Book Discussion Groups
Two book discussion groups, one for fiction selections and another for non-fiction selections, meet once a month. Scheduled discussions are:
Fiction - 2010
Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg, January 27th - Recently widowed Helen Ames and her twenty-seven-year-old daughter Tessa discover that money has disappeared in several big withdrawals from the Ames' retirement savings. What Helen's husband did with all their money turns out to provocative, revelatory--and leads Helen and her daughter to embark on new adventures, and change.(Author speaks at the Library on February 11, 2010)
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, February 24th- The world of Olive Kitteridge, a retired school teacher in a small coastal town in Maine, is revealed in stories that explore her diverse roles in many lives, including a lounge singer. (Author speaks at the Library on March 11, 2010)
Laura Rider's Masterpiece by Jane Hamilton, March 24th - Laura Rider, a budding writer, develops an email correspondence with a female radio host after discovering that she and Laura's husband are writing to each other. Assuming her husband's personna, she crafts florid, strangely intimate messages that entice the radio host in an unexpected way and the project spins out of control with hilarious, poignant, and memorable results. (Author speaks at the Library on February 12, 2010)
Bleeding Kansas by Sara Paretsky, April 28th - Two families, linked by their midwestern pioneer pasts and dark family secrets, threaten to be torn apart when the son of one of the families is killed in Iraq.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows, May 26th - As London is emerging from the shadow of World War II, writer Juliet Ashton discovers her next subject in a book club on Guernsey -- a club born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi after its members are discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island.
Low Country by Anne Rivers Siddons, June 23rd - One woman's proper Old South upbringing and expectations collides with the New South's runaway prosperity.
Loving Frank by Nancy Horan, July 28th - Fact and fiction in a historical novel that chronicles the relationship between seminal architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, from their meeting, when they were each married to another, to the clandestine affair that shocked Chicago society.
Deaf Sentence by David Lodge, August 25th - A novel of coming to terms with late middle age in which Desmond Bates, a retired professor in his mid-sixties, struggles with the monotony of retirement while his wife works, his hearing loss which creates conflict at home and is a social embarrassment, the problems of his elderly father, and a young grad student who wants his support both scholastically and otherwise and threatens to destabilize his life completely.
Testimony by Anita Shreve, September 22nd - At a New England boarding school, a sex scandal is about to break. Even more shocking than the sexual acts themselves is the fact that they were caught on videotape. A Pandora's box of revelations, the tape triggers a chorus of voices - those of the men, women, teenagers, and parents involved in the scandal - that details the ways in which lives can be derailed or destroyed in one foolish moment.
Still Alice by Lisa Genova, October 27th - Feeling at the top of her game when she is suddenly diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's Disease, Harvard psuchologist Alice Howland struggles to find meaning and purpose in her life as her concept of self gradually slips away.
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, November 17th (date change due to Thanksgiving holiday)- Exploring the secrets and complexities lying at the heart of family life and relationships, a collection of eight stories includes the title work about a young mother in a new city whose father tends her garden while hiding a secret love affair.
- There is no fiction book discussion scheduled in December -
Non-Fiction - 2010
January 2010, Russia and The Arabs: Behind the Scenes in the Middle East from the Cold War to the Present by Yevgeny Primakov. Part memoir, part history, Russia and the Arabs reveals the past half-century in the Middle East from a viewpoint seldom seen by Westerners. Yevgeny Primakov, formerly the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Foreign Minister, and Prime Minister of Russia, exposes how key political events unfolded through the personal interactions and rivalries among notable leaders from Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin to Anwar Sadat and Saddam Hussein, whom he knew personally. He shows how the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars developed, exposes Russia’s previously unknown role in the 1991 Gulf War, and assesses Russia’s Middle East policies alongside those of other foreign players, including the United States. The author’s first-hand accounts of behind-the-scenes encounters and his insights into what really drove the region’s key events make Russia and the Arabs an essential read for everyone interested in world affairs.
