The book group will continue to meet at 7:00 pm for snack & chat. The review starts at 7:30. Members are welcome to bring wine, beer and/or a snack. Soft drinks will be provided by the hostess. The club is open to everyone. Another member will review the book, highlighting information about the author, as well as any other interesting and pertinent materials.
Host: Jessica Ruffalo (515 Miranda Rd)
Reviewer: Jessica Ruffalo
Book: The Help by Kathryn Stockett
[box_grey]Synopsis: An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the African-American maids’ point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis.[/box_grey]
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[box_red]Meet the Author! Michelle Dresbold will be joining the newcomers book club to discuss her book, Sex, Lies, and Handwriting. Please bring an appetizer, dessert, or bottle of wine. Rachel will have wine and a pasta and salad.[/box_red]
The book group will continue to meet at 7:00 pm for snack & chat. The review starts at 7:30. Members are welcome to bring wine, beer and/or a snack. Soft drinks will be provided by the hostess. The club is open to everyone. Another member will review the book, highlighting information about the author, as well as any other interesting and pertinent materials.
Host: Rachel Lowden – 1148 Tall Trees Drive
Book: Sex, lies and handwriting by Michelle Dresbold
[box_grey]Synopsis: Have you ever looked at someone and thought: He looks honest. She seems friendly. He doesn’t look like a serial killer. Are you always right? Looks can be deceiving, but handwriting never lies. Handwriting profiling is an amazingly accurate tool for assessing how people think, feel, and act. In fact, handwriting profiling is so accurate that the FBI, the CIA, and the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad use it to build detailed psychological profiles of some of the world’s most dangerous individuals. And thousands of major corporations use handwriting profiling to help them make the right hiring decisions.[/box_grey]
[button link=https://www.uscnewcomers.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Newcomers-Book-Club-Sex-Lies-and-Handwriting-Meet-the-Author.ics]Add to Calendar[/button]
The book group will continue to meet at 7:00 pm for snack & chat. The review starts at 7:30. Members are welcome to bring wine, beer and/or a snack. Soft drinks will be provided by the hostess. The club is open to everyone. Another member will review the book, highlighting information about the author, as well as any other interesting and pertinent materials.
Host: Miriam Ting – 1239 Southgate Dr. USC (412-848-7262)
Reviewer: Cynthia Cable
Book: The Doctor’s Wife by Elizabeth Brundage
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“The memory starts here, in my apron pocket, with the gun.”
So begins The Doctor’s Wife, a stunning debut novel about four people and the cataclysmic intersection of their lives. Michael is a rising OB/GYN at a prominent private practice in Albany, New York; he also moonlights at a local women’s health clinic. But Annie, his wife, has become tired of her workaholic husband’s absences, and the soccer-mom lifestyle has worn thin. She begins a passionate love affair with bad-boy, fading celebrity painter Simon Haas—an affair that quickly goes awry when Simon’s wife Lydia, who is also the model upon whom he built his career, discovers the truth.
Abortion, local evangelism, marital disenchantment, and the rifts of social class: Brundage takes on the fault lines of our era with a deft hand.
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The book group will continue to meet at 7:00 pm for snack & chat. The review starts at 7:30. Members are welcome to bring wine, beer and/or a snack. Soft drinks will be provided by the hostess. The club is open to everyone. Another member will review the book, highlighting information about the author, as well as any other interesting and pertinent materials.
Host: Cynthia Cable – 2102 Blairmont Dr, USC
Reviewer: Stephanie Robinson
Book: The Thirteenth Tale by Diana Setterfield
Sometimes, when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.
Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for so long. Calling on Margaret Lea, a young biographer troubled by her own painful history, Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good. Margaret is mesmerized by the author’s tale of gothic strangeness — featuring the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess,a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Together, Margaret and Vida confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.
The book group will continue to meet at 7:00 pm for snack & chat. The review starts at 7:30. Members are welcome to bring wine, beer and/or a snack. Soft drinks will be provided by the hostess. The club is open to everyone. Another member will review the book, highlighting information about the author, as well as any other interesting and pertinent materials.
Host: Stephanie Robinson
Reviewer: Jessica Ruffalo
Book: Before I go to Sleep; S. J. Watson
Memories define us. So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep? Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love—all forgotten overnight. And the one person you trust may be telling you only half the story. Welcome to Christine’s life.
The book group will continue to meet at 7:00 pm for snack & chat. The review starts at 7:30. Members are welcome to bring wine, beer and/or a snack. Soft drinks will be provided by the hostess. The club is open to everyone. Another member will review the book, highlighting information about the author, as well as any other interesting and pertinent materials.
Host: Jessica Ruffalo, 515 Miranda Drive, USC
Reviewer: Martina Offenberg
Book: Glass Castle….by Jeannette Wall
Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn’t stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an “excitement addict.” Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.
Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town — and the family — Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents’ betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.
What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts and tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.
For two decades, Jeannette Walls hid her roots. Now she tells her own story. A regular contributor to MSNBC.com, she lives in New York and Long Island and is married to the writer John Taylor.
The book group will continue to meet at 7:00 pm for snack & chat. The review starts at 7:30. Members are welcome to bring wine, beer and/or a snack. Soft drinks will be provided by the hostess. The club is open to everyone. Another member will review the book, highlighting information about the author, as well as any other interesting and pertinent materials.
