Book Club: August 9th
Book Club to discuss The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area
For August's Book Club, the host has selected Malcolm Margolin's The Ohlone Way.
The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area is an old book, originally from 1978, which is in this case an advantage because the author had access to the memories of living elders now gone. The book reflects on one of Henry David Thoreau's most central and still crucial concerns, which is how human beings fit into the scheme of nature and what it means to live in close interconnection and interdependence with other humans and other species. This book is an examination of how Native Americans lived in our general area--what we know today as the Bay Area--before they were overwhelmed by European colonization. They are interesting not only because they inhabited a landscape we know well in its modern aspect, but because they are considered to have reached a very high degree of compatibility with and in their surroundings that healthily both sustained them bodily and culturally and nourished the environment in which they flourished. It is worth taking a look at that to see what, if anything, we can learn from how they treated nature and each other. This book is a quick and easy read of not much over 150 pages of text. But you might find it a revelation that keeps you thinking long after you finish it.
The local Harvard Club book club, which has been in existence for ten years, meets on the second Wednesday of every month at 6:30 pm for dinner and to discuss a wide-ranging selection of books -- fiction, poetry, biography, history, etc. They always enjoy having other interested people attend and participate.
The Book Club will meet this month at Bill and Nancy Myer's house at 6:30 pm on August 9th. Please email Bill Myers for more information.