Community Reading and Viewing Group
The New Political You
April - December, 2008
The Elbow Lake Public Library is excited to announce its next adult education reading and film series. With an election year upon us, the library has decided to ride the wave of the highest interest in politics in many years by combining biographies, and political fiction and nonfiction with feature films and documentaries to get participants digging deeper than a sound bite into the issues and candidates of the season. Each month a book will be discussed and at least one film viewed. All discussions will take place at 7:00 on the dates listed in the library and film showings at 7:00 in the Sanford Room in the Elbow Lake Community Building. Participants are welcome to attend any or all of the events.
The series kicks off on Tuesday, April 22nd, with a discussion of the novel Primary Colors which offers a very detailed look inside a presidential campaign in the early 1990’s. It was originally published anonymously but was later revealed to be written by Joe Klein. The film version of the book, starring John Travolta and Emma Thompson, will be shown on Tuesday, May 6th.
The second book in the series is the easily accessible Politics for Dummies by Ann DeLaney. This fun and easy guide cuts through the political jargon and provides clear up-to-date details about all things political. To illustrate an actual election, the documentary Taking on the Kennedy’s will be shown on June 3rd.
On June 24th is a discussion of Marge Piercy’s fictionalized history of the women’s suffrage movement called Sex Wars. The same subject is shown brilliantly by the film Iron Jawed Angels, starring Hilary Swank, Julia Ormond and Anjelica Huston, on July 2nd.
For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism under Fire by James Yee, a patriotic West Point graduate and former U.S. Army Muslim Chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, will be discussed on July 22nd. The documentary, No End in Sight, showing August 5th, “avoids the question of why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, choosing instead to focus on the war's aftermath--and meticulously examines the chain of decisions that led Iraq into a state of lawlessness and civil war.”
Crash!ng the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President, Ralph Nader’s memoir of running as a third -party candidate in a two-party system in 2000 will be discussed on August 26th. On September 9th, the library will be showing King Corn, which reveals how the U.S. farming staple is much more present in our diet -- and having much more of an effect on our ever-expanding national waistline -- than consumers realize.
Titles for discussion on September 23rd and on October 28th, will be written by the Republican and Democratic candidates for president respectively and will be announced after the national conventions this summer. In October the library will be showing two documentary films: Who Killed the Electric Car, starring Martin Sheen, on the 7th, and Michael Moore’s indictment of the U. S. health care system, Sicko, on the 21st.
November 25th the discussion will focus on T. C. Boyle’s novel, Tortilla Curtain, a powerful look at illegal immigration in California. The final film in the series, The Milagro Beanfield War, directed by Robert Redford, is a feel-good film about community pride and social activism in the face of modern progress.
Those interested in participating in any or all of the series, can visit the library’s website at www.alexweb.net/library to reserve a copy of the books, or stop in or call the library at 218-685-6850 and we can request a copy for you. It is best to request the books approximately six weeks before the date of the discussion.