Kathy's Book Selections for February 2014

The House at the End of Hope Street: A Novel Hardcover

by Menna van Praag

A magical debut about an enchanted house that offers refuge to women in their time of need

Distraught that her academic career has stalled, Alba is walking through her hometown of Cambridge, England, when she finds herself in front of a house she’s never seen before, 11 Hope Street. A beautiful older woman named Peggy greets her and invites her to stay, on the house’s usual conditions: she has ninety-nine nights to turn her life around. With nothing left to lose, Alba takes a chance and moves in.

She soon discovers that this is no ordinary house. Past residents have included Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Parker, who, after receiving the assistance they needed, hung around to help newcomers—literally, in talking portraits on the wall. As she escapes into this new world, Alba begins a journey that will heal her wounds—and maybe even save her life.

Filled with a colorful and unforgettable cast of literary figures, The House at the End of Hope Street is a charming, whimsical novel of hope and feminine wisdom that is sure to appeal to fans of Jasper Fforde and especially Sarah Addison Allen.

  

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

At once intimate and epic, The Orchardist is historical fiction at its best, in the grand literary tradition of William Faulkner, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Ondaatje, Annie Proulx, and Toni Morrison.

In her stunningly original and haunting debut novel, Amanda Coplin evokes a powerful sense of place, mixing tenderness and violence as she spins an engrossing tale of a solitary orchardist who provides shelter to two runaway teenage girls in the untamed American West, and the dramatic consequences of his actions. 

The Folded Earth: A Novel   

Anuradha Roy (Author)

 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2011 MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE HINDU LITERARY PRIZE FOR BEST FICTION 2011

WITH HER DEBUT NOVEL, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, Anuradha Roy’s exquisite storytelling instantly won readers’ hearts around the world, and the novel was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and The Seattle Times.

Now, Roy has returned with another masterpiece that is already earning international prize attention, an evocative and deeply moving tale of a young woman making a new life for herself amid the foothills of the Himalaya. Desperate to leave a private tragedy behind, Maya abandons herself to the rhythms of the little village, where people coexist peacefully with nature. But all is not as it seems, and she soon learns that no refuge is remote enough to keep out the modern world. When power-hungry politicians threaten her beloved mountain community, Maya finds herself caught between the life she left behind and the new home she is determined to protect.

Elegiac, witty, and profound by turns, and with a tender love story at its core, The Folded Earth brims with the same genius and love of language that made An Atlas of Impossible Longing an international success and confirms Anuradha Roy as a major new literary talent.

The Island   

Victoria Hislop (Author)

The Petrakis family lives in the small Greek seaside village of Plaka. Just off the coast is the tiny island of Spinalonga, where the nation's leper colony once was located—a place that has haunted four generations of Petrakis women. There's Eleni, ripped from her husband and two young daughters and sent to Spinalonga in 1939, and her daughters Maria, finding joy in the everyday as she dutifully cares for her father, and Anna, a wild child hungry for passion and a life anywhere but Plaka. And finally there's Alexis, Eleni's great-granddaughter, visiting modern-day Greece to unlock her family's past.

A richly enchanting novel of lives and loves unfolding against the backdrop of the Mediterranean during World War II, The Island is an enthralling story of dreams and desires, of secrets desperately hidden, and of leprosy's touch on an unforgettable family.

Snow in August by Pete Hamill

In the year 1947, Michael Devlin, eleven years old and 100 percent American-Irish, is about to forge an extraordinary bond with a refugee of war named Rabbi Judah Hirsch. Standing united against a common enemy, they will summon from ancient sources a power in desperately short supply in modern Brooklyn-a force that's forgotten by most of the world but is known to believers as magic.

Book Selection for January 26, 2014

Claire made the following recommendations (listed below)....   At the October 26, 2013, meeting at Mary Jo's Inn,  "Wild" by Cheryl Strayed was chosen by the majority.    Discussion of possible holiday contributions to be made by the Book Group.

BOOK CLUB SELECTIONS FOR JANUARY 2014

1. ZEITOUN by Dave Eggers

It is a story of one man’s experience after Hurricane Katrina. Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a successful Syrian-born painting contractor, decides to stay in New Orleans and protect his property while his family flees.  After the levees break, he uses a small canoe to rescue people, before being arrested by an armed squad and swept powerlessly into a vortex of bureaucratic brutality. When a guard accuses him of being a member of Al Qaeda, he sees that race and culture may explain his predicament. Eggers, compiling his account from interviews, sensibly resists rhetorical grandstanding, letting injustices speak for themselves. His skill is most evident to how closely he involves the reader in Zeitourn’s thoughts.  Thrown into one of a series of wire cages, Zeitoun speculates, with a contractor’s practicality that construction of his prison must have begun within a day or so of the hurricane.

2. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific  Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe – and built her back up again.
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything.  In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her won marriage was soon destroyed.  Four year later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State – and to do it alone.  She had no experience as a long-distant hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.”  But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.
Strayed must face down rattlesnakes and back bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail.  It is told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor.  Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened and ultimately healed her.

3.TINKERS by Paul Harding

This is a haunting little book that weaves together the story of George Crosby, who is dying, with the story of his father, Howard Crosby.  As George lies hallucinating, he tries to untangle the threads of his youth and finally comes to grips with the enigma that is his father.  Howard is an epileptic at the time in history when being so gets one labeled “insane”.  He suffers under that burden and finds a way of dealing with it that will haunt his son forever
A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost 7 decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Main, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring.

