Sunday, February 5, 2012 at 2 pm

Awe and exhilaration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

Sunday, April 1, 2012 at 2 pm

"Big Girls Don't Cry "offers a startling appraisal of the 2008 presidential campaign and brilliantly demonstrates that it was transformative for American women and for the nation. The campaign for the presidency reopened some of the most fraught American conversations--about gender, race and generational difference, about sexism on the left and feminism on the right--difficult discussions that had been left unfinished but that are crucial to further perfecting our union.

Sunday, June 3, 2012 at 2 pm

When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely independent people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. When Lia Lee entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication.

***Previous Selection***

Sunday, December 4, 2011 at 2 pm

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons--as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

***Previous Selection***

Sunday, October 2, 2011 at 2 pm

On a lazy, quiet afternoon, in the blink of an eye, our world shatters into two parallel universes as men vanish from women and women from men. After families and loved ones separate from one another, life continues in very different ways for men and women, boys and girls. An explosion of violence sweeps one world that still operates technologically; social stability and peace in the other are offset by famine and a widespread breakdown in machinery and science. And as we learn from the fascinating parallel stories of a brilliant couple, Bill and Paula Gaunt, the foundations of relationships, love, and sex are scrutinized, tested, and sometimes redefined in both worlds. The radically divergent trajectories of the gendered histories reveal stark truths about the rigidly defined expectations placed on men and women and their sexual relationships and make clear how much society depends on interconnection between the sexes. Written over a half century ago yet brimming with insight and unsettling in its relevance today, "The Disappearance" is a masterpiece of modern speculative fiction.

***Previous Selection***

Sunday, August 14th, 2011 at 2 pm

Mary Brave Bird grew up fatherless in a one-room cabin, without running water or electricity, on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Rebelling against the aimless drinking, punishing missionary school, narrow strictures for women, and violence and hopeless of reservation life, she joined the new movement of tribal pride sweeping Native American communities in the sixties and seventies. Mary eventually married Leonard Crow Dog, the American Indian Movement's chief medicine man, who revived the sacred but outlawed Ghost Dance.
Originally published in 1990, "Lakota Woman" was a national best seller and winner of the American Book Award. It is a unique document, unparalleled in American Indian literature, a story of death, of determination against all odds, of the cruelties perpetuated against American Indians, and of the Native American struggle for rights. Working with Richard Erdoes, one of the twentieth century's leading writers on Native American affairs, Brave Bird recounts her difficult upbringing and the path of her fascinating life. It is a life intertwined with signal events; Mary took part in the Trail of Broken Treaties, the cross-country protest caravan that ended in Washington D.C. with the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building, as well as the occupation of Wounded Knee.
"Lakota Woman" is a deeply moving account of one woman's triumphant struggle to survive in a hostile world, essential reading for anyone interested in Native American life and history.

***Previous Selection***

Sunday, June 5th, 2011 at 2 pm

Not long after Rhoda Janzen turned forty, her world turned upside down. It was bad enough that her husband of fifteen years left her for Bob, a guy he met on Gay.com, but that same week a car accident left her injured. Needing a place to rest and pick up the pieces of her life, Rhoda packed her bags, crossed the country, and returned to her quirky Mennonite family's home, where she was welcomed back with open arms and offbeat advice. (Rhoda's good-natured mother suggested she get over her heartbreak by dating her first cousin--he owned a tractor, see.)

Written with wry humor and huge personality--and tackling faith, love, family, and aging--"Mennonite in a Little Black Dress" is an immensely moving memoir of healing, certain to touch anyone who has ever had to look homeward in order to move ahead.

***Previous Selection*** 

Sunday, April 3rd, 2011

The New York Times bestselling memoir of pilgrimage and metamorphosis by the author of "The Secret Life of Bees" and her daughter.
Sue Monk Kidd has touched the hearts of millions of readers with her beloved novels and acclaimed nonfiction. Now, in this wise and engrossing dual memoir, she and her daughter, Ann, chronicle their travels together through Greece and France at a time when each was on a quest to redefine herself and rediscover each other.
As Sue struggles to enlarge a vision of swarming bees into a novel, and Ann ponders the classic question of what to do with her life, this modern-day Demeter and Persephone explore an array of inspiring figures and sacred sites. They also give voice to that most protean of human connections: the bond of mothers and daughters.

***Previous Selection***

Sunday, February 6, 2011

In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be a model couple: bright, beautiful, talented, with two young children and a starter home in the suburbs. Perhaps they married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job "is "dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is about to crumble. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.

***Previous Selection***

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Springing from her hit one-woman show of the same name, "The English American" follows Pippa Dunn, who is adopted by British parents and doesn't meet her American birth parents until she is 28. Chaos ensues when reality collides with fantasy, in this hilarious and poignant debut novel.

***Previous Selection***

Sunday, October 3, 2010

At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn't always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive's own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life-sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition-its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.

***Previous Selection***

Sunday, August 1, 2010

The dramatic story of the methamphetamine epidemic as it sweeps the American heartland--a timely, moving, very human account of one community's attempt to battle its way to a brighter future.

Crystal methamphetamine is widely considered to be the most dangerous drug in the world, and nowhere is that more true than in the small towns of the American heartland. "Methland "tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which, like thousands of other small towns across the country, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people. As if this weren't enough to deal with, an incredibly cheap, longlasting, and highly addictive drug has rolled into town.

Over a period of four years, journalist Nick Reding brings us into the heart of Oelwein through a cast of intimately drawn characters, including: Clay Hallburg, the town doctor, who fights meth even as he struggles with his own alcoholism; Nathan Lein, the town prosecutor, whose caseload is filled almost exclusively with meth-related crime; and Jeff Rohrick, a meth addict, still trying to kick the habit after twenty years.

***Previous Selection*** 

Sunday, June 6, 2010

The publishers of Cleave's new novel don't want to spoil the story by revealing too much about it. They will say that the beach scene is brutal, and that it braids the fates of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan and a well-off British couple.

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

Sunday, February 7, 2010

A brain scientist whose own stroke led to personal enlightenment brings a deep personal understanding to something she long studied: that the two lobes of the brain have very different personalities. ("The New York Times"). b&w illustrations throughout.