The May 2022 Southeast Steuben County Library read was The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner

And here is an overview of the plot:

May Read: The Lost Apothecary: A Novel by Sarah Penner: the cliff notes overview of the plot:

The Lost Apothecary is a novel with three narrators that live in two different time periods.
Frequently, books with multiple narrators can be challenging to read; however, Penner pulls off the trick and smoothly blends the stories of her three female protagonists together. And make no bones about it, this book is, despite the difficulties encountered by the women who appear in its pages; in dealing with patriarchal societies in both the past and present, a feminist tale – the three women readers follow all find ways to be empowered while living in societies, both past and present, that over-empower males and under-empower females in both legal and societal ways.

The book opens in London in 1791 and introduces readers to Nella Clavinger, who readers know from the get-go is the apothecary referred to in the title. Nella runs a hidden apothecary shop located near the crossing of two alleys in London. Nella, who was born illegitimate, inherited the shop from her mother who mixed and sold curative potions for women, to women. When Nella first inherited the shop, she too mixed curative potions for women. And then, while she was working through her grief at her mother’s death, she encountered a sweet talking and attentive man named Frederick, who said he was looking for a potion for his sister Rissa to alleviate her menstrual pain. Frederick was very attentive to Nella and frequently visited her becoming a great comfort to her. The two became lovers, Nella became pregnant and when she broke the news to Frederick he seemed overjoyed, saying he wanted to marry her. He preceded to fix a celebratory dinner for her, and mixed in a potion so she would lose their child. Nella discovered this crime after the fact, and also found her uterus was permanently damaged making her sterile. Nella then encountered Rissa, the lady Frederick said was his sister; and discovered that instead, Rissa is his wife. Nella and Rissa subsequently conspire to poison Frederick and ride themselves of this dangerous, serial philanderer.

And after those events, Nella, working to become as empowered in the times she lives in, changes the purpose of her shop, from mixing potions for women to help women, to mixing potions to poison abusive men, thus helping women get rid of the dangerous men in their lives, something the law in the patriarchal society they were living in, in the 18th century, would not do. Nella had two rules 1. The potions she mixed, which were picked up by women at her secret shop located behind a wall holding shelves of rotted goods, had to say who the potions were intended for so Nella could write the information in her ledger and the women, whose lives would otherwise pass unrecorded, would have their names recorded for posterity and 2. The poisons must never be used on another woman.

The second protagonist in the book, who also lives in London in 1791, is Eliza Fanning, a twelve year old girl whose mother assisted her in getting a servant position so she could provide for herself. Eliza works on the Amwell estate as a housemaid reporting to Mrs. Amwell. Mrs. Amwell has a condition that makes her hands shake and she taught Eliza to read and write so she could assist her with her correspondence. Mr. Amwell, the husband of the lady of the estate, is a middle-aged man who has a history of sexually abusing female servants who work at on the estate. A maid, Johanna, who precede Eliza in working for the Amwells, was raped and impregnated by Mr. Amwell and died in childbirth. Mr. Amwell also tried to rape Eliza but was unsuccessful; and her mistress, who is aware of her husband’s activities, sent Eliza to Nella’s shop to get a poison so that she, Eliza and the women her husband might mistreat in the future can be saved from his abusive actions.

Eliza and Nella make a connection upon meeting. Eliza sees Nella as an empowered woman and Nella sees in Eliza, a young woman who reminders her of the daughter might have had if the treacherous Frederick had not caused her to miscarriage. Nella gives Eliza a potion for Mr. Amwell. And the next morning Eliza mixes the potion in with her master’s eggs, and by the end of the day Mr. Amwell is dead.
Eliza then returns to Nella’s shop to tell how she poisoned Mr. Amwell and to learn more about potion making. While Eliza is at the shop, Lady Clarence visits the shop demanding a potion to poison the young lover of her husband, Lord Clarence. At first Nella refuses to give Lady Clarence a poison because harming another woman goes against her two ethical rules. However, Lady Clarence threatens to expose Nella’s business; proclaiming for all the world to hear that she helps women eliminate the dangerous men in their lives via poison; and Nella agrees to give her the poisoned potion she demands. Eliza wants to assist in mixing the potion and pulls an apothecary bottle from the very back of the cupboard, not noticing that this bottle, unlike the ones at the front of the cupboard, that simply show an engraved bear, also features an engraved street address.

Eliza’s accident provides the momentum that pushes the 1791 storyline to its eventual conclusion. Lady Clarence takes the potion, which is mixed in a drink, intending to murder her husband’s young lover; and that plan misfires and instead Lord Clarence himself drinks the poison and dies. In the aftermath of the murder, Nella’s shop is discovered by the police and Nella and Eliza flee from the shop running toward Blackfriar Bridge. Nella, who has had some health issues due to years of mixing positions, intends to jump off the bridge to distract the police from Eliza; however, Eliza has another plan, she tells Nella not to worry and jumps off the bridge a lucky potion she brewed in an apothecary bottle clutched in her hand. The police arrive and discount Nella as the second woman seen fleeing with “lost apothecary” who jumped off the bridge due to her fragile health.

The third protagonist is Caroline Parecwell, whose story is set in contemporary times. Caroline is an American on holiday in London, taking what was intended to be a trip celebrating her tenth wedding anniversary. She is alone, because just before the trip, she discovered her husband, James, was having an affair with a co-worker.

As Caroline has limited the choice she has made in her life, due to the patriarchal leaning society still in place in the western world in the early twenty first century. As her story unfolds, readers discover she has a master’s degree in history and was planning on continuing her education by studying at Cambridge but instead, was persuaded by her new boyfriend, and later husband James, to return Ohio and take an unfulfilling job help managing her family’s farm, while James advanced in his career. Caroline had also wanted to have children, but James favored waiting until he was solidly established in his career.

So Caroline is in London and stops by The Old Fleet Tavern, located near the Themes, where she meets a man known as Bachelor Alf, who asks her if she’d like to join his mudlarking group. He explains that mudlarking means walking the banks of the Themes and picking up historical items that have risen to the surface. At first Caroline refuses his offer, and goes into the pub for a drink, but then she decides to join the group. And while mudlarking she finds a blue apothecary bottle featuring an engraved bear and a partial address, the same bottle Eliza had on her person when she jumped off Blackfriar Bridge in 1791. The historian in Caroline comes alive and she immediately wants to know more about the apothecary bottle. Bachelor Alf suggests Caroline go to the map room at the British Library and ask Gaynor for assistance in researching where the bottle came from.

James then arrives in London and tries to win Caroline back. James shows he wants and expects things to go his way with a lack of regard for Caroline, by ingesting eucalyptus oil that Caroline suggests he use, topically, and as mentioned to him previously, as a cold remedy. James winds up in the hospital and Caroline realizes he intentionally poisoned himself to get her to forgive him for his adultery. She then continues to research the apothecary bottle with Gaynor’s help; the duo discover a story in an old newspaper from 1791 that relays the tale of an unnamed female apothecary, suspected of selling a poisoned potion, who jumped off the Blackfrair’s Bridge in London to escape the police. A second vintage newspaper article is discovered which features an interview conducted several years later with Eliza Fanning Pepper, a young window with two children, who recently inherited her husband’s successful book shop; and was quoted as saying that she has gotten through the hard times in her life with assistance from an old friend who “still encourages and counsels me to this very day” ; readers infer the old friend is Nella although whether Nella was still living at that time, or had simply passed on experience to Liza before dying, is left ambiguous.

Caroline does some addition research and finds the location of Nella’s old shop which seems to have been untouched since Nella and Eliza fled from the shop in 1791. The shop is small and very dark and Caroline’s phone battery is almost dead, but she is able to take photos of the shop and several pages of Nella’s apothecary journal.

Subsequently, Caroline puts the historical puzzle pieces together and figures out that Eliza jumped from the bridge and not the unknown, by her (Caroline), apothecary; Nella, and that both women survived the events of that tumultuous day in 1791. Although Caroline has solved the mystery of the lost apothecary, she feels protective of her, even though she doesn’t know her name, and she decides to keep the truth – that the lost apothecary wasn’t caught by police in 1791, to herself.

In the aftermath of solving the mystery of the lost apothecary, Caroline too empowers herself by deciding to divorce James and move to the U.K. to attend the University of Cambridge, where she intends study the history of the eighteen century and the romantic period. And although Caroline does not reveal the details she discovered about the lost apothecary; she does use some of Nella’s recipes, the ones she took photos of in Nella’s long deserted shop in London, in her dissertation, as readers discover while reading through to the end of the book.

The book club members agreed The Lost Apothecary was a good read. Although it was noted that the plot was very reminiscent of the book Venice Sketchbook by Rhys Bowen; and the book club member that noted that – also said that book was better, just FYI for reader’s advisory purposes!

It was also noted by several book club members that they preferred the 18th century storyline to the 21st century story line – but all in all, book club members enjoyed reading The Lost Apothecary and would recommend it.

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The June Southeast Steuben County Library Book Club gathering will be held at the library, in the Conference Room on Friday, June 10, 2022 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

The June Read is The Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz, copies of which are available at the Circulation Desk – you can pick up a copy anytime between now and June 10.

Have a great day,

Linda

Hi everyone, our June Read is Magpie is Murders by Anthony Horowitz

And just a reading note on our June title!

StarCat lists the book as containing 236 pages; however, this book has a book within the book – the protagonist, a book editor, reads a submitted mystery within the book; and we the readers get to read the additional mystery as well as the mystery the book editor is involved with – so the page count for the entire book is 512 pages!

And I mention this in case there are others out there, like myself, who like to read the monthly book in the week before the book club meeting – with that 512 pages in mind – we might want to start reading a bit earlier!

Print copies of the book can be picked up at the Circulation Desk at any time; and currently, at 3:32 p.m. on Friday, May 20, there are eBook and downloadable audiobook versions available in the Digital Catalog/Libby.

Our June Meeting will be held at the library on Friday, June 10, 2022 | Time: 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. | Location: Conference Room at the library

And I haven’t quite finished writing my overview of the The Lost Apothecary; that will follow soon; and in the meantime, here is the list of recommended reads from book club members, discussed at our May gathering:

Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan

 Joy Davidman is an unhappily married woman in the early 1950s. Her rocky marriage leads her to rely on her faith to get through the days. She begins a correspondence with author C.S. “Jack” Lewis, which they both find uplifting and captures more than their minds. Through all the poverty, death, and hard times, the love between Jack and Joy grows until there is no room for anyone else in their world but each other. Callahan (Where the River Runs) crafts a masterpiece that details the friendship and ultimate romance between the real Davidman (1915-60) and Lewis (1898-1963). Readers may be familiar with Lewis’s “Narnia” books, but this historical novel of a love based on friendship and faith will not disappoint. The story cocoons readers in the world of the 1950s where women had almost no voice, but Davidman found hers, and romance besides. VERDICT Fans of Karen White and Mary Alice Monroe will enjoy this book. Callahan’s writing is riveting and her characters spring to life to create a magical and literary experience that won’t be soon forgotten. -Library Journal Review

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Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism by Charles Clover

A fascinating study of the root motivations behind the political activities and philosophies of Putin’s government in Russia

Charles Clover, award-winning journalist and former Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, here analyses the idea of “Eurasianism,” a theory of Russian national identity based on ethnicity and geography. Clover traces Eurasianism’s origins in the writings of White Russian exiles in 1920s Europe, through Siberia’s Gulag archipelago in the 1950s, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and up to its steady infiltration of the governing elite around Vladimir Putin. This eye-opening analysis pieces together the evidence for Eurasianism’s place at the heart of Kremlin thinking today and explores its impact on recent events, the annexation of Crimea, the rise in Russia of anti-Western paranoia and imperialist rhetoric, as well as Putin’s sometimes perplexing political actions and ambitions.

