Tag: Book Club

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Black History Month Book Club

Book Club: Black History Month 2022

By Dr Abisola Balogun-Katung & PhD student Ania Barros Mendes Couchinho

This months PHSI EDI BOOK CLUB Abisola and Ania have put together a fantastic collection of books on Black History Month and support black businesses and booksellers.

Support Black Businesses

Afrori Books: https://afroribooks.co.uk/

Round Table Books: https://www.roundtablebooks.co.uk/shop-black-studies-module

African Bookstore: https://www.africanbookstore.net/search.asp

New Beacon Books: https://www.newbeaconbooks.com/

Black and British

David Olusoga

Black and British provide its reader with a thorough and vital history of black Britain. It provides the reader with an exposé of the lingering relationship between the people of Africa, the Caribbean and the British Isles, this book has rightfully been described as a “thrilling tale of excavation” and a ‘testimony to the rich experiences of Black people of Britain’. It is also available as a short, essential history for readers aged 12+.

A comprehensive and important history of black Britain

The Sunday Times

The Good Immigrant

Nikesh Shukla

The Good Immigrant brings together 21 thrilling Black, Asian and minority ethnic voices emerging in Britain. With a collection of poignant, challenging, sometimes angry, heartbreaking and humorous essays, it explores why immigrants come to the UK, why they stay and what it means to be ‘other’ in a foreign country miles away from home.  

The stories are sometimes funny, sometimes brutal, always honest … if I could, I’d push a copy of this through the letter box of every front door in Britain.

The Independent

Tribes

David Lammy

Tribes explores the benign and malignant effects of our need to belong in society. This genetically programmed and socially acquired need to belong manifests in positive ways through collaboratively achieving great successes, which individually cannot be achieved. On the other hand, this need can manifest in negative ways, particularly with globalisation and digitisation leading to new, more malicious forms of tribalism. David Lammy provides the reader with a fascinating and perceptive socio-political analysis of Britain and what it means to be British.

Lammy writes with nuance and sensitivity and accepts the lack of easy answers. But his core message is simple. We must cooperate more, compromise more, communicate more. Only connect, but offline.

Prospect

What White People Can Do Next

Emma Dabiri

Vital and empowering What White People Can Do Next teaches each of us how to be agents of change in the fight against racism and the establishment of a more just and equitable world. In this affecting and inspiring collection of essays, Emma Dabiri draws on both academic discipline and lived experience to probe the ways many of us are complacent and complicit—and can therefore combat—white supremacy. She outlines the actions we must take, including: Stopping the Denial, Interrogate Whiteness, Abandon Guilt, Redistribute Resources, Realize this s**t is killing you too . . . 

To move forward, we must begin to evaluate our prejudices, our social systems, and the ways in which white supremacy harms us all. Illuminating and practical, What White People Can Do Next is essential for everyone who wants to go beyond their current understanding and affect real—and lasting—change.

Concise, sure-footed and complete . . . a battle cry against racism for even the most socially aware . . . Dabiri’s reflections have been a very, very long time coming

Tanya Sweeny ― Irish Independent



In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Christina Sharpe

This captivating and poetic piece of work unpacks the state and existence of Black beings in modern society. It Considers what binds Black lives together following the journey from slave ships to consciousness or what Sharpe labels ‘The Wake.’ The consciousness and awareness of Blackness that writers such as Shilliam (2015) and Adichie (2017) adopt in their work. Sharpe reinforces her idea of The Wake by defining it as a Black awareness of ‘skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, impoverishment’ (Sharpe, 2016). This Black consciousness is what Sharpe aims to academically theorize and encapsulate in this text. Its four chapters, The Wake, The Ship, The Hold and The Weather, it cleverly addresses themes of postcolonialism, decoloniality and feminism.

Christina Sharpe’s deep engagement with the archive of Black knowledge production across theory, fiction, poetry and other intellectual endeavours offers an avalanche of new insights on how to think about anti-Blackness as a significant and important structuring element of the modern scene.

