Books
Reading Choices for Book Groups & Personal Fulfillment
Books have been a major formative element in my life. I grew up competing in contests to read the most books each summer. I have actively organized book groups wherever I have lived. One of those book groups is now more than forty years old, another lasted twenty years, and my current local book group is now in its seventh year.
Read more about my Favorite Books on Christianity ➸
| BOOK TITLE | AUTHOR | COMMENT BY ALAN BAUGHCUM |
GENRE |
| 1776 | David McCullough | Great! Has McCullough ever written a bad book? Doubt it … | NONFICTION |
| 1876 | Gore Vidal | I like reading Vidal but be careful about taking his (or other) historical fiction as straightforward and accurate history. | FICTION |
| 1984 | George Orwell | Powerful, and important book on the dangers of government control, almost always undertaken for the “good” of the governed. | FICTION |
| 11/22/63 | Stephen King | Is there a person you would travel back in time to kill in order to change history? Lenin? Mao? Hitler? | FICTION |
| “The Bridge” by Hart Crane, The Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon | Hart Crane | From New York Review of Books: Reviews of the poem were generally positive, and one or two were glowing. But the ones that mattered most to Crane were by his close literary friends and former advocates, the poet-critics Allen Tate and Yvor Winters, and their assessments, published prominently, were withering. While acknowledging the poem’s extraordinary rhetorical power, they both saw it as an intellectual failure. Crane had not managed the “mystical synthesis” he hoped for; the poem was a mess, without a coherent structure of myth or belief to support its willed optimism about American culture. It proved romanticism was a dead end, Whitman was a disastrous influence, and it was impossible to write a modern epic poem, among other chastening lessons. Crane’s ambition, in their view, had turned out to be “too impossible,” just as he’d feared. It’s not clear that the poem has ever fully escaped that judgment, if only because Crane himself seemed to submit to it. At least, that’s one inference from the fact that he wrote almost no more poetry … | FICTION |
| 10 Days That Shook The World | John Reed | A book with an enormous impact … And unintentionally an example of how reporters can be led astray by their own passions and enthusiasms … Reed celebrates the Russian revolution that led to possibly the most horrendous regime in the history of regimes … | NONFICTION |
| 100 Years of Solitude | Gabriel Marquez | Odd book, get used to it … It is worth it … Funny and very well written, but this much awarded author does not need me to tell him that … | FICTION |
| A Beautiful Mind | Sylvia Nasar | I enjoyed the book and the movie about a brilliant mathematician whose mind betrays him … | NONFICTION |
| A Bend In The River | V.S. Naipaul | Very well-written … | FICTION |
| A Brief History of Time | Stephen Hawking | I read it and am glad I read it but the science and math is beyond me … | NONFICTION |
| A City So Grand: Boston 1850-1900 | Stephen Puleo | If you love Boston, you will love this book about Boston at its peak of influence and affluence … | NONFICTION |
| A Civil Action | Jonathon Harr | Great story about pollution, greed, ego and so much more … | NONFICTION |
| A Confederacy of Dunces | John Kennedy Toole | Funny and very southern … | FICTION |
| A Death in Vienna: A Novel | Frank Tallis | I enjoyed it as a good story … | FICTION |
| A Fan’s Notes | Frederick Exley | From Amazon: This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure’s nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair. | FICTION |
| A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway | As a penurious grad student, I courted my faculty wife by reading Hemingway to her … She thought it was very romantic … I love Hemingway. | FICTION |
| A Flag for sunrise | Robert Stone | From Amazon: In the Central American country of Tecan, Americans, terrorists, revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, imported agents and common men and women become involved in a maelstrom of upheaval, terror, and destruction | FICTION |
| A Gentleman in Moscow | Amor Towles | Everybody in my book group except me thought this was a good book … It is well-written … I just could not buy into the notion that the Communist regime would allow an “enemy of the state” to live a long life in the heart of the capital. | FICTION |
| A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America | Stacy Schiff | Franklin: what a guy!! And this is one of those books that tell you how close a call it was that we won our independence from England … Well, ok, I am religious-minded but honestly it did seem like God had us in the betting pool … | NONFICTION |
| A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League | Ron Suskind | From Amazon: In 1993, Cedric Jennings was a bright and ferociously determined honor student at Ballou, a high school in one of Washington D.C.’s most dangerous neighborhoods, where the dropout rate was well into double digits and just 80 students out of more than 1,350 boasted an average of B or better … Cedric Jennings’s driving ambition—which was fully supported by his forceful mother—was to attend a top college. In September 1995, after years of near superhuman dedication, he realized that ambition when he began as a freshman at Brown University. But he didn’t leave his struggles behind. He found himself unprepared for college: he struggled to master classwork and fit in with the white upper-class students. Having traveled too far to turn back, Cedric was left to rely on his intelligence and his determination to maintain hope in the unseen—a future of acceptance and reward. In this updated edition, A Hope in the Unseen chronicles Cedric’s odyssey during his last two years of high school, follows him through his difficult first year at Brown, and tells the story of his subsequent successes in college and the world of work. Eye-opening, sometimes humorous, and often deeply moving … | NONFICTION |
| A Horse Walks into a Bar | David Grossman | One of the most depressing books I have ever read. Well-written, but very dark. | FICTION |
| A House for Mr. Biswas | V.S. Naipaul | From Amazon: In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning death of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on whom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduous– and endless–struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark comedy of manners, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man’s quest for autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas. | FICTION |
| A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East | David Fromkin | From Amazon: In A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin reveals how and why the Allies drew lines on an empty map that remade the geography and politics of the Middle East. Focusing on the formative years of 1914 to 1922, when all seemed possible, he delivers in this sweeping and magisterial book the definitive account of this defining time, showing how the choices narrowed and the Middle East began along a road that led to the conflicts and confusion that continue to this day. | NONFICTION |
| A Perfect Spy | John LeCarre | From Amazon: When British intelligence agent Magnus Pym disappears, two desperate searches are initiated–the hunt of agents, East and West, for the missing spy and Pym’s own quest to uncover the mysteries of his own past | FICTION |
| A Prayer for the City | Buzz Bissinger | A story of trying to save a city … Ed Rendell and Philly … | NONFICTION |
| A Room of One’s Own | Virginia Woolf | From Amazon: A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women’s colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled “Women and Fiction,” and hence the essay, are considered non-fiction. The essay is generally seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy. | NONFICTION |
| A Sense of Place: Listening to Americans | David Lamb | From Amazon re this 1993 book: Provides a close-up look at rural America through the eyes of farmers, ranchers, cowboys, hobos, and other colorful characters who speak candidly about their threatened way of life | NONFICTION |
| A Short History of Nearly Everything | Bill Bryson | Other than his book about the Appalachian Trail, I am just not a fan of this writer … | NONFICTION |
| A Thousand Acres | Jane Smiley | I like Jane Smiley but her books take some time to read. From a review by a women’s book group posted on Amazon: This is a very well-written book with lots of depth, wit, word play, and emotion. The characters are well developed and their growth is a well-paced, slow reveal. There is a good tension and pacing to the pages. The subject matter may seem dull (the central female characters live mostly in a farm setting with their family, and the major crisis deals with family trauma) but the story is anything but that. Despite the rural and bucolic background, this book is a page-turning, taunt tale. There are many layers to these characters that unfold slowly and deliciously. The discussion went on for hours. We, of course, discussed the obvious connection to Shakespeare’s King Lear – and that particular topic was engrossing. Smiley presents the older two daughters (in the play, they were the one-dimensional villains) in a more sympathetic light… giving depth and reason to their decisions. There were many topics here that we picked apart including family dynamics, feminist angles, money, hierarchy, destiny, history, and Americana. Six out of seven women felt that the book was very readable, with one member siting it as a difficult or challenging read. | FICTION |
| A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It | Stephen Kinzer | From Amazon: The story of Paul Kagame, a refugee who, after a generation of exile, found his way home. Learn about President Kagame, who strives to make Rwanda the first middle-income country in Africa, in a single generation. In this adventurous tale, learn about Kagame’s early fascination with Che Guevara and James Bond, his years as an intelligence agent, his training in Cuba and the United States, the way he built his secret rebel army, his bloody rebellion, and his outsized ambitions for Rwanda. | NONFICTION |
| A Turn in the South | V. S. Naipaul | From Amazon: his first book about the United States, is a revealing, disturbing, elegiac book about the American South — from Atlanta to Charleston, Tallahassee to Tuskegee, Nashville to Chapel Hill. | FICTION |
| A Year in Provence | Peter Mayle | A very enjoyable read … | NONFICTION |
| Adam Bede | George Eliot | A great book by a great writer. | FICTION |
| Adaptation To Life | George Vaillant | From Amazon: Between 1939 and 1942, one of America’s leading universities recruited 268 of its healthiest and most promising undergraduates to participate in a revolutionary new study of the human life cycle. The originators of the program, which came to be known as the Grant Study, felt that medical research was too heavily weighted in the direction of disease, and their intent was to chart the ways in which a group of promising individuals coped with their lives over the course of many years. Why do some of us cope so well with the portion life offers us, while others, who have had similar advantages (or disadvantages), cope badly or not at all? Are there ways we can effectively alter those patterns of behavior that make us unhappy, unhealthy, and unwise? | NONFICTION |
| Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent | Blaine Harden | Excellent book abut Africa, even if written by a non-African western journalist … May seem a little dated at this point but insightful and well-written … | NONFICTION |
| Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China | Evan Osnos | A very helpful look inside the changes roiling the modern China … | NONFICTION |
| Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village | Ronald Blythe | From Amazon: Woven from the words of the inhabitants of a small Suffolk village in the 1960s, Akenfield is a masterpiece of twentieth-century English literature, a scrupulously observed and deeply affecting portrait of a place and people and a now vanished way of life. Ronald Blythe’s wonderful book raises enduring questions about the relations between memory and modernity, nature and human nature, silence and speech. | NONFICTION |
| All The King’s Men | Robert Penn Warren | Good book and a warning against charismatic populist political candidates … | FICTION |
| All the Light We Cannot See | Anthony Doerr | A very good novel … Read it! | FICTION |
| All the Pretty Horses | Cormac McCarthy | Well-done by a good writer but a little sad … | FICTION |
| All the Shahs Men | Stephen Kinzer | I liked the history in this book but I remember having to push myself to read it … Somehow it did not grab me … | NONFICTION |
| American Emperor | David O. Stewart | Someday I will get around to reading this book … | NONFICTION |
| American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America | Colin Woodard | A very interesting and thought-provoking book. Ok, so it is guilty of geographical determinism but it really does seem to explain a lot about modern American politics. | NONFICTION |
| American Pastoral | Philip Roth | From Amazon: American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American’s rise and fall—of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. Seymour “Swede” Levov—a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father’s Newark glove factory—comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even the most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. With vigorous realism, Roth takes us back to the conflicts and violent transitions of the 1960s. This is a book about loving—and hating—America. It’s a book about wanting to belong—and refusing to belong—to America. It sets the desire for an American pastoral—a respectable life of space, calm, order, optimism, and achievement—against the indigenous American Berserk. | FICTION |
| American Prison | Shane Bauer | A very scary picture of incarceration in America … The author may be right that private prisons are bad places but it’s not clear that governmentally-owned prisons are safe or well-run either. | NONFICTION |
| Amongst Women | John McGahern | From Amazon: Michael Moran is an old Irish Republican whose life was forever transformed by his days of glory as a guerrilla leader in the Irish War of Independence. Moran is till fighting—with his family, his friends, and even himself—in this haunting testimony to the enduring qualities of the human spirit. | FICTION |
| An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us | James Carroll | A powerful book about war and fathers and sons … | NONFICTION |
| An Officer and a Spy: A novel | Robert Harris | A fabulous account of the Dreyfus affair … The mindset of the French military is wondrously portrayed in its full incompetence … | FICTION |
| Angela’s Ashes | Frank McCourt | McCourt is a great writer but his subject matter is so depressing I have a hard time reading his stuff … | FICTION |
| Angle of Repose | Wallace Stegner | A good book by a good regional American writer | FICTION |
| Antigone | Sophocles | Read it! Just read it … It’s fabulous. | FICTION |
| Appointment in Samarra | John O’Hara | Well-done … | FICTION |
| April 1865: The Month That Saved America | Jay Winik | From Amazon: One month in 1865 witnessed the frenzied fall of Richmond, a daring last-ditch Southern plan for guerrilla warfare, Lee’s harrowing retreat, and then, Appomattox. It saw Lincoln’s assassination just five days later and a near-successful plot to decapitate the Union government, followed by chaos and coup fears in the North, collapsed negotiations and continued bloodshed in the South, and finally, the start of national reconciliation. In the end, April 1865 emerged as not just the tale of the war’s denouement, but the story of the making of our nation. | NONFICTION |
| Arabia: A Journey Through The Labyrinth | Jonathon Raban | A now-dated account of the author’s journey through Arab countries … | NONFICTION |
| Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age | Kevin Boyle | Ossian Sweet was a black man who moved into his own home in a Detroit suburb and faced an angry mob as a result … He was tried for murder … Defense attorney Clarence Darrow’s speech on Sweet’s behalf in court was one I used in oratorical contests in high school, with no great success … | NONFICTION |
| Artemis | Andy Weir | Not as good as the The Martian | FICTION |
| As I Lay Dying | William Faulkner | Faulkner is a great author and his stories about the importance of place and family and the persistence of sin is worth the difficulty of slogging through his particular style of writing. | FICTION |
| As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as A Girl | John Colapinta | How did I miss reading this book? | NONFICTION |
| At Play In the Fields of the Lord | Peter Matthiessen | Another book I should have read and will someday … From Amazon: In a malarial outpost in the South American rain forest, two misplaced gringos converge and clash in this novel from the National Book Award-winning author. Martin Quarrier has come to convert the elusive Niaruna Indians to his brand of Christianity. Lewis Moon, a stateless mercenary who is himself part Indian, has come to kill them on the behalf of the local comandante. Out of this struggle Peter Matthiessen creates an electrifying moral thriller | FICTION |
| Aunt Julia & The Scriptwriter | Mario Vargas Llosa | A fun read! | FICTION |
| Babbit | Sinclair Lewis | I read this book a long time ago, and have absolutely no memory of it … | FICTION |
| Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup | John Carreyrou | Hustle and lies in Silicon Valley … Characters so scummy that I could only get through about half of this story about a high-tech startup … | NONFICTION |
| Ball Four | Jim Bouton | A very fun take on professional baseball …. | NONFICTION |
| Barabbas | Par Lagererkvist | To my amazement I enjoyed reading this imaginative telling of what happened to Barabbas after Pilate decided to crucify Jesus instead of Barabbas … Raises interesting questions for our faith … | FICTION |
| Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco | B. Burrough/ John Heylar | From Library Journal: The leveraged buyout of the RJR Nabisco Corporation for $25 billion is a landmark in American business history, a story of avarice on an epic scale. Two versions of the fierce competition for the largest buyout ever consummated are presented by skilled journalists with contrasting styles. Burrough and Helyar are clearly fascinated with the personalities of the players in the deal and with the trappings of corporate wealth. The restless, flamboyant personality of Ross Johnson, CEO of RJR Nabisco, is portrayed as the key to the events that were to unfold. The colorful description of all of the players and the events will likely have broad appeal. | NONFICTION |
| Barren Ground | Ellen Glasgow | From Amazon: Dorinda Oakley, daughter of a land‐poor farmer in Virginia, at 20 goes to work in Nathan Pedlar’s store. She falls in love with Jason Greylock, weak‐willed son of the village doctor, and forgets her purpose of helping her father to rebuild the farm, but soon before their planned wedding Jason is forced to marry a former fiancée. Bitterly disillusioned and pregnant, Dorinda seeks work in New York City … | FICTION |
| Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity | Katherine Boo | A well-done portrait of the changes in India that have made such a difference in the way a lot of people live … | FICTION |
| Being Mortal | Atul Gawande | A good book but depressing to read if you are, like me, in my seventies … A story of how we age, decline and die … | NONFICTION |
| Bel Canto | Ann Patchett | From Amazon: Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers. | FICTION |
| Beloved | Toni Morrison | Not my favorite Morrison novel but an enjoyable read … I really like Song of Solomon a lot … | FICTION |
| Benjamin Franklin | Edmund Morgan | Most Americans, including me, do not know nearly enough about the people and times and events surrounding our nation’s formation … This book is a serious history by a noted historian that helps improve the reader’s knowledge of Franklin, a complicated man indeed … | NONFICTION |
| Beowulf | Seamus Heaney | Literally, a classic of English literature! Take your time reading it and enjoy the language … | FICTION |
| Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen | Mary Norris | For all you grammar and punctuation nuts! From a long-time editor at The New Yorker … | NONFICTION |
| Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS | Joby Warrick | The rise of violent movements like ISIS all have a sameness about them, an uninteresting sameness … | NONFICTION |
| Bleeding Edge: A Novel | Thomas Pynchon | My book group colleagues seem to like Pynchon but I have to struggle to read him … | FICTION |
| Blindness | Jose Saramago | Well-written but odd … hard to explain why I liked it … | FICTION |
| Blood and Thunder | Hampton Sides | An eye-opening history of the American West — everybody should read this book … | NONFICTION |
| Blue Highways: A Journey into America | William Least Heat Moon | From Amazon: William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about “those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi.”
