Our October 2016 Reading Selection is "Hidden Figures" by Margot Lee Shetterly Morrow



Special NPR Program you may find interesting:


http://www.npr.org/2016/09/25/495179824/hidden-figures-how-black-women-did-the-math-that-put-men-on-the-moon




About the book:


The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA at the leading edge of the feminist and civil rights movement, whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space—a powerful, revelatory contribution that is as essential to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in modern America as Between the World and Me and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner.
Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.
Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South’s segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America’s aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam’s call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.
Even as Virginia’s Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley’s all-black “West Computing” group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens.
Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future.

Our August 2016 Reading selection is....."The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. This magnificent novel juxtaposes geographically distant places, brilliant and playful reflections, and a variety of styles to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world’s truly great writers.  







Our July 2016 Reading selection is "What Alice Forgot" by Liane Moriarty

Alice Love is twenty-nine, crazy about her husband, and pregnant with her first child.

So imagine Alice’s surprise when she comes to on the floor of a gym and is whisked off to the hospital where she discovers the honeymoon is truly over — she’s getting divorced, she has three kids and she’s actually 39 years old. Alice must reconstruct the events of a lost decade, and find out whether it’s possible to reconstruct her life at the same time. She has to figure out why her sister hardly talks to her, and how is it that she’s become one of those super skinny moms with really expensive clothes.

Ultimately, Alice must discover whether forgetting is a blessing or a curse, and whether it’s possible to start over.  


Sounds very interesting....

Our June 2016 Reading selection is "The Rage of the Vulture" by Barry Unsworth

I am doing something a bit different here....I am posting a short description of the book for those who would rather not have spoilers and a longer descriptions for those who may like more details about the story...you decide which you want to read....

Short Description follows:

It is May 1908 and the Ottoman world is crumbling. Robert Markham, an Englishman in Constantinople, is newly posted to the British legation with his imperious wife and overly curious son. Markham's hidden life is about to make itself known as he forgets familial and patriotic ties in order to absolve a deep-seated guilt. Twelve years before, he had been involved with an Armenian woman. On the evening of their engagement, the Armenian massacres erupted. Saved by his British citizenship, he witnessed the brutal rape and murder of his fiancee. Amid the breakdown of the Turkish empire, he now seeks revenge.

Now the Detailed Description:

''The Rage of the Vulture,'' Capt. Robert Markham - a British infantry officer posted to Constantinople during the final years of the Ottoman Empire - is a complicated and not very sympathetic protagonist. He regards his 10-year-old son, Henry, mainly as a rival for his wife's affection.

He resents his wife for her failure to understand a secret thing about him, which secret, paradoxically enough, he refuses to reveal to her just because of that resentment. Convinced that Henry's governess can understand him, he all but rapes her and then rejects her for understanding him too easily.

He has a facility for surpassing in unpleasantness even the worst of the novel's other characters. In one of Mr. Unsworth's more bitter scenes, an English visitor named Miss Munro, who finds Constantinople ''romantic,'' asks Markham to accompany her on an interview she has arranged with one of the Sultan's eunuchs. She has had great success with a series for an English magazine on Turkey during the 1908 revolution and wants to see ''what the experience has meant to people. The guardsman, the concubine, the pageboy.'' '' 'Ordinary people,' Markham said, but Miss Munro was too absorbed in her subject to notice the irony.''

When the liberal Miss Munro inadvertently prompts the eunuch to describe his castration, Markham savagely translates the horrifying description while Miss Munro tries to stop her ears. We actually end up feeling sorry for the petty-minded creature. Why then, you might ask, does one continue to put up with Markham as he makes his way through Barry Unsworth's dazzling and complex portrait of Constantinople in the year 1908? Why does one continue reading ''The Rage of the Vulture,'' whose title is taken from Canto I of Lord Byron's ''The Bride of Abydos'': Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime? Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle, Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime. Why does one go on? For one thing, because Robert Markham's secret is a plausible reason for his complicated behavior. He had been in Constantinople 12 years earlier, about to marry an Armenian girl, when the Turkish massacre of the Armenians began to spread throughout the city. At their engagement party, Markham's fiancee was raped and murdered while he stood by, protesting to her tormentors: ''I am an Englishman. I am an Englishman.'' The shame of the incident has unmanned him, which, of course, is why he translates the eunuch's experience for Miss Munro with such savage relish. Now, in the novel's present, he is determined somehow to make amends for his shame.

Of course he cannot. As a young Armenian nationalist tells him, ''The suffering of individuals is not important.'' He continues, ''You lost your fiancee. You think: They did this to me, to me! You nurse what they did to you. You think of yourself as an outraged individual. You are alone with yourself. There are two million Armenians in Turkey, Captain Markham. The very great majority of them have no leisure to cultivate their personal sense of outrage in that way.''

What is more, the reader knows from actual history that whatever Markham may accomplish by way of revenge or self-punishment, the Armenians in Turkey will eventually suffer far more widespread massacres.

Still, Markham will pursue his own degradation all the way to the Sultan's personal torture chamber. And if he accomplishes little more than to have his English pride and individuality beaten out of him, he serves along the way as the reader's witness to the splendors of exotic Constantinople. Many of Mr. Unsworth's spectacles, such as the celebration of a holy day in the interior of the Hagia Sophia, are heightened in their effect by being made an integral part of the plot. But even when he is merely sightseeing, his scenery is often spectacular.