Cutting across theoretical genres, In the Wake will generate important intellectual debates and maybe even movements in Black studies, cultural studies, feminist studies and beyond. This is where cultural studies should have gone a long time ago

Rinaldo Walcott – author of Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

This emotive and comforting novel offers a Pan-African narrative completely free of Eurocentrism. The story of Okonkwo, a man of the Ibo tribe in Nigeria, tells a story of a way of life many modern Africans continue to mourn. It brings to light both the positive experiences of African life before colonisation and mirrors the fall of African customs and traditions towards the end of the 19th century.

The writer in whose company the prison walls fell down

Nelson Mandela

His courage and generosity are made manifest in the work

Toni Morrison

Small Island

Andrea Levy

A moving novel that tells the stories of a Black woman, a Black man, a white woman and a white man and the way in which their paths overlap unexpectedly. Set at the time of the Windrush era, Small Island tells the story of the Windrush generation. Levy taps into the unique racialised experiences of each individual, the gender roles set by both racial backgrounds and the socio-political experiences of all four individuals as England recovers from the 2nd World War.

Gives us a new urgent take on our past.

Vogue

Black Skin, White Mask

Franz Fanon

This timeless historical critique rewrites the history of colonialism from a lens that describes the transition of Africa towards Eurocentrism. Fanon discusses Africa’s heart-breaking psychological, physical, and cultural transformation that provides historical context for today’s socio-political landscape. A must-read for all those interested in Decoloniality, Black and postcolonial studies.

This century’s most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism

Angela Davis
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Book Club Elder Abuse

EDI Book Club: Elder Abuse Day

15th June

By Connor Richardson with Recommendations from the Lit and Phil.

Thank you for popping into the book club! Finding good recommendations around elder abuse has proved quite difficult! However, I figure as part of elder abuse day we should be celebrating ageing and older people. So I hope you enjoy these books in that sprirt.

Con

Happy Old Me: How to Live A Long Life, and Really Enjoy It

Hunter Davies | Memoir

On 8th February 2016, Margaret Forster lost her life to cancer of the spine. The days that followed for her husband, Hunter Davies, were carried out on autopilot: arrangements to be made, family and friends to be contacted. But how do you cope after you have lost your loved one? How do you carry on?

Ken Loach might have turned all this into a powerful social film, but the avuncular Davies sprinkles in so many cheery anecdotes that the book bounces along enjoyably

Sunday Times


As Hunter navigates what it means to be alone again after 55 years of marriage, coping with bereavement and being elderly (he still doesn’t believe he is), he shares his wisdom and lessons he has learnt living alone again. Revealing his emotional journey over the course of one year, as well as the often ignored practical implications of becoming widowed, he learns that, ultimately, bricks and mortar may change but the memories will remain. 

Part memoir, part self-help, Happy Old Me is a fitting, heart-felt tribute to the love of his life and a surprisingly amusing and informative book about an age, and stage in life, which we might all reach someday. The third book in Hunter Davies’ much-loved memoir series, which includes The Co-Op’s Got Bananas and A Life in the Day. 

You’re looking well: the surprising nature of getting old

Lewis Wolpert | Non-fiction

We now live longer today than at any time in history. In the UK, more people are aged over sixty-five than under sixteen and by 2050, over a third of the developed world will be over sixty. How should we deal with this phenomenon? What are the scientific reasons for ageing? And can – or should – we prevent it?

Lewis Wolpert, distinguished biologist and octogenarian, explores the scientific background and the implications of our ageing population. In this engaging investigation, he tackles every aspect of the subject from ageism to euthanasia to anti-ageing cream and, through it all, tries to better understand his own ageing. Witty, frank and often inspiring, Lewis Wolpert is the perfect guide to ‘looking very well’.

Gangsta Granny

David Walliams | Children

Another hilarious and moving novel from David Walliams, number one bestseller and fastest growing children s author in the country.

A story of prejudice and acceptance, funny lists and silly words, this new book has all the hallmarks of David s previous bestsellers.

