Book Clubs

January 8 –The Family Roe: An American Story by Joshua Prager

Despite her famous pseudonym, “Jane Roe,” no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947–2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers―a previously unseen trove―and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America.

February 12 – Leave Out the Tragic Parts: A Grandfather’s Search for a Boy Lost to Addiction by Dave Kindred

This extraordinary investigation of the death of the author’s grandson yields a powerful memoir of addiction, grief, and the stories we choose to tell our families and ourselves. Jared Kindred left his home and family at the age of eighteen, choosing to wander across America on freight train cars and live on the street.  Dave Kindred was born In Atlanta, Illinois and is a highly acclaimed sports writer. He was on a 60 Minutes segment highlighting his coverage of the Morton girls high school basketball team.

March 12 – The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan

This National Book Award–winning story, a tour de force of historical reportage, rescues an iconic chapter of American history—the Dust Bowl that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression—from the shadows.

April 16 – The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

A fascinating, brilliant argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world. As compelling as it is controversial, authoritative as it is ambitious, Ridley’s stunning perspective will revolutionize the way we think about our world and how it works.

May 21 – An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong

In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses to encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. Funny, rigorous, and suffused with the joy of discovery, An Immense World takes us on what Marcel Proust called “the only true voyage . . . not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.”

June 11 – Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court: by Sandra Day O’Connor

“I called this book Out of Order because it reflects my goal, which is to share a different side of the Supreme Court. Most people know the Court only as it exists between bangs of the gavel, when the Court comes to order to hear arguments or give opinions. But the stories of the Court and the Justices that come from the ‘out of order’ moments add to the richness of the Court as both a branch of our government and a human institution.”—Justice Sandra Day O’Connor

July 9 – Bitch: On the Female of the Species by Lucy Cooke

Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted. In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male.

August 13 – Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence by Amy Zegart

In Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, Amy Zegart separates fact from fiction as she offers an engaging and enlightening account of the past, present, and future of American espionage as it faces a revolution driven by digital technology.

September 10 – The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent by Peter Gatrell

Gattrell places migration at the center of post-war European history, and the aspirations of migrants themselves at the center of the story of migration. This is an urgent history that will reshape our understanding of modern Europe.

October 8 – First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung

From a childhood survivor of the Camdodian genocide under the regime of Pol Pot, this is a riveting narrative of war crimes and desperate actions, the unnerving strength of a small girl and her family, and their triumph of spirit.

November 12 – Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King

Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life. In 1949, Florida’s orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor with the help of Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white 17-year-old girl cried rape, McCall pursued four young black men who dared envision a future for themselves beyond the groves. The Ku Klux Klan joined the hunt, hell-bent on lynching the men who came to be known as “the Groveland Boys.” Associates thought it was suicidal for Marshall to wade into the “Florida Terror,” but the young lawyer would not shrink from the fight despite continuous death threats against him.

December 10 – Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days that Changed the World by Chris Wallace

From Chris Wallace, the veteran journalist and anchor of Fox News Sunday, comes an electrifying behind-the-scenes account of the 116 days leading up to the American attack on Hiroshima. Told with vigor, intelligence, and humanity, Countdown 1945 is the definitive account of one of the most significant moments in history.