Based on extensive research and dozens of interviews with Putin’s close advisers, this quietly explosive story will be essential reading for anyone concerned with Russia’s past century, and its future. – From the publisher

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Cokie: A Life Well Lived by Steven V. Roberts

Roberts (My Fathers’ Houses) offers a moving testimony of the remarkable life and legacy of his wife, trailblazing journalist Cokie (1943–2019). Through depictions of her faith, family, work, writing, and friendships, Roberts shares engrossing anecdotes about his partner from their over 50 years together, as she “crash through glass ceilings… with her impressive mind, impish wit, and infectious laugh.” As the daughter of powerful Louisiana politicians—her mother, Lindy Boggs, succeeded her husband, Hale, in Congress in 1973 after his death in a plane crash—politics and current events were a second language for Cokie. She later parlayed that fluency into a career as a highly respected journalist who covered Washington, D.C., for NPR and ABC and was unafraid to speak truth to power and ask tough questions. In addition to the early challenges he and Cokie encountered dating as an interfaith couple—in the face of resistance from their Jewish and Catholic parents, respectively—Roberts describes with admiration how, notwithstanding the constant demands and stresses of work, Cokie managed to be a devoted friend in times of need, as well as an attentive wife and mother, and bestselling author of histories that restored significant women to their merited prominence in the U.S.’s founding. This loving tribute is likely to gain the celebrated journalist a whole new crop of fans. – Publishers Weekly Review

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Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly

Shetterly, founder of the Human Computer Project, passionately brings to light the important and little-known story of the black women mathematicians hired to work as computers at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Va., part of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NASA’s precursor). The first women NACA brought on took advantage of a WWII opportunity to work in a segregated section of Langley, doing the calculations necessary to support the projects of white male engineers. Shetterly writes of these women as core contributors to American success in the midst of a cultural “collision between race, gender, science, and war,” teasing out how the personal and professional are intimately related. She celebrates the skills of mathematicians such as Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Hoover, whose brilliant work eventually earned them slow advancement but never equal footing. Shetterly collects much of her material directly from those who were there, using personal anecdotes to illuminate the larger forces at play. Exploring the intimate relationships among blackness, womanhood, and 20th-century American technological development, Shetterly crafts a narrative that is crucial to understanding subsequent movements for civil rights. – Publishers Weekly Review

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How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

Everyone knows that African Americans were once enslaved in the U.S., but how well do we understand what that means? Atlantic staff writer and poet Smith explores this question by visiting sites emblematic of American slavery, including Jefferson’s Monticello, the Whitney plantation, which rejects Old South nostalgia to focus on the enslaved, a Confederate cemetery, Juneteenth’s birthplace of Galveston, and Goree Island in Senegal, embarkation point for thousands of Africans headed to slave markets in the Americas. Along the way, Smith engages with conflicted tour guides and historians, ambivalent Senegalese students, Confederate reenactors, and descendants of the enslaved and enslavers, including his own grandparents. Smith probes the contradictions of our collective memory and how deliberate miseducation, nostalgia, and denial fuel a belief in Black inferiority and white innocence. Jefferson’s cosmopolitan image, for example, depended on “the people he allowed to be threatened, manipulated, flogged, assaulted, deceived, and terrorized,” while Confederate apologists insist their ancestors weren’t reliant on slavery, despite copious evidence to the contrary. Ultimately, Smith concludes that “in order for our country to collectively move forward,”” we need “”a collective endeavor to learn, confront, and reckon with the story of slavery and how it has shaped the world we live in today.”

HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Anticipation is running high for Smith’s powerful and diligent exploration of the realities and ongoing consequences of slavery in America. – Booklist Review

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The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Nora Seed believes her life is made up of wrong choices. She didn’t become an Olympic swimmer; she quit her brother’s band; she left her fiancé two days before the wedding. Living with crippling disappointment and situational depression, Nora decides that the only right choice for her is to end her existence. But between life and death there is a midnight library, a library that contains multiple volumes of the lives she could have had if she had made different choices. With the help of the friendly librarian Mrs. Elm, Nora tries on these lives in hopes of finding one where she will truly be happy. In the process, Nora finds that life is made of choices of both little and big consequence, and sometimes the choice to believe in oneself is both the biggest and smallest decision a person can make. Haig’s latest (after the nonfiction collection Notes on a Nervous Planet, 2019) is a stunning contemporary story that explores the choices that make up a life, and the regrets that can stifle it. A compelling novel that will resonate with readers. – Booklist Review

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My Remarkable Journey: A Memoir by Katherine Johnson

In the 1940s, Johnson began working in mathematical research at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). As a “human computer,” she, along with many other men and women, performed complicated calculations that assisted engineers in aeronautical safety. After NACA transformed into NASA in 1958, her work came to include calculating space trajectories, flight ascension, shuttle reentry, and shuttle safety. Johnson’s work at NASA is only one part of her extraordinary life, as recounted in this lovely posthumous memoir, co-written with her daughters. The memoir chronicles Johnson’s childhood in the mountains of West Virginia, her love of learning, her prodigious talent for math and music, and her career as a mathematician. Especially touching are Johnson’s recollections of historical events, such as World War II and the civil rights movement, and her relationships with her family, coworkers, and educators. VERDICT Readers will enjoy Johnson’s personal accounts of the space race and the roles of Black women in STEM. This wonderful, insightful memoir is the perfect companion piece to Margot Lee Shetterly’s best-selling Hidden Figures, which recounted the lives of Johnson and her colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. – Library Journal Review

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The Rose Code by Kate Quinn

Quinn (The Huntress) returns to WWII and the secretive world of Bletchley Park in this immersive saga. Debutant Osla Kendall meets fellow Bletchley Park recruit and London East End resident Mab Churt on the train in 1940. While working at Bletchley, they share a room at the home of Beth Finch, a young woman beaten down by her demanding mother. After discovering Beth’s talent for solving crosswords, Osla helps Beth get a job interview at Bletchley Park. Though Beth is shy and reclusive, she shines in her work on breaking codes. But when she discovers someone at Bletchley is likely a traitor, no one believes her. Soon, she winds up the suspected traitor and is committed at Clockwell Sanitarium after having a mental breakdown. In 1947, almost four years later, Beth contacts Osla and Mab, who help Beth escape from Clockwell. Together, the women work to crack a code that will help them find the traitor. Quinn’s page-turning narrative is enhanced by her richly drawn characters, who unite under the common purpose of Britain’s war effort, and by the fascinating code-breaking techniques, which come alive via Quinn’s extensive historical detail. This does not disappoint. – Publishers Weekly Review

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Venice Sketchbook by Rhys Bowen

A clever prologue referring to Romeo and Juliet sets the stage for Bowen’s (“Royal Spyness” and “Molly Murphy” series) diverting romantic adventure in Venice, complete with intrigue, mystery, and, woe. On her first trip to Venice in 1928, 18-year-old Juliet “Lettie” Browning falls in love with both the city and Leo, the handsome heir of Conte Da Rossi. The trip sets in motion events that result in Lettie’s unexpected life in World War II Venice. In 2001, Caroline, Juliet’s grand-niece, retreats to the family home when her marriage disintegrates. Aunt Lettie dies during Caroline’s visit and leaves her a box containing two sketchbooks, three keys, a diamond ring, and glass beads. Caroline travels to Venice to scatter Lettie’s ashes, where she unravels the mystery of the items in the box and learns that Aunt Lettie was far from the proper English art teacher she seemed. What fun it is to follow the clues with Caroline as the significance of each object is revealed in Juliet’s diary, leading Caroline to a surprise inheritance.

VERDICT This novel’s engaging entertainment is enhanced by its dual time line that uncovers Juliet’s secrets, and a plot enlivened by coincidences and romance. A must-read for Bowen fans and historical fiction enthusiasts – Library Journal Review

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Have a great weekend everyone (it sounds like it will be a good weekend to stay near the A/C and read!),

Linda

Hi everyone, first up a reminder!

The next SSC Library Adult Book Club meeting will be held in the Conference Room at the library on Friday, May 13, 2022 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Our May read is: The Lost Apothecary: A Novel by Sarah Penner, print copies of which may be picked up at the Circulation Desk.

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And onto the notes first for March, and then for April (these include the books that book club members recommend each month too!)

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Our March meeting was held on Friday, March 11, 2022 at the library.

Our March Read was: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman; and the consensus was that the book was definitely worth the read.

The cliff notes version of the 353 page plot is that it is slice of life story telling the tale of the main character, Eleanor Oliphant, who as the story opens, lives in the U.K., has an office job as a finance clerk that doesn’t require her to interact with many people, and who the reader knows early on, grew up in a series of foster homes. As her story progresses we learn that Eleanor originally lived with her mother, that her mother was an alcoholic who was abusive, and that she set the family home on fire, after which her mother seemingly went to prison and Eleanor went into foster care. 

Eleanor copes with her difficult upbringing as an adult by, among other things, being very candid with others people, while also trying to avoid them, and finding comfort in routine as exemplified by her purchasing the same meal and bottle of vodka for her Friday dinner each week.

As the story unfolds, readers discover that Eleanor has weekly phone conversations with her mother who is verbally abusive, and that Eleanor has some mental health challenges brought about by her experiences of living with an abusive mother, and by later living with foster parents that didn’t have the resources to help her. Eleanor’s mental health challenges include an obsession with a local rock star named Johnnie Lomond, and an inability to remember the details of the night her mother set the family home on fire, including being unable to remember her younger sister who died in the fire. And it isn’t until approximately 80% of the way through the book that readers realize the weekly conversations Eleanor has with her mother, which it was implied had been living in prison, are actually going on in her mind, since her mother and sister both died in the fire her mother set.

Although Eleanor is in her early thirties in the book, the tale really is a coming of age tale. Eleanor who hadn’t had sufficient support from people in her previous life; unexpectedly makes friends with and finds support via her co-worker Raymond, Raymond’s mother, Sammy, the senior Raymond and Eleanor save after he passed out in the street, and Eleanor’s boss Bob who is supportive because his sister had struggles with depression just like Eleanor. By the end of the book, Eleanor has set aside her obsession with Johnnie Lomond, remembered the details of the fire and her forgotten sister, has worked with a therapist to overcome her childhood trauma, has accepted a promotion at work and even has a cat, named Glenn for companionship and to take care of – so Eleanor is transformed from a women who certainly wasn’t completely fine into a woman, who is on the path to becoming fine and living a more engaging and enjoyable life.