Our hero Ben is bored beyond belief after he is made to stay at his grandma s house. She s the boringest grandma ever: all she wants to do is to play Scrabble, and eat cabbage soup. But there are two things Ben doesn t know about his grandma.

1) She was once an international jewel thief.

2) All her life, she has been plotting to steal the Crown Jewels, and now she needs Ben s help

Don’t bring me no rocking chair

John Halliday | Poetry

Gathering poems from Shakespeare to the present, Don’t Bring Me No Rocking Chair addresses ageing through the several ages of poetry. Now more than ever, as more of us live for longer, the idea of what it means to age or to grow old engages and concerns people of all ages.

One of the problems of ageing is the language we use to define it and the list of pejoratives associated with it, with attitudes to ageing ranging from ‘fatalism, denial, negative stereotyping and tunnel vision to fantasy’ (Professor Tom Kirkwood, Newcastle University). Poetry can help to give us a fresh language to think about ageing and these poems are chosen to fortify, celebrate, lament, grieve, rage and ridicule. There is not one way to age but neither can any of us truly stop our bodies from ageing.

In our youth-obsessed culture, there is something exquisitely subversive about a book that celebrates old age…As with all anthologies, its delight lies in revisiting old favourites and discovering poems one might not have come across otherwise

Juanita Coulson, The Lady.

Ageing is not a single phenomenon but complex, multiple, perplexing: experienced historically as well as individually. This anthology may not console but it can widen our perspectives, helping us to change what we can change: our attitudes. Joan Bakewell writes in the Foreword: ‘With age comes a growing thoughtfulness: what was it all for?

What have we made of our lives, what have we known of love, what have we enjoyed of beauty and how do we come to terms with our going? This remarkable book contains thoughts on all such concerns. Its variety is extensive but one thing is sustained throughout. The quality of ideas and expression is of the highest. On whichever page you alight there is something that will offer comfort, delight, and insight. While the world of money, ambition and worldly cares recedes, matters of the heart and spirit come to matter more. This book is the ideal companion on that journey.’ This anthology was prepared for the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts as part of the Societal Challenge Theme on Ageing at Newcastle University with support from the Institute of Ageing and Health, Newcastle University.

The Thursday Murder Club

Richard Osman | Fiction

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders.

But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case.

Pure escapism

The Guardian

Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it’s too late?

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Book Club World Refugee Day

Book Club: World Refugee Day

Monday 20th June 2022

By Connor Richardson with Recommendations from the Lit and Phil.

Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi | Graphic Novel

In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country.

“Delectable. . . Dances with drama and insouciant wit.”

New York Times

Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.

Exit West

Mohsin Hamid | Fiction

In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet–sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors–doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. . . .

“Moving, audacious, and indelibly human.”

Entertainment Weekly

Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

The day war came

Nicola Davies | Children’s

Imagine if, on an ordinary day, war came. Imagine it turned your town to rubble. Imagine going on a long and difficult journey – all alone. Imagine finding no welcome at the end of it. Then imagine a child who gives you something small but very, very precious…

There are few modern children’s books that make you cry. This is one of them.

The Times

When the government refused to allow 3000 child refugees to enter this country in 2016, Nicola Davies was so angry she wrote a poem. It started a campaign for which artists contributed drawings of chairs, symbolising a seat in a classroom, education, kindness, the hope of a future. The poem has become this book, movingly illustrated by Rebecca Cobb, which should prove a powerful aid for explaining the ongoing refugee crisis to younger readers.

We are displaced

Malala Yousafzai| Memoir

Nobel Peace Prize winner and bestselling author Malala Yousafzai introduces some of the faces behind the statistics and news stories we read or hear every day about the millions of people displaced worldwide.

A stirring and timely book.

The New York Times

Malala’s experiences visiting refugee camps caused her to reconsider her own displacement – first as an Internally Displaced Person when she was a young child in Pakistan, and then as an international activist who could travel anywhere in the world, except to the home she loved. In We Are Displaced, which is part memoir, part communal storytelling, Malala not only explores her own story of adjusting to a new life while longing for home, but she also shares the personal stories of some of the incredible girls she has met on her various journeys – girls who have lost their community, relatives, and often the only world they’ve ever known.

