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PACG Book Club - September 2022

5/21/2022

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PACG Book Club - The Cider House Rules by John Irving
Monday, September 19th at 4:30 pm

Since we are taking a break in July and August, you will have plenty of time to read our lengthy September book, The Cider House Rules by John Irving. I read this book decades ago and loved it. Since one of the themes of the book is abortion, and the setting is in a time when abortions were illegal, it seems quite relevant today. The book also deals with other issues of interest to our members, such as racism and sexism.

Although we may meet in person in September, depending on the Covid situation it may be a Zoom meeting. In either case, it will be at 4:30 pm on Monday, September 19th. Watch the Progressive Action Update (email) for more information.

Here is more information from Goodreads:
​
Raised from birth in the orphanage at St. Cloud's, Maine, Homer Wells has become the protege of Dr. Wilbur Larch, its physician and director. There Dr. Larch cares for the troubled mothers who seek his help, either by delivering and taking in their unwanted babies or by performing illegal abortions. Meticulously trained by Dr. Larch, Homer assists in the former, but draws the line at the latter. Then a young man brings his beautiful fiancee to Dr. Larch for an abortion, and everything about the couple beckons Homer to the wide world outside the orphanage.

Contact me for a link to the meeting (if it is by Zoom) or with questions.

Alta Price
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PACG Book Club for June 2022

5/21/2022

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PACG Book Club for June 2022 - Equal Before the Law: How Iowa Led Americans to Marriage Equality by Tom Witosky and Marc Hansen 
​Monday, June 20th at 4:30 pm

We have decided to move PACG Book Club to 4:30 pm on the third Monday of the month (instead of 5:30 pm). We will meet in June but take off July and August. We have also decided to include books with social justice themes relating to women and LGBTQ+ people.

Our next discussion will be Monday, June 20th at 4:30 pm. We will read and discuss Equal Before the Law: How Iowa Led Americans to Marriage Equality by Tom Witosky and Marc Hansen. This book is especially relevant to those of us in Iowa. I personally worked for marriage equality in Iowa and I'm looking forward to the read!

Here is some information from Goodreads:

"We’ve been together in sickness and in health, through the death of his mother, through the adoption of our children, through four long years of this legal battle," Jason Morgan told reporters of himself and his partner, Chuck Swaggerty. "And if being together through all of that isn’t love and commitment or isn’t family or isn’t marriage, then I don’t know what is." Just minutes earlier on that day, April 3, 2009, the justices of the Iowa Supreme Court had agreed.

The court’s decision in Varnum v. Brien made Iowa only the third state in the nation to permit same-sex couples to wed—moderate, midwestern Iowa, years before such left-leaning coastal states as California and New York. And unlike the earlier decisions in Massachusetts and Connecticut, Varnum v. Brien was unanimous and unequivocal. It catalyzed the unprecedented and rapid shift in law and public opinion that continues today.

Equal Before the Law tells the stories behind this critical battle in the fight for marriage equality and traces the decision’s impact. The struggle began in 1998 with the easy passage of Iowa’s Defense of Marriage Act and took a turn, surprising to many, in 2005, when six ordinary Iowa couples signed on to Lambda Legal’s suit against the law. Their triumph in 2009 sparked a conservative backlash against the supreme court justices, three of whom faced tough retention elections that fall.
Longtime, award-winning reporters Tom Witosky and Marc Hansen talked with and researched dozens of key figures, including opponent Bob Vander Plaats, proponents Janelle Rettig and Sharon Malheiro, attorneys Roger Kuhle, Dennis Johnson, and Camilla Taylor, and politicians Matt McCoy, Mary Lundby, and Tom Vilsack, who had to weigh their careers against their convictions. Justice Mark Cady, who wrote the decision, explains why the court had to rule in favor of the plaintiffs. At the center of the story are the six couples who sacrificed their privacy to demand public respect for their families.

Through these voices, Witosky and Hansen show that no one should have been surprised by the 2009 decision. Iowans have a long history of leadership on civil rights. Just a year after Iowa became a state, its citizens adopted as their motto the phrase, “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.” And they still do today.

Contact me for the Zoom link. (We'll continue to meet via Zoom for now. If the Covid situation improves by September, we may be able to meet in person then.)

Alta Price
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May Book Club - "Home Made"

3/22/2022

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"Home Made" - PACG Book Club Meeting via Zoom
Monday,  May 16th at 5:30 pm

PACG Book Club

For our May book we are reading Home Made: A Story of Grief, Groceries, Showing Up - and What we Make When We Make Dinner  by Liz Hauck.