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March Book, Video & Genealogy Research Site Recommendation (recommended titles are books, unless otherwise specified)

Dickensian (2015-2016; 20 episodes) (Format: TV Show)

Drama set within the fictional realms of Charles Dickens critically acclaimed novels, bringing together some of his most iconic characters as their lives intertwine in 19th century London.

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Eli’s Promise: A Novel by Ronald H. Balson

A “fixer” in a Polish town during World War II, his betrayal of a Jewish family, and a search for justice 25 years later—by the winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

Eli’s Promise is a masterful work of historical fiction spanning three eras—Nazi-occupied Poland, the American Zone of post-war Germany, and Chicago at the height of the Vietnam War. Award-winning author Ronald H. Balson explores the human cost of war, the mixed blessings of survival, and the enduring strength of family bonds.

1939: Eli Rosen lives with his wife Esther and their young son in the Polish town of Lublin, where his family owns a construction company. As a consequence of the Nazi occupation, Eli’s company is Aryanized, appropriated and transferred to Maximilian Poleski—an unprincipled profiteer who peddles favors to Lublin’s subjugated residents. An uneasy alliance is formed; Poleski will keep the Rosen family safe if Eli will manage the business. Will Poleski honor his promise or will their relationship end in betrayal and tragedy?

1946: Eli resides with his son in a displaced persons camp in Allied-occupied Germany hoping for a visa to America. His wife has been missing since the war. One man is sneaking around the camps selling illegal visas; might he know what has happened to her?

1965: Eli rents a room in Albany Park, Chicago. He is on a mission. With patience, cunning, and relentless focus, he navigates unfamiliar streets and dangerous political backrooms, searching for the truth. Powerful and emotional, Ronald H. Balson’s Eli’s Promise is a rich, rewarding novel of World War II and a husband’s quest for justice.

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Family Search (A free genealogy site hosted by the Mormons) (Format: Website)

Website found at: https://www.familysearch.org/en/ – they have a free app too with the same name.

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Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age–and Other Unexpected Adventures by Reeve Lindbergh

In her funny and wistful new book, Reeve Lindbergh contemplates entering a new stage in life, turning sixty, the period her mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, once described as “the youth of old age.” It is a time of life, she writes, that produces some unexpected surprises. Age brings loss, but also love; disaster, but also delight. The second-graders Reeve taught many years ago are now middle-aged; her own children grow, marry, have children themselves. “Time flies,” she observes, “but if I am willing to fly with it, then I can be airborne, too.” A milestone birthday is also an opportunity to take stock of oneself, although such self-reflection may lead to nothing more than the realization, as Reeve puts it, “that I just seem to continue being me, the same person I was at twelve and at fifty.” At sixty, as she observes, “all I really can do with the rest of my life is to…feel all of it, every bit of it, as much as I can for as long as I can.”

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Genre Fiction: Japanese American World War II Interment Fiction

12 Books Recommended from the Densho (“a term meaning “to pass on to the next generation.”) site – in chronological order by publication year

Why She Left Us by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto (1999)

When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka (2002)

21st Century Manzanar by Perry Miyake (2002)

Southland by Nina Revoyr (2003)

The Legend of Fire Horse Woman by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston (2003)

Color of the Sea by John Hamamura (2006)

Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire by David Mura (2008)

The Issei Prisoners of the San Pedro Internment Center by Stanley N. Kanzaki (2009)

Bridge of Scarlet Leaves by Kristina McMorris (2012)

The Red Kimono by Jan Morrill (2013)

Fox Drum Bebop by Gene Oishi (2014)

For plot details click on the following link:

https://densho.org/catalyst/twelve-novels-japanese-american-authors-centered-wwii-incarceration/’

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Our April meeting was held at the library on Friday, April 9, 2022 and our April read was:

Born A Crime by Trevor Noah

Born A Crime is comedian Trevor Noah’s memoir chronicling his experiences growing up in South Africa during the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties.

Noah was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on February 20, 1984 the son of a native African mother and a white Swiss-German father. Noah was “born a crime” because the apartheid form of government, in use in South Africa at the time of his birth, made it illegal for people of different races to have congress with each other, and by extension, to have children with each other.

The memoir is as much a story of what life was like for native Africans and those, who like Trevor were of mixed race, in South Africa under apartheid; with the ridged racial-based societal hierarchy that form of government established, as it is a story of Trevor Noah, himself. Readers learn about both the way people live due to the government restrictions, and Trevor, as his memoir unfolds.

Trevor was purposely conceived by his mother, who planned to raise him on her own. And as a young child Trevor lived in a household that consisted of himself and his mother, who was a devout Christian and a member of the Xhosa people. Trevor spent time with his father as a young child but as the family group was mixed they couldn’t be seen in public together. Trevor and his mother would walk on one side of the street and his father on the other.

When Trevor was nine years old, his mother Patricia married a mechanic named Abel. During the years of their marriage, which corresponded with the time Trevor grew up, Trevor stopped seeing his father because Able disapproved of Trevor visiting him, Patricia and Abel had two children, Andrew and Isaac, and Abel became a full blown, and abusive alcoholic. Abel was initially able to provide for the family by working as a successful mechanic, but after he lost his garage to creditors, and as alcoholism took hold of him, he provided little financial support for the family.

At that time, the institutional racial segregation laws of apartheid limited the jobs that blacks Africans could obtain. But Trevor’s mother had a will of iron and was determined to do more than be a servant or factory worker, the usual positions available to black women in South Africa. She trained to be a secretary and her timing was good, as after she was trained the government, which was being pressured by the international community to be less the rigid and ease the racial restrictions of apartheid, allowed black Africans to take the lowest level of white collar positions, for the first time. So Trevor’s mother obtained a job as a  secretary and was able to support the family.

As Trevor grew older, the situation in the family home became fraught with tension as they never knew when Abel would launch into a drunken rage and beat them. Trevor stayed away from Abel, and out of the house as much as he could and launched a business at school with a fellow student. He was able to access then high end computer equipment, rare in South Africa at the time, and burn and sell pirated CDs to his fellow classmates. Eventually, his business branched out and he sold other items as well, often hot items. He also became a DJ and played music, from the in-depth library housed on his computer, for parties.

Subsequently, Trevor graduated from high school, moved out of the family home and in with his cousin; and continued to run his business. The book ends with Trevor being awakened by a phone call from his younger half-brother Andrew, who informs Trevor their mother has been shot by his father. Trevor dashes to the hospital and discovers his mother was shot through the head and leg but miraculously has suffered no permanent damage.

Essentially, the book offers an in-depth look at Trevor’s early life, detailing his relationship with his mother, the family’s struggles to live in a legally racist society and how as a youth Trevor launched a business and worked hard to make money so he could support himself.

For this typist’s two cents worth, I was surprised that Trevor didn’t mention in the book, even in passing or as an aftermath, that his successful comedy career began when friends encouraged him to get up on stage and tell jokes at venue having a stand-up comedy night. Trevor became very successful as a stand-up comedian, moved to the United States, worked at Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and took over as host when Stewart left that role in 2015.

To learn more checkout one of the following articles/pages

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/daily-show-trevor-noah-audience-studio-return-1235230144/

https://www.biography.com/media-figure/trevor-noah

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWhs_6x42TyRM4Wstoq8HA

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April Book & Video Recommendations: (recommendations are books, unless otherwise specified)

Benjamin Franklin (2022) by Ken Burns (Format: Streaming – from PBS on TV or WSKG or PBS online)

Ken Burns’s four-hour documentary, Benjamin Franklin, explores the revolutionary life of one of the 18th century’s most consequential figures.

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The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession by Mark Obmascik

In one of the wackiest competitions around, every year hundreds of obsessed bird watchers participate in a contest known as the North American Big Year. Hoping to be the one to spot the most species during the course of the year, each birder spends 365 days racing around the continental U.S. and Canada compiling lists of birds, all for the glory of being recognized by the American Birding Association as the Big Year birding champion of North America. In this entertaining book, Obmascik, a journalist with the Denver Post, tells the stories of the three top contenders in the 1998 American Big Year: a wisecracking industrial roofing contractor from New Jersey who aims to break his previous record and win for a second time; a suave corporate chief executive from Colorado; and a 225-pound nuclear power plant software engineer from Maryland. Obmascik bases his story on post-competition interviews but writes so well that it sounds as if he had been there every step of the way. In a freewheeling style that moves around as fast as his subjects, the author follows each of the three birding fanatics as they travel thousands of miles in search of such hard-to-find species as the crested myna, the pink-footed goose and the fork-tailed flycatcher, spending thousands of dollars and braving rain, sleet, snowstorms, swamps, deserts, mosquitoes and garbage dumps in their attempts to outdo each other. By not revealing the outcome until the end of the book, Obmascik keeps the reader guessing in this fun account of a whirlwind pursuit of birding fame. Publishers Weekly Review

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The Big Year (2011) (Format: Movie) based upon the Obmascik book starring Owen Wilson, Jack Black & Steve Martin: Two bird enthusiasts try to defeat the cocky, cutthroat world record holder in a year-long bird-spotting competition. – IMDB

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Bruno Chief of Police Mysteries by Martin Walker:

Book 1 is Bruno, Chief of Police (2008):

The first installment in the delightful, internationally acclaimed series featuring Chief of Police Bruno.

Meet Benoît Courrèges, aka Bruno, a policeman in a small village in the South of France.  He’s a former soldier who has embraced the pleasures and slow rhythms of country life. He has a gun but never wears it; he has the power to arrest but never uses it.  But then the murder of an elderly North African who fought in the French army changes all that.  Now Bruno must balance his beloved routines—living in his restored shepherd’s cottage, shopping at the local market, drinking wine, strolling the countryside—with a politically delicate investigation.  He’s paired with a young policewoman from Paris and the two suspect anti-immigrant militants.  As they learn more about the dead man’s past, Bruno’s suspicions turn toward a more complex motive.

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Fantastic Fiction (Format: Website) – a great resource to search for authors, the books in a series and read alike titles:

Found at https://www.fantasticfiction.com/

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Guido Brunetti Mysteries Series by Donna Leon

Book 1 Death At La Fenice (1992):  Venice’s canals have always been shrouded in mystery. But when the celebrated opera house, La Fenice, is the scene of a murder the Commissario of Police, Guido Brunetti, has to step behind the lights into the bitchy world of opera to investigate.

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Knives Out (2019) (Format: Movie)

Knives Out sharpens old murder-mystery tropes with a keenly assembled suspense outing that makes brilliant use of writer-director Rian Johnson’s stellar ensemble. – Rotten Tomatoes

The cast includes: Christopher Plummer, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Toni Collett, Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Michael Shannon, Ana de Armas, LaKeith Stanfield, Jaeden Martell & Katherine Langford.

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The Leaphorn & Chee Mystery Series by Tony Hillerman and its sequel series, Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito series continued by his daughter Anne Hillerman.

The first book in Tony’s series is The Blessing Way (1970).

The first book in Anne’s continuation series is The Spider Woman’s Daughter (2013).

The brand new book in Anne’s series is The Sacred Bridge (2022).

