August 2024, Talk About Books on Vacation - no meeting

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March 2024 Book, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

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  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,
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 Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. It's 1932, a time of hardship, adversity, and despair. Especially at the Lincoln Indian Training School, formerly a military outpost called Fort Sibley. It's a place where Indian children who have been taken from their families are sent so they can be educated in the ways of the white world. But it's really a place meant to obliterate every trace of their Indianness, by force if necessary. Odie O'Banion and his older brother Albert, orphans, are the only two white boys in the school. The opening pages describe their time in the school's quiet room, what used to be the military's solitary confinement cell. Odie tells the story from the viewpoint of his younger self: "The night was moonless, the tiny cell as black as pitch, our bed a thin matting of straw laid on the dirt floor, the door a great rectangle of rusted iron with a slot at the bottom for the de
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April 2024 Book, A Visit from the Goon Squad

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  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
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