4. The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

In 1919 the author illustrates with such sweep and agility, World War I was ending, sending home soldiers who would reshape the labor market; the Spanish Influenza plague still raged. Bolsheviks and anarchists were branded the terrorists of their time. The Volstead Act was about to inaugurate Prohibition, creating whole new dimensions of caste and crime; and baseball players talking to game-fixers were laying the groundwork for the Black Sox scandal at the World Series.  As for Boston, it was beset by an apocalyptic, groundbreaking police strike. The author also makes racial tensions a major part of this book’s enthralling drama. It tethers Luther to a marriage in Tulsa, only to rupture that bond and send him fleeing to the supposed safety of Boston. He works for the Coughlins.
This is a historical novel set in Boston, and Tulsa Oklahoma. There are two main characters: Aiden “Danny” Coughlin, an ethnic Irish Boston Police patrolman, whose father is a prominent detective and captain in the department who cast a long shadow over all three sons particularly Danny, the headstrong eldest who has followed his father onto the police force but will develop an idea of lawfulness very different from his old man’s; and Luther Laurence, a talented African-American amateur baseball player from Columbus Ohio. It is about the 1919 Boston police strike and Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the thriving Greenwood District was known as the “Black Wall Street”.
The book begins in September 1918 with Babe Ruth on a train en route from Chicago to Boston in the midst of the World Series. The train breaks down in Ohio, leaving the white ballplayers with time to kill. Babe happens onto a group of black players and decides to engage them in some harmless sporting fun. The segregated black and white teams get along fine until the blacks start winding. When Luther a particularly gifted black player walks away from an easy catch and throws the game to avoid an ugly showdown he creates the highly charged atmosphere in which this book will unfold. In this one episode the author signals the questions of fairness, conscience, fame, power and tactical maneuvering that shape his panoramic story.

5. Baker Towers by Jennifer Haigh

Bakerton Pennsylvania is a community of company houses and church festivals, of union-squabbles and firemen’s parades set in a fictional mining town.  Its neighborhoods include Little Italy, Swedertown, and Polish Hill.  For its tight-knit citizens – it begins with the death of the head of the Novak Polish-Italian family in 1944 and their five children and ends in the 1970s when the town has begun to fall into decline chronicling the impact of change in American Society on its small town and people in it – the 1940s will be a decade of excitement, tragedy, and stunning change.  Baker Towers is a family saga and a love story, a hymn to a time and place long gone, to America’s industrial past, and to the men and women we now call the Greatest Generation.  It is a feat of imagination from an extraordinary voice in American fiction, a writer of enormous power and skill.

Ann S's Selections for December 8, 2013 Meeting

The Sun Also Rises – E. Hemingway – 251 pages

The basis for the novel was Hemingway's 1925 trip to Spain. The setting was unique and memorable, showing the seedy café life in Paris, and the excitement of the Pamplona festival, with a middle section devoted to descriptions of a fishing trip in the Pyrenees. Equally unique was Hemingway's spare writing style, combined with his restrained use of description to convey characterizations and action.

On the surface the novel is a love story between the protagonist Jake Barnes—a man whose war wound has made him impotent—and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. Brett's affair with Robert Cohn causes Jake to be upset and break off his friendship with Cohn; her seduction of the 19-year-old matador Romero causes Jake to lose his good reputation among the Spaniards in Pamplona. The novel is a roman à clef; the characters are based on real people and the action is based on real events. In the novel, Hemingway presents his notion that the "Lost Generation", considered to have been decadent, dissolute and irretrievably damaged by World War I, was resilient and strong. Additionally, Hemingway investigates the themes of love, death, renewal in nature, and the nature of masculinity.

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On Beauty -   Zadie Smith – 464 pages

Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction and named one of the ten best books of the year.  Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars-on both sides of the Atlantic-serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.

American Pastoral - by Philip Roth – 432 Pages

As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.  His  adored daughter, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.

The Light Between Oceans 343 Pages - M.L. Stedman

After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, afte...more After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.

Tomwants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom’s judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them.

M. L. Stedman’s mesmerizing, beautifully written novel seduces us into accommodating Isabel’s decision to keep this “gift from God.”  we are swept into a story about extraordinarily compelling characters seeking to find their North Star in a world where there is no right answer, where justice for one person is another’s tragic loss. The Light Between Oceans is exquisite and unforgettable, a deeply moving novel.

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The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared - 396 Pages

by Jonas Jonasson, Rod Bradbury (Translator)

It all starts on the one-hundredth birthday of Allan Karlsson. Sitting quietly in his room in an old people’s home, he is waiting for the party he-never-wanted-anyway to begin. The Mayor is going to be there. The press is going to be there. But, as it turns out, Allan is not… Slowly but surely Allan climbs out of his bedroom window, into the flowerbed (in his slippers) and...more It all starts on the one-hundredth birthday of Allan Karlsson. Sitting quietly in his room in an old people’s home, he is waiting for the party he-never-wanted-anyway to begin. The Mayor is going to be there. The press is going to be there. But, as it turns out, Allan is not… Slowly but surely Allan climbs out of his bedroom window, into the flowerbed (in his slippers) and makes his getaway. And so begins his picaresque and unlikely journey involving criminals, several murders, a suitcase full of cash, and incompetent police. As his escapades unfold, we learn something of Allan’s earlier life in which – remarkably – he helped to make the atom bomb, became friends with American presidents, Russian tyrants, and Chinese leaders, and was a participant behind the scenes in many key events of the twentieth century. Already a huge bestseller across Europe, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is a fun and feel-good book for all ages.

