Programs for Adults - Friends of the Chapel Hill Public Library

Archived Discussions

Click here to view upcoming discussions

February 2^nd, 2005: The Known World by Edward P. Jones

In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Edward P. Jones, two-time National Book Award finalist, 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. In a daring and ambitious novel, Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all of its moral complexities. A 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner.

[ Show Detail ]
March 2^nd, 2005: Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis

In this landmark work of history, the National Book Awardâ€”winning author of American Sphinx explores how a group of greatly gifted but deeply flawed individualsâ€“Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Adams, and Madisonâ€“confronted the overwhelming challenges before them to set the course for our nation. The United States was more a fragile hope than a reality in 1790. During the decade that followed, the Founding Fathers — re-examined here as Founding Brothers — combined the ideals of the Declaration of Independence with the content of the Constitution to create the practical workings of our government. Through an analysis of six fascinating episodes — Hamilton and Burrâ€™s deadly duel, Washingtonâ€™s precedent-setting Farewell Address, Adamsâ€™ administration and political partnership with his wife, the debate about where to place the capital, Franklinâ€™s attempt to force Congress to confront the issue of slavery and Madisonâ€™s attempts to block him, and Jefferson and Adamsâ€™ famous correspondence — Founding Brothers brings to life the vital issues and personalities from the most important decade in our nationâ€™s history.

[ Show Detail ]
April 6^th, 2005: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner’s Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery — personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents’ remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America’s western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he’s willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.

[ Show Detail ]
May 4^th, 2005: Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz

Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America’s greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance. Written with Horwitz’s signature blend of humor, history, and hard-nosed journalism, Confederates in the Attic brings alive old battlefields and new ones, classrooms, courts, and country bars’, where the past and the present collide, often in explosive ways. Poignant and picaresque, haunting and hilarious, it speaks to anyone who has ever felt drawn to the mythic South and to the dark romance of the Civil War. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1998).

[ Show Detail ]
June 1^st, 2005: Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man’s Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient. Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come.

[ Show Detail ]
July 6^th, 2005: Donâ€™t Letâ€™s Go To the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller

In Donâ€™t Letâ€™s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fullerâ€™s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fullerâ€™s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time. A Book Sense Book of the Year (2003).

[ Show Detail ]
August 3^rd, 2005: Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story by Timothy B. Tyson

In this outstanding personal history, Tyson unflinchingly examines the civil rights struggle in the South. The book focuses on the murder of a young black man, Henry Marrow, in 1970, a tragedy that dramatically widened the racial gap in the author’s hometown of Oxford, N.C. Tyson portrays the killing and its aftermath from multiple perspectives, including that of his contemporary, 10-year-old self; his progressive Methodist pastor father, who strove to lead his parishioners to overcome their prejudices; members of the disempowered black community; one of the killers; and his older self, who comes to Oxford with a historian’s eye. He also artfully interweaves the history of race relations in the South and celebrates a number of inspirational unsung heroes. His avoidance of stereotypes and simple answers brings a shameful recent era in our country’s history to vivid life. Tyson teaches Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is currently also a visiting professor of American Christianity and Southern culture at the Duke Divinity School as well as a senior scholar of documentary studies at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke.

[ Show Detail ]
September 7^th, 2005: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which book paper burns. Fahrenheit 451 is a novel set in the (perhaps near) future when “firemen” burn books forbidden by a totalitarian “brave new world” regime. The hero, according to Mr. Bradbury, is “a book burner who suddenly discovers that books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out silently when put to the torch. Today, when libraries and schools in this country and all over the world are still “burning” certain books, Fahrenheit 451 remains a brilliantly readable and suspenseful work of even greater impact and timeliness.

[ Show Detail ]
October 5^th, 2005: The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad

With The Bookseller of Kabul, award-winning journalist Asne Seierstad has given readers a first-hand look at Afghani life as few outsiders have seen it. Invited to live with Sultan Khan, a bookseller in Kabul, and his family for months, this account of her experience allows the Khans to speak for themselves, giving us a genuinely gripping and moving portrait of a family, and of a country of great cultural riches and extreme contradictions. For more than 20 years, Sultan Khan has defied the authorities—whether Communist or Taliban—to supply books to the people of Kabul. He has been arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned, and has watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. Yet he had persisted in his passion for books, shedding light in one of the world’s darkest places. This is the intimate portrait of a man of principle and of his family—two wives, five children, and many relatives sharing a small four-room house in this war ravaged city. But more than that, it is a rare look at contemporary life under Islam, where even after the Taliban’s collapse, the women must submit to arranged marriages, polygamous husbands, and crippling limitations on their ability to travel, learn and communicate with others.

