So, Mrs. Duell has her Bulldog Banana Bread Blog, and I realized I hadn't updated my blog for a couple of years. But to resume - -
The teacher/staff/retired persons book club here at RB has been reading some really good (and some mediocre) books over the last couple of months.
I was surprised that I liked Loving Frank, about the doomed love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, one of his clients, and a married one at that. The story was told from her point of view, and it was believable, romantic, and a good look at the historical time period -- and full of local references, to boot.
Our September read was Ann Patchett's Run. She won fame and fortune with her novel Bel Canto a few years ago, and although I loved that one (read it!), this novel had all the earmarks of a "sophomore novel" -- the characters weren't as well-developed, and the story ran from one plot point to another without really holding together. The basic idea is that two African American little boys are adopted by a white couple in Boston who already have their own son, 10 years old -- and then the adoptive mother dies of cancer. The father, a former mayor of Boston and very into the political scene, raises the boys on his own. Years later, the father and the two adopted boys meet at a political speech, and afterward, just as one of them is backing away while telling his pushy dad that he no longer wants to go to political meetings (he's a scientist who's interested only in studying fish), he is almost hit by a car ---- but a black woman pushes him to safety and is herself hit and critically injured. Her young daughter is left stranded when the ambulance takes the woman away -- so the mayor and his sons take the daughter home. It turns out that the injured woman is the birth mother of the boys, and she has been following their lives all these years. As the relationships are established and then develop, we follow a series of flashbacks and explanations which lead to some surprising revelations.
Join us on October 14th to discuss our next book, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, by Jim Fergus. "This is an imaginative fictional account of May Dodd and others in the controversial "Brides for Indians" program, a clandestine U.S. government-sponsored program intended to instruct "savages" in the ways of civilization and to assimilate the Indians into white culture through the offspring of these unions. May's personal journals, loaded with humor and intelligent reflection, describe the adventures of some very colorful white brides (including one black one), their marriages to Cheyenne warriors, and the natural abundance of life on the prairie before the final press of the white man's civilization. Fergus . . . writes with tremendous insight and sensitivity about the individual community and the political and religious issues of the time . . ."
The teacher/staff/retired persons book club here at RB has been reading some really good (and some mediocre) books over the last couple of months.
I was surprised that I liked Loving Frank, about the doomed love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, one of his clients, and a married one at that. The story was told from her point of view, and it was believable, romantic, and a good look at the historical time period -- and full of local references, to boot.
Our September read was Ann Patchett's Run. She won fame and fortune with her novel Bel Canto a few years ago, and although I loved that one (read it!), this novel had all the earmarks of a "sophomore novel" -- the characters weren't as well-developed, and the story ran from one plot point to another without really holding together. The basic idea is that two African American little boys are adopted by a white couple in Boston who already have their own son, 10 years old -- and then the adoptive mother dies of cancer. The father, a former mayor of Boston and very into the political scene, raises the boys on his own. Years later, the father and the two adopted boys meet at a political speech, and afterward, just as one of them is backing away while telling his pushy dad that he no longer wants to go to political meetings (he's a scientist who's interested only in studying fish), he is almost hit by a car ---- but a black woman pushes him to safety and is herself hit and critically injured. Her young daughter is left stranded when the ambulance takes the woman away -- so the mayor and his sons take the daughter home. It turns out that the injured woman is the birth mother of the boys, and she has been following their lives all these years. As the relationships are established and then develop, we follow a series of flashbacks and explanations which lead to some surprising revelations.
Join us on October 14th to discuss our next book, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, by Jim Fergus. "This is an imaginative fictional account of May Dodd and others in the controversial "Brides for Indians" program, a clandestine U.S. government-sponsored program intended to instruct "savages" in the ways of civilization and to assimilate the Indians into white culture through the offspring of these unions. May's personal journals, loaded with humor and intelligent reflection, describe the adventures of some very colorful white brides (including one black one), their marriages to Cheyenne warriors, and the natural abundance of life on the prairie before the final press of the white man's civilization. Fergus . . . writes with tremendous insight and sensitivity about the individual community and the political and religious issues of the time . . ."
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