Events - Event View

Special Information: 
-- October Book Club will meet in-person.  Please note that the meeting is not on the last Monday of October (which is Halloween), but rather on the second-to-last Monday! See details below.
 
-- A limited number of copies of the book have been obtained through interlibrary loan for interested participants.  See details below.  

Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details—language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life.

Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia. In her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her parent’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her—but also the things that kept her alive.

   - Winner of the 2022 Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature
   - Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction
   - A Time and NPR Best Book of the Year for 2021

Meeting Location. The October Book Club will gather in the meeting room of RiverPlace Apartments, located at 1 RiverPlace Dr., La Crosse, which is adjacent to International Friendship Gardens. Participants may enter through the front entrance. It is suggested that participants may wish to park in the Friendship Gardens parking lot in back of the apartments,

Registration. Since this meeting is indoors and therefore not subject to weather restrictions, there will be no back-up Zoom link.  Although registration for this in-person meeting will not be required, participants are encouraged to register if they wish to receive an event reminder as well as any potential updates to meeting information.

Copies of the Book. Anyone interested in reading one of the available ILL copies of the book can contact Maureen at: kinneymaureen6@gmail.com.

 

For more information contact:
Maureen Kinney
kinneymaureen6@gmail.com