Site of the Week: Literary Kittie turns on BookTV

It was a hot Memorial Day weekend, so I was inside flipping channels and happened on BookTV. A friend of mine said he thought BookTV was an oxymoron. I used to watch it but  got  really  tired of an abundance of war books and gloom & doom economy tales. 

 Literary Kittie and I settled down, with beverage in hand, to watch a fascinating discussion by Gwen Ifill and Michele Norris on the topic, “Does Race Still Matter?” And it looks like BookTv is going to replay it, (fortunately for you)
June 13th, 4:00 (ET)
Approx. 55 min.
2011 Annapolis Book Festival: Does Race Still Matter

Gwen Ifill has written The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama,  and her friend Michele Norris, wrote The Grace of Silence: A Memoir. As a result of their many book tours and subsequent conversations with each other, they became aware Americans have a hard time talking about race. I know as a white person I’m always afraid of saying the wrong thing or appearing racist if I blunder into some unknown territory.

I think it was Michele Norris who said the important idea we need to take away from talking about race is: Race is not the same as Racism. We should be able to share our diversity and learn to have open conversations with each other even if it starts out uncomfortable. (Of course if you listen to the playback you’ll see she says this much better than I am).

Then we watched  Janny Scott, “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother.”  http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Janny  Stanley Ann Dunham sounds like a fascinating woman, who we know very little about except for some campaign soundbites.  Ms Scott has brought great enthusiasm to the telling her story.

There was a BookExpo panel from the folks at Library Journal and some other librarians. I’m so glad the video is available because I missed a little bit at the first of it and I didn’t have a chance to write down titles. The “Books for Dudes” guy is hysterical. See also Earlyword.com

And for even more diversity of topic, Sam Brower was discussing his soon to be released (October 2011) book Prophet’s Prey.  It’s about his investigation into the Fundamentalist Church of the Later Day Saints  and Warren Jeffs.

I think that was what made my visit back to BookTV so engaging this time around. Lot’s of different books and topics. Literary Kittie and I will visit more often. (We’ve also discovered the BookTV schedule, duh)

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