​Here's an excerpt from the Good Reads review: An intimate account of humorous and heartbreaking conversations, and a vivid account of the clumsy choreography of cooking with other people, Home Made is a sharply observed and honestly told story about how a kitchen can be both safe and dangerous; how even the short journey from kitchen to table can be perilous. Each chapter explores the interconnectedness of flavor, memory, culture, and life and offers a glimpse into the ways we behave when we are hungry and the food we crave when we seek comfort. Home Made is a tender and vivid portrait of poverty and abundance, vulnerability and strength, estrangement and connection. It is a memoir about the radical grace we discover when we consider ourselves bound together in community and a piercing investigation of the essential question: Who are we to each other?

Contact Alta Price or Julie Ross for a Zoom link to this meeting.
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PACG Book Club for April - PACG Event

3/22/2022

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"Klara and the Sun" - PACG Book Club Meeting via Zoom
Monday,  April 18th at 5:30 pm

PACG Book Club

Our next meeting is Monday, April 18th at 5:30 pm, and we will be discussing Klara and the Sun by Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro. This is a work of science fiction. In PACG Book Club we alternate between fiction and nonfiction each month.

From the Goodreads review about Klara and the Sun: From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.

If you would like to read ahead, our book for May is Home Made: A Story of Grief, Groceries, Showing Up - and What We Make When We Make Dinner by Liz Hauk. We will meet on Zoom on Monday, May 16th. Read more at our May Book Club blog post here.

Contact the PACG Webmaster for the Zoom link for this meeting.

​Alta Price
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PACG Book Club for March 2022

1/23/2022

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PACG Book Club  for March 2022 - Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

After reading and discussing War on Us by Colleen Cowles, we decided we wanted to learn more about drug policy and problems. Our March book will be Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe. 

We plan to meet via Zoom on Monday, March 21st at 5:30 pm. At this point we are planning to meet by Zoom. This could change if things go well with the pandemic. We'll let you know after the February meeting if we decide to meet in person somewhere.

Click on my name for an invitation to the Zoom meeting.

Alta Price

Here is more about Empire of Pain from Goodreads:

"The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions: Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis.

"Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling."
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PACG Book Club for January 2022

10/24/2021

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PACG Book Club for January 2022 - War on Us: How the War on Drugs & Myths About Addiction Have Created a War on All of Us  by Colleen Cowles

We will meet via Zoom on Monday, January 17th at 5:30 pm to discuss War on Us: How the War on Drugs & Myths About Addiction Have Created a War on All of Us by Colleen Cowles. We are not meeting in December, so you will have two months to read this book. Although it is long, it is reported to be very engaging and easy to read. Also, it is not as long as you might think since there are lots of references at the end!

I spent some time at the waronus.com website. This book is very relevant to the work the Civil Rights Forum is doing on criminal justice reform and juvenile justice reform. I wonder if PACG and its coalition partners might want to bring the author here (probably by Zoom) to speak?

Here is some information about the book from Goodreads:

"While the War on Drugs may have sounded like a good idea at one time, the consequences have been catastrophic. From physicians persecuted for providing health care to their patients to parents grieving the loss of their children to overdose or prison — we've all become victims of this war.


Our health, our families, our assets, our safety and our freedom are at risk:
 
  • One in three adults in the U.S. now has a criminal record.
  • Patients with severe illnesses or chronic pain are denied access to proven pain medications.
  • Over a trillion in taxpayer dollars in the U.S. alone has 'bought' the highest drug use, the highest overdose and the highest incarceration rates in the world.  
In War on Us, Colleen Cowles raises the alarm and offers practical, proven reforms. There are answers, as long as we have the will to implement change. It’s time to end the War on Drugs — and the war on all of us. This book is the roadmap to do just that." 

Click on my name for a Zoom link to the discussion.

Alta Price

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PACG Book Club for November 2021

10/24/2021

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PACG Book  Club for November 2021 - The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde

On Monday, November 15th at 5:30 pm we will meet via Zoom to discuss The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde.

Here is a review from Kirkus Reviews:

​"Rabbits, foxes, weasels, and other creatures live as humans, among humans in Fforde’s wonderfully absurd new novel.

