A Choice of Weapons discussion questions

Courtesy of Hennepin County Book Discussion Guide.
http://oneminneapolisoneread.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/2013_discussion_guide.pdf

1. As you started reading this memoir, what set the

tone for you in how Gordon Parks wrote his story?

 

2. What is the impact of the history of the Great

Depression being told through personal stories?

How is the effect different than reading a

textbook about those years?

 

3. How much of Gordon’s story is shaped by self-

determination, fate or luck?

 

4. What words would you use to describe Gordon? 

 

5. How much did Gordon mature over the course of

the story?

 

6. How would the author’s life have been different

if he were a young person of today?

 

7. How do the relationships between Gordon and

his family shape his perspective and his actions?

Think about his mother, father, sisters, uncles,

father- and mother-in-law.

 

8. What was the “hawk over the ghetto”? Is it still

flying over urban areas today?

 

9. How are the faces of racism different from placeto place in Gordon’s story? (Kansas, Minnesota, Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C. and Florida)

 

10. Gordon wrote, “Minnesota Negroes were given

more, so they had less to fi ght for. Negro and white boys fought now and then in the Twin Cities,but the fights never amounted to much” (p. 52). Do you agree with his statement? Do you think this is different today than in the times he is writing about?

 

11. Creativity and talent are evident throughout

Gordon’s life. What are some examples? How has

creative expression helped you in trying times?

 

12. What were the weapons that Gordon found “one

by one,” and how did their presence comfort him?

 

13. During the stream of consciousness scene

(pp. 110-114), what happens? Why is it written that

way? What do you think of the language used?

 

14. Why is this story important to us today?

 

15. Were you familiar with Gordon’s story before

reading this book? Were you inspired to learn more

about Gordon and his weapons afterwards?

 

May 2014 book: Blowback

Cindy has announced her selection for May 2014: Blowback by Valerie Plame. "My choice is one I have been thinking about for some time since I heard a review of the book and interview of author," she said.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Introducing Blowback, an exhilarating new espionage thriller by former CIA ops officer Valerie Plame and thriller writer Sarah Lovett.

Covert CIA ops officer Vanessa Pierson is finally close to capturing the world’s most dangerous international nuclear arms dealer: Bhoot, alias the ghost. One of her assets has information about Bhoot’s upcoming visit to a secret underground nuclear weapons facility in Iran—in only a few days. But just as Pierson’s informant is about to give her the location, they’re ambushed by an expert sniper. Pierson narrowly escapes. Her asset: dead.

Desperate to capture Bhoot and the sniper before they inflict more damage, Pierson enlists all of the Agency’s resources to find them. But with each day, the pressure of the manhunt mounts, causing her to push her forbidden romance with a fellow ops officer to its limit when she asks him to do the impossible. Despite the risks, she refuses to halt her pursuit of the terrorists, and she puts her cover and her career—and her life—at risk.

With rapid-cut shifts from European capitals to Washington to the Near East, and with insider detail that only a former spy could provide, Blowback marks the explosive beginning of the hunt for Bhoot, the villain whom Vanessa Pierson devotes her life to capturing, dead or alive.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
There is another book out there that talks about who she is. Here is that book description:

On July 6, 2003, four months after the United States invaded Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson's now historic op-ed, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," appeared in The New York Times. A week later, conservative pundit Robert Novak revealed in his newspaper column that Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA operative. The public disclosure of that secret information spurred a federal investigation and led to the trial and conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and the Wilsons' civil suit against top officials of the Bush administration. Much has been written about the "Valerie Plame" story, but Valerie herself has been silent, until now. Some of what has been reported about her has been frighteningly accurate, serving as a pungent reminder to the Wilsons that their lives are no longer private. And some has been completely false -- distorted characterizations of Valerie and her husband and their shared integrity.

Valerie Wilson retired from the CIA in January 2006, and now, not only as a citizen but as a wife and mother, the daughter of an Air Force colonel, and the sister of a U.S. marine, she sets the record straight, providing an extraordinary account of her training and experiences, and answers many questions that have been asked about her covert status, her responsibilities, and her life. As readers will see, the CIA still deems much of the detail of Valerie's story to be classified. As a service to readers, an afterword by national security reporter Laura Rozen provides a context for Valerie's own story.

