Non-Fiction Book Discussion Group
When: Second Thursday of each month from 1 to 2 p.m.
Where: The Oliver Wolcott Library Community Room.
Facilitated by: Denise Butwill
2010 List of selections
September 9
Greek Way
by Edith Hamilton
Moderated by Pat Ruenhost
The Greek Way captures the spirit and achievements of Greece in the fifth century B.C.
October 14
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
by Stephanie Coontz
Moderated by Joan Bertaccini
The golden age of the American family never existed, asserts Coontz in a wonderfully perceptive, myth-debunking report. The "Leave It to Beaver" ideal of breadwinner father, full- time homemaker mother and dependent children was a fiction of the 1950s, she shows.
November 11
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou
Moderated by Audrey Solnit
In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence.
December 9
The Case for God
by Karen Armstrong
Moderated by Marie Wallace
Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spiritualities, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith.
January 13, 2011
Honor Lost: Love and death in modern day Jordan
by Norma Khouri
Moderated by Dick Benfer
Honor Lost is at once a tender memorial to her best friend Dalia, and a story of outrage at Dalia’s senseless murder in the name of cultural tradition.
February 10
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
by Carlos Eire
Moderated by Pat Donovan
At the start of the nineteen-sixties, an operation called Pedro Pan flew more than fourteen thousand Cuban children out of the country, without their parents, and deposited them in Miami. Eire, now a professor of history and religion at Yale, was one of them. His deeply moving memoir describes his life before Castro and later in America, where he turned from a child of privilege into a Lost Boy.
March 10
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
by Eckhart Tolle
Moderated by Jean Walters
Ekhart Tolle's message is simple: living in the now is the truest path to happiness and enlightenment.
April 14
Lost Continent
by Bill Bryson
Moderated by Pat Ruenhost
Journalist Bryson decided to relive the dreary vacation car trips of his American childhood. Starting out at his mother's house in Des Moines, Iowa, he motors through 38 states over the course of two months, looking for the quintessential American small town.
May 12
Ivory’s Ghosts: the White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants
by John Frederick Walker
Moderated by Jennifer Whittlesey
Walker traces the story of ivory from Paleolithic times to the present and the devastation the ivory trade has wrought on African and Asian elephants. By 1994, nine African nations had stockpiled 100 tons of pickup ivory, harvested from elephants that had died a natural death. This great gift that the elephant leaves at the end of its life, writes Walker, should be sold to help conserve endangered herds, a controversial proposal.
June 9
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot
Moderated by Dick Benfer
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive--even thrive--in the lab.
July/ August
No Meeting
Book Selections for 2010-2011. Email suggested titles to dbutwill@owlibrary.org
