January Beginnings

The book club group still in town will meet on Thursday evening, January 7th, to do two things:  discuss Joseph Conrad’s short story (or short novel) Heart of Darkness (1899) and decide the books we’ll discuss in 2016.

The meeting will be held at Mary Ellen Williams’ home at 7 PM.

Heart of Darkness (1899) is a short novel by Polish novelist Joseph Conrad, written as a frame narrative, about Charles Marlow’s life as an ivory transporter down the Congo River in Central Africa. The river is “a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land”. In the course of his travel in central Africa, Marlow becomes obsessed with Mr.  Kurtz.

Heart of Darkness: A Review (The Guardian)  January 2011

“It is tempting to see Heart of Darkness as a masterfully constructed parable on human nature (witness Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation, in which the action was transposed to south-east Asia) but as historian Adam Hochschild has pointed out in King Leopold’s Ghost, about the king’s rape of the Congo, Conrad himself was quite clear that it was based on specific events he had witnessed, saying it was ‘experience… pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case.'”

NYTimes Summer ’14 Booklist

A Critic’s Survey of Summer Books

“The shredder ate your A.T.M. card. You hear sirens because you butt-dialed 911. Your kid blew up canned cherries in the all-white kitchen because she’s an aspiring filmmaker, and Steven Spielberg once did it — his mother got to like the bloodstained look. You finally bagged the neighborhood pest in a Havahart trap, and it’s the cutest, fluffiest thing, but you never want to hear the deranged hiss of an angry raccoon again.

Yet throughout all this, you haven’t looked up from what you’re reading.

As for this summer’s brand-new reading, if there’s one overriding motif, it’s this: the crazier, the better.”

A granddaughter’s book–chasing the truth!

In taking your grandmother as the subject of your research, what were you surprised to learn? And what stories did the letters not tell?

My favorite discovery was a rare fib she told me in the nineteen-seventies. She hated my tight bellbottom jeans, and huffily said, “I never wore a pair of trousers in my life!” She wouldn’t even utter the word “pants.” When I saw her photo album from Elkhead, there she was, on skis, in a pair of wool “trousers.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/06/the-exchange-dorothy-wickenden-on-nothing-daunted-1.html#ixzz2NHoLbrl4

See photographs on Dorothy Wickenden’s website: http://www.nothingdaunted.com/slideshow.html

Devil in the White City

The World’s Fair of 1893 held in Chicago, the “windy” city of mid-America, was a stretch for Chicago, the country, and the men who masterminded it.  The incredible planning and building of this site led by architect and designer Daniel Burnham took place in the chaos of Chicago’s growth as the meat capital of the world, in more ways than one.  Burnham had a personality that convinced others to work with him to create wonders; another man with a similarly “attractive” personality named Holmes was attracting people to a very different end.  This story, crafted by Erik Larson, is a great read, constructed by him from actual records, diaries, recorded first-person narratives and newspaper archives.  The country’s first serial killer walked through the World’s Columbian Exposition without fear…and he walks through this book.

Cutting for Stone

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Even if you are quesy about medical procedures and medical terms, you will be caught up in the story of the characters in this novel–their towns, their cultures, their dedication to medicine, to freedom–and to truth.  Abraham Verghese, the author and the doctor, is a spokesman for the under-represented patients of the world–no matter where they reside.  Although he is in the US now, his past experiences and connections on two continents enable him to tell stories that are BIG, expansive, and humble.

Please read the review tab (pull-down under 2012 MEETINGS) if you want to read more about Verghese, Cutting for Stone, and humanity, before or after our next meeting in September.  Also check the LINKS page for a link to Verghese’s article “Treat the Patient, Not the CT Scan.”

Think of a Number…

Detective writer John Verdon has created a book of puzzles–number puzzles, poem puzzles, and relationship puzzles in his 2010 thriller, Think of a Number.  I have read a LOT of detective mysteries–this one had me at the edge of my chair.  I knew Detective Dave Gurney’s near-fatal mistake as he made it; I had a hunch about the role of his wife Madeleine in this whole thing.  The role of the police departments in all of the New England scenes of the story is key to the solution of the mystery.  The writing is intelligent; the story is riveting.  If you haven’t read this novel yet, pick it up NOW and get ready for a roller-coaster ride!

Use the pull-down menu for Next Meeting and Reviews to read more.

Zeitoun: Some Thoughts

Abdulrahman, or Zeitoun as he is known, is not everyman in this country.  This man risked his own life to save others in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. In the course of saving ten people, he himself became a victim of  this country’s post-9-11 zealous Homeland Security effort.  When he was interviewed five years after Hurricane Katrina,  he told the Guardian interviewer that he was buying a bigger canoe to be able to help more people, in case anything like Katrina ever happened again.  When asked if he thought it would, he responded, “It happened once, it can happen again.”  True about a flood.  True also about what happened to him.

This is a narrative non-fiction book.  Please check the review page to read several book reviews and then be sure to click on The Zietoun Foundation link for more information about the  Zeitoun story, their family, and efforts that this foundation is making to make sure something like this does not happen again.

This book is currently being made into a movie (due out in 2014).  You can also find interviews with Zeitoun on YouTube.

The Shadow of the Wind

Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s first full-length novel for adult readers, The Shadow of the Wind, was initially published in Spain as La Sombra del Viento in 2001 and sold so well that the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports provided financial support to enable Lucia Graves, daughter of Robert, to translate it into English.

The first chapter of his world-celebrated novel The Shadow of the Wind was published in the New York Times in 2004.  Read the first chapter here.  This book is  “…an ode to the art of reading but it is also a perfect example of the all-encompassing power of a well-told story”  (from Reading Group Guides).   Another website calls this novel  “…a book about a book. In fact, the title of THIS book is the title of the book IN the book.”

It’s a great read…especially for people who like books about books!

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Help is Kathryn Stockett’s first novel.

Library Journal review:
Set in Stockett’s native Jackson, MS, in the early 1960s, this first novel adopts the complicated theme of blacks and whites living in a segregated South. A century after the Emancipation Proclamation, black maids raised white children and ran households but were paid poorly, often had to use separate toilets from the family, and watched the children they cared for commit bigotry. In Stockett’s narrative, Miss Skeeter, a young white woman, is a naive, aspiring writer who wants to create a series of interviews with local black maids. Even if they’re published anonymously, the risk is great; still, Aibileen and Minny agree to participate. Tension pervades the novel as its event are told by these three memorable women. Is this an easy book to read? No, but it is surely worth reading. It may even stir things up as readers in Jackson and beyond question their own discrimination and intolerance in the past and present.