Wednesday, February 7th at 7:30pm
Jenny Offill, Elissa Schappell
Money Changes Everything:
Twenty-Two Writers Tackle the Last Taboo with Tales of Sudden Windfalls,
Staggering Debts, and Other Surprising Turns of Fortune
(Doubleday)
We talk openly about our family
dramas, problems at work and battles with addiction, but when it comes
to what is or is not in our wallets, we remain mum. In this riveting
anthology by the editors of Friend Who Got Away, celebrated
writers from Daniel Handler to Susan Choi explore the complicated
role money has played in their lives, whether they’re hiding
from creditors or hiding a trust fund. An heiress on dating; a forty
year vow of poverty; the moral complexities of victim compensation;
a marriage shaken by money again and again—the pieces range
from comic to harrowing, yet they all strike at the wall of silence
that has long surrounded this topic.
Thursday, February 8th at 7:30pm
Jonathan Raban
Surveillance
(Pantheon)
The National Book Award winner
(Bad Land, Waxwings, Passage to Juneau) Jonathan
Raban turns his fictional scrutiny on the day-after-tomorrow future,
when national identity cards are mandatory and America has become
obsessed with information gathering. Unfulfilled actor Tad spends
his days performing in Homeland Security’s mock disasters and
his nights reading alternative news reports online. Freelance journalist
Lucy is profiling a bestselling author and she is forced to question
the honesty of his memoir. Everyone, willingly or not, is at risk
of confusing what might be true for what actually is—a distinction
not easily honored in a time of panic and fear, when terrorist attack
and literary fraud lurk around the corner. Raban captures this peculiar
and particular period in our ongoing history with precision and compassion.
Monday, February 12th at 7:30pm
Gabriel Thompson
There's No Jose Here: Following
the Hidden Lives of Mexican Immigrants
(Nation)
Mexican immigration will remain
a central and polarizing issue in the coming years. Once Mexicans
had a sizable presence in a few select states like California, but
today the fastest growing populations are in places like North Carolina,
Arkansas, and Georgia. What motivates people to risk their very lives
to come here, and why don't Mexicans just enter legally? How do they
cope, living in a strange country? Do they see immigration as a blessing,
a curse, or something in between? Thompson writes for New YorkMagazine
and The Nation, and here he allows Mexicans in the U.S. to
speak in their own words. The central narrative follows Enrique, a
34-year-old livery cab driver who came to the US illegally at the
age of 16 and has since seen his daughter suffer lead poisoning, his
mother abandoned in Mexico by his father, his cousin murdered on the
streets of Brooklyn, and his best friend deployed to Iraq.
Tuesday, February 13th at 7:30pm
William Poy Lee
The Eighth Promise: An American
Son's Tribute to His Toisanese Mother
(Rodale)
In the tradition of The Color
of Water comes a beautifully written, evocative memoir of a relationship
between a mother and son and the Chinese-American experience. Berkeleyauthor
Lee delivers his moving and complex story of growing up in the housing
projects of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1960s and ’70s,
unfolding it in two voices—the author’s own and that of
his mother—to provide a sense of tradition and culture. It is
a stunning tale of murder, injustice, fortitude, and survival. Alice
Walker writes that The Eighth Promise asks, "Who are
we, having left the land of our ancestors and settled among others
similarly displaced? How do we find ‘home’ in the present
when the past meant a thousand years in the same place?...In this
unusual and wise, insightful and healing memoir, William Poy Lee explores
territory that reflects and intrigues us all.”
Tuesday, February 20th at 7:30pm
Peggy Orenstein
Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of
Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar,
an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night and One Woman’s Quest to Become
a Mother
(Bloomsbury USA)
Orenstein’s story begins
when she tells her new husband that she’s not sure she ever
wants to be a mother; it ends six years later after she’s done
almost everything humanly possible to become one. Buffeted by one
jaw-dropping obstacle after another, Orenstein (Flux, Schoolgirls)
seeks answers both medical and spiritual in America and Asia, along
the way visiting an old flame who’s now the father of fifteen,
and discovering in Japan a ritual of surprising solace. All the while
she tries to hold onto a marriage threatened by cycles, appointments,
procedures and disappointments. Waiting for Daisy is an honest,
wryly funny report from the front that illuminates the ambivalence,
obsession, and sacrifice that characterize so many modern women’s
lives. It’s about doing all the things you swore you’d
never do to get something you hadn’t even been sure you wanted.