His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience. |
NONFICTION |
| Bonfire of the Vanities | Tom Wolfe | Wolfe is a very entertaining writer … I wonder how history will judge his literary efforts in the long-run … Too journalistic in style to stand up over time? | FICTION |
| Book of Laughter and Forgetting | Milas Kundera | A great writer but the book is not as good as The Unbearable Lightness of Being … | FICTION |
| Born a Crime | Trevor Noah | Readable and instructive about growing up under South African laws restricting freedom on the basis of race … | NONFICTION |
| Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community | Robert Putnam | Most people regard this as an important book on declining social capital in American communities … I have reservations about his ability to define the term and to measure it and therefore about his conclusions. | NONFICTION |
| Boys in the Boat | Daniel James Brown | A good and enjoyable book about athletics and overcoming odds. | NONFICTION |
| Brave Companions: Portraits in History | David McCullough | From Amazon: Here are Alexander von Humboldt, whose epic explorations of South America surpassed the Lewis and Clark expedition; Harriet Beecher Stowe, “the little woman who made the big war”; Frederic Remington; the extraordinary Louis Agassiz of Harvard; Charles and Anne Lindbergh, and their fellow long-distance pilots Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Beryl Markham; Harry Caudill, the Kentucky lawyer who awakened the nation to the tragedy of Appalachia; and David Plowden, a present-day photographer of vanishing America. | NONFICTION |
| Broca’s Brain | Carl Sagan | Sagan was a great scientist and a very good writer. This book is a good example of both skill sets. | FICTION |
| Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture | Ross King | I enjoyed reading about the history of Florence and the building of the dome, especially after having visited and seen it … Breathtaking … | NONFICTION |
| Burger’s Daughter | Nadine Gordimer | The difficulties of being white and anti-apartheid in South Africa … | FICTION |
| Cabin: Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine | Lou Ureneck | Meh. | NONFICTION |
| Cadillac Desert | Marc Reisner | The story of water in the American West identifying the main players, the conflicts and the resulting problems of declining water reserves. | NONFICTION |
| Café Europa | Slavenka Drakulic | Post-Communist Eastern Europe in the 1990s … | NONFICTION |
| Call It Sleep | Henry Roth | Life on New York’s Lower East Side as the immigrants saw it in the late 1800s through the early 1900s. | FICTION |
| Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? | Roz Chast | Another graphic book I struggled to read … | FICTION |
| Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) | Joseph Heller | A powerful book about corruption and evil in a war fought to defeat wickedness and oppression. | FICTION |
| Cello Suites | Eric Siblin | From Amazon: three centuries of intrigue, politics, and passion. Part biography, part music history, and part mystery, The Cello Suites weaves together three dramatic narratives: Bach’s composition of the suites and the manuscript’s subsequent disappearance in the eighteenth century; Pablo Casals’s historic discovery of the music in Spain in the late nineteenth century, and his popularization of the suites several decades later; and the author’s own infatuation with the suites at the dawn of the twenty-first century. | NONFICTION |
| Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom | Tom Ricks | Not sure why this book was written. | NONFICTION |
| Citizen Soldiers | Stephen Ambrose | Ambrose’ book on the Lewis and Clark expedition is fabulous. Someday I will read this book on WWII soldiers. | NONFICTION |
| Citizens of London | Lynne Olson | Entertaining and educational … A kind of backstory to the decision-makers in London during WWII | NONFICTION |
| Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee | Michael Korda | I love Robert E. Lee, warts and all … But cannot seem to remember reading this book … | NONFICTION |
| Cold Mountain | Charles Frazier | A very sad novel about a Confederate soldier seeking to return to the woman he loves … | FICTION |
| Come and Go, Molly Snow | Mary Ann Taylor-Hall | A well-written book about the difficulties faced by a woman blue-grass singer in that very masculine world. | FICTION |
| Common Ground | Anthony Lukas | Powerful book that everyone interested in race relations and civil rights should read … | NONFICTION |
| Confessions of Zeno | Italo Svevo | From Amazon: Zeno —the narrator and eponymous hero— on the surface is a hypochondriac, neurotic, quirky, solipsistic, self-examining and self-serving bourgeois; deep down, however, he is love and goodness incarnate, not by design but by the whims of life. | FICTION |
| Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story | Kurt Eichwald | Written in the style of a novel, this is an account of the Enron scandal and its world-wide reach … | NONFICTION |
| Content of Our Character | Shelby Steele | An important book by a wise man … | FICTION |
| Corelli’s Mandolin | Louis de Bernieres | From Amazon: Caught in the WWII Italian occupation of a Greek island are Pelagia, a willful, beautiful young woman, and the two suitors vying for her love: Mandras, a gentle fisherman turned ruthless guerilla, and the charming, mandolin-playing Captain Corelli, a reluctant officer of the Italian garrison on the island. Rich with loyalties and betrayals, and set against a landscape where the factual blends seamlessly with the fantastic, Corelli’s Mandolin is a passionate novel as rich in ideas as it is genuinely moving. | FICTION |
| Crossing to Safety | Wallace Stegner | A good book by a good writer … | FICTION |
| Dark Tide | Stephen Puleo | Another good book for those who like Boston history … The day that the molasses tank gave way and flooded Boston … | NONFICTION |
| Daughter of Time | Josephine Tey | One of a series of mysteries by the author featuring a Scotland Yard detective … This one about the true nature and history of Richard III … | FICTION |
| Dead Man Walking | Helen Prejean | A powerful moral indictment of capital punishment … | NONFICTION |
| Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania | Erik Larson | Well done story of the sinking that brought America into WWI … | NONFICTION |
| Death Comes to the Archbishop | Willa Cather | Well-crafted … Everybody should read at least one Willa Cather novel … | FICTION |
| Death in Venice | Thomas Mann | I guess this is a great book but I found it to be very depressing … | FICTION |
| Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President | Candice Millard | A very interesting story, well-told, about the circumstances of the shooting, incompetent medical care, and death of a very under-rated President … | NONFICTION |
| Discourses | Niccolo Machiavelli | Everyone should read this book … | NONFICTION |
| Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands | J. Amado | Enjoyable fiction … Just plain fun! | FICTION |
| Dracula | Bram Stoker | Wonderfully scary! | FICTION |
| Dreams from My Father | Barack Obama | I don’t have a very high opinion of any U. S. President since Calvin Coolidge and am in general very skeptical of the notion that politicians at this level actually write their own stuff, e.g., Ted Sorenson writing JFK’s book Why England Slept. Fans of former President 3Obama love this book. I am not certain he wrote it without help … and I think it should be regarded at best as campaign propaganda … for example, his creation of a composite girlfriend in this book based on several women whom he dated says to me that this cannot be taken as a historically accurate memoir. | NONFICTION |
| Educated | Tara Westover | Powerful book …. Hard to shake off after reading … The appalling and persistent power of ignorance, isolation, and intolerance … Not to mention violence against women … | NONFICTION |
| Eleni | Nicholas Gage | I loved this book about his mother who saved the family during the war with the Communists in Greek after WW!! Fabulous!! He also wrote the very good script for the movie, Godfather 2 | NONFICTION |
| Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History | S. C. Gwynne | Fabulous book … A history that I absolutely knew nothing about … Great stuff! | NONFICTION |
| Endless Love | Scott Spencer | From Amazon: Seventeen-year-old David Axelrod is consumed with his love for Jade Butterfield. So when Jade’s father exiles him from their home, David does the only thing he thinks is rational: He burns down their house. Sentenced to a psychiatric institution, David’s obsession metastasizes, and upon his release, he sets out to win the Butterfields back by any means necessary. | FICTION |
| Endurance : An Illustrated Account of Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic | Alfred Lansing | A great book about a great man and an absolutely incredible adventure story … All about leadership and survival in an impossible situation. | NONFICTION |
| Everybody’s Fool: A Novel | Richard Russo | Funny book! | FICTION |
| Family | J. California Cooper | I read this long ago but remember it fondly … A story of a Civil War slave whose children are sold away … We see several generations of the family through her eyes, even after she dies and becomes a ghost … | FICTION |
| Fatal Rivalry, Flodden 1513: Henry VIII, James IV and the Battle for Renaissance Britain | George Goodwin | I love the history of this period but this book seemed to me to be plodding, not exciting … | NONFICTION |
| Fatal Vision | Joe McGinnis | McGinnis became as much of an issue as the military doctor he wrote about … Not sure what to say about this book but it was hot stuff at the time … | NONFICTION |
| Fifth Business | Robertson Davies | Part of the Deptford Trilogy … From Amazon: Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man’s land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real. | FICTION |
| First In His Class | David Marannis | If only someone had written the truth about Clinton, we could have been spared so much damage to American political and public life. For example, Trump could never have been elected President if we had not suffered through eight years of minimization of Clinton’s womanizing and lying. Marannis could usefully have written this book prior to Clinton’s election but, like the rest of the media, seemed to succumb to some sort of Clinton spell and goes too easy on him … | FICTION |
| Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion | Roger Angell | My book groups seem to like reading good books, like this one, about baseball … Angell is a good writer. | NONFICTION |
| BOOK TITLE | AUTHOR | COMMENT BY ALAN BAUGHCUM |
GENRE |
| Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions | Edwin Abbott | An interesting philosophical and mathematical treatment of how cultures resist change and new knowledge … | NONFICTION |
| Fools Crow | James Welch | From Amazon: In the Two Medicine Territory of Montana, the Lone Eaters, a small band of Blackfeet Indians, are living their immemorial life. The men hunt and mount the occasional horse-taking raid or war party against the enemy Crow. The women tan the hides, sew the beadwork, and raise the children. But the year is 1870, and the whites are moving into their land. Fools Crow, a young warrior and medicine man, has seen the future and knows that the newcomers will punish resistance with swift retribution. | FICTION |
| Fools Errand | Louis Bayard | A gay romantic comedy in the Dupont Circle area of DC where the protagonist seeks to find his ideal, someone seen only briefly once … | FICTION |
| For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History | Sarah Rose | An entertaining tale of how so many of us came to be tea-drinkers … | NONFICTION |
| Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation | Joseph Ellis | Important history but not written in a way that grabs the reader … | NONFICTION |
| Frankenstein | Mary Shelley | The book is nothing like the Boris Karloff movie except that a doctor creates life from dead human tissue … Is the creature human? Why does the doctor reject the creature? Pursue it? Good book with some dated style and language that raises good questions for discussion. | FICTION |
| Freakonomics | Levitt & Dubner | Economics made fun! | NONFICTION |
| Freedom: A Novel | Jonathan Franzen | From Amazon: Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter’s dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man—she was doing her small part to build a better world.
But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz—outré rocker and Walter’s college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become “a very different kind of neighbor,” an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street’s attentive eyes? |
FICTION |
| Friday Night Lights | H. G. Bissinger | the dream of high school football in Texas | NONFICTION |
| From Beruit to Jerusalem | Thomas Friedman | From Wiki: chronicling his days as a reporter in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War and in Jerusalem through the first year of the Intifada. | NONFICTION |
| Future Shock | Alvin Tofler | Why did we read this book? | NONFICTION |
| Galileo’s Daughter | Dava Sobel | Well done book … | NONFICTION |
| Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World | Jack Weatherford | Everybody should read this book! A history that most people know nothing about … The invasion from the steppes of Asia was much more of a positive factor in developing globalism than I ever knew … | NONFICTION |
| Genie | Russ Rymer | A very powerful story of a young girl who grew up without being spoken to or speaking … And the heart-rending struggle to help her achieve language … One of the most powerful stories I have ever read. | NONFICTION |
| Germinal | Emile Zola | Miners in northern France strike to oppose wage cuts … The leader hopes for the “germination” of a new society … | FICTION |
| Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 | Steve Coll | A good and important history … | NONFICTION |
| Gilgamesh | unknown author | The first book/poem ever written? A story everyone should read, although I think some overdraw the comparisons between the flood story here and the one in Genesis. | FICTION |
| Girl with a Pearl Earring | Tracy Chevalier | From Amazon: Girl with a Pearl Earring tells the story of sixteen-year-old Griet, whose life is transformed by her brief encounter with the painting genius, Vermeer . . . even as she herself is immortalized in canvas and oil. | FICTION |
| Girl, Interrupted | Susanna Kaysen | From an Amazon review: In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she’d never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years in the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. | NONFICTION |
| Glittering Images | Susan Howatch | From Amazon: Charged by Canterbury with the spiritual monitoring of a wayward bishop, Dr. Charles Ashworth, a young, driven Anglican minister, encounters a genteel world whose deeply embedded apostasy forces him to confront his own inner demons | FICTION |
| Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York | Francis Spufford | I very much liked this novel set in the very early days of New York City … When there was still a wooden wall around it! | FICTION |
| Good Enough to Dream | Roger Kahn | A book about Class A baseball written by a guy I just love to read … | NONFICTION |
| Growing Up | Russell Baker | Baker’s memoir…Does anyone now remember that Russell Baker was a leading humorist writer of his time? | NONFICTION |
| Growing Up: Limiting Adolescence in a World Desperate for Adults | Frank C. Strasburger | A good book by a good friend. | NONFICTION |
| Guerillas | V.S. Naipaul | Third world peoples may react badly to First Worlders slumming in their countries … | FICTION |
| Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | Jared Diamond | Another book that everyone needs to read. The author’s range of knowledge is huge and very impressive … | NONFICTION |
| Hard Times | Charles Dickens | Not my favorite by Dickens but pretty much all of his stuff is worth reading … | FICTION |
| Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone | J. K. Rowling | I love the series about Harry Potter and have reread every book at least twice … But I am not sure how well it functions as a vehicle to promote discussion in a book group | FICTION |
| Heat | Bill Buford | An amateur tries to learn kitchen skills from brilliant and famous chefs … With some success! | NONFICTION |
| Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls | Laura Dassow Walls | I liked this book a lot, much to my surprise. Like me, Thoreau also failed in his attempt to climb Maine’s Mt. Katahdin. | NONFICTION |
| Hero of the Empire: Boer War and Making of Winston Churchill | Candice Millard | Churchill was the luckiest human being who ever lived. | NONFICTION |
| Hillbilly Elegy | J.D. Vance | Ok, but I know something of the life of poor white trash described in this book so I was not bowled over … | FICTION |
| History and Hope: Essays on History and the English Civil War | C. V. Wedgwood | From Publishers Weekly: Distinguished British historian Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgwood here assembles 44 of her essays, articles and lectures dating from 1942-78, dealing mainly with the period of her specialization: 17th century England of the civil wars. Among the pieces are perceptive portrait-assessments of Kings Charles I and II, Martin Luther and Oliver Cromwell, Machiavelli and Cardinal Richelieu, William Penn and Edward Gibbon. But there are also several important essays on the aims, purposes, requirements and value of history as an art, craft and discipline, pieces on Germany and Shakespeare, cavalier poetry, social comedy and Paris during the winter of 1945 | NONFICTION |
| History of God | Karen Armstrong | Do not know why I distrust her scholarship but I seem to … | NONFICTION |
| Hong Kong | Jan Morris | A now dated view of Hong Kong looking ahead to the British leaving in 1997 … | NONFICTION |
| House | Tracey Kidder | Everything you ever wanted to know about building a house … | NONFICTION |
| House of Stone | Anthony Shadid | An interesting book about a part of the world (Lebanon) I know very little about … | NONFICTION |
| House of the Spirits | Isabelle Allende | From Amazon: The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future. | FICTION |
| How the Irish Saved Civilization | Thomas Cahill | Enjoyed the book but am skeptical of the author’s thesis … | NONFICTION |
| Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | Everybody should read this book! Even if Twain did not know quite how to end the book … And, no, it is not racist … It is anti-racist. | FICTION |
| Hunger | Knut Hamsun | A very depressing book (it really is about the experience of hunger) by an author who had very pro-German views during WWII and eulogized Hitler after his death. | FICTION |
| Hunt for Red October | Tom Clancy | Best book Clancy ever wrote … Made into a very good movie. | FICTION |
| Hyperbole and a Half | Allie Brosh | Another graphic book I cannot seem to force myself to read. | FICTION |
| I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us | Ed Yong | From Amazon: With humor and erudition, the author prompts us to look at ourselves and our fellow animals less as individuals and more as the interconnected, interdependent multitudes we assuredly are. | NONFICTION |
| I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Maya Angelou | Angelou’s debut memoir deals with longing, loneliness, bigotry, and healing. | NONFICTION |
| I Married a Communist | Philip Roth | A novel of the McCarthy era … | FICTION |
| Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race & Sex in Campus | Dinesh D’Souza | D’Souza delights in giving the finger to the ideas and programs associated with liberalism. Here he argues that affirmative action and other such programs on campuses diminish human liberty. | NONFICTION |
| Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy | David O Stewart | A very interesting history that takes the reader into the machinations behind the impeachment trial of President Johnson … | NONFICTION |
| In Patagonia | Bruce Chatwin | A 1977 travel book … | NONFICTION |
