is a grim yet funny coming-of-age story by Tobias Wolfe that peters out a bit at the end. Would have liked more movement -- what's next, where's next? Instead we're with our boy
driving at top speed with his loser friend whom he doesn't even like much, both drunk, belting out pop tunes, flunked out of prep school and en route to enlistment in the Army. (Probably the best outcome for him at that moment, really.) The best line is "Taylor, Silver and I hung out in the bathroom during lunch smoking cigarettes and exchanging interesting facts not available to the general public about women."
In other reading:
"Wild" by Cheryl Strayed, which I loved for it's straightforward
chronological structure of her external world, the hike, but every-which-way structure of her internal world of grief, decline and life decisions. Ahhh, the redemptive nature of travel!
Discussing "The Warmth of Other Suns," Isabel Wilkerson, our On Matters of Race Book Club had lots of questions: Are race and poverty the same problems? How do they intersect? Why did Americans of the 60s grow up not knowing about the Great Migration and barely knowing about Jim Crow. In our basic education there was a leap from the Civil War to World War I leaving a giant gap about Reconstruction, the post-Civil War years, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the small gains in learning how to read and write that were progressively dismantled by southern legislatures that lasted until 1963.