A true story by a woman in a confusing, contradictory time, Waiting
For Daisy is also about loss, love, anger and redemption
Wednesday, February 21st at 6:30pm *
Book Club
On Beauty by Zadie
Smith
(Penguin)
This month’s selection
is On Beauty by Zadie Smith. Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith’s reputation as a major literary talent. Read the book and join the discussion!
* Please Note Time
Wednesday, February 21st at 7:30pm
Pete Dexter
Paper Trails: True Stories of
Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising
Number of Which Are Not About Marriage
(Ecco)
“Pete Dexter is a master
storyteller in all forms, and this collection only proves it once
again. His work is full of truths we know and recognize the
moment our eyes fall upon them. This is the work of a great America
writer.”—Michael Connelly.
Dexter is the author of the National Book Award-winning
novel Paris Trout, as well as Deadwood, The Paperboy
and Train. Before he earned his national acclaim,
he was a newspaper journalist for the Sacramento Bee and
the Philadelphia News whose weekly columns cut directly to
the heart of the American character at a time of national turmoil
and crucial change. With haunting urgency, his columns laid bare the
violence, hypocrisy, and desperation he saw as he visited across the
country starting in the 1970’s. But he reveled, too, in the
lighter side of his own life, sharing scenes with the indefatigable
Mrs. Dexter, their young daughter, and a series of unforgettable creatures
who strayed into their lives. No matter what caught Dexter's eye,
it was illuminated by his dark, brilliant humor. Collected here for
the first time are the best of those spellbinding, finely wrought
pieces, with a new introduction by the author. Paper Trails
is searing, heart-breaking, and irresistibly funny, sometimes all
at once. As Pete Hamill says in his foreword, these essays "are
as good as it ever gets."
Thursday, February 22nd at 7:30pm
James L. Swanson
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase
for Lincoln's Killer
(Harper Perennial)
The murder of Abraham Lincoln
set off the greatest manhunt in American history. Swanson’s
haunting and gripping account, told through the eyes of the hunted
and the hunters, is history as you've never read it before. Publisher’s
Weekly writes, “With great power, passion and at a thrilling,
breakneck pace, Swanson (Lincoln's Assassins) conjures up
an exhausted yet jubilant nation ruptured by grief, stunned by tragedy
and hell-bent on revenge. For 12 days, assisted by family and some
women smitten by his legendary physical beauty, Booth relied on smarts,
stealth and luck to elude the best detectives, military officers and
local police the federal government could muster. Taking the reader
into the action, the story is shot through with breathless, vivid,
even gory detail. With a deft, probing style and no small amount of
swagger, Swanson, a member of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission,
has crafted pure narrative pleasure, sure to satisfy the casual reader
and Civil War aficionado alike.”
Tuesday, February 27th at 7:00pm *
World Affairs Book Club
Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending
and the Battle Against World Poverty by Muhammad Yunus
(Public Affairs)
This month’s selection
is Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World
Poverty by Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in
2006. For the New Year, we’ll read about some successes in International
Policy and look a bit at creative solutions. In 1983 Muhammad Yunus
established Grameen, a bank devoted to providing the poorest of Bangladesh
with miniscule loans. It was an idea born on a day in 1976 when he
personally loaned a village $27, enough to purchase raw materials
for their stool making trade. The loan helped them break the cycle
of poverty and changed their lives forever. His solution to world
poverty is simple: loan poor people money on terms that are suitable
to them, teach them a few sound financial principles, and they will
help themselves.
* Please Note Time and Day
February 27th at 7:30pm
Sarah Dunant
In the Company of the Courtesan
(Random House)
Fiammetta Bianchini was plucking
her eyebrows and biting color into her lips as Rome was sacked in
1527. Soon, with their stomachs churning on the jewels they have swallowed,
the courtesan Fiammetta and her dwarf companion, Bucino, head for
Venice, that shimmering city born from water, a miracle of east-west
trade. Yet as their fortunes rise, their partnership of beauty and
shrewdness comes under threat by the passions of many. A story of
desire and deception, sin and religion, loyalty and friendship, this
latest novel by the author of The Birth of Venus paints a
portrait of one of the world’s greatest cities at its most potent
moment in history. “Dunant is the kind of writer a reader will
follow anywhere, trusting completely in her ability both to bring
a time and place to life and to tell an enthralling story.”—Booklist.
