Next Meeting: Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 11:30 at the LRC Mezzanine
The next selection the book club will read is Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff. This was a unanimous vote. Shortly there will be a copy available in the library of course you could borrow it from your local library or purchase it. It is too new to be borrowed through Interlibrary Loan. The next meeting of the Mezzanine Mavens will take place Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 11:30 at the LRC Mezzanine. I hope you can join us.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Meeting Notes December 1, 2010
We had 10 members attend Book Club today. The discussion of Angela’s Ashes was animated and all who attended enjoyed the book very much. Suzanne Waddell brought in a Ham & Cheese Puff Tart see recipe below which she generously shared with all. For dessert we had assorted cookies, chocolate covered pretzels and apple turnover. Of course we had coffee, tea and assorted soft drinks.
We are looking for a selection for our next meeting February 2, 2011. Please choose from the choices below. All except Decipher are available in print, kindle and CD. Decipher is only available in print and kindle. Please vote by Friday, December 3rd. I will send the results of the vote next Monday. Thanks.
Cleopatra: A Life Stacy Schiff
Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator.
Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and--after his murder--three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.
Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra's supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff 's is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.
Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and--after his murder--three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.
Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra's supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff 's is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.
The dramatic and chilling story of an Ebola virus outbreak in a suburban Washington, D.C. laboratory, with descriptions of frightening historical epidemics of rare and lethal viruses. More hair-raising than anything Hollywood could think of, because it's all true.
The appeal of McCourt as a reader of his own memoirs (Angela's Ashes flourished commercially on audio, in both abridged and unabridged formats) lies in his ability to express a sustained sense of wonder at the world around him. Also, his brogue is classic, an Irish species unto itself. Here he takes up where he left off in his last book, arriving in America. He is first guided by an Irish bartender who tells him to go to the New York Public Library and read Samuel Johnson. Thus assimilated, he becomes a supply clerk for the army, stationed in postwar Germany, then a warehouse laborer living in a rooming house, before earning a college degree at NYU and settling down as a teacher at a rowdy vocational high school in Staten Island. Along the way come romance and immigrant's-eye life observations aplenty, and a growing sense of knowingness develops even as McCourt's hopes are dashed against disillusions.
Decipher Stel Pavlou
In British screenwriter Pavlou's adolescent first novel, it's March 2012 and huge storms are raging around the globe, sparked by giant sunspots. The villainous U.S. Rola Corporation, drilling for desperately needed oil off Antarctica, discovers strange crystalline artifacts covered with a precuneiform script, while radiation detected under the antarctic ice portends the awakening of powerful alien forces. An unconvincing gaggle of scientists discovers they have only one unholy Holy Week to ship a nuclear device to Antarctica and bomb the underwater threat to smithereens. Pavlou builds his unlikely crescendo of Bad Things from nearly every major folklore, myth and religion, dizzyingly cutting between eye-popping disasters and eye-glazing capsule summaries of linguistics, geology, chemistry, mathematics, numerology, cryptology, archeology, ESP and Edgar Cayce. Stripped down to comic book proportions for the big screen, with a deafening soundtrack and a teenage audience anesthetized to a vocabulary largely dominated by four-letter cliches, this often gruesome tale might make a middling SF adventure flick. The often ludicrous dialogue and the ham-fisted handling of human relations and motivations, however, make for an unfocused novel, one patched together like Frankenstein, with every stitching line, every unnatural feature, unblushingly exposed to the most casual glance.
Recipe
Recipe
Ham & Cheese Puff Tart
1 ½ tablespoons all purpose flour, plus more for rolling
2 sheets frozen puff pastry thawed
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 cup whole milk
Coarse salt and ground pepper
Ground nutmeg
6 oz. of thinly sliced deli ham
1 cup grated Gruyère cheese
1 large egg lightly beaten
On a floured work surface, roll each sheet puff pastry to a 10-by-13-inch rectangle. Transfer to two parchment-lined baking sheets and refrigerate. In a small saucepan, melt butter over medium heat. Add flour; cook, stirring, until golden, 1 minute. Whisking constantly, add milk and simmer. Stir until thickened, 5 minutes. Season with salt, pepper and pinch of nutmeg. Pour sauce in a bowl and let cool 30 minutes.
Pre-heat oven to 400°F, with rack in lower third. Arrange ham evenly on 1 pastry sheet, leaving ¾-inch border; top with cheese and sauce. Brush pastry border with egg; top with second pastry sheet. Fold bottom edges over top and press to seal. Brush top with egg and cut vents in tart. Bake until browned and puffed, 30 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.
From: Everyday Food, A Martha Stewart Magazine
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