The August meeting will be hybrid, with an in-person portion at Traction Steam, 120 S. Main, Suite 103. The new meeting space is great. If you cannot attend in person, request the ZOOM link from pflagmountpleasant@gmail.com. The August selection is "Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land". (https://www.amazon.com/Boys-Oil-Growing.../dp/1324090863/) complete with Iowa and Mount Pleasant connections. "Brorby has written not only a truly great memoir, but also a frighteningly relevant one that speaks to the many battles we still have left to fight." ?Jung Yun, New York Times Book Review From a young, gay environmentalist, a searing coming-of-age memoir set against the arid landscape of rural North Dakota, where homosexuality “seems akin to a ticking bomb.” “I am a child of the American West, a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power.” So begins Taylor Brorby’s Boys and Oil, a haunting, bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, “a place where there is no safety in a ravaged landscape of mining and fracking.” In visceral prose, Brorby recounts his upbringing in the coalfields; his adolescent infatuation with books; and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys. Now an environmentalist, Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth. From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance, and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.