This is to invite y’all to come out for some bookish talk at Richland Library tomorrow night:
Join us for lively discussion surrounding The Dry Grass of August by A. J. Mayhew. Our moderator is Brad Warthen, journalist and Director of Communication/Public Relations for ADCO. He will guide us through discussion of the novel and social issues addressed. Our community panelists include: Dr. Bobby Donaldson, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at USC; Dr. R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Assistant Professor of History at USC; and Ms. Martha Cunningham Monteith, who organized the first speech pathology program in South Carolina’s public schools and was one of the 2013 inductees into the Richland 1 Hall of Fame.
6:00 – 7:00pm, Richland Library, Bostick Auditorium
I finished reading the book last night, which means I was extra conscientious on this one. When I moderated a Salman Rushdie panel at USC several years ago, I had never read any of his books. I tried — I think I checked out Satanic Verses — but quit after about a chapter. Just couldn’t get into it. I enjoyed his lecture, though.
The Dry Grass of August was not the sort of thing I would normally seek out to read — it’s told from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl living in Charlotte in 1954 — but it was pretty good. It’s about a vacation trip that her white family takes along with their black maid through the South in the summer after the Brown v. Board decision. The trip turns horribly tragic very suddenly, and there’s a lot of misery, but a lot of learning about life, too.
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