This summer, in recognition of the COVID-19-virus-induced social isolation, the UUCM Book Club is offering a special read: keeping the book groups alive, in June, July, and August, we’ll be reading some outstanding memoirs.
Indeed, it’s our “Memoirable Summer” of 2020!! So… if you want to be part of this experience, which will probably be mediated through Zoom (either in one big group or two (or three) smaller ones) please (1) tell Michael Glenn (email: michaelglenn01@comcast.net), and (2) respond within the next two weeks with your THREE choices of our SIX books:
- James McBride, The Color of Water: A classic memoir about a single white mother raising twelve inter-racial kids. Oprah calls it the best memoir of the generation.
- Cyntoia Brown-Long, Free Cyntoia: A coming-of-age memoir set against the shocking backdrop of a life behind bars.
- Alix Kate Shulman, Drinking the Rain: At fifty, Shulman leaves a NYC life dense with politics, family, and literary community, and goes to live alone on an island off the Maine coast, where she begins to discover the joys of meditative solitude.
- bell hooks, Bone Black: This memoir details activist bell hooks’ childhood experiences as a poor, African-American girl growing up against a background of racial segregation.
- Lars Eighner, Travels with Lizbeth: Eighner describes his experience being homeless with his dog, Lizbeth, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and his daily struggles to find safe shelter, food, and medical care.
- Sally Mann, Hold Still: This memoir with photographs is one of the great portraits of the American South, a “textbook of illumination, written in pitch-perfect prose style.”