Books for November 2011 - August 2012

Meet	Title	Author, date published	Comments	Recommender
11/13/11 at Amy's	Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition	Daniel Okrent, 2010	This is the excellently written history of prohibition (including cultural background for the success of the Constitutional Amendment), the effects of Prohibition and its ultimate demise. Thorough & fascinating exploration of the craziness, the lawlessness & the social experiment. Ken Burns' series (starting 10/2/11 on PBS) is heavily based on Okrent's research.	Stefanie
12/11/11 at Debra's	March	Geraldine Brooks	Imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. An idealistic Concord cleric, March becomes a Union chaplain and later finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that employs freed slaves, or "contraband."	Debra
1/29/12 at Elizabeth's	The Man Who Loved Children	Christina Stead, 1940	Jonathan Franzen writing about the novel in the NYT. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/Franzen-t.html?pagewanted=all#. Also see Hazel Rowley's essay regarding author's dad vs. Sam Pollit.	Elizabeth
2/24 at Esther's Bakery	"	"
2/26 at Stefanie's	Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World	Jane McGonigal, 2011	An interesting theory that game play can make the world a better place. Here's a link to her TED Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html. (Yes, that's the same name as a character whose animagus is a cat ;) Instead of virtual problem solving, the idea involves gamers harnessing their skills to solve the most pressing, unwieldy, and complicated problems of our time.	Elizabeth
3/19 at Teresa's	Through the Shadowlands: The Love Story of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman	Brian Sibley	At first glance, they were an unlikely couple: C. S. Lewis, a distinguished author and Oxford scholar, and Joy Davidman, a Jewish-American divorcée, converted Christian, mother of two, and former Communist Party member.	Karen
4/22 at Fatma's	Lucrezia Borgia	Maria Bellonci, 2003	biography of Cesare's sister. The Borgia family figures prominently in Machaivelli's The Prince	Fatma
5/12	The Art of Racing in the Rain	Enzo (Garth Stein)	If you've ever wondered what your dog is thinking, Stein's third novel offers an answer. Enzo is a lab terrier mix plucked from a farm outside Seattle to ride shotgun with race car driver Denny Swift as he pursues success on the track and off.	Caroline
6/12	Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do	Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, 2010	Can we scientifically predict our future? Scientists and pseudoscientists have been pursuing this mystery for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. But now, amazing new research is revealing that patterns in human behavior, previously thought to be purely random, follow predictable laws.	Caroline
7/12	The Hour of the Star	Clarice Lispector, 1977	Lispector plays her heroine, Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates, living in the slums of Rio, against an urbane, empty narrator. Working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction, taking readers close to the true mystery of life: from wiki. Lispector is an acclaimed author only recently translated into English from Portuguese.	Grace
8/12	The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece	Eric Siblin	A former pop-music critic, Siblin was transported to the eighteenth century when his imagination was captured by a performance of Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello. He embarked on a journey—part historical, part personal—to discover for himself the music that has remained a pillar of the cello repertoire since Pablo Casals recorded the suites in 1936.	Debra

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Books considered, Oct 2011, but not chosen as group reads

Moby Dick	Herman Melville, 1851	A review of this just-published book reminded me that Moby Dick is still on my reading list.	Grace (use grace36/grcae to access the link)
The Shock Doctrine	Naomi Klein, 2007	(wikipedia) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is a 2007 book by Canadian author Naomi Klein, and is the basis of a 2009 documentary by the same name. The book argues that the free market policies of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman have risen to prominence in some countries because they were pushed through while the citizens were reacting to disasters or upheavals. It is implied that some man-made crises, such as the Falklands war, may have been created with the intention of being able to push through these unpopular reforms in their wake. Current article from Naomi Klein's website	Grace
Wittgenstein's Mistress	David Markson, 1988	You can find some reader response and a link to a review written by David Foster Wallace here: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/wittgenstein%27s+mistress. (Also this blurb.)	Elizabeth
Gang of One	Fan Shen, 2006	Memoir of growing up in Communist China during the Cultural Revolution. The author was a 12-year old when the story opens. He is now a professor in Minnesota. Traces Shen's journey from rabid Maoist to disillusionment to emigre.	Stefanie
Cutting for Stone	Abraham Verghese, 2010	Stanford MD & author. I still want to read this novel, which is lauded high and low as a beautiful & wide-ranging story. "Sweeping novel that moves from India to Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York City over decades." Verghese is also a proponent of hands-on medicine (does your doctor touch you?): the Stanford 25, a list of techniques that every doctor should know. He is seeking to resurrect the lost art of the physicial exam, techniques he learned decades ago in Ethiopia and India.	Stefanie
Trumpet: A Novel	Jacki Kay, 2000	A Scottish poet with a fresh and resonant voice makes her fiction debut with a novel about the life of a famous jazz musician, born female, who masquerades as a man.	Caroline
The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie and The Gospel of Wealth	Andrew Carnegie, 1920 (posthumously)	Carnegie was one of the most famous leaders of industry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries . His net worth in 2007 dollars would have been $298.3 billion according to Forbes magazine.	Fatma
The Help	Kathryn Stockett, 2011	A young white woman in the early 1960s in Mississippi who becomes interested in the plight of the black ladies' maids that every family has working for them. She writes their stories about mistreatment, abuse and heartbreaks of working in white families' homes, all just before the Civil Rights revolution.	Deirdre
State of Wonder	Ann Patchett	A pharmaceutical researcher sets off into the Amazon jungle to find the remains and effects of a colleague who recently died under mysterious circumstances. But first she must locate a renowned gynecologist who has spent years looking at the reproductive habits of a local tribe where women can conceive well into their middle ages and beyond.	Deirdre
Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World	Lisa Randall, 2011	I didn’t think it was possible to write a complex, detailed look at the world of physics that the non-scientist could understand, but then Lisa Randall wrote this amazing, insightful, and engaging book and proved me wrong.	Amy
Drama: An Actor's Education	John Lithgow	The book is full of drama, both onstage and off. I’m an actor. I’m in the drama business. So in plotting the book, I decided to tell stories of my younger years and turn my own life into drama. What these stories have in common is that they were all formative moments, leading me to become the actor that I am today. Hence the subtitle: an actor’s education.	Karen