Adult Book Club

July 7

Meeting to be held at the home of Beth Carroll, 724 Delphia Ave, Elk Grove at 6:30 for a light supper followed by discussion of the National Book Award winner “Arc of Justice” for non-fiction by Kevin Boyle. 1925 was boom year in America, perhaps nowhere more so than in Detroit. But it was also a time of great struggle for Blacks in America, a time of lynching, of the rise of the Klu Klux Klan, and even the burning of entire towns and neighborhoods. The books central character is Dr. Ossian Sweet a Howard educated sharecropper’s son who rises to defend his newly purchased home from a mob. This defense results in a fatality, and a trial in which Clarence Darrow defends Sweet.

August 4

Meeting to be held at the home of Jud and Wanda Strickland, 11981 Tuliptree Ln. Huntley IL at 6:30 for a light supper followed by discussion of “Ragtime” by E.L. Doctorow. First published in 1975, “Ragtime” captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. Almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow’s imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.