In a time of immigration crises, war and border conflicts, We Are Displaced is an important reminder from one of the world’s most prominent young activists that every single one of the 68.5 million currently displaced is a person – often a young person – with hopes and dreams, and that everyone deserves universal human rights and a safe home.

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Book Club LGBT+

Book Club: International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia

May 17th

By Connor Richardson with Recommendations from the Lit and Phil.

Girl, Woman, Other

Bernardine Evaristo | Fiction

This is Britain as you’ve never read it.
This is Britain as it has never been told.

‘Beautifully interwoven stories of identity, race, womanhood, and the realities of modern Britain. The characters are so vivid, the writing is beautiful and it brims with humanity’ 

Nicola Sturgeon


From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They’re each looking for something – a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope . . .

THE SUNDAY TIMES 1# BESTSELLER & BOOKER PRIZE WINNER

BRITISH BOOK AWARDS AUTHOR & FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 

History of Violence

Édouard Louis | Autobiographical fiction

The radical, urgent new novel from the author of The End of Eddy – a personal and powerful story of violence.

‘It stays with you’

The Times

‘A heartbreaking novel’

John Boyne


I met Reda on Christmas Eve 2012, at around four in the morning. He approached me in the street, and finally I invited him up to my apartment. He told me the story of his childhood and how his father had come to France, having fled Algeria. 

We spent the rest of the night together, talking, laughing. At around 6 o’clock, he pulled out a gun and said he was going to kill me. He insulted me, strangled and raped me. The next day, the medical and legal proceedings began.

History of Violence retraces the story of that night, and looks at immigration, class, racism, desire and the effects of trauma in an attempt to understand a history of violence, its origins, its reasons and its causes. 

Transgender History

Susan Stryker | Non-fiction

Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events.

An invaluable text for anyone who wants to better understand evolving concepts of gender. Essential.

CHOICE

Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-’70s to 1990-the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the ’90s and ’00s.

Ground-breaking and all-around excellent.

Autostraddle

Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture.

This timely and relevant book should be required reading.

Portland Book Review

And Tango Makes Three

Justin Richardson, Peter Parnell & Henry Cole | Childrens

Roy and Silo are two boy penguins who live in the zoo in New York’s Central Park. They like to spend all their time together, and so just as the boy and girl penguins begin to build nests, so do Roy and Silo.

But then eggs start to appear in all the other nests, and Roy and Silo’s nest remains empty. So the penguin keeper gets the idea to give them an egg that’s not wanted by another couple.

This is a really delightful story and the message behind it is subtle. It’s a true story, and you can learn more about it in a note at the end.

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Book Club Holocaust Memorial Day

Book Club: Holocaust Memorial Day

January 27th

Recommended by the Lit & Phil

Annexed

Sharon Dogar | Young Fiction

Everyone knows about Anne Frank, and her life hidden in the secret annexe – or do they?


Peter van Pels and his family are locked away in there with the Franks, and Peter sees it all differently. He’s a boy, and for a boy it’s just not the same. What is it like to be forced into hiding with Anne Frank, to hate her and then find yourself falling in love with her? To know you’re being written about in her diary, day after day? What’s it like to sit and wait and watch whilst others die, and you wish you were fighting?

A delicate, poised and scrupulous re-enactment.

Mal Peet, The Guardian


How can Anne and Peter try to make sense of one of the most devastating episodes in recent history – the holocaust?


Anne’s diary ends on August 4 1944, but Peter’s story takes us on, beyond their betrayal and into the Nazi death camps. He details with accuracy, clarity and compassion, the reality of day to day survival in Auschwitz – and the terrible conclusion.


It’s a story rooted firmly in history and it asks a question of us all: Are we listening?


‘Is anybody there?’ Peter cries from the depths of his despair in the camps. Read it, and you will be.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Heather Morris | Fiction

I tattooed a number on her arm. She tattooed her name on my heart.