[ Show Detail ]
November 2^nd, 2005: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner In The Sound and the Fury, first published in 1929, Faulkner created his “heart’s darling,” the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers—the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason.

[ Show Detail ]
December 7^th, 2005: The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson

Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson’s spellbinding bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men—the brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World’s Fair and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative that pairs the wonder of newly discovered history with the thrill of the best fiction.

[ Show Detail ]
January 4^th, 2006: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. 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 breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different countries and continents become compatriots. Friendship, compassion, and the chance for great love lead the characters to forget the real danger that has been set in motion and cannot be stopped.

[ Show Detail ]
February 1^st, 2006: The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry

In his powerful new book, award-winning historian John M. Barry unfolds a tale that is magisterial in its breadth and in the depth of its research, and spellbinding as he weaves multiple narrative strands together. In this first great collision between science and epidemic disease, even as society approached collapse, a handful of heroic researchers stepped forward, risking their lives to confront this strange disease. Titans like William Welch at the newly formed Johns Hopkins Medical School and colleagues at Rockefeller University and others from around the country revolutionized American science and public health, and their work in this crisis led to crucial discoveries that we are still using and learning from today.

[ Show Detail ]
March 1^st, 2006: Interpreter of Maladies [stories] by Jhumpa Lahiri

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. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice.

[ Show Detail ]
April 5^th, 2006: Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg

Few American icons provoke more enduring fascination than Charles Lindbergh — renowned for his one-man transatlantic flight in 1927, remembered for the sorrow surrounding the kidnapping and death of his firstborn son in 1932, and reviled by many for his opposition to America’s entry into World War II. Lindbergh’s is “a dramatic and disturbing American story,” says the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and this biography — the first to be written with unrestricted access to the Lindbergh archives and extensive interviews of his friends, colleagues, and close family members — is “the definitive account.”

[ Show Detail ]
May 3^rd, 2006: Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

Disgrace — set in post-apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape — is deft, lean, quiet, and brutal. A heartbreaking novel about a man and his daughter, Disgrace is a portrait of the new South Africa that is ultimately about grace and love. At fifty-two Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire but lacking passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless and friendless, except for his daughter, Lucy, who works her smallholding with her neighbor, Petrus, an African farmer now on the way to a modest prosperity. David’s attempts to relate to Lucy, and to a society with new racial complexities, are disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his daughter in ways he could never have foreseen. In this wry, visceral, yet strangely tender novel, Coetzee once again tells “truths [that] cut to the bone”

[ Show Detail ]
June 7^th, 2006: House by Tracy Kidder

In this now-classic New York Times bestseller, Pulitzer-Prize winning author Tracy Kidder leads readers through the grand adventure of building an American dream. In his portrayal, constructing a staircase or applying a coat of paint becomes a riveting tale of conflicting wills, the strength and strain of relationships, and pride in craftsmanship. With drama, sensitivity, and insight, Kidder takes us from blueprints to moving day. In the process, he sheds new light on objects usually taken for granted and creates a vivid cast of characters you will not soon forget.

[ Show Detail ]
July 5^th, 2006: Peace Like a River by Leif Enger

Leif Enger’s best-selling debut is at once a heroic quest, a tragedy, and a love story, in which “what could be unbelievable becomes extraordinary” (Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald). Enger brings us eleven-year-old Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy in the Midwest who has reason to believe in miracles. Along with his sister and father, Reuben finds himself on a cross-country search for his outlaw older brother who has been controversially charged with murder. Their journey unfolds like a revelation, and its conclusion shows how family, love, and faith can stand up to the most terrifying of enemies, the most tragic of fates.

[ Show Detail ]
August 2^nd, 2006: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Namesake is a finely wrought, deeply moving family drama that illuminates the Pulitzer prize-winning authors signature themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, and the tangled ties between generations. The novel takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of an arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ashoke does his best to adapt while his wife pines for home. When their son, Gogol, is born, the task of naming him betrays their hope of respecting old ways in a new world. And we watch as Gogol stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.

[ Show Detail ]
September 6^th, 2006: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

One of the most frequently challenged books of all time, twice banned, Mark Twainâ€™s classic is the story of a young boy who, though innately good, has values that have been formed by the deeply corrupt, slave-ridden society in which he lives. Huck tells the story in his own words — a radical narrative technique when the book was first published in 1884 — and the gulf between what he sees and what he understands produces a richly ironic indictment of slavery in all of its forms.

[ Show Detail ]
October 4^th, 2006: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman

In this anthropological exploration of the Hmong population in Merced County, California, Fadiman has created a fascinating account of cultural dislocation that has a haunting lesson for healthcare providers. Following the case of Lia, a Hmong child with a progressive and unpredictable form of epilepsy, Fadiman skillfully and thoughtfully maps out the controversies raised by the collision between Western medicine and the holistic healing traditions of Hmong immigrants.

