August's book

An American Hero: 
The True Story of Charles A. Lindbergh
by Barry Denenberg

August 17th (3rd Thurs)
7:30 pm at Amanda C.'s


Message from Amanda C.
I am hosting in August. I'd like to suggest "American Hero: The True Story of Charles A. Lindbergh" However, the library does not have the book anymore. I have one copy to share. I am a slow reader and it took me 4 hours to read the whole book (So, it is possible all who would like to, can read it before August's meeting). I don't know if there are digital copies (I'm not a big digital reader) Is this still a good book to pick? Or should I pick a book more readily available?


Summary from Barnes and Noble:
Illustrated with archival photographs, this acclaimed biography presents a full portrait of the handsome and brave aviation pioneer--from his global fame to the kidnapping of his baby son and his shocking politics. 272 pp. Ages 10 and up. Pub: 1/98.


Click here to find the book on Amazon
Click here to find the book on Barnes and Noble

January's Book

*Please note the date change*

A Simple Act of Gratitude

by John Kralik

Previously Published as
365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Gratitude Changed My Life

January 26th (4th Thurs)

7:30pm at Carol R.'s home

Summary:
Personal and uplifting, "365 Thank Yous" is Kralik's inspiring memoir about how the seemingly ordinary act of writing thank you notes led him out of hopelessness and into fulfillment of lifelong dreams.

summary from www.goodreads.com

Just when his dearest life dreams seemed to have slipped beyond his reach, Kralik was struck by the belief that his life might become at least tolerable if, instead of focusing on what he didn't have, he could find some way to be grateful for what he had. He set the goal of writing 365 thank-you notes in the coming year.

summary from Pima County Public Library

Click here to visit the author's website

Click here to find the book at the public library

Click here to find the book on Amazon

Click here to find the book at Barnes & Noble

John Kralik's interview on The Early Show

October's Book

A Heart Like His:
Making Space For God's Love in Your Life
by Virginia H. Pearce

*Date & Time Change!

Oct. 27th (4th Thurs) 
7:30pm at Janice F.'s


This book is not available through our local library.  However, Mary S. has a couple of copies and is willing to lend them out.  Please contact her if you're interested in borrowing one.


Summary & Reviews from Desert Book:
The ability to feel God's love doesn't just make life nicer or more comfortable - it changes everything.  When filled with God's love, we can do and see and understand things that we cannot do and see and understand on our own. As our own hearts are softened by these blessings, our overriding desire becomes to help others experience this joy also.  but how do we do that in the normal course of our everyday lives?  Presented in the form of an experiment undertaken by eight friends, this step-by-step guide helps us discover the one change we can make within ourselves that will automatically increase our ability to feel the love of God and to extend the love to others.

"Yes, this book is written for women.  Yet, Pearce makes its content graspable for women everywhere.  I love that is has been easy for me to share this book with some of my Christian friends active in other faiths.  We could use more books like this.
I believe A Heart Like His is a book for women in all season of life - a must read that has the potential to transform lives.  It did mine.  Buy it, borrow it - somehow get your hands on it." -Catherine K. Arvesth, Meridian Magazine

Click here to find the book at Deseret Book
Click here to find the book on Amazon
Click here to find the book at Barnes and Noble

May's book

Why Gender Matters 
by Dr. Leonard Sax

May 19th (3rd Thurs)
8pm at Rebecca L.'s 

Summary from Amazon:
Are boys and girls really that different? Twenty years ago, doctors and researchers didn’t think so. Back then, most experts believed that differences in how girls and boys behave are mainly due to differences in how they were treated by their parents, teachers, and friends.

It's hard to cling to that belief today. An avalanche of research over the past twenty years has shown that sex differences are more significant and profound than anybody guessed. Sex differences are real, biologically programmed, and important to how children are raised, disciplined, and educated. 

In Why Gender Matters, psychologist and family physician Dr. Leonard Sax leads parents through the mystifying world of gender differences by explaining the biologically different ways in which children think, feel, and act. He addresses a host of issues, including discipline, learning, risk taking, aggression, sex, and drugs, and shows how boys and girls react in predictable ways to different situations. 

For example, girls are born with more sensitive hearing than boys, and those differences increase as kids grow up. So when a grown man speaks to a girl in what he thinks is a normal voice, she may hear it as yelling. Conversely, boys who appear to be inattentive in class may just be sitting too far away to hear the teacher—especially if the teacher is female. 

Likewise, negative emotions are seated in an ancient structure of the brain called the amygdala. Girls develop an early connection between this area and the cerebral cortex, enabling them to talk about their feelings. In boys these links develop later. So if you ask a troubled adolescent boy to tell you what his feelings are, he often literally cannot say.

Dr. Sax offers fresh approaches to disciplining children, as well as gender-specific ways to help girls and boys avoid drugs and early sexual activity. He wants parents to understand and work with hardwired differences in children, but he also encourages them to push beyond gender-based stereotypes. 