In 1942, Lale Sokolov arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was given the job of tattooing the prisoners marked for survival – scratching numbers into his fellow victims’ arms in indelible ink to create what would become one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust. 

A sincere…moving attempt to speak the unspeakable

The Sunday Times

Waiting in line to be tattooed, terrified and shaking, was a young girl. For Lale – a dandy, a jack-the-lad, a bit of a chancer – it was love at first sight. And he was determined not only to survive himself, but to ensure this woman, Gita, did, too.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a very moving book, showing the survival of humanity in a brutal place. I love this story

The Reading Life

So begins one of the most life-affirming, courageous, unforgettable and human stories of the Holocaust: the love story of the tattooist of Auschwitz.

Maus

Art Spiegelman | Graphic Novel

Hailed as the greatest graphic novel of all time.

Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story.

The first masterpiece in comic book history.

The New Yorker

Approaching the unspeakable through the diminutive (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father.


Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits, studying the bloody pawprints of history and tracking its meaning for those who come next.

The Holocaust: A New History

Lawrence Reese | Non-fiction

This landmark work answers two of the most fundamental questions in history – how, and why, did the Holocaust happen?

Laurence Rees has spent twenty-five years meeting survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust. Now, in his magnum opus, he combines their enthralling eyewitness testimony, a large amount of which has never been published before, with the latest academic research to create the first accessible and authoritative account of the Holocaust in more than three decades. 

By far the clearest book ever written about the Holocaust, and also the best at explaining its origins and grotesque mentality, as well as its chaotic development.

Antony Beevor

This is a new history of the Holocaust in three ways. First, and most importantly, Rees has created a gripping narrative that that contains a large amount of testimony that has never been published before. Second, he places this powerful interview material in the context of an examination of the decision making process of the Nazi state, and in the process reveals the series of escalations that cumulatively created the horror. Third, Rees covers all those across Europe who participated in the deaths, and he argues that whilst hatred of the Jews was always at the epicentre of Nazi thinking, what happened cannot be fully understood without considering the murder of the Jews alongside plans to kill millions of non-Jews, including homosexuals, ‘Gypsies’ and the disabled.

Through a chronological, intensely readable narrative, featuring enthralling eyewitness testimony and the latest academic research, this is a compelling new account of the worst crime in history.

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Book Club Trangender Awareness Week

Book Club: Transgender Awareness Week

13th – 19th December

Recommended by the Lit & Phil

The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice

Shon Faye | Non-fiction

Trans people in Britain today have become a culture war ‘issue’. Despite making up less than one per cent of the country’s population, subjects of a toxic and polarised ‘debate’ which generates controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact: we are having the wrong conversation, in which trans people themselves are reduced to a talking point and denied a meaningful voice.

Shon Faye reclaims the idea of the ‘transgender issue’ to uncover the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In doing so, she provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.

It is a manifesto for change, and a call for justice and solidarity between all marginalised people and minorities. Trans liberation, as Faye sees it, goes to the root of what our society is and what it could be; it offers the possibility of a more just, free and joyful world for all of us.

Few books are as urgent as Shon Faye’s debut … Faye has hope for the future – and maybe so should we.

Independent

Julian Is a Mermaid

Jessica Love | Children’s fiction

Beautifully illustrated and joyously inclusive, Julian is a M ermaid has a good claim to being the most progressive picture book of the decade. But even aside from the positive messages of tolerance and identity, Love’s future classic is a riot of colour, wit and glorious humanity.

Mesmerising and full of heart, this is a picture book about self-confidence and love, and a radiant celebration of individuality.

While riding the subway home with his Nana one day, Julian notices three women spectacularly dressed up. Their hair billows in brilliant hues, their dresses end in fishtails, and their joy fills the train carriage. When Julian gets home, daydreaming of the magic he’s seen, all he can think about is dressing up just like the ladies and making his own fabulous mermaid costume. But what will Nana think about the mess he makes – and even more importantly – what will she think about how Julian sees himself?

