Talk About Books

  Talk About books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. If the book of the month interests you, contact the library to reserve a copy and join in the discussion. In this memoir, James McBride tells the story of growing up as a son of his white, Jewish mother Ruth. Ruth was born in Poland and raised in Suffolk, Va, the daughter of an itinerant rabbi and a loving, disabled mother who spoke no English. At 17, Ruth fled the South, landed in Harlem, married a black man in 1941, founded a church, was twice widowed and raised 12 children in New York City. Despite hardship, poverty, and suffering, Ruth sent all 12 of her children to college. An astounding story of triumph over poverty and cruelty, through love, courage and determination. It leaves one to acknowledge that "truth can be stranger than fiction."

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. Pi is 17 when he and his zookeeper family decide to escape the political instability of 1970's India and move, animals and all, to Canada. They load their animals onto a Japanese cargo ship named the Tsimtsum and set sail, for the New World, but for reasons that will forever elude the maritime authorities, the Tsimtsum sinks -- suddenly and violently -- just before dawn on its fourth day out of Manila. Only five survivors are able to reach the single lifeboat that doesn't go down with the ship: Pi himself, an injured zebra, a prize Borneo orangutan, one very nervous hyena and a tiger who (thanks to a clerical error that confused the names of the animal and its captor) is called Richard Parker. They make for a rather volatile crew. The politics of the animal kingdom being what they are, the zebra, the orangutan and the hyena are quickly dispatched, leaving boy and tiger alone

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. TransAtlantic begins in 1919 with the first nonstop aerial crossing of the Atlantic by two British pilots, John Alcock and Arthur Brown. The pair flew from Newfoundland to Ireland. (Eight years later, Alcock and Brown would be nudged into history's shadows by Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic.) Bring your airsickness bags into this opening chapter because McCann straps readers into that open cockpit and throttles forward on his spinning and spiraling descriptions of early air travel. Alcock and Brown were both veterans of World War I and, in McCann's account of their historic flight, the men are attempting to reclaim flying as a joyous freedom rather than an instrument of death. Freedom as well as war and peace are the big themes running throughout the other two history-based ocean crossings in this novel: Frederick Douglass visited Ireland in 1845

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month a Guilford Free Library at 6:30. Zoom is available, though we enjoy meeting in person. On April 17, 2024 we are discussing A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Kenya. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library.    In American Dialogue, Ellis divides four chapters into two parts each: Then and Now.  Each chapter focuses on what he identifies as four enduring issues that are more salient and challenging in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Ellis establishes the historical foundation for each subject and then examines the complexity of each in the context of a divisive political climate complicated by domestic and international obstacles.  Acknowledging that a true conversation with the founders is obviously impossible, he attempts to connect their concerns regarding these controversial topics with those of modern America. Hence, his use of the term dialogue in his title.  The four areas he identifies are race, equality, law, and foreign policy. In each case, Ellis chooses one member of the founding generation as the central figure with whom to engage in his “dialogue”: For race,