Fifty-five years ago, the Spontaneous Anthropormorphizing Event resulted in 18 rabbits, “six weasels, five guinea pigs, three foxes, a Dalmatian, a badger, nine bees and a caterpillar” inexplicably becoming, well, anthropomorphized. As time went on, the animals continued to reproduce—especially the rabbits—causing a bit of a political crisis for humans, who are loathe to extend human rights to human-adjacent creatures. Rabbits in particular are subject to cruelty and suspicion because of their rapid reproductive rate, causing political parties like the United Kingdom Anti-Rabbit Party and hate groups like TwoLegsGood (because humans, unlike animals, have two legs, get it?) to rise to immense power. Racism as we know it still exists in this world, as does Brexit. Indeed, "the consequences of the Event seemed to highlight areas of the human social experience that perhaps needed greater exploration, understanding and some kind of concerted action...although once a fringe idea, the notion that the event might have been satirically induced was gaining wider acceptance.” And is there anyone who can write satire quite like Fforde? Perhaps the sharpest, most searing aspect of this brilliant satire is the choice of Peter Knox as narrator. An unassuming human who thinks himself a well-meaning cog in a regrettably evil machine, Knox finds himself at the very center of the rabbit resistance. Not only must he make the choice to atone for the part he has played in the violent government organization RabCoT (Rabbit Compliance Taskforce) and put himself in danger for a greater good, but he learns to embrace a supporting role in a struggle that is not about him at all.

An astonishingly well-crafted work of social and political satire."

Click on my name for a Zoom link to the discussion.

​Alta Price
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PACG Book Club for October 2021

9/19/2021

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PACG Book Club for October 2021 - American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

For October we will read and discuss American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. We will meet via Zoom on October 18th, the third Monday of the month, at 5:30 pm.

Here is more information about the book from Goodreads:

"También de este lado hay sueños.
On this side, too, there are dreams.

Lydia Quixano Pérez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable.

Even though she knows they’ll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with a few books he would like to buy—two of them her favorites. Javier is erudite. He is charming. And, unbeknownst to Lydia, he is the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city. When Lydia’s husband’s tell-all profile of Javier is published, none of their lives will ever be the same.

Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca ride la bestia—trains that make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier’s reach doesn’t extend. As they join the countless people trying to reach el norte, Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to?"

Click on my name for a Zoom link to the Book Club meeting. (Note: If you are already on the list of Book Club members you will get a link without having to contact me each month.)

Alta Price
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PACG Book Club for September 2021

5/22/2021

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PACG Book Club for September 2021 - Separated: Inside an American Tragedy by Jacob Soboroff

Our September 2021 book will be Separated: Inside an American Tragedy by Jacob Soboroff. We will meet via Zoom on Monday, September 27th at 5:30 pm. (Note: We are meeting the fourth Monday instead of the usual third Monday since Alta will be out of town on the third Monday.)

Here is a description of the book from Goodreads:

"NBC News and MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff, winner of the 2019 Walter Cronkite Award for his reporting on the child separation crisis, delivers a profoundly personal and moving report from the border and beyond, revealing the wrenching human story behind one of the most disturbing passages of modern American history. 

Donald Trump’s most infamous decision as president, to systematically separate thousands of migrant families at the border, was in effect for months before most Americans saw the living conditions of the children in custody at the epicenter of the policy. NBC News and MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff was among the first journalists to expose the truth of what their lives were like on the inside after seeing them firsthand. His widely shared reports in June 2018 ignited public scrutiny that contributed to the President reversing his own policy by Executive Order, and earned Soboroff the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Broadcast Journalism and the 2019 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism.

In Separated, Soboroff weaves together his own experience unexpectedly covering this national issue with other key figures in the drama he met along the way, including feuding administration officials responsible for tearing apart and then reuniting families, and the parents and children who were caught in the middle. He reveals new and exclusive details of how the policy was carried out, and how its affects are still being felt. 

Today, there is still not a full accounting of the total number of children the President ripped away from their parents. The exact number may never be known, only that it is in the thousands. Now the President is doubling down on draconian immigration policies, including threatening to hold migrant families indefinitely and making tens of thousands applying for asylum wait in some of Mexico’s most dangerous cities. Separated is required reading for anyone who wants to understand how Trump and his administration were able to carry out this inhumane policy, and how so many missed what was happening before it was too late. Soboroff lays out compassionately, yet in the starkest of terms, its human toll, and makes clear what is at stake in the 2020 presidential election."

Contact me by clicking on my name for a link to the Zoom meeting.

Alta Price
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PACG Book Club for August 2021

5/22/2021

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PACG Book Club for August 2021 - The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

Our August 2021 book will be The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. We will meet via Zoom on Monday, August 16th at 5:30 pm.

Here is a description of the book from Goodreads:

"Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with a vengeance.

In this uncertain and dangerous time, Elsa Martinelli—like so many of her neighbors—must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or go west, to California, in search of a better life. The Four Winds is an indelible portrait of America and the American Dream, as seen through the eyes of one indomitable woman whose courage and sacrifice will come to define a generation.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone comes an epic novel of love and heroism and hope, set against the backdrop of one of America’s most defining eras—the Great Depression."

Contact me by clicking on my name for a link to the August 2021 PACG Book Club discussion.

Alta Price
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