September 7, 2023
The Marcellus Township Wood Memorial Library’s First Thursday Book Club met on Thursday, September 7, 2023 from 12 NOON to 1:00 PM in the library with nine members present.
The Marcellus Township Wood Memorial Library’s First Thursday Book Club meeting minutes are published in “files” on the Marcellus Twp Library Book Club Facebook site. If you have not already joined this site, please do!
The library purchased large print books and has received donations of large print books. In order to ensure that patrons can easily identify these books, a bright orange spine label with the letters LP will be used. The designation “AFLP” will indicate that the book is adult fiction (AF) and large print (LP). The author’s identifiers will follow AFLP.
Club members were also introduced to BookPage and Booklist Reader magazines. The library subscribes to both magazines and copies are available to patrons for review. Club members were asked to take a close look at each magazine and determine if a preference exists for one versus the other. One patron stated that she definitely preferred BookPage. Others were asked to let library staff know their preferences.
Library staff told the group that this month an unusual object would be embedded in the September 2023 minutes. The first person to locate the object and notify library staff by sending an e-mail to marcellusmichiganlibrary@gmail.com describing what the object is and on what page of the minutes it can be found will win this month’s prize. This month, the unusual object is “¥.”
The library staff will notify the first individual sending us an e-mail that she or he is the winner. The winner will be invited to pick up the gift when he/she next visits the library. Other members will be notified by e-mail that a winner has been identified. All persons receiving the First Thursday Book Club Meeting Minutes are eligible to participate. Library staff are not eligible to participate. This month’s unusual object is and readers will need to find the object on a page other than this one to win.
This month’s winner will receive a coffee mug!
The links under each book discussed below will take you directly to the Marcellus Township Wood Memorial Library’s Catalog entry or the MeLCat entry for that particular book, large print book, CD audiobook, Libby audiobook, or Libby eBook.
Books discussed:
Title and Author: Old Babes in the Wood: Stories by Margaret Atwood
Description from MeLCat: The two intrepid sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; 'Impatient Griselda' explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and 'My Evil Mother' touches on the fantastical, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love—and what comes after.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Availability:
In Library: Not available
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb42995738
Club member comment(s): This book of short stories. A good part of the collection are stories about a married couple. There is a “sci-fi” theme to the book.
Title and Author: The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America by Monica Potts
Description from the Marcellus Library catalog entry: Growing up gifted and poor in small –town Arkaescape. In the end, Monica got out, but Darci, along with the rest of their circle of friends, did not. Years later, working as a journalist covering poverty, Monica discovered what she already intuitively knew about women in Arkansas: Their life expectancy had steeply declined—the sharpest such fall in a century. Most painfully, her once talented and ambitious best friend was now a single mother of two, addicted to meth and prescription drugs, jobless, and nearly homeless. What had happened in the years since Monica had left? Why had she escaped while Darci hurtled toward what Monica fears will be a tragic end? What is killing poor white women—and would Darci survive her own life?
Genre: Adult nonfiction
Availability:
In Library:
Book: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/889091203
Libby audiobook: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/861356703
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb43599628
Large Print Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb43634327
Club member comment(s): The setting for this book is rural Alabama. Two girls grow up together. One does well. The other does not. As adults, they reconnect on Facebook. The have similar histories but their lives take them in very different directions. The club member reviewing this book enjoyed it but found it a bit too clinical—focused on statistics—and written in the third person which seems strange. The author is writing the book about what occurred in her life and the life of her best friend. The book was not uplifting and perhaps isn’t intended to be.