| In Revere, In Those Days | Roland Merullo | From Amazon: This is the story of the Benedetto family, hardworking Italian Americans from Revere, Massachusetts, a small city on the coastline just north of Boston. Anthony Benedetto is smart, good kid born in this country who is trying to figure out how to reconcile his family’s rich, old-world heritage with the unstoppable freight train that is America and American culture. | FICTION |
| In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette | Hampton Sides | This voyage did not end as nobly as that described in Endurance … But it was a history about exploring the Artic with which I was unfamiliar … | NONFICTION |
| Independence Day | Richard Ford | Frank Bascombe’s 4th of July does not go as planned … Well-written and funny. | FICTION |
| Interpreter of Maladies | Jhumpa Lahiri | From Amazon: Navigating between the Indian traditions they’ve inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In “A Temporary Matter,” published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. | FICTION |
| Into Thin Air | Jon Krakauer | I love Jon Krakauer’s writing … Really puts the reader into the location and circumstance … This one was so good at describing the reality of climbing that it gave me nightmares. | NONFICTION |
| Intruder in the Dust | William Faulkner | From Amazon: A classic Faulkner novel which explores the lives of a family of characters in the South. An aging black who has long refused to adopt the black’s traditionally servile attitude is wrongfully accused of murdering a white man. | FICTION |
| Investment Biker: On the Road with Jim Rogers | Jim Rogers | A twenty-two-month, fifty-two-country motorcycle odyssey … Fun! | NONFICTION |
| Ironweed | William Kennedy | Sad book about homeless people … | FICTION |
| Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History | Erik Larson | A wonderful book about a hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas in 1900 with a terrible death total … A total that could have been avoided had government weather offices acted properly in disseminating warnings … | NONFICTION |
| Istanbul Passage | Joseph Kanon | A very good book that I enjoyed reading … Lots of noir-ness in this novel of post WWII Instanbul | FICTION |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte | Plain and orphaned is not a good situation for a young girl in the early 19th century England … But she is spirited, sharp-witted and bold. She goes to work at Thornfield Hall to work as governess for Mr. Rochester and one of literature’s great romances develops. | FICTION |
| Jewel In The Crown | Paul Scott | The opening novel of the The Raj Quartet, set in 1942, about the end of British rule in India … | FICTION |
| Jihad vs. McWorld: How the Planet Is Both Falling Apart and Coming Together and What This Means for Democracy | Benjamin R. Barber | The title says it all … | NONFICTION |
| Joe | Larry Brown | I remember when this book (and the movie of it) were quite controversial with its hard-drinking pro-Vietnam War protagonist … | FICTION |
| Jude The Obscure | Thomas Hardy | From the Library Journal: Jude the Obscure created storms of scandal and protest for the author upon its publication. Hardy, disgusted and disappointed, devoted the remainder of his life to poetry and never wrote another novel. Today, the material is far less shocking. Jude Fawley, a poor stone carver with aspirations toward an academic career, is thwarted at every turn and is finally forced to give up his dreams of a university education. He is tricked into an unwise marriage, and when his wife deserts him, he begins a relationship with a free-spirited cousin. With this begins the descent into bleak tragedy as the couple alternately defy and succumb to the pressures of a deeply disapproving society. Hardy’s characters have a fascinating ambiguity: they are victimized by a stern moral code, but they are also selfish and weak-willed creatures who bring on much of their own difficulties through their own vacillations and submissions to impulse. | FICTION |
| Just Mercy | Bryan Stephenson | An impressive account of truly noble work to free wrongly convicted folks on death row … | NONFICTION |
| Justine | Lawrence Durrell | From Amazon: Set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the years between World Wars I and II, Justine is the first installment in the distinguished Alexandria Quartet. Here Lawrence Durrell crafts an exquisite and challenging modern novel that explores tragic love and the fluidity of recollection. Employing a fluctuating narrative and poetic prose, Durrell recounts his unnamed narrator’s all-encompassing romance with the intoxicating Justine. The result is a matchless work that confronts all we understand and believe about sexual desire, identity, place, and the certainty of time. | FICTION |
| Kill My Mother | Jules Feiffer | A graphic novel … I find myself unable to read them … My bad, no doubt … | FICTION |
| Killer Angels | Michael Shaara | Fabulous book about the battle at Gettysburg … His son has also written a superb account of the Battle at Choisin Reservoir in Korea | NONFICTION |
| Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI | David Grann | More history that everyone needs to know … And yet more evidence for getting rid of or drastically changing the FBI. | NONFICTION |
| Kiss of the Spider Woman | Manual Puig | From a review posted on Amazon: It is set in an jail in Argentina in a time of political upheaval Two men share a jail cell. Valentin is a revolutionary. Molina is a gay window dresser who has been jailed for seducing a young boy and he is obsessed with movies. To fight boredom, Molina tells Valenin detailed stories of romantic movies. They go through a lot together including food poisoning and their friendship grows. But all is not as it seems as they live their fantasy lives and we are soon surprised to discover that one of the men is working for the government. | FICTION |
| Labyrinths | Jorge Luis Borges | I find Borges difficult to understand. From a review on Amazon: If Jorge Luis Borges had been a computer scientist, he probably would have invented hypertext and the World Wide Web. Instead, being a librarian and one of the world’s most widely read people, he became the leading practitioner of a densely layered imaginistic writing style that has been imitated throughout this century, but has no peer … Borges’ stories are redolent with an intelligence, wealth of invention, and a tight, almost mathematically formal style that challenge with mysteries and paradoxes revealed only slowly after several readings. Highly recommended to anyone who wants their imagination and intellect to be aswarm with philosophical plots, compelling conundrums, and a wealth of real and imagined literary references derived from an infinitely imaginary library. | FICTION |
| Lake Woebegone Days | Garrison Keillor | Enjoyable light fiction … | FICTION |
| Last Call | Daniel Okrent | Great history of the events leading up to Prohibition and then the repeal of Prohibition … An important cast of characters whom no one remembers anymore … An important and unfortunate history of how the U.S. came to have an income tax … | NONFICTION |
| Last Orders | Graham Swift | From Amazon: Paul can’t let an incident from his past go. When he finds out a rival detective agency played a key role in it, he drags MCM Investigations into a blood feud that they can’t hope to win. Soon they’re faced with the prospect of the company going out of business and Brigit going out of her damn mind. When long-buried bodies are discovered in the Wicklow Mountains, Bunny’s past starts closing in on him too. Who can he trust when he can’t even trust himself? When he finds himself with nowhere left to run and nobody he can turn to, will the big fella make the ultimate sacrifice to protect the ones he loves? When all that’s left is the fall, the fall is everything. And even the mighty fall. Last Orders is the thrilling conclusion of the critically acclaimed Dublin Trilogy, which melds fast-paced action with a distinctly Irish acerbic wit. It’s best enjoyed having read the other books in the series, particularly the prequel Angels in the Moonlight. | FICTION |
| Le Pere Goriot | Honore de Balzac | From Amazon: The story takes place in Paris just after the fall of Napoleon in 1819. The story focuses on three characters, Rastignac, a student who wants to try and make it big in the capital, Vautrin, an interesting and funny character who is also quite mysterious, and the main character, Goriot, that carries a heavy burden that only a loving parent would endure. The story follows the journey of Rastignac, the two daughters of Goriot, and Goriot himself who was once a wealthy businessman. It’s a heart wrenching story of a man driven to poverty by the selfless acts and the overwhelming love and devotion that he has for his two daughters, both of whom are very selfish, and do not share the same love for their father. How far will Goriot go to keep his daughters happy, and will the daughters ever appreciate the great sacrifices this man has made for them? | FICTION |
| Left Hand of Darkness | Ursula K. LeGuin | LeGuin is a good writer whose abilities are not limited to telling a good sci-fi yarn … | FICTION |
| Leviathan | Paul Auster | From a review by Library Journal: Born on August 6, 1945, Benjamin Sachs describes himself as “America’s first Hiroshima baby . . . the original bomb child.” Forty-five years later, while the FBI investigates Sachs’s mysterious death, Sachs’s friend Peter Aaron attempts to explain his even more enigmatic life–the personal and political forces that propelled his progression from Vietnam War protester to successful novelist to bomb-wielding terrorist. Auster’s inventive plot, reminiscent at times of works by Paul Theroux, con tains bizarre coincidences which affirm that “everything is connected to everything else” as well as disturbing ambiguities that proclaim the elusiveness of truth. Both suspenseful and meditative, this novel blends a crime story with a thoughtful examination of important psychological and moral questions. | FICTION |
| Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies | Laura Esquival | Great book, fabulous movie!! From Amazon: This classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother’s womb, her daughter to be weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef, using cooking to express herself and sharing recipes with readers along the way. | FICTION |
| Lincoln | Gore Vidal | Vidal is always fun to read, if snarky … | FICTION |
| Lincoln at Gettysburg | Garry Wills | A good rumination about Lincoln’s short speech at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg … But I always find Wills to be kind of a lightweight and finish reading his stuff dis-satisfied … | NONFICTION |
| Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel | George Saunders | Unreadable … | FICTION |
| Live By Night | Dennis Lehane | A good storyteller that starts with gangsters in Boston and ends up in Florida and Cuba | FICTION |
| Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time | Dava Sobel | An important history …. How very difficult it is to solve scientific problems and why it can take some time for that to happen … | NONFICTION |
| Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 | Tom Friedman | A collection of Friedman’s columns about 9/11. | NONFICTION |
| Lord Jim | Joseph Conrad | Jim a young British seaman becomes first mate on the Patna, a ship full of pilgrims travelling to Mecca for the hajj. When the ship starts rapidly taking on water and disaster seems imminent, Jim joins his captain and other crew members in abandoning the ship and its passengers. A few days later, they are picked up by a British ship. However, the Patna and its passengers are later also saved, and the reprehensible actions of Jim and the crew are exposed. Later in life Jim becomes a factor on a remote inland settlement with a mixed population. While living on the island he acquires the title ‘Tuan’ (‘Lord’). Here, Jim wins the respect of the people and becomes their leader. The ending satisfies the purpose of expiating Jim’s guilt for the Patna incident and making him a hero for accepting responsibility for a killing he committed in defense of his people. | FICTION |
| Lost Horizon | James Hilton | A classic … The story of the discovery of the fictional Shangri-La | FICTION |
| Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language | Eva Hoffman | From Amazon: moves from Hoffman’s childhood in Cracow, Poland to her adolescence in Vancouver, British Columbia to her university years in Texas and Massachusetts to New York City, where she becomes a writer and an editor at the New York Times Book Review. Its multi-layered narrative encompasses many themes: the defining power of language; the costs and benefits of changing cultures, the construction of personal identity, and the profound consequences, for a generation of post-war Jews like Hoffman, of Nazism and Communism. | NONFICTION |
| Love In The Ruins | Walker Percy | I really like Walker Percy … Probably not quite as important a writer as Faulkner but certainly has a style that is easier to read … | FICTION |
| Love in the Time of Cholera | Gabriel Garcia Marquez | A great writer writes elegantly and eloquently about love and marriage … | FICTION |
| Lying | Sissela Bok | A good book to provoke discussion … If memory serves, written at a time when the elites were bending themselves into moral pretzels in an effort to minimize/justify Clinton’s lying … | NONFICTION |
| Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | Great book! | FICTION |
| Madison’s Gift: Five Partnerships That Built America | David Stewart | Good history … Fine for having on your nightstand for pre-sleep reading … | NONFICTION |
| Making of the Atomic Bomb | Richard Rhodes | A powerful combination of history and biography of the major players in the development of the bomb … | NONFICTION |
| Manhattan Beach | Jennifer Egan | Enjoyable fiction about a woman worker in NYC during WWII and the organized crime that helped shape her life … | FICTION |
| Mao II | Don DeLillo | I cannot read DeLillo … Cannot make sense of his stuff. | FICTION |
| March | Geraldine Brooks | Well written … | FICTION |
| March of Folly | Barbara Tuchman | Good history, and readable … | NONFICTION |
| Mariette in Ecstasy | Ron Hansen | From Publishers Weekly: In this quiet and forceful study of religious passion, Hansen places an extraordinary spiritual experience in the center of a deftly evoked natural world, namely, rural upstate New York just after the turn of the century. At summer’s end, when she is 17, Mariette Baptiste, educated daughter of the local doctor, enters the cloistered convent of Our Lady of the Afflictions as a postulant. Her religious fervor makes an impact on the small community of nuns. Their ordered life is disrupted, however, as Mariette begins to fall into a series of trances from which she awakens with stigmata, which heal as spontaneously as they appear. The feelings of skepticism, jealousy and adoration evoked in the nuns, Mariette’s own response and that of the Mother Superior are delicately, indelibly drawn in Hansen’s authoritative prose. | FICTION |
| Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins | Ian Tattersall | From Amazon: 50,000 years ago – merely a blip in evolutionary time – our Homo sapiens ancestors were competing for existence with several other human species, just as their own precursors had been doing for millions of years. Yet something about our species separated it from the pack, and led to its survival while the rest became extinct. So just what was it that allowed Homo sapiens to become Masters of the Planet? Curator Emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, Ian Tattersall takes us deep into the fossil record to uncover what made humans so special. Surveying a vast field from initial bipedality to language and intelligence, Tattersall argues that Homo sapiens acquired a winning combination of traits that was not the result of long term evolutionary refinement. Instead it emerged quickly, shocking their world and changing it forever. | NONFICTION |
| Mayflower | Nathan Philbrick | None of us know enough about the very early history of this country … This book goes a long (and enjoyable) way towards remedying that ignorance. | NONFICTION |
| Memoirs of a Geisha | Arthur Golden | A plausible female protagonist in a world now gone | FICTION |
| Memories of the Ford Administration | John Updike | A college professor writes about his memories of the Ford Administration while struggling to write a biography of President Buchanan. | FICTION |
| Men At Work | George Will | Columnist and political advisor George Wills writes a good book about the sport he loves, professional baseball | NONFICTION |
| Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming | Naomi Oreskes & Erik Conway | A sobering warning of the extent to which we should examine the motives (and checking accounts) of scientists hired to speak on important public issues. | NONFICTION |
| Michael Harrington: Speaking American | Robert Gorman | I have no memory of this book and can find no reviews of it … My advice is to run screaming away … I once had to read a Harrington book in which he seemed to have collected the minutes of the meeting of every socialist meeting he ever attended … one of the worst experiences of my life. | NONFICTION |
| Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology | George Gilder | An early look at the power that information technology gives to the individual … Gilder is an economist who emphasizes the entrepreneurial impulse. | NONFICTION |
| Middle Passage | Charles Johnson | From Amazon: It is 1830. Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave and irrepressible rogue, is desperate to escape unscrupulous bill collectors and an impending marriage to a priggish schoolteacher. He jumps aboard the first boat leaving New Orleans, the Republic, a slave ship en route to collect members of a legendary African tribe, the Allmuseri. Thus begins a daring voyage of horror and self-discovery. | FICTION |
| Middlesex | Jeffrey Eugenides | From Amazon: In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls’ school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them–along with Callie’s failure to develop–leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all. The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia … to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie’s grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite. | FICTION |
| Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil | John Berendt | Others seem to like this homage to oddballs in Savannah GA better than I … But it is a good read. | NONFICTION |
| Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787 | Catherine Bowen | From Amazon: This is the story of that stormy, brilliant session of 1787 in Philadelphia which saw the birth of the Constitution of the United States. Looked at straight from the records, the Federal Convention is startlingly fresh and new. | NONFICTION |
| Moby Dick | Herman Melville | Great book, just skip the parts about turning a whale into oil … | NONFICTION |
| More Die of Heartbreak | Saul Bellow | Bellow is a unique American voice. From Amazon: In More Die of Heartbreak, our erratic narrator explains to his audience that he must abandon Paris for the Midwest. Of course, Kenneth merely wants to be closer to his beloved uncle, the world-famous botanist Benn Crader, to receive the older man’s worldly wisdom. The mercurial Benn, however, struggles to put down roots himself, constantly departing for the forests of India, the mountains of China, the jungles of Brazil, or even the Antarctic. Why does he travel so much? Submerging himself in botanical studies seem insufficient, and he hunts relentlessly for more carnal satisfaction. More Die of Heartbreak has all the humor of a French farce, and all the brooding darkness of a Hitchcock film. From this tragicomedy Bellow unravels a brilliant and sinister examination of contemporary sexuality, asking why even the most noble pursuits often end in mundane disillusionment. | FICTION |
| Morgan’s Passing | Ann Tyler | From Amazon: Morgan Gower works at Cullen’s hardware store in north Baltimore. He has seven daughters and a warmhearted wife, but as he journeys into the gray area of middle age, he finds his household growing tedious. Then Morgan meets two lovely young newlyweds under some rather extreme circumstances–and all three discover that no one’s heart is safe… | FICTION |