Published July 12th 2012  Translated from Swedish

The Hotel New Hampshire – John Irving – 520 pages

 “The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.” So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times...more “The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.” So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they “dream on” in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Prayer for Owen Meany and Last Night in Twisted River.

August 25, 2013 - Meeting at Marilyn's

Beautiful August day ....We sat out on Marilyn's deck.  Stephanie led our discussion of "The Round House" by Louise Eldridge. Good discussion about Native American culture, rituals, prejudices and rights.  If Joe's mother had been Caucasian, would her rapist have been arrested and tried?  Was there a double standard for crimes against the tribal people?   Of those present, all but two liked this book. 

Voted on Carol's list of book recommendations for our October 27th meeting.  Majority voted for "When we were the Kennedys" by Monica Wood.  MJ offered her home for the October meeting.

September 29, meeting - There was no longer any interest in the suggested boat ride on Squam Lake.  Meeting will be held at Joy's house.  Book to be discussed is "Paris Wife" by Paula McLain.

As per our custom, we will skip our November 24th meeting and hold a November/December meeting on Sunday, December 8.  Opps.....that might not work.  That is the date of Marilyn's concert which many of us attend.  Suggestion:  What if we meet at 11am or noon and then go to the 3pm concert??

Carol's Book Suggestions for October, 2013

Swimming to Antarctica, by Lynne Cox

Just about every other person in the world seems like an unfocused dilettante compared to longdistance
swimming legend Lynne Cox. Soon At the age of 14, after several years of training hard
in pools and the open sea, she was swimming the 26 mile stretch from Catalina Island to the
coast of California. A year after that, she surpassed a lifelong goal by not only swimming the
English Channel but setting a new men's and women's record in the process. Rather than be
satisfied, Cox aimed still higher, conquering the Cook Strait in New Zealand, the Strait of
Magellan and, the Cape of Good Hope, none of which had been swum before. Being the first to
swim the Bering Sea from Alaska to what was then the Soviet Union is perhaps Cox's most
impressive achievement, requiring a phenomenal amount of physical strength and endurance to
withstand the chilly waters and diplomatic persistence to gain permission from Gorbachev during
the Cold War. Swimming to Antarctica is Cox's remarkably detailed account of her major swims
and all that went right and wrong with them. While there are plenty of highs, as one might expect
in a memoir by so impressive an athlete, all is not sunshine and roses for Cox. She overcomes
extreme physical hardship, predatory sharks, and a swim through a sewage-soaked Nile while
suffering from dysentery. There is plenty in Swimming to Antarctica to encourage even nonswimmers
to work hard to achieve the seemingly impossible, but Cox, a skilled and highly
readable writer, sticks to the swimming, leading the reader by example. For thrills and
inspiration, it's hard to find anyone better than Lynne Cox. --John Moe --


CATCH 22
By Joseph heller
Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in
American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary.
At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero
endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His efforts
are perfectly understandable because as he furiously scrambles, thousands of people he hasn't
even met are trying to kill him. His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number
of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to
excuse himself from the perilous missions that he is committed to flying, he is trapped by the
Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes
its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions,
but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of
making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.
Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to some one
dangerously sane—a masterpiece of our time.


When We Were the Kennedy’s
by Monica Wood
“Every few years, a memoir comes along that revitalizes the form…With generous, precise, and
unsentimental prose, Monica Wood brilliantly achieves this . . . When We Were the Kennedys is a deeply
moving gem!”—Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog and Townie
Mexico, Maine, 1963: The Wood family is much like its close, Catholic, immigrant neighbors, all
dependent on the fathers’ wages from the Oxford Paper Company. But when Dad suddenly dies on his
way to work, Mum and the four deeply connected Wood girls are set adrift. When We Were the
Kennedys is the story of how a family, a town, and then a nation mourns and finds the strength to move
on.
“On her own terms, wry and empathetic, Wood locates the melodies in the aftershock of sudden
loss.”—Boston Globe
“[A] marvel of storytelling, layered and rich. It is, by turns, a chronicle of the renowned paper mill that
was both pride and poison to several generations of a town; a tribute to the ethnic stew of immigrant
families that grew and prospered there; and an account of one family’s grief, love, and resilience.”—
Maine Sunday Telegram


Sometimes a Great Notion
by Ken Kesey  736 pages
This is the Kesey novel that nobody read after One Flew Over the Cuckoos nest stole all its thunder. Although it was filmed with an great cast (Henry Fonda, Paul Newman) it never gained the reputation that its inferior sibling achieved.
This is, quite simply, one of the great classics of the 20th century. Its pace and moody evocation of the American North West are stunning. The collision between the traditional and the modern, the past and the present make riveting, enthralling reading.
The Stamper family are loggers, rough, hard men and women who care for no ones opinion but their own. They are fighting the union, the neighbours, the town, their whole world. Their motto of "never give an inch" was the title of the film of the book. Into the strike-breaking start of the book comes the dope-smoking, college educated half brother, the prodigal son. His arrival triggers a tidal wave of events that spiral gradually out of control until everything that has been permanent before is now threatened.
If I seem vague in this review it is simply that I don't want to deprive you of the pleasure of discovering this story for yourself. This is one of the forgotten masterpieces. A book to be read, and then passed on to friends who are later bullied to give it back to be read again.


Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d'Art
by Christopher Moore
Absolutely nothing is sacred to Christopher Moore. The phenomenally popular New York Timesbestselling satirist, whom the Atlanta Journal-Constitution calls “Stephen King with a whoopee cushion and a double-espresso imagination,” has already lampooned Shakespeare, San Francisco vampires, marine biologists, Death... even Jesus Christ and Santa Claus. In his latest novel, the immortal Moore takes on the Great French Masters. A magnificent “Comedy d’Art” from the author of Lamb, Fool and Bite Me, Moore’s Sacre Bleu is part mystery, part history (sort
of), part love story, and wholly hilarious as it follows a young baker-painter who joins the dapper Henri Toulouse-Lautrec on a quest to unravel the mystery behind the supposed suicide of Vincent van Gogh.


Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
By Mark Twain
The novel is a satirical comedy that looks at 6th-Century England and its medieval culture through the
eyes of Hank Morgan, a 19th-century resident of Hartford, Connecticut, who, after a blow to the head,
awakens to find himself inexplicably transported back in time to early medieval England at the time of
the legendary King Arthur. The fictional Mr. Morgan, who had an image of that time that had been
colored over the years by romantic myths, takes on the task of analyzing the problems and sharing his
knowledge from 1300 years in the future to modernize, Americanize, and improve the lives of the
people.


Any Hemmingway novel” then sharing common themes
Farewell to Arms
Old man and the Sea,
The sun also rises
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Garden of Eden
Many others.

July 28, 2013 - Meeting at Celia's

We continued our tradition of "Dressing Up" when we have bookclub at Celia's house.  We wore dresses...and hats...all in good fun.  Everyone looked Great!!  Celia's home should be on a Garden Tour as her gardens and window boxes are lovely.

The book discussed was "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn.  Nobody "loved" this book.....not sure if anyone said that they even "liked" the book.  Some were glad that they read it...since it is a popular book.  The main characters Amy and Nick were analyzed.  Agreed that they were both psychos.  Did Amy cause Nick to be that way???  Would he have been different if not mixed up with her.  Agreed that it was a co-dependent relationship.  Did not see that anyone in the group could identify with the characters or the story.

Ann F. presented her recommendations for our September book.  Kathy pointed out that all but "Paris Wife" might be difficult to obtain.  Checking the NH Library System, there did not seem to be any or many books available.  There are many copies of "Paris Wife" by Paula McLain available.  Majority voted for this book. Our second choice was "Chasing China:  A Daughter's Quest for Truth" by Kay Bratt.

Our August meeting will be held at Marilyn's house.  Book is "Round House" by Louise Eldrich.

Request was made that our September meeting be held at Squam Lake and include a boatride out on he lake. 

Ashland Garden Tour - July 14, 2013

Several of us joined Ann F and MJ at their Garden Club's progressive luncheon.  Visited four different homes and gardens.  Pictures will show it all.

You are invited to view kdidier's photo album: Ashland Garden Tour - July 14, 2013

Ashland Garden Tour - July 14, 2013 Jul 14, 2013 by kdidier Thank you to MJ and Ann .and the Ashland Garden Club, for sharing this event with our Bookclub. View Album Play slideshow

Ann F's Book Suggestions for our September Book

Following are the book selections for our September meeting.  Ann F.

 Chasing China; A Daughter's Quest for Truth by Kay Bratt

Mia is a confused soul. After being adopted as a toddler, she's led a life of comfort surrounded by loving parents and a pack of protective brothers. Now she's in college with only a few years until obtaining a degree that will allow her to use her past to help others. Then why all of a sudden does she feel so unsettled? It all boils down to the reality that she was found wandering alone in a Chinese train station so long ago. Deciding she must face her past to embrace her future, Mia takes a journey to the mysterious land of her birth on a mission to find answers. As she follows the invisible red thread back through her motherland, she finds herself enamored by the history and culture of her heritage--strengthening her resolve to get to the truth, even as
Chinese officials struggle to keep it buried. With her unwavering spirit of determination, Mia will battle the forces stacked against her and face mystery, danger, a dash of romance, and finally a conclusion that will change her life.  

 

Irreplaceable by Stephen Lovely

 

When 30-year-old archaeologist Alex Voormann’s bright, ambitious wife, Isabel, is killed in a bicycle accident, he is faced with a momentous decision. She had filled out a donor card, and the hospital staff are requesting his permission to take her heart for a woman who would die without a transplant. Even a full year after he signed off on the procedure, Alex is still conflicted about the decision, so when Janet Corcoran, the mother of two whose life Isabel saved, contacts him, he becomes angry. Her gratefulness reminds him all over again of his grievous loss, and he can’t help but feel resentful that her good fortune came at his expense; meanwhile, his mother-in-law has a totally different reaction, believing that her daughter’s generous spirit lives on in Janet. Author Lovely patiently and tenderly details all of the emotions of his principal characters as they deal with grief, loss, and survivor’s guilt. A sensitive debut novel that assiduously avoids the sentimental while facing up to the difficulties of finding one’s way back to emotional and physical health.

 

Come Back to Me by Melissa Foster

 

Tess Johnson has it all: her handsome photographer husband Beau, a thriving business, and a newly discovered pregnancy. When Beau accepts an overseas photography assignment, Tess decides to wait to reveal her secret--only she's never given the chance. Beau's helicopter crashes in the desert.

