Our July Author: Tracy Kidder (Strength in What Remains)

Strength in What Remains (Random House Reader's Circle)Our July author, Tracy Kidder (Strength in What Remains), has his own website: Tracy Kidder.com, a good place to start.  But readers of this book will probably find it more rewarding to spend some time at Village Health Works which features many videos about the clinic and the people it serves as well as descriptions of the ambitious programs the VHW is undertaking. You can also find VHW on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

There are several good interviews with Tracy Kidder available. You can download the Los Angeles Public Library and CSPAN interviews from iTunes. On Point brings in VHW's executive director Sarah Broom for the second half of the program and Radio Open Source goes deep on genocide and public health here.

Here is a short video excerpt of an interview from PRI's The World:


An Interview with Author Tracy Kidder from Clark Boyd on Vimeo.

Finally, be sure to check out this NYT editorial by Tracy Kidder: A Death in Burundi.

For October: Forest Gate by Peter Akinti

For October we have selected Forest Gate by Peter Akinti:

A profoundly affecting novel that forces the reader to connect, on a very personal level, with the stories behind the headlines, it is a coming-of-age story which finds hope in the midst of modern London’s urban deprivation. Peter Akinti was a seventies child, born of Nigerian ancestry, in London. He read Law at a London University. He has written for the Guardian, and worked for four years at HM Treasury Chambers before founding and editing Untold Magazine for five years. Untold was the first independent British magazine for black men and had a wealth of gifted contributors from all over the diaspora. Peter spent eighteen months in Nigeria, running a restaurant, beer parlour and cinema in Ondo Town, Southwest Nigeria. He currently lives in Brooklyn.  Forest Gate is his first novel.