Humanities Book Group
A monthly reading and discussion group focusing on topics in history, culture, and the humanities. The group typically meets first Thursdays at 7pm and is led by guest scholars. Pick up a copy of each month's book from the front desk.
2026 Theme
Wild About Nature
15 January 2026, 7pm
The Power of Scenery
by Dennis Drabelle
Scholar: Susan Matt, PhD, WSU
Book Summary:
Wallace Stegner called national parks “the best idea we ever had.” But where did the idea originate? Before Yellowstone, with nothing to put up against Europe’s cultural pearls―its cathedrals, castles, and museums―Americans came to realize that their plenitude of natural wonders might compensate for the dearth of manmade attractions. That insight guided the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted as he organized his thoughts on how to manage the wilderness park centered on Yosemite Valley, at first a state-owned precursor to the national park model of Yellowstone. Haunting his thoughts were the cluttered and carnival-like banks of Niagara Falls, which served as an oft-cited example of what should not happen to a spectacular natural phenomenon.
5 February 2026, 7pm
My First Summer in the Sierra
by John Muir
Scholar: Rebecca Andersen, PhD, USU
Book Summary:
John Muir, a young Scottish immigrant, had not yet become a famed conservationist when he first trekked into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, not long after the Civil War. He was so captivated by what he saw that he decided to devote his life to the glorification and preservation of this magnificent wilderness. My First Summer in the Sierra, whose heart is the diary Muir kept while tending sheep in Yosemite country, enticed thousands of Americans to visit this magical place, and resounds with Muir’s regard for the “divine, enduring, unwasteable wealth” of the natural world. A classic of environmental literature, My First Summer in the Sierra continues to inspire readers to seek out such places for themselves and make them their own.
5 March 2026, 7pm
A Place Called Yellowstone
by Randall K. Wilson
Scholar: Tracey Smith, PhD, WSU
Book Summary:
It has been called Wonderland, America’s Serengeti, the crown jewel of the National Park System, and America’s best idea. But how did this faraway landscape evolve into one of the most recognizable places in the world? As the birthplace of the national park system, Yellowstone witnessed the first-ever attempt to protect wildlife, to restore endangered species, and to develop a new industry centered on nature tourism.
Yellowstone remains a national icon, one of the few entities capable of bridging ideological divides in the United States. Yet the park’s history is also filled with episodes of conflict and exclusion, setting precedents for Native American land dispossession, land rights disputes, and prolonged tensions between commercialism and environmental conservation. Yellowstone’s legacies are both celebratory and problematic. A Place Called Yellowstone tells the comprehensive story of Yellowstone National Park as the story of the nation itself.
2 April 2026, 7pm
The Naturalist
by Darrin Lunde
Scholar: Branden Little, PhD, WSU
Book Summary:
A captivating account of how Theodore Roosevelt’s lifelong passion for the natural world set the stage for America’s wildlife conservation movement and determined his legacy as a founding father of today’s museum naturalism.
7 May 2026, 7pm
River of Doubt
by Candice Millard
Scholar: Jay Hart, WSU
Book Summary:
The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.
After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.
4 June 2026, 7pm
Indian Country, God’s Country
by Philip Burnham
Scholar: Kathryn Mackay, PhD, WSU
Book Summary:
The mythology of "gifted land" is strong in the Park Service, but some of our greatest parks were "gifted" by people who had little if any choice in the matter. Places like the Grand Canyon's south rim and Glacier had to be bought, finagled, borrowed -- or taken by force -- when Indian occupants and owners resisted the call to contribute to the public welfare. The story of national parks and Indians is, depending on perspective, a costly triumph of the public interest, or a bitter betrayal of America's native people.
2 July 2026, 7pm
Our National Parks
by John Muir
Scholar: Kyler Webb, SLCC
Book Summary:
Take in John Muir’s detailed observations of the sights, scents, sounds, and textures of Yosemite, Yellowstone, and forest reservations of the West.
