Next Selection - Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James.

We met January 18, 2012 at 11:30 AM in the LRC Mezzanine. Four members were present and we had a nice discussion of In the Garden of Beasts, Love and Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Germany by Erik Larson. Most felt although it was interesting and we learned some new information we liked the previous tile we read by Mr. Larson better. We also touched on various other topics. The library staff provide mini cupcakes as well as coffee & tea.

Three books were suggested for the next selection. This information was sent via email to  members of the Mezzanine Mavens and the title chosen was Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James.
If you would like to know about this title please visit the library webpage at http://www.stevenscollege.edu/library .  At the bottom right of the library webpage you will find a link to the NY Times review of this title.

Our next meeting will take place March 14, 2012 at 11:30 AM in the Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology, LRC Mezzanine. Please bring a bag lunch the library staff will provide dessert and beverages.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson

We had a great meeting November 9, 2011. Antimated discussion of The Devil in the White City also by Erik Larson. Laurie Grove shared some amazing photos of the Chicago World's Fair 1893 she located
online.
Our next selection is In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson.
The meeting will be in January the date to be determined at 11:30 AM in the LRC Mezzanine. Check the library web page at http://www.stevenscollege.edu/library . Please plan to join us, bring a bag lunch; the library staff will provide beverages and desert.

Next Selection - The Paris Wife

The next reading selection will be The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. Discussion Meeting will take place September 28, 2011 at 11:30 AM - TSCT- library Mezzanine. Please bring your lunch; the library will supply beverages and dessert. Please come with suggestions for the next selection. Hope you can make it.

Book Description from Amazon.com

A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.

Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Despite their extraordinary bond, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.

A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wife is all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.

Next Selection - The War Horse

The next selection will be The War Horse by Michael Morpurgo. This novel tells the story of a horse's life as told by the horse. This selection received the most votes of the titles suggested.
I hope you enjoy the book and attend the next meeting Wednesday, July 6, 2011 at 11:30 in the LRC mezzanine.  As usual the library staff will provide beverages and dessert. Please bring a brown bag lunch.

Mezzanine Mavens Meeting Wednesday, April 27, 2011

DO NOT FORGET TO SELECT A MEETING DATE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST

We had an excellent book club meeting today, Wednesday, April 27, 2011. We discussed In The Woods by Tana French. One member commented that it was the most animated discussion they ever remembered at a book club meeting. For those of you who could not make it I am sorry the meeting conflicted with the Faculty Meeting.

Now we need to choose the next selection and meeting date. I hope we can meet in the summer. We came up with six titles. Below find a brief synopsis of each and let me know your preference for each.

I will compile the responses and get back to you next week.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom by Amy Chua

Amazon.com

From Publishers Weekly

Chua (Day of Empire) imparts the secret behind the stereotypical Asian child's phenomenal success: the Chinese mother. Chua promotes what has traditionally worked very well in raising children: strict, Old World, uncompromising values--and the parents don't have to be Chinese. What they are, however, are different from what she sees as indulgent and permissive Western parents: stressing academic performance above all, never accepting a mediocre grade, insisting on drilling and practice, and instilling respect for authority. Chua and her Jewish husband (both are professors at Yale Law) raised two girls, and her account of their formative years achieving amazing success in school and music performance proves both a model and a cautionary tale. Sophia, the eldest, was dutiful and diligent, leapfrogging over her peers in academics and as a Suzuki piano student; Lulu was also gifted, but defiant, who excelled at the violin but eventually balked at her mother's pushing. Chua's efforts "not to raise a soft, entitled child" will strike American readers as a little scary--removing her children from school for extra practice, public shaming and insults, equating Western parenting with failure--but the results, she claims somewhat glibly in this frank, unapologetic report card, "were hard to quarrel with." (Jan.)

Freedom : A Novel by Jonathan Franzen

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, August 2010: "The awful thing about life is this:" says Octave to the Marquis in Renoir's Rules of the Game. "Everyone has his reasons." That could be a motto for novelists as well, few more so than Jonathan Franzen, who seems less concerned with creating merely likeable characters than ones who are fully alive, in all their self-justifying complexity. Freedom is his fourth novel, and, yes, his first in nine years since The Corrections. Happy to say, it's very much a match for that great book, a wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than the fictional St. Jude). Patty and Walter Berglund find each other early: a pretty jock, focused on the court and a little lost off it, and a stolid budding lawyer, besotted with her and almost burdened by his integrity. They make a family and a life together, and, over time, slowly lose track of each other. Their stories align at times with Big Issues--among them mountaintop removal, war profiteering, and rock'n'roll--and in some ways can't be separated from them, but what you remember most are the characters, whom you grow to love the way families often love each other: not for their charm or goodness, but because they have their reasons, and you know them. --Tom Nissley

I Love Yous Are For White People by Lac Su

From Amazon.com

Moving. . . . Anyone who wonders what obstacles an immigrant must overcome will be fascinated by this assimilation story; Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior complements it nicely. (Library Journal )

Product Description

As a young child, Lac Su made a harrowing escape from the Communists in Vietnam. With a price on his father's head, Lac, with his family, was forced to immigrate in 1979 to seedy West Los Angeles where squalid living conditions and a cultural fabric that refused to thread them in effectively squashed their American Dream. Lac's search for love and acceptance amid poverty—not to mention the psychological turmoil created by a harsh and unrelenting father—turned his young life into a comedy of errors and led him to a dangerous gang experience that threatened to tear his life apart.

