21 Bookers
armed with sustenance descended on the home of Melanie Prebis for our “wine and
cheese” evening to say farewell for the summer to meeting, but not reading.
Bookers will resume on September 12 for the beginning of our fourteenth year of
camaraderie celebrating a mutual love of the written word. Please keep in mind
this is your book club. My role is simply the facilitator (an adored role I
might add!) Your input on the direction of Bookers is a valued part of its
success, our goal continuing to be to embrace our own “cup of tea” reading
choices and at the same time, challenge our minds and hearts with an
understanding of what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes. Thank you for
this opportunity and we (MN and I) look forward to resuming Bookers in the fall.
New PWC member, Kittie Minick, joined us for our end
of year soiree, and we hope she got a taste of what we are all about and will
join us again. As always, Bonnie Magee did an excellent job as our food czar
and we appreciate her organizational expertise. Many thanks to Kathi Baublits
for coordinating Jane Freer’s Summer Fun Bucket, which she delivered today, and
to everyone who contributed a wonderful assortment of “fun” and love. Jane
called earlier to give an update on how she is doing and to express her
heartfelt appreciation for everything Bookers has done to try to boost her
spirits. All the flowers from last month are planted under the big tree in
their front yard and she and Gary are enjoying the wealth of color added to
their landscape. Jane recently spent two days in the hospital and this past
Monday she received a double bag of chemotherapy, starting her “rough patch.”
She’ll have a week off then a CT scan and MRI to assess the results of the
chemo. If good news is measured in love, prayers, and support, we’ll all be
toasting Jane’s prognosis!! Kay Hazelbaker sent a thank you card to Bookers for
all the well wishes. We missed Lee McFarlane also, and hope she is on the road
to recovery from her recent surgery.
The mere mention of mistreatment of Jewish children and
medical experimentation allowed comparisons of Orphan # 8 to the horrors
of the Holocaust. The author, doing some family research, came across
information on the day-to-day operations of an orphanage that in 1920 was one
of the largest childcare institutions in the country. The inspiration for the
novel came from a request for the purchase of wigs for eight children who had
developed alopecia because of X-ray treatments. She tapped into her family tree
to produce characters based on her great-grandfather and great-grandmother,
discovering how many women were involved in medical research on children during
this timeframe and the dual role of medicine in healing and harm. Ms. Van
Alkemade referencing the “unnatural” relationship between Rachel and Naomi
remained true to the norm of the era in which they lived their lives in secret
and as adults would be referred to as “female spinster roommates.” As late as
the 1950’s, homosexuality was a psychological disorder that could be cured
through analysis and therapy, its cause, “a deep-seated and unresolved
neurosis…instead of really being happy, they are lonely and unhappy but afraid
to admit it.”
Patty Evans dissected this month’s selection, Orphan
# 8, a multi-layered novel, with the skill of a surgeon fostering a
lively discussion from our group. The novel begins with four-year old Rachel
Rabinowitz living with her parents and older brother in a crowded tenement in
New York City’s lower Eastside. When tragedy strikes, Rachel is sent to a
Jewish orphanage where she is part of an experimental X-ray protocol conducted
by Dr. Mildred Solomon. Years later Rachel is confronted with her dark past
when she becomes a nurse at Manhattan’s Old Hebrew Home and her patient is none
other than the elderly, cancer-stricken Dr. Solomon. Rachel arrived at the
orphanage, “whole, undamaged, and pretty,” but Dr. Solomon left her weak,
vulnerable, and disfigured. If you had the power to seek revenge on the woman
who ruined your life, what would you do? Rachel finally realized what it felt
like to control someone’s destiny. Could she justify her actions because the
old woman was going to die anyway? In the end, she recognizes that a person’s
fate – to be the one who inflicts harm or one who heals – is not always set in
stone.
The majority of our group read and finished the novel,
those who did not found the mistreatment of children too much to bear. Granted
it was not an easy read, but Rachel discovered a resolve to continue moving
forward, not allowing herself to be swallowed up by her circumstances, pursuing
a career in the care-giving field of nursing. She found the fortitude to break
through the walls of misery, evolving as a valuable asset to society, becoming
a genuine “good girl.” We discussed mother figures, abandonment, the men in
Rachel’s life, the importance of cuddling children from a very early age, and
some personal blasts from the past.
On the business side:
Bookers donated many books to the Pinnacle Free
Library located downstairs of the Clubhouse only to discover the bookcase was
removed due to mold. John Magee generously offered to build a new one for the
cost of materials, around $150.00. We voted to embrace this project and Beverly
Dossett is collecting the funds for us. Please contact her if you can help with
this project. If we collect additional funds, we hope to purchase a Bookers
plaque for the bookcase with the intention of donating books throughout the
year for others to enjoy. This is our way of letting the community in on our
secret… Bookers’ books.
