We met on June 1, 2024 at Dick’s. Most of us preferred Tinkers, Harding’s debut novel. Eden was far from Carolyn’s favorite. She found the author’s use of language to be almost a barrier to the story. He seemed to idealize and glorify the island residents who suffered from intellectual and/or physical limitations, which seemed…
We started the new year on Saturday January 27, 2024 at Renee’s parents’ home in Rockland discussing Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War by Roger Lowenstein, which was proposed by Michael. Salmon Chase, as Secretary of the Treasury, was the irascible hero of this story. As an…
The group selected Grace’s recommendation for Tom Lake by Ann Patchett and we met at Carolyn’s to discuss it on Friday, October 27, 2023. Members who had read some of Ann Patchett’s other books considered this a minor work. Some of us raised credibility issues with the number of coincidences in the storyline and/or with…
Discussed March 14, 2021 From the bestselling author of The Color of Water and Song Yet Sung comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade—and who must pass as a girl to survive. Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1857, when…
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters…
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this…
From the beet fields of North Dakota to the campgrounds of California to Amazon’s CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older adults. These invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in RVs and modified vans,…
Susan Orlean—the beloved New Yorker staff writer and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Library Book—gathers a lifetime of musings, meditations, and in-depth profiles about animals. “How we interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers, poets, and naturalists for ages,” writes Susan Orlean. Since the age of six, when Orlean wrote and illustrated…
First published in 1949, A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America’s relationship to the land. Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the monthly changes of the Wisconsin countryside; another part…
Paul Theroux spent a lifetime crossing the globe, exploring exotic and rich history and folklore of foreign places. For his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America — the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation’s worst schools, housing,…
