Book Discussion Titles
January 2012
East to the Dawn: the Life of Amelia Earhart by Susan Butler
A comprehensive biography recounts Earhart's varied life as a social worker, fashion plate, wife, and pilot, and dispels the myths surrounding her disappearance in 1938.
February 2012
The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
In 1865, the preparations of the Dante Club--led by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes--to release the first translation of Dante's "The Divine Comedy" are threatened by a series of murders that re-create episodes from "Inferno.".
March 2012
Emily's Ghost: a Novel of the Bronte Sisters
Emily Bronte refuses to bow to the conventions of her day. She is distrustful of marriage, prefers freedom above all else, and walks alone at night on the moors above the isolated rural village of Haworth. But Emily's life, along with the rest of the Bront?e family, is turned upside down with the arrival of an idealistic clergyman named Willam Weightman. An improbable friendship between Weightman and Emily develops into something deeper, and when tragedy strikes, the relationship continues.
April 2012
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black mother of five in Baltimore when she died of cervical cancer in 1951. Without her knowledge, doctors treating her at Johns Hopkins took tissue samples from her cervix for research. They spawned the first viable, indeed miraculously productive, cell line known as HeLa. These cells have aided in medical discoveries from the polio vaccine to AIDS treatments. What Skloot so poignantly portrays is the devastating impact Henrietta's death and the eventual importance of her cells had on her husband and children.
May 2012
Breakfast With Buddha by Roland Merrullo
At the behest of his sister, Otto Ringling finds himself reluctantly accompanying her guru, an enigmatic Mongolian monk, on a trip through Middle America to their childhood home, introducing his passenger to some American "fun" along the way.
June 2012
The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Identifies the qualities of successful people, posing theories about the cultural, family, and idiosyncratic factors that shape high achievers, in a resource that covers such topics as the secrets of software billionaires and why the Beatles earned their fame.
July 2012
Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Forging a deep friendship with a Wampanoag chieftain's son on the Great Harbor settlement where her minister father is working to convert the tribe, Bethia follows his subsequent ivy league education and efforts to bridge cultures among the colonial elite.
August 2012
The Invisible Wall by Harry Bernstein
The narrow street where Harry Bernstein grew up, in a small English mill town, was identical to countless other streets in countless other working-class neighborhoods of the early 1900s, except for the "invisible wall" that ran down its center, dividing Jewish families on one side from Christian families on the other. On the eve of World War I, Harry's family struggles to make ends meet. His father earns little money at the Jewish tailoring shop and brings home even less, preferring to spend his wages drinking and gambling. Harry's mother, devoted to her children and fiercely resilient, survives on her dreams: new shoes that might secure Harry's admission to a fancy school; that her daughter might marry the local rabbi; that the entire family might one day go to America. Then Harry's older sister does the unthinkable: she falls in love with a Christian boy from across the street.
September 2012
In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson
Documents the efforts of the first American ambassador to Hitler's Germany, William E. Dodd, to acclimate to a residence in an increasingly violent city where he is forced to associate with the Nazis while his daughter pursues a relationship with Gestapochief Rudolf Diels.
October 2012
The Big Burn by Timothy Egan
Narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire of August, 1910, and Teddy Roosevelt's pioneering conservation efforts that helped turn public opinion permanently in favor of the forests, though it changed the mission of theforest service with consequences felt in the fires of today
November 2012
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Bartlett
In telling the true story of book thief John Charles Gilkey and the man who was driven to capture him, journalist Allison Hoover Bartlett explores the larger history of book passion, collection, and theft through the ages. .
December 2012
Same Kind of Different As Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore
The co-author relates how he was held under plantation-style slavery until he fled in the 1960s and suffered homelessness for an additional eighteen years before the wife of the other co-author, an art dealer accustomed to privilege, intervened.
