Barista's Book Club

When: Third Wednesday of each month, 7 p.m.
Where: Plaza Branch
Contact: Diana Hyle, dianahyle@kclibrary.org or 816.701.3481

2010 Schedule

January 20
The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides by John West.
A husband and wife, both medical professionals, are gravely ill. Rather than living in pain, they choose to end their lives, and they turn to their son for help. Despite the legal risks and emotional turmoil it is sure to cause him, he agrees--and ultimately performs an act of love more difficult than any other. The Last Goodnights provides a unique, powerful, and unflinching look deep inside the reality of one of the most galvanizing issues of our time: assisted suicide.

February 17
The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig.
1909, north central Montana. In the year since their mother died, 13-year-old Paul Milliron and his younger brothers have all found ways to cope. When their attentive but overworked father spies a newspaper ad for a housekeeper willing to trek from Minneapolis to Marias Coulee, Montana ("Can't cook, but doesn't bite," reads the headline), change sweeps in like the wind whistling down the Rockies on to the wide, dry prairie.Rose Llewellyn can't cook, but she can clean—and whistle. And when the teacher in the one-room school runs off with a tent show preacher, Rose's brother Morris Morgan is drafted to replace her. The fifth teacher in four years, Morrie appears to be a dandy with a mind full of trivia. Can he manage three dozen youngsters—including farm boys, ditch diggers' kids, the battling Swedes and Slavs?

Author Diane Eickhoff will join the book club
for the March 17, 2010, discussion.

March 17
Revolutionary Heart: The Life of Clarina Nichols and the Pioneering Crusade for Women's Rights by Diane Eickhoff.
Driven by a deep inner need to end the mistreatment of women, Clarina Nichols (1810-1885) left the comforts of her Vermont home and moved West to the wild frontier of "Bleeding Kansas," where her sons fought alongside John Brown and she helped shaped the state's new Constitution to free slaves and give women rights they had no where else in America. The story of Clarina Nichols comes alive thanks to Diane Eickhoff, whose meticulous, six-year quest to collect and analyze Nichols's scattered writings and papers has yielded a richer understanding of this remarkable pioneer in Revolutionary Heart: The Life of Clarina Nichols and the Pioneering Crusade for Women's Rights.

April 21
Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Mutsuki Mockett.
No one knows who fathered eleven-year-old Satomi, and the women of her 1950s Japanese mountain town find her mother's restless sensuality a threat. Satomi's success in piano competitions has always won respect, saving her and her mother from complete ostracism. But when her mother's growing ambition tests this delicate social balance, Satomi's gift is not enough to protect them. Eventually, Satomi is pushed to make a drastic decision in order to begin her life anew. Years later, Satomi's choices echo in the life of her American daughter, Rumi, a gifted authenticator of Asian antiques. Rumi has always believed her mother to be dead, but when Rumi begins to see a ghost, she wonders: Is this the spirit of her mother? If so, what happened to Satomi?

Author Marie Mockett will join the book club
for the April 21, 2010, discussion.

May 19
While I'm Falling by Laura Moriarty.
Ever since her parents announced that they're getting divorced, Veronica has been falling. Hard. A junior in college, she's fallen in love. She's fallen behind in her difficult coursework. She hates her job at the dorm, and she longs for the home that no longer exists. When an attempt to escape the pressure, combined with bad luck, lands her in a terrifying situation, a shaken Veronica calls her mother for help - only to find her former foundation too preoccupied to offer any assistance at all. But Veronica only gets to feel hurt for so long. Her mother shows up at the dorm with a surprising request - and with the elderly family dog in tow. Veronica soon finds herself with a new set of problems, and new questions about love and independence. Darkly humorous, compelling, and filled with crystalline observations, While I'm Falling takes a deep look at a relationship between a mother and a daughter when one is trying to grow up and the other is trying to stay afloat.

Author Laura Moriarty will join the book club
for the May 19, 2010, discussion.

June 16
The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee.
In the course of Janice Y.K. Lee's exceptional first novel, Claire (the eponymous piano teacher) eventually lands at the far end of the arc of independence she hadn't realized she'd been following from the beginning. Certainly, if one is to do one's own thing, Hong Kong, with its population of rebels and fawners, is the place for it. On the other hand (except perhaps for poor Martin), the other residents all have longer histories of machinations and personal betrayals—how could it be otherwise given the last 10 years of this city's history, the first five of which were spent in trying to survive the brutal Japanese occupation, and the last five in trying to forget it?

July
Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life by David McCullough.
A brilliant biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt hailed as "a masterpiece" (John A. Gable, Newsday), the winner of the Los Angeles Times 1981 Book Prize for Biography and the National Book Award for Biography. This is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and almost fatal asthma attacks, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household in which he was raised.

August
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore.
One of the most heralded writers of the past thirty years. Set just after the events of September 2001, about a twenty-year-old woman from a small midwestern farm, making her way, coming of age. Under the novel's languid, easygoing surface, Moore's deft, lyrical writing brings us up against the heart of racism, the shock of war, and the carelessness perpetrated against others in the name of love.

September
The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan.
Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers' genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires - sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control - with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind's most basic yearnings. And just as we've benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?

October
Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel by Jeannette Walls.
In her riveting memoir about her hardscrabble childhood, The Glass Castle (2005), Jeannette Walls described being severely burned while boiling hot dogs when she was three years old. “I used to think being burned was my earliest memory,” Walls says during a call to the home she shares with her husband, writer John Taylor, in Culpepper, Virginia. “But I also remember going to a cafeteria with [my grandmother] Lily and her standing up, pointing to me, and shouting to the entire place: SHE’S ONLY TWO YEARS OLD AND SHE’S DRINKING FROM A STRAW! SHE’S A GENIUS!" The loud, irrepressible and ever-resourceful Lily Casey Smith, who in later years took pleasure in brandishing both her “choppers” and her pearl-handled pistol in the air, is the subject of Wall’s captivating new “true-life novel,” Half Broke Horses.

November
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard.
Theodore Roosevelt's scientific trek through the Amazon wilderness in 1913-14 is not as well known as many other explorations of the Americas. In Candice Millard's The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, his trip has finally found a chronicler equal to this astonishing story of horror and triumph. Millard understands Roosevelt as a man who always needed a challenge, especially after any personal loss or public defeat, such as he had suffered in losing the presidential election of 1912. Hence, Roosevelt agreed to lead a dangerous expedition down the unexplored 950-mile River of Doubt.

December
Day After Night by Anita Diamant.
Anita Diamant, the best-selling author of The Red Tent, turns her attention from biblical narrative to the story of a decidedly more modern group of Jewish women in her latest novel, Day After Night. The tale takes place in the latter half of 1945 at Atlit, a camp in Israel where those fleeing Europe and hoping for a homeland are held if they do not have papers--or if there is any other problem with their status.

Book descriptions provided by BookLetters.