Adult Book Club
(All meetings begin with a light supper at 6:30, followed by the book discussion at 7:30. Please RSVP to the hosts for the evening.)
June 7, 2010:
Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Shaffer and Barrows
Meeting to be held at the Schumann/Weaver home (635 N. Hickory, Arlington Hts., 847-749-1097) at 6:30 pm. Moderator is Lee Koenig.
Publisher's Weekly Review
The letters comprising this small charming novel begin in 1946, when single, 30-something author Juliet Ashton (nom de plume Izzy Bickerstaff) writes to her publisher to say she is tired of covering the sunny side of war and its aftermath. When Guernsey farmer Dawsey Adams finds Juliet's name in a used book and invites articulate—and not-so-articulate—neighbors to write Juliet with their stories, the book's epistolary circle widens, putting Juliet back in the path of war stories. The occasionally contrived letters jump from incident to incident—including the formation of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society while Guernsey was under German occupation—and person to person in a manner that feels disjointed. But Juliet's quips are so clever, the Guernsey inhabitants so enchanting and the small acts of heroism so vivid and moving that one forgives the authors (Shaffer died earlier this year) for not being able to settle on a single person or plot. Juliet finds in the letters not just inspiration for her next work, but also for her life—as will readers.
July 6, 2010:
Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder
Meeting to be held at the Gonyo's home (906 South I-Oka, Mt. Prospect, 847-342-0056) at 6:30 pm. Moderator is Jud Strickland.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. With an anthropologist's eye and a novelist's pen, Pulitzer Prize–winning Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains) recounts the story of Deo, the Burundian former medical student turned American émigré at the center of this strikingly vivid story. Told in flashbacks from Deo's 2006 return visit to Burundi to mid-1990s New York and the Burundi of childhood memory and young adulthood—as the Rwandan genocide spilled across the border following the same inflamed ethnic divisions—then picking up in 2003, when author and subject first meet, Deo's experience is conveyed with a remarkable depth of vision and feeling. Kidder renders his subject with deep yet unfussy fidelity and the conflict with detail and nuance. While the book might recall Dave Eggers's novelized version of a real-life Sudanese refugee's experience in What Is the What, reading this book hardly covers old ground, but enables one to walk in the footsteps of its singular subject and see worlds new and old afresh. This profoundly gripping, hopeful and crucial testament is a work of the utmost skill, sympathy and moral clarity.
August 2, 2010:
Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
Meeting to be held at the Strickland's home (11981 Tuliptree, Huntley, 847-515-3455) at 6:30 pm. Moderator is Jud Strickland.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. Kingsolver's ambitious new novel, her first in nine years (after the The Poisonwood Bible), focuses on Harrison William Shepherd, the product of a divorced American father and a Mexican mother. After getting kicked out of his American military academy, Harrison spends his formative years in Mexico in the 1930s in the household of Diego Rivera; his wife, Frida Kahlo; and their houseguest, Leon Trotsky, who is hiding from Soviet assassins. After Trotsky is assassinated, Harrison returns to the U.S., settling down in Asheville, N.C., where he becomes an author of historical potboilers (e.g., Vassals of Majesty) and is later investigated as a possible subversive. Narrated in the form of letters, diary entries and newspaper clippings, the novel takes a while to get going, but once it does, it achieves a rare dramatic power that reaches its emotional peak when Harrison wittily and eloquently defends himself before the House Un-American Activities Committee (on the panel is a young Dick Nixon). Employed by the American imagination, is how one character describes Harrison, a term that could apply equally to Kingsolver as she masterfully resurrects a dark period in American history with the assured hand of a true literary artist.
September 13, 2010:
Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
Meeting to be held at the Weber's home (107 South Audrey Lane, Mt. Prospect, 847-427-1242) at 6:30 pm. Moderator is Lenore Bragaw.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Horan's ambitious first novel is a fictionalization of the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, best known as the woman who wrecked Frank Lloyd Wright's first marriage. Despite the title, this is not a romance, but a portrayal of an independent, educated woman at odds with the restrictions of the early 20th century. Frank and Mamah, both married and with children, met when Mamah's husband, Edwin, commissioned Frank to design a house. Their affair became the stuff of headlines when they left their families to live and travel together, going first to Germany, where Mamah found rewarding work doing scholarly translations of Swedish feminist Ellen Key's books. Frank and Mamah eventually settled in Wisconsin, where they were hounded by a scandal-hungry press, with tragic repercussions. Horan puts considerable effort into recreating Frank's vibrant, overwhelming personality, but her primary interest is in Mamah, who pursued her intellectual interests and love for Frank at great personal cost. As is often the case when a life story is novelized, historical fact inconveniently intrudes: Mamah's life is cut short in the most unexpected and violent of ways, leaving the narrative to crawl toward a startlingly quiet conclusion. Nevertheless, this spirited novel brings Mamah the attention she deserves as an intellectual and feminist.
