UPCOMING BOOK DISCUSSIONS
Past Book Discussion Choices
Book Discussion Members Recommend
About the Groups
|
MONTHLY DISCUSSION
October 6
The Housekeeper and the Professor
by Yoko Ogawa
He had been a brilliant mathematics professor until the accident. Now he can only remember his life before the accident and the events of the previous 80 minutes. She is a single mother raising her son. She is the tenth housekeeper assigned to clean the professor’s house; the others quit in frustration with this old man who forgets everything, including their names. Unlike the others, the Housekeeper understands the professor’s frustration and finds ways to communicate with him. The strongest bond between them is her son, whom the Professor nicknames Root because the flat top of the boy’s head reminds him of the square root sign. It is not an easy life for either of them, but they form comfortable routines, until the professor’s sister-in-law has the Housekeeper removed from the job.
Questions to consider
|
|
NONFICTION DISCUSSION
Sept 13, 22 or Oct 1
American Passage: The History of Ellis Island
by Vincent Cannato
Ellis Island is iconic in American history. Forty percent of Americans can trace their ancestry back to someone who passed through the island’s immigration station. Those fortunate enough to be admitted, some 12 million in all, transformed the country to which they came. Historian Vincent J. Cannato has written a meticulously researched account of the island, of the bureaucracy and politics of immigration and of the wrangling between immigration restrictionists and those who wanted an open policy that would admit all newcomers. He is a lively storyteller and includes accounts of individual immigrant journeys, some of them heartbreaking and others uplifting.
In the introduction, Cannato describes his book as “a biography, not of a person, but of a place, of one small island in New York Harbor that crystallized the nation’s complex and contradictory ideas about how to welcome people to the New World.
View the American Passage Book Blog
|
|
|