[ Show Detail ]
November 1^st, 2006: Beloved by Toni Morrison

Recently named “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years,” Beloved is a fascinating, grim, relentless story about ex-slaves haunted by violent memories. Before the Civil War, Sethe sent her children away to their grandmother in Ohio, whose freedom had been paid for by their father. Sethe runs too, but when her “owners” come to recapture her, she attempts to murder the children, succeeding with one, named Beloved. This murder will (literally) haunt Sethe for the rest of her life and affect everyone around her.

[ Show Detail ]
December 6^th, 2006: American Prometheus : The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

Though many recognize Oppenheimer as the father of the atomic bomb, few are familiar with his personal life or his career before and after Los Alamos. Restoring human complexity to a man who has been both elevated and demonized, the authors present a carefully researched account of Oppenheimer’s life from his childhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and his prewar years as a Berkeley physicist to his public humiliation when he was branded a security risk at the height of anticommunist hysteria in 1954.

[ Show Detail ]
January 3^rd, 2007: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

A beautifully developed, richly textured story that begins in Poland, where a boy falls in love and writes a book. When World War II arrives, both the love and the book are lost. Leo Gursky, now in his eighties and living in New York City, struggles to be noticed each day so that people will know he has not yet died. Meanwhile, 14-year-old Alma Singer, whose father has just died, wants her brother to be normal and her mother to be happy again. In a quest for the story behind her name, Alma and Leo find each other, and Leo learns that the book he wrote so long ago has not been lost.

[ Show Detail ]
February 7^th, 2007: A Crack in the Edge of the World : America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 by Simon Winchester

In this page-turner, Winchester has crafted a magnificent testament to the power of planet Earth and the efforts of humankind to understand her. A master storyteller and Oxford trained geologist, Winchester effortlessly weaves together countless threads of interest and produces a powerfully compelling narrative about one of the most devastating of all time. With fabulous style, wit and grace, Winchester casts doubt on the very notion of solid ground and invites his readers to ponder the planet they live on, from both inside and out.

[ Show Detail ]
March 7^th, 2007: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

One of the most widely read novels from Nigeria’s most famous novelist, Things Fall Apart is a gripping study of European colonialism in Africa. The story relates the cultural collision that occurs when Christian English missionaries arrive among the Ibos of Nigeria, bringing along their European ways of life and religion. In the novel, the Nigerian Okonkwo recognizes the cultural imperialism of the white men and tries to show his own people how their society will fall apart if they exchange their own cultural core for that of the English.

[ Show Detail ]
April 4^th, 2007: The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery

Over the past decade, the world has seen the most powerful El Nino ever recorded, the most devastating hurricane in two hundred years, the hottest European summer on record, and one of the worst storm seasons ever experienced in Florida. Flannery’s book is “an authoritative yet accessible presentation of the scientific evidence that climate change is happening; a clear delineation of what global warming has done and could do to life on our planet; and an urgent call for action.”

[ Show Detail ]
May 2^nd, 2007: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

An unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant. The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country — Afghanistan — that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption.

[ Show Detail ]
June 6^th, 2007: The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan

Elegantly combining literary, historical, philosophical, and scientific references with engaging anecdotes, Pollan’s fascinating account of four everyday plants — apples, tulips, potatoes and cannabis — and their co evolution with human society challenges traditional views about humans, nature, and the very meaning of domestication.

[ Show Detail ]
July 12^th, 2007: The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

In an astonishing feat of narrative invention, one of our most ambitious novelists imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, New Jersey, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America — and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.

[ Show Detail ]
August 1^st, 2007: Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions by Sister Helen Prejean

Since the 1993 publication of her memoir Dead Man Walking and the 1995 film it inspired, Sister Helen Prejean has become a powerful and articulate presence in the fight against the death penalty in America. In The Death of Innocents, Prejean focuses her argument on the ways in which an unjust system may be killing innocent people. She tells the story of two inmates she came to know as a spiritual adviser. Dobie Williams, a poor black man with an IQ of 65 from rural Louisiana, was executed after being represented by incompetent counsel and found guilty by an all-white jury based mostly on conjecture and speculation. Joseph O’Dell was convicted of murder after the court heard from an inmate who later admitted to giving false testimony for his own benefit. O’Dell received neither an evidentiary hearing nor potentially exculpatory DNA testing and was executed, insisting on his innocence the whole while. Besides exploring the shaky cases against them, Prejean describes in vivid detail the thoughts and feelings of Williams and O’Dell as their bids for clemency fail and they are put to death. The second part of the book details “the machinery of death,” the legal process that Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, dismayed at the inequities of the death penalty, cited as his reason for resigning and that current justice Antonin Scalia has boasted of being a part of. Prejean is impassioned as she describes what she sees as an arrogant attitude by both Scalia and the contemporary judicial system. Her chance confrontation with Scalia at an airport is a gripping collision of disparate worlds. In recent years, DNA testing has overturned the convictions of scores of prisoners, including many on death row. As the death penalty is increasingly called into question, Sister Helen Prejean will surely be a force in that debate.

