March 2013

A lot of our discussion revolved around World Book Night which is April 23.  We're giving away 20 copies of The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, and ideas were thrown about as to what groups and agencies would benefit most from our donation.  We'll also give copies away to individuals who will hopefully be pleasantly surprised.

Here's what else we discussed:

The Code Talker Stories - Laura Tohe
The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen - Syrie James
Heading Out to Wonderful - Robert Goolrick
Reliable Wife - Robert Goolrick
Are We Rome - Cullen Murphy
How Rome Fell - Adrian Goldsworthy
Listen to This - Alex Ross
LibriVox
The Sign of the Four - Arthur Conan Doyle
Winesburg Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
Chamber Music - James Joyce
Free Culture - Lawrence Lessig
Francona:  The Red Sox Years - Terry Francona
Constellation Games  - Leonard Richardson
Homeland - Corey Doctorow
Little Brother - Corey Doctorow
Invented Religions - Carole Cusack
Going Clear - Lawrence Wright
Dying to be Me - Anita Moorjani
The Unexpected Houseplant - Tovah Martin
Outsiders - S. E. Hinton
Tommy's Honor - Kevin Cook
A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan
Yes, Chef - Marcus Samuelsson
Making Artisan Pasta - Aliza Green
Celebrations of Curious Characters - Ricky Jay
Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women - Ricky Jay


From our sister group in OK:

Lawton Book Bunch

March 14, 2013

Books

Benioff, David: City of Thieves

Blackwell, Andrew: Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World’s Most       Polluted Places

Beauvoir, Simone de: The Ethics of Ambiguity

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand: Journey to the End of the Night

Coplin, Amanda: The Orchardist: A Novel

Dahl, Roald: George’s Marvelous Medicine

Ford, Ford Maddox: Parade’s End and The Good Soldier

Gide, Andre: The Counterfeiters

Horowitz, Alexandra: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know

Keane, Molly: Good Behavior

Kimmell, James: Trial of Fallen Angels

Knowles, John: A Separate Peace

McCarthy, Cormac: All the Pretty Horses

Myers, Walter Dean: Fallen Angels

O’Brien, Tim: The Things They Carried

Salisbury, Harrison: The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad

Sharenow, Robert: The Berlin Boxing Club

Discussion

Phenomenology, Richard Dawkins, and Genetic Determinism

PBS

 The Abolitionists

Call the Midwife (Begins March 31, 2013)

Downton Abbey

Mr. Selfridge (Begins March 31, 2013)

C-SPAN (Channel 77 or 78)

(In conjunction with The White House Historical Society)

The First Ladies (Monday evenings 8:00 Central Time)

From Mary Lou in MD:

Richard Hughes, High Wind in Jamaica (1929). Emily and her brothers and sisters are the children of an English couple living on a decaying plantation in Jamaica.  On her 10^th birthday Emily and the other children are swimming in their favorite lagoon when an earthquake occurs.  Thereafter, Emily perceives herself as the remarkable girls who lived through an earthquake.   The hurricane that destroys their house and forces the family to evacuate to England has a much lower level of importance in Emily’s consciousness. So do such subsequent events as trans-Atlantic voyages, piracy, kidnapping and murder.  The most intriguing aspect of this novel is the children’s amoral perspective on characters and events. Since to them all actions of adults are irrational and inexplicable, they are sublimely unscarred by the experiences that adults view as traumatic.   

Jerry Apps, Symbols:  Viewing a Rural Past (2000).  Jerry Apps has published many books of essays and fiction featuring Wisconsin history and culture.  This is a particularly delightful collection.  Each little chapter begins with a sentence or two describing the role of the item or symbol in daily life.  Next Apps tells a persona anecdote about the item.  The chapter ends with a history of the item in rural life.  Topics or “symbols” include lamps and lanterns, weathervanes, clotheslines, woodpiles, draft horses, windmills, dairy cows, depots and trains, mail order catalogs, radios, grist mills, country stores, and country churches.  Apps, with his dry and gentle humor, manages to be nostalgic with becoming sentimental.   

Jerry Apps,. The Travels of Increase Joseph (2003).  Increase Joseph Link always wanted to be a preacher, but he was expelled from Harvard and sent home to his western New York farm.  Several years later, however, he begins preaching his unique brand of agrarian religion, gathers followers who call themselves The Standalone Fellowship, and in 1852 leads them to form a settlement in the wilds of central Wisconsin.  Increase Joseph is a very peculiar character and Apps is a more journalistic than literary writer.   He is, however, an accomplished and gently humorous story teller with an unequaled ability to convey the realities of Midwestern rural life in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.