{"id":68475,"date":"2020-01-31T16:29:13","date_gmt":"2020-01-31T21:29:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=68475"},"modified":"2020-05-07T13:26:56","modified_gmt":"2020-05-07T17:26:56","slug":"february-2020-reading-group-selection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2020\/01\/31\/february-2020-reading-group-selection\/","title":{"rendered":"February 2020 Reading Group Selection"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/91qXqrM9KCL.jpg\" alt=\"Image result for barracoon&quot;\" width=\"292\" height=\"442\">February&#8217;s reading group selection is <em><strong>Barracoon<\/strong><\/em><b><i>&nbsp;<\/i>by Zora Neale Hurston<\/b>.<\/p>\r\n<!-- \/wp:post-content -->\r\n<p>The Book Beat reading group will meet <strong>Wednesday, February 26th<\/strong><strong>&nbsp;at 7:00 pm at the Goldfish Tea Cafe<\/strong>, located at 117 W. Fourth Street in Downtown Royal Oak. All are welcome.<\/p>\r\n<!-- \/wp:paragraph -->\r\n\r\n<!-- wp:paragraph -->\r\n<p>Get 15% off on the Current Reading Group Selection.<\/p>\r\n<!-- \/wp:paragraph -->\r\n<p><strong>Winner of&nbsp;<em>Time<\/em> Magazine and New York Public Library&#8217;s Best Nonfiction Book of the Year<\/strong><\/p>\r\n<blockquote>&nbsp;This book is one of those gorgeous, much too fleeting things&#8230;the story is at times devastating, but Hurston&#8217;s success in bringing it to light is a marvel.&#8211; Jean Zimmerman, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2018\/05\/08\/608205763\/barracoon-brings-a-lost-slave-story-to-light\">NPR&nbsp;<\/a><\/blockquote>\r\n<blockquote>One of the greatest writers of our time. &#8212; Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize Winner<\/blockquote>\r\n<blockquote>Zora Neale Hurston\u2019s recovered masterpiece, \u201cBarracoon,\u201d is a stunning addition to several overlapping canons of American literature. Available now in this handsome edition with a foreword by Alice Walker, it joins a small body of firsthand accounts&nbsp;of the transatlantic slave trade while providing a new glimpse into the life of Hurston as an anthropologist. The book also offers an unnerving interrogation of modern conceptions of the earliest African Americans. &#8212;&nbsp;<span class=\"author-name font-bold black\">Tayari Jones, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/entertainment\/books\/zora-neale-hurstons-masterpiece-barracoon-finally-sees-the-light-of-day\/2018\/05\/07\/654f9b50-5214-11e8-9c91-7dab596e8252_story.html\">The Washington Post<\/a><\/span><\/blockquote>\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Barracoon: The Story of the Last &quot;Black Cargo&quot; by Zora Neale Hurston\" width=\"635\" height=\"476\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/GxYbbPz9O0M?start=9&#038;feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n<hr>\r\n<p><strong style=\"font-size: 1.4rem;\"><i><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/5\/57\/Hurston-Zora-Neale-LOC.jpg\/220px-Hurston-Zora-Neale-LOC.jpg\" alt=\"Image result for zora neale hurston short biography&quot;\">Zora Neale Hurston<\/i><\/strong><span style=\"font-size: 1.4rem;\">&nbsp;was an American folklorist and author. In 1925, shortly before entering Barnard College, Hurston became one of the leaders of the literary renaissance happening in Harlem, producing the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! along with&nbsp;<\/span><i style=\"font-size: 1.4rem;\">Langston Hughes<\/i><span style=\"font-size: 1.4rem;\">&nbsp;and&nbsp;<\/span><i style=\"font-size: 1.4rem;\">Wallace Thurman<\/i><span style=\"font-size: 1.4rem;\">. This literary movement became the center of the Harlem Renaissance.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 1.4rem;\">Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book&nbsp;<\/span><i style=\"font-size: 1.4rem;\">Mules and Men<\/i><span style=\"font-size: 1.4rem;\">&nbsp;along with fiction&nbsp;<\/span><i style=\"font-size: 1.4rem;\">Their Eyes Were Watching God<\/i><span style=\"font-size: 1.4rem;\">&nbsp;and dance, assembling a folk-based performance group that recreated her Southern tableau, with one performance on Broadway.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 1.4rem;\">Hurston was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her work was significant because she was able to break into the secret societies and expose their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer\/anthropologist Katherine Dunham who was then at the University of Chicago.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 1.4rem;\">In 1954 Hurston was unable to sell her fiction but was assigned by the Pittsburgh Courier to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local lottery racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor.<\/span><\/p>\r\n<div id=\"aboutAuthor\" class=\" clearFloats bigBox\">\r\n<div class=\"bigBoxBody\">\r\n<div class=\"bigBoxContent containerWithHeaderContent\">\r\n<div class=\"clear\">\r\n<div class=\"bookAuthorProfile\">\r\n<div class=\"bookAuthorProfile__about\"><span id=\"freeText2173438287638980085\">Hurston also contributed to&nbsp;<i>Woman in the Suwanee County Jail<\/i>, a book by journalist and civil rights advocate&nbsp;<i>William Bradford Huie<\/i>.&nbsp;<\/span><\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"clear\">&nbsp;<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"bigBoxBottom\">&nbsp;<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\" clearFloats bigBox\">\r\n<div class=\"h2Container gradientHeaderContainer\">&nbsp;<\/div>\r\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>February&rsquo;s reading group selection is Barracoon&nbsp;by Zora Neale Hurston. The Book Beat reading group will meet Wednesday, February 26th&nbsp;at 7:00 pm at the Goldfish Tea Cafe, located at 117 W. Fourth Street in Downtown Royal Oak. All are welcome. Get 15% off on the Current Reading Group Selection. Winner of&nbsp;Time Magazine and New York Public [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":68493,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,1,25,65],"tags":[460,459],"class_list":["post-68475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-african-american-lit","category-bookbeat-shop-history","category-reading-group","category-world-lit","tag-black-history-month","tag-zora-neal-hurston"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}