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PACG Book Club - "Caleb's Crossing" June 2024

5/25/2024

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PACG Book Club - Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Monday, June 17th at 5:15 pm - hybrid meeting


Edwards Congregational UCC
3420 Jersey Ridge Rd
Davenport, IA (map)
​
PACG Book Club

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For June we will read and discuss Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks. Although we should be reading a non-fiction book this month, due to the short notice we decided a novel of reasonable length might be better! This story, set in the 1660's, features Caleb, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. We've read many books this year with Native American characters or themes, so we thought this would be a good Geraldine Brooks novel to read.

Contact me for the Zoom link if you want to come that way.

There will be no PACG Book Club meetings in July or August. We'll let you know after the June discussion what we will read for September.

Alta Price

Here is more information from Goodreads: 

Once again, Geraldine Brooks takes a remarkable shard of history and brings it to vivid life. In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Upon this slender factual scaffold, Brooks has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure.

The narrator of "Caleb's Crossing" is Bethia Mayfield, growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans. Restless and curious, she yearns after an education that is closed to her by her sex. As often as she can, she slips away to explore the island's glistening beaches and observe its native Wampanoag inhabitants. At twelve, she encounters Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a tentative secret friendship that draws each into the alien world of the other. Bethia's minister father tries to convert the Wampanoag, awakening the wrath of the tribe's shaman, against whose magic he must test his own beliefs. One of his projects becomes the education of Caleb, and a year later, Caleb is in Cambridge, studying Latin and Greek among the colonial elite. There, Bethia finds herself reluctantly indentured as a housekeeper and can closely observe Caleb's crossing of cultures.

Like Brooks's beloved narrator Anna in "
Year of Wonders", Bethia proves an emotionally irresistible guide to the wilds of Martha's Vineyard and the intimate spaces of the human heart. Evocative and utterly absorbing, "Caleb's Crossing" further establishes Brooks's place as one of our most acclaimed novelists.
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PACG Book Club for March 2023 - Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

2/26/2023

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PACG Book Club - Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West  by Dee Brown  (first 10 chapters) 
Monday, March 20th at 4:30 pm via Zoom

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The PACG Book Club decided to further explore the history of our country’s treatment of its indigenous peoples by reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown. Since the book is long, we will read and discuss the first ten chapters in March and finish the book in April. 

More about the book from Goodreads:

“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. A national bestseller in hardcover for more than a year after its initial publication, it has sold almost four million copies and has been translated into seventeen languages…

Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows the great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them demoralized and defeated. A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was really won.”


We hope you can join us! Click on my name for a link to the March discussion, which will be by Zoom.

Alta Price



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PACG Book Club for January 2023 - The Girl in the Photograph

12/10/2022

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PACG Book Club - The Girl in the Photograph 
​by Byron L Dorgan
Monday, January 16th at 4:30 pm (via Zoom)

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For January and February we will be back to Zoom. March may be in-person, depending upon the weather.

​We are reading a non-fiction book about Native American issues in January, followed by a novel by a Native American author about a teenager growing up on a reservation in Washington State who decides to attend the local "white" high school.

The January book is The Girl in the Photograph by Senator Byron Dorgan. A description from Goodreads follows:


On a winter morning in 1990, U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota picked up the Bismarck Tribune. On the front page, a small Native American girl gazed into the distance, shedding a tear. The headline: Foster home children beaten--and nobody's helping.
​

Dorgan, who had been working with American Indian tribes to secure resources, was upset. He flew to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation to meet with five-year-old Tamara who had suffered a horrible beating at a foster home. He visited with Tamara and her grandfather and they became friends. Then Tamara disappeared. And he would search for her for decades until they finally found each other again.

This book is her story, from childhood to the present, but it's also the story of a people and a nation. More than one in three American Indian/Alaskan Native children live in poverty. AI/AN children are disproportionately in foster care and awaiting adoption. Suicide among AI/AN youth ages 15 to 24 is 2.5 times the national rate. How has America allowed this to happen?


As distressing a situation as it is, this is also a story of hope and resilience. Dorgan, who founded the Center for Native American Youth (CNAY) at the Aspen Institute, has worked tirelessly to bring Native youth voices to the forefront of policy discussions, engage Native youth in leadership and advocacy, and secure and share resources for Native youth. You will fall in love with this heartbreaking story, but end the book knowing what can be done and what you can do.

Alta Price (click on my name for the Zoom link)
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PACG Book Club for February 2023 - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

12/10/2022

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PACG Book Club - The Absolutely True Diary of  a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Monday, February 20th at 4:30 pm (via Zoom)

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Our February book will be The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. I found this novel to be quick to read, entertaining and thought-provoking. It is a nice companion to January's book, The Girl in the Photograph, a non-fiction book about challenges facing children and youth on reservations.

A description of the book from Goodreads follows:

Bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by Ellen Forney that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.


Alta Price (click on my name for the Zoom link)
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