Hokkaido Multinational Support Community (HMSC): Book Club

Book Club

List of Services

Book Talk #75 The Courage to be Happy by Ichiro Kishimi
August 25 2024, Sunday 17:00-19:00 Book Talk #75
Book Talk #80 Free topic
January 19 2025, Sunday 16:00-18:00 Book Talk #80
Book Talk #81 History (Historical novels - broadly interpreted)
February 23 2025, Sunday 16:00-18:00 Book Talk #81

Recommended Books

The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life
The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life
239 Days: Abdu'l-Bahá's Journey in America
239 Days: Abdu'l-Bahá's Journey in America 239 Days: Abdu'l-Bahá's Journey in America
Every Day Is a Gift: A Memoir Hardcover
Every Day Is a Gift: A Memoir Hardcover Every Day Is a Gift: A Memoir Hardcover
Wild Nights!
Wild Nights! Wild Nights!
The Enchiridion
The Enchiridion The Enchiridion
Index, A History of the
Index, A History of the Index, A History of the
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Pedagogy of the Oppressed Pedagogy of the Oppressed
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America The myth of a frontier and of relentless expansion has profoundly affected domestic politics in the United States.
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
Scrappy Little Nobody A collection of humorous autobiographical essays by the Academy Award-nominated actress and star of Up in the Air and Pitch Perfect.
Scrappy Little Nobody Scrappy Little Nobody
Foregone A searing novel about memory, abandonment, and betrayal from the acclaimed and bestselling Russell Banks

At the center of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late seventies, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex–star student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fife’s wife and alongside Malcolm’s producer, cinematographer, and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession.

Imaginatively structured around Fife’s secret memories and alternating between the experiences of the characters who are filming his confession, the novel challenges our assumptions and understanding about a significant lost chapter in American history and the nature of memory itself. Russell Banks gives us a daring and resonant work about the scope of one man’s mysterious life, revealed through the fragments of his recovered past.
Foregone Foregone
The Trail of Tears: The Forced Removal of the Five Civilized Tribes *Includes pictures
*Includes eyewitness accounts of the Trail of Tears
*Includes a Bibliography for further reading.
"I fought through the War Between the States and have seen many men shot, but the Cherokee Removal was the cruelest work I ever knew." - Georgia soldier on the Trail of Tears
The "Five Civilized Tribes" are among the best known Native American groups in American history, and they were even celebrated by contemporary Americans for their abilities to adapt to white culture. But tragically, they are also well known tribes due to the trials and tribulations they suffered by being forcibly moved west along the "Trail of Tears."
Though the Trail of Tears applied to several different tribes, it is most commonly associated today with the Cherokee. The Cherokee began the process of assimilation into European America very early, even before the establishment of the Unites States, but it is unclear what benefits that brought the tribe. Throughout the colonial period and after the American Revolution, the Cherokee struggled to satisfy the whims and desires of American government officials and settlers, often suffering injustices after complying with their desires. Nevertheless, the Cherokee continued to endure, and after being pushed west, they rose from humble origins as refugees new to the southeastern United States to build themselves back up into a powerhouse both economically and militarily. The Cherokee ultimately became the first people of non-European descent to become U.S. citizens en masse, and today the Cherokee Nation is the largest federally recognized tribe in the United States, boasting over 300,000 members.
The Creek became known as one of the Five Civilized Tribes for quickly assimilating aspects of European culture, but in response to early European contact, the Muscogee established one of the strongest confederacies in the region. Despite becoming a dominant regional force, however, infighting brought about civil war in the early 19th century, and they were quickly wrapped up in the War of 1812 as well. By the end of that fighting, the Creek were compelled to cede millions of acres of land to the expanding United States, ushering in a new era that found the Creek occupying only a small strip of Alabama by the 1830s.
With the Spanish Empire foundering during the mid-19th century, the young United States sought to take possession of Florida. President Andrew Jackson's notorious policy of Indian Removal led to the Seminole Wars in the 1830s, and that was already after General Andrew Jackson had led American soldiers against the Seminole in the First Seminole War a generation earlier. The Seminole Wars ultimately pushed much of the tribe into Oklahoma, and the nature of some of the fighting remains one of the best known aspects of Seminole history among Americans.
The Trail of Tears comprehensively covers the history and legacy of the events that brought about the removal of the Southeastern tribes. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Trail of Tears like you never have before, in no time at all.
The Trail of Tears: The Forced Removal of the Five Civilized Tribes The Trail of Tears: The Forced Removal of the Five Civilized Tribes
The Cat's Table A spellbinding story - by turns poignant and electrifying - about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage.

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the "cat's table" - as far from the Captain's Table as can be - with a ragtag group of "insignificant" adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed mercury. But there are other diversions as well: one man talks with them about jazz and women, another opens the door to the world of literature. The narrator's elusive, beautiful cousin Emily becomes his confidante, allowing him to see himself "with a distant eye" for the first time, and to feel the first stirring of desire. Another Cat's Table denizen, the shadowy Miss Lasqueti, is perhaps more than what she seems. And very late every night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner, his crime and his fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever.

As the narrative moves between the decks and holds of the ship and the boy's adult years, it tells a spellbinding story - by turns poignant and electrifying - about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage.
The Cat's Table The Cat's Table
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created From the author of 1491—the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas—a deeply engaging new history of the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs.

More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals. When Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, he ended that separation at a stroke. Driven by the economic goal of establishing trade with China, he accidentally set off an ecological convulsion as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans.

