Log in

Events

Upcoming events

    • 07 Dec 2024
    • 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
    • Holman's Table
    • 39
    Register

    The 2024 Annual Luncheon will be held at Holman's Table, Amelia Earhart Room, on Saturday, December 7th.

    Our featured speaker will be former MN State Representative Betty Folliard. She will be speaking on her progression through elected office and her current "work" load with the ERA.

    • 09 Dec 2024
    • 6:30 PM
    • Zoom

    Join us to discuss How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair. We will meet on Zoom on Monday, December 9 at 6:30 p.m. Please email Sharon Slettehaugh (s.slettehaugh@gmail.com) to join the email list and receive the Zoom link. 

    *Please note that Evening Book Club moved to the second Monday to avoid some holidays and big LWV events. 

    "Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and a militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, was obsessed with the ever-present threat of the corrupting evils of the Western world outside their home, and worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure. For him, a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.

    Safiya’s extraordinary mother, though loyal to her father, gave her the one gift she knew would take Safiya beyond the stretch of beach and mountains in Jamaica their family called home: a world of books, knowledge, and education she conjured almost out of thin air. When she introduced Safiya to poetry, Safiya’s voice awakened. As she watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under relentless domesticity, Safiya’s rebellion against her father’s rules set her on an inevitable collision course with him. Her education became the sharp tool to hone her own poetic voice and carve her path to liberation. Rich in emotion and page-turning drama, How to Say Babylon is “a melodious wave of memories” of a woman finding her own power (NPR)."

    • 11 Dec 2024
    • 10:00 AM
    • Highland Park Library (1974 Ford Parkway, St. Paul)

    Join us on Wednesday, December 11 at 10 AM to discuss On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service by Anthony Fauci, M.D.


    "The memoir by the doctor who became a beacon of hope for millions through the COVID pandemic, and whose six-decade career in high-level public service put him in the room with seven presidents."

    • 08 Jan 2025
    • 10:00 AM
    • Highland Park Library (1974 Ford Parkway, St. Paul)

    Join us on Wednesday, January 8 at 10 AM to discuss The Thirty-first of March: An Intimate Portrait of Lyndon Johnson by Horace Busby.


    " An indelible portrait of a president and a presidency at a time of crisis. From the aftereffects of the Kennedy assassination, when Busby was asked by the newly sworn-in president to sit by his bedside during his first troubled nights in office, to the concerns that defined the Great Society—civil rights, the economy, social legislation, housing, and the Vietnam War—Busby not only articulated and refined Johnson's political thinking, he also helped shape the most ambitious, far-reaching legislative agenda since FDR's New Deal."

    • 13 Jan 2025
    • 6:30 PM
    • Zoom

    Join us to discuss A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell. We will meet on Zoom on Monday, January 13 at 6:30 p.m. Please email Sharon Slettehaugh (s.slettehaugh@gmail.com) to join the email list and receive the Zoom link. 

    *Please note that Evening Book Club moved to the second Monday to avoid some holidays and big LWV events. 

    "In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: “She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her.”

    The target in their sights was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite who talked her way into Special Operations Executive, the spy organization dubbed Winston Churchill’s “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and–despite her prosthetic leg–helped to light the flame of the French Resistance, revolutionizing secret warfare as we know it."

    • 10 Feb 2025
    • 6:30 PM
    • Zoom

    Join us to discuss The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi. We will meet on Zoom on Monday, February 10 at 6:30 p.m. Please email Sharon Slettehaugh (s.slettehaugh@gmail.com) to join the email list and receive the Zoom link. 

    *Please note that Evening Book Club moved to the second Monday to avoid some holidays and big LWV events. 

    "A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history
    ...

    Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. "

    • 12 Feb 2025
    • 10:00 AM
    • Highland Park Library (1974 Ford Parkway, St. Paul)

    Join us on Wednesday, February 12 at 10 AM to discuss Far Out Man: The Tales of Life in the Counterculture by Eric Utne.


    "The founder of the 'Utne Reader' chronicles his adventures on the frontlines of American culture-from the Vietnam era to the age of Trump-as a spiritual seeker, antiwar activist, and minor media celebrity."

    • 10 Mar 2025
    • 6:30 PM
    • Zoom

    Join us to discuss As Long as the Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker. We will meet on Zoom on Monday, March 10 at 6:30 p.m. Please email Sharon Slettehaugh (s.slettehaugh@gmail.com) to join the email list and receive the Zoom link. 

    *Please note that Evening Book Club moved to the second Monday to avoid some holidays and big LWV events. 

    "The story of Native peoples' resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community's rich history of activism.

