June 20, 2010
More, Austin Clarke (Barbados/Canada)
At the news of her son BJ’s involvement in gang crime, Idora Morrison, a maid at the local university, collapses in her basement apartment. For four days and nights she retreats into a vortex of memory, pain, and disappointment that becomes a riveting expose of her life as a Caribbean immigrant living abroad. While she struggled to make ends meet, her deadbeat husband, Bertram, abandoned her for a better life in New York. Left alone to raise her son, Idora has done her best to survive against immense odds. But now that BJ has disappeared into a life of crime, she recoils from his loss and is unable to get out of bed, burdened by feelings of invisibility.
July 18, 2010
Outliers,
Malcolm Gladwell, US/Can/Jamaica
Now
that he's gotten us talking about the viral life of ideas and the power of gut reactions,, Malcolm Gladwell poses a more
provocative question in Outliers: why do some people succeed, living
remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their
potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the "self-made man,"
he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don't arise out of nowhere,
propelled by genius and talent: "they are invariably the beneficiaries of
hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that
allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others
cannot." Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he
builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of
advantages, "some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain
lucky."