First Presbyterian Book Club

 

The Book Club meets at noon in L-6.  Park in the back of the church and enter the door to the left under the canopy.  The new year will find us in different quarters.  All meetings will be on the 4th Thursday of the month except the November meeting, which will be held December 2nd.

 

 

 

 

It was the most influential marriage of the nineteenth century--and one of history's most enduring love stories.  Victoria and Albert entered their marriage longing for intimate companionship, yet each was determined to be to be the ruler.  The dynamic would continue through the years--each spouse, headstrong and impassioned, eager to lead the marriage on his or her own terms.  For two decades, Victoria and Albert engaged in a very public contest for dominance.  Against all odds, the marriage succeeded.  

 

 

This is Dylan Thomas's homage to the Christmases of his boyhood, when the snow was thicker and whiter, when everything about Christmas was better than it is now.  It's the sheer acrobatic brilliance of the language here that we most love.

 

 

In this remarkable account of the April, 20, 1999, Columbine High School shooting, journalist Cullen not only dispels several of the prevailing myths about the event but tackles the hardest question of all:  why did it happen?  Drawing on extensive interviews, police reports and his own reporting, Cullen meticulously pieces together what happened when 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold killed 13 people before turning their guns on themselves.

 

 

Fellowes portrays the British upper class in this brilliantly acerbic tale of snobbery and marital tomfoolery in the 1990s London.  The nameless protagonist introduces his middle-class but sleek and beautiful friend Edith Lavery to the earnest but dull Lord Charles  Broughton.  <Much to the dismay of "civilized" society, Charles falls in love and proposes to Edith.  Even after her marriage, Edith is snubbed and humiliated at every turn until she moves out with her actor-lover.  To Edith's consternation, the glittering world of theater turns out to be just as small-minded and dull as that of society.  

 

 

Rachel Kushner's first novel doesn't read like your usual debut.  Using family stories, extensive archival research, and all the tools of the novelist's imagination, she creates a portrait of a small society at a crucial moment in time:  the American sugar cane and nickel-mining colony in the last years before Castro and the first movements of this revolution.  As seen through the lives of the children and wives of American executives, and the parallel intrigues of a nightclub dancer with powerful friends and a former French collaborator, Kushner's Cuba makes the the revolution and its aftermath come alive.

 

 

In this work, Mark Seal tells the mesmerizing story of the captivating life and shocking death of world-renowned naturalist Joan Root.  From her passion for animals to her storybook love affair to her hard-fought crusade to save Kenya's beautiful Lake Naivasha, Wildflower is naturalist, filmaker and lifelong conservationist Joan Root's gripping life story--a stunning and moving tale featuring a remarkable modern-day heroine.

 

 

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