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    • 2021 >
      • The Mysteries
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      • The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
    • 2020 >
      • Where the Crawdads Sing
      • Death of a Red Heroine
      • Age of Light
      • Beneath the Scarlet Sky
      • Next Year in Havana
      • What the Wind Knows
      • Simon the Fiddler
      • The Dutch House
      • Dear Edward
    • 2019 >
      • Caleb's Crossing
    • 2018 >
      • Educated
      • To Have and To Have Not
    • 2017 >
      • A Gentleman in Moscow
    • 2016 >
      • The Mare
      • Fates and Furies
    • 2015 >
      • Citizens of London
      • Euphoria
      • The Blue Flower
      • Being Mortal
      • Waiting for Snow in Havana
      • All that is Solid Melts into Air
      • All the Light We Cannot See
    • 2014 >
      • On Such a Full Sea
      • A Canticle for Leibowitz
      • The Luminaries
      • The Lowland
      • Alice Munro shorts
      • The Goldfinch
      • The Round House
      • Salvage the Bones
    • 2013 >
      • The Monuments Men
      • Wild
      • The Great Fire
      • A Time of Gifts
      • Sweet Tooth
      • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
      • To the End of the Land
      • The Casual Vacancy
      • Canada
      • The Light Between Oceans
    • 2012 >
      • One Amazing Thing
      • Bossypants
      • The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
      • Rules of Civility
      • Cutting for Stone
      • Just Kids
      • Red Badge of Courage
      • Lost on Treasure Island
      • The Reluctant Fundamentalist
      • The Children's Book
    • 2011 >
      • The Cellist of Sarajevo
      • Food Rules
      • Freedom
      • Unbroken
      • The Painted Veil
      • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
      • Elegance of the Hedgehog
      • Soul Mountain
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Books for the
Reader Extraordinaire 

​​Upcoming Books:
June 23 @ Anne

Broken Heart of America  - Walter Johnson
July 15 @ Kathy

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek  - Kim Michele Richardson
September 16 @Maitand

Middlemarch - George Eliot
October 21 @Carol

TBD

Author Bio: 

Walter Johnson grew up in Columbia, Missouri, and is a member of the Rock Bridge High School Hall of Fame (2006). His prize-winning books, Soul by Soul: Life Inside in the Antebellum Slave Market (1999) and River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Mississippi Valley's Cotton Kingdom (2013), were published by Harvard University Press. His autobiographical essay, “Guns in the Family,” was included the 2019 edition of Best American Essays; it was originally published in the Boston Review, of which Johnson is a contributing editor. The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States will be published in the spring of 2020. Johnson is a founding member of the Commonwealth Project, which brings together academics, artists, and activists in an effort to imagine, foster, and support revolutionary social change, beginning in St. Louis.
Source: Harvard University 
Book Review:
 “Walter really has a key piece of the puzzle that I think no one has grasped as brilliantly,” says George Lipsitz, a professor of black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “He correctly recognized that Emerson Electric paid about $68,000 in property taxes a year, but Ferguson collected $2 to $3 million in fines from residents, mostly from black residents. So the policing was not just an overt act of racial control, it was also an act of extraction from the poor in order to subsidize the rich.
To Lewis and Clark to Michael Brown
by MARINA N. BOLOTNIKOVAMAY-JUNE 2020
Harvard Magazine 

 Book Stack - on the blog

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is reading The Broken Heart of America  by Walter Johnson for June Book Club.​

Walter Johnson's book, The Broken Heart of America: Saint Louis and the Violent History of the United States broke my heart. I could not believe what I was reading.  I could barely read it.  Although the book is dense and contains some truth, it is full of falsehoods, half truths and farfetched conflations. Johnson's rage can be found on every page. 

In the Prologue: Mapping the Loss, Johnson ties the Lewis and Clark expedition to Michael Brown's death, the BLM movement and other events in St. Louis's history to racial capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism and ethnic cleansing. 
On June 26, 1834  an enslaved woman, Hannah was beaten to death by William Harney, second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, who was later acquitted of  her murder in March 1835. Regarding this event, Johnson writes, "Perhaps it goes too far to see in this case an uncanny premonition of the unpunished murder of Michael Brown almost two centuries later." 
Here is an educated ivory-towered white male historian, who wants us to believe there is a correlation between these events.  He must have been binge-watching "Outlanders" when he wrote that! He has taken facts out of context to advance his agenda. He loses any credibility with statements like the one above. How can any reader believe a word he writes?

Washington University St. Louis  October 6, 2020

LaClede Town: The Rise and Fall of a “Bohemian Utopia”
​
By Julie Flory and Sean Gunste
Read this for an integrated development built in the Mill Creek Valley that was initially a big success.  A bohemian center of individual houses managed by Jerry Berger
Author Quotes: 
“Viewed from St. Louis, the history of capitalism in the United States seems to have as much to do with eviction and extraction as with exploitation and production. History in St. Louis unfolded at the juncture of racism and real estate, of the violent management of the population and the speculative valuation of property. The first to be forced out were Native Americans, who were pushed west and killed off by settlers and the US military. But in St. Louis the practices of removal and containment that developed out of the history of empire in the West were generalized into mechanisms for the dispossession and management of Black people within the city limits. And because removal is fundamentally about controlling the future, about determining what sorts of people will be allowed to live in what sorts of places, it is always concerned with the control of gender, sexuality, and reproduction; often women and children are singled out for particular sanction and targeted violence.”
― Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States
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  • Home
    • BExtraordinaire Calendar
  • Blog BExtraordinaire
  • Past Reads
    • 2021 >
      • The Mysteries
      • The Long Petal of the Sea
      • The Silent Patient
      • The Broken Heart of America
      • The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
    • 2020 >
      • Where the Crawdads Sing
      • Death of a Red Heroine
      • Age of Light
      • Beneath the Scarlet Sky
      • Next Year in Havana
      • What the Wind Knows
      • Simon the Fiddler
      • The Dutch House
      • Dear Edward
    • 2019 >
      • Caleb's Crossing
    • 2018 >
      • Educated
      • To Have and To Have Not
    • 2017 >
      • A Gentleman in Moscow
    • 2016 >
      • The Mare
      • Fates and Furies
    • 2015 >
      • Citizens of London
      • Euphoria
      • The Blue Flower
      • Being Mortal
      • Waiting for Snow in Havana
      • All that is Solid Melts into Air
      • All the Light We Cannot See
    • 2014 >
      • On Such a Full Sea
      • A Canticle for Leibowitz
      • The Luminaries
      • The Lowland
      • Alice Munro shorts
      • The Goldfinch
      • The Round House
      • Salvage the Bones
    • 2013 >
      • The Monuments Men
      • Wild
      • The Great Fire
      • A Time of Gifts
      • Sweet Tooth
      • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
      • To the End of the Land
      • The Casual Vacancy
      • Canada
      • The Light Between Oceans
    • 2012 >
      • One Amazing Thing
      • Bossypants
      • The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
      • Rules of Civility
      • Cutting for Stone
      • Just Kids
      • Red Badge of Courage
      • Lost on Treasure Island
      • The Reluctant Fundamentalist
      • The Children's Book
    • 2011 >
      • The Cellist of Sarajevo
      • Food Rules
      • Freedom
      • Unbroken
      • The Painted Veil
      • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
      • Elegance of the Hedgehog
      • Soul Mountain
  • Highlights
    • The Complete List
  • ReaderRec