Posted on: December 22, 2022
by Louise Erdrich
It is 1953. Thomas Wazhushk is the night watchman at the first factory to open near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a prominent Chippewa Council member, trying to understand a new bill that is soon to be ...
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Posted on: November 18, 2022
by Layla F. Saad
When Layla Saad began an Instagram challenge called #meandwhitesupremacy, she never predicted it would become a cultural movement. She encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviors, big and small. She was looking for truth, ...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: October 25, 2022
by Matthew Desmond
From Harvard sociologist and MacArthur "Genius" Matthew Desmond, a landmark work of scholarship and reportage that will forever change the way we look at poverty in America. In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Matthew Desmon...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: September 28, 2022
by Pawan Dhingra
Beyond soccer leagues, music camps, and drama lessons, today's youth are in an education arms race that begins in elementary school. In Hyper Education, Pawan Dhingra uncovers the growing world of high-achievement education and th...
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Posted on: August 17, 2022
by Thrity Umrigar
Set in modern-day India, this evocative novel follows upper-middle-class Parsi housewife Sera Dubash and 65-year-old illiterate household worker Bhima as they make their way through life. Though separated by their stations in l...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: May 25, 2022
by Lisa Genova
Two women meet by accident on a Nantucket beach and are drawn into a friendship. Olivia is a young mother whose eight-year-old severely autistic son has recently died. She comes to the island in a trial separation to try and make sense of th...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: April 20, 2022
by Kiese Laymon
Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about the physical manifestations of violence, grief, trauma, and abuse on his own body. He writes of his own eating disorder and gambling addiction as well as similar issues that run throughout his fam...
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Posted on: February 14, 2022
by Suketu Mehta
There are few subjects in American life that prompt more discussion and rancor these days than immigration. In This Land is Our Land, the renowned author Suketu Mehta offers a reality-based polemic that vitally clarifies the debate. Drawing...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: December 16, 2021
by Bernardine Evaristo
The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: June 10, 2021
by Paul Ortiz
Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America a...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: March 10, 2021
by Ed Orzechowski
Abandoned by his unwed mother during World War II, Donald Vitkus becomes a ward of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He is 27 days old. Six years later as 'Patient #3394,' he is committed to Belchertown State School, where he is labeled ...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: January 20, 2021
by Kathryn Stockett
In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women — black and white, mo...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: February 18, 2020
by Michelle Obama
In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America, she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive Whit...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: January 22, 2020
by Abdi Nor Iftin
Abdi Nor Iftin first fell in love with America from afar. As a child, he learned English by listening to American pop artists like Michael Jackson and watching films starring action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger. When U.S. marines lan...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: October 18, 2019
by Jennifer Rosner
This revelatory memoir explores family, silence, and what it means to be heard. When her daughters are born deaf, Rosner is stunned. Then she discovers a hidden history of deafness in her family, going back generations to the Jewish encl...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: July 18, 2019
by Leland Melvin
A memoir by the former NASA astronaut and NFL wide receiver traces his personal journey from the gridiron to the stars, examining the intersecting roles of community, perseverance, and grace that create opportunities for success.
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: May 29, 2019
by Angie Thomas
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of he...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: April 12, 2019
by Lauren Markham
The deeply reported story of identical twin brothers who escape El Salvador's violence to build new lives in California — fighting to survive, to stay, and to belong. Growing up in rural El Salvador in the wake of the civil war,...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: March 20, 2019
by Cecile Richards
From the president of Planned Parenthood, daughter of the late Governor Ann Richards, and featured speaker at the Women's March on Washington, comes a story about learning to lead and make change, based on a lifetime of fighting for wome...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: February 19, 2019
by Patrisse Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele
A memoir by the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement explains the movement's position of love, humanity, and justice, challenging perspectives that have negatively labeled the movement's activists while ...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: January 25, 2019
by Paulette Jiles
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, an elderly widower and itinerant news reader, is offered fifty dollars to bring an orphan girl, who was kidnapped and raised by Kiowa raiders, from Wichita Falls back to her ...
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Posted on: December 18, 2018
by J.D. Vance
Provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction i...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: November 17, 2018
by Malala Yousafzai
When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education. On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the u...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: October 12, 2018
by Trevor Noah
Noah's path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, at the time such a union was punishable by five years in prison. As he struggl...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: August 16, 2018
by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Two leading spiritual masters share their wisdom about living with joy even in the face of adversity, sharing personal stories and teachings about the science of profound happiness and the daily pr...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: July 24, 2018
by Rod Nordland
An astonishingly powerful and profoundly moving story of a young couple willing to risk everything for love that puts a human face on the ongoing debate about women's rights in the Muslim world. Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: June 22, 2018
by Laurie Frankel
When Rosie and Penn and their four boys welcome the newest member of their family, no one is surprised it's another baby boy. At least their large, loving, chaotic family knows what to expect. But Claude is not like his brothers. One day ...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: May 11, 2018
by Diksha Basu
Moving to a wealthy community after the lucrative sale of their website, Mr. And Mrs. Jha, formerly of East Delhi, struggle with cultural changes while their son, studying in America, pursues romance and wonders how his parents' new status w...
