October 5 & 26: John Archibald, Shaking the Gates of Hell: A Search for Family and Truth in the Wake of the Civil Rights Revolution (Knopf, 2021)

Learn more about the author here: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/john-archibald-alabama- media-group and https://www.al.com/staff/jaarchib/posts.html

Archibald’s memoir focuses on growing up in the American South of the 1960s–an all-American white boy–son of a long line of Methodist preachers, in the midst of the civil rights revolution, and discovering the culpability of silence within the church. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and columnist for The Birmingham News. “My dad was a Methodist preacher and his dad was a Methodist preacher,” writes John Archibald. “It goes all the way back on both sides of my family. When I am at my best, I think it comes from that sermon place.” Everything Archibald knows and believes about life is “refracted through the stained glass of the Southern church. It had everything to do with people. And fairness. And compassion.” In Shaking the Gates of Hell, Archibald asks: Can a good person remain silent in the face of discrimination and horror, and still be a good person?

November 2 & 30: Kate Bowler, No Cure for Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear) (Random House, 2021) Learn more about the author here: https://katebowler.com/

Kate Bowler believed that life was a series of unlimited choices, until she discovered, at age 35, that her body was wracked with cancer. In No Cure for Being Human, she searches for a way forward as she mines the wisdom (and absurdity) of today’s “best life now” advice industry, which insists on exhausting positivity and on trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn, and out-perform our humanness. We are, she finds, as fragile as the day we were born. With dry wit and unflinching honesty, Kate Bowler grapples with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tries to come to terms with her limitations in a culture that says anything is possible. She finds that we need one another if we’re going to tell the truth: Life is beautiful and terrible, full of hope and despair and everything in between—and there’s no cure for being human.