—offer an invaluable window on daily life in "enemy nations" and humanize the individuals living there. The book includes works from Syria, Lybia, the Sudan, Cuba, as well as from Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. As editor Alane Mason writes in the introduction, "Not knowing what the rest of the world is thinking and writing is both dangerous and boring."

John Howard Griffin, BLACK LIKE ME

In the Deep South of the 1950s, a color line was etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. What happened to John Howard Griffin--from the outside and within himself--as he made his way through the segregated Deep South is recorded in this searing work of nonfiction.

He did not look in the mirror until the process was complete, and when he did, he saw "the face and shoulders of a stranger -- a fierce, bald, very dark Negro." He was stunned:

"The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. . . . I looked into the mirror and saw reflected nothing of the white John Griffin's past. No, the reflections led back to Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness. . . . I had tampered with the mystery of existence and I had lost the sense of my own being. This is what devastated me. The Griffin that was had become invisible."

As Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post wrote:

"What remains most important about 'Black Like Me' is the force of the shock Griffin felt when he learned, in the most intimate ways, what it was -- and for many still is -- like to be black in America. In 1959 virtually none of the rights and opportunities that whites took for granted were extended to blacks, so Griffin immediately discovered that "an important part of my daily life was spent searching for the basic things that all whites take for granted: a place to eat, or somewhere to find a drink of water, a rest room, somewhere to wash my hands. More than once I walked into drugstores where a Negro can buy cigarettes or anything else except soda fountain service." Invariably he was directed to 'the nearest Negro café [which] is always far away, it seems.'"

Dave Eggers, WHAT IS THE WHAT?

From the New York Magazine review: What Is the What tells the story of a refugee from the second Sudanese civil war (1983–2005), one of the 20,000 so-called Lost Boys who walked thousands of miles from their decimated villages (their homes burned by Arab militiamen, most of the adults slaughtered) to relative safety in Ethiopia and later Kenya. In a region with no shortage of unimaginable horrors—the ongoing genocide in Darfur has taken some 300,000 lives with no signs of abating—the particulars of the Lost Boys have long stood out as a crushing reminder of the primitive cruelty of African warfare. Few were older than 10 when they were displaced, and many died during their journey, some of starvation and dehydration, others at the mercy of lions and armed forces. It is a tragedy related by the extraordinarily clear-eyed Valentino Achak Deng, one of 4,000 refugees offered sanctuary in the U.S. in 2001, who is reflecting back while trying to survive an altogether different struggle: assimilation into a culture defined by its short-term memory and chronic indifference to the world beyond its borders.

Luis Alberto Urrea, THE DEVIL'S HIGHWAY

Luis Alberto Urrea has been called "one of the most talented writers of his generation" and has been inducted into the Latino Literary Hall of Fame. The Devil's Highway was a finalist for the 2005 Pultizer Prize for general nonfiction. In it we follow 26 men who in May 2001 attempted to cross the Mexican borher into the desert of Southern Arizona, through the deadly region known as the Devil's Highway. Only twelve of the men made it out. The Atlantic Monthly says of this book: "The single most compelling, lucid, and lyrical contemporary account of the absurdity of U.S. border policy..."

V.S. Naipaul - A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS

For our September gathering, we are reading V.S. Naipaul's novel, A House for Mr Biswas. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2001. You might find his Nobel lecture to be of interest. His Nobel interview might also provide insight into his writing that will inform your reading of the book.

If you are buying a copy of the book, please support your local, independent bookstore.

Audre Lorde, SISTER OUTSIDER

Our book for our August gathering,"Sister Outsider" by Audre Lorde, is a powerful collection of her speeches and essays. You'll find a short clip of her speaking here. I'm particularly taken with her last statement: "...I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there..." You can find links to some of her poetry here.

You might also find this powerful op-ed piece about violence against women ("Women at Risk") a valuable companion to her work.