The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard by John Birdsall

Legendary cookbook author James Beard (1903–1985) remade the American palate while carefully hiding his homosexuality, according to this zesty biography. Food writer and cookbook author Birdsall (Hawker Fare) styles Beard the Walt Whitman of 20th-century cooking: he championed fresh, local, seasonal fare against processed and frozen foods, and pioneered New American cuisine by applying French cooking methods to simple American classics. (He invented the gourmet hamburger while running a hamburger stand in Nantucket in 1953, and wrote groundbreaking works on cocktail hors d’oeuvres and outdoor cooking.) In Birdsall’s colorful portrait, Beard is a larger-than-life figure with a six-foot-three-inch, 300-pound bulk, a charisma developed from theater training, and the Rabelaisian tag-line “‘I love to eat!’”; on the shadier side, he padded books with previously published recipes and plagiarized some from other authors. Birdsall highlights Beard’s homosexuality, which he kept closeted until late in life to avoid alienating mainstream readers while subtly negotiating the fraught gender politics of men in kitchens. Birdsall’s narrative offers a tangy portrait of the backstabbing world of post-WWII food writing along with vivid, novelistic evocations of Beard’s flavor experiences (“The ham was salty and pungent. Its smokiness and moldy specter would linger as the first taste of the coast”). The result is a rich, entertaining account of an essential tastemaker. Publishers Weekly Review

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Meet Me In The Margins by Melissa Ferguson

Ferguson (The Cul-de-Sac War) enchants with this whimsical tale set against the evergreen culture war between literary and commercial fiction. Savannah Cade, an assistant acquisitions editor at Nashville’s stately Pennington Publishing House, hides her love of the romance genre and the novel she’s writing from her colleagues—until she accidentally drops her unpublished manuscript at the feet of her new boss, Will Pennington, whose CEO mother has recruited him to rescue their failing enterprise. Desperate to hide the evidence before anyone else sees, Savannah stashes her manuscript in a hidden room that few employees know exists, but when she returns to claim it, she finds that a mysterious editor has marked up the pages she thought ready for publication. Though initially indignant, Savannah takes the advice and comes back for more, falling for her unknown editor’s charming way with words and spot-on advice—while simultaneously softening to her stern boss, though she’s still sure he disapproves of her romance habit. An idealistic, competent heroine, a swoon-worthy hero, and delightfully quirky supporting characters bolster this often hilarious send up of the publishing industry, which doubles as a love letter to the power of stories. This is sure to win Ferguson some new fans. Publishers Weekly Review

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Reverend Mother Mysteries by Cora Harrison: Set in Ireland in the 1920s with Reverend Mother Aquinas as the mystery solving protagonist. Book 1 is:

 A Shameful Murder: Ireland, 1923. The country has been torn apart by the War of Independence and is now in the throes of sectarian violence and severe flooding. But Mother Aquinas knows that not all floods cleanse the deeds of humanity . . . When a body washes up at her convent chapel dressed in evening finery, she immediately suspects foul play. The overstretched police force may be ready to dismiss the case as accidental drowning, but strangulation marks on the girl’s throat tell a grimmer story. Mother Aquinas wants justice for the girl – and won’t let a murderer slip away unpunished under the cover of war.

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Sebastian St. Cyr Mysteries by C. S. Harris

Book 1 is What Angels Fear (2005): It’s 1811, and the threat of revolution haunts the upper classes of King George III’s England. Then a beautiful young woman is found savagely murdered on the altar steps of an ancient church near Westminster Abbey. A dueling pistol found at the scene and the damning testimony of a witness both point to one man-Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, a brilliant young nobleman shattered by his experience in the Napoleonic Wars.

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The Vanderbilt: Rise And Fall of An American Dynasty by Anderson Cooper & Katherine Howe:

New York Times bestselling author and journalist Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times bestselling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty—his mother’s family, the Vanderbilts.

When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father’s small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that one day he would, through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empires—one in shipping and another in railroads—that would make him the richest man in America. His staggering fortune was fought over by his heirs after his death in 1877, sowing familial discord that would never fully heal. Though his son Billy doubled the money left by “the Commodore,” subsequent generations competed to find new and ever more extraordinary ways of spending it. By 2018, when the last Vanderbilt was forced out of The Breakers—the seventy-room summer estate in Newport, Rhode Island, that Cornelius’s grandson and namesake had built—the family would have been unrecognizable to the tycoon who started it all.

Now, the Commodore’s great-great-great-grandson Anderson Cooper, joins with historian Katherine Howe to explore the story of his legendary family and their outsized influence. Cooper and Howe breathe life into the ancestors who built the family’s empire, basked in the Commodore’s wealth, hosted lavish galas, and became synonymous with unfettered American capitalism and high society. Moving from the hardscrabble wharves of old Manhattan to the lavish drawing rooms of Gilded Age Fifth Avenue, from the ornate summer palaces of Newport to the courts of Europe, and all the way to modern-day New York, Cooper and Howe wryly recount the triumphs and tragedies of an American dynasty unlike any other.

Written with a unique insider’s viewpoint, this is a rollicking, quintessentially American history as remarkable as the family it so vividly captures.

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Have a great day everyone!

Linda

Hi everyone, just a reminder the SSC Library March Adult Book Club gathering will be this Friday, March 11, 2022.

We’ll be meeting from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. in the Conference Room and discussing the novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman.

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For those who wish to read ahead, our April read will be Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah. Our April meeting will be on Friday, April 8 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.and we’ll be meeting in our usual location — the Conference Room at the library.

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And here, finally – but at least before our March meeting, are the notes from our February gathering:

The February Adult Book Club meeting was held on Friday, February 11 in the Conference Room at the library from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

The February read was Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion. The book consists of twelve essays written by Didion between 1968 and 2000.

And it was noted that if readers would like a more in-depth understanding of Didion, as a means of gaining insight into her writing style; they should watch the 2017 Netflix documentary on Didion, titled Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold; the documentary, incidentally was directed by Didon’s nephew Griffin Dunne.

With that as a preface, here is a brief overview of the twelve essays in the book:

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion

1. Alice and the Underground Press (1968):

In this essay Didion discusses American newspapers of the day both the established newspapers and counterculture newspapers. She notes that all writers have a “particular bias” which they must explain to readers to connect with them; and if writers explain their bias they make their writing accessible to readers.

And Didion notes, regarding the accessibility of articles to the news reading public,

“I am talking here about something deadening and peculiar, the inability of all of us to speak to one another in a direct way, the failure of American newspapers to “get through.” The Wall Street Journal talks to me directly (that I have only have a minimal interest I what it tells me is beside the point), and so does the “underground” press.

And Didion goes on to describes the way most newspaper articles, and by extension newspapers in general, don’t offer that direct connection with article writers by noting: “The Only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire, are The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Los Angeles Open City, and the East Village Other.

Her essay thus offers her humorous take on how newspapers do or do not get the reading public to read them.

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2. Getting Serenity (1968)

In her second essay, Didion discusses attending a Gamblers Anonymous meeting and speaking with several of the attendees.

She notes there are many gambling clubs in the area where the meeting was held, Gardena, California

Didion observed that most of the attendees blamed someone or something other than themselves for their gambling addictions and that they all wanted to achieve what they referred to as “serenity.”

Didion was most impacted by speech of attendee Frank L., who had been attending meetings for six years and had just completed his first complete gambling free year. He noted “in the last three, four weeks we’ve gotten a…a serenity at home.”

 Another attendee notes of serenity that “That’s my ideal,” someone added. “Getting serenity.”

And Didion had a major issue with the Gambler’s Anonymous attendees working toward “serenity>

She stated “There was nothing particularly wrong with any of it, and yet there was something not quite right, something troubling.” And she further noted that she was disquieted by the whole ideal; and that after Frank L. gave his speech she made a beeline for the exit for anyone could utter the word “serenity” again.

Didion concluded the essay by noting that “serenity” “is a word I associated with death, and for several days after that meeting I only wanted to be in places where the lights where bright and no one counted days.”

And this essay may be one that watching the Netflix documentary on Didion, would help one understand her point of view as the word “serenity” in common usage, is not synonymous with the word death. 

My understanding of the word is has always been that it denotes being calm and at peace with the world. And the online Oxford dictionary backs up that understanding with its definition of the word: defining serenity as “the state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled,” while noting that it can also refer to someone from a royal background. Ironically then, since Didion’s first essay was about connecting with readers, her second essay didn’t connect her writing for this reader – but her viewpoint was certainly interesting.

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3. A Trip To Xanadu (1968)

Didion’s third essay relays her tour of what she, as a California native, refers to as San Simeon Castle; it is also known as Hearst Castle, having been built by businessman and newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst.

She goes on to discuss the fact that, as she saw it, Hearst built his castle to show is wealth, as a monument to all he had achieved in his life; but also as a way to emphasize living in the here and now, because Hearst feared death and wanted to deflect attention away from the idea that life is finite.

She further notes that Hearst was seen as a king in his day; and that because he was able to rise to the top of the financial and social stratospheres of American society, so too other people could looked and his castle, and felt empowered because if Hearst could become that successful, that with hard work and bit of luck they could too.

And finally, Didion notes of the castle, that when unseen it encourages ones imagination; but when in sight the castle was seen as it is and so doors of imagination that might otherwise be opened to thinkers were closed.

Didion has a quite a bit to say in essay three,  offering an interesting take on William Randolph Hearst and his castle, on how building monuments that celebrate life and achievement, lessen the fear mortals have of death, while also touching on the American ideal that anyone can rise to the top of American society.

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4. On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice (1968)

Didion begins this essay by noting that as a high school student she applied to Stanford University, and in the spring of 1952 she received a rejection letter from Stanford. From the way Didion describes the event of receiving the letter, reading it and the immediate aftermath; by quoting the letter itself, noting that after reading it she felt like she’d never amount to anything, but instead wind up a spinster like the spinster in the film Washington Square; how she re-read the letter several times in disbelief, before finally believing what the letter said and then storming upstairs to her bedroom where she locked the door and cried for several hours; readers get the distinct impression that Didion came to the conclusion that too much pressure is put on young people applying to college both in her day and the day she was writing in, the late nineteen sixties.

Didion went how young people of the sixties who were applying to college, also the pressure of having to get into prestigious schools, or the school of their choice, if they wanted to succeed. Didion’s bottom line being that American society in the early 1950s and late 1960s put too much pressure on high school students when it came to being accepted by the best universities. Or as Didion well put it “Finding one’s role at seventeen is problem enough, without being handed somebody else’s script.”

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5. Pretty Nancy (1968)

The Nancy of the title Nancy Reagan, future first lady and then wife of California Governor Ronald Reagan who, as the story opens, has a newspaper crew setting up to interview her in her rented Sacramento home. Didion noted that the report was essentially stages – “The television crew wanted to watch her, while she was doing precisely what she would ordinarily be doing on a Tuesday morning at home.”

The staged report showing Nancy cutting flowers in the garden with a basket, smiling the smile of “a woman who seems to be playing out some middle class American woman’s daydream, circa 1948.”

Didion offers glimpses into Nancy’s world describing aspects of the house including their being electric trains in the gaming room, Charles Schutz prints on the wall and an apothecary jar of hard candies on the governor’s desk. She likewise describes some members of the Reagan family including dogs Lady & Fuzzy, teenage daughter Pattie and middle school aged son Ronnie who was known as “The Skipper.”

