Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

I grew up in Michigan, in the United States, where I was surrounded by places named with Native American names. I drove to Saginaw to play in basketball tournaments and to Pontiac to watch an NBA team play. Now in Kansas, I live near towns called Kiowa and Cherokee. But for much of my life, despite my profession as an historian, names like these were just background noise in the everyday reality of my life, not reminders of the fact that Native Americans have lived in and with the presence of settlers for centuries.

Andrew Woolford has done much to help me recognize and understand this. Woolford is one of the preeminent scholars on the relationship between “natives” and settlers in the United States and Canada. He is also one of the most thoughtful voices in considering whether this relationship should be called genocidal.

In my discussion with him, we tried to get at the essence of his ideas by looking at three of his works. We begin with the volume of essays he co-edited with Alexander Hinton and Jeff Benvenuto, titled Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America. The book collects the contributions of a variety of authors researching the issue. The essays generally offer focused examinations of specific issues of events. But the editors also offer valuable reflections on what we know and don’t know about the subject. It’s an outstanding resource for people interested in the question broadly. We then move on to Woolford’s own work, titled This Benevolent Experiment:Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (University of Nebraska Press, 2015).The book is a wonderful examination of the Indigenous school systems in Canada and the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Woolford extracts from his research a wonderful new metaphor to illustrate the way in which genocide worked in North America, one that has much broader utility in the field. And he offers a careful, well-reasoned explanation for why he thinks genocide is indeed the most appropriate term for the cultural and physical violent that characterized the period. Both books are excellent.

Finally, while we didn’t have much time to address it specifically, Woolford edited a recent special edition of the Journal of Genocide Research focusing on the topic. It’s also a rich source of information and insight.

Put together, the three works offer perhaps the best way into the growing field of genocide studies in North America.

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To celebrate the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, World Book Club travels back to Victorian England to discuss her captivating and enduring tale, Jane Eyre with writer Tracy Chevalier and biographer Claire Harman in a packed BBC Radio Theatre.

The novel traces the fortunes of a young orphaned girl searching for a sense of belonging and identity in a hostile world, plagued by both gender and social inequality.

Weaving together the sweeping romance between Jane and Mr Rochester, a social commentary on nineteenth century England and set against the eerie Gothic backdrop of imposing mansions and wild moorland, Brontë has produced one of the world’s most loved and timeless tales.

(Photo: Charlotte Bronte. Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Katy Waldman, Laura Miller, and Susan Matthews discuss Hope Jahren's budding debut memoir, Lab Girl. Join us next month to discuss Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld.

Slate's Audio Book Club is brought to you by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at AudiblePodcast.com/ABC.

And by Texture, the mobile app that gives you full access to more than 150 of the world's most popular magazines, anytime, using your phone or tablet. Read Vogue, People, Esquire, Time—and hundreds more—from back issues to the one currently on the newsstand. Right now, try Texture for free at Texture.com/ABC.

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Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Harvard University Press, 2016) maps the intricate, intersecting channels of information exchange in the early American South, exploring how people in the colonial world came into possession of vital knowledge in a region that lacked a regular mail system or a printing press until the 1730s.

Challenging the notion of early colonial America as an uninformed backwater, Alejandra Dubcovsky uncovers the ingenious ways its inhabitants acquired timely news through largely oral networks. Information circulated through the region via spies, scouts, traders, missionaries, and other ad hoc couriers and by encounters of sheer chance with hunting parties, shipwrecked sailors, captured soldiers, or fugitive slaves. For many, content was often inseparable from the paths taken and the alliances involved in acquiring it. The different and innovative ways that Indians, Africans, and Europeans struggled to make sense of their world created communication networks that linked together peoples who otherwise shared no consensus of the physical and political boundaries shaping their lives.

Exchanging information was not simply about having the most up-to-date news or the quickest messenger. It was a way of establishing and maintaining relationships, of articulating values and enforcing prioritiesa process inextricably tied to the regions social and geopolitical realities. At the heart of Dubcovskys study are important lessons about the nexus of information and power in the early American South.

Andrew Bard Epstein is a graduate teacher and researcher at Yale University. Follow him on twitter @andeps.

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This month, as part of the World Service’s Identity Season, World Book Club is in Cape Town, home of acclaimed Somali writer Nuruddin Farah, where we’ll be talking to him about his novel, Maps.

This moving and dramatic book is the first of three novels which make up Nuruddin Farah’s Blood in the Sun trilogy. Maps traces the journey of a young orphaned boy, Askar, who is taken under the wing of a loving surrogate mother, Misra.

Set in both Somalia and Ethiopia with an ever looming backdrop of conflict and political turmoil, Askar struggles to find and forge his identity in a land ravaged by war. Farah’s lucid exploration of struggle – both internal and external; personal and political – is as profound as it is compelling and draws on his own complex relationship with his native Somalia.

(Picture credit: Jeffrey Wilson.)

Critics Katy Waldman, Parul Sehgal, and Meghan O'Rourke discuss Paul Kalanithi's bestselling memoir, When Breath Becomes Air. Join us next month to discuss A Hologram for the King by Dave Egger's.

Slate's Audio Book Club is brought to you by Fun Home, winner of five Tony Awards including Best Musical. The Associated Press calls this groundbreaking production, “The best of what Broadway can do.” Get tickets at FunHomeBroadway.com.

And by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at AudiblePodcast.com/ABC.

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Heather Miyano Kopelson explores how religion, primarily expressed through bodily action, contributed to colonial notions of difference in her recent book Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (NYU Press, 2014). She examines the religious rituals of Taíno, Algonquian, and West African peoples in the New World, and how they intersected with Puritan theology and expression. By comparing these interactions in both New England and Bermuda, she demonstrates how divergent attitudes toward race could be, even among like-minded colonists. Her book demonstrates the centrality of religious attitudes in Puritans’ changing conceptions of colonized bodies, and therefore how racial ideologies developed in two radically different imperial outposts.

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Critics Katy Waldman, Laura Miller, and Laura Bennett discuss A.O. Scott’s insightful new book, Better Living Through Criticism. Next month, Slate's Audio Book Club will be chatting about When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Read the book and join us for our conversation in April!

Slate's Audiobook Club is brought to you by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at AudiblePodcast.com/ABC.

And by Texture, the mobile app that gives you full access to more than 150 of the world's most popular magazines, anytime, using your phone or tablet. Read Vogue, People, Esquire, Time—and hundreds more—from back issues to the one currently on the newsstand. Right now, try Texture for free at Texture.com/ABC.

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This month we talk to the much-loved German-born, British author and illustrator Judith Kerr about her classic children’s novel, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.

Set during World War Two, this semi-autobiographical novel traces the story of a young Jewish girl and her family who flee Berlin just as the Nazis come to power. The journey of a family splintered by conflict, driven by fear and eventually rewarded with reunion is seen through the eyes of the nine-year-old Anna. Judith Kerr’s novel, by turns heart-lifting and heart-rending has stood the test of time. Celebrating its 45th anniversary this year it continues to be enjoyed by readers of all ages to this day.

(Picture: Judith Kerr. Credit: Eliz Huseyin)

This quixotic ‘novel of ideas’ blends philosophical reflection with the haunting tale of Herman Mussert, a retired, outmoded ancient language teacher preoccupied with Classical antiquity. After falling asleep one evening in Amsterdam, he mysteriously wakes the next morning in a hotel room in Lisbon where he slept with another man’s wife twenty years earlier. From here Mussert embarks on an enigmatic journey of the mind, contemplating passion, death, wisdom and disillusionment. Presented by Harriet Gilbert.