Books - December 20 Book Talk

Lucille - The Bastard King by Jean Plaidy

Meredith - Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear
1. Maisie Dobbs (2003)
2. Birds of a Feather (2004)
3. Pardonable Lies (2005)
4. Messenger of Truth (2006)
5. An Incomplete Revenge (2008)
6. Among the Mad (2009)
7. The Mapping of Love and Death (2010)
8. A Lesson in Secrets (2011)
9. Elegy for Eddie (2012)
10. Leaving Everything Most Loved (2013)
11. A Dangerous Place (2015)
12. Journey to Munich (2016)
13. In This Grave Hour (2017)
14. To Die but Once (2018)
15. The American Agent (2019)
What Would Maisie Do? (2019)

Sharon  - Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng & Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

Tracey - Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Katherine - Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

Fred - Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation by Ken Starr

Lorretta - American War by Omar El Akkad

Jan - Dear Committee Members by Julie Shumacher & The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Shumacher

Kay - The Meadow by James Galvin & The Vance Stance by Vance Bonner

Kay - Boy: Tales of a Childhood by Roald Dahl

Lucinda - In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu

Valerie - An American Marriage by Tayari Jones & Another Country by James Baldwin

Kenn - The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk W. Johnson & The Patch by John McPhee

December 20 - Book Talk

November 15 - Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

Killers of the Flower Moon
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. One Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, watched as her family was murdered. Her older sister was shot. Her mother was then slowly poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.

In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, “the Phantom Terror,” roamed – virtually anyone who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll surpassed more than twenty-four Osage, the newly created F.B.I. took up the case, in what became one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations. But the bureau was then notoriously corrupt and initially bungled the case. Eventually the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only Native American agents in the bureau. They infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest modern techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most sinister conspiracies in American history.

A true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history.

October 18 - The Tenderness of Wolves

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney

A brilliant and breathtaking debut that captivated readers and garnered critical acclaim in the United Kingdom, The Tenderness of Wolves was long-listed for the Orange Prize in fiction and won the Costa Award (formerly Whitbread) Book of the Year.

The year is 1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, a tiny isolated settlement in the Northern Territory, when a man is brutally murdered. Laurent Jammett had been a voyageur for the Hudson Bay Company before an accident lamed him four years earlier. The same accident afforded him the little parcel of land in Dove River, land that the locals called unlucky due to the untimely death of the previous owner.

A local woman, Mrs. Ross, stumbles upon the crime scene and sees the tracks leading from the dead man's cabin north toward the forest and the tundra beyond. It is Mrs. Ross's knock on the door of the largest house in Caulfield that launches the investigation. Within hours she will regret that knock with a mother's love -- for soon she makes another discovery: her seventeen-year-old son Francis has disappeared and is now considered a prime suspect.

In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the crime and to the township -- Andrew Knox, Dove River's elder statesman; Thomas Sturrock, a wily American itinerant trader; Donald Moody, the clumsy young Company representative; William Parker, a half-breed Native American and trapper who was briefly detained for Jammett's murder before becoming Mrs. Ross's guide. But the question remains: do these men want to solve the crime or exploit it?

One by one, the searchers set out from Dove River following the tracks across a desolate landscape -- home to only wild animals, madmen, and fugitives -- variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for seventeen years, and a forgotten Native American culture before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good.

In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation, and humor into an exhilarating thriller; a panoramic historical romance; a gripping murder mystery; and, ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, an epic for the ages.

August 16 - The Orphan Master's Son

The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master's Son follows a young man's journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world's most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.

Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother - a singer "stolen" to Pyongyang - and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.

Considering himself "a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world," Jun Do becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his Korean overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress "so pure, she didn't know what starving people looked like."

Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master's Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love. A towering literary achievement, The Orphan Master's Son ushers Adam Johnson into the small group of today's greatest writers.

