Never Far from Home by Bruce Jackson
Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series
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1M ago
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 decisio ..read more
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The Movement Made Us: A Father, A Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride by David J. Dennis Jr. in collaboration with David J. Dennis Sr.
Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series
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2M ago
 Book Discussion of The Movement Made Us by David Dennis Jr. and David Dennis Sr.   Discussion date: December 30, 2023  Nine of us met for our last book discussion of 2023 on the last Saturday of December. The book, The Movement Made Us: A Father, A Son, and The Legacy of a Freedom Ride. This book chronicles Dave Dennis Sr.’s Movement stories from 1961 to 1964. The stories are transcribed by his son Dave Dennis Jr.     Meghan: He (the son) was like translating an oral history that he had broken down through interviews. I like the wordplay he used but I ..read more
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Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America by Keisha N. Blain Ph.D.
Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series
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4M ago
 Eight of us met on Saturday October 14th to discuss Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America by Dr. Keisha N. Blain.   The one thing we all agreed on about this book is that it was short on biographical information about Fannie Lou Hamer, and instead more focused on the events of the last few years. It seems that the author’s point was to relate Fannie Lou Hamer’s work and legacy to modern activists and point out her influences on today’s justice seekers.   Fannie Lou Hamer entered the Voting Rights arena after attending a SNCC meeting. SNC ..read more
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The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence Injustice and the American City
Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series
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6M ago
  The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City by Nicholas Dawidoff                                                             The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued August 26th. Sixteen of us met to discuss this disturbing non-fiction book. The Other Side of Prospect begins with the murder of Pete Fields, a senior citizen on a residential street in New Haven and an innocent teenage ..read more
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Just Pursuit: A Black Prosecutor's Fight for Fairness by Laura Coates
Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series
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8M ago
  Eleven of us met on Saturday July 15th to discuss Laura Coates' book, "Just Pursuit." The book consists of sixteen descriptive essays of her experiences working as a federal prosecutor. Robin started us off with, "One thing that was sort of interesting was that I felt like there were many different themes, different chapters had different sorts of themes. They weren’t always about white supremacy. Sometimes they were about the power of these judges. There were many different themes, some of them about the arbitrariness of these judges and the lack of justice in our system." Wendy clari ..read more
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Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up by Remica Bingham-Risher
Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series
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1y ago
  Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions That Grew Me Up by Remica Bingham-Risher 2022    This book is a collection of ten essays written over a decade based on the author’s interviews with ten poets. What’s more, it’s also a memoir, where the author describes her family life and the influences of the ten poets on her own work. The poets interviewed are E. Ethelbert Miller, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sancez, and others. In addition to the ten poets interviewed, Bingham-Risher also brings up the names and works of other poets within the chapters ..read more
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Angela Davis: An Autobiography
Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series
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1y ago
  Notes from Book Discussion Mar. 4, 2023  Angela Davis, an Autobiography ©1974, 1988, 2021  Fourteen of us met on Saturday March 4th to discuss Angela Davis: An Autobiography. This is the newest edition of her autobiography and the prefaces to the first, second, and now third editions are included at the beginning.   I admitted to the group that I had a little trouble reading this book. I’m sure that I read the autobiography when I was younger and remember harboring some ingrained prejudice against communism, due to indoctrination, not at all by my own logic or r ..read more
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Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South
Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series
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1y ago
  Book Discussion of Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly, with a foreword by Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI).                        Chasing Me to My Grave won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.   Winfred Rembert was an artist who painted scenes from his life in Cuthbert Georgia onto leather. His story details the hardship of his life in Cuthbert, his being abandoned by his mother, his being sent ..read more
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The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton
Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series
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1y ago
  The Final Revival of Opal and Nev is a fictional oral history of the  interracial 1970s rock duo Opal Jewell and Nev Charles. The journalist S. Sunny Shelton  (nee SarahLena Curtis) is now editor of the music magazine Aural. Sunny proposes a book- length feature about Opal and Nev because there’s a rumor of an upcoming reunion tour.  Sunny has her own reasons for wanting to write this story. The book begins with her note: Disclosure: My father, a drummer named Jimmy Curtis, fell in love with Opal Jewell in the summer of 1970. For the duration of their affair, he was ..read more
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Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo
Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series
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1y ago
  Eleven of us met Saturday Sept. 10 to discuss Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo. I started the discussion by asking the group: Did you just love Sankofa? I did. I had read it over a year ago and I just re-read it over the last two days. Robin: I didn’t love Anna, I guess she had sort of tough childhood. I just wanted her to be tougher, braver. I thought she was so different in how she responded to things the way I would’ve, but I wasn’t raised as a biracial child by a white woman. Robin gave us a summary of the story:  Anna is a biracial woman in her fifties(?) her mother was white woma ..read more
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