September Book Club Meeting

In September, the Bancroft Book Club read and enjoyed 'THE MAN WHO LOVED BOOKS TOO MUCH" by Allison Hoover Bartlett

A prize winning journalist (the Crime Journalism award 2008) she has recreated the scenes when she interviewed Gekley a known and much-arrested book thief. She also makes vivid his passion for rare volumes, for putting it over on the owners,or the elite, or those who have what he desires. He has grown up with this bibliophilia in a family that cheered his enterprise when he shoplifted at age 6.
Psyching out the rare booksellers countrywide he stole in city after city, on-line and in person. He was knowledgeable, clever, and did thorough research on the dealers as well as the availability and condition of titles he craved. He was addicted. But was he crazy? He often accepted his two or three month jail terms as a time for reading and being interviewed at length by Bartlett. who has a clear probing style and obviously sensitive to his imbalanced perspective as he became more and more confidential. Her patience matched his.
He may have met his match when a dealer Sanderson in Salt Lake City got on his trail as the "detective' named by the American booksellers Ass'n to look into these expensive heists. In San Francisco he stashed books by the thousands with his father, on a deserted terrain called appropriately Treasure Island. With credit cards receipts stolen at Sak's men's department, he ordered by mail but also arrived in person: presentable, well-spoken and just the reliable gentleman to be hired by a top end store or to be handed a package with a $10,000 first edition!
This was an exciting and tantalizing read and insight into the intelligent mind of a brazen crook who never stole; in his view he "got" a book or he succeeded in" finding" the 17th Cty manuscript...etc. He deserved to have his mania satisfied. Such suavity is unsettling. Could one of us understand desiring objects enough to constantly steal??
In discussion we puzzled over the role of the journalist. At what point, and she does raise the question, should she alert Sanderson (she does) or the police (she doesn't. ) Values are not always definable as right or wrong, we debated.

THE NEXT MEETING IS TUES. OCT 1ST

August Book Club Meeting

For our August meeting we all read biographies (fictional or real) about the lives of wives or daughters of very famous men of the 1920's/30's.

Books reported on included The Aviator's Wife, by Melanie Benjamin, about Anne Morrow Lindberg; Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan, about the wife of of Frank Lloyd Wright; Call Me Zelda by Erik Robuck and Z by Anne Fowler, both about the wife of F Scott Fitzgerald; and Reading my Father, by Alexandra Styron, about her author father.

Much discussion focused on the limitations of these men in their family life, and the effects on those around them. Frank Lloyd Wright especially was portrayed very negatively. By comparison, F Scott Fitzgerald cared for his wife and daughter but his own emotional problems made him destructive to Zelda. While the women were each different, they all lived in our American society during the same years (before the "women's movement") and all were related to very famous men. This provided a comparison.

One book Call me Zelda was the fictional story of a psychiatric nurse who met Zelda while she was hospitalized for schizophrenia, and they developed a personal relationship. The reader described this book as more the story of the nurse's life experience rather than Zelda's.

Our next meeting is Sept 2 at 1pm. You can enter the library through the village office. We would enjoy having new members!

Margery Robertiello

April 2013 Book Club Report

submitted by Margery Robertiello:

For our meeting on April 2 we all read "Cutting for Stone" by Abraham Verghese. Reactions were mixed! One member thought the author was a "terrific story teller". The book begins with the tale of a very devout nursing nun from India, who finds her way to a hospital in Ethiopia. There she becomes devoted to a brilliant but emotionally damaged surgeon. They become involved, she becomes pregnant, but conceals this until the day she gives birth to twin boys and dies in childbirth. The surgeon, traumatized, disappears. This is high drama, wonderfully told!

In the continuing story, narrated by one of the twins, the boys are raised in Ethiopia by two doctors from India. The contrasting characters of the two parents are fully portrayed, within the background of the culture of Ethiopia and the culture of the medical profession, which is an integral part of the novel.

One of our members found this book out of step with her values and views, and the story itself too drawn out. Another shared with us quotes which she--and we--found amusing. Especially in anecdotes about the twins adoptive father.

We had a good discussion!

For our May meeting we will be reading books by Jodi Picoult. Your choice. New members always welcome!

February 2013 Book Club Report

submitted by Anita Witten:

Last month, the Book Club read David McCullough's marvelous Greater Journey, which we discussed on Feb.5th. It's IMPRESSIVE. This tour de force is a history of a century (the 19th) of Americans drawn to Paris for many reasons. Winner of Pulitzers for his biographies Truman and John Adams, the author's ability to dramatize and carry us through those years and over 400 pages is stunning; one reader thought it was too much to handle.