Every choice Jessica Love makes imbues the story with charm, tenderness and humour

New York Times Book Review

Conundrum

Jan Morris | Memoir

As one of Britain’s best and most loved travel writers, Jan Morris has led an extraordinary life. Perhaps her most remarkable work is this grippingly honest account of her ten-year transition from man to woman – its pains and joys, its frustrations and discoveries.

On first publication in 1974, the book generated enormous interest and curiosity around the world, and was subsequently chosen by The Times as one of the ‘100 Key Books of Our Time’. Including a new introduction, this re-issue marks a return to that particular journey.

Certainly the best first-hand account ever written by a traveller across the boundaries of sex.

Daily Mail

Wonderland

Juno Dawson | Fiction

Addressing issues of mental health, gender and privilege, Dawson’s novel is an irrepressibly stylish take on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.   

Waterstones

Alice lives in a world of stifling privilege and luxury – but none of it means anything when your own head plays tricks on your reality. When her troubled friend Bunny goes missing, Alice becomes obsessed with finding her. On the trail of her last movements, Alice discovers a mysterious invitation to ‘Wonderland’: the party to end all parties – three days of hedonistic excess to which only the elite are welcome.

Will she find Bunny there? Or is this really a case of finding herself? Because Alice has secrets of her own, and ruthless socialite queen Paisley Hart is determined to uncover them, whatever it takes.

Alice is all alone, miles from home and without her essential medication. She can trust no-one, least of all herself, and now she has a new enemy who wants her head…

African AIDS Awareness Month Alzheimer's Black History Month Book Club Caribbean Conversion Therapy COVID-19 Dementia Diabetes Disability History Month Elder Abuse End of Life Care holocaust Inclusion International Men's Day LGBT+ Medicine Mental Health Paternal PEACE Project Perinatal Refugee Transgender Violence against LGBT people world alzheimer's day world religion day

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AIDS Awareness Month Book Club

Book Club: AIDS Awareness Month

December

Recommended by the Lit & Phil https://www.litandphil.org.uk

Tales of the City

Armistead Maupin | Fiction

For more than three decades Armistead Maupin’s T ales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world.

The first of six novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.

Maupin’s other novels include Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener. Maupin was the 2012 recipient of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Pioneer Award. He lives in San Francisco with his husband, the photographer Christopher Turner.

Inspiring, uplifting and necessary reading.

Steve Silberman author of Neurotribes, Financial Times

How to Survive a Plague

David France | Non-fiction

How to Survive a Plague by David France is the riveting, powerful and profoundly moving story of the AIDS epidemic and the grass-roots movement of activists, many of them facing their own life-or-death struggles, who grabbed the reins of scientific research to help develop the drugs that turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable disease.

Around the globe, the 15.8 million people taking anti-AIDS drugs today are alive thanks to their efforts. Not since the publication of Randy Shilts’s now classic And the Band Played On in 1987 has a book sought to measure the AIDS plague in such brutally human, intimate, and soaring terms.

Weaving together the stories of dozens of individuals, this is an insider’s account of a pivotal moment in our history and one that changed the way that medical science is practised worldwide.

This superbly written chronicle will stand as a towering work in its field.

Sunday Times

The Line of Beauty

Alan Hollinghurst | Alt-fiction

It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest, an innocent in the matters of politics and money, has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. Nick had idolised Toby at Oxford, but in his London life it will be the troubled Catherine who becomes his friend and his uneasy responsibility.

Innocent of politics and money, Nick is swept up into the Feddens’ world and an era of endless possibility, all the while pursuing his own private obsession with beauty.

The Line of Beauty is novel that defines a decade, exploring with peerless style a young man’s collision with his own desires, and with a world he can never truly belong to.

The best-deserving Booker winner ever.

The Sunday Times

Living and Loving in the age of AIDS

Derek Frost | Memoir

This is the tale of a devastating pandemic, of lives cut painfully short – it’s also a love story.

