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OMA Book Club 2007-2008
September Book Club: Hispanic Heritage Month
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Saving the World by Julia Alvarez
Date: TBA
Location: Room 1334 - School of Nursing
Time: 5 - 6 PM
Facilitator: TBA  |
Synopsis
This novel is about two women, one contemporary and one historical, who want desperately for this rhyme to happen. The historical story I came upon while doing research for my novel In the Name of Salomé. A footnote in a history book I was reading caught my eye: due to the occupation of the colony of Santo Domingo by the French, the 1804 Spanish smallpox expedition going around the world with the newly discovered vaccine did not make a stop there. This was the first world-wide effort to eradicate a deadly disease. Back then, travel was slow, on ships. There was no refrigeration, so the only way to keep the vaccine alive was through carriers, sequentially vaccinated. The carriers were, for the most part, orphan boys. The first group of 22 boys, between the ages of three and nine, came from an orphanage in Spain, and here's an incredible detail for a novelist to come upon: the rectoress of the orphanage went along to take care of them. Nothing is known about her except her name, Doña Isabel, her surname variously misspelled.
The second story in the novel is about Alma, a contemporary writer undergoing her own dark night of the soul. Alma has lost faith in writing, lost faith in most things. She is married to a wonderful man, whom she dearly loves, and that saves her from total despair. Her husband, who has a job at an international aid consulting firm, finds himself mixed up with an AIDS clinic (our 21st century epidemic) in a third world country where a pharmaceutical company is testing a new vaccine. These two stories, seemingly so different, begin to "speak" to each other, and I hope there is, if not a full rhyme, then a sort of half rhyme: a hope that stories can make a difference in a world that increasingly seems beyond any kind of redemption.
October Book Club
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Monique and the Mango Rains by Kris Holloway (alumna of U of M)
Date: TBA
Location: Room 2184 - School of Nursing
Time: 5 - 6 PM
Facilitator: Kris Holloway |
Synopsis
Monique and the Mango Rains is the true story of the life and death of a remarkable West African midwife, seen through the eyes of a young Peace Corps Volunteer who worked side-by-side with her, birthing babies and caring for mothers, in a remote, impoverished village. It is a rare tale of friendship that reaches beyond borders to vividly and irrevocably unite another woman's world with our own.
November Book Club Native American Heritage Month
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Faces in the Moon by Betty Bell -- UM Professor of English, Women's Studies and American Literature, Department of English Language and Literature, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.
Date: Tuesday, Nov 13, 2007
Location: Room 1334 - School of Nursing
Time: 12-1 PM
Facilitator: Irene Felicetti |
Synopsis
Most children, at some point, try to leave their pasts behind them, and Lucie is no different. She has been abused; she has lived in poverty. She has not had the most fulfilling relationship with her mother. The trials of her childhood are experiences she wishes to be rid of, but escape from her past is not possible. She must come to terms with it. Bell uses the image of a foot race to describe the elder Lucies relationship with her familial past: "No matter how great my desire to run away from home I always take up my position at the table I almost out run them but in the long distance they pass me" (4). Running away from aspects of life is a central theme in the book. Many dream sequences are filled with dog chases or chases by unseen villains. Sometimes a character is chased by memory and ghosts. We see how running from the past and present has affected many of the characters we meet. Bells vision is that those characters who do not run or who stop running are able to remain grounded.
January Book Club MLK Day
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The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why by Jabari Asim
Date: Tuesday, Jan 15, 2008
Location: Room 1334 - School of Nursing
Time: 5 - 6 PM
Facilitator: Dr. Patricia Coleman-Burns |
Synopsis
What's in a word? When it comes to "nigger," the better question is what isn't? Whatever one thinks of its usage, the granddaddy of ethnic slurs is much more than a stick or stone that can be deflected with self-esteem and forgotten until the next encounter. The word is not singular and never has been. It is a social orientation, a state of mind so deeply embedded in the collective American unconscious — and the conscious — it's not perceived as a problem; it's part of who we are. It is a 400-year-old storm front that has never blown over, a forked tongue of lightning that can crash overhead without warning or welcome, breaking the fragile continuum of American conversations about race. And for all its obvious negatives, its more controversial appearances serve a useful purpose: to illuminate with sudden, unsparing fluorescence the racial divide on which America stands but is ever ambiguous about acknowledging. In every generation, this word speaks — sharply and loudly — to the multitude of our remaining sins.
