On March 22, 2024 we met at the Larkes. Renee suggested this book. I remember Grace and I trying to force an alternative – the fictionalized account about the midwife in Maine. We did not prevail. This saga portrays a worldly/saintly/mythic Amazonian woman, Marie, based on an historical abbess, as being in direct contact with…
On Saturday, September 23, 2023 the Larkes hosted our discussion of The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel, which was proposed by Dick Malmquist. Carolyn recalls that we questioned the motives of the author in developing a “friendship” with the hermit. Was the author gathering information for a book all along? We talked of…
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…
Critically acclaimed biography of Theodore Roosevelt, the first complete one-volume life of the Rough Rider to be published in more than thirty years. From his sickly childhood to charging up San Juan Hill to waving his fist under J.P. Morgan’s rubicund nose, Theodore Roosevelt offers the intimate history of a man who continues to cast…
“I had only a moment to get all sail down and myself upon the peak halliards, out of danger, when I saw the mighty crest towering masthead-high above me. The mountain of water submerged my vessel. She shook in every timber and reeled under the weight of the sea …” What would it be like…
The story of McIntosh County, a small, isolated, and lovely place on the flowery coast of Georgia–and a county where, in the 1970s, the white sheriff still wielded all the power, controlling everything and everybody. Author Melissa Greene has been a contributor to NPR, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, LIFE, Good Housekeeping,…
The classic travel narrative of a Don Quixote-of-the-seas the first man to circumnavigate the world single handedly. Author Joshua Slocum was the first man to sail single-handedly around the world. He was a Nova Scotian born, naturalised American seaman and adventurer, and a noted writer. In 1900 he wrote a book about his journey ‘Sailing…
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…
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic…
The first two stories of a masterwork once thought lost, written by a pre-WWII bestselling author who was deported to Auschwitz and died before her work could be completed. Author Irène Némirovsky (born February 11, 1903, Kiev, died August 17, 1942, Auschwitz, German Occupied Poland) was a Jewish novelist and biographer born in the Ukraine,…