Derek, a distinguished designer, and J, a pioneering entrepreneur and creator of Heaven, the iconic gay dance club, met and fell in love more than 40 years ago.

In the early 1980s their friends began to get sick and die – AIDS had arrived in their lives. When they got tested, J received what was then a death sentence: he was HIV Positive. While the onset of AIDS strengthened stigma and fear globally, they confronted their crisis with courage, humour and an indomitable resolve to survive. J’s battle lasted six long years.

Turning to spiritual reflection, yoga, nature – and always to love – Derek describes a transformation of the spirit, how compassion and empathy rose phoenix-like from the flames of sickness and death, and how he and J founded the charity Aids Ark, which has helped to save more than 1,000 HIV Positive lives.

This is a story of joy and triumph, of facing universal challenges, of the great rewards that come from giving back. Derek speaks for a generation who lived through a global health crisis that many at the time refused even to acknowledge. His is a powerful story chronicling this extraordinary era.

A classic of our times… The work of a great English stylist in full maturity; a masterpiece.

The Observer

African AIDS Awareness Month Alzheimer's Black History Month Book Club Caribbean Conversion Therapy COVID-19 Dementia Diabetes Disability History Month Elder Abuse End of Life Care holocaust Inclusion International Men's Day LGBT+ Medicine Mental Health Paternal PEACE Project Perinatal Refugee Transgender Violence against LGBT people world alzheimer's day world religion day

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Book Club Disability History Month

Book Club: Disability History Month

18th November – 20th December

Recommendations from the Lit & Phil https://www.litandphil.org.uk

So Lucky

Nicola Griffith | Fiction

Mara Tagarelli is on top of her world. She’s the head of a multimillion-dollar AIDS foundation, an accomplished martial artist, and happily married. She has never met a problem she can’t solve — until suddenly she can’t solve any of them. In a single week her wife leaves her, she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and she loses her job.

Now everything begins to feel like a threat. At first, she thinks it’s just her newfound sense of vulnerability. Then she realises the threat of violence is real, deadly, and heading straight for her.

Nicola Griffith’s So Lucky is fiction from the front lines, incandescent and urgent, a narrative juggernaut that rips through sentiment to expose the savagery of the experience of becoming disabled and dismissed.

Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People
Who Think Differently

Steve Silberman | Non-fiction

What is autism: a devastating developmental condition, a lifelong disability, or a naturally occurring form of cognitive difference akin to certain forms of genius? In truth, it is all of these things and more – and the future of our society depends on our understanding it.

Following on from his groundbreaking article ‘The Geek Syndrome’, Wired reporter Steve Silberman unearths the secret history of autism, long suppressed by the same clinicians who became famous for discovering it, and finds surprising answers to the crucial question of why the number of diagnoses has soared in recent years.

Going back to the earliest autism research and chronicling the brave and lonely journey of autistic people and their families through the decades, Silberman provides long- sought solutions to the autism puzzle while casting light on the growing movement of ‘neurodiversity’ and mapping out a path towards a more humane world for people with learning differences.

Wonder

R.J. Palacio | Children 9-11 years

‘My name is August . I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse.’

Auggie wants to be an ordinary ten-year-old. He does ordinary things – eating ice cream, playing on his Xbox. He feels ordinary -inside. But ordinary kids don’t make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds. Ordinary kids aren’t stared at wherever they go.

Born with a terrible facial abnormality, Auggie has been home-schooled by his parents his whole life. Now, for the first time, he’s being sent to a real school – and he’s dreading it. All he wants is to be accepted – but can he convince his new classmates that he’s just like them, underneath it all?

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

Alice Wong | Non-fiction

According to the last Census, one in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some are visible, some are hidden but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together an urgent, galvanising collection of personal essays by disabled people in the 21st century.

From Harriet McBryde Johnson’s account of her famous debate with Princeton philosopher Peter Singer over her own personhood, to original pieces by up-and-coming authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, eulogies, testimonies to Congress, and beyond: this anthology gives a glimpse of the vast richness and complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own assumptions and understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and past with hope and love.

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