No difference in lifestyle, as first lady of California “There’s been no difference at all as far as our friends are concerned.. If there was a difference, why, they wouldn’t be friends. Your friends are…your friends.”

Magazines on table reflect the fantasy life being portrayed – Town & Country, Vogue, Newsweek, Life, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Art News – a question being how real is the life style being presented.

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6. Fathers, Sons, Screaming Eagles (1968)

The story Fathers, Sons, Screaming Eagles  unfolds at the twenty third annual reunion of the World War II veterans of the 101 Airborne division and opens in the Crown Room of the Stardust Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, where Joan is talking to Skip Skivington who was growing a beard but assured her he wasn’t a hippie. He was in his early forties and served with the 101st Airborne Division during World War II. Skip’s son, was missing in action in Vietnam at the time.

Didion notes attendees included veterans and their families as well as Gold Star Mothers and Joan had traveled from LA to attend the gathering.

Didion describes the everydayness of the reunion by noting they had the reunion offered a “a swimming party, a buffet dinner featuring classic American cuisine “roast beef, ham, coleslaw, sliced beats, slices tomatoes, American cheese, and dinner rolls;” and  that the party favors were metal crickets because “crickets” was the code for the 101 Airborne on D-Day. She went on to note that there was a wives luncheon, army movies and that the group sent messages of support to the current members of the 101st serving in Vietnam.

And the basic gist of the essay is two-fold, firstly, that as Joan noted of the veterans who survived the war, “They had indeed had a great adventure, an essential adventure, and almost everyone in the room had been nineteen and twenty years old when they had it.”

And secondly, that in war men die as Skip Skippington was contemplating about his missing son William Edward “Skip” Skivington Jr.; who although he did not know for certain at the time, had indeed been killed in action in Vietnam*; and as veteran Walter Davis was contemplating as he noted the contrast between his thinking as a young solider vs. being a middle ages father, he said “I never thought of dying then.” I see it a little differently now. I didn’t look at it from the parents’ point of view then. I was eighteen, nineteen. I wanted to go, couldn’t stand not to go. I got to see Paris, Berlin, go to see placed I’d heard about but never dreamed I’d see. Now I’ve got a boy, well, in four years maybe he’ll have to go.” I see it differently now.”

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7. Why I Write (1976)

In Why I Write Didion explains why she became a writer. In essence, she was born to it; and she highlights this fact by first talking about how she saw writing itself and second by talking about the way she saw the world, which is what made her a writer.

Didion begins by noting that she stole the title for the piece Why I Write from George Orwell because she liked it, and liked the way it sounds; she goes on to say that “In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise it…”

She also notes that there is “no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, and invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space,” and that “Like many writers I have only this one “subject,” only excel at this one “area” the act of writing.”

And then she offers insight into just why the way she saw the world made her a writer, noting that when she was a student at Berkeley and sitting in class “contemplating Hegelian dialectic, I would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor,” and further, that when attending a class on linguistic theory she would find herself pondering “if the lights were on in the nearby Bevatron particle accelerator building, and wondering, not about the accelerator itself but instead how the lights of the building looked shining out the windows.

She sums up the whole enchilada by noting that by her temperament she was a writer although it took her a number of years to realize that fact.  

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8. Telling Stories (1978)

Telling Stories is another Didion essay which focuses on the fact that she was a natural born writer. In this piece she describes her youthful fear of not being a good writer, how she learned the importance of how words were written and placed in a sentence, how to write concise pieces while working for Vogue and that she discovered she didn’t like writing short stories because she found the form confining.

Of her youthful fear of not being a good writer, Diddion recalls that while attending an English 106 class, as an English major she was terrified of making mistakes and was convinced that she would never be as good at writing as the other students in the class. Her fear of imperfection lead her to complete only 3 of the required 5 stories she was instructed to write for the class. She was fortunate that she has a kind professor who understood that her fear of writing was a fear that should wouldn’t be as good as she thought she should be at writing and he gave her a B for the class.

She then goes on to describe her tenure of writing copy for Vogue magazine, when she learned that the way words appear in a sentence and the way paragraphs are put together is important in and of itself; of her Vogue learning experience she noted “I recall “to ravish” as a highly favored verb for a number of issues and I also recall it, for a number of issues more, as the source of a highly flavored noun” “Ravishments” as in “tables cluttered with porcelain tulips. Fabergé eggs, other ravishments;” and that the sentence “There were two oranges and an apple” read better than “there were an apple and two oranges” The bottom line being of course that when writing with a maximum word count, and a deadline, one had to “Prune it out, clean it up, make the point” and that “Less was more, smooth was better and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion.”

And finally she gives more credence to why she became a writer by noting that she wasn’t fond of the short story form because it didn’t allow her to spread out while writing and including deep details; which is way she only three short stories professionally all in 1964.

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9. Some Women (1989)

In Some Women Didion recalled when while working for Vogue, she went to a photography studio and how she felt watching the women being photographed for the feature pages. All the women were celebrated for one reason or another, but not specifically for being fashionable or glamourous.  The women being photographed were told to simply be themselves; while the photographer was working on getting a certain look that meshed with the subject of the feature page.

Didion went on discuss the writing process noting that “If you say too much about a novel you’re writing you may lose the creativity to write the story i.e. “I “had” a novel when it presented itself to me as an oil slick, with an iridescent surface; during the several years it took me to finish the novel I mentioned the oil slick to no one, afraid the talismanic hold the image had on me would fade, go flat, go away like a dream told at breakfast.” And she tied her ponderings of the writing process together with the mystery of the photography process by talking about the famous photographer Robert Mapplethrope who once told an interviewer that he thought photos should have a mystery to them which was up to the viewer to solve; and that he didn’t like to comment on his photos because “If you say too much you lose some of that mystery.”

Didion went on to further discuss both related subjects, how writers and photographers create their works for the balance of the essay.

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10. The Long Distance Runner (1993):

The so called long distance runner of the story was the actor Tony Richardson a friend of Didion and her husband.

Didion describes two major sides of Richardson in her essay by noting firstly, of Richardson, that “I never knew anyone who so loved to make things, or anyone who had such limited interest in what he had already made. What Tony loved was the sheer act of doing it whether what he was making was a big picture or theater or twenty-one minutes for television.” Didion determined that Richardson loved the process of working and wanted to be working creating and that was what made his life magical. In contrast, he had no interest in his past work.

And the second side of Richardson that Didion described was that his view of the world, was, well, a bit different than the view most people would take of events. Richardson found value in things that were out of the ordinary. Didion gave an excellent example of this by describing an incident that she had a front row seat to. Didion and her husband were dinning out with Richardson and a group of people when Didion’s husband and another guest had a loud argument at the table which ended when Didion’s husband stormed out or the restaurant; and later Richardson, who she said “thrived on the very moments most of us try to avoid”; told her that the argument made the evening magical.

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11. Last Word (1998)

Didion opens the essay Last Words by quoting the first section of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms:  “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.  Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were study and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bar and white except for the leaves.”

Didion was a big fan of Hemingway and she notes of the first paragraph from A Farewell To Arms that “That paragraph which was published in 1929, bears examination: four deceptively simple sentences, 126 words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them.”

The bottom line of this essay, is the Didion was what one would call a “Writer’s writer” someone who was very gifted at her craft and had insight that others who also practiced the art of writing could learn from.

12. Everywoman.com (2000)

The “Every Woman” of the final essay in the book is, of course, Martha Stewart.

And in this twelfth essay Didion offers her take on how Martha Stewart became exceptionally successful by a tremendous amount of hard work and effort – in essence, she had the dream and the drive. Didion notes of her that Martha was “the fifty-eight-year old Charman and CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia LLC needs,” who needs “ only four hours of sleep per night, unitized the saved hours by grooming her six cats and gardening by flashlight, prefers Macs in the office and a PowerBook for herself, commutes between her house in Westport and her two houses in East Hampton and her Manhattan apartment in a GMC Suburban, was raised the second-oldest of six children in a Polish-American family in Nutley NJ, has one daughter Alexis and survived a “non-amicable divorce from her husband of twenty-six years, Andrew Stewart.”

As Didion describes it this essay is a “woman’s pluck” story, the dust-bowl story, the burying your child on the train story, the I will never go hungry again story etc., the story of the sheer nerve that unskilled women can prevail and show the men they can.”

Hi everyone, just a reminder the SSC Library March Adult Book Club gathering will be this Friday, March 11, 2022.

We’ll be meeting from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. in the Conference Room and discussing the novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman.

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For those who wish to read ahead, our April read will be Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah. Our April meeting will be on Friday, April 8 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.and we’ll be meeting in our usual location — the Conference Room at the library.

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What Book Club Members Have Been Reading, Watching & Listening Too: February 2022 Edition:

Books:

Doris Kearns Goodwin books, her works include:

Leadership In Turbulent Times which offers insight into how Presidents Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Teddy Roosevelt lead the country during, you guessed it – turbulent times!

Team of Rivals: which focuses on the men in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet and the era of the 1860s.

& The Bully Pulpit a biography of Teddy Roosevelt.

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A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway: Published in 1929 this Hemingway classic unfolds during World War I, during the Italian campaign and relays the story of a soldier named Henry and a nurse named Catherine – it is a classic! 

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We also discussed “Japanese interment camp fiction” and came up with the following titles:

The House of Sixty Fathers by Meindert De Jong & Maurice Sendak: “The House of Sixty Fathers is a 1956 children’s novel by Meindert DeJong. Illustrations were provided by Maurice Sendak. The novel was based on the author’s own experiences as a military flier in China during the second world war.” Wikipedia

They Called Us The Enemy by George Takei: The Star Trek actor’s biographical graphic novel; relays his experiences of being forcibly removed to an internment camp with his family during World War II.

Videos:

All Things Great And Small (2022): This PBS series follows a young veterinarian in the English countryside in 1930s Yorkshire.

Dickensian TV Series (2015-2016: Drama set within the fictional realms of Charles Dickens critically acclaimed novels, bringing together some of his most iconic characters as their lives intertwine in 19th century London. –  IMDB

The Gilded Age TV Series (2022) (HBO): The new series by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellows set in New York City in the 19th Century.

Heaven’s Garden (2011-2012): A Korean Drama, with English subtitles that tells that tale of a mother with two young daughters, who returns to her family home and her disapproving father.

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017): Netflix documentary of Didion produced by her nephew Griffin Dunne.

Last Tango In Halifax (2012-2020): Cliff notes description this series follows childhood sweethearts Celia Dawson and Alan Buttershaw who meet again later in life and get married.

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Have a great day everyone,

Linda

P.S. We actually read two books for our February book club. The Didion book of essays, and just for fun the terrifically illustrated book “Tuesday” by David Wiesner – which follows the magical trip a group of frogs take on a Tuesday evening – the book is highly recommend for all ages!

Hi everyone, first up, here is the information regarding our March book club gathering. We’ll be meeting on Friday, March 11 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. in the Conference Room

Our March read is Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman.

Print copies of the book are available for book club members to pick up at the Circulation Desk and eBook and digital audiobook version are available in the Digital Catalog (AKA Libby app).

