- This event has passed.
1:15 PM – Saturday – Book Club
January 16, 2021 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
What: How We Fight For Our Lives
By: Saeed Jones
Host: Rick
Where: Zoom
When: Jan 16 at 1:15 PM
Contact Rick for details or to subscribe to book club notices by email here.
Book Review:
As How We Fight for Our Lives is Saeed Jones’ biography, it is a unique narrative of the events that shaped him.
However, it is also a story packed with elements that profoundly connect him to poetry, to every black person that came before him in this country, and to many of us who grew up dreaming of a chance at upward social mobility through education that we couldn’t afford. Extremely personal, emotionally gritty, and unabashedly honest, How We Fight for Our Lives is an outstanding memoir that somehow manages a perfect balance between love and violence, hope and hostility, transformation, and resentment.
Despite the changing backgrounds, the core of his life remained the same: his mother; his family; his passion for words; and his sexuality. Jones knew he was gay at an early age but finding himself and developing the strength to show his true self to the world took years. His memoir highlights that he was painfully aware of how discrimination, homophobia, and racism work in this country, how they contaminate everything, and that made him cognizant of the possible consequences of being an openly gay black man. The struggles that he faced and the journey he embarked on to find and (re)define his identity after every major change are the heart of this book. And it’s a wild heart full of need — and one desperate to communicate its humanity with the world.