6 August 2026, 7pm
The Last Ridge
by Mckay Jenkins
Scholar: Austin Petersen, WSU
Book Summary:
When World War II broke out in Europe, the American army had no specialized division of mountain soldiers. But in the winter of 1939–40, after a tiny band of Finnish mountain troops brought the invading Soviet army to its knees, an amateur skier named Charles Minot “Minnie” Dole convinced the United States Army to let him recruit an extraordinary assortment of European expatriates, wealthy ski bums, mountaineers, and thrill-seekers and form them into a unique band of Alpine soldiers. These men endured nearly three years of grueling training in the Colorado Rockies and in the process set new standards for both soldiering and mountaineering. The newly forged 10th Mountain Division finally faced combat in the winter of 1945, in Italy’s Apennine Mountains, against the seemingly unbreakable German fortifications north of the Gothic Line. There, they planned and executed what is still regarded as the most daring series of nighttime mountain attacks in U.S. military history, taking Mount Belvedere and the sheer, treacherous face of Riva Ridge to smash the linchpin of the German army’s lines.
17 September 2026, 7pm
The Sound of Mountain Water
by Wallace Stegner
Scholar: Kathryn Mackay, PhD, WSU
Book Summary:
When World War II broke out in Europe, the American army had no specialized division of mountain soldiers. But in the winter of 1939–40, after a tiny band of Finnish mountain troops brought the invading Soviet army to its knees, an amateur skier named Charles Minot “Minnie” Dole convinced the United States Army to let him recruit an extraordinary assortment of European expatriates, wealthy ski bums, mountaineers, and thrill-seekers and form them into a unique band of Alpine soldiers. These men endured nearly three years of grueling training in the Colorado Rockies and in the process set new standards for both soldiering and mountaineering. The newly forged 10th Mountain Division finally faced combat in the winter of 1945, in Italy’s Apennine Mountains, against the seemingly unbreakable German fortifications north of the Gothic Line. There, they planned and executed what is still regarded as the most daring series of nighttime mountain attacks in U.S. military history, taking Mount Belvedere and the sheer, treacherous face of Riva Ridge to smash the linchpin of the German army’s lines.
1 october 2026, 7pm
The Wild Trees
by Richard Preston
Scholar: Kerri Clement, PhD, WSU
Book Summary:
Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained–the coast redwood trees,Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air.
5 November 2026, 7pm
Lassoing the Sun
by Mark Woods
Scholar: Lawrence Culver, PhD, USU
Book Summary:
For many childhood summers, Mark Woods piled into a station wagon with his parents and two sisters and headed to America's national parks. Mark’s most vivid childhood memories are set against a backdrop of mountains, woods, and fireflies in places like Redwood, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon national parks.
On the eve of turning fifty and a little burned-out, Mark decided to reconnect with the great outdoors. He'd spend a year visiting the national parks. He planned to take his mother to a park she'd not yet visited and to re-create his childhood trips with his wife and their iPad-generation daughter.
3 December 2026, 7pm
Wild Rescues
by Kevin Grange
Scholar: Eric Swedin, PhD, WSU
Book Summary:
Wild Rescues is a fast-paced, firsthand glimpse into the exciting lives of paramedics who work with the National Park Service: a unique brand of park rangers who respond to medical and traumatic emergencies in some of the most isolated and rugged parts of America.
2025 Theme
Selected Readings on the Japanese American Experience
2 January 2025, 7pm
The Grave on the Wall
by Brandon Shimoda
Scholar: Branden Little, PhD, WSU
Book Summary:
Award-winning poet Brandon Shimoda has crafted a lyrical portrait of his paternal grandfather, Midori Shimoda, whose life--child migrant, talented photographer, suspected enemy alien and spy, desert wanderer, American citizen--mirrors the arc of Japanese America in the twentieth century. In a series of pilgrimages, Shimoda records the search to find his grandfather, and unfolds, in the process, a moving elegy on memory and forgetting.
6 February 2025, 7pm
The Buddha in the Attic
by Julie Otsuka
Scholar: Nathan Rives, PhD, WSU
Book Summary:
Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought from Japan to San Francisco as “picture brides” nearly a century ago.
In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the picture brides’ extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.
6 March 2025, 7pm
The Three-Year Swim Club
by Julie Checkoway
Scholar: Kyler Webb, SLCC
Book Summary:
In 1937, a schoolteacher on the island of Maui challenged a group of poverty-stricken sugar plantation kids to swim upstream against the current of their circumstance. The goal? To become Olympians.
They faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The children were Japanese-American and were malnourished and barefoot. They had no pool; they trained in the filthy irrigation ditches that snaked down from the mountains into the sugarcane fields. Their future was in those same fields, working alongside their parents in virtual slavery, known not by their names but by numbered tags that hung around their necks. Their teacher, Soichi Sakamoto, was an ordinary man whose swimming ability didn't extend much beyond treading water.
In spite of everything, including the virulent anti-Japanese sentiment of the late 1930s, in their first year the children outraced Olympic athletes twice their size; in their second year, they were national and international champs, shattering American and world records and making headlines from L.A. to Nazi Germany. In their third year, they'd be declared the greatest swimmers in the world. But they'd also face their greatest obstacle: the dawning of a world war and the cancellation of the Games. Still, on the battlefield, they'd become the 20th century's most celebrated heroes, and in 1948, they'd have one last chance for Olympic glory.
They were the Three-Year Swim Club. This is their story.
3 april 2025, 7pm
Enduring Conviction
by Lorraine K. Bannai
Scholar: Kerri Clement, PhD, WSU
Book Summary:
Fred Korematsu's decision to resist F.D.R.'s Executive Order 9066, which provided authority for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, was initially the case of a young man following his heart: he wanted to remain in California with his white fiancée. However, he quickly came to realize that it was more than just a personal choice; it was a matter of basic human rights.
After refusing to leave for incarceration when ordered, Korematsu was eventually arrested and convicted of a federal crime before being sent to the internment camp at Topaz, Utah.
He appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, which, in one of the most infamous cases in American legal history, upheld the wartime orders. Forty years later, in the early 1980s, a team of young attorneys resurrected Korematsu's case. This time, Korematsu was victorious, and his conviction was overturned, helping to pave the way for Japanese American redress.
1 may 2025, 7pm
Journey to Topaz
by Yoshiko Uchida
The Children of Topaz
by George W. Chilcoat
Scholar: Kathryn MacKay, PhD, WSU
Book Summaries:
Journey to Topaz:
This much-loved and widely read classic is the moving story of one girl's struggle to remain brave during the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. In 1941, eleven-year-old Yuki is looking forward to Christmas when disaster strikes: she and her family, along with everyone of Japanese descent on the West Coast, are labeled enemy aliens. The FBI arrests her father, and she, her mother, and her brother are imprisoned in a bleak and dusty camp surrounded by barbed wire in the Utah desert. There, she and her family experience both true friendship and heart-wrenching tragedy.
Journey to Topaz explores the consequences of prejudice and the capacities of the human spirit. First published in 1971, this novel was the first children's book about the wartime incarceration written by a Japanese American. This fiftieth anniversary edition features new cover art, a refreshed design, and a new foreword by Traci Chee.
The Children of Topaz:
The diary of a third-grade class of Japanese-American children being held with their families in an internment camp during World War II.
5 June 2025, 7pm
Midnight in Broad Daylight
by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto
Scholar: Tracey Smith, PhD, WSU
Book Summary:
After their father’s death, Harry, Frank, and Pierce Fukuhara—all born and raised in the Pacific Northwest—moved to Hiroshima, their mother’s ancestral home. Eager to go back to America, Harry returned in the late 1930s. Then came Pearl Harbor. Harry was sent to an internment camp until a call came for Japanese translators and he dutifully volunteered to serve his country. Back in Hiroshima, his brothers Frank and Pierce became soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army.
As the war raged on, Harry, one of the finest bilingual interpreters in the United States Army, island-hopped across the Pacific, moving ever closer to the enemy—and to his younger brothers. But before the Fukuharas would have to face each other in battle, the U.S. detonated the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, gravely injuring tens of thousands of civilians, including members of their family.
Alternating between the American and Japanese perspectives, Midnight in Broad Daylight captures the uncertainty and intensity of those charged with the fighting as well as the deteriorating home front of Hiroshima—as never told before in English—and provides a fresh look at the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Intimate and evocative, it is an indelible portrait of a resilient family, a scathing examination of racism and xenophobia, an homage to the tremendous Japanese American contribution to the American war effort, and an invaluable addition to the historical record of this extraordinary time.