A leading proponent of single-sex education, Dr. Sax points out specific instances where keeping boys and girls separate in the classroom has yielded striking educational, social, and interpersonal benefits. Despite the view of many educators and experts on child-rearing that sex differences should be ignored or overcome, parents and teachers would do better to recognize, understand, and make use of the biological differences that make a girl a girl, and a boy a boy.


From the author's website:
My main motivation for writing Why Gender Matters was to make sense of what I had been seeing in my own clinical practice, as a board-certified family doctor - and as a PhD psychologist - among the children who I had come to known, practicing for many years in the same town in Montgomery County, Maryland.  I tried to make sense of these observations by linking them to emerging research in psychology and neuroscience.  Some of those efforts were more successful than others.  On this Web page, I would like to provide updates and corrections for those points where my discussion in Why Gender Matters is now clearly out-of-date or inaccurate.


Click here to visit the author's website

Click here to find the book on Amazon

Click here to find the book at Barnes and Noble

November's Book

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
By Marie Kondo

Nov. 19th (3rd Thurs)
8pm at Lieschen's

Summary from NPR:
The guide to cleaning and organizing a living space discusses best methods for decluttering and the impact that an organized home can have on mood and physical and mental health.

Summary from PCPL:
This best-selling guide to decluttering your home from Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes readers step-by-step through her KonMari Method for simplifying, organizing, and storing.


Click here to visit the library website.

Click here to find the book on Amazon.

Click here to visit the NPR website and read an excerpt of the book.

July's Book

I Don't Have to Make Everything All Better
by Gary & Joy Lundberg

July 16th (3rd Thurs)
8pm at Rebecca L.'s

Summary:
refreshing and powerful, this amazing book tells how to use the six principles of validation with your spouse, friends, family, and step-family; on the job, and in line at the store.  inspiring, entertaining, and timeless, this book is poised to become a classic guide to successful relationships and realistic peace of mind.

summary from Deseret Book

Click here to visit the authors' website

Click here to visit the library website

Click here to find it on amazon.com

April's Book

Nothing to Envy:  Ordinary Lives in North Korea
by Barbara Demick

April 16th (3rd Thurs)
8pm at Amanda C.'s

Summary:

In NOTHING TO ENVY, Demick follows the lives of six people: a couple of teenaged lovers courting in secret, an idealistic woman doctor,  a homeless boy, a model factory worker who loves Kim Il Sung more than her own family and her rebellious daughter.

Demick spent six years painstakakingly reconstructing life in a city off-limits to outsiders through interviews with defectors, smuggled photographs and videos. The book spans the chaotic years that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the unchallenged rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il, the devastating effects of a famine that killed an estimated twenty percent of the population, and an increase in illegal defections.

While many books focus on the North Korean nuclear threat, NOTHING TO ENVY is one of the few that dwells on what everyday life is like for ordinary citizens.  With remarkable detail, Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive totalitarian regime in the world today.  She gives a portrait as vivid as walking oneself through the darkened streets of North Korea.

Reviewers have compared the book  to John Hersey’s Hiroshima and to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  NOTHING TO ENVY is a groundbreaking addition to the literature of totalitarianism. Both the New Yorker and Paris Review have published excerpts of  the book.

Summary from nothingtoenvy.com

Click here for discussion questions from www.litlovers.com

Click here to visit the library website 

November's Book

Unbroken
by Laura Hillenbrand

Nov. 15th (3rd Thurs.)
8pm at Stacy C.'s

We will also be having our annual White Elephant Gift (Book) Exchange this evening.  Hope to see you there!

Summary:
On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood.  Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared.  It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard.  So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.

The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini.  In boyhood, he’d been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails.  As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile.  But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.

Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater.  Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion.  His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.

In her long-awaited new book, Laura Hillenbrand writes with the same rich and vivid narrative voice she displayed in Seabiscuit.  Telling an unforgettable story of a man’s journey into extremity, Unbroken is a testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.

summary from www.goodreads.com

Click here to go to the library website

October's Selection

The Weight of the Nation

HBO Documentary
Produced by Sheila Nevins & John Hoffman

Oct. 18th (3rd Thurs.)
8pm at Lieschen's home

We are trying something different this month.  Instead of reading a book, we will view a documentary and discuss it. Please plan on viewing the documentary prior to attending book club. 

A message from Lieschen:

A few months ago HBO did a special called "The Weight of the Nation", which comments on the current state of the obesity epidemic. The series contains 4 one-hour segments, available for free streaming on HBO's website. 

If watching the whole series is too much of a time commitment, Part 1 "Consequences" and Part 3 "Children in Crisis" are the two that deal most with childhood obesity, though I do recommend the entire series. I have a list of discussion questions.

I would only mean for this to be informative and positive. I don't mean to focus on our own weight, politics or anything like that. I was hoping for a discussion of how we can help our children be healthy into young adulthood and beyond.