We can look forward to another Pulitzer and, again, perhaps, another TV series based on McCullough output. A tremendous amount of research is attested to by the extensive bibliography. On his view of history he said: "To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure (it was) - an enlargement of the experience of being alive" YES. And: "Writing a book is like being under a spell...almost as in hypnosis." YES again.

Born in 1933 in Pittsburgh, of Scots and Irish background, he drew cartoons as a child, loved school and eventually at Yale studied with John O'Hara, Robt. Penn Warren and was a close friend of Thornton Wilder. In the midst of a journalism career, Sports Illustrated and Time/Life, he switched focus; wanting to tell the "story of people" and said "I want my subject to show "people who were not always inept or foolish". In describing the allure of Paris for Americans, often overwhelmed with admiration of the highly developed culture of the Old World, we share their adjustment and awe. He ranges from the early diplomats of the New World who sail for months on dangerous seas *to arrive to the hopeful artists obsessed with copying in the Louvre and medical students who enjoy the accessibility to cadavers; many of the unknown paupers dying daily.

Pick a famous American artist, architect, inventor, writer, and read his story of learning in Paris: Samuel B. Morse; James Fenimore Cooper; Whistler; Sargent; Mary Cassatt; George Catlin and his tribal companions; Oliver Wendell Holmes, sculptor St. Gaudens, who gets great coverage; and many of our personal heroes such as Mary Putnam, celebrated medical student and M.D. Meet Louis Phllippe who posed for Sargent and then Napoleon III and suffer through the eyes of the beneficent Washburn,US ambassador during the violence of the Communards and the Prussian War. This book carries away the reader.

    

* note- the first steamship crossing was in 1838

January Book Club Meeting

Report submitted by Margery Robertiello, book club member:

Our first meeting of the new year (January 8) was a little different.We all read books of our own choosing in which the story was about a meaningful journey. There were interesting choices:

• One member is reading Moby Dick (Herman Melville). She said she is about 1/3 through and determined to finish! 
• Another choice was The Last of the Donkey Pilgrims (Kevin O'Hara) about a 1979 trip through Ireland, and another The Old Ways, a Journey on Foot (Robert McFarland). This led to a discussion of walking not only as exercise but as spiritually meaningful. Something has been lost in our present constant use of our cars. 
• Another choice, Footsteps (Richard Holmes) written by a biographer, follows the author's journey as he traces the footsteps of his subject.
• North to the Orient (Anne Morrow Lindbergh), another choice, describes the author's journey over the arctic with her aviator husband in 1931 in a 2-seater plane. She writes beautifully, not about the logisistcs of the trip, but about her own reactions, and the contrast between the life in the the isolated outposts they visit and the "Hi tech" capabilities of the airplane.
• Two other members reported on books they found disappointing. One was The Shadow of the Ark (Anne Provoost). another Snow (Orkan Pamuk).

For our February meeting we will again all be reading the same book! The Greater Journey by David McCullough. New members are very welcome to join our discussion. Please join us on February 5th at 11 AM.

Book Club Report: December 2012

Book Club met on December 4th, and the next meeting will be on January 8th because of the New Year's holiday. For January's meeting we are to read any book or look at any movie with the theme of “By Foot or by Hoof: Pilgrimages and Journeys of the Spirit”. December's meeting was very lively with most of the members reading “Boomerang” by Michael Lewis. In this book he looks at the economic madness of several countries including the United States. Other countries that he visited and wrote about were Iceland , Greece, Germany and Ireland. One of the members had visited Iceland many times and told us about the negative changes she had seen in Iceland over the years. Most members felt the book was excellent in spite of the topic. Mr. Lewis had a way of making this topic both enjoyable and humorous even though at times it was difficult reading. The other book that members could choose to read was “ In the Sea There Were Crocodiles” by Fabia Geda. This is a fictionalized account of a real young boy who was taken to Pakistan and left there by his mother because she felt that if he stayed in Afghanistan he would be either killed or made a slave because of his ethnic background. The author interviewed the boy but didn’t feel that he had enough accurate information for the book to be non-fiction It is a story about his trip through Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Greece before he arrived in Italy at age 15 where he now lives. The book was an eye opening account about what it is like to live in that part of the world and what some of the children do there to survive there. We hope to see you on January 8th at 11AM in the Historical Room at the library. The library is not open at that time so you can come in through the Village Office.