| Mortal Stakes | Robert Parker | Oh, how I miss Robert Parker and his detective novels about Spenser in Boston and evirons! Wonderful series of books but I am not sure how valuable they would be for discussion in a book group. Race relations (Hawk and Spenser)? Relations between the sexes (Spenser and Susan)? Violence (how do we justify our enjoyment of Spenser’s and Hawk’s killings and beatings)? Lots of good dialogue and lots of hard-edged gumshoe talk … | FICTION |
| Mountains Beyond Mountains | Tracey Kidder | A good introduction to a helluva of an interesting guy, Dr. Paul Farmer … | NONFICTION |
| Murder in the Cathedral | T. S. Eliot | A classic … Read it! | FICTION |
| My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel | Ari Shavit | A valuable look at Israel and its history by a Jewish journalist. | NONFICTION |
| Name of the Rose | Umberto Eco | Enjoyed the book but am sure I missed a lot of the symbolism … | FICTION |
| Nickel and Dimed- On Not Getting by in America | Barbara Ehrenreich | Bad popular economics … A journalist documents how hard it is to live on a minimum wage … Duh!!! … The minimum wage was not designed to be a living wage, and in fact is a sure way to guarantee that people lose their job (I did!), to protect labor unions from competition, and in South Africa to protect white workers from competition from blacks. | NONFICTION |
| No Longer Enemies, Not Yet Friends: An American Soldier Returns to Vietnam | Frederick Downs | A former lieutenant who fought in Vietnam describes his emotional journey to reconciliation with his former enemies while participating in a humanitarian aid program in Vietnam | NONFICTION |
| No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II | Doris Kearns Goodwin | From Amazon: Goodwin masterfully weaves together a striking number of story lines—Eleanor and Franklin’s marriage and remarkable partnership, Eleanor’s life as First Lady, and FDR’s White House and its impact on America as well as on a world at war. Goodwin effectively melds these details and stories into an unforgettable and intimate portrait of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and of the time during which a new, modern America was born. | NONFICTION |
| Noble house: A Novel of Contemporary Hong Kong | James Clavell | From Amazon: The setting is Hong Kong, 1963. The action spans scarcely more than a week, but these are days of high adventure: from kidnapping and murder to financial double-dealing and natural catastrophes-fire, flood, landslide. Yet they are days filled as well with all the mystery and romance of Hong Kong-the heart of Asia-rich in every trade…money, flesh, opium, power. | FICTION |
| Notes from the Underground and The Grand Inquisitor | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | I don’t think I am smart enough for Russian novels. Either there are so many characters, I get lost … Or the subject matter is so dense/profound that I get lost … Either way it’s a struggle for me to read this stuff … But you should be better than I am and read this one specially. From Amazon: The apology and confession of a minor mid-19th-century Russian official, “Notes from Underground” is a half-desperate, half-mocking political critique and a powerful, at times absurdly comical, account of man’s breakaway from society and descent ‘underground’. | FICTION |
| Offshore | Penelope Fitzgerald | From Amazon: Offshore is a dry, genuinely funny novel, set among the houseboat community who rise and fall with the tide of the Thames on Battersea Reach. Living between land and water, they feel as if they belong to neither…Maurice, a male prostitute, is the sympathetic friend to whom all the others turn. Nenna loves her husband but can’t get him back; her children run wild on the muddy foreshore. She feels drawn to Richard, the ex-RNVR city man whose converted minesweeper dominates the Reach. Is he sexually attractive because he can fold maps the right way? With this and other questions waiting to be answered, Offshore offers a delightful glimpse of the workings of an eccentric community. | FICTION |
| Olive Kitteridge | Elizabeth Strout | Well written but, jeez, depressing … | FICTION |
| On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry | William Gass | From Amazon: On Being Blue is a book about everything blue—sex and sleaze and sadness, among other things—and about everything else. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among contemporary American writers, can do. | NONFICTION |
| On Deep History & the Brain | Daniel Lord Smail | From Amazon: When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that in the wake of the Decade of the Brain and the best-selling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history. | NONFICTION |
| On Wings of Eagles: The Inspiring True Story of One Man’s Patriotic Spirit–and His Heroic Mission to Save His Countrymen | Ken Follett | An almost unbelievable story of loyalty and adventure sponsored by H. Ross Perot … | NONFICTION |
| One Man’s Chorus: The Uncollected Writings | Anthony Burgess | From Amazon: In a collection of nonfiction writings, the British novelist addresses his childhood, his experiences in Malaysia and Monaco, his own work and its critics, and the work of his contemporaries | NONFICTION |
| One of Ours | Willa Cather | From Amazon: It tells the story of the life of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native around the turn of the 20th century. The son of a successful farmer and an intensely pious mother, he is guaranteed a comfortable livelihood. Nevertheless, Wheeler views himself as a victim of his father’s success and his own inexplicable malaise. While attending Temple College, Claude tried to convince his parents that attending the State University would give him a better education. His parents ignore his pleas and Claude continues at the Christian college. After a football game, Claude meets and befriends the Erlich family, quickly adapting his own world perception to the Erlichs’ love of music, free-thinking, and debate. His career at university and his friendship with the Erlichs are dramatically interrupted, however, when his father expands the family farm and Claude is obligated to leave university and operate part of the family farm. | FICTION |
| One Summer: America, 1927 | Bill Bryson | Lightweight stuff … | NONFICTION |
| Oscar Wilde | Richard Ellman | Good book! Wilde was a talent and a royal pain with disturbing views on sex with children … From Amazon: the definitive biography of the tortured poet and playwright and the last book by renowned biographer and literary critic Richard Ellmann. Ellmann dedicated two decades to the research and writing of this biography, resulting in a complex and richly detailed portrait of Oscar Wilde. Ellman captures the wit, creativity, and charm of the psychologically and sexually complicated writer, as well as the darker aspects of his personality and life. Covering everything from Wilde’s rise as a young literary talent to his eventual imprisonment and death in exile | NONFICTION |
| Othello | William Shakespeare | OMG! Read it … Fabulous!!! Othello, Iago, Desdemona, and more … Great story and great characters. | FICTION |
| BOOK TITLE | AUTHOR | COMMENT BY ALAN BAUGHCUM |
GENRE |
| Out Stealing Horses | Per Petterson | Again, Scandinavian authors, why are they all depressed??? | FICTION |
| Outerbridge Reach | Robert Stone | From Amazon: Now in his early forties, Annapolis graduate and Vietnam vet Owen Browne sees his final chance for greatness in an upcoming yacht race. | FICTION |
| Outlaws | George V. Higgins | I know people who think George Higgins is the bees’ knees when it comes to crime and gangster novels … From Amazon: Betrayers and betrayed are caught in a deadly web of deceit after a series of successful armored-car robberies in Massachusetts leads to murder | FICTION |
| Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha | Roddy Doyle | From Amazon: Paddy Clarke, a ten-year-old boy who longs to be a missionary, experiences life’s joys and setbacks–specifically his ma and da’s fights–as he grows up in Liffey, Ireland, in the late 1960s. | FICTION |
| Passage to India | E. M. Forster | A very good book about the tensions between the people of India and their imperial rulers … Style may seem dated to modern readers but a very good story raising lots of good issues for discussion | FICTION |
| Paul Revere’s Ride | David Hacket Fischer | A retelling of the event that you think you know … But there is so much more … And so much more to know about Revere and his role in the American Revolution | NONFICTION |
| Perfume: The Story of a Murderer | Patrick Susskind | In the slums of 18th-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift – an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille’s genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day, he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the “ultimate perfume” – the scent of a beautiful young virgin. | FICTION |
| Pigs in Heaven | Barbara Kingsolver | From Amazon: Picking up where her modern classic The Bean Trees left off, Barbara Kingsolver’s best-selling Pigs in Heaven continues the tale of Turtle and Taylor Greer, a Native American girl and her adoptive mother who have settled in Tucson, Arizona, as they both try to overcome their difficult pasts. Taking place three years after The Bean Trees, Taylor is now dating a musician named Jax and has officially adopted Turtle. But when a lawyer for the Cherokee Nation begins to investigate the adoption, their new life together begins to crumble. Depicting the clash between fierce family love and tribal law, poverty and means, abandonment and belonging, Pigs in Heaven is a morally wrenching, gently humorous work of fiction that speaks equally to the head and to the heart. | FICTION |
| Pilgrim at Tinker Creek | Annie Dillard | Great book and best book Dillard has written. For me good books are like friends, and I have revisited this old friend many times. | NONFICTION |
| Poland | James Michener | From Amazon: In this sweeping novel, James A. Michener chronicles eight tumultuous centuries as three Polish families live out their destinies. The Counts Lubonski, the petty nobles Bukowksi, and the peasants Buk are at times fiercely united, at others tragically divided. With an inspiring tradition of resistance to brutal invaders, from the barbarians to the Nazis, and a heritage of pride that burns through eras of romantic passion and courageous solidarity, their common story reaches a breathtaking culmination in the historic showdown between the ruthless Communists and rebellious farmers of the modern age. Like the heroic land that is its subject, Poland teems with vivid events, unforgettable characters, and the unfolding drama of an entire nation. | FICTION |
| Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty | Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo | Too much work for most in the book group to read through … | NONFICTION |
| Portrait of Isaac Newton | Frank Manuel | From a review posted on Amazon: I bought this almost 50 year old book because it was recommended in another 50 year old book by Theodore White. While the book does recount the discoveries of Isaac Newton, it attempts to be a psychological portrait of the man, and, at times, seems to get caught up in the postwar Freudian speak that was popular then. Since this can get a bit tedious, I was tempted to give the book three stars, but the author has done an excellent job of research and uncovered new material that helps to more fully frame Newton, and I feel this pushes it up a notch. Because of the book I feel I know Newton well enough to state that I’m glad I didn’t work for him or with him. He was a very imperfect man, which, perhaps, is why Principia is near perfection. | NONFICTION |
| Prayer for Owen Meany | John Irving | A good read although I do not seem to have enjoyed it as much as my friends think a pastor should have … | FICTION |
| Primary Colors | The author was aunonymous at the time my book group read this but was later revealed to be the columnist Joe Klein | Why anyone would have any respect at all for Bill and Hillary Clinton after reading this fictional account about their first Presidential campaign is beyond me! | FICTION |
| Prince of Tides | Pat Conroy | Conroy is ok … | FICTION |
| Prisoner Without a Name, Cell without a Number | Jacobo Timmerman | A powerful account of the oppression that afflicted Argentina under the rule of their generals … How can this stuff keep happening??? | NONFICTION |
| Psychiatric Malpractice | James L. Kelley | An interesting book by a lawyer/member of my book group … | NONFICTION |
| Rabbit at Rest | John Updike | Updike wrote a series of books on the protagonist, Rabbit … Well-written but the subject matter is kind of hum-drum. | FICTION |
| Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books | Azar Nafisi | From Amazon: Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Azar Nafisi, a bold and inspired teacher, secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; some had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they removed their veils and began to speak more freely–their stories intertwining with the novels they were reading by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, as fundamentalists seized hold of the universities and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the women in Nafisi’s living room spoke not only of the books they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. | NONFICTION |
| Red Notice | Bill Browder | The author is the son of the long-time head of the American Communist Party, now making his living in international finance. A book my book group liked very much. | NONFICTION |
| Regeneration | Pat Barker | From Amazon: Stressed by the war, poet, pacifist, and protestor Siegfried Sassoon is sent to Craiglockhart Hospital, where his views challenge the patriotic vision of Dr. William Rivers, a neurologist assigned to restore the sanity of shell-shocked soldiers. | FICTION |
| Reinventing Government: How The Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming The Public Sector | David Osborne | Have not read this but it appeals to my libertarian soul … From Amazon: A revolution is stirring in America. People are angry at governments that spend more but deliver less, frustrated with bureaucracies that give them no control, and tired of politicians who raise taxes and cut services but fail to solve the problems we face. Reinventing Government is both a call to arms in the revolt against bureaucratic malaise and a guide to those who want to build something better. It shows that there is a third way: that the options are not simply liberal or conservative, but that our systems of governance can be fundamentally reframed; that a caring government can still function as efficiently and productively as the best-run businesses. . | NONFICTION |
| Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things | M. R. O’Connor | My memory of this is that it would have been better written by a scientist than a journalist … And that it should have been a featured article in a magazine instead of a book … | NONFICTION |
| Return of Eva Peron | V.S. Naipaul | From Amazon: In four essays, Naipaul assesses contemporary “half-made societies”–those in Argentina, Trinidad, and the Congo–and compares Conrad’s vision of Africa, South America, and the Far East with his own views of those places today | FICTION |
| Return of Martin Guerre | Natalie Davis | From Amazon: The Inventive Peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse, when on a summer’s day in 1560 a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the Continent. Told and retold over the centuries, the story of Martin Guerre became a legend, still remembered in the Pyrenean village where the impostor was executed more than 400 years ago. Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the lives of ordinary people, in a sparkling way that reveals the hidden attachments and sensibilities of nonliterate sixteenth-century villagers. Here we see men and women trying to fashion their identities within a world of traditional ideas about property and family and of changing ideas about religion. We learn what happens when common people get involved in the workings of the criminal courts in the ancien régime, and how judges struggle to decide who a man was in the days before fingerprints and photographs. The Return of Martin Guerre will interest those who want to know more about ordinary families and especially women of the past, and about the creation of literary legends. It is also a remarkable psychological narrative about where self-fashioning stops and lying begins. | FICTION |
| Richard III | William Shakespeare | Read everything by Shakespeare … A superb writer … Great stories … Mythic lessons. | FICTION |
| Russian Journal | Andrea Lee | From Amazon: At age twenty-five, Andrea Lee joined her husband, a Harvard doctoral candidate in Russian history, for his eight months’ study at Moscow State University and an additional two months in Leningrad. Published to enormous critical acclaim in 1981, Russian Journal is the award-winning author’s penetrating, vivid account of her everyday life as an expatriate in Soviet culture, chronicling her fascinating exchanges with journalists, diplomats, and her Soviet contemporaries. | NONFICTION |
| Sabbatical | John Barth | From Amazon: The story of a young associate professor of early American literature and her husband, a fifty-year-old ex-CIA officer, and their life aboard a cruising sailboat | FICTION |
| Saving Italy | Robert M. Edsel | An interesting history of saving art in Italy in WWII but not the most riveting book I’ve ever read … | NONFICTION |
| Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland | Patrick Radden Keefe | From Amazon: In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Patrick Radden Keefe’s mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past–Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish. | NONFICTION |
| Schindler’s List | Thomas Keneally | Who am I to argue? Great book, and fabulous movie … | NONFICTION |
| Seabiscuit- An American Legend | Laura Hillenbrand | Enjoyable … | NONFICTION |
| Selected Stories | Andre Dubus | From Amazon: a collection of twenty-two tales peopled with decidedly unglamorous characters living north of Boston who everyday fight the small struggles of their lives | FICTION |
| Shakespeare’s Poems | William Shakespeare | Not the best stuff Shakespeare ever wrote, but worth reading … | NONFICTION |
| Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea | Gary Kinder | A great adventure story that helps explain why everyone is not out on the ocean looking for ancient shipwrecks full of wealth of all sorts … It is a tough job! | NONFICTION |
| Sideshow | William Shawcross | Not about a circus sideshow but Nixon’s illegal, ill-advised, and destabilizing “incursion” into Cambodia … | NONFICTION |
| Silence of the Sea | Yrsa Sigurdardottir | Mysteries by Scandinavian authors really seem to be very very dark … | FICTION |
| Skeptic in the House of God | James L. Kelley | My lawyer book club friend was not a believer but he did love the rituals of the Episcopalian communion, and so he attended and participated actively … | NONFICTION |
| Sketches from the Ranch: A Montana Memoir | Dan Aadland | Another book I inflicted upon my book group … Not a bad book, I was just in love with Montana when I found this little book on vacation there … | NONFICTION |
| Skinny Legs and All | Tom Robbins | Tom Robbins is a fun author to read … | FICTION |
| Small Is Beautiful | Richard Schumacher | This book is almost certainly better than the very negative reaction I had to it when I read it many years ago … Isn’t it? | NONFICTION |
| Smilla’s Sense of Snow | Peter Hoeg | Mysteries by Scandinavian authors seem to be very very dark even when they are about all the different kinds of snow … | FICTION |
| Snow | Orhan Pamuk | It’s about Turkey, not winter weather … | NONFICTION |
| Snow Falling on Cedars | David Guterson | A very well-written book that I enjoyed in part because its story is located in the Pacific Northwest, an extraordinarily beautiful part of our country … | FICTION |
| So Shall You Reap: Farming And Crops In Human Affairs | Otto and Dorothy Solbrig | The importance of agriculture in human and ecological history by a book group member (and his wife) and one of the most knowledgeable people I have ever met … | NONFICTION |
