February 7th Choices

Vote before midnight on Wednesday, January 17th for our February 7th selection:

1) 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann (non-fiction)

Science journalist Charles C. Mann compiles a groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. Traditionally, Americans have learned in school that the ancestors of the American Indians crossed the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago, existed in small, nomadic bands, and lived so lightly on the land that much of the Americas was wilderness when Columbus set sail. But as Charles Mann makes clear, in the last 20 years archaeologists and anthropologists have proven these and other long-held assumptions to be only partially true. He shows us how a new generation of researchers—with new scientific techniques—have come to understand that in 1491 (1) more people lived in the Americas than in Europe; (2) American societies were older and far more advanced than had been thought; and (3) Americans managed their environments in ways that, if replicated today, could revolutionize local agriculture. 1491 is an impassioned account of scientific inquiry and revelation.

2) Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore (fiction)

A disillusioned, middle-aged woman's remembrance of a teenage friendship forms Moore's acerbic, witty and affecting third novel. While vacationing in Paris, narrator Berie Carr, whose marriage is stuck in a bleakly funny state of suspended collapse, looks back to her girlhood in Horsehearts, an Adirondack tourist town near the Canadian border. There in the summer of 1972, she was a skinny, 15-year-old misfit who rejected her parents and idolized her sassy, sexually precocious friend Sils, who played Cinderella at a theme park called Storyland where Berie was a cashier. In a series of flashbacks, Berie recounts stealing into bars with Sils; sneaking cigarettes in the shadows of Storyland rides named Memory Lane and The Lost Mine; and how, midway through the summer, she was shipped off to Baptist camp after filching hundreds of dollars from her register to pay for an abortion for Sils. Moore's bitterly funny hymn to vanished adolescence is suffused with droll wordplay, allegorical images of lost innocence and fairy-tale witchery and a poignant awareness of how life's significant events often prove dismally anticlimactic. Publishers Weekly.

3) The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (historical fiction)

Book group previously read Brooks’ novel March. This new novel is intelligent, thoughtful, gracefully written and original. Brooks has built upon her experience as a correspondent in Bosnia for The Wall Street Journal to construct a story around a book—small, rare and very old—and the people into whose hands it had fallen over five centuries. Suffice it to say that it's a book that resides comfortably in a place we too often imagine to be a no-man's land between popular fiction and literature. She tells an engaging story about sympathetic but imperfect characters—popular fiction demands all of that—but she also does the business of literature, exploring serious themes and writing about them in handsome prose.