Claire's Recommendations for February 2019 Book Selection

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FEBRUARY MEETING

H IS FOR HAWK by HELEN MACDONALD

On the surface H is for Hawk is a falconry book chronicling the training of a Northern Goshawk, and yet it is so much more. It is a brilliantly written memoir of the darkest time in Helen Macdonald’s as she struggled to cope with the sudden death of her father, noted photographer, photo journalist Alisdair MacDonald. She spent a year training a northern goshawk in the wake of her father’s death. Having been a falconer for many years she purchased a young goshawk to help her through the grieving process. The story opens on Helen who is a protagonist as well as a falconer. She’s talking about how she loves birds. Specifically, she talks about the Goshawk, Known for being difficult to train, these savage birds have piqued her interest.

CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY by ALLAN PATON

This is a story about a black man’ country under white man’s law. A deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalu and his son Absalom set against the background of a land and a people driven by racial injustice, It is a classic work of love, hope, courage, and endurance born of the dignity of man. One of the important characters in the book was the land of South Africa itself. It is about Kumalu coming from a small village who undertakes his first journey to Johannesburg to search for his only son. This is a story of James Jarvis (white English-speaking farmer) and the pastor’s relationship to him because of the things Kumulu’s son has done to his family.

Msimangu is another important person in this novel. He is a warm, generous and humble young mister in Sophiatown explaining the political and socioeconomic difficulties that the black population faces and providing shrewd commentary on both blacks and whites. Of all the characters ln the novel he has the clearest understanding of South Africa’s injustices, and he serves as Paton’s mouthpiece in suggesting a solution: Christian love.

Absolom Kumalu Stephen’s son leaves home for Johannesburg for work, loves touch with his family and falls into a life of crime. He carries a gun for protection and fires the weapon in fear killing James Jarvis son Arthur. Even though a friend is suspected of crime Absolum is sentenced to be executed.

Arthur Jarvis is a solution S Africa needs and even though he is murdered some hope lives on his young son. He is a staunch opponent of S Africa’s racial injustices. He spends his life at the center of the debates on racism and poverty, and his essays and articles provide answers to many of the novels questions. His motives are selfless and he works for change not because he seeks personal glory but because he is way of the system’s contradictions and oppressions.

THE WOMEN IN THE CASTLE by JESSICA SHATTUCK

It is a powerful and propulsive story of the relationships of three German widows and their children whose lives and fates become intertwined – an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel each of whom suffers loss and tragedy during and after World War II.

Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany’s defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband’s ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband’s brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows. First Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin’s mother, the beautiful and naïve Benita, has fallen into the hands of occupying Red Army solders. Then Marianne locates Ania, another resister’s wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of the many camps that hours the millions displaced by the war.

As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her husband’s resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her principled past has become infinitely more complicated and filled with dark secrets that threaten to tear them apart, Eventually, all three women must come to terms with the choices that have defined their lives before, during and after the war – each with their own unique share of challenges

BORN A CRIME by TREVOR NOAH

These are stories from Trevor Noah childhood growing up in post-apartheid in South Africa. As a light-skinned product of a white Swiss father and black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him form a government that could at any moment steal him away. He never fit well into the racial schemes introduced after apartheid. Even under apartheid there was trouble fitting in. Finally liberated by the end of S Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.

This is a story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It’s a story of that young man’s relations with his fearless, rebellious and fervently religious mother – his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.

The stories collected here are by turns hilarious, dramatic and deeply affecting, whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown for a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and death pitfalls of dating in high schools, Trego illuminates his curious world with incisive wit and unflinching honesty. His stories weave together to form a moving and funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed only with a keen sense of humor and a mother’s unconventional love

UNDAUNTED COURAGE by STEPHEN E AMBROSE

In this sweeping adventure story, the author presents the definitive account of one of the most momentous journeys in American History. He follows the Lewis and Clark Expedition from Thomas Jefferson’s hope of finding a waterway to the Pacific, through the heart-stopping moments of the actual trip, to Lewis’s lonely demise on the Natchez Traced. Along the way, the author shows us the American West a Lewis saw it. Wild, awesome and pristinely beautiful. One person said it was a swiftly moving, full-dress treatment of the expedition… A lively retelling of the journey of the two captains conveyed with passionate enthusiasm by the author.