A Journey Through History

David Faucheux will be presenting the following book on December sixth

The storyteller of Casablanca DB107192

NLS ANNOTATION:

Morocco 1941, Twelve year-old Josie and her family fled Nazi occupied France for Casablanca where they awaited safe passage to America. Seventy years later, Zoey is a wife and mother living as an ex-pat in an unfamiliar place. But when she discovers Josie’s diary from the 1940’s beneath the floorboards of her daughter’s bedroom, Zoe enters the inner world of young Josie. 2021

Brad Snyder and Alan Lemly co-hosted the October session discussing the book ISAAC STORM by Erik Larson. Everyone seemed to like it. There were no challengers with the Erik Larson Best Sellers we had reviewed.

On Tuesday, November 1st we will leave the familiar Trumpian, Anglo-American literary venue for Hitler’s Germany and some incredibly courageous dissidents.

Defying Hitler: the Germans who resisted Nazi rule DB94884

Thomas, Gordon; Lewis, Greg

NLS ANNOTATION:

An account of the many Germans who actively resisted Hitler. Describes and profiles individuals who passed industrial secrets to Allied spies, forged passports for escaping Jews, denounced Nazi law, distributed anti-Nazi fliers, spied on the SS, and more. Unrated. Commercial audiobook.

2019.

On October 4 we will be reviewing Isaac Storm: a Man, a Time, and the deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson(db48811). This was published more than a hundred years after the Galveston Flood and was this author six best selling books four of which we have discussed. Name them if you can.

NLS ANNOTATION

Galveston Texas, September 8, 1900, a massive hurricane approaches the city. Isaac Kline, head of the Weather Bureau’s Galveston Station fails to receive advance warning due to bureaucratic blundering and scientific snobbery. No evacuation is ordered and more than eight thousand citizens are subsequently lost including Kline’s wife. Best Seller 1999.

On September 6 we will review our second World War Two Churchill book, The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson, covering WWII from May 1940 to May 1941. It focuses on how Winston Churchill and his Family coped with the Blitz which killed over forty-thousand Londoners and led England to foil Hitler and his plans to conquer all of Europe. Similar to Lincoln and Napoleon, there are already many books on Churchill. The author’s access to the detailed diary of Churchill’s youngest daughter, Mary Churchill, gave the author a unique view of the family during the Blitz.

As usual, we will skip July and meet on August 2 when David Faucheux present his historic fiction but is a realistic history of the 1937 NAZI invasion of the Ukraine. A real page-turner with realistic character description.

The title is The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn, db107522.

Again, except for July, Journey Through History meets on the first Tuesday of the month at eight P.M. Eastern Time.

On Tuesday, June 7, your History Group will discuss the consequences of WWII after Yalta and the expanded roles of the privileged daughters of the three powerful leaders. Here’s the NLS annotation:

The daughters of Yalta: the Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans : a story of love and war DB102417

Biography

An account of the “daughter diplomacy” of Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill, and Kathleen Harriman, who accompanied their powerful fathers to the Yalta Conference with Joseph Stalin in the final days of World War II. Unrated. Commercial audiobook. 2020.

Don Queen

the Journey Through History Group will review The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial settlers , Tribal Nations and the kidnap that shaped America by Matthew Pearl( Db106571). Reading time: six hours fifty seconds.

Synopsis from Bookshare.org.

The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped America

“A rousing tale of frontier daring and ingenuity, better than legend on every front.” — Pulitzer Prize–winning author Stacy SchiffA Goodreads Most Anticipated Book In his first work of narrative nonfiction, Matthew Pearl, bestselling author of acclaimed novel The Dante Club, explores the little-known true story of the kidnapping of legendary pioneer Daniel Boone’s daughter and the dramatic aftermath that rippled across the nation. On a quiet midsummer day in 1776, weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone and her friends Betsy and Fanny Callaway disappear near the Kentucky settlement of Boonesboro, the echoes of their faraway screams lingering on the air. A Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party has taken the girls as the latest salvo in the blood feud between American Indians and the colonial settlers who have decimated native lands and resources. Hanging Maw, the raiders’ leader, recognizes one of the captives as Jemima Boone, daughter of Kentucky’s most influential pioneers, and realizes she could be a valuable pawn in the battle to drive the colonists out of the contested Kentucky territory for good. With Daniel Boone and his posse in pursuit, Hanging Maw devises a plan that could ultimately bring greater peace both to the tribes and the colonists. But after the girls find clever ways to create a trail of clues, the raiding party is ambushed by Boone and the rescuers in a battle with reverberations that nobody could predict. As Matthew Pearl reveals, the exciting story of Jemima Boone’s kidnapping vividly illuminates the early days of America’s westward expansion, and the violent and tragic clashes across cultural lines that ensue. In this enthralling narrative in the tradition of Candice Millard and David Grann, Matthew Pearl unearths a forgotten and dramatic series of events from early in the Revolutionary War that opens a window into America’s transition from colony to nation, with the heavy moral costs incurred amid shocking new alliances and betrayals.