Tess struggles with the news of Beau's death and tries to put her life back together. Alone and dealing with a pregnancy that only reminds her of what she has lost, Tess is adrift in a world of failed plans and fallen expectations. When a new client appears offering more than just a new project, Tess must confront the circumstances of her life head on.
Meanwhile, two Iraqi women who are fleeing honor killings find Beau barely alive in the middle of the desert, his body ravaged by the crash. Suha, a doctor, and Samira, a widow and mother of three young children, nurse him back to health in a makeshift tent. Beau bonds with the women and children, and together, with the help of an underground organization, they continue their dangerous escape. What happens next is a test of loyalties, strength, and love.

 

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

 

Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking, fast-living, and free-loving life of Jazz Age Paris. As Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history and pours himself into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises, Hadley strives to hold on to her sense of self as her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Eventually they find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.
 A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wife is all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.

June 23, 2013 - Meeting at Marlena's

We met at Marlena's lovely condo.  Smaller group than usual....just nine of us.  Discussed "The Art of Hearing Heartbeats".  Four of us "really" liked the book.  A few liked it....and two disliked the book. 

Voted to read Stephanie's suggestion of "Round House" by Louise Erdrich, and discuss at our August 25, meeting.  "The Dove Keeper" was a close second.

Mary Jo announced a Progressive Lunch  on Sunday, July 14, offered by the Ashland Garden Club.  Tickets cost $20.  Several of us made plans to go.

Our July 28, meeting will be held at Celia's.  For this "Garden Party" meeting, we decided to wear dresses and hats.  Mark your calendars accordingly.  Book to be discussed is "Gone Girl".  

Book Suggestions for our August Meeting

It is Patricia's turn....but, she is not certain if she will be in NH this summer.  Next on our list is Stephanie.  Prior to going on vacation, Stephanie gave Kathy her list of books.  We will vote at the June 23, meeting for one of the books to be our August selection.

 

Little Bee by Chris Cleave: The publishers of Chris Cleave's new novel "don't want to spoil" the story by revealing too much about it, and there's good reason not to tell too much about the plot's pivot point. All you should know going in to Little Bee is that what happens on the beach is brutal, and that it braids the fates of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan (who calls herself Little Bee) and a well-off British couple--journalists trying to repair their strained marriage with a free holiday--who should have stayed behind their resort's walls. The tide of that event carries Little Bee back to their world, which she claims she couldn't explain to the girls from her village because they'd have no context for its abundance and calm. But she shows us the infinite rifts in a globalized world, where any distance can be crossed in a day--with the right papers--and "no one likes each other, but everyone likes U2." Where you have to give up the safety you'd assumed as your birthright if you decide to save the girl gazing at you through razor wire, left to the wolves of a failing state.         Pub: 2010; 271 pgs.

The Dove Keepers by Alice Hoffman: Nearly two thousand years ago, nine hundred Jews held out for months against armies of Romans on Masada, a mountain in the Judean desert. According to the ancient historian Josephus, two women and five children survived. Based on this tragic and iconic event, Hoffman’s novel is a spellbinding tale of four extraordinarily bold, resourceful, and sensuous women, each of whom has come to Masada by a different path. Yael’s mother died in childbirth, and her father, an expert assassin, never forgave her for that death. Revka, a village baker’s wife, watched the murder of her daughter by Roman soldiers; she brings to Masada her young grandsons, rendered mute by what they have witnessed. Aziza is a warrior’s daughter, raised as a boy, a fearless rider and expert marksman who finds passion with a fellow soldier. Shirah, born in Alexandria, is wise in the ways of ancient magic and medicine, a woman with uncanny insight and power. The lives of these four complex and fiercely independent women intersect in the desperate days of the siege. All are dovekeepers, and all are also keeping secrets—about who they are, where they come from, who fathered them, and whom they love. Pub: 2012; 528 pgs.

The Round House by Louise Erdrich: One of the most revered novelists of our time—a brilliant chronicler of Native-American life—Louise Erdrich returns to the territory of her bestselling, Pulitzer Prize finalist The Plague of Doves with The Round House, transporting readers to the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. It is an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family. Pub: 2012; 336 pgs

Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron: Running the Rift follows the progress of Jean Patrick Nkuba from the day he knows that running will be his life to the moment he must run to save his life. A naturally gifted athlete, he sprints over the thousand hills of Rwanda and dreams of becoming his country’s first Olympic medal winner in track. But Jean Patrick is a Tutsi in a world that has become increasingly restrictive and violent for his people. As tensions mount between the Hutu and Tutsi, he holds fast to his dream that running might deliver him, and his people, from the brutality around them…. a stunning and gorgeous novel that—through the eyes of one unforgettable boy— explores a country’s unraveling, its tentative new beginning, and the love that binds its people together. Pub: 2012; 384 pgs.

Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya: Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima comes to stay with his family in New Mexico. She is a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic. Under her wise wing, Tony will test the bonds that tie him to his people, and discover himself in the pagan past, in his father's wisdom, and in his mother's Catholicism. And at each life turn there is Ultima, who delivered Tony into the world-and will nurture the birth of his soul. Pub:1999; 290 pgs.

Book Descriptions from Amazon.com

May 18, 2013, Meeting at Marilyn's

"Clara and Mr. Tiffany" by Susan Vhreeland, was the subject of our discussion.  Clara Driscoll was the designer of the Tiffany Lamps back in the early 1900's.   We were pretty much divided as to who loved, liked and disliked the book.  Each person felt strongly about their position.  I, KD, really liked the book for the descriptions of the stain glass process as well as the story of Clara Discoll.  On the opposite end was MP who wished that it had not been a historical novel but, a non-fiction account of the life and work of Clara Driscoll.  Others liked the story of women's lives in the early 20th century.