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Secondly, and better late than never, here are the notes from our January meeting:

January 2022:

Our January meeting was held at the library on Friday, January 14, 2022 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Our January read was the slightly dystopian novel Klara And The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

I say the book is a “slightly dystopian” novel, because although the protagonist is an artificial life form, a basic android named Klara who was created to be a friend to a teenager; the book is set in the very near future and really could be set in our time.

As the book opens we are introduced to Klara who has been turned on by the Store Manager, and becomes self-aware at the shop where she is for sale. Klara  she discovers she is one of a number of artificial friends for sale; and the author does a great job of describing how Klara see the world while living in the shop, particularly in his description of how Klara, as a solar powered artificial friend, worships the sun. Klara is a good learner and does exactly what she is told to do by the Store Manager, while she is sitting in the display window at the front of the store.

Eventually Klara is purchased for a young teenage girl named Josie. Klara is purchased by Josie’s mother who is never referred to by her first name and whom Klara always thinks of as “The Mother.”

Klara goes home with Josie to live in her house as her friend. And the readers’ view of the plot unfolds as Klara experiences what life is like living in Josie’s household with Josie, Josie’s mother and Melania the Housekeeper. Also of note, on the very day she arrives at Josie’s house Klara also meets Josie’s best friend Rick, who lives next door, and who is flying several drones that he engineered.

And as she begins her new life as Josie’s friend, Klara realizes in short order, that Josie has some vague recurring health issue, that the adults imply that Rick has less of a chance of succeeding in life than Josie, and that Josie’s father who once had a good job was “substituted” and now lives apart from Josie and her mother in a fringe community.  

Klara is the reader’s guide for the story, and we learn what she learns as the plot unfolds; although with a bit more insight than Klara has. And cliff notes version of what happens in the rest of the book is that in the near future era the book is set in, parents have the option to have their children’s genetic code tweaked so that they will excel academically and be admitted to the best colleges. If a child has not has his or her genetic code adjusted than that child has much less of a chance of succeeding as an adult because he, or she, is not seen as being as good as a child who has had their genetic code tweaked. This genetic tweaking is something the fictional futuristic society of novel values, but it can be deadly. It is revealed that Josie had an older sister who died after her genetic code was re-written; that the tweaking of Josie’s genetic code is the reason she is frequently ill; that Rick is looked down on by adults because he didn’t have his genetic code tweaked; and that Klara was purchased not only to be Josie’s friend but to observe her so if Josie too were to die, than Klara could impersonate her for Josie’s mother – transitioning into a new role as a “new Josie.”

Josie survives her genetic tweaking illness, and by the end of the book she has gone off to college. And our friend Klara, and I say that as I felt Klara became a friend by the end of the book, and she really is the most sympathetic and likeable character in the book, has been disposed of. As the story ends readers discover that Klara has been left sitting outside in what one can infer is a junk yard for artificial friends and other disposable items; and readers are left pondering what Klara has learned and experienced; as well as the obvious related questions, is a good idea to create artificial life or to tweak the code of life that naturally exists?

The general consensus of the book club member is to give the novel Klara And The Sun a read-it thumbs-up as very interesting read; although several members noted that the world-view of Klara as an artificial life form with internal projection screens, and an A.I.’s view of the world, occasional presented a challenge in understanding what Klara was experiencing.

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Books Club Members Recommended at January meeting:

Gordo: Short Stories by Jamie Cortez: The first-ever collection of short stories by Jaime Cortez, Gordo is set in a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California in the 1970s. A young, probably gay, boy named Gordo puts on a wrestler’s mask and throws fists with a boy in the neighborhood, fighting his own tears as he tries to grow into the idea of manhood so imposed on him by his father. As he comes of age, Gordo learns about sex, watches his father’s drunken fights, and discovers even his own documented Mexican-American parents are wary of illegal migrants. Fat Cookie, high schooler and resident artist, uses tiny library pencils to draw huge murals of graffiti flowers along the camp’s blank walls, the words “CHICANO POWER” boldly lettered across, until she runs away from home one day with her mother’s boyfriend, Manny, and steals her mother’s Panasonic radio for a final dance competition among the camp kids before she disappears. And then there are Los Tigres, the perfect pair of twins so dark they look like indios, Pepito and Manuel, who show up at Gyrich Farms every season without fail. Los Tigres, champion drinkers, end up assaulting each other in a drunken brawl, until one of them is rushed to the emergency room still slumped in an upholstered chair tied to the back of a pick-up truck.

These scenes from Steinbeck Country seen so intimately from within are full of humor, family drama, and a sweet frankness about serious matters – who belongs to America and how are they treated? How does one learn decency, when laborers, grown adults, must fear for their lives and livelihoods as they try to do everything to bring home a paycheck? Written with balance and poise, Cortez braids together elegant and inviting stories about life on a California camp, in essence redefining what all-American means.

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Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach:

Experience Jonathan Livingston Seagull’s timeless and inspirational message like never before in the new complete edition of this philosophical classic, perfect for readers of all ages—now with a fourth part of Jonathan’s journey, as well as last words from author Richard Bach.

This is the story for people who follow their hearts and make their own rules…people who get special pleasure out of doing something well, even if only for themselves…people who know there’s more to this living than meets the eye: they’ll be right there with Jonathan, flying higher and faster than they ever dreamed.

A pioneering work that wed graphics with words, Jonathan Livingston Seagull now enjoys a whole new life

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A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash: For a curious boy like Jess Hall, growing up in Marshall means trouble when your mother catches you spying on grown-ups. Adventurous and precocious, Jess is enormously protective of his older brother, Christopher, a mute whom everyone calls Stump. Though their mother has warned them not to snoop, Stump can’t help sneaking a look at something he’s not supposed to—an act that will have catastrophic repercussions, shattering both his world and Jess’s. It’s a wrenching event that thrusts Jess into an adulthood for which he’s not prepared. While there is much about the world that still confuses him, he now knows that a new understanding can bring not only a growing danger and evil—but also the possibility of freedom and deliverance as well.

Told by three resonant and evocative characters—Jess; Adelaide Lyle, the town midwife and moral conscience; and Clem Barefield, a sheriff with his own painful past—A Land More Kind Than Home is a haunting tale of courage in the face of cruelty and the power of love to overcome the darkness that lives in us all. These are masterful portrayals, written with assurance and truth, and they show us the extraordinary promise of this remarkable first novel.

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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: Like Ishiguro’s previous works (The Remains of the Day; When We Were Orphans), his sixth novel is so exquisitely observed that even the most workaday objects and interactions are infused with a luminous, humming otherworldliness. The dystopian story it tells, meanwhile, gives it a different kind of electric charge. Set in late 1990s England, in a parallel universe in which humans are cloned and raised expressly to “donate” their healthy organs and thus eradicate disease from the normal population, this is an epic ethical horror story, told in devastatingly poignant miniature. By age 31, narrator (and clone) Kathy H has spent nearly 12 years as a “carer” to dozens of “donors.” Knowing that her number is sure to come up soon, she recounts—in excruciating detail—the fraught, minute dramas of her happily sheltered childhood and adolescence at Hailsham, an idyllic, isolated school/orphanage where clone-students are encouraged to make art and feel special. Protected (as is the reader, at first) from the full truth about their eventual purpose in the larger world, “we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we’d take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly.” This tension of knowing-without-knowing permeates all of the students’ tense, sweetly innocent interactions, especially Kath’s touchingly stilted love triangle with two Hailsham classmates, manipulative Ruth and kind-hearted Tommy. In savoring the subtle shades of atmosphere and innuendo in these three small, tightly bound lives, Ishiguro spins a stinging cautionary tale of science outpacing ethics. Publishers Weekly Review

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Nowhere Girl by Cheryl Diamond:  Former model Diamond (Naked Rome) offers a transfixing chronicle of her coming-of-age bouncing from city to city and country to country to outrun the authorities. Her family—a tight band of five comprising her parents, sister, and brother—lived a life straight out of a thriller that was marked by false identities, financial schemes, deep mistrust, and a desperation to avoid Interpol officers. “By the age of nine, I will have lived in more than a dozen countries, on five continents, under six assumed identities,” she writes. As her family flitted from India to South Africa to America—committing forgery and fraud along the way—she was taught how to survive through judo lessons and a detailed escape plan (which she was entrusted with at age 13) to use “if everything goes to hell”—but she never learned her parents’ real names to protect them and herself. In a propulsive, at times harrowing, narrative, Diamond recounts the tutelage of her psychologically abusive father, how she went from being homeless to a successful fashion model in New York City, and a debilitating illness that devastated her mind and body in her early 20s. Eloquent and bracing, Diamond’s story will haunt readers long after the last page. Publishers Weekly Review

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Prey by Michael Crichton: Michael Crichton’s Prey is a terrifying page-turner that masterfully combines a heart–pounding thriller with cutting-edge technology.

Deep in the Nevada desert, the Xymos Corporation has built a state-of-the-art fabrication plant, surrounded by miles and miles of nothing but cactus and coyotes. Eight people are trapped. A self-replicating swarm of predatory molecules is rapidly evolving outside the plant. Massed together, the molecules form an intelligent organism that is anything but benign. More powerful by the hour, it has targeted the eight scientists as prey. They must stop the swarm before it is too late…

In Prey, Michael Crichton combines scientific brilliance with relentless pacing to create an electrifying, chilling techno-thriller

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And I’m still working on a short overview of each of the 12 essays in the February read – Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion. I will have that work completed by the end of the week and will post the notes as soon as I finish them.

Have a great day,

Linda Reimer, SSCL

P.S. If you’ve found this blog and are interested in the book club, but haven’t yet attended a meeting – you can sign up for upcoming meetings on the calendar of events page found on our website at –> https://ssclibrary.org/ –>Calendar

P.S.S. If you’ve previously signed up for a book club meeting, and thus get my monthly book club emails – you don’t need to register for upcoming book club gathering – just join us each month!

Southeast Steuben County Library Adult Book Club February Meeting Reminder

Hi everyone, February 1 is almost here and our next book club meeting is next Friday, February 11, 2022.

we’ll be meeting from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. in the Conference Room and copies of the March Read, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, will be available to checkout at the meeting.

Our February reads are Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion and the lovely, whimsical picture book Tuesday by David Wiesner.

Despite being less than two hundred pages, the Joan Didion book offers us a look into the mind and creative progression of the writer herself via 12 pieces she wrote between 1968 and 2000.

If you’d like to know to know more about Joan’s life, here are links to two interesting articles:

From The Guardian an overview of her life via her December 2021 obituary: Joan Didion obituary: Detached observer of American society and political life through her collections of journalism, novels and screenwriting

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/23/joan-didion-obituary

&
From Vanity Fair: How Joan Didion the Writer Became Joan Didion the Legend by Lili Anolik (2/2/2016)

https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/02/joan-didion-writer-los-angeles

I also found the Atlantic review of a Joan Didion biography, The Elitist Allure of Joan Didion: A big biography looks at the author’s legacy of cool by Meghan Daum (September 2015), to be interesting:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-elitist-allure-of-joan-didion/399320/

(Note: The bio was written by Tracy Daugherty, and it can be requested through StarCat should anyone liked to read it!)