Note: The book club will continue through the summer.
Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist with a Minnesota pharmaceutical company, is sent to Brazil to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have all but disappeared in the Amazon while working on what is destined to be an extremely valuable new drug, the development of which has already cost the company a fortune. Nothing about Marina’s assignment is easy: not only does no one know where Dr. Swenson is, but the last person who was sent to find her, Marina’s research partner Anders Eckman, died before he could complete his mission. Plagued by trepidation, Marina embarks on an odyssey into the insect-infested jungle in hopes of finding her former mentor as well as answers to several troubling questions about her friend’s death, the state of her company’s future, and her own past.
The book group will continue to meet at 7:00 pm for snack & chat. The review starts at 7:30. Members are welcome to bring wine, beer and/or a snack. Soft drinks will be provided by the hostess. The club is open to everyone. Another member will review the book, highlighting information about the author, as well as any other interesting and pertinent materials.
Host: Kirstan Boettger, 114 Mitchell Drive
Reviewer: Kirstan Boettger
Book: Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the novel begins in August 1991 with a teenager going by the alias of Charlie, writing to an anonymous “friend” whom he heard someone at school talking about, and decided they sounded like a nice person to write to, on the basis that he or she reportedly did not sleep with someone at a party despite having the opportunity. Charlie states that he does not want the anonymous friend to try to figure out who he is or to find him. Charlie has just begun his freshman year of high school, his brother is at Pennsylvania State University on a football scholarship, and his sister is a senior in high school. We learn that his best—and only—friend, Michael committed suicide prior to the beginning of the book—leaving Charlie to face high school alone. Charlie often refers to his late Aunt Helen and how she was his “favorite person in the whole world” and states frequently that something bad happened to her (we later find out she was molested by a family friend), but he can never talk about her death as it takes him to his “bad place.” Soon Charlie makes the acquaintance of Sam, a beautiful senior on whom Charlie develops a crush almost instantly, and her gay stepbrother Patrick, a charismatic student who is friendly to Charlie. Upon disclosing his feelings and sexual confusion to Patrick and Sam, they are not angry with him, but rather advise him how to handle his feelings privately. Sam and Patrick continue their advisory role while introducing Charlie to many people, music artists, and drugs. Meanwhile his English teacher Bill introduces him to books and encourages him to write essays about them that he will grade despite having no bearing on his English class. At the very beginning of the book, Charlie is referred to as a wallflower for his ability to observe and understand things, but over the course of a year’s worth of letters, Charlie explains the efforts of the people in his life to get him to “participate” or “do things” and the feelings and experiences he has as a result.
The book group will continue to meet at 7:00 pm for snack & chat. The review starts at 7:30. Members are welcome to bring wine, beer and/or a snack. Soft drinks will be provided by the hostess. The club is open to everyone. Another member will review the book, highlighting information about the author, as well as any other interesting and pertinent materials.
Host: Jessica Ruffalo, 515 Miranda Drive
Reviewer: Jennifer Cox
Book: Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Ruiz Zafón’s novel, a bestseller in his native Spain, takes the satanic touches from Angel Heart and stirs them into a bookish intrigue à la Foucault’s Pendulum. The time is the 1950s; the place, Barcelona. Daniel Sempere, the son of a widowed bookstore owner, is 10 when he discovers a novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax. The novel is rare, the author obscure, and rumors tell of a horribly disfigured man who has been burning every copy he can find of Carax’s novels. The man calls himself Laín Coubert-the name of the devil in one of Carax’s novels. As he grows up, Daniel’s fascination with the mysterious Carax links him to a blind femme fatale with a “porcelain gaze,” Clara Barceló; another fan, a leftist jack-of-all-trades, Fermín Romero de Torres; his best friend’s sister, the delectable Beatriz Aguilar; and, as he begins investigating the life and death of Carax, a cast of characters with secrets to hide. Officially, Carax’s dead body was dumped in an alley in 1936. But discrepancies in this story surface. Meanwhile, Daniel and Fermín are being harried by a sadistic policeman, Carax’s childhood friend. As Daniel’s quest continues, frightening parallels between his own life and Carax’s begin to emerge. Ruiz Zafón strives for a literary tone, and no scene goes by without its complement of florid, cute and inexact similes and metaphors (snow is “God’s dandruff”; servants obey orders with “the efficiency and submissiveness of a body of well-trained insects”). Yet the colorful cast of characters, the gothic turns and the straining for effect only give the book the feel of para-literature or the Hollywood version of a great 19th-century novel.
Host: Miriam Ting, 1239 Southgate Drive
Reviewer: Stephanie Robinson
Book: Black Dahlia by James Ellroy
The Book Club meets on the third Thursday of each month.
The book group will continue to meet at 7:00 pm for snack & chat. The review starts at 7:30. Members are welcome to bring wine, beer and/or a snack. Soft drinks will be provided by the hostess. The club is open to everyone. Another member will review the book, highlighting information about the author, as well as any other interesting and pertinent materials.
On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a Los Angeles vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia-and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia-driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl’s twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches-into a region of total madness.