| Space | James Michener | Only space is big enough to hold all the words Michener has written … Despite that snarky comment, Michener has written some very readable and informative books (I recommend Hawaii) … Do not look for great character development in Michener’s novels but this one provides a lot of inside info on the space program and particularly on the tensions between scientists and newspeople who were anxious to present a highly positive picture of the program … | NONFICTION |
| Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment | Floyd Abrams | Good book by a warrior for the First Amendment … | NONFICTION |
| State of Wonder | Ann Patchett | From Amazon: a provocative and assured novel of morality and miracles, science and sacrifice set in the Amazon rainforest. | FICTION |
| Steppenwolf | Herman Hesse | Not light reading … | FICTION |
| Straight Man | Richard Russo | Very funny book by a talented author … | FICTION |
| Street of Crocodiles | Bruno Schulz | From Amazon: Bruno Schulz’s untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership … a distinctively surrealist vision. | FICTION |
| Striptease | Carl Hiaasen | Carl Hiassen is my second favorite Miami newspaper columnist, after Dave Barry … Barry cannot seem to write good novels but Hiassen does, although they get a little formualic after a while … All about Florida, lots of oddball characters, and strange plots … lots of fun to read… | FICTION |
| Summer of ’49 | David Halberstam | If you like baseball and remember when it was central to American life, you will enjoy this book … | NONFICTION |
| Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano | Patrick Modiano | Do not be dissuaded … Keep reading, it is well worth the effort by the end of the collection of stories. | FICTION |
| Taste, Memory | David Buchanan and Gary Paul Nabhan | Our group enjoyed meeting the author and sampling his ciders … | NONFICTION |
| Team of Rivals | Doris Kearns Goodwin | Well written and I learned a lot, especially a deeper appreciation for Lincoln’s political skills. | NONFICTION |
| Tearing the Silence: Being German in America | Ursula Hegi | From Amazon: Ursula Hegi uses the art of the interview to see deeply into the personal histories of fifteen women and men as they confront at last the terrible and pervasive silence that made any mention of the Holocaust taboo in their homes and schools while they were growing up. For many of them this is the first time they’ve spoken of these memories and feelings. They share their pain with us, their guilt, their anger, and their compassion as they take us into the world of their parents and try to sort out the impact of the war on their own lives. It is a powerful and provocative account of post-Holocaust German immigrants in America, an important document of what it is like to grow up within the numbing silence of postwar Germany, a moving story of what it means to live between two cultures. | NONFICTION |
| Tess of the D’Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy | Maybe the best of Hardy’s novels … Challenges Victorian sexual mores … Have to put up with Hardy’s florid writing style but worthwhile … | FICTION |
| The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World | A. J. Bairne | A good history of a brief time that I did not know very well. | NONFICTION |
| The Alchemist | Paulo Coelho | Well done, Paulo, a very well done fiction! | FICTION |
| The Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man | Thomas Page McBee | The story of a young man, born in the body of a female and now trans-gendered … and how he grapples with the question of what it is that makes a man a man … Provoked much discussion in book group. | NONFICTION |
| The Arkansas Testament | Derek Walcott | From Library Journal: Despite its title, this is another evocation of Walcott’s St. Lucia, a Caribbean paradise of whelk-gatherers, sea grapes, and sugar cane where the poet reads “silvery nouns” and deciphers “scriptures of sand.” Walcott is again the consummate phrasemaker, describing a night “with white rum on its breath” and a moon “with a birthmark like Gorbachev’s head.” He includes a sequence of poignant love poems and concludes with the title poem, a painful examination of the visiting black poet’s role in an Arkansas where he “was still nothing.” In language that is unfailingly fresh and inventive, Walcott reminds us in every poem that a largely unexperienced world exists just “outside the door.” | FICTION |
| The Art Forger | B. A. Shapiro | Fun, and educational for those of us who are challenged when it comes to art appreciation … | FICTION |
| The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service | Henry Crumpton | An insider’s view of how the CIA works and what we did to fight terrorism after the bombing of the World Trade Center | NONFICTION |
| The Art of War | Sun Tzu | 2200 years old but still a basic text for training the military and those who wage and avoid wars … | NONFICTION |
| The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 | Bernard Bailyn | A scholarly and well-written history that helps us understand who we are … And a very violent history at that … No one, native or European, comes out looking very noble at all … | NONFICTION |
| The Bartender’s Tale | Ivan Doig | Workmanlike … | FICTION |
| The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 | Antony Beevor | A much awarded historian offers a history of one of the bloodiest and awful civil wars ever … | NONFICTION |
| The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time | Jonathan Weiner | Evolution happens faster than you (and Darwin) might have thought … | NONFICTION |
| The Beggar King: A Hangman’s Daughter Tale | Oliver Potzsch | I learned a lot about Germany in the 1600s, especially that I am so grateful not to have been born in those times … Dirty, dangerous, violent, unpredictable!! | FICTION |
| The Beginning and The End | Naguib Mahfouz | Written about an Egyptian family struggling to make it and to rise, Mahfouz is a Nobel Literature Prize winner … | FICTION |
| The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plathe | From Amazon: When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther’s life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiraling into depression and eventually a suicide attempt, as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take women’s aspirations seriously. | FICTION |
| The Best Defense | Alan Dershowitz | As a long-time ACLU member, I like Dershowitz even if he is a bit of a egotist … A good book on our judicial system written by someone who has made a career out of working for the defense | NONFICTION |
| The Big Short | Michael Lewis | My book groups have all had higher opinions of Michael Lewis than I seem to. | NONFICTION |
| The Big Sleep | Raymond Chandler | I like this kind of period mystery that is creative with language, e.g., death as “the big sleep.” | FICTION |
| The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo | Tom Reiss | Fascinating … | NONFICTION |
| The Blind Side | Michael Lewis | This is a Michael Lewis book I very much liked … A young black man taken into a white home in Mississippi to insure that he gets a college education and preparation for the NFL … Great movie as well! | NONFICTION |
| The Blind Watchmaker | Richard Dawkins | This noted atheist author takes issue with the notion that the universe was designed by a designer … In his view Darwinism pretty much answers all the important questions. As a Christian and ordained minister, I have a hard time understanding how an otherwise intelligent man can miss what to me is the primary fact of existence: the sovereignty of the loving God of Israel. Ah well, … | NONFICTION |
| The Bone People | Keri Hulme | Loved this book … The author’s only book … A wonderful introduction to New Zealand and the Maori people … | FICTION |
| The Bookseller of Kabul | Asne Seierstad | A wonderful book that gives an extremely disturbing view into the very restricted lives of women in Islam … | NONFICTION |
| The Boston Raphael: A Mysterious Painting, an Embattled Museum in an Era of Change, and a Daughter’s Search for the Truth | Belinda Rathbone | One might think the subject matter, a provenance dispute in an art museum, to be of limited interest but I enjoyed the book and learned a lot about art … | NONFICTION |
| The Bridge on the Drina | Ivo Andric | Uses a bridge to present the history of tensions between East and West from the 1600s to the present … Powerful! | NONFICTION |
| The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret War | Stephen Kinzer | Interesting history … Allen Dulles missed meeting Lenin early in the 20th century because of a weekend date with blonde twins! | NONFICTION |
| The Buried Giant | Kazuo Ishiguro | From Amazon: The Romans have long since departed and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But, at least, the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased. Axl and Beatrice, a couple of elderly Britons, decide that now is the time, finally, for them to set off across this troubled land of mist and rain to find the son they have not seen for years, the son they can scarcely remember. They know they will face many hazards—some strange and otherworldly—but they cannot foresee how their journey will reveal to them the dark and forgotten corners of their love for each other. Nor can they foresee that they will be joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and a knight—each of them, like Axl and Beatrice, lost in some way to his own past, but drawn inexorably toward the comfort, and the burden, of the fullness of a life’s memories. | FICTION |
| The Catcher Was A Spy | Nicholas Dawidoff | Who knew? Moe Berg, baseball catcher and language savant (could speak a dozen languages and not hit in any of them) was a spy during WWII … | NONFICTION |
| The Charterhouse of Parma | Stendhal | Balzac said this was the most important novel of his time … Court intrigue in Italy during the time of the Napoleonic wars | FICTION |
| The Chosen | Chaim Potok | Secular and religious Jewish boys coming of age … | FICTION |
| The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order | Samuel P Huntington | A controversial view of Islam (dangerous whether fundamentalist or not) and a skeptic on the subject of multiculturalism … Worth reading to find out if you agree or not … | NONFICTION |
| The Clown | Heinrich Boll | A fictional account of life in post-WWII Germany … A scathing critique of a people enjoying prosperity without coming to terms with their history … | FICTION |
| The Cocktail Waitress | James Cain | Meh. Cain wrote better novels than this … | FICTION |
| The Collector | John Fowles | From Amazon: . the story of an obsessive young man and the girl he kidnaps and holds prisoner in his cellar. | FICTION |
| The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother | James McBride | From Amazon: The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in “orchestrated chaos” with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. “Mommy,” a fiercely protective woman with “dark eyes full of pep and fire,” herded her brood to Manhattan’s free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades, and commanded respect. As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion—and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain. | NONFICTION |
| The Color Purple | Alice Walker | I liked the book better than the movie … | FICTION |
| The Confusions of Young Törless | Robert Musil | Given the sexual subject matter of this book, you would think I would remember more about it … All I can now remember is how depressing and bleak I thought the book was. | FICTION |
| The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy | Kirkpatrick Sale | A kind of sensationalistic retelling of Columbus’ discoveries with Europeans in the worst light and native peoples in the best … I do not trust this as the most dispassionate history of those events … The initial mingling of civilizations historically often has tragic results … this one was no exception. | NONFICTION |
| The Conservationist | Nadine Gordimer | Another book from Gordimer on the apartheid era in South Africa … Focuses on a rich man who lives in fear of losing it all … | FICTION |
| The Coup | John Updike | Read this a long time ago … All I can remember is that I thought it was funny … Updike was a good writer who just never wrote about anything that seems to be lastingly important … | FICTION |
| The Culture Of Disbelief: How American Law And Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion | Stephen Carter | Deals with the touchy interface between faith and the secular world … Carter raises good questions about how the separation of church and state doctrine may have devalued religion in the public sphere and deprived public policy of a an important source of ideas … | NONFICTION |
| The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations | Christopher Lasch | From a review posted on Amazon: Lasch is concerned with the bureaucratization of both business and life, the surrendering of parental authority to `professionals’ who are anxious to justify their existence and reap the benefits of a general cultural and personal dependency. We emerge from the womb too early, our primal feelings being those of loss (of our previous blissful state) and the painful realization of our utter dependency. This leads to both systems of thought and political/cultural programs designed to capitalize on those psychological realities. Rather than come to terms with our limitations and constraints we strive to regain our bliss by indulging our dependency and many stand by to help us with that doomed quest. | NONFICTION |
| The DaVinci Code | Dan Brown | I cannot get past my anger at the author’s claim/disclaimer about Jesus having married and fathered a child … Irresponsible and false. | FICTION |
| The Devil in the Grove | Gilbert King | Well worth reading … Gave me a real appreciation for how important and dangerous was the work done by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP legal team prior to civil rights becoming a mass movement. | NONFICTION |
| The Dispossessed | Ursula K. LeGuin | LeGuin is more than merely a sci-fi writer … She deals with large and important themes and writes extremely well … This book deals with trying to build trust and peace between warring peoples … | FICTION |
| The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society | Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. | A good warning on the dangers of celebrating ethnicity to the point of identity politics that may tear our country apart, as it has elsewhere … | NONFICTION |
| The Dynamic Constitution | Richard Fallon | Written by a parishioner and Harvard Law School professor about the way our constitution has evolved … | NONFICTION |
| The End of Eddy | Édouard Louis | From Amazon: “Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I’m really gonna be a tough guy.” Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different―“girlish,” intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men … The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening … Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. | FICTION |
| The End of History and The Last Man | Francis Fukuyama | From a Library Journal review on the Amazon website: Fukuyama, then deputy director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, first presented this thesis in the foreign policy journal National Interest (Summer 1989), where it attracted worldwide attention. He argues that there is a positive direction to current history, demonstrated by the collapse of authoritarian regimes of right and left and their replacement (in many but not all cases) by liberal governments. “A true global culture has emerged, centering around technologically driven economic growth and the capitalist social relations necessary to produce and sustain it.” In the absence of viable alternatives to liberalism, history, conceived of as the clash of political ideologies, is at an end. We face instead the question of how to forge a rational global order that can accommodate humanity’s restless desire for recognition without a return to chaos. | NONFICTION |
| The English Patient | Michael Ondaatje | Boooorrrrrriiiinnnngggg …. Ditto the movie. | FICTION |
| The Fall | Albert Camus | Not my favorite Camus novel … Like The Plague better … This one deals with the confessions of a Parisian lawyer as his life unravels … | FICTION |
| The First Dissident: The Book of Job in Today’s Politics | William Safire | Not the first book to try to interpret the Book of Job in the Old Testament … I am skeptical of his attempts to compare modern American political figures to a Job resisting injustice … | NONFICTION |
| The First Eagle | Tony Hillerman | I love the Tony Hillerman novels and feel like I learned a lot about the American Southwest and its native American tribes from his books. | FICTION |
| The Fixer | Bernard Malamud | From Amazon: Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit. | FICTION |
| The French Lieutenant’s Women | John Fowles | Must not have made a big impact on me because I remember none of it … | FICTION |
| The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress | Virginia Postrel | I love these libertarian blow-ups of the notion that the future is bleak and dangerous. Postrel knows that the world has never been as peaceful and wealthy as it is today … And argues that decentralization is the way to continued creativity and a bright future … | NONFICTION |
| The Garden of the Finzi-Continis | Georgio Bassani | A sad account of the life of well-to-do Jews in Italy in the years before nd during WWII | FICTION |
| The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee | Siddhartha Mukerjee | A history of how we have come to our understanding of the gene and an ability to pull apart the genome … | NONFICTION |
| The Genius of Venice | Dial Parrott | Interesting stuff about Venice and its importance in world history … | NONFICTION |
| The Girl in the Spiders Web | David Lagerkrantz | Ok, but not as good as the Larsson trilogy that precedes it … | FICTION |
| The Girl on the Train | Paula Hawkins | From Amazon: Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning and night. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. Jess and Jason, she calls them. Their life–as she sees it–is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost. And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything’s changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel goes to the police. But is she really as unreliable as they say? Soon she is deeply entangled not only in the investigation but in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good? | FICTION |
| The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo | Stieg Larsson | Love the Larsson trilogy, again very dark … | FICTION |
| The Given Day | Dennis Lehane | A powerful fictional history of Boston in the early 20th century … Learned a lot about Calvin Coolidge among other important historical figures … | FICTION |
| The Glory and the Dream, a Narrative History of America 1932-1972 | William Manchester | Manchester is always very readable. I especially enjoyed his history of the Middle Ages and the fight between two sets of Popes of the Roman Catholic Church: A World Lit Only by Fire : The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance – Portrait of an Age | NONFICTION |
| The God of Small Things | Arundhati Roy | A 1969 story of the Indian caste system, illicit liaisons, politics and more … | FICTION |
| The Goldfinch | Donna Tartt | ok, but not memorable … | FICTION |
| The Good Lord Bird: A Novel by James McBride | James McBride | I liked this book but I think I was in the minority in my group … A very different angle into the life of John Brown. | FICTION |
| The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames | Kai Bird | Dastardly!! | NONFICTION |
| The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | I have never understood why this is on everybody’s required reading list … Seems to me to be very lightweight stuff … | FICTION |
| The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society | Annie Barrows | Ok, but nothing much seems to happen … | NONFICTION |