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Also of note, Beth H. watched the Netflix documentary on Didion, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold and said it offered top-notch insight into Didion and her writing – so if you have Netflix and time before next Friday – check it out!

Have a great day,

Linda

SSCL Adult Book Club Reading List

February – December 2022

Friday, February 11, 2022: Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (149 pages)  & Tuesday by David Wiesner (32 pages)

Friday, March 11, 2022: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (325 pages)

Friday, April 8, 2022: Born A Crime by Trevor Noah (288 pages)

Friday, May 13, 2022: The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner (301 pages)

Friday, June 10, 2022: Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz (236 pages)

Friday, July 8, 2022 The Ballad of Laurel Springs by Janet Beard (288 pages)

Friday, August 12, 2022 A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins (320 pages)

Friday, September 9, 2022 Hell of a Book: A Novel (333 pages)

Friday, October 14, 2022 Bewilderment by Richard Powers (288 pages)

Friday, November 11, 2022 The Last Chance Library by Freya Sampson (336 pages)

Friday, December 9, 2022  Oh William!: A Novel by Elizabeth Stout (256 pages)

Adult Reading Club Contact:

Linda Reimer | Tel: 607-936-3713 x 212 | Email: reimerl@stls.org

Hi everyone, our January 2022 Adult Book Club gathering is quickly approaching.

We’ll be meeting next Friday, January 14, 2022 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. in the library’s Conference Room.

Our January Read is: Klara And The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (303 pages)

Our December Book Club meeting notes follow, and at the end of this email is the book club reading list for the first half of 2022.

Have a great day & I hope to see everyone next Friday!

Linda

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December 2021 SSCL Adult Book Club Meeting Notes

The Southeast Steuben County Library December 2021 Adult Book Club was held on December 10, 2021 | 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. at the library.

The December Read was: Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR by Lisa Napoli

The book club members unanimously agreed that the book was a fascinating read. 

The cliff notes overview of the book is that it focuses on four main things:

1. The lives and journalistic careers of the women mentioned in the title who all broke through glass ceilings to achieve success in their field

2. The limited options available to American women in the working world in the 1950s and 1960s, and the related struggles of women to rise above those limitations

3. In relation to point 2, how both society and the word were evolving during the time covered in the book, roughly the 1950s through the early 1990s; or as Dylan put it the fact that the times were a-changin’

4. How NPR was founded and evolved during the time covered in the book

And I’ll add a fifth item that is a notch or two below being a “main thing,” but one that I, as someone in my fifties was unware of, and which I found fascinating — and that is the launch and evolution of national radio.

The book relays the story of the Founding Mothers of NPR in the order in which they began working at NPR; and to try and keep this overview brief, which admittedly is hard for me! I’m going to simply relay brief biographical information on the Founding Mothers of the title in the chronological order that the began working at NPR:  Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer, Nina Totenberg and Cokie Roberts; and recommend that if anyone reading this overview wants to know more – they should read the book – which is available for instant checkout through Hoopla.

So here is the cliff notes version of each journalist’s story:

Susan Stamberg: Susan Stamberg was born Sue Levitt, the only child of Anne and Robert Levitt. Sue grew up in New York City, just blocks from Grand Central Station.  And young girl she was captivated by the medium of radio.

Sue attended the Music and Art high school in New York City becoming the features editor of the school newspaper, The Overtone. And by the time she was a high school student Sue was aware that the life society in the fifties expected her to live, as either a wife and mother tied to hearth and home, or, as a woman working in a designated “woman’s position” as a secretary, account clerk or support staff etc., wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to be a fully-fledged journalist and not be limited due to her gender. 

During her college years, Sue won a scholarship to Barnard College, worked as an assistant to the library archivist at Columbia University and decided to be known as Susan instead of Sue. She graduated in 1959 with degrees in English and sociology. And as the author notes, she was one of only five women in her class to graduate without being engaged.

After graduation she worked as a secretary at the newly launched 16 Magazine, briefly studied advanced English at Brandeis University in Massachusetts before deciding that wasn’t for her; landed a job as an editorial assistant, AKA a secretary; at Daedalus, a journal produced by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and became an advocate for improving Boston public schools. It was during this time that she met Lou Stamberg, the son of a prominent Allentown family who was working on a law degree at Harvard. Susan and Lou hit it off and were married in 1962. Lou was an equality minded individual and the couple were life partners from day one becoming known as “SueLou.” After their honeymoon they moved to Washington, D.C. where Lou landed a job in short order. While Sue struggled to find a job that allowed her to use her intellect and abilities.  

Eventually Susan took a job as a secretary for The New Republic and was, in her words “bored silly,” before getting a tip from a friend that the local educational radio station WAMU-FM, a non-profit educational radio station, was looking for a producer for a new public affairs program. The experimental current affairs program launched on May 3, 1971, was named All Things Considered; and it became the flagship program of the new National Public Radio (NPR). In 1972, when Susan became co-host of the program, she also became the first woman to co-host a national news program. Susan was co-host of All Things Considered from 1972 – 1986.

In addition to her work on All Things Considered, Susan hosted a newly created program, Weekend Editions Sunday and filled in a guest host for the show Morning Edition.

Today Susan is a Special Correspondent for N.P.R. 

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Linda Wertheimer: Linda Wertheimer, was born Linda Cozby in Carlsbad, New Mexico in 1943. She was the daughter of businessman and grocer Vernon Crosby and his wife June who was a member of the Women’s Club and the local Concert Listener Lectures music series.

Linda grew up reading the local newspaper, The Current-Argus and listening to the local radio station KAVE-AM 1240. And as a youth, Linda was captivated when she saw pioneering female journalist Pauline Frederick on television reporting from the United Nations. While in high school, Linda won a National Merit Scholarship going on to attended Wellesley College, located near Boston. Subsequently, she was part of a college exchange program that allowed her to travel to London and work for the B.B.C. for seventeen months. After returning to Boston she looked for a job and found many job openings but none that would allow a woman to use her intellect as a fully-fledged journalist.  She eventually landed a job with radio station WCBS in New York. During this time she met Fred Wertheimer who was then working as a legal counsel for Massachusetts Congressman Silvio Conte in Washington.

Linda and Fred were married in 1969 and took their honeymoon in Europe, before returning to the United States. Fred then return to his job working for Congressman Silvio, while Linda looked for work that would allow her to be a bona fide journalist and found nothing. After a year, Fred, who like Lou Stamberg was both a partner to his wife and supported her quest to a position that allowed her to use her intellect and abilities, decided to take a sabbatical from his job so he could assist his wife in finding a suitable job; then Fred overheard the news that N.P.R. was being launched, via 90 stations in 30 states, with its headquarters being located in Washington. Fred took Linda’s resume over to N.P.R.’s headquarters. And Bill Siemering, a member of the NPR Board and Program Director of the getting ready to launch and yet-to-be named news program, interviewed Linda and hired her as a production assistant.

Siemering was looking for staff that were creative, enthusiastic about creating the program and eager to work as part of team, and he was game to hire anyone, of either sex, that fit that proverbial bill. So Linda found herself working in as team player in a creative environment where she could use her intellect, and she did in many ways – including coming up with the name of the then un-named radio show – All Things Considered.

In the days leading up to the launch of All Things Considered, Linda became the director of the program and was integral part of the subsequent success of All Thing Considered.

She went on to become the first person to broadcast live from the U.S. Senate chamber; she traveled the country reporting on presidential races, anchored 10 presidential nomination conventions and 12 election nights, and did award-winning work as both a National Political Correspondent and a Congressional Correspondent for NPR.

Today Linda is a Senior National Correspondent for N.P.R.

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Nina Totenberg: Nina Totenberg was born in New York City in 1944, the daughter of virtuoso violinist Roman Totenberg and his wife Julliard educated pianist Melanie Schroder.

When Nina was a child Roman was the director of classical music at WQXR radio in N.Y.C and the family listened to the radio. Nina grew up reading and loving Nancy Drew Mysteries, wrote stories for her high school magazine, the Scarsdale High Jabberwock.

After high school Nina attended Boston University and began studying communications; but quickly learned that college wasn’t for her. So she dropped out and began looking for a job in the news field. She landed a job at newspaper the Boston Record-American covering the only subjects available for women reporters – the Society pages, i.e. society news, stories on fashion, recipes etc. Frustrated by being limited to working on soft news, Nina longed to do more and so she volunteered to work the night shift. Covering the night shift, without being paid, allowed her to work on hard news stories; granted without credit; but it did allow her to branch out and become a more seasoned journalist.

Nina went on to work for the Peabody Times, a paper that had a circulation of just several thousand and where the administrative staff didn’t care if a reporter was male of female as long as he or she could produce content at a furious pace.  Unfortunately, the paper went out of business and Nina found herself looking for another job. The time was the early 70’s, an era that was seeing the beginning of the Women’s Rights Movement and when the glass ceiling was starring to crack; and Nina landed a job with the Washington paper Roll Call covering the Supreme Court. Nina knew little of the workings of the Supreme Court at the time but was fierce in her determination to learn.

Nina went on to work for National Observer and the New Times papers, and when she had questions about supreme court cases she contracted the author of the brief in question, including in the sex discrimination case Reed v. Reed (1971), a Rutgers University Law Professor, named Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

With her intellect, fierce determination to succeed and great curiosity Nina began to break stories. When President Nixon was about to nominate a Minnesota judge, Harry Blackmun to the Supreme Court, Nina went and interviewed Blackmun’s mother who gave her a scoop telling her that her son and the chief justice of the court were old friends and spoke to each other frequently. Thus Totenberg was able to add that exclusive note of interest to her story on Blackmun when he was nominated by Nixon shortly thereafter. And in 1971, as author Napoli notes Nina “set the White House on its ear” by relaying the list of names on President Nixon’s secret list of possible Supreme Court justice nominees.

In 1974 she was hired by N.P.R. to cover the Washington beat with a focus on the Supreme Court, and she’s been working for N.P.R ever since. Over the years she has covered many notable stories and won a number of awards; one of the most notable being the George Foster Peabody award received by N.P.R. for her reports chronicling the charges of sexual harassment made by Oklahoma Law Professor Anita Hill against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991.

Today, Nina continues her work for N.P.R. as a Correspondent of Legal Affairs.

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Cokie Roberts: Cokie Roberts was born Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs in New Orleans in 1944. She was the daughter of Louisiana Congressmen Hale Boggs and his wife Lindy.

Congressman Boggs represented Louisiana’s second congressional district from 1947 – 1972; thus the Boggs children, Cokie, Tommy and Barbara, spent a great deal of time in Washington while they were growing up. Author Napoli well sums up the influence living in Washington and having a congressman for a father had on the children by noting they received “political training by osmosis” and “roamed the halls of the Capitol, the consummate playground, becoming as intimate with the hideaways as with their own back yard.”

Cokie graduated from high school in 1960 and went on to attend Wellesley College. And during her college years, while attending the annual congress of the National Student Association at Ohio State she met Steven Roberts, a Harvard student studying government who wrote for Harvard’s daily newspaper the Crimson. The couple hit it off and were married in 1966; after which they set up shop in New York City; Steve working for the New York Times and Cokie working at a local TV production company on a program called Meeting Of The Minds, which ran on Sundays prior to NBC’s premier political discussion show Meet The Press.