MJ presented a choice of books for our July meeting.   They were:

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, 352 p.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn-432 p.

The Heretic’s Daughter by Kathleen Kent- 332 p.

The Round House by Louise Erdich-336 p. 
A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash-336 p.

The majority voted from Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

Date of next meeting was changed to June 23, at Marlena's.  Book - "The Art of Hearing Heartbeats"

July meeting on July 28, at Celia's.

Books We Have Read as a group

Recent books are at the bottom of list:

 No date – “Losing the Garden” by Laura Waterman

***No date –“Glass Castle” – Jeanette Walls

***October 22, 2006 – “Three Cups of Tea” – Greg Mortenson

***No date – “Kite Runner”

No date – “Namesake”

***No date – “A Fine Balance” Rohinton Mistry

No date – “A Thousand White Women”

***No date -  “Bel Canto” by Anne Patchett

***2005 – Broken for You – Stephanie Kallos

***December 2005 – Shadow of the Wind

November 19, 2006 -   "History of Love" by Nicole Kraus

December 10, 06   "The Painted Drum" by Louise  Erdrich.   

***January 7, 2007    "The Five Quarters of the Orange" by Joanne Harris

***February 11, 2007 "Suite Francaise", by Irene Nemirovsky

 March 4, 2007  "A Short History of  Tractors in Ukrainian" by Marina Lewycka

***April 2007 -  "Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson

***April 29, 2007   "Waiting" by Ha Jian

*** June 3, 2007 -   "My Antonia" by Willa Cather

July 1, 2007 - "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy.  

***July 29, 2007 - "Gentlemen & Players" by Joanne Harris

***September 23, 2007    "Astrid and Veronika" by Linda Olsson

***October 2007  Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth".

***October 21, 2007 - "In the Lake of the Woods" by Tim O'Brien 

November 17, 2007   , "Peyton Place" – Six Burner Café after “Spitfire Grill”

January 6, 2008   "Keeping Faith" by Jodi Picoult

February 3, 2008 “In the Fall” Jeffrey Lent

***March 2, 2008 – “Crossing to Safety” Wallace Stegner

April 6, 2008- Sunday at 3:00 PM  Jeffrey Lent at the Silver Center followed by dinner at Six Burner Bistro

.

April 27, 2008 "These is My Words" by Nancy Turner

***June 1, 2008 -    "A Prayer for Owen Meany" by John Irving.

July 6, 2008   Jeffrey Lent's "Lost Nation". 

August 10, 2008  "The Last Chinese Chef" by Nicole Mones  

September 14, 2008, “Crow Lake” by Mary Lawson

October 5, 2008  "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami  

November 2, 2008   Consumption" by Kevin Patterson. 

December 7, 2008. “Some Can Whistle”

January 4, 2009  “Loving Frank”

February 1, 2009 -  “Annie Freeman’s Fabulous Traveling Funeral”

***March 1, 2009 – “When the Crocodile Eats the Sun” – Peter Godwin (memoir)

***April 1, 2009 – “East of Eden”, John Steinbeck

***May 30, 2009 – “The Reader”, Berhard Schlink

June 28, 2009 – “Sassy Tree”

July 26, 2009 – “Garden in the Dunes”

***August 30, 2009 – “The Life and Death of Charlie St. Cloud” 

September 27, 2009 – “Pope Joan”

October 25, 2009 – “The Scalpel and the Silver Bear”

November, 2009 – no meeting

December 6, 2009 – “The Housekeeper and the Professor”

***January 31, 2010 – “Olive Kitteridge”

February 28, 2010 – “Sin in the Second City”

March 28, 2010 –  “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” by Carson McCullers

April 18, 2010 – “Main Street” by Sinclair Lewis

***May 16, 2010 – “Cellist of Sarajevo” by Stephen Galloway

June 27, 2010 – “Mists of Avalon”

July 25, 2010 – “We Took to the Woods” by Louise Dickinson Rich

August 29, 2010 – “Ines of My Soul” – Isabel Allende

***September 26, 2010 -  “The Help” – 

October 31, 2010 – "A Tale of Two Valleys" by Alan Deutschman,

November 2010 – No meeting

***December 5, 2010 – “Power of One” – Bryce Courtenay

January 30, 2011 – Reservation Blues –  Sherman Alexie

***February 27, 2011 – Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet – Jamie Ford

***March 27, 2011 – “Strength in What Remains” by Tracy Kidder

April, 2011 – no meeting

***May 15, 2011 – “Water for Elephants” by Sarah Gruen

June 26, 2011 – “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot

July 31, 2011 – “The Widow’s War” by Sarah Gunning

***August 21, 2011 – “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand”

September 25, 2011 – “The Girl who Fell from the Sky”

***October 30, 2011 – “The Bells” by Richard Harvell

***December 4, 2011 – “Kindred” by Octavia Butler

January 29, 2012 – “The Wives of Henry Oades – a Novel” by Johanna Moran

***February 25, 2012 – “Breakfast with Buddha”

March 25, 2012 – Ann Patchett  “State of Wonder”

April 29, 2012 – James McBride “ The Color of Water”