| The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism | Tina Rosenberg | Post-communist transition to what? And what to do about punishment when pretty much everyone is guilty? | NONFICTION |
| The Heart cf Darkness | Joseph Conrad | Classic, important … The issues raised in this book seem to stay with us … First worlders trying to control non-first worlders, going native, the persistence of evil and violence… | FICTION |
| The Hero with A Thousand Faces | Joseph Campbell | An argument, as I recall it, that all the world’s great myths and religions feature the self-discovery by a “hero,” a self-discovery with many common characteristics … I continue to be wary that this is a way of relativizing religious beliefs into one common stew … a process that risks losing as much knowledge as might be gained by seeking commonalities … | NONFICTION |
| The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution | Andre Codrescu | Codrescu is skeptical of the the revolution that overthrew the despotic Romanian regime … | NONFICTION |
| The Hours | Michael Cunningham | From Amazon: The Hours tells the story of three women: Virginia Woolf, beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway as she recuperates in a London suburb with her husband in 1923; Clarissa Vaughan, beloved friend of an acclaimed poet dying from AIDS, who in modern-day New York is planning a party in his honor; and Laura Brown, in a 1949 Los Angeles suburb, who slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home. By the end of the novel, these three stories intertwine in remarkable ways, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace. | FICTION |
| BOOK TITLE | AUTHOR | COMMENT BY ALAN BAUGHCUM | GENRE |
| The House of Sand & Fog | Andre Dubus | From Amazon: A recent immigrant from the Middle East—a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force—yearns to restore his family’s dignity in California. A recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck struggles to hold onto the one thing she has left? Her home. And her lover, a married cop, is driven to extremes to win her love. Andre Dubus III’s unforgettable characters—people with ordinary flaws, looking for a small piece of ground to stand on—careen toward inevitable conflict. Their tragedy paints a shockingly true picture of the country we live in today. | FICTION |
| The Human Factor | Graham Greene | I am ambivalent about Graham Greene and his books … probably like The Quiet American the best … From a review on Amazon: Graham Greene’s passion for moral complexity and his stylistic aplomb were perfectly suited to the cat-and mouse game of the spy novel, a genre he practically invented and to which he periodically returned while fashioning one of the twentieth century’s longest, most triumphant literary careers. Written late in his life, The Human Factor displays his gift for suspense at its most refined level, and his understanding of the physical and spiritual vulnerability of the individual at its deepest. | FICTION |
| The Immortal Irishman | Timothy Egan | A wonderful history of, to me, an unknown Irishman who led a fabulous and very interesting life. | NONFICTION |
| The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks | Rebecca Skloot | From a review on Amazon: Henrietta Lacks was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. Her cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia — a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? | NONFICTION |
| The Informant | Kurt Eichenwald | An awkward account of the informant who turned in Archer Daniel Midland but turned out to have his own agenda … | NONFICTION |
| The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World | Andrea Wulf | Everybody needs to read this book and know who this scientist was … Tells us a lot about nature and how our view of nature came to be shaped … | NONFICTION |
| The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers | Michael Blumenthal | Working class life in northern England in the early 1900s and the boundaries that separated, among others, Jews and Christians … | NONFICTION |
| The Irony of American History | Reinhold Niebuhr | The religious/theological difficulties of having and using power in modern America … No easy answers. | NONFICTION |
| The Kite Runner | Khaled Hosseini | From Amazon: The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, caught in the tragic sweep of history, The Kite Runner transports readers to Afghanistan at a tense and crucial moment of change and destruction. A powerful story of friendship, it is also about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies. | FICTION |
| The Knowledge of Angels | Jill Payton Walsh | From a review on Amazon: It is, perhaps, the fifteenth century and the ordered tranquility of a Mediterranean island is about to be shattered by the appearance of two outsiders: one, a castaway, plucked from the sea by fishermen, whose beliefs represent a challenge to the established order; the other, a child abandoned by her mother and suckled by wolves, who knows nothing of the precarious relationship between Church and State but whose innocence will become the subject of a dangerous experiment. But the arrival of the Inquisition on the island creates a darker, more threatening force which will transform what has been a philosophical game of chess into a matter of life and death… | FICTION |
| The Known World | Edward P. Jones | From Amazon: The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can’t uphold the estate’s order, and chaos ensues. | FICTION |
| The Last Hurrah | Edwin O’Connor | Anyone interested in politics has to read this book about state and local politics (a fictional account of the Curley mayoral administrations and campaigns in Boston) … A moving protagonist who may be a good guy or a bad guy … You decide … | FICTION |
| The Last Lion | William Manchester | I like biographies of Churchill and Manchester is a very enjoyable writer … | NONFICTION |
| The Last of the President’s Men | Bob Woodward | All about Alexander Butterfield, the keeper of the Nixon tapes, and more of the nastiness of Richard Nixon … | NONFICTION |
| The Late George Apley | John Marquand | The class obligations of the wealthy in late 19th and early 20th century Boston | FICTION |
| The Leftovers | Tom Perrotta | How does a town react when a large number of its residents simply vanish? | FICTION |
| The Lexus and the Olive Tree | Thomas Friedman | Globalization adds to enrichment (the Lexus) but may endanger the environment and the community (the olive tree). How to balance? | NONFICTION |
| The Little Book: A Novel | Selden Edwards | A good book … Especially if you like reading about and imagining time travel … | FICTION |
| The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 | Lawrence Wright | From Amazon: A gripping narrative that spans five decades, The Looming Tower explains in unprecedented detail the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence failures that culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Lawrence Wright re-creates firsthand the transformation of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri from incompetent and idealistic soldiers in Afghanistan to leaders of the most successful terrorist group in history. He follows FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill as he uncovers the emerging danger from al-Qaeda in the 1990s and struggles to track this new threat. Packed with new information and a deep historical perspective, The Looming Tower is the definitive history of the long road to September 11. | NONFICTION |
| The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story | Douglas Preston | The story of an expedition to find a mythic city overtaken by the jungle … The expedition is “successful” but it also finds torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, deadly snakes, and a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease. | NONFICTION |
| The Lost City of Z | David Grann | Good adventure … | NONFICTION |
| The Lovely Bones | Alice Sebold | A 14 year old girl, now in heaven, watches as her family tries to deal with her death and loss … | FICTION |
| The Madman and the Professor | Simon Winchester | A very interesting history of the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary … | NONFICTION |
| The Magus | John Fowles | Well-done and someday someone will explain this book to me … | FICTION |
| The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran | Roy Mottahedeh | A review of the factors and elements leading up to the Iranian Revolution that brought Khomeini to power. | NONFICTION |
| The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology | Simon Winchester | The story of William Smith, the orphaned son of an English country blacksmith, who became obsessed with creating the world’s first geological map and ultimately became the father of modern geology. | NONFICTION |
| The Martian | Andy Weir | A very enjoyable and imaginative story of an astonaut stranded on Mars and how he might survive, and even be rescued … The movie was fun to watch as well. | FICTION |
| The Mayor of Casterbridge | Thomas Hardy | From a review on Amazon: In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper. | FICTION |
| The Mayor of Mogadishu | Andrew Harding | Life is very iffy in Mogadishu and the politics are probably impossible … | NONFICTION |
| The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America | Louis Menand | From Amazon: The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Well Holmes, Jr., future associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea — an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Holmes, James, and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things “out there” waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent — like knives and forks and microchips — to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals — that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely dependent — like germs — on their human carriers and environment. And they thought that the survival of any idea depends not on its immutability but on its adaptability. The Metaphysical Club is written in the spirit of this idea about ideas. It is not a history of philosophy but an absorbing narrative about personalities and social history, a story about America. It begins with the Civil War and s in 1919 with Justice Holmes’s dissenting opinion in the case of U.S. v. Abrams-the basis for the constitutional law of free speech. The first four sections of the book focus on Holmes, James, Peirce, and their intellectual heir, John Dewey. The last section discusses some of the fundamental twentieth-century ideas they are associated with. This is a book about a way of thinking that changed American life. | NONFICTION |
| The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology | Robert Wright | From Amazon: Are men literally born to cheat? Does monogamy actually serve women’s interests? These are among the questions that have made The Moral Animal one of the most provocative science books in recent years. Wright unveils the genetic strategies behind everything from our sexual preferences to our office politics–as well as their implications for our moral codes and public policies. Illustrations. | NONFICTION |
| The Moral Sense | James Q. Wilson | From Amazon: Are human beings naturally endowed with a conscience? Or is morality artificially acquired through social pressure and instruction? Most people assume that modern science proves the latter. Further, most of our current social policies are based upon this “scientific” view of the sources of morality. In this book, however, James Q. Wilson seeks to reconcile traditional ideas with a range of important empirical research into the sources of human behavior over the last fifty years. Wilson shows that the facts about the origin and development of moral reasoning are not at odds with traditional views predating Freud, Darwin and Marx. Our basic sense of right and wrong actually does have a biological and behavioral origin. This “moral sense” arises from the infant’s innate sociability, though it must also be nurtured by parental influence. | NONFICTION |
| The Moviegoer | Walker Percy | A classic! From Amazon: This elegantly written account of a young man’s search for signs of purpose in the universe is one of the great existential texts of the postwar era and is really funny besides. Binx Bolling, inveterate cinemaphile, contemplative rake and man of the periphery, tries hedonism and tries doing the right thing, but ultimately finds redemption (or at least the prospect of it) by taking a leap of faith and quite literally embracing what only seems irrational. | FICTION |
| The Naked & the Dead | Norman Mailer | Powerful!! More than one wants to know about the experience of war … | FICTION |
| The Narrow Road to the Deep North: A Novel | Richard Flanagan | An appalling story of the treatment of Allied POWs by the Japanese in Asia in WWII | FICTION |
| The Natural | Bernard Malamud | Malamud’s first novel may be the best written on baseball, raising it to the level of mythology. | FICTION |
| The New Life | Orhan Parnak | Truly different … The reader may have to push to get through but I found the effort worthwhile. From Amazon: Through the single act of reading a book, a young student is uprooted from his old life and identity. Within days he has fallen in love with the luminous and elusive Janan; witnessed the attempted assassination of a rival suitor; and forsaken his family to travel aimlessly through a nocturnal landscape of traveler’s cafes and apocalyptic bus wrecks. | FICTION |
| The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas | Paul Theroux | Theroux lives on Cape Cod. He takes a train in Boston and ends up at the very tip of South America, offering observations on the geography, economies and people he encounters. | NONFICTION |
| The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals | Michael Pollan | From Amazon: Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world. | NONFICTION |
| The Orphan Masters Son | Adam Johnson | A fictional account of life in North Korea … Odd, but entertaining. | FICTION |
| The Panda’s Thumb | Stephen Jay Gould | A collection of essays … I wonder how Gould is now viewed by other scientists … An entertaining writer though … | NONFICTION |
| The Paperboy | Pete Dexter | A murder mystery set in Florida … | FICTION |
| The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone | Joseph Nye | Our current President would disagree completely with this author’s foreign policy prescriptions. From Publishers Weekly: “Unilateralism, arrogance, and parochialism” the U.S. must abandon these traits in a post-Sept. 11 world, says Nye, former assistant secretary of defense … He explains the principles he believes should govern American foreign policy in the decades ahead. Nye distinguishes between hard power (military and economic strength) and soft power (openness, prosperity and similar values that persuade and attract rather than coerce others). Nye argues that a dominant state needs both kinds of power, and that the current information revolution and the related phenomenon of globalization call for the exercise of soft more than hard power. It is, Nye believes, dangerous for the U.S. systematically to opt out of treaties and conventions endorsed by the great majority of nations. The U.S. should participate in world debate on transnational issues such as global warming and nuclear defense, not simply declare American interests paramount to the exclusion of all other views. | NONFICTION |
| The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea | Sebastian Unger | Powerful description of an enormous storm and its effects on ships caught in it … Introduces us to Linda Greenlaw, Maine sea captain and now author … | NONFICTION |
| The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber AgeThe Perfect Weapon | David Sanger | Cyberweapons are the real threat as the U. S., Russia and China compete on the world stage. | NONFICTION |
| The Pill, Pygmy Chimps, And Degas’ Horse: The Remarkable Autobiography Of The Award-winning Scientist Who Synthesized The Birth-control Pill | Carl Djerassi | I enjoyed this book but it really is an ego trip for the author … Funny story about dealing with architects intent on building him a Frank Lloyd Wright home even though it had no space for his very large and dear-to-his-heart art collection. | NONFICTION |
| The Plague | Albert Camus | My favorite Camus novel … | FICTION |
| The Power & Glory | Graham Greene | From a review posted on Amazon: This is an extraordinary book about a flawed priest trying to live out his Christian faith in a world hostile to Christian philosophy. But he also has the ability to portray the thinking of the radical secularists who have valid criticism of faith and it inability to deliver, what Dostoyevksy called in his parable of the Grand Inquisitor, “earthly bread.” | FICTION |
| The Quantum Spy | David Ignatius | Who will build the first quantum computer, the new version of a nuclear bomb? | NONFICTION |
| The Racketeer | John Grisham | From Amazon: In the history of the United States, only four active federal judges have been murdered. Judge Raymond Fawcett has just become number five. His body is found in his remote lakeside cabin. There is no sign of forced entry or struggle. Just two dead bodies: Judge Fawcett and his young secretary. And one large, state-of-the-art, extremely secure safe, opened and emptied. One man, a former attorney, knows who killed Judge Fawcett, and why. But that man, Malcolm Bannister, is currently residing in the Federal Prison Camp near Frostburg, Maryland. Though serving time, Malcolm has an ace up his sleeve. He has information the FBI would love to know. Malcolm would love to tell them. But everything has a price—and the man known as the Racketeer wasn’t born yesterday. | FICTION |
| The Reader | Bernhard Schlink | From Amazon: At the age of fifteen, Michael Berg falls in love with a woman who disappears, and while observing a trial as a law student years later, he is shocked to discover the same woman as the defendant in a horrible crime. | FICTION |
| The Rebel Angels | Robertson Davies | Entertaining … | FICTION |
| The Reckoning | David Halberstram | From Amazon: After generations of creating high-quality automotive products, American industrialists began losing ground to the Japanese auto industry in the decades after World War II. David Halberstam, with his signature precision and absorbing narrative style, traces this power shift by delving into the boardrooms and onto the factory floors of the America’s Ford Motor Company and Japan’s Nissan. Different in every way—from their reactions to labor problems to their philosophies and leadership styles—the two companies stand as singular testaments to the challenges brought by the rise of the global economy. | NONFICTION |
| The Remains of the Day | Kazuo Ishiguro | I think I have blocked out the book from my memory because the movie was so infuriatingly obtuse … | FICTION |
| The Rings of Saturn | W. G. Sebald | From Amazon: The Rings of Saturn, with its curious archive of photographs, records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things that cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics. Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson”, the natural history of the herring, Borges, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, recession-hit seaside towns, Joseph Conrad, the once-thriving silk industry of Norwich, Swinburne, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the massive bombings of WWII. Mesmerized by the mutability of all things, the narrator catalogs the transmigration of whole worlds: “On every new thing, there lies already the shadow of annihilation.” | FICTION |
| The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 | Paul Kennedy | One of those books that attempt to provide reasons for everything that has happened. Interesting but doesn’t it seem that there is always another set of explanations coming down the road. From Amazon: This study describes how the past 500 years shows that nations which became great powers had to decline as their growth rate slowed and their spending on defence continued to increase … | NONFICTION |
| The Rising Sun | Michael Crichton | Not the best of Crichton’s books … | FICTION |
| The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey | Candice Millard | An unbelievable adventure that should have but did not (at least immediately) kill Theodore Roosevelt and his party … | NONFICTION |
