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.
