The next Book Club meeting will be held at 11 am, on Tuesday, October 16th in the Media Center of the Education Building.  Our book selection is “Jewboy of the South” by Don Koplen.  It is available on Amazon in paperback and kindle. We will have an optional lunch following the meeting. Contact Jane Renz with any questions: jane7751@aol.com

https://smile.amazon.com/Jewboy-South-Don-Koplen/dp/1546923667/

About the Book

A Southern story is never a straight line to the end point. Ask a southerner about an event or how to get to a place and you’ll hear about everyone and everything and everywhere along the way. It lurches forward, then backtracks, goes off center, infuriates and, eventually, rediscovers its luscious, rich, often humorous and just as often, perverse, path. It’s made of, like the South itself, a soup pot of characters—redneck, slave roots, sex, blood, love, hate, war, religion, intrigue and wink of the eye—all chopped, diced and thrown into its cauldron. Often as not, it boils into a mess. But somehow, sometimes, if you enjoy a mélange of tastes, it blends into a delicious, or at least colorful, potage. So settle in, relax and enjoy this saga about a small-town southern Jewish boy and the characters who helped him grow up, learn about sex versus love, black and white, true religion, soul music and jazz, all while attempting to keep the love of his life, the Klan minister’s daughter, and to free an innocent black man, his carpenter hero.

About the Author

Don Koplen was born in 1947 in Danville, Virginia, a textile mill and tobacco market city of 50,000 mainly Baptists and 100 Jewish families. He was a varsity wrestler and academic honor athlete in high school and worked in the family’s men’s clothing business, started in 1880, one of only a few white businesses there not boycotted during civil rights struggles. He majored in psychology at the University of South Carolina, where he started the first southern uncensored speak-out forum during the Vietnam War era. During summer break, now with hair halfway down his back, he sold household and body care products to country stores all over rural North Carolina. After a year-long DHEW psychodrama internship program at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., he graduated as a certified Psychodramatist. His interest broadened to body-mind therapies, studying for licensure as a massage therapist. In 1976, after quitting Chiropractic College, he hitchhiked from Atlanta to Colorado, starting a health spa and several magazines. At age 48, Don fell in love with the saxophone and the building trades. He volunteered with Habitat for Humanity to build houses in New Orleans’ fifth district after Katrina, eventually going on to fix and flip houses in Boulder. He also plays tenor sax in a local jazz band. Don is married and has two sons and two grandchildren.