The Rye Public Library Military Book Group has chosen The Admirals by Walter Bomeman as the title for their June 6 discussion at 6:30 PM. The Military Book Group meets on the first Thursday of the month.
Only four men in American history have been promoted to the five-star rank of Admiral of the Fleet: William Leahy, Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and William Halsey. These four men were the best and the brightest the navy produced, and together they led the U.S. navy to victory in World War II, establishing the United States as the world’s greatest fleet.
In THE ADMIRALS, award-winning historian Walter R. Borneman tells their story in full detail for the first time. Drawing upon journals, ship logs, and other primary sources, he brings an incredible historical moment to life, showing us how the four admirals revolutionized naval warfare forever with submarines and aircraft carriers, and how these men-who were both friends and rivals-worked together to ensure that the Axis fleets lay destroyed on the ocean floor at the end of World War II.
The Adult Book Discussion Group selection for May 21st, 2013, isOne Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus. The group meets the third Tuesday of every month from 2 – 3 P.M. or from 7 – 8 P.M. Newcomers are always welcome. Call us or drop in to reserve your copy! Downloadable copies also available.
One Thousand White Women is the story of May Dodd and a colorful assembly of pioneer women who, under the auspices of the U.S. government, travel to the western prairies in 1875 to intermarry among the Cheyenne Indians. The covert and controversial “Brides for Indians” program, launched by the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, is intended to help assimilate the Indians into the white man’s world. Toward that end May and her friends embark upon the adventure of their lifetime. Jim Fergus has so vividly depicted the American West that it is as if these diaries are a capsule in time.
The Rye Public Library Military Book Group has chosen MacArthur by Courtney Whitney as the title for their May 2nd discussion at 6:30 PM. The Military Book Group meets on the first Thursday of the month.
A sympathetic account of his life by one of his senior staff officers.
The Adult Book Discussion Group selection for April 16, 2013, East of Eden by John Steinbeck. The group meets the third Tuesday of every month from 2 – 3 P.M. or from 7 – 8 P.M. Newcomers are always welcome. Call us or drop in to reserve your copy! Downloadable copies also available.
Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here Steinbeck created some of his most memorable characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity; the inexplicability of love; and the murderous consequences of love’s absence.
The Rye Public Library Military Book Group has chosen Americans at War by Stephen Ambrose as the title for their April 4th discussion at 6:30 PM. The Military Book Group meets on the first Thursday of the month.
Collected here for the first time are fifteen essays that span over 100 years of American history–and the remarkable thirty-year career of America’s foremost historian. Ambrose’s vivid and compelling essays take you to the heart of America’s wars, from Grant’s stunning Fourth of July victory at Vicksburg, to Nixon’s surprise Christmas bombing of Hanoi. Ambrose brings to life the ambition and charisma that led to Custer’s great success in the Civil War and fateful disaster at Little Big Horn.
The Adult Book Discussion Group selection for March 19, 2013, Townie: a Memoir by Andre Dubus. The group meets the third Tuesday of every month from 2 – 3 P.M. or from 7 – 8 P.M. Newcomers are always welcome. Call us or drop in to reserve your copy! Downloadable copies also available - click on the title link above.
After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their overworked mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and everyday violence. Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash between town and gown, between the hard drinking, drugging, and fighting of “townies” and the ambitions of students debating books and ideas, couldn’t have been more stark. In this unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Dubus shows us how he escaped the cycle of violence and found empathy in channeling the stories of others—bridging, in the process, the rift between his father and himself.
The Rye Public Library Military Book Group has chosen Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce by Stanley Weintraub as the title for their March 7th discussion at 6:30 PM. The Military Book Group meets on the first Thursday of the month.
In the early months of World War I, on Christmas Eve, men on both sides of the trenches laid down their arms and joined in a spontaneous celebration. Despite orders to continue shooting, the unofficial truce spread across the front lines. Even the participants found what they were doing incredible: Germans placed candlelit Christmas trees on trench parapets, warring soldiers sang carols, and men on both sides shared food parcels from home. They climbed from the trenches to meet in “No Man’s Land” where they buried the dead, exchanged gifts, ate and drank together, and even played soccer.
Throughout his narrative, Stanley Weintraub uses the stories of the men who were there, as well as their letters and diaries, to illuminate the fragile truce and bring to life this extraordinary moment in time.
The Adult Book Discussion Group selection for Feb 19, 2013, A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano. The group meets the third Tuesday of every month from 2 – 3 P.M. or from 7 – 8 P.M. Newcomers are always welcome. Call us or drop in to reserve your copy!
Years after poor health forces her to return to her family home, author Flannery O’Connor reluctantly attends the wedding of her cousin and inadvertently draws the attention of the groom, a wealthy Manhattan resident who fears life is passing him by.
The Rye Public Library Military Book Group has chosen Part 2 of “A World on Fire” by Amanda Foreman as the title for their February 7th discussion at 6:30 PM. The Military Book Group meets on the first Thursday of the month.
‘No two nations have ever existed on the face of the earth which could do each other so much good or so much harm’ – President Buchanan, State of the Nation Address, 1859. “A World on Fire” tells, with extraordinary sweep, one of the least known great stories of British and American history. As America descended into Civil War, British loyalties were torn between support for the North, which was against slavery, and defending the South, which portrayed itself as bravely fighting for its independence. Rallying to their respective causes, thousands of Britons went to America as soldiers – fighting for both Union and Confederacy – racing ships through the Northern blockades, and as observers, nurses, adventurers, guerillas and spies. At the heart of this international conflict lay a complicated and at times tortuous relationship between four individuals: Lord Lyons, the painfully shy British Ambassador in Washington; William Seward, the blustering US Secretary of State; Charles Francis Adams, the dry but fiercely patriotic U.S. ambassador in London; and, the restless and abrasive Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell. Despite their efforts, and sometimes as a result of them, America and Britain came within a whisker of declaring war on each other twice in four years.
The Rye Public Library Military Book Group has chosen “Lili Marlene: The Soldiers’ Song of World War II “ by Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller as the title for their January 3rd discussion at 6:30 PM. The Military Book Group meets on the first Thursday of the month.
“Lili Marlene,” the unlikely anthem of World War II, cut across front lines and ideological divides, uniting soldiers across the globe. This love song, telling the story of a young woman waiting for her lover to return from the battlefield, began as a poem written by a German solider during World War I. The soldier-poet’s words found their way to Berlin’s decadent cabaret scene in the 1930s, where they were set to music by one of Hitler’s favored composers. The song’s singer, however, soon found herself torn between her desire for fame and a personal hatred of the Nazi regime. In a gripping and suspenseful narrative, the three artists’ remarkable stories of arrests and close calls intertwine with the recollections of soldiers on all sides who fought their way through deserts and towns, seeking solace and finding hope in “Lili Marlene.”
The Rye Public Library Military Book Group has chosen The Admirals by Walter Bomeman as the title for their June 6 discussion at 6:30 PM. The Military Book Group meets on the first Thursday of the month.