The Columbian Exchange, as researchers call it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in Florida, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. More important, creatures the colonists knew nothing about hitched along for the ride. Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; bacteria, fungi, and viruses; rats of every description—all of them rushed like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before, changing lives and landscapes across the planet.

Eight decades after Columbus, a Spaniard named Legazpi succeeded where Columbus had failed. He sailed west to establish continual trade with China, then the richest, most powerful country in the world. In Manila, a city Legazpi founded, silver from the Americas, mined by African and Indian slaves, was sold to Asians in return for silk for Europeans. It was the first time that goods and people from every corner of the globe were connected in a single worldwide exchange. Much as Columbus created a new world biologically, Legazpi and the Spanish empire he served created a new world economically.
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
The Emigrants (The Emigrants #1) Considered one of Sweden's greatest 20th-century writers, Vilhelm Moberg created Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson to portray the joys and tragedies of daily life for early Swedish pioneers in America. His consistently faithful depiction of these humble people's lives is a major strength of the Emigrant Novels.

Moberg's extensive research in the papers of Swedish emigrants in archival collections, including the Minnesota Historical Society, enabled him to incorporate many details of pioneer life. First published between 1949 and 1959 in Swedish, these four books were considered a single work by Moberg, who intended that they be read as documentary novels. These editions contain introductions written by Roger McKnight, Gustavus Adolphus College, and restore Moberg's bibliography not included in earlier English editions.

Book 1 introduces Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson, their three young children, and eleven others who make up a resolute party of Swedes fleeing the poverty, religious persecution, and social oppression of Småland in 1850.
The Emigrants (The Emigrants #1) The Emigrants (The Emigrants #1)
People of the Wolf
(North America's Forgotten Past #1) In the dawn of history, a valiant people forged a pathway from an old world into a new one. Led by a dreamer who followed the spirit of the wolf, a handful of courageous men and women dared to cross the frozen wastes to find an untouched, unspoiled continent. Set in what is now Alaska, this is the magnificent saga of the vision-filled man who led his people to an awesome destiny, and the courageous woman whose love and bravery drove them on in pursuit of that dream.
People of the Wolf
(North America's Forgotten Past #1) People of the Wolf
(North America's Forgotten Past #1)
American Dirt Lydia Quixano Pérez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable.
American Dirt American Dirt
Blanche on the Lam Goes beyond mystery and into political and social commentary. Blanche is a heavy-set, dark-skinned Black woman who works as a maid. Deals with violence against women, racism, class boundaries, and sexism in a very human and down to earth way! Blanche is opinionated but hilarious in her comments about her employers, friends and neighbors.
Blanche on the Lam Blanche on the Lam
Maus
(The complete version with I and II merged) Maus I: A Survivor's Tale and Maus II - the complete story of Vladek Spiegelman and his wife, living and surviving in Hitler's Europe. By addressing the horror of the Holocaust through cartoons, the author captures the everyday reality of fear and is able to explore the guilt, relief and extraordinary sensation of survival - and how the children of survivors are in their own way affected by the trials of their parents. A contemporary classic of immeasurable significance.
Maus
(The complete version with I and II merged) Maus
(The complete version with I and II merged)
The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution The renowned biologist and thinker Richard Dawkins presents his most expansive work yet: a comprehensive look at evolution, ranging from the latest developments in the field to his own provocative views. Loosely based on the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dawkins's Tale takes us modern humans back through four billion years of life on our planet. As the pilgrimage progresses, we join with other organisms at the forty "rendezvous points" where we find a common ancestor. The band of pilgrims swells into a vast crowd as we join first Dawkins's brilliant, inventive approach allows us to view the connections between ourselves and all other life in a bracingly novel way. It also lets him shed bright new light on the most compelling aspects of evolutionary history and theory: sexual selection, speciation, convergent evolution, extinction, genetics, plate tectonics, geographical dispersal, and more. The Ancestor's Tale is at once a far-reaching survey of the latest, best thinking on biology and a fascinating history of life on Earth. Here Dawkins shows us how remarkable we are, how astonishing our history, and how intimate our relationship with the rest of the living world.with other primates, then with other mammals, and so on back to the first primordial organism.
The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
Tun-Huang A fiction book written to explain why and how the Buddhist sutras and other scriptures were hidden in the Moago caves more than a thousand years ago.
Tun-Huang Tun-Huang
Being Mortal
Being Mortal Being Mortal
Homo Deus The future of Artificial Intelligence
Homo Deus Homo Deus
As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride From actor Cary Elwes, who played the iconic role of Westley in The Princess Bride, comes a first-person account and behind-the-scenes look at the making of the cult classic film filled with never-before-told stories, exclusive photographs, and interviews with costars Robin Wright, Wallace Shawn, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, and Mandy Patinkin, as well as author and screenwriter William Goldman, producer Norman Lear, and director Rob Reiner.
As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride
The Dark Tower (Series) The Dark Tower series tells the story of Roland Deschain, Mid-World’s last gunslinger, who is traveling southeast across Mid-World’s post-apocalyptic landscape, searching for the powerful but elusive magical edifice known as The Dark Tower. Located in the fey region of End-World, amid a sea of singing red roses, the Dark Tower is the nexus point of the time-space continuum. It is the heart of all worlds, but it is also under threat. Someone, or something, is using the evil technology of the Great Old Ones to destroy it.
The Dark Tower (Series) The Dark Tower (Series)
The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression The New Human Rights Movement reveals the critical importance of a unified activism working to overcome the inherent injustice of our system. This book warns against what is in store if we continue to ignore the flaws of our socioeconomic approach, while also revealing the bright and expansive future possible if we succeed.
The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression

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