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Posted on: January 18, 2018
by Jill Lepore
A cultural history of Wonder Woman traces the character's creation and enduring popularity, drawing on interviews and archival research to reveal the pivotal role of feminism in shaping her seven-decade story. This book examines the life of ...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: December 13, 2017
by Khaled Hosseini
Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and step-mother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters....
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: October 13, 2017
by Felicia Day
From the online entertainment pioneer, actress, and "queen of the geeks" Felicia Day, comes a funny, quirky, and inspiring memoir about her unusual upbringing, her rise to internet stardom, and embracing her weirdness to find her p...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: July 14, 2017
by John Elder Robison
Shocked by the teenage violence she witnessed during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, Erin Gruwell became a teacher at a high school rampant with hostility and racial intolerance. For many of these students - whose ranks included...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: May 15, 2017
by the Freedom Writers with Erin Gruwell
Shocked by the teenage violence she witnessed during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, Erin Gruwell became a teacher at a high school rampant with hostility and racial intolerance. For many of these students &am...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: May 15, 2017
by Maya Angelou
The celebrated author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings shares the intimate story of her relationship with her mother, an officer in the Merchant Marines and a purveyor of a gambling business and rooming house, relating the events that pro...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: April 6, 2017
by Judith Frank
For years, Matthew Greene and Daniel Rosen have enjoyed a quiet domestic life together in Northampton, Massachusetts. Opposites in many ways, they have grown together and made their relationship work. But when they learn that Daniel's twin ...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: March 19, 2017
by Tracy Kidder
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder returns with the extraordinary true story of Deo, a young man who arrives in America from Burundi in search of a new life. After surviving a civil war and genocide, he ekes out a precarious exi...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: January 19, 2017
by Kate Andersen Brower
America's first families are unknowable in many ways. No one has insight into their true character like the people who serve their meals and make their beds every day. Full of stories and details by turns dramatic, humorous, and hea...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: January 19, 2017
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the indigenous peoples was genocidal and imperialist, designed to crush the original inhabitants.
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: October 19, 2016
by Sandra Cisneros
For Esperanza, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, life is an endless landscape of concrete and run-down tenements, and she tries to rise above the hopelessness.
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: December 15, 2016
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a black father for his son, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: September 14, 2016
by Susan Cain
A former Wall Street attorney and business coach demonstrates how introverted people are misunderstood and undervalued in today's culture, charting the rise of "the extrovert ideal" while sharing anecdotal examples to counsel reader...
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Posted on: June 23, 2016
by Victoria Sweet
This portrait of America's last surviving almshouse describes the author's long-time practice at Laguna Honda Hospital, explaining how its extraordinary patients and low-tech focus on "attentive medicine" transformed her views a...
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Posted on: May 13, 2016
by Black Elk and John G. Neihardt
Reveals the life of Lakota healer Nicholas Black Elk as he led his tribe's battle against white settlers who threatened their homes and buffalo herds, and describes the victories and tragedies at Little Bighorn and Wounded...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: March 17, 2016
by Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn
A Pulitzer Prize-winning husband-and-wife team speaks out against the oppression of women in the developing world, sharing example stories about victims and survivors who are working to raise awareness, counter ab...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: February 17, 2016
by Cammie McGovern
Born with cerebral palsy, Amy can't walk without a walker, talk without a voice box, or even fully control her facial expressions. Plagued by obsessive-compulsive disorder, Matthew is consumed with repeated thoughts, neurotic rituals, an...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: December 24, 2015
by Tim O'Brien
The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: November 25, 2015
by Cokie Roberts
Cokie Roberts's number one New York Times bestseller, We Are Our Mothers' Daughters, examined the nature of women's roles throughout history and led USA Today to praise her as a "custodian of time-honored values." Her second best...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: July 24, 2015
by Michelle Alexander
Law professor Alexander argues that the War on Drugs and policies that deny convicted felons equal access to employment, housing, education, and public benefits create a permanent under caste based largely on race. As the United State...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: July 24, 2015
R.J. Palacio
Ten-year-old Auggie Pullman, who was born with extreme facial abnormalities and was not expected to survive, goes from being home-schooled to entering fifth grade at a private middle school in Manhattan, which entails enduring the taunting and...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences
Posted on: July 24, 2015
by Studs Terkel
From the 1950s through 1997, Louis "Studs" Terkel, bestselling author of Hard Times, Working, The Great War, Coming of Age, and eight other books, hosted a daily one-hour show on WFMT Radio in Chicago. This nationally syndicated, ...
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Posted on: December 15, 2016
by Tim Wise
White Like Me is part memoir, part polemical essay collection. It is a personal examination of the way in which racial privilege shapes the daily lives of white Americans in every realm: employment, education, housing, criminal justice, and els...
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Book Club - Understanding Differences