Title and Author: Happy Place by Emily Henrynsas, Monica and Darci became fast friends. The girls bonded over a shared love of reading and learning, even as the navigated the challenges of their declining town and tumultuous family lives—broken marriages, alcohol abuse, and shuttered stores and factories. They pored over the giant map in their middle school classroom, tracing their fingers over the world that awaited them, vowing to escape. In the end, Monica got out, but Darci, along with the rest of their circle of friends, did not. Years later, working as a journalist covering poverty, Monica discovered what she already intuitively knew about women in Arkansas: Their life expectancy had steeply declined—the sharpest such fall in a century. Most painfully, her once talented and ambitious best friend was now a single mother of two, addicted to meth and prescription drugs, jobless, and nearly homeless. What had happened in the years since Monica had left? Why had she escaped while Darci hurtled toward what Monica fears will be a tragic end? What is killing poor white women—and would Darci survive her own life?
Genre: Adult nonfiction
Availability:
In Library:
Book: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/889091203
Libby audiobook: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/861356703
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb43599628
Large Print Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb43634327
Club member comment(s): The setting for this book is rural Alabama. Two girls grow up together. One does well. The other does not. As adults, they reconnect on Facebook. The have similar histories but their lives take them in very different directions. The club member reviewing this book enjoyed it but found it a bit too clinical—focused on statistics—and written in the third person which seems strange. The author is writing the book about what occurred in her life and the life of her best friend. The book was not uplifting and perhaps isn’t intended to be.
Title and Author: Happy Place by Emily Henry
Description from Marcellus Library catalog entry: Harriet and Wyn have been the perfect couple since they met in college—they go together like salt and pepper, honey and tea, lobster and rolls. Except, now—for reasons they’re still not discussing they don’t. They broke up five months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends. Which is how they find themselves sharing a bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blissful week they leave behind their daily lives; have co¥pious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood; and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most. Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Because the cottage is for sale and this is the last week they’ll all have together in this place. They can’t stand to break their friends’ hearts, and so they’ll play their parts. Harriet will be the driven surgical resident who never starts and fight, and Wyn will be the laid-back charmer who never lets the cracks show. It’s a flawless plan (if you look at it from a great distance and through a pair of sunscreen-smeared sunglasses). After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week…in front of those who know you best?
Genre: Romance
Availability:
In Library:
Libby audiobook: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/861361763
Libby e-Book: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/774567746
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb43037841
Large print book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb43376910
Audiobook: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb43387025
Club member comment(s): The club member reviewing this book loved it and recommended it to the others. She said that the book reminded her of the “Friends” show.
Title and Author: The Librarianist by Patrick DeWitt
Description: Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he's known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed. Behind Bob Comet's straight-man facade is the story of an unhappy child's runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian's vocation, and of the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Bob's experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsize players to welcome onto the stage of his life. With his inimitable verve, skewed humor, and compassion for the outcast, Patrick deWitt has written a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert's condition. The Librarianist celebrates the extraordinary in the so-called ordinary life, and depicts beautifully the turbulence that sometimes exists beneath a surface of serenity.
Genre: Literary fiction
Availability:
In Library:
Book: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/889056603
Libby audiobook: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/900978026
Libby eBook: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/900982106
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb43310691
Audiobook: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb43653305
Club member comment(s): The club member reviewing this book said that she loved this book with its quirky characters. The Librarianist is painfully introverted but wants to change. The book delves into his childhood and reasons for his introversion as an adult. Ultimately, he finds friends and adventure.
Title and Author: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
Description: Gilbert offers insights into the mysterious nature of inspiration. She asks us to embrace our curiosity and let go of needless suffering. She shows us how to tackle what we most love, and how to face down what we most fear. She discusses the attitudes, approaches, and habits we need in order to live our most creative lives. Balancing between soulful spirituality and cheerful pragmatism, Gilbert encourages us to uncover the “strange jewels” that are hidden within each of us. Whether we are looking to write a book, make art, find new ways to address challenges in our work, embark on a dream long deferred, or simply infuse our everyday lives with more mindfulness and passion, Big Magic cracks open a world of wonder and joy.