Copyright: 2021

ISBN: 9780062937810

The Engineers Wife

by Tracey Enerson Wood

She built a monument for all time. Then she was lost in its shadow. Emily Warren Roebling refuses to live conventionally—she knows who she is and what she wants, and she’s determined to make change. But then her husband Wash asks the unthinkable: give up her dreams to make his possible. Emily’s fight for women’s suffrage is put on hold, and her life transformed when Wash, the Chief Engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, is injured on the job. Untrained for the task, but under his guidance, she assumes his role, despite stern resistance and overwhelming obstacles. Lines blur as Wash’s vision becomes her own, and when he is unable to return to the job, Emily is consumed by it. But as the project takes shape under Emily’s direction, she wonders whose legacy she is building—hers, or her husband’s. As the monument rises, Emily’s marriage, principles, and identity threaten to collapse. When the bridge finally stands finished, will she recognize the woman who built it? Based on the true story of the Brooklyn Bridge, The Engineer’s Wife delivers an emotional portrait of a woman transformed by a project of unfathomable scale, which takes her into the bowels of the East River, suffragette riots, the halls of Manhattan’s elite, and the heady, freewheeling temptations of P.T. Barnum. It’s the story of a husband and wife determined to build something that lasts—even at the risk of losing each other.

by Tracey Enerson Wood

In March, (finally after fifty years) the real people behind Roe V. Wade are revealed. Families were afflicted by alcohol and drugs. There was never an abortion.

The opposition to Roe V. Wade is rising and faces a conservative Supreme court.

FROM BOOKSHARE.ORG

A masterpiece of reporting on the Supreme Court’s most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart. 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. Journalist Joshua 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. Prager begins that story on the banks of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River where Norma was born, and where unplanned pregnancies upended generations of her forebears. A pregnancy then upended Norma’s life too, and the Dallas waitress became Jane Roe. Drawing on a decade of research, Prager reveals the woman behind the pseudonym, writing in novelistic detail of her unknown life from her time as a sex worker in Dallas, to her private thoughts on family and abortion, to her dealings with feminist and Christian leaders, to the three daughters she placed for adoption. Prager found those women, including the youngest—Baby Roe—now fifty years old. She shares her story in The Family Roe for the first time, from her tortured interactions with her birth mother, to her emotional first meeting with her sisters, to the burden that was uniquely hers from conception. The Family Roe abounds in such revelations—not only about Norma and her children but about the broader “family” connected to the case. Prager tells the stories of activists and bystanders alike whose lives intertwined with Roe. In particular, he introduces three figures as important as they are unknown: feminist lawyer Linda Coffee, who filed the original Texas lawsuit yet now lives in obscurity; Curtis Boyd, a former fundamentalist Christian, today a leading provider of third-trimester abortions; and Mildred Jefferson, the first black female Harvard Medical School graduate, who became a pro-life leader with great secrets. An epic work spanning fifty years of American history, The Family Roe will change the way you think about our enduring American divide: the right to choose or the right to life.

Our next month’s title ‘PERIL’ by Bob Woodward. Was there really a “PERIL”? Last March 5, 1919, we reviewed Fields of Blood: Violence in congress and the road to Civil War by Jane Freeman where Congressmen from slave states carried and used clubs and guns to intimidate beat and even kill (at least one) fellow Congressman to prevent their submission of anti-slavery petitions. While the January 6 insurrection lasted only one day it cost several lives and nearly brought the American Democracy to a standstill. Also, it nearly upset Nuclear China enough to making a preventative first strike. Author Bob Woodward says we may have to repeat this peril again in four years.

We will review the new bestseller “Peril DB 104817” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, 13 hours thirty-six minutes.