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 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 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 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 Adult Book Discussion Group selection for November 20th is A Ticket to the Circus, by Norris Church Mailer.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!
A great American love story, this warm, funny, revealing memoir introduces the world to Norman Mailer’s greatest inspiration, his wife of more than thirty years. Like Zelda Fitzgerald before her, Norris Church Mailer has led a life as large and as colorful as her husband’s—and every bit as engaging.
Growing up a strict Free Will Baptist in the South of the 1950s, Norris Church, christened Barbara Jean Davis, was crowned “Little Miss Little Rock” at the age of three and always knew that life had more to offer her than the comforts of small-town Arkansas. But she could never have guessed that in her early twenties she would date future president Bill Clinton (and predict his national victory even after he lost his first run for Congress), or that the following year she would meet Norman Mailer, who was passing through town giving a lecture at the local college. They fell in love in one night—and their marriage lasted thirty-three years.
Despite her enduring love for the man, Norris found life with the writer full of challenges—from carving out her own niche in the wake of five ex-wives and numerous former girlfriends, to easing her way into the hearts of her seven stepchildren, to negotiating the ferocious world of Mailer’s fame, friends, and literary life. The couple’s New York parties were legendary, and their social circle included such luminaries as Muhammad Ali, Jacqueline Kennedy, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and Imelda Marcos.
Marina Singh, who’s given up her medical practice for the relative quiet of pharmaceutical research, finds her world upturned when she’s suddenly sent to the Amazon. A field team there, working on a new drug, has been unresponsive for two years, and Marina’s colleague Anders, who has gone to investigate, is reported dead.
The Adult Book Discussion Group selection for May 21st, 2013, is One 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.