Heart-wrenching, irreverent, and ultimately uplifting, I Love Yous Are for White People is memoir at its most affecting, depicting the struggles that countless individuals have faced in their quest to belong and that even more have endured in pursuit of a father's fleeting affection.

Once Upon A Time There Was You by Elizabeth Berg

From Amazon.com

An enchanting and empathic storyteller, Berg delights in the eccentricities that shape complex personalities and excels in decoding the chemistry and paradoxes of relationships. She is also an avid appreciator of the pleasures of food, funny and assuring on the subject of age, and an advocate for kindness. All these elements are at work in her latest comedy of marriage. . . . All is droll and intriguing until Berg swerves, briefly, into the realm of terror, thus dramatically deepening questions about fear, love, family, and what one makes of one’s life. Berg’s tender and wise novels are oases in a harsh world.”—Booklist

Room : A Novel by Emma Donoghue

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, September 2010: In many ways, Jack is a typical 5-year-old. He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games with his Ma. But Jack is different in a big way--he has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick. For Jack, Room is the only world he knows, but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son. When their insular world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary. Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, Emma Donoghue's Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty, and the dogged determination to live, even in the most desolate circumstances. A stunning and original novel of survival in captivity, readers who enter Room will leave staggered, as though, like Jack, they are seeing the world for the very first time. --Lynette Mong

The War Horse by Michael Murpurgo

From Booklist

Like Morpurgo's Private Peaceful (2004), this searing World War I novel reveals the unspeakable slaughter of soldiers on all sides fighting against people who are just like them. The story is told by an English farm horse, Joey, and, as in Cynthia Kadahota's Cracker! The Best Dog in Vietnam (2007), the first-person narrative blends the animal's physical experience with what men say. On the farm, Joey has close ties to Albert, who is too young to join up when his dad first sells Joey to the army. Charging into battle under machine-gun fire, Joey is captured by the Germans, who train him to haul ambulances and guns. His reunion with Albert in battle is sentimental and contrived, but the viewpoint brings close the fury of the thundering guns, the confusion, and the kindness of enemies who come together in No Man's Land to save the wounded horse. Joey's ability to understand the language wherever he is--England, France, Germany--reinforces the novel's antiwar message, and the terse details speak eloquently about peace. Hazel Rochman

Suggested Meeting Times

Wednesday, June 18, 2011

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

The time TBD.

Next Meeting April 27, 2011 11:30 AM LRC Mezzanine

THE DATE OF THE NEXT MEETING HAS BEEN CHANGE TO APRIL 27, 2011 11:30 AM IN THE LRC MEZZANINE.

Current Selection: In the Woods by Tana French

First let me apologize for being so tardy getting out the information about our last meeting. We had a great meeting with seven members attending; not everyone was there at the same time but over the course of the hour seven mavens attended. The meeting took place as scheduled Wednesday, February 2^nd. We had a very spirited discussion about Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff. It seems you either loved the book or found it boring. Since there was very little middle ground the discussion was quite lively. We all agreed that we learned some new information about this famous woman.

Due to my tardiness and in an effort to give people enough time to read (about 8 weeks) I have taken the liberty of choosing the next book we will read. It is a novel, in the murder mystery genre; In the Woods by Tana French. A brief review is below. I hope you will join us at the next meeting Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 11:30 AM in the LRC Mezzanine. Please bring your lunch; dessert and beverages will be provided.  

FYI the library has ordered 3 copies and they should be available shortly.

From Publishers Weekly

Irish author French expertly walks the line between police procedural and psychological thriller in her debut. When Katy Devlin, a 12-year-old girl from Knocknaree, a Dublin suburb, is found murdered at a local archeological dig, Det. Rob Ryan and his partner, Cassie Maddox, must probe deep into the victim's troubled family history. There are chilling similarities between the Devlin murder and the disappearance 20 years before of two children from the same neighborhood who were Ryan's best friends. Only Maddox knows Ryan was involved in the 1984 case. The plot climaxes with a taut interrogation by Maddox of a potential suspect, and the reader is floored by the eventual identity and motives of the killer. A distracting political subplot involves a pending motorway in Knocknaree, but Ryan and Maddox are empathetic and flawed heroes, whose partnership and friendship elevate the narrative beyond a gory tale of murdered children and repressed childhood trauma. (May)