“To Emmett, all the houses in this part of the country looked like they’d been dropped from the sky. The Watson house just looked like it’d had a rougher landing. The roof line sagged on either side of the chimney and the window frames were slanted just enough that half the windows wouldn’t quite open and the other half wouldn’t quite shut. In another moment, they’d be able to see how the paint had been shaken right off the clapboard.”

“Like all humans, my mind is wired to look for the story in any situation. Where’s the beginning, the middle, the twist, the end? And what’s the moral?”

The Legends Club begins in the spring of 1980 when Mike Krzyzewski was named the head basketball coach at Duke University, and Jim Valvano to North Carolina State. Dean Smith had already been the coach at North Carolina for 19 years.

“Spring, 1923. Ada smelled the swamp before she reached it. The mingling of sulfur and rot worked with memory to knot her stomach and burn the back of her throat. She was returning with little more than she had taken with her a year before.”

“I learned about Belle from a passing docent, who took a few moments from her busy schedule to describe this astonishing woman, and, in so doing, offered me a new lens through which to view the Pierpont Morgan Library, its collection, and the time in which it was created.”

It’s July 1539 and the lives of three women are about to converge in England. Mary Boleyn of Norfolk House is to return to court, Ann, Duchess of Cleves is having her portrait painted in anticipation of being chosen by Henry the VIII as his next queen and fourteen year old Katherine of Norfolk House, a vain and silly girl is adding up her possessions.

“Bobby Kennedy was a personal hero to a multitude of Americans... They loved him as a fellow patriot who believed a great country could also be a good one.”

“Jerusza’s mother...used to tell her that the knowing of impossible things was a gift from God passed down through maternal blood of only the most fortunate Jewish women. Jerusza,....was certain at times that it was a curse instead, but whatever it was it had been her burden all her life to follow the voices that echoed through the forests.”

“In the 1580’s, a couple living on Henley Street, Stratford, had three children: Susanna, then Hamnet and Judith, who were twins. The boy, Hamnet, died in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the father wrote a play called Hamlet.”

If you are looking to read about the human condition, danger, excitement and exceptional heroics then you must read Julian Sancton’s book Madhouse at the End of the Earth.