Allende has been called “the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author”. In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters,[4] and in 2010, she received Chile’s National Literature Prize. Allende’s novels are often based upon her personal experience and pay homage to the lives of women, while weaving together elements of myth and realism. This book is set in Haiti and New Orleans in the days of colonialism and slavery. A sprawling, multifaceted historical epic. The novel follows a young woman born into slavery, Tete, and her master, Toulouse Valmorain, through two countries, over several years. Valmorain, a young Frenchman who has moved to Haiti to manage his father’s sugar plantation, first buys Tete in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), where she was born to an African woman and one of her white enslavers. Valmorain uses Tete for sex; she eventually gives birth to his daughter, and the two develop a complicated, somewhat troubled relationship. After the beginning of the slave revolts that would lead to the Haitian Revolution, Valmorain and Tete move to New Orleans with divergent plans and dreams.  He plans to get a new plantation, while  she seeks freedom and self determination.

Thursday, January 24, at 6:00 p.m., Parnell Memorial Library Meeting Room.
“The Lives of Women in  Brazil.” 
Presenter: Dr. Marli Rosa, UM Fulbright Professor, under the Fulbright Visiting Scholars Program and the UM Vacca Program.  Dr. Rosa will speak about the personal and professional lives of Brazilian women, as reflected in a variety of Family Models and Career Goals.                          

Adelante Session and Branch Meeting:  Thursday, February 28, 4:00 p.m. Black History Month Event
“Cradle of Freedom: The Alabama Movement that Changed  America” by Frye Gaillard.
Presenters: Alabama Author and Journalist, Frye Gaillard and UM Professsor Wilson Fallin.
(Note that this combined Branch Meeting and Book Group Session will be cosponsored by Carmichael Library)

Frye Gaillard, a native of Mobile, Alabama, is a graduate of Vanderbilt University. Gaillard began his career as a reporter for daily newspapers in the late 1960s, writing about the Civil Rights Movement as it unfolded across the South.   “As a reporter, and later editor for The Charlotte Observer, he covered the integration of that North Carolina city’s schools by busing, He has been editor of Race Relations Reporter and southern editor of the Charlotte Observer.”  In Cradle of Freedom, he  puts a human face on the story of the black American struggle for equality in Alabama during the 1960s. While exceptional leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, and others rose up from the ranks and carved their places in history, the burden of the movement was not carried by them alone. It was fueled by the commitment and hard work of thousands of everyday people who decided that the time had come to take a stand.”  (Adapted from the Amazon.com reviews.)