[ Show Detail ]
September 5^th, 2007: Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher

If the stereotype of the “bonehead jock” is ever to be defeated, it will be at Crutcher’s hands. In these six short stories, he and his athlete protagonists take on such weighty issues as racism, homophobia, sexism and the teenager’s essential task of coming to terms with his parents. At the same time the author makes the world of sports compelling enough to engage even the most sedentary readers. Three of the stories revolve around characters featured in Crutcher’s The Crazy Horse Electric Game , including the memorable eccentric known as Telephone Man. Also starring in his own story is Lionel Serbousek, the orphaned artist and swimmer of Stotan! In the book’s final tale, Louie Banks (from Running Loose ) is befriended by a young man with AIDS and must cope once again with the untimely death of a loved one. The stories’ locales—mostly small towns in Montana and Idaho—are vividly evoked, and make a satisfying change from the well-known big cities and bland suburbs where so many YA novels are set.

[ Show Detail ]
October 3^rd, 2007: King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild

Hochschild’s superb, engrossing chronicle focuses on one of the great, horrifying and nearly forgotten crimes of the century: greedy Belgian King Leopold II’s rape of the Congo, the vast colony he seized as his private fiefdom in 1885. Until 1909, he used his mercenary army to force slaves into mines and rubber plantations, burn villages, mete out sadistic punishments, including dismemberment, and committ mass murder. The hero of Hochschild’s highly personal, even gossipy narrative is Liverpool shipping agent Edmund Morel, who, having stumbled on evidence of Leopold’s atrocities, became an investigative journalist and launched an international Congo reform movement with support from Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and Arthur Conan Doyle. Other pivotal figures include Joseph Conrad, whose disgust with Leopold’s “civilizing mission” led to Heart of Darkness; and black American journalist George Washington Williams, who wrote the first systematic indictment of Leopold’s colonial regime in 1890. Hochschild (The Unquiet Ghost) documents the machinations of Leopold, who won over President Chester A. Arthur and bribed a U.S. senator to derail Congo protest resolutions. He also draws provocative parallels between Leopold’s predatory one-man rule and the strongarm tactics of Mobuto Sese Seko, who ruled the successor state of Zaire. But most of all it is a story of the bestiality of one challenged by the heroism of many in an increasingly democratic world

[ Show Detail ]
November 7^th, 2007: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Lily is haunted by memories —- of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness.  In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu (“women’s writing”). Some girls were paired with laotongs, “old sames,” in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments.  With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become “old sames” at the tender age of seven. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.  Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a brilliantly realistic journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. With the period detail and deep resonance of Memoirs of a Geisha, this lyrical and emotionally charged novel delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendship.

[ Show Detail ]
December 5^th, 2007: I’m a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson

Ex-expatriate Bryson, who chronicled one effort at American reentry in his bestselling A Walk in the Woods, collects another: the whimsical columns on America he wrote weekly, while living in New Hampshire in the mid-to-late 1990s, for a British Sunday newspaper. Although he happily describes himself as dazzled by American ease, friendliness and abundance, Bryson has no trouble finding comic targets, among them fast food, computer efficiency and, ironically, American friendliness and putative convenience. As he edges into Dave Barry-style hyperbole, Bryson sometimes strains for yuks, but he’s deft when he compares the two cultures, as in their different treatment of Christmas, pointing out how the British “pack all their festive excesses” into that single holiday. Bryson also nudges into domestic territory with regular references to his own British wife, the resolutely sensible Mrs. B. In a few columns, Bryson adopts a sentimental tone, writing about his family and his new hometown of Hanover. In others, he’s more sober, criticizing anti-immigration activists, environmental depredation and drug laws (though he draws out the humor in these as well). Not all the columns hit their mark, and they are best read in small groupings, but this collection should sell well enough, although not likely to the heights of A Walk in the Woods.

