Join us either on Zoom or in the Kasian Room for "Nonfiction at Night," our new book group to discuss real reads and true stories. You are welcome to attend the discussion even if you haven't finished the book.

This month's title
"Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own" by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.

Book description: "Begin Again" is one of the great books about James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America's ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race. Just as in Baldwin's "after times," argues Eddie S. Glaude Jr., when white Americans met the civil rights movement's call for truth and justice with blind rage and the murders of movement leaders, so in our moment were the Obama presidency and the birth of Black Lives Matter answered with the ascendance of Trump and the violent resurgence of white nationalism. In these brilliant and stirring pages, Glaude finds hope and guidance in Baldwin as he mixes biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered Baldwin interviews—with history, memoir, and poignant analysis of our current moment to reveal the painful cycle of Black resistance and white retrenchment. As Glaude bears witness to the difficult truth of racism's continued grip on the national soul, "Begin Again" is a searing exploration of the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.