Genre: Adult nonfiction
Availability:
In Library:
Book: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/242556429
Libby audiobook: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/597714634
Libby eBook: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/469017099
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb28628685
Audiobook: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb28722730
Club member comment(s): The club member reviewing this book told the others that the author writes about how each of us can be our most creative selves. The author has an irreverent writing style and uses the street talk of today which the club member enjoyed.
Title and Author: Spring Rain: A Life Lived In Gardens by Marc Hammer
Description: Best enjoyed in a single sitting under the shade of a tree, this inventive and curative book captures the moment when an adventurous young boy who traveled the world in his mind meets the old man he becomes. Together, they build a new garden from a neglected plot behind his house on the edge of town. Retired professional gardener Marc Hamer has always found the answers to life's questions in the natural world, whether as a child watching ants, as a young man living homeless in the countryside, or as a professional gardener creating places of calm and restoration for others. Now in his sixties, he is finally creating a garden for himself, at his home in Cardiff, Wales. This moving memoir follows his process as he shares what he's learned, from the spring of youth to his autumn years, and reflects on how we reconcile our childhoods with where we end up. In Hamer's own words, "Spring Rain is about the joy of your own back garden. It is a story about the joy of small things, the world in a grain of sand, a universe in a small garden, with love for all the insects and slugs and flowers and weeds and seeds and roots and boundaries and shade and weather that the garden contains."
Genre: Adult nonfiction
Availability:
In Library:
Book: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/760539730
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb43383507
Club member comment(s): This book is the 4th in a series, but the club member reviewing the book told the group that the books in this series do not have to be read in order. The club member enjoyed the book, telling the others that the author knows how to live life fully and simply. The book examines the theme of forgiving oneself and others.
Title and Author: Home Front Girls by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan
Description: It’s January 1943 when Rita Vincenzo receives her first letter from Glory Whitehall. Glory is an effervescent young mother from New England, impulsive and free as a bird. Rita is a Midwestern professor’s wife with a love of gardening and a generous, old soul. These two women have nothing in common except one powerful bond: the men they love are fighting in a war a world away from home.
Brought together by an unlikely twist of fate, Glory and Rita begin a remarkable correspondence. The friendship forged by their letters allows them to survive the loneliness and uncertainty of waiting on the home front, and gives them the courage to face the battles raging in their very own backyards. Connected across the country by the lifeline of the written word, each woman finds her life profoundly altered by the other’s unwavering support. Filled with unforgettable characters and unbridled charm, Home Front Girls is a timeless celebration of the strength and solidarity of women. It is a luminous reminder that even in the darkest of times, true friendship will carry us through.
Genre: Historical fiction
Availability:
In Library: Not available.
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb39017772
Club member comment(s): Set during WWII, this enjoyable books consists of letters that two women assigned to each other as pen pals send during wartime. The women have very different backgrounds but through their letters to each other find hope, friendship, forgiveness, strength and support. One of the most enjoyable books that the club member has read recently.
Title and Author: Where Coyotes Howl by Sandra Dallas
Description: 1916. The two-street town of Wallace is not exactly what Ellen Webster had in mind when she accepted a teaching position in Wyoming, but within a year’s time she’s fallen in love—both with the High Plains and with a handsome cowboy named Charlie Bacon. Life is not easy in the flat, brown corner of the state where winter blizzards are unforgiving and the summer heat relentless. But Ellen and Charlie face it all together, their relationship growing stronger with each shared success, and each deeply felt tragedy. Ellen finds purpose in her work as a rancher’s wife and in her bonds with other women settled on the prairie. Not all of them are so lucky as to have loving husbands, not all came to Wallace willingly, and not all of them can survive the cruel seasons. But they look out for each other, share their secrets, and help one another in times of need. And the needs are great and constant. The only city to speak of, Cheyenne, is miles away, making it akin to the Wild West in rural Wallace. In the end, it is not the trials Ellen and Charlie face together that make them remarkable, but their love for one another that endures through it all.
Genre: Historical fiction
Availability:
In Library: Not available.