 Here's a look at the trailer...

Click here to go to the HBO website
and begin watching today

May's Book

365 Thank Yous:
The Year a Simple Act of Gratitude Changed My Life
by John Kralik

May 17th (3rd Thurs.)
8pm at Aimeè's home

Summary:
Personal and uplifting, "365 Thank Yous" is Kralik's inspiring memoir about how the seemingly ordinary act of writing thank you notes led him out of hopelessness and into fulfillment of lifelong dreams.

summary from www.goodreads.com

Just when his dearest life dreams seemed to have slipped beyond his reach, Kralik was struck by the belief that his life might become at least tolerable if, instead of focusing on what he didn't have, he could find some way to be grateful for what he had. He set the goal of writing 365 thank-you notes in the coming year.

summary from www.librarycatalog.pima.gov

Click here or
the picture to go to the library web site

July's Book

Left to Tell:
Discovering God Amidst The Rwandan Holocaust
by Immaculée Ilibagiza
with Steve Erwin

July 20th (3rd Wed.)
8pm at Aimeè's

Summary:
Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee’s family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans.

Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other women huddled silently together in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor while hundreds of machete-wielding killers hunted for them.

It was during those endless hours of unspeakable terror that Immaculee discovered the power of prayer, eventually shedding her fear of death and forging a profound and lasting relationship with God. She emerged from her bathroom hideout having discovered the meaning of truly unconditional love—a love so strong she was able seek out and forgive her family’s killers.
The triumphant story of this remarkable young woman’s journey through the darkness of genocide will inspire anyone whose life has been touched by fear, suffering, and loss.

summary from www.goodreads.com

Click on the picture to go to the library web site

February's Book

A Tramp Abroad
by Mark Twain

Feb. 16th (3rd Wed)
8pm at Emily's

Summary:
A humorous account of Mark Twain's later travels in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy mixes memory and invention, history and exaggeration.

Click on the picture to go to the library web site

October's Book

The Five Love Languages
by Gary Chapman

October 20th (3rd Wed)
8pm at Cori's

Summary:
Outlines five expressions of love--quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch--and explains how to identify and communicate effectively in a spouse's "love language."

summary from the library web site

Click on the picture to go to the library web site

August's Book

The Last Lecture
by Randy Pausch

Aug. 18th (3rd Wed)
8pm at Jenn's

Summary:
The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

Click on the picture to go to the library web site

July's Book

The Survivors Club
by Ben Sherwood

July 21st (3rd Wed)
8pm at Kristi's

Summary:
From award-winning journalist Sherwood comes a fascinating exploration of survival that can help prepare you for life's inevitable struggles, from cancer and crime to car accidents and airplane crashes.

Click on the picture to go to the library web site

May's Book

The 5000 year leap: the 28 great ideas that changed the world
by W. Cleon Skousen

May 19th (3rd Wed)
8pm at Cami's

Summary:
The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World. For many years in the United States there has been a gradual drifting away from the Founding Fathers original success formula. This has resulted in some of their most unique contributions for a free and prosperous society becoming lost or misunderstood. Therefore, there has been a need to review the history and development of the making of America in order to recapture the brilliant precepts which made Americans the first free people in modern times.
In this book, discover the 28 Principles of Freedom our Founding Fathers said must be understood and perpetuated by every people who desire peace, prosperity, and freedom. Learn how adherence to these beliefs during the past 200 years has brought about more progress than was made in the previous 5000 years. Published by National Center for Constitutional Studies, a non-profit organization.

Summary from www.goodreads.com

Reviews:
A fascinating, in-depth study of the remarkable origins and enlightening ideas that helped to forge this great nation. I am proud to be an American and sincerely grateful for this God ordained nation. --Dr. Stephen R. Covey, Co-founder FranklinCovey, Speaker, Bestselling Author

I beg you to read this book filled with words of wisdom which I can only describe as divinely inspired. You will find answers to questions plaguing America, and more importantly you will find hope. I know I have! --Glenn Beck, Nationally Syndicated Radio and Television Host

The fight for the soul of our country is real! Every patriotic American, young and old, should read this book! --Chris Cannon, US House of Representatives, 1997-2009

Reviews found at www.amazon.com

Click on the picture to go to the library web site.
There's quite a wait for the book so reserve your copy early.

August's Book

The Omnivore's Dilemma:
a natural hisory of four meals
by Michael Pollan


Aug. 12th
8pm at Emily's

The library has *tons* of copies, but you'll want to reserve a copy because it's a popular book with most of the copies out right now. Here's the summary from the library:

Summary:
What should we have for dinner? When you can eat just about anything nature (or the supermarket) has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the foods might shorten your life. Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from a national eating disorder. As the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous landscape, what's at stake becomes not only our own and our children's health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth. Pollan follows each of the food chains--industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves--from the source to the final meal, always emphasizing our coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. The surprising answers Pollan offers have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us.--From publisher description.