Sunday, August 2nd
The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride – This fascinating, superbly written memoir was a New York Times bestseller for two years. To date it has sold more than 2.1 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 16 languages.
Join the Braun Library Book Club in reading an award-winning autobiography of a black man that explores the issues of identity and race by delving into his Jewish immigrant mother’s painful past.
The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, is the autobiography and memoir of James McBride first published in 1995; it is also a tribute to his mother, whom he calls Mommy, or Ma. The chapters alternate between James McBride’s descriptions of his early life and first-person accounts of his mother Ruth’s life, mostly taking place before her son was born. McBride depicts the conflicting emotions that he endured as he struggled to discover who he truly was, as his mother narrates the hardships that she had to overcome as a white, Jewish woman who chose to marry a black man in 1942.
Get the book
The library has multiple copies to borrow (contact-less pickup from TIS parking lot). Contact librarian@tiferethisrael.com. Also available in Kindle and Audible form.
Join us via ZOOM here. Meeting ID: 919-999-6085 | Password: 999
Plan Ahead:
Sunday, September 6th – The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2013) (688 pp) by Daniel Mendelsohn
What We’ve Read in the Past
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel by Jonathan Safran Foer
Drawing in the Dust by Zoe Klein
A Bend in the Stars by Rachel Barenbaum
The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks
Moonglow by Michael Chabon
Naamah by Sarah Blake
Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
A Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman
A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev
A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
The River Midnight by Lilian Nattel
I am Forbidden by Anouk Markovits
Mr. Mani by Abraham B. Yehoshua,
Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman
Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
The Chosen by Chaim Potok
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska
Einstein and the Rabbi by Naomi Levy
The Best Place on Earth, a collection of short stories by Ayelet Tsabari
The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish
Afterword
The September 3rd, 2018 issue of the New York Times magazine included an interview with David Peplow, a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University in England who has done multiyear ethnographies of book groups.
The article reports that when he asked people why they joined a book club, many said — unsurprisingly — that they wanted to talk about books. But, the article continued, “when he read through transcripts from dozens of hours of recorded group meetings, it became clear that they were grappling to understand themselves more deeply. “Reading and talking about fiction gives people a way of processing things that happened in their lives in a relatively safe space.” Peplow says.
Click here for the full article.
For more information, send an email to library@tiferethisrael.com.