Humanities Montana’s OpenBook reading and discussion program
offers books and discussion leaders to nonprofit groups across the
state. Program sponsors can choose a thematic series or individual
titles from the over 100 books in our catalog. The practice of
reading and discussing literature can result in more engaged
communities where members can discuss values, issues, ideas, and
conflicts.
Humanities Montana
is currently featuring two OpenBook series—The Great Depression:
Then and Now and Stranger at the Table (see details
below). For more information about organizing an OpenBook
discussion series, or to see other titles in the program catalog,
visit the OpenBook program page on the Humanities Montana
website.
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The Great Depression: Then and Now |
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Stranger at the Table |
- The Worst Hard Time
by Timothy Egan
The Worst Hard Time is an apt
title for Timothy Egan’s story of the ordinary Americans who
survived the Dust Bowl on the southern plains during the 1930s.
Natural disaster followed economic collapse to make this perhaps
the deepest pocket of despair during the hard times of the Great
Depression....
[Download Study Guide]
- Nickle and Dimed: On (Not)
Getting By in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Although it was written almost a
decade before the Great Recession, Nickel and Dimed
continues to provide an engaging entry into the glaring
inequalities of recent American life. In the aftermath of welfare
reform during the late 1990s, Barbara Ehrenreich set out to find
out what life was like for America’s working poor....
[Download Study Guide]
- Hope in Hard Times: New Deal
Photographs of Montana, 1936-1942
by Mary Murphy
Hope in Hard Times combines
Mary Murphy’s lively description of Montana’s Depression-era
history with over 140 Farm Security Administration photographs to
create an evocative representation of the Depression in Montana.
Murphy culled the pictures for this book from the more than 107,000
images taken by FSA photographers and now held by the Library of
Congress....
[Download Study Guide]
- In Open Spaces
by Russell Rowland
A great deal happens to the Arbuckle
family in Russell Rowland's In Open Spaces, and that complex
mix of events can be read as a summary of changes to Montana from
the homestead years to the end of World War II....
[Download Study Guide]
- The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
In an age of flattened hierarchies,
there may no longer be such thing as a classic, but The Grapes
of Wrath still confronts us as perhaps the most durable work of
fiction to emerge from the Great Depression. It was both an
immediate popular success and an instant controversy—banned in some
places—when it was published in 1939 and received the Pulitzer
Prize for Literature....
[Download Study Guide]
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- Crescent
by Diana Abu-Jabur
Diana Abu-Jaber weaves the story of a
love affair between a comely chef and a handsome, haunted Near
Eastern Studies professor together with a fanciful tale of a
mother's quest to find her wayward son in this beautifully imagined
and timely novel, which explores private emotions and global
politics with both grace and conviction.
[Download Study Guide]
- House of Sand and Fog
by Andre Dubus III
House of Sand and Fog is a narrative
triumph in which a traditional immigrant success story and a modern
love story are turned upside down with brutal, heartrending
consequences. It is an American tragedy, and a shockingly true
picture of the country we live in today.
- The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Namesake is an intimate,
closely observed family portrait that effortlessly and discreetly
unfolds to disclose a capacious social vision.... In chronicling
more than three decades in the Gangulis' lives, Ms. Lahiri has not
only given us a wonderfully intimate and knowing family portrait,
she has also taken the haunting chamber music of her first
collection of stories and reorchestrated its themes of exile and
identity to create a symphonic work, a debut novel that is as
assured and eloquent as the work of a longtime master of the
craft.
- Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
“Quiet, gemlike, perfect” or
“tumultuous and raw”? Surely Housekeeping is both, and the
magic of Robinson’s craft is that she under-paints every scene with
so many conflicting emotions that we are scarcely aware, on first
reading, of the tumult roiling beneath the surface of the prose —
akin to the horrors of death and decay beneath the calm surface of
the glacial lake at the center of the novel....
[Download Study Guide]
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