Introduction Meet Oskar Schell, an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist, correspondent with Stephen Hawking and Ringo Starr. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York. His mission is to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his [...]
Archive of posts tagged history
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien Reading Group Guide Introduction They carried malaria tablets, love letters, twenty-eight-pound mine detectors, dope, illustrated Bibles, each other. And if they made it home alive, they carried unrelenting images of a nightmarish war that history is only beginning to absorb. The Things They Carried is a classic work [...]
Mapping Human History by Steve Olson
Questions for Discussion Questions to think about and answer before reading the book: What is race? What is ethnicity? What is nationality? What race are you? What ethnicity are you? What nationality are you? What do your answers to these questions mean to you personally? What role does race play in your life? Why [...]
The Peabody Sisters by Megan Marshall
• Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Biography • Winner, Francis Parkman Prize awarded by The Society of American Historians • Winner, Mark Lynton History Prize About the Book Fascinating, insightful, and wholly engrossing, The Peabody Sisters is a landmark biography of three women who made American intellectual history. Though theirs may not be household names, [...]
King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild
Finalist, 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction Winner, 1998 J. Anthony Lukas Prize “An enthralling story, full of fascinating characters,intense drama, high adventure, deceitful manipulations,courageous truthtelling, and splendid moral fervor . . . A work of history that reads like a novel.” —Christian Science Monitor “Carefully researched and vigorously told, King [...]
The Winter Queen by Jane Stevenson
About The Winter Queen An immensely moving account of a strange and magical interracial love affair, The Winter Queen illuminates the Netherlands of the seventeenth century. In the dark ambiance of the time, the exiled Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia and Pelagius, a West African prince and former slave, fall in love and secretly marry. [...]
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
About The Plot Against America Set in Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1940s, The Plot Against America tells the story of what it was like for the Roth family and Jews across the country when the isolationist aviation hero Charles Lindbergh was elected president of the United States. Roth’s richly imagined novel begins [...]
Empress Orchid by Anchee Min
About Empress Orchid A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year “A fascinating novel, similar to Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha . . . A revisionist portrait of a beautiful and strong-willed woman.” — Houston Chronicle “Superb . . . [an] unforgettable heroine.” — People “A sexually charged, eye-opening portrayal of the [...]
Becoming Madame Mao by Anchee Min
“Nothing less than brillant.” —ALA Booklist starred & boxed review “Historical fiction acquires new luster and credibility in Min’s brillant evocation of the woman who married Mao and fought to succeed him…[a] spellbinding novel.” —Publishers Weekly starred & boxed review “Brillant. We will never imagine Madame Mao the same way again. This is historical [...]
Charity Girl by Michael Lowenthal
About the Book “Lively and illuminating…[Lowenthal] has accomplished the difficult feat of marrying the facts of history with the details that make a fictional life come alive…nothing short of a gift.” —Anita Shreve, Washington Post Book World About the Author Michael Lowenthal grew up near Washington, D.C., and graduated from Dartmouth College, after which [...]
