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…
The Greater Journey is the enthralling, inspiring story of adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America; Charles Sumner, who enrolled at the Sorbonne because of a burning desire to…
This was the England of Shakespeare, Johnson, and Bacon; the era of the Gunpowder Plot and the worst outbreak of the plague. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than the country had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between these polarities. This was the world that created the King…
By the author of the highly-lauded biography of her parents, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Composing a Life uses the complex and varied lives of five women to explore the work in process, the life creatively lived. Author Mary Catherine Bateson, the author of Composing a Life, is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is Clarence…
When artist, illustrator, writer, and adventurer Rockwell Kent first published N by E in a limited edition in 1930, his account of a voyage on a 33-foot cutter from New York Harbor to the rugged shores of Greenland quickly became a collectors’ item. Author Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882 March 13, 1971) was an American…
Sailing Alone Around the Room, by Americas Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. These poems show Collins at his best. Author William A. (“Billy”) Collins is an American poet. He…
The only comprehensive gathering of Frost’s published poetry, this affordable volume offers the entire contents of his eleven books of verse, from A Boy’s Will (1913) to In the Clearing (1962). Frost scholar Lathem, who was also a close friend of the four-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, scrupulously annotated the 350-plus poems in this collection. Flinty, moody,…
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is likely the most influential novel ever written by an American. In a fitting tribute to the two hundredth anniversary of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s birth, Bancroft Prize-winning historian David S. Reynolds reveals her book’s impact not only on the abolitionist movement and the American Civil War but also on worldwide events, including…
Diana Athill is one of the great editors in British publishing. For more than five decades she edited the likes of V. S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys, for whom she was a confidante and caretaker. As a writer, Diana Athill has made her reputation for the frankness and precisely expressed wisdom of her memoirs. Now…
On the eve of his move to a new, more desirable residence, Professor Godfrey St. Peter finds himself in the shabby study of his former home. Surrounded by the comforting, familiar sights of his past, he surveys his life and the people he has loved — his wife Lillian, his daughters, and Tom Outland, his…
