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A Book Launch/Signing with Jon Lurie, Author of Canoeing with José
September 11, 2017 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm CDT
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The East Side Freedom Library and Milkweed invite you to join us for
A Book Launch/Signing with Jon Lurie, Author of Canoeing with José
Monday, September 11, 7:00pm
Join us and author Jon Lurie for a reading from his memoir, Canoeing With José. Following the reading, Diane Wilson will lead Lurie in a conversation about memoir- and adventure-writing.
About the book: The first time journalist Jon Lurie meets José Perez, and the smart, angry, fifteen-year-old Lakota-Puerto Rican draws blood. Five years later, both men are floundering. Lurie is newly divorced and depressed. José is embedded in a haze of women and street feuds. And both lack a meaningful connection to their cultural roots and Minnesotan home.
Then Lurie hits upon a plan to save them. After years of admiring Eric Sevareid’s classic 1935 account Canoeing with the Cree, Lurie invites José to join him in retracing Sevareid’s route from Breckenridge, Minnesota, to the Hudson Bay. Faced with extreme weather, suspicious law enforcement officers, tricky border crossings, and José’s preference for Kanye West over the great outdoors, the trip becomes an odyssey of self-discovery. Acknowledging the erased native histories that Sevareid’s prejudicial account could not perceive, and written in gritty, honest prose, Canoeing with José is a remarkable journey.
Free and open to all.
East Side Freedom Library
1105 Greenbrier Street, Saint Paul, MN 55106