[ Show Detail ]
January 8^th, 2008: My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

In 16th-century Istanbul, master miniaturist and illuminator of books Enishte Effendi is commissioned to illustrate a book celebrating the sultan. Soon he lies dead at the bottom of a well, and how he got there is the crux of this novel. A number of narrators give testimony to what they know about the circumstances surrounding the murder. The stories accumulate and become more detailed as the novel progresses, giving the reader not only a nontraditional murder mystery but insight into the mores and customs of the time. In addition, this is both an examination of the way figurative art is viewed within Islam and a love story that demonstrates the tricky mechanics of marriage laws. Award-winning Turkish author Pamuk (The White Castle) creatively casts the novel with colorful characters (including such entities as a tree and a gold coin) and provides a palpable sense of atmosphere of the Ottoman Empire that history and literary fans will appreciate.

[ Show Detail ]
February 6^th, 2008: His Excellency, George Washington by Joseph Ellis

To this landmark biography of our first president, Joseph J. Ellis brings the exacting scholarship, shrewd analysis, and lyric prose that have made him one of the premier historians of the Revolutionary era. Training his lens on a figure who sometimes seems as remote as his effigy on Mount Rushmore, Ellis assesses George Washington as a military and political leader and a man whose “statue-like solidity” concealed volcanic energies and emotions.

Here is the impetuous young officer whose miraculous survival in combat half-convinced him that he could not be killed. Here is the free-spending landowner whose debts to English merchants instilled him with a prickly resentment of imperial power. We see the general who lost more battles than he won and the reluctant president who tried to float above the partisan feuding of his cabinet. His Excellency is a magnificent work, indispensable to an understanding not only of its subject but also of the nation he brought into being.

[ Show Detail ]
March 5^th, 2008: The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri

The title of Manil Suri’s first novel gets right to the point. His protagonist, having purchased the right to sleep on the ground-floor landing of a Bombay apartment house, slips slowly from a coma into death. As this aging alcoholic takes leave of the earth, his neighbors surround him, arguing over who gave Vishnu a few dried chapatis, who called the doctor for him, and who will pay for the ambulance to cart him away. Meanwhile, the hero of The Death of Vishnu is lost in memories. Drifting through increasingly vivid scenes from his past, he recalls his relatively rare snatches of love and joy—and especially his romance with Padmini, a self-involved prostitute. On one particular day, it seems, he stole one of his employer’s cars and drove his love interest to the honeymoon town of Lonavala, where he showered her with gifts and finally lifted her veil to kiss her like a bride:
Then the absurdity of the situation strikes him. The preposterousness of his images, the foolishness of his feelings, the comicality of chasing currents that skim across Padmini’s face. He thinks how absurd this whole trip has been, how absurd is the presence of the two of them in Lonavala, how absurd is the scenery itself that stretches before them. He thinks of poor, ridiculous Mr. Jalal, waiting back in Bombay for his Fiat, and of how Padmini will react when he asks her to buy them petrol so they can get back.
Vishnu also recalls his secret passion for Kavita Asrani, the beautiful teenage daughter of one of the families for whom he works. Given the protagonist’s focus on his hapless love life, the scope of Suri’s dazzling debut may appear narrow. However, the apartment house upon whose floor Vishnu spends his final hours functions as a microcosm of Indian society. It helps to know even a smattering about Hindu mythology or India’s religious conflicts. But even if you don’t, there is plenty to relish in The Death of Vishnu, with its comical, richly drawn characters, loving attention to the details of everyday life, and provocative exploration of destiny and free will

[ Show Detail ]
April 2^nd, 2008: Roanoke by Lee Miller

November of 1587, a report reached London claiming Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition to land English settlers in America had foundered. The colony on Roanoke Island off of the coast of North Carolina-115 men, women, and children-had disappeared without a trace. For four hundred years, the question of what became of the doomed settlers has remained unanswered. Where did they go? What really happened? Why were they on Roanoke Island in the first place, as that was not their destination? Using her consummate skills as an anthropologist and ethnohistorian, Lee Miller casts new light on the previously inexplicable puzzle of Roanoke, unraveling a thrilling web of deceit that can be traced back to the inner circle of Queen Elizabeth’s government to finally solve the lasting mystery of the Lost Colony

[ Show Detail ]
May 7^th, 2008: Plant Life by Pamela Duncan

“Plant Life is an American classic. Like Our Town or Winesburg, Ohio, it presents a compelling and moving portrait of an entire community. In this case, it is the life of a cotton mill, and three generations of women who work there—whose whole lives have been determined by the mill. Stark, poetic, funny, gritty, and intense, their stories will move you to tears and make you laugh at the same time. Never have the lives of Southern working women been so well documented, their stories so truly told. Plant Life is a mature work of a great compassion and insight.”—Lee Smith, bestselling author

[ Show Detail ]
June 4^th, 2008: The Places In Between by Rory Stewart

In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan-surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers’ floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan’s first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following.

Through these encounters-by turns touching, confounding, surprising, and funny-Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map’s countless places in between.

