Family maid sues author of best-seller 'The Help'

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110217/ap_en_ot/us_books_the_help_lawsuit

JACKSON, Miss. – A black woman who once worked as a maid for a relative of novelist Kathryn Stockett is suing the author of the best-selling book "The Help," claiming she was the basis for a black servant character who she thought depicted her in a poor light.
The novel is based on relationships between white families and their African-American maids in the segregated South of the 1960s, and a driving character in the book is a woman named Aibileen.
Now, a real-life woman named Ablene Cooper, who said she worked for Stockett's brother, is claiming Stockett used her name and likeness without permission and with embarrassing results.
The lawsuit was filed Feb. 9 in Hinds County Circuit Court in Jackson, Miss., where Stockett grew up. It asks for $75,000 in damages, an amount chosen to keep the litigation from ending up in federal jurisdiction, where larger actions are often decided.
Cooper referred questions to her attorney when contacted Thursday. Her attorneys did not immediately respond to messages.
Penguin USA publisher Amy Einhorn said she doesn't think there's any basis to the lawsuit.
"This is a beautifully written work of fiction and we don't think there is any basis to the legal claims," Einhorn said Thursday in an e-mail.
The six-page lawsuit claims, among other things, that Stockett's refusal to publicly admit that she based the character on Cooper's likeness "is so outrageous in character, and so extreme as to go beyond all bounds of human decency, and is utterly intolerable in a civilized community."
It quotes passages from the book, including one in which Aibileen's character describes a cockroach: "He black. Blacker than me."
The lawsuit said Cooper found it upsetting and highly offensive to be portrayed as someone "who uses this kind of language and compares her skin color to a cockroach."
"The Help" tells the story of black maids Aibileen and Minny, who work with a white woman named Skeeter on a book about their experiences as domestic help. The black characters fear retribution for working with the white woman on such a book, but Aibileen decides to help in part because black maids are forced to use outside restrooms.
Cooper's lawsuit claims it was offensive to be portrayed as someone who must use a segregated toilet.
Stockett told The Associated Press in 2009 that growing up her family had a maid named Demetrie, who used a restroom on the outside of the family's house. Stockett said Demetrie died in the mid-1980s.
"The Help" debuted in 2009, and there are 2.5 million hardcover copies in print in the U.S., according to the publisher's website. Scenes for a movie based on the book were shot in Mississippi. The film has not yet been released.

Our Meeting

Our group was small but mighty. We talked about a lot of our favorite kid's books and we talked about a lot of of children's favorite subjects!

Christine will be in touch about our next meeting date for "Family Matters".

January 31 at 7PM Kid's Book Meeting

We will meet at 7pm at Michelle's home for our Kid's Book Discussion. Be sure to bring your favorite Children's Book to share with the group.

See me email for location specifics.

Kid's Book Night! Please respond to the poll on the right!

We are all busy people with difficult schedules that too often rely on on the availability of other people. It is difficult to get everyone together on the same evening. I have created a poll that should help determine which night would accommodate the most people for a Kid's Book Night Discussion.  If you can not make it do not worry, our regular book club selection will be coming up shortly!

Kid's Book Meeting-Jan 19th or the 25th

Hi Everyone

I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday season.  We had a great holiday and now I am ready to get started on a great new year!

We will be setting up a date for our official book club meeting on our book "Family Matters' . Until then, I would like to invite everyone to my home to reschedule the meeting on kid's books that we were going to have right before Christmas.

Thursday nights are out for me for the next six weeks. We are taking Matilda to doggie training those evenings! I would like to suggest either this Wednesday, January 19th or the following Tuesday, January 25th.

Bring your favorite (or favorites) Children's Book(s) and we can discuss them all. Perhaps Annette will bring some of the Usborne books to show us since they have so many fantastic selections.

So let me know who is into it and what day works best for everyone. I am looking forward to seeing everyone and since our lower level (I no longer call it a basement) is finished, we will have plenty of buffer between us and my kids!

I will post this to the blog as well.

Readers and Breeder Michelle

Banned and Challenged Classics

http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedclassics/index.cfm

1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses, by James Joyce
7. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
9. 1984, by George Orwell

11. Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck

15. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

23. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son, by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway

33. The Call of the Wild, by Jack London

36. Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin

38. All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren

40. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

45. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

48. Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin

53. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

55. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie

57. Sophie's Choice, by William Styron

64. Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence

66. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace, by John Knowles

73. Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence

80. The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer

84. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller

88. An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser

97. Rabbit, Run, by John Updike

'Tis January!

Welcome to 2011



To those of you who are like me and have not started or finished the book, "Family Matters", get busy because we will be meeting this month to discuss the book!

Look over the list of book ideas that we have or bring some new suggestions to our group.





"The worst thing about reading new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
— Joseph Joubert