| The Road to Character | David Brooks | Brooks is not, in my opinion, a good writer … | NONFICTION |
| The Russia House | John Le Carre | Written at the time of perestroika, may be Le Carre’s most hopeful novel … | FICTION |
| The Scarlet Letter | Nathaniel Hawthorne | Old-style language but good lessons on sex, conformity, tolerance and intolerance, etc. | FICTION |
| The Secret Agent a Simple Tale | Joseph Conrad | From Amazon: A provocateur and a professional anarchist Karl Verloc, hiding under a disguise of a companionable owner of a stationery shop, conducts a series of bombings in London. Detectives manage to find some clues only after the death of Verlok’s wife’s younger brother, whom he asked to deliver a mysterious package to the opposite side of the city. | FICTION |
| The Secret Chord | Geraldine Brooks | Imputes a homosexual relationship between David and Jonathan in the Old Testament to which no reputable Biblical scholar would attest … | FICTION |
| The Sellout by Paul Beatty | Paul Beatty | A very odd book that I (and the critics) thought funny and liked but very politically incorrect … Won a lot of literary prizes … | FICTION |
| The Shipping News | Annie Proulx | Well-written but not likely to make you want to move to Newfoundland, the locus of the novel … | FICTION |
| The Signal and the Noise | Nate Silver | A good book on numbers by a guy who seems to be the current “go to” expert on polling and predictions, especially in politics … | NONFICTION |
| The Sixth Extinction | Elizabeth Kolbert | If you want to read about science, read a scientist not a journalist … | NONFICTION |
| The Snoring Bird | Bernd Heinrich | Great story of escape from post WWII Europe and then a life devoted to study of nature … | NONFICTION |
| The Snow Leopard | Peter Mathiessen | An enjoyable writer, even if I cannot after the fact remember much about this book… | FICTION |
| The Social Animal | David Brooks | Ugh! | FICTION |
| The Soul of a New Machine | Tracey Kidder | From a review posted on Amazon: This book is a non-fiction account of the development of a mini-computer in the 1980s. The book begins by describing the background: Data General, a computer company, has been recently leapfrogged by a competitor who put out a 32-bit mini computer system over their 16-bit system. To keep up with their major competitor (DEC), the company begins a development project for their own 32-bit mini computer. The company HQ is based in Massachusetts. What complicates matters is that the CEO establishes a new R&D center in North Carolina where he hopes the new 32-bit mini computer will be built. The new R&D center however, creates a major rift between the engineers who stayed in Massachusetts and the ones who work in North Carolina – as both groups want to be in charge of development. A major feud begins, but basically the group in North Carolina wins and gets to build the new 32-bit system. | NONFICTION |
| The Soul of an Octopus | Sy Montgomery | Just plain fun to read, and it does raise interesting questions about intelligence and personality in other species. | NONFICTION |
| The Sound & The Fury | William Faulkner | I recommend Faulkner but know that it will take time to read given his style … | FICTION |
| The Spike | Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss | How do we know whether the news reported by the media is the truth? Or, perhaps planted by agencies with their own agenda? | FICTION |
| The Starship and the Canoe | Kenneth Brower | I really liked this book and its story about a long canoe trip in British Columbia. The canoeist, George Dyson, explores a very different world than his father, Freeman Dyson, a physicist who wanted to explore the solar system in a spaceship powered by nuclear explosions. | NONFICTION |
| The Story of Edgar Sawtelle | David Wroblewski | As a dog lover, I really enjoyed this story of Edgar’s relationship with the dogs he raised … | FICTION |
| The Swerve: How the World Became Modern | Stephen Greenblatt | Excellent! A great book and an interesting take on the origin of the Renaissance | NONFICTION |
| The Sympathizer | Viet Thanh Nguyen | From Amazon: The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction … The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship | FICTION |
| The Tipping Point | Malcolm Gladwell | Another book by a journalist that, if written at all, would be better written by a scientist … Way too facile with some underlying serious science … | NONFICTION |
| The Trial | Franz Kafka | You probably need to read this but it can be tough going … | FICTION |
| The Trial of Socrates | I. F. Stone | An idiosyncratic take on the dissident Socrates by the idiosyncratic and dissident I. F. Stone. | NONFICTION |
| The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire | Stephen Kinzer | Mark Twain was right! Theodore Roosevelt was a dangerous imperialist and war-monger. | NONFICTION |
| The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley | Hannah Tinti | A well-written book but a violent one … At least one member of our group thought the nautical discussions in the book were weak or outright wrong … | FICTION |
| The Unbearable Lightness of Being | Milan Kundera | Great book! Everyone should read this. | FICTION |
| The Underground Railroad | Colson Whitehead | I have no idea what this book was about and I read it … | FICTION |
| The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds | Michael Lewis | The story of a friendship and the orgins of behavioral economics … A good read even if Michael Lewis is not one of my favorite authors … | NONFICTION |
| The Universal Baseball Association | Robert Coover | From Amazon: J. Henry Waugh immerses himself in his fantasy baseball league every night after work. As owner of every team in the league, Henry is flush with pride in a young rookie who is pitching a perfect game. When the pitcher completes the miracle game, Henry’s life lights up. But then the rookie is killed by a freak accident, and this”death” affects Henry’s life in ways unimaginable. In a blackly comic novel that takes the reader between the real world and fantasy, Robert Coover delves into the notions of chance and power. | FICTION |
| The Wall | John Hersey | A powerful history of several dozen people who escaped the Warsaw ghetto … | NONFICTION |
| The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration | Isabel Wilkerson | A very interesting account of the movement of black folks from the South to the North and West … | NONFICTION |
| The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism | Ron Suskind | From Amazon: The Way of the World investigates how America relinquished the moral leadership it now desperately needs to fight the real threat of our era: a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists. … Suskind shows where the most neglected dangers lie in the story of “The Armageddon Test” —a desperate gamble to send undercover teams into the world’s nuclear black market to frustrate the efforts of terrorists trying to procure weapons-grade uranium. In the end, he finally reveals for the first time the explosive falsehood underlying the Iraq War and the entire Bush presidency. | NONFICTION |
| The Wealth of Nations | Adam Smith | A major step forward in economics …. Readable … So much to learn in this book. | NONFICTION |
| The White Nile | Alan Morehead | A good adventure and discovery yarn … | NONFICTION |
| The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl | Timothy Egan | A good history and a warning against the arrogance of unwisely messing with the land and nature … | NONFICTION |
| The Yellow Birds | Kevin Powers | A novel about the effects of war (in this case the Iraqi War) on the fighters and their families at home. | FICTION |
| Their Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston | Hurston was a powerful, if under-appreciated writer. I am glad to have read this book about life from the underside. | FICTION |
| Thief of Time | Tony Hillerman | Love Hillerman’s works, and now his daughter is carrying on the family tradition … | FICTION |
| Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | A very good novel by one of the great writers of modern Africa. A Greek-like tragedy as prosperous farmer and respected tribal leader succumbs to his fears of becoming like his father and loses everything … Then the colonialists come and things become really impossible. | FICTION |
| Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man | Henry Louis Gates | A portfolio of descriptions of famous black men that demonstrates their diversity. | NONFICTION |
| Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh and America’s Fight over World War | Lynne Olson | A good reminder of the reluctance of Americans to take a leading role in world politics prior to WWII | NONFICTION |
| Thousand Cranes | Yasunari Kawabata | From Amazon: While attending a traditional tea ceremony in the aftermath of his parents’ deaths, Kikuji encounters his father’s former mistress, Mrs. Ota. At first Kikuji is appalled by her indelicate nature, but it is not long before he succumbs to passion—a passion with tragic and unforeseen consequences, not just for the two lovers, but also for Mrs. Ota’s daughter, to whom Kikuji’s attachments soon extend. Death, jealousy, and attraction convene around the delicate art of the tea ceremony, where every gesture is imbued with profound meaning | FICTION |
| Three Cups of Tea | Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin | Powerful story although later revelations raise questions about authenticity. | NONFICTION |
| Thunder at Twilight | Frederic Morton | From Amazon: Thunder at Twilight is a landmark historical vision, drawing on hitherto untapped sources to illuminate two crucial years in the life of the extraordinary city of Vienna … It was during the carnival of 1913 that a young Stalin arrived in Vienna on a mission that would launch him into the upper echelon of Russian revolutionaries … It was in Vienna that the failed artist Adolf Hitler kept daubing watercolors and spouting tirades at fellow drifters in a flophouse. Here Archduke Franz Ferdinand had a troubled audience with Emperor Franz Joseph-and soon the bullet that killed the Archduke would set off the Great War …
With luminous prose that has twice made him a finalist for the National Book Award, Frederic Morton evokes the opulent, elegant, incomparable sunset metropolis-Vienna on the brink of cataclysm. |
NONFICTION |
| Time and Again | Jack Finney | From Amazon: Now with masterfully restored original artwork, lovers of time travel, romance, and adventure can rediscover Time and Again, the beloved classic hailed as “THE great time-travel story” by Stephen King, author of 11/22/63, and praised as a “pure New York fun” by Alice Hoffman, author of The Rules of Magic. | FICTION |
| To Dance with the White Dog | Terry Kay | I remember liking this book but giving it a B while my other book group members gave it an A. From Amazon: A haunting story of love, grief, and confronting death. The elderly Sam Peek is still mourning the death of his beloved wife when a mysterious white dog appears. Seen only by Sam, White Dog becomes a part of Sam’s grief. Though it’s unclear if White Dog is real or phantom, the creature eases Sam’s grief, brings him closer to his family, and helps him reconcile with his own mortality. | FICTION |
| To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 | Adam Hochschild | A fascinating story of English opposition to WWI … | NONFICTION |
| To Kill A Mockingbird | Harper Lee | Great book, made into a great movie. | FICTION |
| Transparent Things | Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov | Nabokov is one of those authors everyone should read … And he wrote a lot, not just Lolita … And he wrote extremely well. From Martin Amis at Amazon: “Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of the hero–sullen, gawky Hugh Person–to Switzerland . . . As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride. . . . Eight years later–following a murder, a period of madness and a brief imprisonment–Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past. . . . The several strands of dream, memory, and time [are] set off against the literary theorizing of R. and, more centrally, against the world of observable objects.” | FICTION |
| Truman | David McCullough | As usual with McCullough, a very good book … | NONFICTION |
| Tuesdays with Morrie | Mitch Albom | Heart-warming | NONFICTION |
| Under a Monsoon Cloud, An Inspector Ghote Mystery | H. R. Keating | From Amazon: What had until recently been a police sergeant is now lying at Ghote’s feet bleeding its last. An accident it may have been, but Ghote saw exactly what happened, and it’s his duty to arrest the killer. Isn’t it? Or can the inspector better serve his beloved police force by disposing of the body – by concealing a crime? And if he does, will he manage to keep his terrible secret? | FICTION |
| Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith | Jon Krakauer | Interesting history of early Mormonism … | NONFICTION |
| Under the Volcano | Malcolm Lowry | From Amazon: On the Day of the Dead, in 1938, Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic and ruined man, is fatefully living out his last day, drowning himself in mescal while his former wife and half-brother look on, powerless to help him. The events of this one day unfold against a backdrop unforgettable for its evocation of a Mexico at once magical and diabolical. | FICTION |
| Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987 | Bob Woodward | I have enjoyed Woodward’s books … Well-written if, like him, a little wooden … But the question about whether the deathbed scene in this book where Casey admits knowing about Iran-Contra fund diversions has made me just a little bit skeptical of Woodward … apparently Casey was in a coma and uncommunicative and under constant guard in the hospital. On the other hand, that is what great reporters do … find a way when others cannot. | NONFICTION |
| Wait Till Next Year | Doris Kearns Goodwin | Goodwin’s memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. | NONFICTION |
| War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire | Sarah Ellison | The story of the purchase of the Journal by Rupert Murdoch | NONFICTION |
| Washington Black | Esi Edugyan | Won just about every award there is … From Amazon: George Washington Black, or “Wash,” an eleven-year-old field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is terrified to be chosen by his master’s brother as his manservant. To his surprise, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where … two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human. But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash’s head, Christopher and Wash must abandon everything. What follows is their flight along the eastern coast of America, and, finally, to a remote outpost in the Arctic. What brings Christopher and Wash together will tear them apart, propelling Wash even further across the globe in search of his true self … [the book asks] What is true freedom? | FICTION |
| Washington Square | Henry James | I confess that Henry James is an acquired taste I have not acquired … From Amazon: Set in the genteel New York of James’s early childhood, it is a tale of cruelty laced with comedy. Dr. Austin Sloper is a wealthy and domineering father who is disappointed in the unremarkable daughter he has produced; he dismisses her as both plain and simpleminded. The gentle and dutiful Catherine Sloper has always been in awe of her father, but when she falls in love with Morris Townsend, a penniless charmer whom Dr. Sloper accuses of being a fortune hunter, she dares to defy him and a battle of wills ensues that will leave her forever changed. Readers have long admired the way that the innocent Catherine, misled by her meddling aunt and mistreated by both her father and her lover, grows in strength and wisdom over the course of her ordeal. | FICTION |
| Washington’s Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge | Thomas Fleming | I thoroughly enjoy reading Thomas Fleming’s histories, and this one is no exception. | NONFICTION |
| West with the Night | Beryl Markham | I am a sucker for stories of daring women doing dangerous things and leading interesting lives. I enjoyed this book. | NONFICTION |
| What It Is Like to Go to War | Karl Marlantes | From Amazon: In 1968, at the age of twenty-three, Karl Marlantes was dropped into the highland jungle of Vietnam, an inexperienced lieutenant in command of a platoon of forty Marines who would live or die by his decisions. Marlantes survived, but like many of his brothers in arms, he has spent the last forty years dealing with his war experience … Marlantes takes a deeply personal and candid look at what it is like to experience the ordeal of combat, critically examining how we might better prepare our soldiers for war. Marlantes weaves riveting accounts of his combat experiences with thoughtful analysis, self-examination, and his readings … He makes it clear just how poorly prepared our nineteen-year-old warriors are for the psychological and spiritual aspects of the journey. | NONFICTION |
| What Went Wrong | Bernard Lewis | An examination of how and why the Islamic world fell from its peak of dominance in the Middle Ages and fell ever behind the countries that make up Western civilization … There seems to be a split between followers of Edward Said and those who prefer Lewis as the better analyst of these historical and economic and religious and social issues … | NONFICTION |
| What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America | Thomas Frank | Why is it that commentators think people are doing something crazy when they do not go along with the ruling elites? Sheer arrogance … From Amazon: With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank turns his eye on what he calls the “thirty-year backlash”—the populist revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment. The high point of that backlash is the Republican Party’s success in building the most unnatural of alliances: between blue-collar Midwesterners and Wall Street business interests, workers and bosses, populists and right-wingers. | NONFICTION |
| When Giants Learn to Dance | Rose Beth Kantor | From Amazon: The definitive guide to today’s new management strategies and techniques. Kanter shows how the truly innovative companies are leading the way, and how “giants” are actually joining this “post-entrepreneurial revolution.” | NONFICTION |
| White Hotel | D. M. Thomas | From Amazon: It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of the twentieth century, and an attempt to heal them. Interweaving poetry and case history, fantasy and historical truth-telling, The White Hotel is a modern classic of enduring emotional power that attempts nothing less than to reconcile the notion of individual destiny with that of historical fate. | FICTION |
| White Tiger | Aravind Adiga | Interesting to learn about a different nation and culture … | FICTION |
| White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America | Nancy Isenberg | Meh. | NONFICTION |
| Who We Are and How We Got Here | David Reich | You probably will not understand the science, I don’t, but read the conclusions and consider well. Human beings originated in more than one locale and have traveled more widely over longer periods of time than anyone ever thought. By the way, Genghis Khan is EVERYBODY’s great-great-great- …. grandfather … | NONFICTION |
| Wolf Hall | Hilary Mantel | Tedious. | FICTION |
| Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History | Stephen Jay Gould | I have enjoyed reading Gould over the years but wonder how his reputation is holding up among his scientific colleagues. I struggle with his notion for example of “punctuated equilibrium” and how it can be integrated into a coherent theory of evolution. Nonetheless he is a good writer and great popularizer of science. I really enjoyed his discussion of the discovery of the Burgess shale and what that discovery has meant. | NONFICTION |
| World According to Garp | John Irving | Fun | FICTION |
| World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability | Amy Chua | A report on how democracy and free markets can lead to disruptions and instability … The antidote, if you want one, to Thomas Friedman | NONFICTION |