Why 'getting lost in a book' is so good for you, according to science

Whether you’re the reader who rips through a new book each week or the one still slogging through that bestseller your friend recommended months ago, psychologists (and their research) say your time is well spent.

https://www.nbcnews.com/better/pop-culture/why-getting-lost-book-so-good-you-according-science-ncna893256

July 19 - One Summer: America, 1927

Bill Bryson - One Summer: America, 1927

“Rollicking, immensely readable. . . . [Bryson’s] subject isn't really a year. It’s human nature in all its odd and amazing array.” —Chicago Tribune

“A wonderful romp . . . . Fascinating. . . . Written in a style as effervescent as the time itself.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Addictively readable.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Entertaining. . . . Splendid. . . . Sure to delight.” —Newsday

The New Vanguard of Climate Fiction

Climate change is not fiction, but some of today’s most compelling writing about it is. 

https://lithub.com/the-new-vanguard-of-climate-fiction/

The Great American Read | PBS

100 Book List
http://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/books/#/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=pbsofficial&utm_campaign=americanread_2018

April 19 - Ghostwalk

Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott

Filled with evocative descriptions of Cambridge, past and present, of seventeenth-century glassmaking, alchemy, the Great Plague, and Newton’s scientific innovations, Ghostwalk centers around a real historical mystery that Rebecca Stott has uncovered involving Newton’s alchemy.

A Cambridge historian, Elizabeth Vogelsang, is found drowned, clutching a glass prism in her hand. The book she was writing about Isaac Newton’s involvement with alchemy—the culmination of her lifelong obsession with the seventeenth century—remains unfinished. When her son, Cameron, asks his former lover, Lydia Brooke, to ghostwrite the missing final chapters of his mother’s book, Lydia agrees and moves into Elizabeth’s house—a studio in an orchard where the light moves restlessly across the walls. Soon Lydia discovers that the shadow of violence that has fallen across present-day Cambridge, which escalates to a series of murders, may have its origins in the troubling evidence that Elizabeth’s research has unearthed. As Lydia becomes ensnared in a dangerous conspiracy that reawakens ghosts of the past, the seventeenth century slowly seeps into the twenty-first, with the city of Cambridge the bridge between them.

Filled with evocative descriptions of Cambridge, past and present, of seventeenth-century glassmaking, alchemy, the Great Plague, and Newton’s scientific innovations, Ghostwalk centers around a real historical mystery that Rebecca Stott has uncovered involving Newton’s alchemy. In it, time and relationships are entangled—the present with the seventeenth century, and figures from the past with the love-torn twenty-first century woman who is trying to discover their secrets. A stunningly original display of scholarship and imagination, and a gripping story of desire and obsession, Ghostwalk is a rare debut that will change the way most of us think about scientific innovation, the force of history, and time itself.

Book Discussion, March 15

My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile by Isabel Allende 

Isabel Allende's first memory of Chile is of a house she never knew. The "large old house" on the Calle Cueto, where her mother was born and which her grandfather evoked so frequently that Isabel felt as if she had lived there, became the protagonist of her first novel, The House of the Spirits. It appears again at the beginning of Allende's playful, seductively compelling memoir My Invented Country, and leads us into this gifted writer's world.

Here are the almost mythic figures of a Chilean family -- grandparents and great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends -- with whom readers of Allende's fiction will feel immediately at home. And here, too, is an unforgettable portrait of a charming, idiosyncratic Chilean people with a violent history and an indomitable spirit. Although she claims to have been an outsider in her native land -- "I never fit in anywhere, not into my family, my social class, or the religion fate bestowed on me" -- Isabel Allende carries with her even today the mark of the politics, myth, and magic of her homeland. In My Invented County, she explores the role of memory and nostalgia in shaping her life, her books, and that most intimate connection to her place of origin.

