Presenter: Carrie Brown
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading Beloved by Toni Morrison.
Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
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Presenter: Damian Costello
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading Black Elk Speaks by Nicholas Black Elk. The life of Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950), the Oglala Lakota visionary and healer.
Black Elk Speaks, the story of the Oglala Lakota visionary and healer Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) and his people during momentous twilight years of the nineteenth century, offers readers much more than a precious glimpse of a vanished time. Black Elk's searing visions of the unity of humanity and Earth, conveyed by John G. Neihardt, have made this book a classic that crosses multiple genres. Whether appreciated as the poignant tale of a Lakota life, as a history of a Native nation, or as an enduring spiritual testament, Black Elk Speaks is unforgettable.
Black Elk met the distinguished poet, writer, and critic John G. Neihardt in 1930 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and asked Neihardt to share his story with the world. Neihardt understood and conveyed Black Elk's experiences in this powerful and inspirational message for all humankind.
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Presenter: Damian Costello
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
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Presenter: Alice Fogel
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, a genre-bending meditation on race, racism, and citizenship in 21st-century America.
Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.
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Presenter: Mary C. Kelly
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading Crazy Horse: A Life by Larry McMurtry.
Legends cloud the life of Crazy Horse, a seminal figure in American history but an enigma even to his own people in his own day. This superb biography looks back across more than 120 years at the life and death of this great Sioux warrior who became a reluctant leader at the Battle of Little Bighorn. With his uncanny gift for understanding the human psyche, Larry McMurtry animates the character of this remarkable figure, whose betrayal by white representatives of the U.S. government was a tragic turning point in the history of the West. A mythic figure puzzled over by generations of historians, Crazy Horse emerges from McMurtry’s sensitive portrait as the poignant hero of a long-since-vanished epoch.
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Presenter: Carrie Brown
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading Deacon King Kong by James McBride.
In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range. The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong. McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting.
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Presenter: Mary C. Kelly
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain.
Edited by two historians of race and African American history, Ibram X. Kendi, with Keisha N. Blain, Four Hundred Souls features readings by familiar names including Nikole Hannah-Jones, Annette Gordon-Reed, Isabel Wilkerson, and Imani Perry. This is a comprehensive collection of short readings on African American history and culture. The editors seek to combat hate through deeper understandings of Black history and experience, and the cultivation of empathy in celebrating Black resilience over the centuries. The book is designed to educate general readers on racial struggles and the role of slavery in American history, using the voices and perspectives of Black writers. IIt maps the course of enslaved Africans’ forced transport to colonial America, slavery’s institutionalization, sectional pressures prior to the Civil War, Emancipation and codification of the 14th, 15th and 16th Amendments, Reconstruction-era challenges, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and Civil Rights activism and Black Power through to our own time.
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Presenter: Liz Tentarelli
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading Gilded Suffragists by Johanna Neuman.
In the early twentieth century over two hundred of New York's most glamorous socialites joined the suffrage movement. Their names—Astor, Belmont, Rockefeller, Tiffany, Vanderbilt, Whitney and the like—carried enormous public value. These women were the media darlings of their day because of the extravagance of their costume balls and the opulence of the French couture clothes, and they leveraged their social celebrity for political power, turning women's right to vote into a fashionable cause.
Although they were dismissed by critics as bored socialites “trying on suffrage as they might the latest couture designs from Paris,” these gilded suffragists were at the epicenter of the great reforms known collectively as the Progressive Era. From championing education for women, to pursuing careers, and advocating for the end of marriage, these women were engaged with the swirl of change that swept through the streets of New York City.
Johanna Neuman restores these women to their rightful place in the story of women’s suffrage. Understanding the need for popular approval for any social change, these socialites used their wealth, power, social connections and style to excite mainstream interest and to diffuse resistance to the cause. In the end, as Neuman says, when change was in the air, these women helped push women’s suffrage over the finish line.
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Presenter: Joshua Tepley
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading How Long 'Til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin. These science fiction short stories challenge and delight readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption that sharply examine modern society.
Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story “The City Born Great,” a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis’s soul.
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Presenter: Alice Fogel
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine, a collection of essays and images exploring racism and white supremacy.
As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.
Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.
This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend’s explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word.
Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.
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Presenter: Tammi Truax
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading Never Caught, by Erica Armstrong Dunbar. A startling and eye-opening look into America’s First Family, Never Caught is the powerful story about a daring woman of “extraordinary grit.” We will explore the facts about the escape to NH of Ona Judge, from the Washington presidential household, after reading this non-fiction book.
When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation’s capital. In setting up his household he brought along nine slaves, including Ona Judge. As the President grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn’t abide: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire.
Though Ona Judge lived a life of relative comfort, she was denied freedom. So, when the opportunity presented itself one clear and pleasant spring day in Philadelphia, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England. Yet freedom would not come without its costs. At just twenty-two-years-old, Ona became the subject of an intense manhunt led by George Washington, who used his political and personal contacts to recapture his property.