    Through the unique lens of "Indigenized environmental justice," Indigenous researcher and activist Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle. As Long As Grass Grows gives readers an accessible history of Indigenous resistance to government and corporate incursions on their lands and offers new approaches to environmental justice activism and policy."

    • 12 Mar 2025
    • 10:00 AM
    • Highland Park Library (1974 Ford Parkway, St. Paul)

    Join us on Wednesday, March 12 at 10 AM to discuss Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe.


    "Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book—as finely paced as a novel—Keefe uses McConville's murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland."

    • 09 Apr 2025
    • 10:00 AM
    • Highland Park Library (1974 Ford Parkway, St. Paul)

    Join us on Wednesday, April 9 at 10 AM to discuss Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum.

    "We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

    But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America."

    • 14 Apr 2025
    • 6:30 PM
    • Zoom

    Join us to discuss Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow. We will meet on Zoom on Monday, April 14 at 6:30 p.m. Please email Sharon Slettehaugh (s.slettehaugh@gmail.com) to join the email list and receive the Zoom link. 

    *Please note that Evening Book Club moved to the second Monday to avoid some holidays and big LWV events. 

    "Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century. Before and even after our troops had begun fighting abroad in World War II, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that our natural alliance was with the Axis, not against it. It was a sophisticated and shockingly well-funded campaign to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens' confidence in their elected leaders, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and installing authoritarian rule."

    • 12 May 2025
    • 6:30 PM
    • Zoom

    Join us to discuss The Rooster house: A Ukrainian Family Memoir by Victoria Belim. We will meet on Zoom on Monday, May 12 at 6:30 p.m. Please email Sharon Slettehaugh (s.slettehaugh@gmail.com) to join the email list and receive the Zoom link. 

    *Please note that Evening Book Club moved to the second Monday to avoid some holidays and big LWV events. 

    " In the Ukrainian city of Poltava stands a building known as the Rooster House, an elegant mansion with two voluptuous red roosters flanking the door. It doesn’t look horrifying. And yet, when Victoria was a girl growing up in the 1980s, her great-grandmother would take pains to avoid walking past it.

    In 2014, while the Russian state was annexing Crimea, Victoria visited her grandmother in Bereh, the hamlet near Poltava that was a haven in her childhood. Just before the trip she came across her great-grandfather’s diary, one page scored deep with the single line: ‘Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine.’ She had never heard of this uncle and no one – especially her grandmother – seemed willing to tell her about him.

    Victoria became obsessed with recovering his story, and returned to her birth country again and again in pursuit of it. In the end, after years of sifting through Ukraine’s post-Soviet bureaucracy, after travelling to tiny, ruined villages and speaking to the wizened survivors of that era, her winding search took her back to the place she had always known it would – to the Rooster House, and the dark truths contained in its basement.

    Inspired by the author’s love for her family, and peopled by warm, larger-than-life characters who jostle alongside the ghostly absences of others, The Rooster House is at once a riveting journey into the complex history of a wounded country and a profoundly moving tribute to hope and the refusal of despair. "

    • 14 May 2025
    • 10:00 AM
    • Highland Park Library (1974 Ford Parkway, St. Paul)

    Join us on Wednesday, May 14 at 10 AM to discuss One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Control Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy by Dominic Erdozain.

    "This takedown of American gun culture argues that the nation's founders did not intend the Second Amendment to guarantee an individual right to bear arms - and that this distortion of the record is an urgent threat to democracy." 

    • 09 Jun 2025
    • 6:30 PM
    • Zoom

    Join us to discuss The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle. We will meet on Zoom on Monday,  June 9 at 6:30 p.m. Please email Sharon Slettehaugh (s.slettehaugh@gmail.com) to join the email list and receive the Zoom link. 

    *Please note that Evening Book Club moved to the second Monday to avoid some holidays and big LWV events. 

    " A human-centered narrative with national scope, The Great Displacement is “a vivid tour of the new human geography just coming into view” (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth). From half-drowned Louisiana to fire-scorched California, from the dried-up cotton fields of Arizona to the soaked watersheds of inland North Carolina, people are moving. In the last few decades, the federal government has moved tens of thousands of families away from flood zones, and tens of thousands more have moved of their own accord in the aftermath of natural disasters. Insurance and mortgage markets are already shifting to reflect mounting climate risk, pricing people out of risky areas."

    • 11 Jun 2025
    • 10:00 AM
    • Highland Park Library (1974 Ford Parkway, St. Paul)

    Join us on Wednesday, June 11 at 10 AM to discuss Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence by Anita Hill.

    "An elegant, impassioned demand that America see gender-based violence as a cultural and structural problem that hurts everyone, not just victims and survivors… It's at times downright virtuosic in the threads it weaves together."

Powered by Wild Apricot Membership Software