[ Show Detail ]
July 2^nd, 2008: Plainsong by Kent Haruf

Plainsong, according to Kent Haruf’s epigraph, is “any simple and unadorned melody or air.” It’s a perfect description of this lovely, rough-edged book, set on the very edge of the Colorado plains. Tom Guthrie is a high school teacher whose wife can’t—or won’t—get out of bed; the McPherons are two bachelor brothers who know little about the world beyond their farm gate; Victoria Roubideaux is a pregnant 17-year-old with no place to turn. Their lives parallel each other in much the same way any small-town lives would—until Maggie Jones, another teacher, makes them intersect. Even as she tries to draw Guthrie out of his black cloud, she sends Victoria to live with the two elderly McPheron brothers, who know far more about cattle than about teenage girls. Trying to console her when she think she’s hurt her baby, the best lie they can come up with is this: “I knew of a heifer we had one time that was carrying a calf, and she got a length of fencewire down her some way and it never hurt her or the calf.”
Holt, Colorado, is the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone’s business before that business even happens. In a way, that’s true of the book, too. There’s not a lot of suspense here, plotwise; you can see each narrative twist and turn coming several miles down the pike. What Plainsong has instead is note-perfect dialogue, surrounded by prose that’s straightforward yet rich in particulars: “a woman walking a white lapdog on a piece of ribbon,” glimpsed from a car window; the boys’ mother, her face “as pale as schoolhouse chalk”; the smells of hay and manure, the variations of prairie light. Even the novel’s larger questions are sized to a domestic scale. Will Guthrie find love? Will Victoria run away with the father of her baby? Will the McPherons learn to hold a conversation? But in this case, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and Plainsong manages to capture nothing less than an entire world—fencing pliers, calf-pullers, and all. Kent Haruf has a gorgeous ear, and a knack for rendering the simple complex

[ Show Detail ]
August 6^th, 2008: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino

Yoshino, a law professor at Yale and a gay, Asian-American man, masterfully melds autobiography and legal scholarship in this book, marking a move from more traditional pleas for civil equality to a case for individual autonomy in identity politics. In questioning the phenomenon of “covering,” a term used for the coerced hiding of crucial aspects of one’s self, Yoshino thrusts the reader into a battlefield of shifting gray areas. Yet, at every step, he anticipates the reader’s questions and rebuttals, answering them not only with acute reasoning, but with disarming humility. What emerges is an eloquent, poetic protest against the hidden prejudices embedded in American civil rights legislation—legislation that tacitly apologizes for “immutable” human difference from the white, male, straight norm, rather than defending one’s “right to say what one is.” Though Yoshino recognizes the law’s potential to further (and hinder) liberty’s cause, he admits that his “education in law has been an education in its limitations.” Hence, by way of his unsparing accounts of self-realization, he reveals that the struggle against oppression lies not solely in fighting an imagined, monolithic state but as much in intimate discourse with the mother, the father and the colleague who constitute that state.

[ Show Detail ]
September 3^rd, 2008: The Position by Greg Wolitzer

Paul and Roz Mellow are enthusiastically in love—so much so that in 1975 they write a how-to sex book, Pleasuring, that features illustrations of them in every imaginable position. The book becomes a runaway bestseller. When the children find the book and read it together, they’re forever traumatized, in ways both serious and comedic. Flash forward 30 years: Paul and Roz are long divorced and remarried, and Paul, in particular, remains bitter; the grown children fumble through their lives on the eve of the publisher’s reissue of the sex classic.

[ Show Detail ]
October 1^st, 2008: Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick

In this remarkable effort, National Book Award–winner Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea) examines the history of Plymouth Colony. Philbrick brings into focus a gruesome period in early American history.

[ Show Detail ]
November 5^th, 2008: Magic Time by Doug Marlette

When a terrorist group bombs a Manhattan museum, New York Examiner columnist Carter Ransom suffers an emotional breakdown and returns to his Mississippi hometown, Troy, to convalesce. Carter’s father, Judge Ransom, has just retired after 40 years on the bench there; his most famous case was presiding over Troy’s national disgrace: the Shiloh Church bombing, in which four civil rights activists died in 1965.

[ Show Detail ]
December 3^rd, 2008: Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen

Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse’s unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world’s second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town’s first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.

[ Show Detail ]
February 4^th, 2009: The Good German by Joseph Kanon

This compelling thriller is both a touching love story and a masterful portrayal of the struggle for geopolitical control of postwar Germany. Network correspondent Jake Geismar, who covered Berlin before the war, has returned to the devastated city, ostensibly to cover the Potsdam Conference but actually to find the woman he loves. Miraculously, Lena Brandt, Jake’s wartime mistress, has survived. However, her mathematician husband is missing, and both the American and Russian intelligence services are hunting him.