3 July 2025, 7pm
The Eagles of Heart Mountain
by Bradford Pearson
Scholar: Kyler Webb, SLCC
Book Summary:
Spring, 1942. The United States government forced 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes and sent them to incarceration camps across the West. Nearly 14,000 of them landed on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming, at the base of Heart Mountain. They faced racism, cruelty, and frozen winters. Trying to recreate comforts from home, many established Buddhist temples and sumo wrestling pits. Kabuki performances drew hundreds of spectators. Then in fall, 1943, the camp's high school football team, the Eagles, started its first season and finished it undefeated, crushing the competition from nearby, predominantly white high schools. As the team's second season kicked off, the young men faced a choice to either join the Army or resist the draft. Parson profiles the team as teammates were divided, and some were jailed for their decisions.
7 August 2025, 7pm
No-No Boy
by John Okada
Scholar: Jay Hart, PhD, WSU
Book Summary:
"No-No Boy" tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a fictional version of the real-life "no-no boys". Yamada answered "no" twice in a compulsory government questionnaire as to whether he would serve in the armed forces and swear loyalty to the United States. Unwilling to pledge himself to the country that interned him and his family, Ichiro earns two years in prison and the hostility of his family and community when he returns home to Seattle.
2 October 2025, 7pm
Facing the Mountain
by Daniel James Brown
Scholar: Branden Little, PhD, WSU
Book Summary:
In the days and months after Pearl Harbor, the lives of Japanese Americans across the continent and Hawai'i were changed forever. In this unforgettable chronicle of wartime America and the battlefields of Europe, Daniel James Brown portrays the journey of Rudy Tokiwa, Fred Shiosaki, and Kats Miho, who volunteered for the 442nd Regimental combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy, where they were asked to do the near impossible. Brown also tells the story of their parents, immigrants who were forced to submit to life in concentration camps on U.S. soil. Woven throughout is the chronicle of Gordon Hirabayashi, one of a cadre of patriotic resisters who stood up against their government in defense of their own rights. Whether fighting on battle fields or in the courtrooms, these were Americans under unprecedented strain, doing what Americans do best--striving, resisting, pushing back, rising up, standing on principle, laying down their lives, and enduring.
6 November 2025, 7pm
Not Yo' Butterfly
by Nobuko Miyamoto
Scholar: Leah LaGrone, PhD, WSU
Book Summary:
Not Yo' Butterfly is the intimate and unflinching life story of Nobuko Miyamoto--artist, activist, and mother. Beginning with the harrowing early years of her life as a Japanese American child navigating a fearful west coast during World War II, Miyamoto leads readers into the landscapes that defined the experiences of twentieth-century America and also foregrounds the struggles of people of color who reclaimed their histories, identities, and power through activism and art. Miyamoto vividly describes her early life in the racialized atmosphere of Hollywood musicals and then her turn toward activism as an Asian American troubadour with the release of A Grain of Sand--considered to be the first Asian American folk album. Her story intersects with Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs, influential in both Asian and Black liberation movements. She tells how her experience of motherhood with an Afro-Asian son, as well as a marriage that intertwined Black and Japanese families and communities, placed her at the nexus of the 1992 Rodney King riots--and how she used art to create interracial solidarity and conciliation. Through it all, Miyamoto has embraced her identity as an Asian American woman to create an antiracist body of work and a blueprint for empathy and praxis through community art. Her sometimes barbed, oft-provocative, and always steadfast story is now told.
4 December 2025, 7pm
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
by Jamie Ford
Scholar: Susan Grayzel, PhD, USU
Book Summary:
Set in the ethnic neighborhoods of Seattle during World War II and Japanese American internment camps of the era, this debut novel tells the heartwarming story of widower Henry Lee, his father, and his first love Keiko Okabe.
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This program has received funding from Utah Humanities. Utah Humanities enriches our cultural, intellectual, and civic life by providing opportunities for all Utahns to explore life's most engaging questions and the wonders of the human experience.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent the views of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Utah Humanities, or the Brigham City Public Library.