BOOK CLUB SCHEDULE FOR 2009-2010
September 21, 2009
The Devil's Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea (Mexico/USA)
In May 2001, 26 Mexican men scrambled across the border and into an area of the Arizona desert known as the Devil's Highway. Only 12 made it safely across. Write/poet Urrea tracks the paths those men took from their home state of Veracruz all the way norte.
November 2, 2009
In the Land of No Right Angles by Daphne Beal (Nepal)
It starts with a standard conceit: What I saw on my semester abroad. Alex Larson, a wholesome-bordering-on-nerdy Des Moines girl, interested in photography and what lies beyond her upstate New York college, spends a year in Nepal. Equal parts coming-of-age quest and travelogue, this debut novel dazzles most with its deft descriptions, which transform an unimaginably foreign land into terra cognita.
December 7, 2009
Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris (Saudi Arabia)
A finely detailed literary mystery set in contemporary Saudi Arabia, Ferraris's debut centers on Nouf ash-Shrawi, a 16-year-old girl who disappeared into the desert three days before her marriage and has been found dead, several weeks pregnant.
January 4, 2010
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (France)
Narrator Renee Michel is a fifty-four-year-old woman who has worked for twenty-seven years as a concierge of a small Parisian apartment building. Grateful for her job, she finds it prudent to keep her rich intellectual life hidden from the residents, maintaining the facade of the perfect concierge, someone who lives in a completely different world from them.
February 22, 2010
The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman (Poland)
Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses) tells the remarkable WWII story of Jan Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw Zoo, and his wife, Antonia, who, with courage and coolheaded ingenuity, sheltered 300 Jews as well as Polish resisters in their villa and in animal cages and sheds.
March 29, 2010
The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester (China)
Joseph Needham (1900-1995) is the man who made China China, forming the West's understanding of a sophisticated culture with his masterpiece, Science and the Civilization in China, says bestselling author Winchester. In a life devoted to recording the Middle Kingdom's intellectual wealth, Needham, an eccentric, brilliant Cambridge don, made a remarkable journey from son of a London doctor through scientist-adventurer to red scare target.
May 3, 2010
This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Liberia)
In and out of government, in and out of exile, but consistent in her commitment to Liberia, Sirleaf in her memoir reveals herself to be among the most resilient, determined and courageous.
June 7, 2010
Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran by Azadeh Moaveni (Iran)
American-born jounalist Moaveni returns to Tehran in 2005 to cover Ahmadinejad's election for Time magazine, hoping to make the city her permanent home. She falls in love, moves in with her boyfriend, becomes pregnant, gets married - in that order - in a country that has no word for boyfriend and no qualms about brutally beating unmarried pregnant women.
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The Book Club gathers from
7:00 to 9:00 p.m. on Mondays on the dates noted below. Meetings
are at