| Yellow Fever, Black Goddess: The Coevolution Of People And Plagues | Christophe Wills | From Amazon: By focusing on microorganisms that cause human suffering, Wills examines the evolution of diseases, viruses, and plagues from their “point of view,” producing a fascinating glimpse into the complex lives of microbes and how they manifest with often disastrous results. He explains that when we alter nature in such ways as burning forests and disrupting the food chain, human beings unwittingly unleash diseases by destroying their host resources. | NONFICTION |
| You Just Don’t Understand : Women and Men in Conversation | Deborah Tanner | I remember when this book was all the rage … Learning how men and women experience difficulties in talking with one another … Seems kind of quaint now when no one is able to talk with anyone else on serious issues, regardless of gender or other attribute … | NONFICTION |
| Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History | Erik Erikson | Of course, one must be crazy to be religious … psychologists just cannot seem to take religious experiences at face value, e.g., Freud on Moses. From Wiki: It was one of the first psychobiographies of a famous historical figure. Erikson found in Martin Luther a good model of his discovery of “the identity crisis”. Erikson was sure he could explain Luther’s spontaneous eruption, during a monastery choir practice, “I am not!” According to Erikson, Luther suffered through an environment that fomented crisis, and succeeded in a healthy resolution, thereby becoming more fulfilled than if the crisis had not been experienced. In the end Luther chose the obedient, provincial leadership path his father had wished for him, rather than the national fame he could have easily pursued after his celebrity and wealth, but only after Luther had disobeyed and suffered many years in an identity crisis. | NONFICTION |
| BOOK TITLE | AUTHOR | COMMENT BY ALAN BAUGHCUM | GENRE |
| A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States | Frederick Law Olmsted | This is one of two books I’ve read by Olmsted about pre-Civil War trips he took in the south. A powerful indictment of the effects of slavery on civil society … all energy is focused on purchasing, containing, and working slaves. The result: no roads, churches, schools and a general deterioration of in the lives of the entire population. | Nonfiction |
| Amateur – A True Story About What Makes A Man, A Reckoning with Gender, Identity, and Masculinity | Thomas Page McBee | The author was the first transgender man to ever box in Madison Square Garden. This book is an examination of the training for that fight and the fight itself as well as ruminations about what it all means. An odd book but worth reading. | Nonfiction |
| American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism | J. D. Dickey | A wonderful history of the religious upheavals of the first great religious awakenings in the U. S. in the early and mid-1700s. The author’s major thesis is that these revivals and their evangelist leaders, such as George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards, so stirred up resistance in the general population to religious and government authority that they laid the groundwork for the American Revolution itself. Very interesting! | Nonfiction |
| American Prison | Shane Bauer | A would-be expose of the problems in privately-contracted prisons from the point of view of a prison guard. However it struck me as painting a very depressing picture of all prisons, public and private. | Nonfiction |
| Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England | Jared Ross Hardesty | A brand-new history of slavery in New England that is very disturbing. Did you know that Congregational ministers and other colonial leaders in New England in the 1600s actively sought to kill Native Americans and sell the survivors into slavery? | Nonfiction |
| Blue Moon | Lee Child | The latest installment of the adventures of Jack Reacher, a retired Marine MP who roams the countryside and seems inevitably to find bad guys whom he vanquishes. Forgive me, Lord, but the books are violent and a pleasure to read … good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, etc. Child received a CBE this year for his contributions to crime fiction literature. I have read all of Child’s books and find them a wonderful escape. | Fiction |
| Educated: A Memoir | Tara Westover | One of the most powerful books I have ever read. The author is the daughter of a Mormon family that lived off the radar in Idaho, so much so that she did not have a birth certificate or an education. She left her family to get that education, culminating in a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. An amazing story of courage and survival and struggle. She is now estranged from her family, who appallingly now make millions selling homeopathic “essential oils.” I’m including several website references that I believe add to the value of reading this book. Comments on the book by three of the brothers, including the abusive Shawn: … LaRee Westover, the mother of Tara, has a page on Facebook: … Butterfly Miracles with Essential Oils … the mother’s 2010 book on Amazon: … She also teaches something called “Foot Zone” … and a website for “Butterfly Miracles” … where you can buy 108 essential oils … and a two-hour YouTube talk on the use of essential oils … Other books by LaRee Westover … And the Facebook page for the company, Butterfly Miracles … the family’s attorney says to read Educated with grain of salt… | Nonfiction |
| Fair Clear and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh | Shirley Nelson | Fair Clear and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh, Shirley Nelson … Nonfiction … The Shiloh community was located during the early 1900s near where I live in Maine. Nelson’s parents grew up as part of the very strange and religious Shiloh community. This book is the most definitive study of Shiloh and its founder/leader Frank Sandford. The book is now out of print, but it should be required reading for seminary students. It reveals various pathologies that seem to recur among religious leaders and their followers. Read a brief history of the community. | Nonfiction |
| Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team | Simon Sinek, David Mead, Peter Docker | A wonderful and short book that makes the point that the reason for so many successful individuals and institutions is that they were able to identify and articulate a “why” for people to pay attention. The reason “why” works is that it is a why that those who are attracted want to claim for themselves. | Nonfiction |
| He Stopped Loving Her Today: George Jones, Billy Sherrill, and the Pretty-Much Totally True Story of the Making of the Greatest Country Record of All Time | Jack Isenhour | He Stopped Loving Her Today is almost certainly not the best country song of all time but the recording of the song is just about as good as it get in the country music business. It brought me to tears the first time I heard it and it still gets to me when I hear it again. No other recording of the song and no other live version (including those by the now-deceased George Jones) comes near the original recording. The book tells the story of the country music business (and it is very much that, a business!) … the great studio musicians and back-up singers and studio facilities in Nashville, employed by both country and non-country acts … the writing of the song … laying the tracks … and how producer Billy Sherrill got the coked-up, drunk George Jones to sing the song. First, Jones sang it to the tune of another song … ok, get that straightened out … then, he’s so out of it that he cannot get the lyrics right … had to cut and paste words and phrases together for the song … adding the back-up vocals another. The studio records say it took a month or two to produce the record but those who participated remembered it taking more than a year. The book takes a raised-eyebrow approach to country music that I found refreshing. Turns out a lot of those early “country” songs did not come so much from the ancient hills and dales of Scotland, Ireland, and England as they did from Tin Pan Alley in NYC. Similarly, the author very much undercuts the complaints of country music purists about the alien and unnatural “Nashville Sound” they blame for getting away from real country music: three chords and the truth. Turns out the Nashville Sound (lots of violins for one thing) has been around for a very long time, simply because it helps sell records. | Nonfiction |
| In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth | Jack L. Goldsmith | Goldsmith’s father was a close friend of Jimmy Hoffa. The FBI believed that he transported Hoffa to his executioners. Goldsmith shows convincingly that this was almost certainly not true. This is a good history of the rise of Hoffa and the Teamsters Union, as well as yet one more nail in the coffin of the image of the FBI as a competent and dispassionate law enforcement agency. It is also a good father/son story. | Nonfiction |
| In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown | Nathaniel Philbrick | Not as engrossing as his book, Mayflower, but a good read. If you are like me, you need to read this to repair your lack of exposure to the history of the American Revolution. This is a good step towards that goal. | Nonfiction |
| Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption | Bryan Stephenson | An inspiring and simultaneously dispiriting story of a young Harvard Law School graduate’s progress in saving innocent people and children from death row in Alabama and elsewhere in the South. | Nonfiction |
| Lanterns on the Levee, Recollections of a Planter’s Son | William Alexander Percy | Percy is the uncle of novelist Walker Percy. Amazon says, “Born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi, within the shelter of old traditions, aristocratic in the best sense, William Alexander Percy in his lifetime (1885–1942) was brought face to face with the convulsions of a changing world. Lanterns on the Levee is his memorial to the South of his youth and young manhood. In describing life in the Mississippi Delta, Percy bridges the interval between the semi-feudal South of the 1800s and the anxious South of the early 1940s. The rare qualities of this classic memoir lie not in what Will Percy did in his life—although his life was exciting and varied—but rather in the intimate, honest, and soul-probing record of how he brought himself to contemplate unflinchingly a new and unstable era. The 1973 introduction by Walker Percy — Will’s nephew and adopted son — recalls the strong character and easy grace of “the most extraordinary man I have ever known.” | Nonfiction |
| Lethal Agent | Vince Flynn | Mitch Rapp, a sometime CIA agent, goes off the radar screen in order to save the world from a weapon that could kill hundreds of millions of people … Kyle Mills is the author chosen to continue the series following Flynn’s death. Another wonderful, if violent, series of escape novels … | Fiction |
| Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt | Arthur C. Brooks | I cannot imagine where Brooks got the idea of loving your enemies, but I find this book, while very readable, extremely challenging and difficult its call for us to give up our contempt for those who disagree with us. Ralph Nader wrote a letter to the NYT editor suggesting a contradiction between Brooks’ urging that we give up contempt and his decade-long tenure as President of the free-market oriented American Enterprise Institute, an institution that Nader asserts is itself contemptuous of ideas Nader holds dear. I fear that I am happy that Nader is upset … | Nonfiction |
| Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler | Lynne Olson | Fabulous! Terrific young woman ran the largest anti-Nazi intelligence network in France during WWII, responsible for uncovering the first evidence of V-1 and V-2 bombs at Peenemunde and perhaps saved D-Day by facilitating Allied bombing that delayed their implementation. She and her network provided such valuable intel that resulted in so many German sub losses that the SS made a special point of seeking network members even at the very end of the war and shooting them. Also, De Gaulle and the French male leadership pretty much ignored her, being the completely misogynistic a–holes that they were … | Nonfiction |
| On Desperate Ground | Hampton Sides | A very highly-rated book on the battle of Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War. As it happened, I read The Frozen Hours on the same topic instead but this volume sounds like a great read! | Nonfiction |
| Pioneers | David McCullough | This is kind of an old-fashioned read, very celebratory of the founders of the country … of the white male founders of the country … almost hero worship … some good material on the women, but only a cursory discussion of native Americans and their disappearance/displacement/removal from Ohio. Still, I learned a lot about some very interesting people I never heard of in a place (Ohio) I know somewhat, where they came from (New England), and the historical importance of fighting for education, religion and freedom from slavery. This is an enjoyable read but it’s not the best work by McCullough. | Nonfiction |
| Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland | Patrick Radden Keefe | My book group loved this book. From Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Book Review: Many a writer has attempted to parse the 400 years of colonial/sectarian violence that preceded the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But Say Nothing shows young paramilitaries compelled by more recent, deeply personal history: an aunt who lost her eyes and hands while setting a bomb, peaceful marchers ambushed and stoned on a bridge. With no dog in the race, an outsider such as Keefe can recount with stark, rousing clarity the story of an IRA gunman trying not to scream as a doctor sews up his severed artery in the front room of a safe house while a British armored tank rumbles outside. Or describe how Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, came to be suspected of being an informer, a charge which led to her being taken from her home by the IRA one night in 1972, her young ones clinging to her legs. Hastened to her grave by a bullet to the back of her head, her bones lay buried on a remote beach for thirty years, years during which her children were left to live and work alongside neighbors they suspected, yet dared not accuse, of being responsible for her death. With the pacing of a thriller, and an intricate, yet compulsively readable storytelling structure, Keefe’s exhaustive reportage brings home the terror, the waste, and the heartbreaking futility of a guerrilla war fought in peoples’ homes as well as in the streets. And he captures the devastation of veterans on both sides, uneasily enjoying the peace that finally came while wondering if they had fought the good fight or been complicit in murder all along. | Nonfiction |
| Taste, Memory: Forgotten Foods, Lost Flavors, and Why They Matter | David Buchanan | An interesting book on saving good flavors that was the occasion for my Maine book group to enjoy a cider tasting from the author. | Nonfiction |
| The Angel | Uri Bar-Joseph | A very interesting account of how Nassar’s son-in-law, serving in Sadat’s administration, was a spy for the Israelis and may well have been the most valuable source of intelligence in the history of Israel. | Nonfiction |
| The Black Ascot | Charles Todd | Another series of mystery novels that are a great escape. The books can be read on their own but the entire series about a Scotland Yard detective with PTSD from WWI benefits from a sequential reading. Not only are mysteries solved but one learns how Inspector Rutledge comes to deal with the voice in his head from a fellow soldier whom he was compelled to execute. | Fiction |
| The Conservative Sensibility | George Will | Who knew that Will was an atheist? Or, that he would see the judicial branch as the savior of the constitutional system? A good review of constitutional history and Madisonian political theory … | Nonfiction |
| The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton And Slavery In The American Slave States, 1853-1861 | Frederick Law Olmsted | This is one of two books I’ve read by Olmsted about pre-Civil War trips he took in the south. A powerful indictment of the effects of slavery on civil society … all energy is focused on purchasing, containing, and working slaves. The result: no roads, churches, schools and a general deterioration of in the lives of the entire population. | Nonfiction |
| The Frozen Hours | Jeff Shaara | The Frozen Hours is, as is Desperate Ground, a book about the battle of Chosin Reservoir. It is a fabulous book about a battle I knew little about. The fighting was unbelievably horrendous with the Chinese commanders literally expending their soldiers as if they were bullets rather than human beings. Americans displayed enormous heroism in one of the coldest places on the planet. | Nonfiction |
| The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America | Daniel Okrent | Okrent wrote a very readable and wonderful history of Prohibition, its adoption and repeal. This book has important content but is not nearly as easy to read. As with the book on Prohibition, we learn about an entire cast of political characters about whom most of knew very little. In this case we also learn about the subversion of the scientific enterprise by racists and unscrupulous elected government officials. I came away from the book convinced that there has existed and still exists a lot of ethnic and racial bias that is just waiting to be used and abused by those with no conscience. | Nonfiction |
| The Indiscreet Jewels | Denis Diderot | The author of the world’s first Encyclopedia also wrote this pornographic novel that, in its own unique way, anticipated today’s Vagina Monologues. | Fiction |
| The Kingdom of the Blind: An Inspector Gamache Novel | Louise Penny | This Canadian author has written a wonderful series of mysteries centered in a small town in Quebec that not only entertain but offer a lot to learn about human character, both loving and unloving. Best to read these novels in sequence as we (and the characters) learn more about one another and themselves. | Fiction |
| The Last Palace | Norman Eisen | A very interesting history of the palace built by a prosperous Jewish family in Prague that later became an embassy, occupied by both the Nazis and the Americans (including Shirley Temple!). An enjoyable read … | Nonfiction |
| The Sympathizer | Viet Thanh Nguyen | Amazon says: The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship. | Fiction |
| The Tale Teller | Anne Hillerman | This is the latest in the series about Navahos, the Southwest, and law enforcement on the rez that the author has continued since her father’s death. Anne’s books are focused on a female police officer and so the vantage point is interestingly different from that of her father’s male protagonists. This is a very good series that has not fallen off in quality. | Fiction |
| The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley | Hannah Tinti | The author gradually peels back the history of the Samuel Hawley, a single itinerant criminal father raising his young daughter. An interesting, if not riveting, novel. | Fiction |
| Washington Black: A Novel | Esi Edugyan | From Chris Schluep, Amazon Book Review Washington Black is that rarest of novels: a hybrid that knows exactly what it is. The story begins as an antebellum novel about Wash, an 11-year-old slave working on a Barbados plantation run by a sadistic master. When Christopher, the master’s brother, takes Wash under his wing and teaches him to read, the novel turns more toward adventure and scientific exploration. There are inventions, twists, and turns; there is danger and intrigue; there is travel and growth. What holds everything together is author Esi Edugyan’s writing chops. She is a precise writer who has created a world that seems whole and all-embracing. Her characters are fully realized human beings. The weight of personal freedom is a theme that winds through the book, as does the opposing weight of cultural and societal expectations. There is so much to digest here, and so much to enjoy, that readers may well be tempted to read this book twice. | Fiction |