The Sorum Book Club has chosen two titles for discussion this fall, both true stories of people entering cultures foreign to them: “Black Ice,” by Lorene Cary, and “Keep the River on Your Right,” by Tobias Schneebaum.
“Black Ice” is the summer reading for first-year students, and there’s a good chance the author will visit campus next fall. .
Called “a stunning memoir . . . subtly nuanced and unsparingly self-aware,” by the New York Times Book Review, “Black Ice” chronicles the journey in 1972 by Cary, a bright black teenager from Philadelphia, into the world of the elite St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, formerly all-white and all-male. Cary, a scholarship student, became the prep school’s first African-American female.
The Washington Post Book World wrote of this coming-of-age memoir: “A genuinely remarkable book that takes its place alongside those by Richard Wright [and] Maya Angelou . . . by a writer of singular grace, wit and self-knowledge . . . ‘Black Ice’ is beautiful in all respects, not merely as a contribution to that 'unruly conversation' among black Americans but as a precious gift to all of us.”
“Keep the River on your Right” is the basis for a new, highly regarded documentary that Union will show in the fall. The book has been called an extraordinary, stranger-than-fiction story. It chronicles Schneebaum's return to the jungle, 45 years after his original visit, to reunite with the tribesmen he loved and who gave him nightmares for nearly half a century.
Schneebaum, who died in 2005, was a New York painter, an anthropologist and a Fulbright scholar in 1955 when he spent seven months in the rain forests of Peru with the Indian tribe, the Harakambut. When the tribe went on a raid, killed enemies and ate them, Schneebaum joined them in this cannibalism. The documentary, by Laurie and David Shapiro, has been described as “a deeply affecting and searing portrait.”
To participate in the book club, contact Sorum House Representative Suzanne Benack at benacks@union.edu. Spouses, partners and family members are welcome at the book club and at all Minerva events.