[ Show Detail ]
March 4^th, 2009: My Life in France by Julia Child

With Julia Child’s death in 2004 at age 91, her grandnephew Prud’homme (The Cell Game) completed this playful memoir of the famous chef’s first, formative sojourn in France with her new husband, Paul Child, in 1949. The couple met during WWII in Ceylon, working for the OSS, and soon after moved to Paris, where Paul worked for the U.S. Information Service. Child describes herself as a “rather loud and unserious Californian,” 36, six-foot-two and without a word of French, while Paul was 10 years older, an urbane, well-traveled Bostonian.

[ Show Detail ]
April 1^st, 2009: Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux

In one of Theroux’s most magnificent novels, the paranoid, brilliant, and self-destructive Allie Fox takes his family to live in the Honduran jungle, determined to build a civilization better than the one they’ve left.

[ Show Detail ]
May 6^th, 2009: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents—Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls’ childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices.

[ Show Detail ]
June 3^rd, 2009: Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards

Because of a storm, Dr. David Henry delivers his wife’s babies himself, aided only by a nurse. The fraternal twins are born healthy, but one has Down syndrome. Without telling his wife, he asks the nurse to take the child to a home and tells his wife that the twin died at birth. The nurse secretly absconds with the baby to Pittsburg and this story traces the impact of the Dr.’s decision on the lives of those involved over 25 years.

[ Show Detail ]
July 1^st, 2009: The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: a Jewish Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Lucette Lagnado

This memoir of an Egyptian Jewish family’s gradual ruin is told without melodrama by its youngest survivor, now a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Lagnado’s story hinges on her father, “the Captain,” who cut a dashing figure in mid-century Cairo, consorting with British officers and Egyptian royalty at French cafés while his family, neglected, stayed home.

[ Show Detail ]
August 5^th, 2009: A Home on the Field by Paul Cuadros - Discussion Led by Author

The discussion will be led by Paul Cuadros, author of the club’s August selection, A Home on the Field. The meeting is free and open to the public.
UNC Freshman Choice This is the story of one team and their accidental coach who became certain heroes to the whole community of Siler City , North Carolina . Workers there have come from traditional Latino enclaves across the United States and from Latin American countries to work in poultry processing. There are struggles to assimilate, often in the schools. Paul’s goal was to show Latino youth that high school graduation and college could be a reality. Long-time residents came to appreciate the Jets soccer team as they fought through three seasons to become eligible to win the state championship. The book is about faith, loyalty and trust.

[ Show Detail ]
September 2^nd, 2009: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Challenged Book

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee – This American classic tells of Scout and Jem’s childhood in Alabama and how a series of events shook their innocence, shaped their character and taught them about human nature. Lee examines racism and other prejudices through an entertaining story told in the easy Southern voice, the voice of a child. It is as relevant today as when it was written in 1960. It is described as being able to evoke sympathy while dealing with heavy, sensitive issues of racism, oppression and injustice and does this without being depressing or preachy.

[ Show Detail ]
October 7^th, 2009: The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper

Journalist Cooper has a compelling story: born into a powerful Liberian family descended from freed American slaves, she came of age in the 1980’s when her homeland slipped into civil war. Cooper combines deeply personal and wide-ranging political strands in her memoir. Years after the family’s exile to America and Cooper’s successful career as a journalist with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, she returns to Liberia to reclaim her childhood and reunite with her “Country sister” who had been left behind. She revisits the house where she had witnessed unspeakable horrors and becomes familiar again with poverty in the ruined country to which she feels a strong connection.

[ Show Detail ]
November 4^th, 2009: North River by Pete Hamill

The North River is what real New Yorkers call the Hudson . Two blocks from its shore, Dr. James Delaney lives and serves as a GP to the indigent poor. A wounded World War I veteran, he is despondent about his wife who left him and that his only child Grace has left her son, two-year-old Carlos, in his care. This is in the dead of winter in the Depression year of 1934. Pete Hamill draws from the streets of his own native New York and tells the story of Dr. Delaney and his daily struggles with life and death. Peopled with gangsters, political bosses and waves of immigrants, the story takes the doctor through complex, sometimes dangerous, professional and family situations. This beautiful novel, rich in New York City detail and with Hamill’s wit and humor, showcases the power of human goodness and how love can prevail in an unfair world.

