The Gulf Coast Chapter Book Club

The Gulf Coast Chapter Book Club focuses on reading books about women in developing countries and also serves as an educational, as well as literary and enjoyable monthly forum. The book club meets every second Monday at the Sarasota North County Library from 2:30-4:00.   All members are invited to attend.  For further information, please contact Leita Kaldi Davis at lkaldi@hotmail.com. 

***Please note that the future reading list has been revised.***


Upcoming Selections:

Past Meetings/Readings:

March 2011
The Gulf Coast Chapter Book Club gathered on Monday, March 14, 2011, to discuss Shanghai Girls by Lisa See, a novel that centers on Pearl and her younger sister, May, who enjoy an elite life in 1930s China until their father reveals that his gambling habit has decimated the family's finances.  To to make good on his debts, he has sold both girls to a wealthy Chinese-American as wives for his sons. Pearl and May have no intention of leaving home, but after Japanese bombs and soldiers ravage their city and both their parents disappear, the sisters head for California, where their husbands-to-be live. As they adjust to marriage with strangers and the challenges of living in a foreign land, Pearl and May begin to long for the traditions of their homeland, which they formerly scoffed, learning that their traditions provide comfort in unbearable times. We have read some of Lisa See's other books and noticed that her renditions of earlier historical periods are written with more fluidity than this modern story, which seemed stilted and less convincing than See's former books.


February 2011
The Gulf Coast Chapter Book Club gathered on Monday, February 14, 2011 to discuss Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work by Edwidge Danticat. We read and admired earlier works of Danticat, but everyone agreed that this book showed an intellectual maturity and power that has been steadily evolving in this Haitian writer's creative expression. The book is a compilation of essays and stories that Danticat presented at the Toni Morrison Lecture Series in 2008. She profiles many Haitian and other writers who risk their lives and/or their self-esteem by proclaiming their often controversial truths. Danticat writes of her own suffering at the hands of critics, and the loss of many Haitian friends, like Jean Dominique, to outright murder. 


January 2011
The Gulf Coast Chapter Book Club gathered on Monday, January 10, 2011 to discuss Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda's Children by Faith J.H. McDonnell and Grace Akallo. Grace Akallo was captured at the age of fifteen by Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army and forced to become a child soldier and sex slave, while she watched many of her friends die, and anguished over her family left behind. In 1997 she escaped, starving and traumatized, to return to her family, her school and eventually to graduate from Clark University. Her goal is to make known the plight of children in Uganda and, to that end, she has published this book, been on speaking tours, appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show, and testified at a Congressional hearing.
Her co-author, Faith McDonnell, is an American activist and writer with a special concern for the vulnerable Acholi people of northern Uganda. Her history of Uganda and anthropological background notes alternate chapter by chapter with Grace's story. Readers learned about the history and politics of Uganda and the nefarious activities of northern Ugandas with Sudan, We agreed, however, that we could have done without the Christian proselytizing that fills the book.

December 2010
The Gulf Coast Chapter Book Club met on Monday, December 13, 2010,to discuss Nomad by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ali's tirade against Islam was disturbing to liberal-minded readers, who felt ambiguous about their own reactions to her challenging viewpoints. They criticized Ali's condemnation of Islam, which might be better directed to patriarchal behavior, and her idolization of the West as epitomizing enlightenment. Ali's position as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and her praise of right-wing politics and proponents such as Frederick Hayek, among others, is an anathema to left-wing liberals, but made us probe our own prejudices, and reluctance, perhaps, to accept opposing ideas. Her writing style, we agreed, was repetitive, preachy, and egotistical, and she probably covered most of what she has to say in her first book, Infidel. But Ali gave us plenty to think about.

Some Book Club members belong to other book clubs, but several remarked that the UNIFEM-USNC Book Club offers the most challenging reading and interesting discussions of all.  We appreciate those comments.

November 2010
The Gulf Coast Chapter Book Club met on Monday, November 7, 2010, to discuss The Space between Us by Thrity Umrigar, a novel of the relationship of Sera, a wealthy Parsi housewife in Mumbai whose opulent life style hides her secrets of abuse by her husband and mother-in-law, and Bhima, her devoted maid, whose life of misery hides nothing. Sera has a daughter and son-in-law upon whom she dotes, while Bhima loses her daughter to AIDS and her son to his alcoholic, desperate father. Participants found many similarities between this book and The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, a novel about American servants and their masters, while everyone agreed that the injustices of class and gender are sadly universal.

October 2010
No book club selection or meeting.