Gordon Parks exhibit at Mill City Museum

Hey all! There's an exhibit of Gordon Park's photographs at the Mill City Museum through June. Anyone interested in going?

See more:

http://www.millcitymuseum.org/choice-weapons-exhibit

A Choice of Weapons: A Living Legacy

Free

Through June 8, 2014

Located in Mill Commons (museum’s main lobby)

View an exhibit of photographs created by Minneapolis high school students alongside images by photographer Gordon Parks, on loan from the Gordon Parks Foundation. . The exhibit is part of One Minneapolis One Read which has chosen Parks' autobiography A Choice of Weapons as its 2013 selection. Taking inspiration from the book, the students worked with acclaimed photographer Jamel Shabazz at Juxtaposition Arts to create their own photographs. Shabazz worked with the students in early October during a week-long artist residency.

June 2014 book: Divergent

Amy has picked Divergent by Veronica Roth for us to read in June 2014. It's a book that's getting a lot of attention lately, and was just released in March 2014 as a movie.

ABOUT THE BOOK
In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago world, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can’t have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.

During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles alongside her fellow initiates to live out the choice they have made. Together they must undergo extreme physical tests of endurance and intense psychological simulations, some with devastating consequences. As initiation transforms them all, Tris must determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes exasperating boy fits into the life she's chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she's kept hidden from everyone because she's been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers unrest and growing conflict that threaten to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves . . . or it might destroy her.

Debut author Veronica Roth bursts onto the YA scene with the first book in the Divergent series—dystopian thrillers filled with electrifying decisions, heartbreaking betrayals, stunning consequences, and unexpected romance.

Biography

Veronica Roth was born in a Chicago suburb, and studied creative writing at Northwestern University. She and her husband currently live in the city that inspired the setting of the Divergent Trilogy.

A Q&A with Author Veronica Roth

Q: What advice would you offer to young aspiring writers, who long to live a success story like your own?
Roth: One piece of advice I have is: Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldn’t rely on it, because it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent and it’s not sufficient. So work hard, fall in love with the writing—the characters, the story, the words, the themes—and make sure that you are who you are regardless of your life circumstances. That way, when the good things come, they don’t warp you, and when the bad things hit you, you don’t fall apart.

Q: You’re a young author--is it your current adult perspective or not-so-recent teenage perspective that brought about the factions in the development of this story? Do you think that teens or adults are more likely to fit into categories in our current society?
Roth: Other aspects of my identity have more to do with the factions than my age. The faction system reflects my beliefs about human nature—that we can make even something as well-intentioned as virtue into an idol, or an evil thing. And that virtue as an end unto itself is worthless to us. I did spend a large portion of my adolescence trying to be as “good” as possible so that I could prove my worth to the people around me, to myself, to God, to everyone. It’s only now that I’m a little older that I realize I am unable to be truly “good” and that it’s my reasons for striving after virtue that need adjustment more than my behavior. In a sense, Divergent is me writing through that realization—everyone in Beatrice’s society believes that virtue is the end, the answer. I think that’s a little twisted.
I think we all secretly love and hate categories—love to get a firm hold on our identities, but hate to be confined—and I never loved and hated them more than when I was a teenager. That said: Though we hear a lot about high school cliques, I believe that adults categorize each other just as often, just in subtler ways. It is a dangerous tendency of ours. And it begins in adolescence.

Q: If you could add one more faction to the world within Divergent, what would it be?
Roth: I tried to construct the factions so that they spanned a wide range of virtues. Abnegation, for example, includes five of the traditional “seven heavenly virtues:” chastity, temperance, charity, patience, and humility. That said, it would be interesting to have a faction centered on industriousness, in which diligence and hard work are valued most, and laziness is not allowed. They would be in constant motion, and would probably be happy to take over for the factionless. And hard-working people can certainly take their work too far, as all the factions do with their respective virtues. I’m not sure what they would wear, though. Overalls, probably.

