BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME: MONDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2016, AT 2:00 P.M.
Sarah Grimké was an actual early abolitionist and feminist whose
upbringing in a slaveholding Southern family made her voice particularly
controversial. Kidd re-imagines Sarah's life in tandem with that of a
slave in the Grimké household. In 1803, 11-year-old Sarah receives a
slave as her birthday present from her wealthy Charleston parents.
Called Hetty by the whites, Handful is just what her name implies--sharp
tongued and spirited. Precocious Sarah is horrified at the idea of
owning a slave but is given no choice by her mother, a conventional
Southern woman of her time who is not evil but accepts slavery (and the
dehumanizing cruelties that go along with it) as a God-given right.
BOOK DISCUSSION DATE AND TIME:
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2016 AT 2:00 P.M.
"A contentious, deeply
moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce
Attachments A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in
our time, The Odd Woman
and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing
friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely
independent woman who has
lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that
has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's
exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is
sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more
light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any
other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard
acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual
engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on
the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the
handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street
she makes sense of what she sees. Written as a narrative collage that
includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role
of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over
the past two centuries, The Odd Woman
and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce
Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with
the ultimate metropolis"-- Provided by publisher.