[ Show Detail ]
December 2^nd, 2009: The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner

The author, a correspondent for NPR, has written a charming, funny, and illuminating travelogue after a year of visiting the world’s most and least happy places. From the Persian Gulf to the Arctic Circle , Weiner has discovered that happiness blooms where we least expect it. He traveled to Countries like Iceland , Qatar , Bhutan , Holland , Switzerland , Thailand , and India to figure out why residents tell positive psychology researchers that they’re actually quite happy. Weiner unapologetically indulges in his own stereotypes and is funny and smart while he settles for clichés. Daniel Gilbert at the Washington Post says you will hope to hit the road again with Weiner and you will find this book a journey too good to miss.

[ Show Detail ]
February 3^rd, 2010: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

The history of Afghanistan is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. The author of The Kite Runner has written of Laila who sees that people find a way to survive, to go on. This new novel by Hosseini is the story of the unconquerable spirit of a people and individuals seen through the eyes of two indomitable women, Laila and Mariam. The time is 1964-2003. There is love of family, home, country, God and also violence, both physical and mental, under the Mujahideen and the Taliban. The author wants the reader to walk away with a sense of empathy for the Afghans, specifically for Afghan women, on whom the extremes of war and extremism have been devastating. He gives descriptive words that evoke the reality and the deeper meaning of each particular scene.

[ Show Detail ]
March 3^rd, 2010: Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The esteemed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin gives fresh insights into Lincoln ’s leadership style and his deep understanding of human behavior and motivation. Goodwin examines his relationships with three men he selected for his cabinet, all of whom were opponents for the Republican nomination in 1860: m Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates. These men originally disdained Lincoln for his backwoods upbringing and his lack of experience. Yet Lincoln not only convinced them to join his administration, he ultimately gained their admiration and respect as well. These three men were invaluable to Lincoln and played key roles in keeping the nation intact. Goodwin profiles the entire team of personal and political competitors Lincoln put together and tells how they worked together in the cabinet.

[ Show Detail ]
April 7^th, 2010: America, America: A Novel by Ethan Canin

Corey Sifter is the narrator in this novel of a rupture in the American dream as he looks back on the struggles between public idealism and personal ruthlessness. Canin gives the reader an eager, observant Corey who is 16 in 1971 and living in a little town in western New York state. The town is ruled by Liam Metarey , a tycoon of Scottish descent. Metarey is wealthy but sets out to reverse America ’s politics of greed. He makes Corey the caretaker of his extensive lands and in effect “adopts” him. Metarey plans to create his own president and chooses as his intended candidate Henry Bonwiller, a United States senator from New York who has a deeply flawed character. After becoming involved in the presidential campaign, Corey eventually becomes the publisher of a small independent newspaper and marries one of Metarey’s daughters. Canin splices his complex characters into the news of the 1960’s and 70’s and delivers a powerful political novel.

[ Show Detail ]
May 5^th, 2010: The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

This is Berendt’s first book since Midnight… and is the same unique brand of journalism, story-telling and social insight that made him a household name. This is a portrait of the intriguing and colorful private Venice after the tourists leave in the off-season. It opens after a colossal fire destroyed the Fenice Opera House and through stories of the Venetians themselves, Berendt describes natives and expatriates who reveal many secrets, some of which are connected to the fire and others not. The variety of people he interviews range from those who live in castles to those in cottages, often the city’s eccentrics. The chaos, corruption and crime are as characteristic of Venice as its winding canals.

[ Show Detail ]
June 2^nd, 2010: The Night Journal - Elizabeth Crook

A mesmerizing novel of four generations of Southwestern women bound to a mythical legacy

With its family secrets and hallowed texts containing explosive truths, The Night Journal suggests A. S. Byatt’s Possession transplanted to the raw and beautiful landscape of the American Southwest. Meg Mabry has spent her life oppressed by her family’s legacy—a heritage beginning with the journals written by her great-grandmother in the 1890s and solidified by her grandmother Bassie, a famous historian who published them to great acclaim. Until now, Meg has stubbornly refused to read the journals. But when she concedes to accompany the elderly and vipertongued Bassie on a return trip to the fabled land of her childhood in New Mexico, Meg finally succumbs to the allure of her great-grandmother’s story—and soon everything she believed about her family is turned upside down.

goodreads.com

[ Show Detail ]
July 7^th, 2010: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin

It’s not laws or constitutional theory that rules the High Court, argues this absorbing group profile, but quirky men and women guided by political intuition. Toobin surveys the Court from the Reagan administration onward , as the justices wrestled with abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty, gay rights and church-state separation. He gives a gossipy account of the lives and motives of individuals that often ended up with a middle-of-the-road consensus, not a conservative revolution expected from a Court dominated by Republican appointees. This is not a treatise for attorneys but an insight into the background and behind-the-scenes that often does not make its way into the news for the citizens.

[ Show Detail ]

Friends of Chapel Hill Public Library

Activities and Events

Programs for Adults - Book Discussions

Archived Discussions

Upcoming Events