Q: What do you think are the advantages, if any, to the society you’ve created in Divergent?
Roth: All the advantages I see only seem like advantages to me because I live in our current society. For example, the members of their society don’t focus on certain things: race, religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, etc. I mean, a world in which you look different from the majority and no one minds? That sounds good to me. But when I think about it more, I realize that they’re doing the exact same thing we do, but with different criteria by which to distinguish ourselves from others. Instead of your skin color, it’s the color of your shirt that people assess, or the results of your aptitude test. Same problem, different system.

Q: What book are you currently reading and how has it changed you, if at all?
Roth: I recently finished Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma, which I would call “contemporary with a paranormal twist,” or something to that effect. It’s about a girl whose sister has a powerful kind of magnetism within the confines of a particular town, and how their love for each other breaks some things apart and puts other things back together. It was refreshing to read a young adult book that is about sisterhood instead of romance. It’s one of those books that makes you love a character and then hate a character and then love them again—that shows you that people aren’t all good or all bad, but somewhere in between. Imaginary Girls gave me a lot to think about, and the writing was lovely, which I always love to see.

Why no e-book for Stephen King?

Why Cling to the Past? Exclusive essay by Stephen King's publisher about Joyland

Charles Ardai looks to the past, and past angry internet message boards, to find something worth cherishing in a new novel.

Click here for full essay.

EXCERPTS:

For me, at least, the other reason is that some stories just beg to be experienced in a certain way, and Joyland is one such. Joyland is framed as the reminiscence of a 61-year-old man about events he experienced four decades earlier, in the summer before his senior year of college. It’s about memory; it’s about the passage of time and its impact; it’s about ways of life that existed once and are gone now, ones that deserve not to be forgotten. It’s about all the things that led us to create Hard Case Crime in the first place. ...

But one thing our books are is a shrine to a particular way of consuming stories and the particular object that for decades delivered that experience to millions of people. An object that has dimensions and heft and feels a certain way when you handle it, that looks a certain way when you thumb its pages back, creases a certain way when you jam it in a jacket pocket or a lunch bucket. Shape and form and texture matter. The past matters. Preserving things we love matters. And insofar as we want people to remember something we love, putting an example of it in their hands is a powerful way to do so.

So: Joyland. A book. A paperback book, by and large, and one I cherish and that I hope other readers will cherish as well. Not those who angrily proclaim on Internet message boards, “I’ll never read a paper book again!” – there isn’t any hope for those, their souls are too tattered for repair – but those who see our little bit of yesterday and feel their hearts beat faster, scent a bit of their own younger days on the backward-blowing breeze.

“1973 was the year of the OPEC oil embargo, the year Richard Nixon announced he was not a crook, the year Edward G. Robinson and Noel Coward died,” Steve writes. “It was Devin Jones’s lost year. I was a twenty-one year-old virgin with literary aspirations. I possessed three pairs of bluejeans, four pairs of Jockey shorts, a clunker Ford (with a good radio), occasional suicidal ideations, and a broken heart.” And so it begins. For just one day, unkindle your Kindle and nook your Nook, lie back in the bath or on your sofa or beach chair or with your head on the grass, and read the way we used to.
Tomorrow will still be there when you’re done.

Stephen King on The Today Show

6.3.13 - Stephen appeared on The Today Show to discuss Joyland and other topics.

CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO LINK

EXCERPTS:
On Joyland:
It started with the image of a little boy on a wheelchair. Kept looking and saw the amusement park down the beach.

“Why have I waited so long to set a book in an amusement park? They’re just scary places.”

He originally planned for the Hotel in The Shining to be an amusement park, but then decided he needed something more rural.

ON WRITING
It’s like having a fossil in the sand. You have to brush it away. You try to get it out as much as possible intact.

Books like the Green Mile where I had no idea, and others I get the whole picture.

44th book - 44th alternate realities

“Without writing, I’d be dead.”
“It’s an escape hatch.”
“I would do this for free.”

WHY NOT AN EBOOK:
Because it’s retro. It’s published with Hard Case crime. Throwback covers. If retro, let’s go all the way. Reacquaint themselves with bookstores.

MUSICAL
With Stephen King, John Mellencamp & T Bone Burnett
"Ghost Brothers of Darkland County"

BOOKS HE RECOMMENDS
(First two are by his sons)
- Joe Hill: “NOSA4A2”
- Owen King: “Double Feature”
- John Sandford: “Silken Prey”

Joyland - The Map