Afternoon Coffee Book Club

Join the Afternoon Coffee Book Club where Scott Biegen, a PSPL Librarian (and English Teacher in a previous life), leads a book club meeting on Zoom. For Summer 2021, we will read three current nonfiction books.

The group meets the 3rd Wednesday of the month on Zoom from 2:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. (PST). Starting in September, the Afternoon Coffee Book Club will become the Morning Coffee Book Club again and shift to the 3rd Wednesday of the Month on Zoom from 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

To receive meeting information and join the email list for the Afternoon Coffee Book Club, please email Scott Biegen in advance of the meeting at scott.biegen@palmspringsca.gov

View other selections for the Afternoon/Morning Coffee Book Club.

August 18, 2021

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

—#1 New York Times Bestseller

The story begins in 1619—a year before the Mayflower—when the White Lion disgorges “some 20-and-odd Negroes” onto the shores of Virginia, inaugurating the African presence in what would become the United States. It takes us to the present, when African Americans, descendants of those on the White Lion and a thousand other routes to this country, continue a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles, stunning achievements, and millions of ordinary lives passing through extraordinary history.

Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness.

This is a history that illuminates our past and gives us new ways of thinking about our future, written by the most vital and essential voices of our present.

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