September 2010
The Gulf Coast Chapter Book Club met on Monday, September 13, 2010, to discuss Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout. This was an unusual “summer reading” selection, as it was lighter than our usual book choices, but came highly recommended by many participants. The book consists of short stories of Maine characters who surround Olive, a complicated curmudgeon with the “passions and prejudices of a peasant,” who manages to offend everyone around her. Beneath her abrasive behavior, however, Strout reveals a personality that is comparable to the Maine coast that she so deftly describes – rugged, unforgiving, yet with a subtle beauty and depth that is not apparent to a shallow observer, but is perceived and hauntingly depicted by the author.

August 2010
The Gulf Coast Chapter Book Club met on Monday, August 9, 2010 to discuss The Girl from Foreign by Sadia Shepard. Shepard grows up half-Muslim, half-Christian and then learns that her beloved grandmother is actually Jewish from an obscure Bene Israel community in India. Shepard traces her grandmother's story from the Konkan Coast of India, where her nana secretly married a Muslim man, to Pakistan where they fled during Partition. On a Fulbright Scholarship, she studies at the Film Institute in Bombay and there meets Rekhev, a talented activist, who challenges her emotionally and intellectually, and they eventually forge a long-lasting friendship. Shepard's journey takes her to cities, synagogues and villas that materialize from her nana's memories. She also meets many intriguing people who bring her nana's distant past to life. This memoir is fascinating for its global implications of a person raised with multiple religions and homelands and, at the same time, as a classic American search for one's roots.

July 2010
The Gulf Coast Chapter Book Club met on Monday, July 12, 2010 to discuss The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. Because Kingsolver is such a popular author, her name attracted several new participants to the discussion. Everyone agreed, however, that in spite of brilliant writing, character development and descriptions, The Lacuna did not work as an historical novel. The hero is an American young man whose mother, a flamboyant Mexican woman, sails from one lover to another, leaving her son to struggle in her wake. He emancipates himself in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, working as a secretary/cook, and ends up also serving Lev Trotsky and entourage, refugees from Stalinist Russia. After Trotsky's murder, our hero moves to Washington DC and becomes involved in returning soldiers' riots, along with his emergence from the homosexual closet. The, he moves to Asheville, N.C., where he becomes an acclaimed writer, gaining a devoted local stenographer friend. Although there is grist here for two novels already, Kingsolver moves on to a third story; the persecution of our hero by the Joseph McCarthy Commission. We compared this book to many of Kingsolver's best sellers and, while everyone expressed deep admiration of her earlier books, most readers were disappointed by this last publication.


June 2010
The Gulf Coast Chapter Book Club met on Monday, June 14, 2010 to discuss Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy by Marie Vieux-Chauvet, and Tales from the Heart of Haiti by Patti Marxsen. Vieux-Chauvet's book, which Edwidge Danticat calls the “cornerstone of Haitian literature,” reads like a stream of dark consciousness that devolves from love to anger to madness. Vieux-Chauvet writes with shocking, exquisite style about the mystery, fear, poverty, violence, racism and political paralysis of Haiti. Haiti itself is the overriding character in all three novellas, personnified by brutal dictators and their agents of evil -- French or mulatto soldiers, tontons macoutes or black-shirted devils. Vieux-Chauvet's female heroines are, like herself, seething victims of cruel misogynists or merely foolish men, women who are “in perpetual revolt,” as Patti Marxsen points out in her thorough review of the author in Women's Review of Books.
     Marxsen's Tales from the Heart of Haiti also illustrates the nation's sinister undercurrent, along with the naïve or deliberate exploitation of Haitians by foreign do-gooders who compound their miseries. But Marxsen soars above the political mire with descriptions of the country's natural beauty and honest, if sometimes heartbreaking stories of human passions and spirituality. (One reader said that, for the first time, she wished to visit Haiti after reading Marxsen's stories.)
     These books elicited feelings of outrage at the universal phenomenon of abused people abusing their own and anyone beneath them. While both books offered only glimmers of hope for Haiti, participants who had visited the country or knew Haitians expressed their admiration of the resilience, dignity and strength of the Haitian people, who seem cursed not by a vengeful god, but by merciless humans and relentless forces of nature.


May 2010
The Gulf Coast Chapter Book Club met on Monday, May 10, 2010 to discuss The Twentieth Wife by Indu Sundaresan, an historical epoch of the 17th century Mughal Empire, a fairy tale heroine, Mehrunissa, and her star-crossed love for the Emperor Jahangir.  Readers found similarities to Empress Orchid by Anchee Min of the Ch'ang Dynasty.  Though historical periods and geographical settings differed, both stories centered on opulant lifestyles and palace intrigues.  We also discussed religious issues of the book, e.g., the coexistence of Islam, Hinduism, Catholicism and Sufism.  Some readers were encouraged to read Sundaresan's sequel, Feast of Roses, while others felt surfeited for the time being with historical sagas.