May 20, 2012 -  The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister

July 1, 2012 – Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd

July 29, 2012 – Old Filth by Jane Gardam

***August 26, 2012 – “In the Time of the Butterflies” by Julia Alvarez

***September 30 – “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury

October 28, 2012 – “Tea-Olive Bird Watching Society

December 1, 2012 – “11/22/63” – by Stephen King

Jan;uary 27, 2013 – “The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes

February 24, 2013 – “Their Eyes were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston

March 24, 2013 – “Lower River” by Paul Therouix

April 2013 – No meeting

***May 19, 2013 – “Clara and Mr. Tiffany”  by Susan Veerland

***June30, 2013 – “The Art of Hearing Heartbeats”

*** - Books liked by Kathy Didier

March 24, 2013 - Meeting at Diane's

Once again, we enjoyed the scenic mountain views from Diane's living room.  Beautiful day.  No weather issues.  Book discussed was "Lower River" by Paul Theroux.  We all agreed that Theroux writes well...but, this was a very dark story.  After a divorce and sale of his business, our main character "Hock" returns to Mali where he happily spent time in the Peace Corps forty years earlier.  This story proved that "You cannot go back".  Hock's intentions were good.  He wanted to help the people...to continue where he left off.  But, times had changed and he had changed, the people of the village had changed.  The book was like a nightmare.  He was trapped...held captive.  Felt hopeless.  It was not a pleasant read...and yet written well. 

From Malena's suggestions we voted to read "The Art of Hearing Heartbeats" by
Jan-Philipp Sendker at our June 30, meeting. 

Marilyn is our club's coordinator for World Book Night.  This year, those of us in the North Country applied as a group.  We will be receiving twelve orders of twenty books each.  These books will be distributed to different organizations in Plymouth, NH...such as the Pemi Youth, Women Against Violence, the Whole Village, Bridge House.  The idea of the book distribution is to share our love of books with "Light Readers". The distribution date, World Wide, is April 23.  Lori and Claire are sharing their forty books with the Women's Soup Kitchen where Claire volunteers.  Marilyn asked for assistance in sorting and packing books for our local organizations.  Publicity of the event was discussed. 

Because so many members will be out of town on April 28, it was decided that our next meeting will be on May 19, at Marilyn's house.   Book to be discussed is "Clara and Mr. Tiffany" by Susan Vreeland.

Marlena's suggestions for June book

Just to remind everyone.  We meet on March 24, at Diane's.  We agreed to skip the April meeting.  We meet on May 19, as the next weekend is Memorial Day.  Our June meeting will be on June 30.  Below are Marlena's suggestions for the June book.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry: A Novel
Rachel Joyce
Meet Harold Fry, recently retired. He lives in a small English village with
his wife, Maureen, who seems irritated by almost everything he does, even
down to how he butters his toast. Little differentiates one day from the
next. Then one morning the mail arrives, and within the stack of quotidian
minutiae is a letter addressed to Harold in a shaky scrawl from a woman he
hasn't seen or heard from in twenty years. Queenie Hennessy is in hospice
and is writing to say goodbye.

Harold pens a quick reply and, leaving Maureen to her chores, heads to the
corner mailbox. But then, as happens in the very best works of fiction,
Harold has a chance encounter, one that convinces him that he absolutely
must deliver his message to Queenie in person. And thus begins the unlikely
pilgrimage at the heart of Rachel Joyce's remarkable debut. Harold Fry is
determined to walk six hundred miles from Kingsbridge to the hospice in
Berwick-upon-Tweed because, he believes, as long as he walks, Queenie
Hennessey will live.

Still in his yachting shoes and light coat, Harold embarks on his urgent
quest across the countryside. Along the way he meets one fascinating
character after another, each of whom unlocks his long-dormant spirit and
sense of promise. Memories of his first dance with Maureen, his wedding day,
his joy in fatherhood, come rushing back to him-allowing him to also
reconcile the losses and the regrets. As for Maureen, she finds herself
missing Harold for the first time in years.

And then there is the unfinished business with Queenie Hennessy.


One Amazing Thing
Chitra Divakaruni
Late afternoon sun sneaks through the windows of a passport and visa office
in an unnamed American city. Most customers and even most office workers
have come and gone, but nine people remain. A punky teenager with an
unexpected gift. An upper-class Caucasian couple whose relationship is
disintegrating. A young Muslim-American man struggling with the fallout of
9/11. A graduate student haunted by a question about love. An
African-American ex-soldier searching for redemption. A Chinese grandmother
with a secret past. And two visa office workers on the verge of an
adulterous affair.

When an earthquake rips through the afternoon lull, trapping these nine
characters together, their focus first jolts to their collective struggle to
survive. There's little food. The office begins to flood. Then, at a moment
when the psychological and emotional stress seems nearly too much for them
to bear, the young graduate student suggests that each tell a personal tale,
"one amazing thing" from their lives, which they have never told anyone
before. And as their surprising stories of romance, marriage, family,
political upheaval, and self-discovery unfold against the urgency of their
life-or-death circumstances, the novel proves the transcendent power of
stories and the meaningfulness of human expression itself.

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats
Jan-Philipp Sendker
A poignant and inspirational love story set in Burma, The Art of Hearing
Heartbeats spans the decades between the 1950s and the present.  When a
successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his
wife nor his daughter Julia has any idea where he might be...until they find
a love letter he wrote many years ago, to a Burmese woman they have never
heard of. Intent on solving the mystery and coming to terms with her
father's past, Julia decides to travel to the village where the woman lived.
There she uncovers a tale of unimaginable hardship, resilience, and passion
that will reaffirm the reader's belief in the power of love to move
mountains.

