Books @ Noon March 2021 Picks

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The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling biography of America's founding father and second president that was the basis for the acclaimed HBO series, brilliantly told by master historian David McCullough.
In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot who spared nothing in his zeal for the American...

2) The quartet: orchestrating the second American Revolution, 1783-1789

Author

Ellis, Joseph J

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle, Large Print - Paperback

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The triumph of the American Revolution was neither an ideological nor political guarantee that the colonies would relinquish their independence and accept the creation of a federal government with power over their individual autonomy. The Quartet is the story of this second American founding and of the men responsible. Some names are familiar, such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, and some less so, such as Robert...

3) first principles what americas founders learned fr

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4) Whiskey when we're dry

Author

Larison, John

Notes

Bill enjoyed this western featuring a female lead taking on a traditional male role. He described the language as "rustic."

Formats:

Book, Book - Hardback, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

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Named a Best Book by Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine, Goodreads, Southern Living, Outside Magazine, Oprah.com, HelloGiggles, Parade, Fodor’s Travel, Sioux City Journal, Read it Forward, Medium.com, and NPR’s All Things Considered.

"A thunderclap of originality, here is a fresh voice and fresh take on one of the oldest stories we tell about ourselves as Americans and...

5) American nations: a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America

Author

Woodard, Colin

Notes

Bonnie has been taking an OLLI course about this book which discusses the regional cultures of the US. Bonnie remarked at the prescience of the author's take on our country given what has happened here in the intervening time between it's publication and today.

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

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An illuminating history of North America's eleven rival cultural regions that explodes the red state-blue state myth. North America was settled by people with distinct religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics, creating regional cultures that have been at odds with one another ever since. Subsequent immigrants didn't confront or assimilate into an "American" or "Canadian" culture, but rather into one of the eleven distinct regional ones...

6) The meaning of Mariah Carey

Author

Carey, Mariah

Notes

Wendy read the recent Mariah Carey biography at Carolyn's recommendation. She was intrigued by the discussions of colorism within the text and has listened to some of Ms. Carey's music as a follow up to having read about it.

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"Mariah Carey shares her life story"--

7) A woman of no importance: the untold story of the American spy who helped win World War II

Author

Purnell, Sonia

Series

Thorndike Press large print nonfiction

Notes

Mary highly recommended this title to those who enjoy personal narratives about WWII, especially about women. All of these thing combine to make this sound like a great read!

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print - Hardback

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"The never-before-told story of one woman's heroism that changed the course of the Second World War. In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman--rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg--who talked her way into the spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly...

8) Brown girl dreaming

Author

Woodson, Jacqueline

Formats:

Book, Book - Paperback, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

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"Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and...

9) Red at the bone

Author

Woodson, Jacqueline

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, Large Print - Hardback

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Named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2019 by LitHub and The Millions.
Called one of the Top 10 Literary Fiction titles of Fall by Publishers Weekly.
An extraordinary new novel about the influence of history on a contemporary family, from the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming.
Two families from...

10) If you come softly

Author

Woodson, Jacqueline

Formats:

Book - Paperback, eBook, Kindle

Description

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After meeting at their private school in New York, fifteen-year-old Jeremiah, who is black and whose parents are separated, and Ellie, who is white and whose mother has twice abandoned her, fall in love and then try to cope with people's reactions.

11) An American marriage: a novel

Author

Jones, Tayari

Series

Oprah's Book Club

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

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Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...

12) If Beale Street could talk

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A timeless love story set in early 1970s Harlem involving newly engaged nineteen-year-old Tish and her fiancé Fonny who have a beautiful future ahead. But their plans are derailed when Fonny is arrested for a crime he did not commit. Now the pair and their families must fight for justice in the name of love and the promise of the American dream.

13) If Beale Street could talk: a novel

Author

Baldwin, James

Notes

Claudia kicked us off with a wide ranging discussion of If Beale Street Could Talk that referenced the recent Jacqueline Woodson author talk and the adaptation of the movie. Claudia also compared the "one true love" narrative in this book with If You Come Softly. Kristin mentioned that she had read this book in close succession with other love stories where the Black main characters were separated by prison. She mentioned Upstate (set in the 90s) and An American Marriage (set in present day). You will find information about all of these things in the next several links!

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Book, eAudiobook

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From one of the most important writers of the twentieth century comes a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime—"a moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless" (The New York Times Book Review)."One of the best books Baldwin has ever written—perhaps the best of all." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

In

...

14) Magpie murders

Author

Horowitz, Anthony

Series

Magpie murders volume 1

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

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A "brilliant and strikingly original reimagining of the classic whodunit (a la Agatha Christie) with a contemporary mystery wrapped around it"-- After working with bestselling crime writer Alan Conway for years, editor Susan Ryeland is intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries in sleepy English villages. His traditional formula has proved hugely successful, so successful that Susan must continue to put up with his...

15) Moonflower murders: a novel

Author

Horowitz, Anthony

Series

Magpie murders volume 2

Notes

...and Bonnie mentioned being baffled by the short page count of Moonflower Murders given its thickness until she realized it was a twofer: a novel within a novel. This is a sequel to Magpie Murders, linked next.

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, Book - Hardback, Book - Paperback, eAudiobook, eBook

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"Branlow Hall is a beautiful hotel in Suffolk on the east coast of England. Unfortunately, it is also the site of the brutal murder of Frank Parris, a retired advertising executive. Stefan Codrescu, a Romanian maintenance man, is arrested after police find blood spatter on his clothes and bed linen. He is found guilty and spends eight years in prison. It appears an open and shut case, but there is more than meets the eye. Alan Conway, the late author...

16) A bright ray of darkness

Author

Hawke, Ethan

Notes

Carolyn enjoyed the new Ethan Hawke novel.

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, Large Print

Description

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"The first novel in nearly twenty years from the acclaimed actor/writer/director is a book about art and love, fame and heartbreak--a blistering story of a young man making his Broadway debut in Henry IV just as his marriage implodes A bracing meditation on fame and celebrity, and the redemptive, healing power of art; a portrait of the ravages of disappointment and divorce; a poignant consideration of the rites of fatherhood and manhood; a novel soaked...

17) Pet

Author

Emezi, Akwaeke

Description

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In a near-future society that claims to have gotten rid of all monstrous people, a creature emerges from a painting seventeen-year-old Jam's mother created, a hunter from another world seeking a real-life monster.

18) The liar's dictionary: a novel

Author

Williams, Eley

Notes

Kristin shared that the bookishness of this newer novel would appeal to attendees. Featuring two timelines and a failed dictionary publisher, there is a lot of humor in this one. The world Kristin was searching for that refers to non-words planted in dictionaries (typically to protect copyright) was mountweazel!

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Book, Book - Hardback, Book - Paperback, eAudiobook

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"An exhilarating and laugh-out-loud debut novel from a prize-winning new talent which chronicles the misadventures of a lovelorn Victorian lexicographer and the young woman put on his trail a century later to root out his misdeeds while confronting questions of her own sexuality and place in the world"--

19) Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America ; The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster ; and, In Watermelon Sugar

Author

Brautigan, Richard

Notes

Bill mentioned (re?)reading Trout Fishing in America and enjoying the humor.

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Collected in one volume, three counterculture classics that embody the spirit of the 1960s.

Included here are three great works by the incomparable Richard Brautigan:

Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through the country’s rural waterways—a book “that has very little to do with trout fishing and a lot to...

20) Freshwater

Author

Emezi, Akwaeke

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

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An extraordinary debut novel, Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side." Unsettling, heart wrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that illuminates how we all construct our identities. Ada begins her life in...