“The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration" by Isabel Wilkerson will be held at 3 p.m. each Thursday.

“Blood and Honor: The Life and Times of Fur Trader Pierre-Louis de Lorimier” by Robert Kuck II will be held at 6 p.m. each Thursday.

Participants may meet in-person at the Crisp Museum or will be provided a Zoom link. Pre-registration is required by Feb. 17 at semo.edu/museum.

“The two book groups involve main characters leaving their current conditions seeking better circumstances. Each story depicts the discomfort and adaptions one makes when facing those who just do not think, act, or look like you,” says Ellen Flentge, curator of education. “Managing past cultural differences is continually a current issue. When one society with its certain views partially or fully tolerates the outsiders, is when seeds of acceptance get planted. These books can provide contemplative talking points to guide and inspire you to make the most of the rest of your life.” 

The Crisp Museum is located in the Cultural Arts Center at Southeast Missouri State University’s River Campus, 518 S. Fountain St., Cape Girardeau, Missouri.  

Book Descriptions:
  
“The Warmth of Other Suns” is a New York Times Bestseller, and National Book Critics Circle Award Winner. Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago; George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career and became the personal physician to Ray Charles.  

This is a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land, through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed.  

“Blood and Honor” takes readers to the frontier of North America in the 1700s to witness events through the eyes of French fur trader Pierre-Louis de Lorimier moving southward when the frontier was wild.  

This is the first novel about Lorimier’s colorful life –from his birth near Montreal, Canada, in 1748, to his death in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in 1812. Travel with him as he and Native warriors raid Kentucky settlements. Share in the capture of Daniel Boone, and be present when his trading post is looted and burned under orders from George Rogers Clark. Sit at the Lorimier dinner table in Cape Girardeau with Meriwether Lewis and Lorimier’s nephew George Drouillard. Meet Lorimier’s Shawnee wife Charlotte de Bougainville, and learn about the famous father she never knew.