October 4, 2010:
Uncommon: Finding Your Path to Significance by Tony Dungy
Meeting to be held at the Spillar's home (129 South Waverly, Mt. Prospect, 847-398-4838) at 6:30 pm. Moderator is Tom Weaver.
Amazon Product Review
Super Bowl–winning coach and #1 New York Times best selling author Tony Dungy has had an unusual opportunity to reflect on what it takes to achieve significance. He is looked to by many as the epitome of the success and significance that is highly valued in our culture. He also works every day with young men who are trying to achieve significance through football and all that goes with a professional athletic career—such as money, power, and celebrity. Coach Dungy has had all that, but he passionately believes that there is a different path to significance, a path characterized by attitudes, ambitions, and allegiances that are all too rare but uncommonly rewarding. Uncommon reveals lessons on achieving significance that the coach has learned from his remarkable parents, his athletic and coaching career, his mentors, and his journey with God. A particular focus of the book: what it means to be a man of significance in a culture that is offering young men few positive role models.
November 1, 2010:
Jane Austen Ruined My Life by Beth Patillo
Meeting to be held at the Sissors's home (807 South Elm, Mt. Prospect, 847-255-7542) at 6:30 pm. Moderator is Jennie Schumann.
BookPage Review
Jane Austen Ruined My Life by Beth Patillo is smart chick lit that is an absolute pleasure to read. English professor and Austen expert Emma Grant is heartbroken after her divorce when an intriguing communication lures her to England and a possible cache of Jane Austen's unpublished letters. Her desire to inspect them is complicated by her renewed acquaintance with fellow professor Adam Clark, and the series of Austen-related assignments that the guardian of the letters gives to Emma. Yet through these tasks Emma learns about herself and her attitudes toward love and marriage. While the growing romance between the heroine and Adam is sweet, sweeter is the new sense of self that Emma gains. Written in first person and flavored with interesting Austen information, this is a book readers will drink down like a lovely cup of fragrant tea.
December 6, 2010:
PLANNING MEETING
Meeting place and Moderator to be determined.
This is our annual planning meeting and book exchange. Bring your ideas of books we should read, along with why we should read them. The entire group will vote on the books we will read for the next year. Also, bring a book you have read (which the book club has not read) for the book exchange.
January 3, 2011:
My Wife's Affair by Nancy Woodruff (former Trinity UMC Member)
Meeting to be held at the Bragaw's home (1108 Carlyle Court, Arlington Heights, 847-392-7652) at 6:30 pm. Moderator is Lois Spillar.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. Woodruff (Someone Else's Child) leaves not a dry eye in the house in this gripping ode to theater and the love it can command—and crush. Former actress turned restless suburban New Jersey mom-of-three Georgie and her journalist husband, Peter, transplant to London for Peter's new job. There, Georgie finds her way back to the theater and lands a role in a small one-woman production of Shakespeare's Woman, playing famous 18th-century British stage actress Dora Jordan. It's a part that consumes Georgie from the start, notes Peter, who achingly chronicles his wife's affair with her part and, eventually, with playwright Piers. Georgie's tour de force as Dora comes from her total recognition of the character—Two hundred years later and it's exactly the same thing, Georgie tells Piers—and her life as Dora and as Piers's lover begin to take precedence over her husband and children. Peter's excruciating autopsy of his crumbling marriage is unsparing and relentlessly punishing, but the kicker at the novel's end makes the adultery feel like a cozy little tea party. It's brutal and lovely.
February 7, 2011:
Stones Into Schools by Greg Mortenson
Meeting to be held at Charlotte Sneed-McCall's home (1530 Dempster, Apt. 203, Mt. Prospect, 815-719-1347). Moderator is Judy Studtmann.
