Consider this your invitation to read and discuss Narrative Nonfiction. We will not be reading cookbooks (though there may be a recipe or two.) No self-improvement books, (though you may find yourself changed for the better.) We will be reading across the genres of nonfiction, from history to adventure, memoir/biography and beyond. Please join us. We meet on the first Friday of the month at 10:00AM in the Hermann Foundation Meeting Room. Pick up a copy of the next book at the reference desk.
April 5, 2013
Outwitting History: the Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books by Aaron Lansky
"Precious Yiddish books that had survived Hitler and Stalin were being passed down from older generations of Jewish immigrants to their non-Yiddish-speaking children-only to be thrown away or destroyed. With little more than his own chutzpah, 23 year old Aaron Lansky issued a worldwide appeal for unwanted Yiddish books, and the response was overwhelming."
May 3, 2013
Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Differnce by Malcolm Gladwell
"The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life," writes Malcolm Gladwell, "is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do."
June 7, 2013
The Road to Ubar by Nicholas Clapp
"In the 1980s Nicholas Clapp stumbled on the legend of the city of Ubar. He organized two expeditions to Arabia with a team of archaeologists, geologists, space scientists, and adventurers. After many false starts, dead ends, and weeks of digging, they uncovered a remarkable walled city."
July 5, 2013
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow
"When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at, was asked to give a “last lecture,” he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment."
August 2, 2013
The Hare with Amber Eyes: a Family's Century of Art and Loss by Edmund de Waal
"In the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi assembled a collection of 360 Japanese ivory carvings known as "netsuke." In this grand story, a renowned ceramicist and the fifth generation to inherit the collection traces the story of a remarkable family and a tumultuous century."
September 6, 2013
Alive: the Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read
"True story about how a group of people who survived an airplane crash in the Andes had to resort to cannibalism in order to stay alive."