Markham's eventual defeat transports him into a state of eccentricity somehow peculiar to the English. In the novel's epilogue, set toward the end of World War I, we find him back in England, living once again with his wife, though at a somewhat chilling remove. He has taken up beekeeping, as well as writing a massive book whose thesis it is that in keeping with the tendency of certain races to ''take on an excitatory role in history,'' it has been the fate of the Armenians to stimulate ''the atrocity glands, that was their collective historical role.''

As the conclusion to a heroic quest, this is not very satisfying. But it is an altogether fitting end to this curiously crabbed and obsessive adventure, in which Barry Unsworth once again, just as he did earlier in such accomplished novels as ''Mooncrankers Gift'' and ''The Idol Hunter,'' has exercised his strange fascination with Turkey and the Middle East during the early years of this century, and has thereby succeeded in fascinating his readers.

Our Book Selection for May 2016 is "Orange is the New Black" By Piper Kerman



With a career, a boyfriend, and a loving family, Piper Kerman barely resembles the reckless young woman who delivered a suitcase of drug money ten years before. But that past has caught up with her. Convicted and sentenced to fifteen months at the infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, the well-heeled Smith College alumna is now inmate #11187–424—one of the millions of people who disappear “down the rabbit hole” of the American penal system. From her first strip search to her final release, Kerman learns to navigate this strange world with its strictly enforced codes of behavior and arbitrary rules. She meets women from all walks of life, who surprise her with small tokens of generosity, hard words of wisdom, and simple acts of acceptance. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and at times enraging, Kerman’s story offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison—why it is we lock so many away and what happens to them when they’re there.

Welcome Our Newest Member.....Mary

Welcome aboard Mary so nice to have you join our little club!

We Are Trying Something New For March and April....Read On.....

It was suggested that we pick two books one for March which is "We are Water" By Wally Lamb and a book for April which is "Little Bee" By Chris Cleave.  By picking two books if you finish with March book early you can start on the April book early if you want.

In middle age, Annie Oh—wife, mother, and outsider artist—has shaken her family to its core. After twenty-seven years of marriage and three children, Annie has fallen in love with Viveca, the wealthy, cultured, confident Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her professional success.

Annie and Viveca plan to wed in the Oh family's hometown of Three Rivers, Connecticut, where gay marriage has recently been legalized. But the impending wedding provokes some very mixed reactions and opens a Pandora's box of toxic secrets—dark and painful truths that have festered below the surface of the Ohs' lives.

We Are Water is an intricate and layered portrait of marriage, family, and the inexorable need for understanding and connection, told in the alternating voices of the Ohs—nonconformist Annie; her ex-husband, Orion, a psychologist; Ariane, the do-gooder daughter, and her twin, Andrew, the rebellious only son; and free-spirited Marissa, the youngest Oh. Set in New England and New York during the first years of the Obama presidency, it is also a portrait of modern America, exploring issues of class, changing social mores, the legacy of racial violence, and the nature of creativity and art.

With humor and breathtaking compassion, Wally Lamb brilliantly captures the essence of human experience in vivid and unforgettable characters struggling to find hope and redemption in the aftermath of trauma and loss. We Are Water is vintage Wally Lamb—a compulsively readable, generous, and uplifting masterpiece that digs deep into the complexities of the human heart to explore the ways in which we search for love and meaning in our lives.

Little Bee, a young Nigerian refugee, has just been released from the British immigration detention center where she has been held under horrific conditions for the past two years, after narrowly escaping a traumatic fate in her homeland of Nigeria. Alone in a foreign country, without a family member, friend, or pound to call her own, she seeks out the only English person she knows. Sarah is a posh young mother and magazine editor with whom Little Bee shares a dark and tumultuous past.

They first met on a beach in Nigeria, where Sarah was vacationing with her husband, Andrew, in an effort to save their marriage after an affair, and their brief encounter has haunted each woman for two years. Now together, they face a disturbing past and an uncertain future with the help of Sarah’s four-year-old son, Charlie, who refuses to take off his Batman costume. A sense of humor and an unflinching moral compass allow each woman, and the reader, to believe that even in the face of unspeakable odds, humanity can prevail.  

Our February Reading Selection is The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace

Set before the advent of the Bronze Age, The Gift of Stones centers around a community of stoneworkers who live in a village near the sea. Wealthy and complacent, they survive by the trade of their unrivaled skills, secure in the supremacy of their craftsmanship. A small boy, outcast by misfortune, ventures from the confines of the enclave to explore the unknown. He returns with enchanting tales of ships and the seashore, of new vistas and horizons, that beguile and disturb the villagers. In spite of his words and intuitive wisdom, the stoneworkers remain oblivious to the winds of change beginning to blow in the outside world. Until, that is, the storyteller brings back to the village a strange and angry woman whose presence foretells the coming of metal, the end of stone, and the demise of their way of life.

Our Next Book Club Meeting will be February 25th

Our next book club meeting will be held Feb 25th at 5 PM @ Panera in Wilkes Barre...see you there.