Book Club-Fair Housing Center...
The FHCWM invites you to read and discuss the following books for their February and March Book Club meetings. Discussion will take place in the Disability Network Lakeshore office (426 Century Lane, Holland) at 11:45am. Please RSVP to lkeegan@fhcwm.org or by calling 616.451.2980. Bring a lunch, bring a friend, and join the discussion!
February’s Book Club meets Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 11:45 am to discuss: Little Bee: A Novel, by Chris Cleave.
March’s Book Club meets March 15, 2011 at 11:45 am to discuss Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City
About Little Bee & FordlandiaLittle Bee (Amazon.com Review) The publishers of Chris Cleave’s new novel “don’t want to spoil” the story by revealing too much about it, and there’s good reason not to tell too much about the plot’s pivot point. All you should know going in to Little Bee is that what happens on the beach is brutal, and that it braids the fates of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan (who calls herself Little Bee) and a well-off British couple–journalists trying to repair their strained marriage with a free holiday–who should have stayed behind their resort’s walls. The tide of that event carries Little Bee back to their world, which she claims she couldn’t explain to the girls from her village because they’d have no context for its abundance and calm. But she shows us the infinite rifts in a globalized world, where any distance can be crossed in a day–with the right papers–and “no one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.” Where you have to give up the safety you’d assumed as your birthright if you decide to save the girl gazing at you through razor wire, left to the wolves of a failing state. – Mari Malcolm Fordlandia (Amazon.com Review) Proving that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction, Fordlandia is the story of Henry Ford’s ill-advised attempt to transform raw Brazilian rainforest into homespun slices of Americana. With sales of his Model-T booming, the automotive tycoon saw an opportunity to expand his reach further by exploiting a downtrodden Brazilian rubber industry. His vision, the laughably-named Amazonian outpost of Fordlandia, would become an enviable symbol of efficiency and mark the Ford Motor Company as a player on the global stage. Or so he thought. With thoughtful and meticulous research, author Greg Grandin explores the astounding oversights (no botanists were consulted to confirm the colony’s agricultural viability) and painful arrogance (little thought was paid to how native Brazilians would react to an American way of life) that hamstrung the project from the start. Instead of ushering in a new era of commerce, Fordlandia became a cautionary tale of a dream destroyed by hubris. –Dave Callanan |
