We meet the second Friday of each month (with a potluck) at 6:30pm  in U Park Room #154.  We plan to have a field trip once a month during the summer.  For more information contact Maria Polly @ akmpolly@hotmail.com.

February 19, 2013

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghase
Verghese turns his formidable talents to fiction, mining his own life and experiences in a magnificent, sweeping novel that moves from India to Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York City over decades and generations. Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a devout young nun, leaves the south Indian state of Kerala in 1947 for a missionary post in Yemen. During the arduous sea voyage, she saves the life of an English doctor bound for Ethiopia, Thomas Stone, who becomes a key player in her destiny when they meet up again at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa. Seven years later, Sister Praise dies birthing twin boys: Shiva and Marion, the latter narrating his own and his brother’s long, dramatic, biblical story set against the backdrop of political turmoil in Ethiopia, the life of the hospital compound in which they grow up and the love story of their adopted parents, both doctors at Missing. The boys become doctors as well and Verghese’s weaving of the practice of medicine into the narrative is fascinating even as the story bobs and weaves with the power and coincidences of the best 19th-century novel. (fiction; 2009; 541 pgs)

March 19, 2013
Island Beneath the Sea by Isabelle Allende
Zarieté, known as Tété, is born a slave in Haiti, then called Saint-Domingue, in 1700. She is bought by Toulouse Valmorain, a young Frenchman whose ideals quickly disappear in the brutality of life on a sugar plantation. Tété tenderly cares for Valmorain's son and, since she is her master's property, bears two of the master's children herself. She helps Valmorain and the children escape just as the bloody violence of the slave revolt reaches the plantation. They set sail for New Orleans, a raucous city where Tété finds more family drama and, finally, love and freedom. VERDICT Confining Allende's trademark magic realism to the otherworldly solace Tété finds in the island's voodoo, this timely and absorbing novel is another winning Allende story filled with adventure, vivid characters, and richly detailed descriptions of life in the Caribbean at that time. Sure to be popular with Allende's many fans. (fiction; 2010; 457 pgs)

April 16, 2013
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet: a novel by Jamie Ford
Fifth-grade scholarship students and best friends Henry and Keiko are the only Asians in their Seattle elementary school in 1942. Henry is Chinese, Keiko is Japanese, and Pearl Harbor has made all Asians—even those who are American born—targets for abuse. Because Henry's nationalistic father has a deep-seated hatred for Japan, Henry keeps his friendship with and eventual love for Keiko a secret. When Keiko's family is sent to an internment camp in Idaho, Henry vows to wait for her. Forty years later, Henry comes upon an old hotel where the belongings of dozens of displaced Japanese families have turned up in the basement, and his love for Keiko is reborn. In his first novel, Ford expertly nails the sweet innocence of first love, the cruelty of racism, the blindness of patriotism, the astonishing unknowns between parents and their children, and the sadness and satisfaction at the end of a life well lived. The result is a vivid picture of a confusing and critical time in American history. (fiction; 2009; 290 pgs)

May 21, 2013
Title selection for September 2013 – April 2014