MCC’s Diversity Matters Book Series began in 2008. It consists of 4-5 books featured for discussion from September to June each year. Audience members are encouraged to read the book and join to share in a discussion with an appointed leader. It is not required to read the book to attend the discussion. Limited copies of the books are available in the MCC library.
Participation for all programs is free and open to the public.
Infinite Country by: Patricia Engel
At the dawn of the new millennium, Colombia is a country devastated by half a century of violence. Elena and Mauro are teenagers when they meet, their blooming love an antidote to the mounting brutality of life in Bogotá. Once their first daughter is born, and facing grim economic prospects, they set their sights on the United States.
They travel to Houston and send wages back to Elena’s mother, all the while weighing whether to risk overstaying their tourist visas or to return to Bogotá. As their family expands, and they move again and again, their decision to ignore their exit dates plunges the young family into the precariousness of undocumented status, the threat of discovery menacing a life already strained. When Mauro is deported, Elena, now tasked with caring for their three small children, makes a difficult choice that will ease her burdens but splinter the family even further.
Date: Thursday, December 12, 2024
Time: 10:45 a.m.-11:45 a.m.
Location: Fort Omaha Campus, Building 10, Room 110
Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O'connell's Urgent mission to bring healing to homeless people by Tracy Kidder
Date: Monday, January 20, 2025
Time: 2:00 p.m.- 3:00 p.m.
Location: South Omaha Campus, Mahoney, Room 511
After Jim O’Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School and was nearing the end of his residency at Massachusetts General, the hospital’s chief of medicine made a decision. Would he defer a prestigious fellowship and spend a year helping to create an organization to bring health care to homeless citizens? That year turned into O’Connell’s life’s calling. Tracy Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell and his colleagues as they work with thousands of homeless patients, some of whom we meet in this illuminating book. We travel with O’Connell as he navigates the city streets at night, offering medical care, socks, soup, empathy, humor, and friendship to some of the city’s most endangered citizens. He emphasizes a style of medicine in which patients come first, joined with their providers in what he calls “a system of friends.”
Much as he did with Paul Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains , Kidder explores how Jim O’Connell and a dedicated group of people have improved countless lives by facing and addressing one of American society’s most difficult problems, instead of looking away.
Soil....The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille T. Dungy.
Date: Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Time: 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m.
Location: Fort Omaha, Campus, Building 10, Room 110
In resistance to the homogeneous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of the planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.
Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage readers to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.
The last secrets of Anne Frank: The Untold Story of Her Silent Protector By: Joop Van Wijk-Voskuijl and Jeroen De Bruyn
Date: Wednesday, March 12, 202
Time: 10:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m.
Location: Elkhorn Valley Campus, Room 114
Told by her own son, The Last Secrets of Anne Frank intertwines the story of Bep and her sister Nelly with Anne’s iconic narrative. Nelly’s name may have been scrubbed from Anne’s published diary, but Joop van Wijk-Voskuijl and Jeroen De Bruyn expose details about her collaboration with the Nazis, a deeply held family secret. After the war, Bep tried to bury her memories just as the Secret Annex was becoming world famous as a symbol of resistance to the Nazi horrors. She never got over losing Anne nor could Bep put to rest the horrifying suspicion that those in the Annex had been betrayed by her own flesh and blood.
“Part biography, part whodunit” (The Wall Street Journal), this is a story about those caught in between the Jewish victims and Nazi persecutors, and the moral ambiguities and hard choices faced by ordinary families like the Voskuijls, in which collaborators and resistors often lived under the same roof.
Beautifully written and unsettlingly suspenseful, The Last Secrets of Anne Frank will show the Secret Annex as we’ve never seen it before. And it provides a powerful understanding of how historical trauma is inherited from one generation to the next and how sometimes keeping a secret hurts far more than revealing a shameful truth.
The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony by Annabelle Tometich
Date: Tuesday, May , 2025
Time: 12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m.
Location: South Omaha Campus, Mahoney, Room 511
The Mango Tree is a poignant and deceptively entertaining memoir of growing up as a mixed-race Filipina “nobody” in suburban Florida as Annabelle traces the roots of her upbringing—all the while reckoning with her erratic father’s untimely death in a Fort Myers motel, her fiery mother’s bitter yearning for the country she left behind, and her own journey in the pursuit of belonging.
With clear-eyed compassion and piercing honesty, The Mango Tree is a family saga that navigates the tangled branches of Annabelle’s life, from her childhood days in an overflowing house flooded by balikbayan boxes, vegetation, and juicy mangoes, to her winding path from medical school hopeful to restaurant critic. It is a love letter to her fellow Filipino Americans, her lost younger self, and the beloved fruit tree at the heart of her family. But above all, it is an ode to Annabelle’s hot-blooded, whip-smart mother Josefina, a woman who made a life and a home of her own, and without whom Annabelle would not have herself.
Contact: interculturaled@mccneb.edu for more information.
Additional International/Intercultural Education virtual programming can be found on Youtube.
ACCOMMODATIONS: Audience members requiring accommodations due to a disability must contact International/Intercultural Education, interculturaled@mccneb.edu, 531-622-2253 at least two weeks prior to the program.
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