Even the modern pervasiveness of the word via hip-hop and hard-core rap has not settled the protean question — indeed; it has only made it larger. African American artists, scholars, activists, comedians and thinkers have all argued in favor of the n-word's respectability, or at least its viability, and they have failed; those in the opposition who have argued its cultural irrelevance have failed too. The irresolution was driven home to me last year when I was listening to a radio debate among a group of black nationalists who were responding to Michael Richards' now-infamous rant at the Comedy Store. The group was politically progressive and radically Afrocentric, yet it could not agree on what should be done with the word "nigger," whether to treat it as poisonous or empowering.
February Book Club: Black History Month
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Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculee Ilibagiza
Date: Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008
Location: Room 1334 - School of Nursing
Time: 12-1 PM
Facilitator: Co-Facilitated by: Emeline Mugisha and Dr. Patricia Coleman-Burns |
Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
Synopsis
In the spring of 1994, more than one million people were murdered in the Rwandan genocide. This is the story of how Immaculee survived certain death, along with seven other women, by hiding in a very small bathroom for more than 3 months. Day after day, for months, the killers would search nearby – gleefully chanting “kill them big, kill them small, kill them, kill them, kill them all!” With uncommon sincerity, Immaculee shares with us her soul's struggle through disbelief to anger and rage and, ultimately, forgiveness. She is living proof of the power of prayer and positive thinking.
Her story will touch you deeply. You will feel her fear, you will cry, and you will ask yourself the same questions that we as a people have been asking forever: How could this happen? Where does such animosity come from? Why can't we just be like God, Who is the Source for all of us? But you will also feel something else most profoundly: You will feel hope, a hope that inch by inch, we as a people are moving toward a new alignment—that is, we're moving toward living God-realized lives.
"In 1994, Rwandan native Ilibagiza was 22 years old and home from college to spend Easter with her devout Catholic family when the death of Rwanda's Hutu president sparked a three-month slaughter of nearly one million ethnic Tutsis. She survived by hiding in a Hutu pastor's tiny bathroom with seven other starving women for 91 cramped, terrifying days. This searing firsthand account of Ilibagiza's experience cuts two ways: her description of the evil that was perpetrated, including the brutal murders of her family members, is soul-numbingly devastating, yet the story of her unquenchable faith and connection to God throughout the ordeal uplifts and inspires. This book is a precious addition to the literature that tries to make sense of humankind's seemingly bottomless depravity and counterbalancing hope in an all-powerful, loving God."
March Book Club
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Nursing Against the Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Sterotypes, and Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses and Patient Care by Suzanne Gordon
Date: Tuesday, Mar 18, 2008
Location: Room 1334 - School of Nursing
Time: 5 - 6 PM
Facilitator: Joan Wolfe |
Synopsis
Suzanne Gordon's Nursing Against the Odds is a searing indictment of the denursification of developed world health care and the associated nursing shortage. Gordon (a member of the Center's advisory panel) links the nursing crisis to the three factors cited in her subtitle, which presents a handy executive summary of the book. She uses research and anecdotes to explain why skilled nursing is vital to patient outcomes, and she spares virtually no one with responsibility for the crisis, including nurses themselves.
April Book Club
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A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Date: Tuesday, Apr 15, 2008
Location: Room 1334 - School of Nursing
Time: 12-1 PM
Facilitator: Maureen Belden |
Synopsis
The time is 1975; the place is India, in an unnamed city by the sea. The corrupt and brutal government has just declared a State of Emergency, and the country is on the edge of chaos. In these precarious circumstances, four characters form an unlikely alliance: two tailors, uncle and nephew, who have come to the city in flight from the cruel caste violence in their native village; a middle-aged widow desperately trying to preserve her fragile independence; and a young student from the northern mountains, bewildered by the end of his idyllic childhood and his parents' slow collapse. Through the dramatic and often shocking turns their lives take, we get an intimate view not only of their world but of India itself, in all its extraordinary variety. Rohinton Mistry creates unforgettable characters and vast social panoramas on the scale of Dickens and Victor Hugo, and he shares, as well, their remarkable generosity of spirit. "Those who continue to harp on the decline of the novel ought to . . . consider Rohinton Mistry," wrote the New York Times. "He needs no infusion of magic realism to vivify the real. The real world, through his eyes, is magical."
May Book Club
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
Date: Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Location: Room 1334 - School of Nursing
Time: 5 - 6 PM
Facilitator: Dr. Linda Strodtman |
Synopsis
Lia Lee was born in 1981 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, overmedication, 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." |
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