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Chinua Achebe, 1958
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Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe, 1958
GenevaBookClub: Things Fall Apart is acclaimed as the finest novel written about life in Nigeria at the end of the nineteenth century. Published in 1958, it is unquestionably the world’s most widely read African novel, having sold more than eight million copies in English and been translated into fifty languages. A simple story of a "strong man" whose life is dominated by fear and anger, Things Fall Apart is written with remarkable economy and subtle irony. Uniquely and richly African, at the same time it reveals Achebe's keen awareness of the human qualities common to men of all times and places.
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Italo Calvino, 1972
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Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino, 1972
GenevaBookClub: Mathematical structure. Series of dreamy meditations about metropolises that has intrigued generations of writers, architects, urban planners and philosophers. The book is framed as a conversation between the explorer Marco Polo and the emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo. “In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the street are all strangers. At each encounter they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings  which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no-one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping”. Cities as meditations on culture, language, time, memory, death, the nature of human experience Imagination and perception, truth and deception, and the inevitable passage of time – and therefore, inevitable decay.
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David Treuer, 2019
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The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee
David Treuer, 2019
GenevaBookClub: David Treuer is a 50 year-old writer, critic and academic who is one of the most prolific writers (and critics) of the contemporary American Indian experience. A response to the classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, a well-known eulogy of American Indian culture. A strong counterpoint to the idea that everything of their original culture was destroyed, corrupted and stolen with modern American Indians as degenerate walking-dead dependent on drugs, alcohol and government handouts. 445 pages published in 2019. Finalist for 2019 National Book Award and longlisted for Andrew Carnegie Medal.
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Tommy Orange, 2019
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There There
Tommy Orange, 2019
GenevaBookClub: Tommy Orange is a 38 year old American novelist and writer from Oakland, California. This is his first book. Told as a series of loosely connected stories centered around Oakland, California that all come together by the end of the book. Many of the characters are young, not full-blood and living on the margins of modern America. 300 pages, published in 2019. Finalist for 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.
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David Edward Stannard, 1992
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American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World
David Edward Stannard, 1992
GenevaBookClub: David E Stannard is a 79 year-old professor. This is a massively controversial work starting with the title! He argues that the European colonization of North and South America resulted in the death of 100 million indigenous peoples. This was mostly due to diseases, but even some of that was a conscious part of the settler strategy to eliminate indigenous populations. Stannard makes no attempt to moderate his language or sentiments but, like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, this book is pivotal to any discussion of the settlement of the Americas.
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