For the fourth year in a row, UMass Boston’s WUMB Radio (91.9 FM) has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to manage a Boston-area Big Read project. Previous WUMB Big Read efforts threw the spotlight on To Kill A Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451 and Their Eyes Were Watching God.
This year the Columbia Point folk music station and its principal partner the Adams Street Branch of the Boston Public Library are busy promoting Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies.
“Reading at Risk,” a 2004 NEA Report, found that book reading has reached an all-time low among Americans of every age. So it’s understandable that the Adams Street Library along with 40 other local libraries, schools and other organizations have scheduled more than 100 activities and events in celebration of this eye-opening work.
Set during the mid-twentieth century in the Dominican Republic under the brutal dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, “In the Time of the Butterflies” is a fictionalized account of the lives and deaths of the real-life Mirabal sisters. The 1994 novel honors the lives of Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa Mirabal, who became icons of freedom and women’s rights when they were assassinated in the autumn of 1960 for their role in the underground movement against Trujillo’s regime.
The murders of the three women inspired many in the Dominican Republic to denounce the regime publicly and marked the beginning of the end for Trujillo’s reign. In 1999 the United Nations General Assembly designated the date of the Mirabal sisters’ deaths, November 25, as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
The activities planned to encourage wider appreciation of this novel include book clubs, movie screenings, and lectures. WUMB has distributed free Reader’s Guides, Teacher’s Guides, Audio and some copies of the book. The station has even set up a special Internet channel of music from the Dominican Republic in the 1950s, so readers while perusing the novel can listen to the very music the Mirabal sisters might have enjoyed.
Earlier this week Adams Street showed the 2001 Showtime feature film adaptation of “Butterflies” starring Salma Hayek and Edward James Olmos as part of its Monday Movie Matinee series. Next month its four part series of films on Revolution in South and Central America continues on Mondays from 2 to 3:30 p.m : April 2 “Missing”; April 9 “Salvador”; April 23 “Romero”; April 30 “House of Spirits.”
UMass Boston’s Osher Lifetime Learning Institute, with continuing classes for those over 50, is conducting a four-week discussion group on the book led by Phyllis Jennings and Meg Stone. The two remaining discussion sessions are on April 5 and April 12 from 1-3 pm..
For further information about any of this programming, visit wumb.org/thebigread/.