Washington Post Review
Greg Mortenson's first book, "Three Cups of Tea," was a gravity-defying wide-screen wilderness adventure. It began with the author's failed attempt to climb the world's second-highest mountain. It included a daring rescue, bonding with an alien tribe in a tiny cliffside village and his establishment of several dozen schools in Taliban territory despite being kidnapped and threatened with death. That book, which came out in 2006, was a publishing-industry cliffhanger, too. Mortenson hated the subtitle Penguin insisted on: "One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism One School at a Time." It sold nicely in hardcover, enough to merit a paperback edition and to persuade the publisher to insert Mortenson's preferred subtitle: "One Man's Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time." Mortenson was a nobody, the son of an American missionary in Africa. He had been a medic in the U.S. Army and gotten degrees in nursing and chemistry from the University of South Dakota. He had not even written the book. His co-author, journalist David Oliver Relin, had constructed the story with Mortensen in the third person. But the hero was tall, good-looking, dynamite on the lecture circuit and outrageously persistent. The paperback swept college campuses, picked up worldwide interest and surpassed sales of 3.4 million copies. There is no way its sequel, "Stones Into Schools," can repeat that marketing miracle. It is, for one thing, not as well written as "Three Cups of Tea." Relin has moved on to other projects. Mortenson is listed as the sole author, giving credit to two writers, Mike Bryan and Kevin Fedarko, in the acknowledgements. If the first book was inspirational, the second sometimes reads like an infomercial. Mortenson recounts in detail all the good that has been done because of the notoriety and generosity inspired by the first book, and how much more money he needs to keep his remote schools going. Instead of Pamir Range terrors, we have scary bouts of exhaustion after too many speeches and dinners in Pennsylvania. Still, few new books are as well-timed as "Stones Into Schools." Mortenson is the author of the most popular recent account of a part of the world at the center of American foreign policy. His views will influence how voters react to President Obama's efforts in Afghanistan. However distasteful he finds the word "terrorism," Mortenson makes no secret of his disgust with the Taliban. The heroes of this book are 14 riders, loaded with AK-47s, their horses "short legged and shaggy and iridescent with sweat," who came across the Irshad Pass to Pakistan in 1999 and begged Mortensen to build a school in their remote part of Afghanistan. The school was built, and at the end of that struggle the author saw their triumph as a path to peace for all. "They had raised a beacon of hope that called out not only to the Kirghiz themselves, but also to every village and town in Afghanistan where children yearn for education, and where fathers and mothers dream of building a school whose doors will open not only to their sons but also to their daughters," Mortenson writes, "including -- and perhaps especially -- those places that are surrounded by a ring of men with Kalashnikovs who help to sustain the grotesque lie that flinging battery acid into the face of a girl who longs to study arithmetic is somehow in keeping with the teachings of the Koran." After some initial reluctance, he embraces the U.S. military as part of the effort to bring education to children so unimaginably far from civilization. Soldiers provide personal donations and transportation of materials for some of his projects. But Mortenson puts most of his faith in the Afghans themselves, particularly those who persuaded him to build more schools. He says they can crush the Taliban and overcome the country's old cultural biases against educating girls. Mortenson may be unrealistic, but the past decade of his life has been one improbability after another. It is unfair to expect him to lose hope now. He wants the United States to stay and help his friends save their country. He's on a roll, and he doesn't see why he can't carry everyone with him.
March 7, 2011:
Fordlandia by Greg Grandin
Meeting to be held at Sue Argoe's home (1224 West Green Acres, Mt. Prospect, 847-593-2575). Moderator is Austin Weber
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. Gandin, an NYU professor of Latin American history, offers the thoroughly remarkable story of Henry Ford's attempt, from the 1920s through 1945, to transform part of Brazil's Amazon River basin into a rubber plantation and eponymous American-style company town: Fordlandia. Gandin has found a fascinating vehicle to illuminate the many contradictory parts of Henry Ford: the pacifist, the internationalist, the virulent anti-Semite, the $5-a-day friend of the workingman, the anti-union crusader, the man who ushered America into the industrial age yet rejected the social changes that followed urbanization. Both infuriating and fascinating, Ford is only a piece of the Fordlandia story. The follies of colonialism and the testing of the belief that the Amazon—where 7,882 organisms could be found on any given five square miles—could be made to produce rubber with the reliability of an auto assembly line makes a surprisingly dramatic tale. Although readers know that Fordlandia will return to the jungle, the unfolding of this unprecedented experiment is compelling. Grandin concludes that Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism—and by extension Americanism. Readers may find it a cautionary tale for the 21st century. 54 b&w photos.