Classics & Contemporary Book Discussion: Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
Tuesday, July 11, 10:30-11:30am, Adults, Auditorium
It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been. (From the Publisher)
Copies of the book are available here.
In-person discussion. No registration required.
Memento Mori Book Club Discussion: In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom
Tuesday, July 18, 6-7pm, Adults, Auditorium
Join Senior Services librarian Jillian McKeown for a discussion of the book, In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom. In her compelling, beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking memoir, Amy Bloom retells her experience of exploring assisted suicide with her husband after his Alzheimer's diagnosis. Bloom details the intensely strong bonds that often transpire between two people in a relationship, and the honest, sometimes sobering decisions that result from those moments.
To obtain a copy of the book in your favorite format, please visit the library catalog.
This discussion will be held on-site in the library's Auditorium; the author will not be present.
Read Around the World Book Discussion: Solito: A Memoir by Javier Zamora
Thursday, July 27, 2-3pm, Adults, Auditorium
Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago—“one day, you’ll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure.”
Javier Zamora’s adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone amid a group of strangers and a “coyote” hired to lead them to safety, Javier expects his trip to last two short weeks.
At nine years old, all Javier can imagine is rushing into his parents’ arms, snuggling in bed between them, and living under the same roof again. He cannot foresee the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns, arrests and deceptions that await him; nor can he know that those two weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside fellow migrants who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family. (From the Publisher)
Find a copy of the book here.