Book Chat: The Great American Read
Humans have always felt the need to share stories. They began telling tales as soon as they developed the capacity for speech. Early civilizations would gather at holy places, around their campfires, to listen and memorize the stories shared with them by the elders and religious leaders of their communities. Stories were told to communicate their knowledge and experience to other members of their communities – they told stories to warn of danger, to teach how to hunt, explain away terrifying natural events and share the wonder of nature. We have always felt the need to share stories. Sharing experiences and other worlds are as important to humans now as they were in prehistory. Stories bring us together and help us give meaning and make sense of our lives.
The Huntsville-Madison County Public Library welcomed the permanent installation of a community mosaic at the Downtown Huntsville Library on Tuesday, August 28.
A female dystopia mutated to its logical extreme Margaret Atwood wrote ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ in 1984, a very important year in the history of dystopian fiction. Perhaps the number of the year inspired her; most definitely, the leanings toward theocratic authoritarianism expressed by organizations at that time such as the Moral Majority. The dystopian framework was the best suited for a novel about events that had happened multiple times throughout human history, projected into a possible recurrence in the U.S. Atwood has repeatedly insisted that she invented none of the developments in the novel; everything that happens in the novel has occurred at some point in the past. So here we are in 2018 and ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ along with ‘1984’ and several other dystopian novels have seen a not very surprising increase in sales.