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.