Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and audio books. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
Books Are Us!
Thank goodness for that. It may be a slogan, but the fact that we are intensely involved in books and reading is vital to civilization.
You may say that books are not food, but they energize us and teach us how to learn, how to communicate, how to empathize and we can see the need for that in today’s world.
When I got to college, I found a rich atmosphere of books that had not been available to me before and I gorged on them. Classic paperbacks cost 35 to 50 cents and I could save lunch money and buy one at the end of the week.
I read authors I might not agree with and authors who opened my eyes and authors who set the terms for civilization many, many years ago. I learned what obsession with a white whale and revenge could cost.
I shared the world of being invisible. I went to Paris and Madrid. I learned about the wars. I was no longer sheltered by a small community against the horror of the Holocaust or Jim Crow.
My mind expanded. I asked questions. I searched for answers.
I have never stopped.
What I wish for all my grandchildren is the continued right to read and for writers to be published.
Books Are Us.
One book that opened my eyes and heart was Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bury_My_Heart_at_Wounded_Knee
… Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was first published in 1970 to generally strong reviews. Published at a time of increasing American Indian activism, the book has never gone out of print and has been translated into 17 languages. The title is taken from the final phrase of a twentieth-century poem titled "American Names" by Stephen Vincent Benet. The full quotation, "I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee." appears at the beginning of Brown's book. Although Benet's poem is not about the plight of Native Americans, Wounded Knee was the location of the last major confrontation between the US Army and Native Americans. It is also the vicinity of where Crazy Horse's parents buried his heart and some of his bones after his death in 1877.
In the first chapter, Brown presents a brief history of the discovery and settlement of America, from 1492 to the Indian turmoil that began in 1860. He stresses the initially gentle and peaceable behavior of Indians toward Europeans, especially given their apparent lack of resistance to early colonial efforts at Europeanization. It was not until the further influx of European settlers, gradual encroachment, and eventual seizure of American lands by the "white man" that the Native people were shown to exhibit forms of major resistance.
Brown completes his initial overview by briefly describing incidents up to 1860 that involve American encroachment and Indian removal, beginning with the defeat of the Wampanoags and Narragansetts, Iroquois, and Cherokee Nations, as well as the establishment of the West as the "permanent Indian frontier" and the ultimate breaches of the frontier as a means to achieve Manifest Destiny.
In each of the following chapters, Brown provides an in-depth description of a significant post-1860 event in American Western expansion or Native American eradication, focusing in turn on the specific tribe or tribes involved in the event. In his narrative, Brown primarily discusses such tribes as the Navajo Nation, Santee Dakota, Hunkpapa Lakota, Oglala Lakota, Cheyenne, and Apache people. He touches more lightly upon the subjects of the Arapaho, Modoc, Kiowa, Comanche, Nez Perce, Ponca, Ute, and Minneconjou Lakota tribes.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bury-my-heart-at-wounded-knee-dee-brown/1100757038?ean=9780805086843
Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the series of battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them and their people demoralized and decimated. 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 won, and lost. It tells a story that should not be forgotten, and so must be retold from time to time.
I have also read The Cat from Hue by John Laurence.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment-july-dec02-laurence_07-11/
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-cat-from-hue-john-laurence/1125867360?ean=9781586481605
John Laurence covered the Vietnam war for CBS News from 1965 to 1970 and was judged by his colleagues to be the best television reporter of the war. His documentary about a squad of U.S. troops, "The World of Charlie Company," received every major award for broadcast journalism. Despite the professional acclaim, however, the traumatic stories Laurence covered became a personal burden that he carried long after the war was over.
In this evocative, unflinching memoir, laced with humor, anger, love, and the unforgettable story of Méo, the Vietnamese cat, Laurence recalls coming of age during the war years as a journalist and as a man. Along the way, he clarifies the murky history of the war and the role that journalists played in altering its course.
Of course there were important plays, poems and films:
Tennessee Williams
Eugene O’Neill
Dylan Thomas
e. e. cummings
What books made you think and question?
What books are still important to us, today?
Who is speaking out now?
Diaries of the Week:
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Write on! Point of view and story shape
By bonetti
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/3/30/1645245/-Write-on-Point-of-view-and-story-shape#view-story
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Introducing the New Kos Katalogue!
By Avilyn
www.dailykos.com/...
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All Times are EDT, EST
NOTE: I just listened to the weather report and big winds are coming plus lots of rain followed by heavy snow. So if I disappear or am not here, tomorrow, you will know why...sigh. But fingers are crossed. We do have a small generator if it comes to that, but it is hard to set up so we might just wait things out.