A new book delivers a gripping, portrait not only of Harper Lee, but also of a still-unanswered set of crimes. |
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| The Thread's Must Read | 
“The Miseducation of Cameron Post”
by Emily Danforth
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If you’re over 40, you probably remember gay conversion in its 1990s heyday: A pseudoscientific, Christian-based practice that purported to “pray away the gay.” Cities throughout the country, including nearly a dozen in Florida, have since banned gay conversion therapy for minors.
There’s a moment in “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” when Cam understands that the people running the gay conversion camp she’s been exiled to have no idea what they’re actually doing. “You’re just making it up as you go along,” she says with dawning chagrin.
Author Emily M. Danforth never went to a conversion camp, but in her eastern Montana hometown, it was held out as a threat against coming out. Indeed, as she told Terry Gross recently, she was well aware that her friends might snitch out her secret.
Danforth said: “It’s so strange for me now to look back because even by junior, senior year, that was not my peer group. But I absolutely kind of went right in to what was like the danger zone. I mean, I was like, let me carry a Bible around high school with me. And let me meet with you in the mornings to pray before class and adopt, really, this whole sort of lifestyle that was not -- it wasn't in my house. It was my friends in this sense that they're going to keep me from being true to myself essentially, and that's safer.”
Most of the conquistadors are ultimately killed by disease or Natives, but Estebenico escapes, along with a few others. They wander the region for eight years, relying on the charity of tribes. And in that nomadic exile, Estebenico — a Moroccan Muslim, a black man who was once, himself, a buyer and seller of slaves — fulfills a promise to God to lead a morally awakened life.
I recommend this eye-opening book.
— Kerri Miller |
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 | | Take a breath and dive into 'Exhalation' | | "Exhalation: Stories" by Ted Chiang |
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Ted Chiang's new collection is jammed with brilliant ideas — but it also makes time to take one single fascinating notion and examine it in depth, in stories that are never too long or too short.
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 | | An assassin walks into a library | "The Plotters" by Un-su Kim |
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David Enyeart, from Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul, recommends an assassin-filled thriller from South Korea, which offers a biting portrayal of power and corruption.
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