The Light Between Oceans
M. L. Stedman
AFTER FOUR HARROWING YEARS ON THE WESTERN Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly
half a day's journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the
supply boat comes once a season, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife,
Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving
Isabel hears a baby's cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore
carrying a dead man and a living baby.
Tom, who keeps meticulous records and whose moral principles have withstood
a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel
insists the baby is a "gift from God," and against Tom's judgment, they
claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel
return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the
world. Their choice has devastated one of them.

Brooklyn: A Novel
Colm Toibin
One of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary literature"
(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland
in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from
Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America, she decides she must go,
leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least
expects it, finds love. Tony, who loves the Dodgers and his big Italian
family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. But just as Eilis begins to
fall in love, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her
future.

February 24, 2013 Meeting at Stephanies

Heavy snows and poor road conditions kept our Southern NH and MA friends home.  The rest of us enjoyed a discussion of Zora Neale Hurston's book "Their Eyes Were Watching God".  "This remarkable female novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist's  factual accounts of Black heritage are unparalleled."  All but one of us liked this book.  It was a difficult book to read as we are not used to the Southern Florida Black dialect.    The content gave us a picture of life in a black communities in Florida during perhaps the 1930's..  We spoke of the courage that the main character "Janie" had to follow her heart and leave a comfortable life...to follow someone she loved. 

Voted on the book selections presented by Marilyn.  Our choice was "Clara and Mr. Tiffany" by Susan Vreeland.  This was to be our book for an April 28, meeting.  It appeared that only three people who were present would be available to meet on that date.  We knew that two of those not at the meeting would be away at that time.  The April meeting will be postponed and we will discuss "Clara and Mr. T" at our May 19, meeting.  We are not having a meeting on May 26, as that is Memorial Day weekend.

Our next meeting will be on March 24, at Diane's.  Book to be discussed is "Lower River" by Paul Theroux..  We are not meeting on March 31, as that is Easter.

Marilyn's Suggestions for April 28, 2013, Book

Clara and Mr. Tiffany: A Novel   Susan Vreeland   (448 pages)  It’s 1893, and at the Chicago World’s Fair, Louis Comfort Tiffany makes his debut with a luminous exhibition of innovative stained-glass windows that he hopes will earn him a place on the international artistic stage. But behind the scenes in his New York studio is the freethinking Clara Driscoll, head of his women’s division, who conceives of and designs nearly all of the iconic leaded-glass lamps for which Tiffany will long be remembered.

 

Never publicly acknowledged, Clara struggles with her desire for artistic recognition and the seemingly insurmountable challenges that she faces as a professional woman. She also yearns for love and companionship, and is devoted in different ways to five men, including Tiffany, who enforces a strict policy: He does not employ married women. Ultimately, Clara must decide what makes her happiest—the professional world of her hands or the personal world of her heart

 

Cleopatra: A Life  - Stacy Schiff (368 pages)

Her palace shimmered with onyx and gold but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first and poisoned the second; incest and assassination were family specialties. She had children by Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, two of the most prominent Romans of the day. With Antony she would attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled both their ends. Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Her supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost.

 

The Dovekeepers  Alice Hoffman   (528 pages)
Her most ambitious and mesmerizing novel, a tour de force of research and imagination. Nearly two thousand years ago, nine hundred Jews held out for months against armies of Romans on Masada, a mountain in the Judean desert. According to the ancient historian Josephus, two women and five children survived. Based on this tragic and iconic event, Hoffman’s novel is a spellbinding tale of four extraordinarily bold, resourceful, and sensuous women, each of whom has come to Masada by a different path. Yael’s mother died in childbirth, and her father, an expert assassin, never forgave her for that death. Revka, a village baker’s wife, watched the murder of her daughter by Roman soldiers; she brings to Masada her young grandsons, rendered mute by what they have witnessed. Aziza is a warrior’s daughter, raised as a boy, a fearless rider and expert marksman who finds passion with a fellow soldier. Shirah, born in Alexandria, is wise in the ways of ancient magic and medicine, a woman with uncanny insight and power.

The lives of these four complex and fiercely independent women intersect in the desperate days of the siege. All are dovekeepers, and all are also keeping secrets—about who they are, where they come from, who fathered them, and whom they love.

The House of Spirits – Isabel Allende (448 pages)

The House of Spirits is probably Allende's most famous and important book. In it, she chronicles the life of a family, as the patriarch grows from a child to an elder, with the world changing all around him while he tries to keep it the same. Through the lenses of the Trueba family, we follow the portion of Chilean history that eventually leads to the 1973 coup. Of course, the author is niece of Salvador Allende, the socialist president democratically elected that was removed from power and killed by Pinochet.

The book is based on clashes; old versus young, communists vs conservatives, landlords vs tenants. As the story unfolds, we view the extremist positions that each side takes: landlords attacking tenants, conservatives attacking communists, and vice versa. From the polarization of positions emerges a military dictatorship that no one wanted, but that was a product of the system setup by polarization.

In the end, the distinctions that originally separated young from old, conservatives from communists, are removed, as both sides realize the futility of their disputes in the face on an authoritarian regime.

Warmth of Other Suns The Epic Story of America's Great Migration   - Isabel Wilkerson  (622 pages)

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize--winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.

With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an "unrecognized immigration" within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.