“A crisp and compulsively readable feat of research and storytelling” (USA TODAY), historian and National Book Award finalist Erica Armstrong Dunbar weaves a powerful tale and offers fascinating new scholarship on how one young woman risked everything to gain freedom from the famous founding father and most powerful man in the United States at the time.
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Presenter: Joshua Tepley
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.
A post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror by the first great Black woman science fiction writer.
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Presenter: Tammi Truax
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading Peyton Place by Grace Metalious.
First published in 1956, Peyton Place uncovers the passions, lies and cruelties that simmer beneath the surface of a postcard-perfect town. At the centre of the novel are three women, each with a secret to hide: Constance MacKenzie, the original desperate housewife; her daughter Allison, whose dreams are stifled by small-town small-mindedness; and Selena Cross, her gypsy-eyed friend from the wrong side of the tracks.
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Presenter: Mohamed Defaa
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading Samarkand by Amin Maalouf.
Accused of mocking the inviolate codes of Islam, the Persian poet and sage Omar Khayyam fortuitously finds sympathy with the very man who is to judge his alleged crimes. Recognizing genius, the judge decides to spare him and gives him instead a small, blank book, encouraging him to confine his thoughts to it alone. Thus begins the seamless blend of fact and fiction that is Samarkand. Vividly recreating the history of the manuscript of the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam, Amin Maalouf spans continents and centuries with breathtaking vision: the dusky exoticism of 11th-century Persia, with its poetesses and assassins; the same country's struggles nine hundred years later, seen through the eyes of an American academic obsessed with finding the original manuscript; and the fated maiden voyage of the Titanic, whose tragedy led to the Rubaiyaat's final resting place—all are brought to life with keen assurance by this gifted and award-winning writer.
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Presenter: Mary C. Kelly
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading Stony the Road by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. A challenging and unsettling account of Reconstruction-era racial history, with much to inform us about today's cultural and political divides.
Presenter: Mohamed Defaa
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading The Attack by Yasmina Khadra.
Dr. Amin Jaafari, an Arab-Israeli citizen, is a surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. Dedicated to his work, respected and admired by his colleagues and community, he represents integration at its most successful. He has learned to live with the violence and chaos that plague his city, and on the night of a deadly bombing in a local restaurant, he works tirelessly to help the shocked and shattered patients brought to the emergency room. But this night of turmoil and death takes a horrifyingly personal turn. His wife's body is found among the dead, with massive injuries, the police coldly announce, typical of those found on the bodies of fundamentalist suicide bombers. As evidence mounts that his wife, Sihem, was responsible for the catastrophic bombing, Dr. Jaafari is torn between cherished memories of their years together and the inescapable realization that the beautiful, intelligent, thoroughly modern woman he loved had a life far removed from the comfortable, assimilated existence they shared.
From the graphic, beautifully rendered description of the bombing that opens the novel to the searing conclusion, The Attack portrays the reality of terrorism and its incalculable spiritual costs. Intense and humane, devoid of political bias, hatred, and polemics, it probes deep inside the Muslim world and gives readers a profound understanding of what seems impossible to understand.
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As part of New Hampshire Humanities' 2023 Big Read and Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading The Bear by Andrew Krivak.
In an Edenic future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain, the last of humankind. When the girl finds herself alone in an unknown landscape, it is a bear that will lead her back home through a vast wilderness that offers the greatest lessons of all, if she can only learn to listen in this cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss.
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Presenter: Mary C. Kelly
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine by Cian T. McMahon.
The oceangoing voyage endured by two million Irish escaping the country’s Great Famine of the mid-1800s endures as a cornerstone of the modern Irish and Irish American historical narrative. This book traces the epic journey undertaken by destitute Irish smallholders across the Atlantic to Boston and New York and other North American safe harbors. Famine emigrants fleeing Ireland strengthened their chances of survival aboard ship in proactive ways, but ongoing dangers persisted on the voyage and subsequently within the urban immigrant enclaves established by the survivors.
This stirring account transports the reader from destitute fields, ports of departure and seafaring rituals to eventual settlement in American cities for the fortunate survivors. The Atlantic crossing that represented a last hope for so many, and imprinted the Irish immigrant community in North America so powerfully, provides a compelling focus in this accessible historical narrative.
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Presenter: Kiki Berk
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein.
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.
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Presenter: Mohamed Defaa
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak. In this lyrical, exuberant tale, acclaimed Turkish author Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees (a Reese’s Book Club Pick), incarnates Rumi’s timeless message of love.
Presenter: Alice Fogel
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading The Humans by Matt Haig. The bestselling, award-winning author of The Midnight Library offers his funniest, most devastating dark comedy yet, a “silly, sad, suspenseful, and soulful” (Philadelphia Inquirer) novel that’s “full of heart” (Entertainment Weekly).