If you have attended a meeting in the last year, it’s
no secret that my voice does not carry well and without MN’s hypnotic aura,
we’ve enlisted an external microphone to help in the voice of Bonnie Magee, so
if you hear her asking you to gather around…she’s doing her job.
With our summer read in flux because of the production
delay of Life in a Box, we offered the suggestion of meeting in June in
hopes a publish date could be shared for my novel at that time. We voted not to
meet, but to wait for the announcement hopefully by the end of June, and select
Life
in a Box as our summer read to be reviewed in September. Chances are a
Q&A with the author will be available at the meeting. HA! Thanks again for
all your support!!!!!
Last year we held the December meeting at the Club
preceded by cocktails and a very nice dinner. We just learned from our reviewer
that when she took the podium, our audience appeared almost asleep and another
observation was that it was difficult to hear the discussion if you were
sitting behind the participant. We’ll work on a solution or another alternative
during the summer.
Here’s a few suggestions to whet your reading appetite
while enjoying our break:
Hillbilly Elegy by J.D.
Vance. A memoir written by a former marine and Yale Law School graduate…a
powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town. It’s a personal
analysis of a culture in crisis – that of white working-class Americans. He
tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like
when you were born with it hung around your neck.
Tribe by Sebastian
Junger. Decades before the American
Revolution, Benjamin Franklin lamented that English settlers were constantly
fleeing over to the Indians-but Indians almost never did the same. Tribal
society has been exerting an almost gravitational pull on Westerners for
hundreds of years, and the reason lies deep in our evolutionary past as a
communal species. The most recent example of that attraction is combat veterans
who come home to find themselves missing the incredibly intimate bonds of
platoon life. The loss of closeness that comes at the end of deployment may
explain the high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by military
veterans today. Combining history, psychology, and anthropology, Tribe explores what we
can learn from tribal societies about loyalty, belonging, and the eternal human
quest for meaning.
America’s First Daughter
by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie. An historical fiction telling of Thomas
Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Martha “Patsy” Jefferson Randolph, the woman who
kept the secrets of our most enigmatic founding father. She became the “first
lady” when her mother died and at fifteen learned about her father’s troubling
liaison with Sally Hemings, a slave girl her own age.
Beartown, by Fredrik Backman, bestselling author of A
Man Called Ove returns with a dazzling, profound novel about a
small town with a big dream—and the price required to make it come true. People say Beartown is finished.
A tiny community nestled deep in the forest is slowly losing ground to the
ever-encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built
generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink
is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today.
Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals,
and they actually have a chance at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this
place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.
Elizabeth Strout’s
latest, Anything Is Possible, written in the same vein as her Pulitzer
Prize winning novel, Olive Kitteridge, a series of linked
short stories exploring the whole range of human emotion through intimate
dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. The characters
are from My Name is Lucy Barton, featuring the return of Lucy to her
hometown after a seventeen-year absence.
A Gentleman in Moscow, by
Amor Towles, author of Rules of Civility, is set in a famed
Moscow hotel where movie stars hobnob with Russian royalty.
The Doula, by Bridgit Boland, a debut novel about a doula trained
to support women and their families during childbirth who is on trial for her
best friend’s death.
The Match: The Day the Game of Golf Changed Forever, by Mark Frost. The
year is 1956 and an impromptu eighteen-hole best ball match features living
legends Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson versus rising stars, Harvie Ward and Ken
Venturi.
Taking Flight, by Adrian R. Magnusom. A thirteen-year old boy sent against
his will by his career-absorbed father to spend the summer with his bipolar
mother meets a one-legged elderly man with mid-stage Alzheimer’s on a
cross-country flight. What happens next is a lifetime adventure for both.
Ida Mae Tutweiler and the Traveling Tea Party, by Ginnie Siena Bivona. A simple,
charming yarn that will make you laugh out loud and shed a tear about women,
mothers, daughters, sisters, and lifelong friendships.
COLOR CODING SYSTEM
WHITE: LIGHT READ
PINK: MODERATELY
CHALLENGING
RED: CHALLENGING
September
12 Beginning
Year 14
Life
in a Box, a novel by JoDee Neathery
RED
Home
of Kathi Baublits
Reviewer:
TBA
October
3 Moved a week early due to garage sale
conflict
Book:
TBA
Host
home: TBA
Reviewer:
TBA
November
14 Book: TBA
Host
home: Chris Batt
Reviewer:
TBA
December
12 Book: TBA
Host
home: TBA
Reviewer:
TBA
January
9, 2018 Book:
TBA
Home
of Daryl Daniels
Reviewer:
TBA
February
13 Book TBA
Home
of Bonnie Magee
Reviewer:
TBA
March
13 Book: TBA
Home
of Patty Evans
Reviewer:
TBA
April
10 Book: TBA
Home
of Sandy Molander
Reviewer:
TBA
May
8 Book: TBA
Host
Home: TBA
Reviewer:
TBA
Have a wonderful summer…curl up with a good book!
JoDee
