Roseville History Book Club Discusses
Under Ground by Megan Marsnik
Roseville Library, 2180 Hamline Avenue North, Roseville, MN (Upstairs Board Room)
1 p.m.

A year ago, the History Book Club read and discussed Flames of Discontent by Gary Kaunonen, which is a non-fiction history of the 1916 strike of mostly immigrant mineworkers in Aurora, Minnesota. This month, we read a fictional account of this history from a woman’s perspective in Megan Marsnik’s Under Ground.

Join the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Ramsey County Library at Roseville and the East Side Freedom Library for the January installment of the History Book Club with a conversation of “Under Ground,” a novel written by Megan Marsnik.

Like many stories of revolution and uprising, Under Ground has passionately-spirited, colorful protagonists and deeply-hated antagonists. It chronicles shootouts at labor rallies, guns transported to and from secret bunkers, fights in brothels, police corruption, xenophobia, and false imprisonment. It features a cast of historical figures including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, and socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs. It is about courage and consequences. But unlike most novels written about the labor movement in the U.S., this novel is told from the perspective of a strong, immigrant woman, who reminds us that there are things worth dying for, but more importantly, there are things to live for.

We meet in the upstairs Board Room at the Roseville Library at 1 p.m.

The History Book Club meets the third Wednesday of each month. In February, we will be reading “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War” by Viet Thanh Nguyen (National Book Award-winning volume, discussion of the war in a Vietnamese-American context) on Wednesday the 19th.

Events this spring are:

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