Two life-altering events inflect the peripatetic narration of this book: The military coup and violent death of her uncle, Salvador Allende Gossens, on September 11, 1973, sent her into exile and transformed her into a writer. The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, on her newly adopted homeland, the United States, brought forth from Allende an overdue acknowledgment that she had indeed left home. My Invented Country, whose structure mimics the workings of memory itself, ranges back and forth across that distance accrued between the author's past and present lives. It speaks compellingly to immigrants, and to all of us, who try to retain a coherent inner life in a world full of contradictions.

February 15 - The Last Days of Night

The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore

A thrilling novel based on actual events, about the nature of genius, the cost of ambition, and the battle to electrify America—from the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Imitation Game and bestselling author of The Sherlockian.

New York, 1888. Gas lamps still flicker in the city streets, but the miracle of electric light is in its infancy. The person who controls the means to turn night into day will make history—and a vast fortune.

A young untested lawyer named Paul Cravath, fresh out of Columbia Law School, takes a case that seems impossible to win. Paul’s client, George Westinghouse, has been sued by Thomas Edison over a billion-dollar question: Who invented the light bulb and holds the right to power the country?

The case affords Paul entry to the heady world of high society—the glittering parties in Gramercy Park mansions, and the more insidious dealings done behind closed doors. The task facing him is beyond daunting. Edison is a wily, dangerous opponent with vast resources at his disposal—private spies, newspapers in his pocket, and the backing of J. P. Morgan himself. Yet this unknown lawyer shares with his famous adversary a compulsion to win at all costs. How will he do it?

In obsessive pursuit of victory, Paul crosses paths with Nikola Tesla, an eccentric, brilliant inventor who may hold the key to defeating Edison, and with Agnes Huntington, a beautiful opera singer who proves to be a flawless performer on stage and off.

As Paul takes greater and greater risks, he’ll find that everyone in his path is playing their own game, and no one is quite who they seem. (From the publisher.)

Wallace Stegner A Writer's Life - Stephen Fisher Productions

"Wallace Stegner: A Writer's Life," narrated by Robert Redford, was produced during the last four years of this great writer's life. Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award winner, and long time historian and environmental activist, Stegner energetically spoke out for the advancement of literature in America, and for the wise use of natural resources. His influence was particularly felt during the Kennedy years, when he and Interior Secretary Stewart Udall traveled widely to formulate plans for the preservation of America's national parks and wilderness areas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGCC6hhrSKQ

Thursday, January 18 - Where the Bluebird Sings ...

Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs by Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner is generally recognized as one of our most important living American fiction writers, and in that fiction he has generally taken for his physical and moral landscape the geography of the American West. It is a part of the country that Stegner knows well, having been born and reared West of the Mississippi, and having lived most of his life there. In this collection of essays, Stegner looks at the changing nature of the West, at the alterations wrought upon landscape and character as reflected in its politics and economics and art.

The first section of WHERE THE BLUEBIRD SINGS deals with Stegner’s own life, tracing his path from his birth in Iowa, to his childhood in Canada and Montana, and on to his maturity in various parts of the country. More specifically, Stegner traces his personal development as a Westerner; the author probes his own nature and his own relationship with the Western landscape, seeking to understand its influence upon his private and artistic Self.

The second section of the book takes a broad and incisive look at the identity of the American West, at its stereotypes, its myths, and its transformations. Stegner notes that the only unity within the vastness of the region is aridity: Water, and the scarcity of water, identifies the West most precisely and dramatically. The West, says Stegner, is a region we have sought to shape in our own images, and so we have imposed our necessary myths upon it. What Stegner argues is that the direction in which the West is headed runs counter to nearly all of those cherished and inauthentic images.

The third and final portion of the book studies the literary art of the West, suggesting ways of reading that literature. Stegner emphasizes the need to understand the literature of the West as a product of a particular place and therefore infused with the spirit of that place. In his essays here on such writers as Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Norman Maclean, Stegner describes his own aesthetic vision and his impulses as a writer. He make special mention of the autobiographical element in his fiction, an element which he says especially allows for knowledge and truth-telling. It is that very knowledge and truth for which Stegner will continue to be known.