When an extraterrestrial visitor arrives on Earth, his first impressions of the human species are less than positive. Taking the form of Professor Andrew Martin, a prominent mathematician at Cambridge University, the visitor is eager to complete the gruesome task assigned him and hurry home to his own utopian planet, where everyone is omniscient and immortal.
He is disgusted by the way humans look, what they eat, their capacity for murder and war, and is equally baffled by the concepts of love and family. But as time goes on, he starts to realize there may be more to this strange species than he had thought. Disguised as Martin, he drinks wine, reads poetry, develops an ear for rock music, and a taste for peanut butter. Slowly, unexpectedly, he forges bonds with Martin’s family. He begins to see hope and beauty in the humans’ imperfection, and begins to question the very mission that brought him there.
Praised by The New York Times as a “novelist of great seriousness and talent,” author Matt Haig delivers an unlikely story about human nature and the joy found in the messiness of life on Earth. The Humans is a funny, compulsively readable tale that playfully and movingly explores the ultimate subject—ourselves.
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Presenter: Joshua Tepley
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. A beautiful and haunting collection of short stories about the colonization of Mars.
In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, America’s preeminent storyteller, imagines a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor— of crystal pillars and fossil seas—where a fine dust settles on the great empty cities of a vanished, devastated civilization. Earthmen conquer Mars and then are conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race. In this classic work of fiction, Bradbury exposes our ambitions, weaknesses, and ignorance in a strange and breathtaking world where man does not belong.
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Presenter: Kiki Berk
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.
Author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead, brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in 1960s Florida. Based on the history of a real reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped and destroyed the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative by a great American novelist whose work is essential to understanding the current reality of the United States.
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Presenter: Mohamed Defaa
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid.
At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful encounter…
Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.
But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.
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Presenter: Kiki Berk
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. The story of a charismatic Jesuit priest and linguist, Emilio Sandoz, who leads a twenty-first- century scientific mission to a newly discovered extraterrestrial culture.
A visionary work that combines speculative fiction with deep philosophical inquiry, The Sparrow tells the story of a charismatic Jesuit priest and linguist, Emilio Sandoz, who leads a scientific mission entrusted with a profound task: to make first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life. The mission begins in faith, hope, and beauty, but a series of small misunderstandings brings it to a catastrophic end.
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Presenter: Liz Tentarelli
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading The Woman's Hour by Elaine Weiss. The story of how American women won the right to vote, and the opening campaign in the great twentieth-century battles for civil rights.
Presenter: Carrie Brown
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading The Women With Silver Wings by Katherine Sharp Landdeck, about the inspiring true story about American women pilots in World War II.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Cornelia Fort was already in the air. At twenty-two, Fort had escaped Nashville’s debutante scene for a fresh start as a flight instructor in Hawaii. She and her student were in the middle of their lesson when the bombs began to fall, and they barely made it back to ground that morning. Still, when the U.S. Army Air Forces put out a call for women pilots to aid the war effort, Fort was one of the first to respond. She became one of just over 1,100 women from across the nation to make it through the Army’s rigorous selection process and earn her silver wings.
The brainchild of trailblazing pilots Nancy Love and Jacqueline Cochran, the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) gave women like Fort a chance to serve their country—and to prove that women aviators were just as skilled as men. While not authorized to serve in combat, the WASP helped train male pilots for service abroad, and ferried bombers and pursuits across the country. Thirty-eight WASP would not survive the war. But even taking into account these tragic losses, Love and Cochran’s social experiment seemed to be a resounding success—until, with the tides of war turning, Congress clipped the women’s wings. The program was disbanded, the women sent home. But the bonds they’d forged never failed, and over the next few decades they came together to fight for recognition as the military veterans they were—and for their place in history.
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Presenter: Mohamed Defaa
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading The Yacobean Building by Alaa al-Aswany. The controversial bestselling novel in the Arab world reveals the politicial corruption, sexual repression, religious extemism, and modern hopes of Egypt today.
A fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed ‘scientist of women.’ A purring, voluptuous siren. A young shop-girl enduring the clammy touch of her boss and hating herself for accepting the modest banknotes he tucks into her pocket afterward. An earnest, devout young doorman, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism. A cynical, secretly gay newspaper editor, helplessly in love with a peasant security guard. A roof-squatting tailor, scheming to own property. A corrupt and corpulent politician, twisting the Koran to justify taking a mistress.
All live in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor slowly decaying in the smog and hubbub of downtown Cairo, Egypt. In the course of this unforgettable novel, these disparate lives converge, careening inexorably toward an explosive conclusion. Tragicomic, passionate, shockingly frank in its sexuality, and brimming with an extraordinary, embracing human compassion, The Yacoubian Building is a literary achievement of the first order.
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Presenter: Damian Costello
As part of New Hampshire Humanities' Perspectives Book Groups, we're reading There There by Tommy Orange. In There There, Cheyenne/Arapaho novelist Tommy Orange explores the challenges and rich texture of Native Urban life.
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