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…
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…
Ceremonial time is the moment when past, present, and future can be perceived simultaneously. Usually experienced only during ancient dances or rituals, this escape from time is the theme of this book, which traces the life on a single spot in New England from the last ice age through years of Indians, shamans, and bears,…
Outside Lies Magic is a book about the acute observation of ordinary things, about becoming aware in everyday places, about seeing in utterly new ways, about enriching your life unexpectedly.For more than 20 years, John R. Stilgoe has developed and practiced the art of exploring the everyday world around us, where so much lies hidden…
With meticulous research and page-turning suspense, Patriots brings to life the American Revolutionthe battles, the treacheries, and the dynamic personalities of the men who forged our freedom. Author A.J. “Jack” Langguth is Professor Emeritus of the the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California and an American author and journalist. In addition to…
“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…
Drawing on the diaries of a midwife and healer in eighteenth-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier. Author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University. She is the author of Good Wives: Image and Reality in the…
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,…
Faced with the sale of the century-old family summer house on Cape Cod where he had spent forty-two summers, George Howe Colt recounts returning for one last stay with his wife and children in this stunning memoir that was a National Book Award Finalist and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Author…
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…
