from Heidi

I would like to recommend the following book for next year's read. Wolves at the Door: The Trials of Fatty Arbuckle by David Kizer. David is a lawyer in Oakland and my neighbor works for him. She told him about our book club and he offered to come to our meeting if we choose his book. Check it out. It has gotten good reviews. I love that era and I think we can possibly consider this one of the non-fiction reads.. .. Heidi

“Wolves at the Door” is the compelling true story of actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle manslaughter trials of 1921-1922. It is the narrative day by day account of the still unsolved mystery surrounding the sudden death of Virginia Rappe, four days after a drinking party in Arbuckle's rooms at the St. Francis Hotel at the height of prohibition.

As seen from the perspective of Arbuckle, the judges and the attorneys, 'Wolves at the Door' combines the public's adulation with the early stars of Hollywood and the drama of courtroom confrontations and the looming presence of William Randolph Hearst.

The science of ‘CSI’ was introduced to America during the trials for the sole purpose of convicting Arbuckle. Some of the witnesses were coerced and others simply lied. The mystery of Rappe's death became the national fixation as perhaps the funniest man in the world went on trial for his life for a crime that the evidence showed he could not have committed.

from Melanie

I would like to recommend "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok

Few stories offer more warmth, wisdom, or generosity than this tale of two boys, their fathers, their friendship, and the chaotic times in which they live. Though on the surface it explores religious faith--the intellectually committed as well as the passionately observant--the struggles addressed in The Chosen are familiar to families of all faiths and in all nations.

In 1940s Brooklyn, New York, an accident throws Reuven Malther and Danny Saunders together. Despite their differences (Reuven is a Modern Orthodox Jew with an intellectual, Zionist father; Danny is the brilliant son and rightful heir to a Hasidic rebbe), the young men form a deep, if unlikely, friendship. Together they negotiate adolescence, family conflicts, the crisis of faith engendered when Holocaust stories begin to emerge in the U.S., loss, love, and the journey to adulthood. The intellectual and spiritual clashes between fathers, between each son and his own father, and between the two young men, provide a unique backdrop for this exploration of fathers, sons, faith, loyalty, and, ultimately, the power of love.

A very brief synopsis.......

Following a baseball game that nearly became a religious war, two Jewish boys become friends. Danny comes from the strict Hasidic sect that keeps him bound in centuries of orthodoxy. Reuven is brought up by a father patently aware of the twentieth century. Everything tries to destroy their friendship, but they use honesty with each other as a shield and it proves an impenetrable protection.

Regards Melanie

from Janice

I have a couple of suggestions for next the reading group.
When Borders was closing, I picked up a book called "Don't Shoot! I'm The
Guitar Man." I started reading it this afternoon and I want everyone to
read it. It is non fiction and the author is Buzzy Martin. It's about a guy
who teaches at risk youths to play the guitar and then is asked to teach
guitar to inmates at San Quentin. It is so interesting the effect that
prison life has on him and more interesting the effect he has on the
prisoners.

I would also like to read Away by Amy Bloom and The Namesake but I don't
feel like writing a summary. If we choose a classic, might I suggest, The
Grapes of Wrath or The Great Gatsby. I would also like everyone to consider
A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

from Martina

Hello all.

Here is the book Fugitive Visions that I wanted to present to all of you as a suggested book for our coming year.

Jane Jeong Trenka was born in Seoul, Korea. In 1972, Trenka and her sister were adopted into a white family in rural northern Minnesota. In 2004, she returned to live in Korea where she became an activist for standard and transparent adoption practices to protect the human rights of adult adoptees, children, and families. She reunited with her birth family in Korea in 1995.

She has written and/or collaborated on the following three books:

Fugitive Visions
Outsiders Within
The Language of Blood

"My name is Jeong Kyong-Ah. My ancestry includes landowners, scholars, and government officials. I have six siblings. I am a citizen of the Republic of Korea. I come from a land of pear fields and streams, where people laugh loudly and honor their dead. Halfway around the world, I am someone else."

Jane Jeong Trenka and her sister Carol were adopted by Frederick and Margaret Brauer and raised in the small, homogeneous town of Harlow, Minnesota—a place “where the sky touches the earth in uninterrupted horizon . . . where stoicism is stamped into the bones of each generation.” They were loved as American children without a past.

With inventive and radiant prose that includes real and imagined letters, a fairy tale, a one-act play, crossword puzzles, and child-welfare manuals, Trenka recounts a childhood of insecurity, a battle with a stalker that escalates to a plot for her murder, and an extraordinary trip to Seoul to meet her birth mother and siblings. Lost between two cultures for the majority of her life, it is in Korea that she begins to understand her past and the power of the unspoken language of blood.

-----------------------------------

Book Review by Thea Brown

from Martina

This is my other book suggestion for the coming year.
The Book Thief. When I was in Stockholm this past November, a friend of mine accompanied me to a book store. She bought this book, put it in my hands, and said "you have to read this book! It's an amazing book and you should suggest it to your book club."
I just now started reading it, (since we don't have any required reading for this month), and I am already fascinated by it after only the first couple of chapters.
-Martina
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The Book Thief tells the story of Liesel Meminger, a young German foster child living in a small town during the late 1930s and early 1940s. What she witnesses and experiences is tragic enough, but what makes Zusak’s novel especially compelling is that the person narrating Liesel’s story is Death himself.
The brilliance of Zusak’s novel is the way Death relates the events of Liesel’s life. The narrator is possibly the most interesting of all the characters in the novel, and Zusak does a masterful job of creating a believable persona for Death. He has a kind of wisdom and sensitivity that one might find surprising from a being whose job it is to cart away the souls of the dead. Death also foreshadows and in some cases pointedly reveals all the major events of the story because he wants to spare his readers emotional pain. This is a caring, insightful narrator, and I came to think of him as the Angel of Death, rather than as simply death personified.

Video interview with the author:
http://youtu.be/m7B8ioiZz7M

from Melanie

Hi

I have another selection for next year.

Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray".

The elder man lay back and looked at him with half-closed eyes."By the way Dorian," he said after a pause," 'what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose' --- how does the quotation run? ---'his own soul?' "

Casting conscience aside, Dorian Gray seeks pleasure and eternal youth, while his aging portrait reveals to him the horror of his self-indulgent crimes.

There's not alot I need to say about this book. A classic which speaks for any generation.