On Tuesday, May 14, at 2 pm we will be discussing The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by Jmes McBride. This is the second Tuesday of the month, as usual. To RSVP, please email tonilin@aol.com. If you would like to meet in person, please resond to tonilin@aol.com. Or if you would like to offer a meeting place, please do.
You will be sent the Google Meet link or the physical address upon RSVP.
Suggestions for discussion in 2024 are welcome. Please send to tonilin@aol.com .
The list of the books for the beginning of 2024 is included below. We still need to fill out the year, so …
May–The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store – James McBride — 2023 – 400 pp
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR/FRESH AIR, WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, AND TIME MAGAZINE
“A murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel . . . Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing.” —Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review
“We all need—we all deserve—this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.
June–Mendeleyev’s Dream: The Quest for the Elements–Paul Strathern– 2019–314 pp
The wondrous and illuminating story of humankind’s quest to discover the fundamentals of chemistry, culminating in Mendeleyev’s dream of the Periodic Table.
**One of Bill Gates’ Top Five Book Recommendations**
In 1869 Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev was puzzling over a way to bring order to the fledgling science of chemistry. Wearied by the effort, he fell asleep at his desk. What he dreamed would fundamentally change the way we see the world.
From ancient philosophy through medieval alchemy to the splitting of the atom, this is the true story of the birth of chemistry and the role of one man’s dream.
In this elegant, erudite, and entertaining book, Paul Strathern unravels the quixotic history of chemistry through the quest for the elements.
July – The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures–Edward Ball –2013–464 pages
From the National Book Award-winning author of Slaves in the Family, a riveting true life/true crime narrative of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads.
Set in California during its frontier decades, The Tycoon and the Inventor interweaves Muybridge’s quest to unlock the secrets of motion through photography, an obsessive murder plot, and the peculiar partnership of an eccentric inventor and a driven entrepreneur. A tale from the great American West, this popular history unspools a story of passion, wealth, and sinister ingenuity.
BAIN Downtown 