[I]t’s only January, but Amy Cunningham says one book is the title of the year, sparking Vermonters in town upon town to talk up its specific scenes and larger lessons.
Cunningham isn’t speaking of the current White House tell-all “Fire and Fury.” Instead, the director of community programs at the Vermont Humanities Council is referring to her organization’s Vermont Reads 2018 selection “Bread and Roses, Too.”
Pick up one of the nearly 4,000 copies the council is distributing free to schools, libraries and community centers, and you might question the relevance of a novel written a dozen years ago about the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers’ strike of 1912. But start reading and you’ll find its story of immigrants and the working class to be surprisingly current.
“Choosing a perfect Vermont Reads book is like threading a very small needle, but this one checks off all the boxes,” Cunningham says. “It’s beautifully written, accessible to a lot of different readers, and it explores big historic topics, including the idea of the American dream.”
The book is the brainchild of Vermont author Katherine Paterson, whose Muslim refugee novel “The Day of the Pelican” was a past Vermont Reads selection and whose latest pick showcases her former hometown of Barre.
“I must say I did not expect this,” the Montpelier resident says, “but I’m thrilled for people to be reading it again.”
Paterson dreamed up “Bread and Roses, Too” when she spotted an old photograph taken outside Barre’s Socialist Labor Party Hall bearing the caption, “Children of Lawrence, Mass., Bread and Roses Strike Come to Barre.”
“I looked at the picture and thought, ‘There’s got to be a story,’” says the two-time winner of both the Newbery Medal and National Book Award.
The result, Paterson notes on the dust jacket, “is the story of the powerless against the mighty, the story of those who do the work while struggling to survive hunger, cold, accident and disease, and of the self-satisfied owners who bask in luxury and despise the very persons who make their lives of ease possible. In short, it is a story of our own times.”
The Vermont Reads program began 15 years ago as a way to figuratively and literally put the state on the same page by having participants hold community conversations about a shared title.
“A really good book,” Cunningham says, “is like a campfire for bringing people together.”
The Vermont Historical Society agrees. Its Martin Luther King Jr. Day program, “Still They Persisted: Immigrant & Community Solidarity in the 1912 Bread & Roses Strike,” will feature University of Massachusetts professor Robert Forrant talking about the events that inspired the book.
“The program always focuses on issues and topics that would have been important to Dr. King,” says Amanda Gustin, the society’s public program manager, “and labor history and workers’ rights are certainly on that list.”
The event, set for Monday at 2 p.m. at the Vermont History Center in Barre, will take place during the opening of the new exhibit “The Art of Granite,” which, in turn, will offer free copies of “Bread and Roses, Too” to the first 50 visitors.
“We very firmly believe that in studying history,” Gustin says, “you connect to a bigger story that remains relevant today.”