February 2010, Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment by Wojciech Materski. The 14,500 Polish army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians taken prisoner by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939 were held in three special NKVD camps and executed at three different sites in spring 1940, of which the one in the Katyn Forest is the most famous. Another 7,300 prisoners held in NKVD jails in the Ukraine and Belarus were also shot at this time, and many others disappeared without trace. The murder of these Poles is among the most monstrous mass murders undertaken by any modern government. Three leading historians of the NKVD massacres of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn, Kharkov, and Tver—now subsumed under “Katyn”—present 122 documents selected from the published Russian and Polish volumes credited by Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski. The documents, with introductions and notes by Anna M. Cienciala, detail the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up, the admission of the truth, and the Katyn question in Soviet/Russian–Polish relations up to the present.
March 2010, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan by Seth Jones. Since 2001, RAND Corporation political scientist Jones (The Rise of European Security Cooperation) has been observing the reinvigorated insurgency in Afghanistan and weighing the potency of its threat to the country's future and American interests in the region. Jones finds the roots of the re-emergence in the expected areas: the deterioration of security after the ousting of the Taliban regime in 2002, the U.S.'s focus on Iraq as its foreign policy priority and Pakistan's role as a haven for insurgents. He revisits Afghan history, specifically the invasions by the British in the mid- and late-19th century and the Russians in the late 20th to rue how little the U.S. has learned from these two previous wars. He sheds light on why Pakistan—a consistent supporter of the Taliban—continues to be a key player in the region's future. Jones makes important arguments for the inclusion of local leaders, particularly in rural regions, but his diligent panorama of the situation fails to consider whether the war in Afghanistan is already lost.
April 2010, Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert Edsel. WWII was the most destructive war in history and caused the greatest dislocation of cultural artifacts. Hundreds of thousands of items remain missing. The main burden fell to a few hundred men and women, curators and archivists, artists and art historians from 13 nations. Their task was to save and preserve what they could of Europe's great art, and they were called the Monuments Men. Edsel has presented their achievements in documentaries and photographs. He and Witter (coauthor of the bestselling Dewey) are no less successful here. Focusing on the organization's role in northwest Europe, they describe the Monuments Men from their initial mission to limit combat damage to structures and artifacts to their changed focus of locating missing items. Most had been stolen by the Nazis. In southern Germany alone, over a thousand caches emerged, containing everything from church bells to insect collections. The story is both engaging and inspiring. In the midst of a total war, armies systematically sought to mitigate cultural loss.
May 2010, No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864 by Richard Slotkin. Three decades after publishing a novel on the Battle of the Crater, Wesleyan professor emeritus Slotkin offers a historical analysis of an event meant as a turning point in the Civil War but remembered instead as one of its greatest failures. Most accounts focus on the slaughter of hundreds of black Union troops; Slotkin takes a broader perspective. The Crater was intended to draw on the Union's strengths, like the mastery of industrial technology, and the physical energies liberated by black emancipation. A regiment of coal miners dug a 500-foot tunnel under a Confederate strong point and packed it with four tons of blasting powder. A division of African-Americans was to exploit the blast to open the way to the Confederate capital, Richmond. The Civil War might have ended by Christmas. Instead, Slotkin describes a fiasco. Jealousy, intransigence, incompetence, and even cowardice among Union generals resulted in a combination massacre and race riot, as white Union and Confederate troops turned on the blacks.
June 2010, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham. Newsweek editor and best-selling author Meacham (Franklin and Winston) offers a lively take on the seventh president's White House years. We get the Indian fighter and hero of New Orleans facing down South Carolina radicals' efforts to nullify federal laws they found unacceptable, speaking the words of democracy even if his banking and other policies strengthened local oligarchies, and doing nothing to protect southern Indians from their land-hungry white neighbors. For the first time, with Jackson, demagoguery became presidential, and his Democratic Party deepened its identification with Southern slavery. Relying on the huge mound of previous Jackson studies, Meacham can add little to this well-known story, save for the few tidbits he's unearthed in private collections rarely consulted before. What he does bring is a writer's flair and the ability to relate his story without the incrustations of ideology and position taking that often disfigure more scholarly studies of Jackson.
All meetings are held at 2 o'clock in the Library ground floor meeting room. Anyone may attend these free discussions. Participants are urged to read the book or listen to the recorded version before the meeting.
