Call library for more information. No registration required. Join us for stories, songs, finger-plays, and a craft.
- Toddler Time, for 2-year-olds, with an adult. Thursdays at 10:15 am. Runs September 21 thru December 14.
- Threes and Fours Together, for 3- and 4-year-olds, with an adult. Thursdays at 11:15 am. Runs September 21 thru December 14.
- For all, with an adult: Drop In for Stories on Wednesdays at 7 pm. Runs from September 20 thru December 13.
Meets at 7:30 pm on the second Monday of each month, except for unusual circumstances. Facilitated by volunteer Joan Marik. New participants are always welcome, even if you read the book some time ago. Send an e-mail to group member Suzanne Embree (suza1@comcast.net) for more information. Call to sign up for a discussion or to reserve a title (available a month in advance) from the special “discussion-group” copies.Schedule Through December 2006:
Monday, October 2 (***We're meeting this month on the first Monday, because of Columbus Day.***) (7:30 pm): Law in America: A Short History,by Lawrence M. Friedman [a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History] . . . Amazon reader rating: 4-1/2 stars (out of a possible 5 stars). . . pub. 2004. . . . (Another discussion group particularly enjoyed this title.) . . ."Friedman, a law professor and author of American Law in the 20th Century, reflects on law through the evolving social needs and circumstances of our nation. He takes the interest and circumstances of America's social realities and interposes them in the law as an interactive force. The law of the American colonial period was often the opposite of what we take for granted today; religious tolerance was nonexistent and sin was a crime. As the U.S. evolved, economic interests came to dominate the law. Thus, slavery, which is today a crime, was formerly legal, at least if the slaves were black, and indentured servitude evolved from a status predominated by whites during the colonial era and black sharecroppers in the post-Reconstruction era. Friedman shows how a free enterprise perspective dominated U.S. Supreme Court rulings until the New Deal period, when President Roosevelt shifted the focus to the concerns of ordinary people, creating administrative systems that prompted increasing reliance on regulatory agencies to address the nation's needs." Vernon Ford, American Library Association. -- Booklist. . . .“Law in America is a little gem. It is a peerless introduction to our legal historyconcise, clear, tellingly told, and beautifully written. The greatest living historian of American law has done it again.”-- Stanley N. Katz, former president of the American Society for Legal History and the Organization of American Historians. . . . (224 pages).
Monday, November 13 (7:30 pm): Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, by Laurence Bergreen. . . . . . . Amazon reader rating: 4-1/2-star rating (out of a possible 5). . . . "One of the most fascinating historical accounts I've read." --another library branch's facilitator. . . . "It's all here in wondrous detail. . . . A first-rate page-turner."-- New York Times Book Review. . . . "A wealth of fascinating tidbits and stories all raveled around the thread of an amazing tale of exploration and discovery."--Charlotte Observer. . . .". . . excellent, highly readable account. . . "-- San Antonio Express-News . . (**We have five weeks to read this book due to the Columbus Day adjustment . . .512 pages, but only four hundred some pages are text.**)
Monday, December 11 (7:30 pm): The Bookseller of Kabul, by Asne Seierstad . . . .Amazon reader rating: 4 stars (out of a possible 5 stars). . . .(320 pages). "After living for three months with the Kabul bookseller Sultan Khan in the spring of 2002, Norwegian journalist Seierstad penned this astounding portrait of a nation recovering from war, undergoing political flux and mired in misogyny and poverty. As a Westerner, she has the privilege of traveling between the worlds of men and women, and though the book is ostensibly a portrait of Khan, its real strength is the intimacy and brutal honesty with which it portrays the lives of Afghani living under fundamentalist Islam. Seierstad also expertly outlines Sultan's fight to preserve whatever he can of the literary life of the capital during its numerous decades of warfare (he stashed some 10,000 books in attics around town). Seierstad, though only 31, is a veteran war reporter and a skilled observer; as she hides behind her burqa, the men in the Sultan's family become so comfortable with her presence that she accompanies one of Sultan's sons on a religious pilgrimage and witnesses another buy sex from a beggar girl-then offer her to his brother. This is only one of many equally shocking stories Seierstad uncovers. In another, an adulteress is suffocated by her three brothers as ordered by their mother. Seierstad's visceral account is equally seductive and repulsive and resembles the work of Martha Gellhorn. An international bestseller, it will likely stand as one of the best books of reportage of Afghan life after the fall of the Taliban."--From Publishers Weekly