Early in their married years Cokie and Steve had two children; and as a young mother Cokie realized that in order to live a fulfilling life she had to work outside the home at something more than the traditional role of a woman as a wife and mother; and she had to find a job that was equal to her intellect. She took a number of unsatisfying jobs as she struggled against the glass ceiling of the era just as Susan, Linda and Nina had. Steve’s job with the Times then took the family first to California and then to Greece where he became bureau chief; and where the family lived several years. While they were in Greece, Cokie did some freelance reporting, sending audio stories back to The Nation and CBS; and one of these stories appeared, with a photo of Cokie, on the Evening News with Walter Cronkite and become her first national news story.

After a few years Steve was offered a position in Thailand which he turned down; instead accepting a position in Washington D.C. And Cokie, who had been enjoying the freelance journalistic work she had been doing and knew she wanted to continue being a reporter, was displeased by this turn of events believing that she wouldn’t be able to find a job that did her intellect and abilities justice when they returned to Washington.

Shortly after the Roberts family returned to Washington in 1977, Steve, who worked at the New York Times bureau in D.C. had a new co-worker take the desk next to his – Judith Miller. When he asked Judith where she had worked before she said National Public Radio. N.P.R. was not yet the household name it would become; and Steve had never heard of it. He discovered the N.P.R.’s Washington headquarters was just a few blocks from his office and the next day, to save Cokie a trip, he took her resume to the NPR office and left it in the hand of a very capable journalist – Nina Totenberg.

Cokie was hired by N.P.R. as a contract employee and within months was promoted to a salaried reporter position. Her charming, disarming and straight the point style served her well and she went on to serve as NPR’s Congressional Correspondent for a decade, while also contributing reports to the nightly program the MacNeil Lehrer Report.

In 1988 Roberts left NPR to work as a political correspondent for ABC on their World News Tonight program, hosted by Peter Jennings. She also worked as guest host for the news program Nightline and co-anchored the Sunday morning show This Week with Sam Donaldson. Thus Cokie, like Susan, Linda and Nina before her was able to break through the glass ceiling and become a successful and famous reporter.

Cokie Roberts died of cancer in 2019.

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Books Written by N.P.R.’s Founding Mother’s

Susan Stamberg:

Every Night At Five: Susan Stamberg’s All Things Considered Book (1982)

Talk: NPR’s Susan Stamberg Considers All Things (1993)

Linda Wertheimer:

Listening to America: Twenty-five Years in the Life of a Nation as Heard on National Public Radio (1995)

Nina Totenberg:

No books – but many, many news stories!

Cokie Roberts:

We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters: Revised and Expanded Edition (1998)

From This Day Forward by Cokie & Steven V. Roberts (2000)

Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation (2004)

Ladies of Liberty (2009)

Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families by Cokie & Steven V. Roberts (2011)

Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington (2015)

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Videos:

National Press Club Book Launch: Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie with author Lisa Napoli, Susan Stemberg, Nina Totenberg & Linda Wertheimer (2021) (National Press Club)

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“A Thousand Hours of Talk” with NPR Correspondent and Host Susan Stamberg (2018) (Bedford Community Television)

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Senior NPR Correspondent Linda Wertheimer at Mills College (2013) (Mills College)

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Supreme Revenge: Nina Totenberg (interview) 2020 (PBS: FRONTLINE)

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An Evening with Cokie Roberts (2017) (LBJ Library)

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Legendary journalist Cokie Roberts dies at 75: Special Report | ABC News (2019) (ABC)

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A list of some of the pioneering women journalist prior to Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie mentioned in the book (should anyone wish to do additional research…)

Sophie B. Altman

Lindy Boggs

Nancy Dickerson

Pauline Frederick

Dr. Mira Komarovsky

Mrs. Helen Hill Miller

Judith Miller

Marie Torre

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Bibliography

Print:

Napoli, L. (2021). Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR. Harry N. Abrams.

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Online Sources:

Allen, B., & Neuman, S. (2019, September 17). Cokie Roberts, Pioneering Journalist Who Helped Shape NPR, Dies At 75. N.P.R. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/2019/09/17/761050916/cokie-roberts-pioneering-female-journalist-who-helped-shape-npr-dies-at-75

George Washington University. (n.d.). Roberts, Steven V. | GW School of Media & Public Affairs | The George Washington University. GW School of Media & Public Affairs. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://smpa.gwu.edu/roberts-steven-v

N.P.R. (n.d.-a). Linda Wertheimer Senior National Correspondent. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/people/1931801/linda-wertheimer

N.P.R. (n.d.-b). Nina Totenberg Correspondent, Legal Affairs. Retrieved January 5, 2021, from https://www.npr.org/people/2101289/nina-totenberg

N.P.R. (n.d.). Susan Stamberg Special Correspondent. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/people/2101242/susan-stamberg

P.B.S. (2021, February 3). Nina Totenberg. Finding Your Roots. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots/about/meet-our-guests/nina-totenberg

Premiere Speakers. (n.d.). Susan Stamberg | Bio | Premiere Speakers Bureau. N.P.R. Retrieved January 5, 2022, from https://premierespeakers.com/susan_stamberg/bio

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SSCL Adult Book Club Reading List January – June 2022

January 14, 2022: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (303 pages)

February 11, 2022: Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (149 pages) & Tuesday by David Wiesner (copies will be available at the January meeting)

March 11, 2022: Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine by Gail Honeyman (325 pages)

April 8, 2022: Born A Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood by Trevor Noah (288 pages)

May 2022: The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner (301 pages)

June 2022: Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz (236 pages)

Hi everyone, just a reminder our December Adult Book Club meeting is this Friday, December 10, 2021.

We’ll be meeting in the Conference Room at the library from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Our December read is: Susan, Linda, Nina and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR by Lisa Napoli (352 page)

If you’re digitally inclined, you can instantly checkout the eBook and audiobook versions of the book through Hoopla, online at https://www.hoopladigital.com/ or by downloading the Hoopla app to your mobile device (a library card is required!)

Have a great day,

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Hi everyone, first the December book club info!

Our December meeting will be held in the Conference Room at the library on Friday, December 10, 2021 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. (Zoom link available, upon request)

Our December read is: Susan, Linda, Nina and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR by Lisa Napoli (352 page)

Book Description: A group biography of four beloved women who fought sexism, covered decades of American news, and whose voices defined NPR

In the years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, women in the workplace still found themselves relegated to secretarial positions or locked out of jobs entirely. This was especially true in the news business, a backwater of male chauvinism where a woman might be lucky to get a foothold on the “women’s pages.” But when a pioneering nonprofit called National Public Radio came along in the 1970s, and the door to serious journalism opened a crack, four remarkable women came along and blew it off the hinges.

Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie is journalist Lisa Napoli’s captivating account of these four women, their deep and enduring friendships, and the trail they blazed to becoming icons. They had radically different stories. Cokie Roberts was born into a political dynasty, roamed the halls of Congress as a child, and felt a tug toward public service. Susan Stamberg, who had lived in India with her husband who worked for the State Department, was the first woman to anchor a nightly news program and pressed for accommodations to balance work and home life. Linda Wertheimer, the daughter of shopkeepers in New Mexico, fought her way to a scholarship and a spot on-air. And Nina Totenberg, the network’s legal affairs correspondent, invented a new way to cover the Supreme Court. Based on extensive interviews and calling on the author’s deep connections in news and public radio, Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie will be as beguiling and sharp as its formidable subjects.

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And here are the notes from our November meeting, which was held at the library on Friday, November 12, 2021.

November Read: The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean, and the Looming Threat That Imperils It by Helen Scales

About The Author: The author Dr. Helen Scales, is a marine biologist and teaches at Cambridge University. Dr. Scales weaves her story of the Brilliant Abyss around her experiences doing marine research, with assistance from modern robotic technology, during a trip to the Gulf of Mexico aboard a research vessel named The Pelican.

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A cliff notes overview of the book; the first half offers a description of the life forms and geological features of the deep ocean; and the second half describes how critical it is to life on the planet that the deep ocean be preserved.

The “deep ocean” is defined as the part of the ocean that starts when sunlight dwindles and the ocean waters become pitch black, down to the ocean floor. The transition from the ocean to the deep ocean starts to occur at about 200 feet below the surface. The author well describes the deep ocean, which is extensive and features a multitude of geological features including Continental Shelfs that border the continents, Continental Slopes that descend from the Continental Shelfs toward the ocean floor, the flat Abyssal Plains of the ocean floor, Seamounts (submerged mountains) and Volcanic Islands that rise from the ocean floor, and some of which break the surface of the ocean; and, at the deepest parts of the ocean, deep trenches and rift valleys located miles beneath the ocean’s surface; and which were formed over long periods of time as underwater tectonic plates shifted.

For most of human history the deep ocean has remained a mystery. In fact, the author notes that prior to the twentieth century many scientists thought the deep ocean was devoid of life. This ideology was disproven, and today with modern technology that allows scientists, via Remote Operating Vehicles, to study the deep ocean in ways never before possible; we are living in a golden age of oceanic exploration.

Scales expressively describes the marine life that live in the deep ocean including bone-eating worms, Vampire Squid, the almost wheat-like-looking Iridogoria octocoral and the eloquent Ctenophore; with tis many feeding tentacles spread out to catch the nutritious marine snow that drifts down to the deep ocean from above. And she brings home the point that the deep ocean is a vibrant ecosystem full of life.

Scales kicks off the second part of the book by noting, that history tells us that any time new lands have been discovered by the human race; that humans have subsequently exploited those lands for commercial gain; leaving the lands depleted of natural resources and the local ecosystems damaged. She goes on to discuss how human behavior is damaging the ocean via exploitation and climate change.

On the exploitation front, Scales describes some of the ways that commercial interests want to gain wealth from the ocean and she is dubious, to say the least, when some of those commercial forces assure naysayers that what they wish to do, will not harm the ocean. Examples of the potential commercial project include medicinal cures made from sea sponges, intense deep sea fishing of orange roughies (deep sea perch), deep sea mining done by sophisticated robots and certain green energy projects.

Additionally, the author makes a case that humans are already damaging the oceanic ecosystem, both by human made climate change, and by humans using the ocean as a receptacle for human junk and waste including a huge amounts of plastics.

One book club member loved this book! The others, including the hostess, thought the book, which does have academic-scientific bent, required quite a bit of work thus wasn’t quite as much fun to read and discuss as previous book club selections. The hostess concurred with that latter assessment and has promised that in the future, any non-fiction book club selections will be more accessible.

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Additional Related Resources

NOAA: Touring The Ocean Floor

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The Brilliant Abyss (what is is?) by Helen Scales (A Cambridge University Video) (49 minutes)

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Author Talk: Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss (Talk hosted by Nantucket Atheneum)  

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Other Books Recommended By Book Club Readers:

Beautiful County: A Memoir by Qian Julie Wang – the story of how a young Chinese immigrant grew up doing menial work with her parents to pay the bills, became a star student at school and eventually a civil rights lawyer.

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On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor – the author offers an exploration of foot trails; how and why they have been created overtime by animals and people.

Have a great day,

Linda Reimer, SSCL