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Caste Book Discussion #4

Caste Book Discussion #4

Join this summer's Book to Action, part of the Reading Colors Your World adult summer reading program, as we read, listen, and discuss Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. Check-out a copy from the Monterey Public Library. Hard copies and audio CD available, or download an e-book or audiobook to your personal tech devices such as smartphone, computer, iPad, or Kindle via the Northern California Digital Library.

Book discussions take place June 22 - July 24 and will be facilitated by an experienced book discussion leader. You may join on Zoom or by phone. Zoom breakout rooms will be used for smaller group discussions. Register once for the entire Tuesday series. You are are welcome to join any week and may register to attend on Saturdays if missing a Tuesday discussion. View the book discussion questions by clicking here.

Tuesdays, 3:00 - 4:00 pm

#1 - June 22: Intro, Parts 1 & 2 -- pp. xv – 98        

#2 - June 29: Part 3 --  pp. 99 166

#3 - July 6: Part 4  -- pp. 167 262

#4 - July 13: Part 5 & 6  -- pp.  263 – 360

#5 - July 20: Part 7 & Epilogue -- pp. 361 388

 

Saturdays, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

#1 - June 26: Intro, Parts 1 & 2 -- pp. xv – 98        

#2 - July 3: Part 3 --  pp. 99 166

#3 - July 10: Part 4  -- pp. 167 262

#4 - July 17: Part 5 & 6  -- pp.  263 – 360

#5 - July 24: Part 7 & Epilogue -- pp. 361 388

 

If you enjoy podcasts, Oprah Winfrey and author Isabel Wilkerson take listeners through the 8 Pillars of Caste featured in the Oprah’s Book Club selection: Click this link to access the podcast.

#1 New York Times Bestseller, Named the #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year by Time, Oprah's Book Club Pick, One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by People  The Washington Post • Publishers Weekly AND One of the Best Books of the Year by O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • Bloomberg • Christian Science Monitor • Fortune • Smithsonian Magazine • Marie Claire • Town & Country • Slate • Library Journal • Kirkus Reviews • LibraryReads • PopMatters

Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today. 

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, has become a leading figure in narrative nonfiction, an interpreter of the human condition, and an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country, and our current era of upheaval.

Through her writing, Wilkerson brings the invisible and the marginalized into the light and into our hearts. Through her lectures, she explores with authority the need to reconcile America’s karmic inheritance and the origins of both our divisions and our shared commonality.

Poetically written and brilliantly researched, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents invites us to discover the inner workings of an American hierarchy that goes far beyond the confines of race, class, or gender. A book steeped in empathy and insight, Caste explores, through layered analysis and stories of real people, the structure of an unspoken system of human ranking and reveals how our lives are still restricted by what divided us centuries ago. “Modern-day caste protocols,” Wilkerson writes, “are often less about overt attacks or conscious hostility. They are like the wind, powerful enough to knock you down but invisible as they go about their work.” Caste is available now.

Her debut work, The Warmth of Other Suns, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize and was shortlisted for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

She is a native of Washington, D.C., and a daughter of the Great Migration, the mass movement that she would go on to write about. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994, as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, making her the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She then devoted fifteen years and interviewed more than 1,200 people to tell the story of the six million people, among them her parents, who defected from the Jim Crow South.

Wilkerson has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.

 

Book to Action is a program of the California Library Association, supported in whole or in part by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.


De Libro a Acción es un programa de la Asociación de Bibliotecas de California, apoyada enteramente o en parte por el Instituto de Servicios Bibliotecarios y de Museo de Estados Unidos conforme a lo dispuesto por la Ley de Servicios Bibliotecarios y Tecnología, administrada en California por la Bibliotecaria del Estado.

 


This program takes place on Zoom, or participants may join by phone. Registration closes an hour before the program. The Zoom access information will be sent to registered participants shortly before the program begins. Use of video camera and level of participation is determined by each person. This program will not be recorded.

A Zoom account is not required to join this program. Please ensure that you are using Zoom 5.0+. Click here to learn about the latest version of Zoom.

New to Zoom? Visit the Zoom help guide for an overview of the virtual platform, participate in live training via the library, or click here to sign up for Zoom's free training. 

 

Date:
Tuesday, July 13, 2021 Show more dates
Time:
3:00pm - 4:00pm
Location:
Online
Audience:
  Adults     Teens  
Registration has closed.