The calendar shows events we are part of and events we are sponsoring. Do you have an event we should know about? Send us a message.
For our July book club, we will be reading, Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde.
Goodreads describes the book as, “A collection of fifteen essays written between 1976 and 1984 gives clear voice to Audre Lorde’s literary and philosophical personae. These essays explore and illuminate the roots of Lorde’s intellectual development and her deep-seated and longstanding concerns about ways of increasing empowerment among minority women writers and the absolute necessity to explicate the concept of difference—difference according to sex, race, and economic status. The title Sister Outsider finds its source in her poetry collection The Black Unicorn (1978). These poems and the essays in Sister Outsider stress Lorde’s oft-stated theme of continuity, particularly of the geographical and intellectual link between Dahomey, Africa, and her emerging self.”
For the August JEDI Book Club, we will be reading, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, but Anne Fadiman. Here is the Goodreads Summary: Lia Lee was born in 1982 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, over-medication, and culture clash: “What the doctors viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance.” The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, written with the deepest of human feeling. Sherwin Nuland said of the account, “There are no villains in Fadiman’s tale, just as there are no heroes. People are presented as she saw them, in their humility and their frailty—and their nobility.”
Get your book from the library or a local bookstore + register on Mighty Networks to join us in discussion!
For September, we will be listening to a podcast, something new for our group, but a great idea from a JEDI book club participant! We will listen to Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s.
“Last May, investigative journalist Connie Walker came upon a story about her late father she’d never heard before. One night back in the late 1970s while he was working as an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he pulled over a suspected drunk driver. He walked up to the vehicle and came face-to-face with a ghost from his past—a residential school priest. What happened on the road that night set in motion an investigation that would send Connie deep into her own past, trying to uncover the secrets of her family and the legacy of trauma passed down through the generations.
In Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s, Connie unearths how her family’s story fits into one of Canada’s darkest chapters: the residential school system.”
It is a podcast by journalist Connie Walker and the team at Spotify’s Gimlet Media. It won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize this year for best audio journalism. It also won a Peabody Award for its “its tenacious reporting and continued commitment to recognizing the full history of the Indigenous community” in the podcast and radio category.
Join us on Mighty Networks to dicsuss!
In October we will be discussing “I Never Thought of it That Way” by Mónica Guzmán.
Goodreads has this summary of the book:
“Partisanship is up, trust is down, and our social media feeds make us sure we’re right and everyone else is ignorant (or worse). But avoiding and attacking one another is breaking… everything.
Journalist Mónica Guzmán is the loving liberal daughter of Mexican immigrants who voted—twice—for Donald Trump. When the country could no longer see straight across the political divide, Mónica set out to find what was blinding us, and discovered the most eye-opening tool we’re not using: our own curiosity.
In this timely, personal guide, Mónica, the chief storyteller for the national cross-partisan depolarization organization Braver Angels, takes you to the real front lines of a crisis that threatens to grind America to a halt—broken conversations among confounded people. She shows you how to overcome the fear and assumptions that surround us to finally do what only seems impossible: understand and even learn from people in your life whose whole worldview is not just different from yours, but opposed.
Drawing from conversations she’s had, organized, or witnessed everywhere from the echo chambers on social media to the wheat fields in Oregon to raw, unfiltered fights with her family on election night, Mónica shows how you can put your natural sense of wonder to work for you immediately, finding the answers you need by talking with people—rather than about them—and asking the questions you want across the divides you want, curiously.
In these pages, you’ll learn:
• How to ask what you really want to know (even if you’re afraid to)
• How to grow smarter from even the most tense interactions, online or off
• How to cross boundaries and find common ground—with anyone
Whether you’re left, right, center, or sick of the labels: If you’re ready to fight back against the confusion, heartbreak, and madness of our dangerously divided times—in your own life, at least—Mónica’s got the tools and fresh, surprising insights to prove that seeing where people are coming from isn’t just possible. It’s easier than you think.
For November we will be reading, “In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom” by Yeonmi Park and Maryanne Vollers. Here is a link to the Goodreads summary.
“Human rights activist Park, who fled North Korea with her mother in 2007 at age 13 and eventually made it to South Korea two years later after a harrowing ordeal, recognized that in order to be “completely free,” she had to confront the truth of her past. It is an ugly, shameful story of being sold with her mother into slave marriages by Chinese brokers, and although she at first tried to hide the painful details when blending into South Korean society, she realized how her survival story could inspire others. Moreover, her sister had also escaped earlier and had vanished into China for years, prompting the author to go public with her story in the hope of finding her sister.”
For December we will be reading, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing by Joy DeGruy Here is a link to the Goodreads summary.
“While African Americans managed to emerge from chattel slavery and the oppressive decades that followed with great strength and resiliency, they did not emerge unscathed. Slavery produced centuries of physical, psychological and spiritual injury. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing lays the groundwork for understanding how the past has influenced the present, and opens up the discussion of how we can use the strengths we have gained to heal.”
For our January JEDI Book Club, we are going to be discussing The Barbie Movie! Here is a link to the trailer https://youtu.be/pBk4NYhWNMM?si=QCh51J6KaqD-yDDo
If you haven’t seen it, or you want to watch it again, you can find it streaming on multiple platforms including: Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, and some other platforms. Streaming the movie is not free: The movie is available to own for $29.99 or as a 48-hour rental for $24.99 on participating platforms.
The movie is rich in themes related to JEDI topics, so we will have a lively and informative discussion.
For our February book club, we will be reading, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times by Jane Goodall and Doug Abrams.
From Goodreads, “In this urgent book, Jane Goodall, the world’s most famous living naturalist and Doug Abrams, internationally-bestselling author, explore–through intimate and thought-provoking dialogue–one of the most sought after and least understood elements of human nature: hope. In The Book of Hope, Jane focuses on her “Four Reasons for Hope”: The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit.”
For our March book club we will be reading Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body by Rebekah Taussig.
From her website:
“Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.
Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life.
Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.”
For our April 2024 JEDI Book Club, we will be reading Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World, by Gaia Vince. Below you will find the Goodreads Summary.
“We are facing a species emergency. We can survive, but to do so will require a planned and deliberate migration of a kind humanity has never before undertaken. This is the biggest human crisis you’ve never heard of.”
Drought-hit regions bleeding those for whom a rural life has become untenable. Coastlines diminishing year on year. Wildfires and hurricanes leaving widening swaths of destruction. The culprit, most of us accept, is climate change, but not enough of us are confronting one of its biggest, and most present, consequences: a total reshaping of the earth’s human geography. As Gaia Vince points out early in Nomad Century , global migration has doubled in the past decade, on track to see literal billions displaced in the coming decades. What exactly is happening, Vince asks? And how will this new great migration reshape us all?
In this deeply-reported clarion call, Vince draws on a career of environmental reporting and over two years of travel to the front lines of climate migration across the globe, to tell us how the changes already in play will transform our food, our cities, our politics, and much more. Her findings are answers we all need, now more than ever.”