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb43178282
Audiobook: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb43496141
Club member comment(s): The club member reviewing this book listened to the audiobook format. The book is set in Wyoming in the early 1900s. A young school teacher accepts a position in rural Wyoming and once there, falls in love with a cowboy and area. The characters all experience significant hardships. Difficult topics such as child neglect and abuse, spousal abuse, prostitution, loss of a child, and more come out as the lives of the characters are explored. The characters don’t wallow in self-pity because of their circumstances. The book focuses on their friendships, support for each other, and how love can see a couple through the most trying of events. The narrator was excellent. She has a unique ability to emote through her voice. The club member highly recommended this book to the other members.
Title and Author: Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Description: Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right. But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other. With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone "family," and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times.
Genre: Adult fiction
Availability:
In Library:
Book: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/409533827
Libby audiobook: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/597645908
Libby eBook: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/609698248
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb39740226
Audiobook: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb40341381
Club member comment(s): The club member listened to the audiobook format of this book. A black woman caring for a white woman’s small child, takes the child to a high end grocery store and is accused of abducting the child.
Title and Author: The Wedding Guest: An Alex Delaware Novel by Jonathan Kellerman
Description: LAPD Lieutenant Milo Sturgis is a fine homicide detective, but when he needs to get into the mind of a killer, he leans on the expertise of his best friend, the brilliant psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware. While Sturgis has a knack for piecing together the details of a crime, Delaware can decipher the darkest intents driving the most vicious of perpetrators. And there’s no better place for the doctor’s analytical skills to shine than a rowdy hall full of young men and women intoxicated on life and lust . . . and suddenly faced with the specter of death. Summoned to a run-down former strip joint, Delaware and Sturgis find themselves crashing a wild Saints and Sinners–themed wedding reception. But they’re not the only uninvited guests. A horrified bridesmaid has discovered the body of a young woman, dressed to impress in pricey haute couture and accessorized with a grisly red slash around her neck. What’s missing is any means of identification, or a single partygoer who recognizes the victim. The baffled bride is convinced the stranger snuck in to sabotage her big day—and the groom is sure it’s all a dreadful mistake. But Delaware and Sturgis have a hundred guests to question, and a sneaking suspicion that the motive for murder is personal. Now they must separate the sinners from the saints, the true from the false, and the secrets from those keeping them. The party’s over—and the hunt for whoever killed it is on.
Genre: Mystery
Availability:
In Library:
Book: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/919663626
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb37356358
Large print book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb37839696
Audiobook: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb41769769
Club member comment(s): The club member reviewing this book told the others that she enjoys Kellerman’s mystery novels immensely and recommended these to the other readers.
Title and Author: Indulgence in Death by J.D. Robb
Description: When a murder disrupts the Irish vacation she is taking with her husband, Roarke, Eve realizes that no place is safe - not an Irish wood or the streets of the manic city she calls home. But nothing prepares her for what she discovers upon her return to the cop shop in New York City....A driver for a top-of-the-line limousine service is found dead - shot through the neck with a crossbow. The car was booked by an executive at a venerable security company whose identity had been stolen. Days later, a stunning, high-priced escort is found killed at Coney Island, a bayonet stuck in her heart. And again, the trail leads to a CEO whose information has been hijacked. With a method established, but no motive to be found, Eve begins to fear that she has come across that most dangerous of criminals, a thrill killer, but one with a taste for the finer things in life - and death. Eve does not know where or when the next kill will be, or that her investigation will take her to the rarefied circle that Roarke travels in - and into the perverted heart of madness....
Genre: Urban fantasy
Availability:
In Library:
Book: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/147399708
Libby eBook: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/468975523
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb17241289
Large print book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb17233230
Audiobook: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb17233230
Club member comment(s): The club member reviewing this book said that she enjoyed the futuristic theme and didn’t want the book to end. She recommended it to the others.
Title and Author: Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health by Anupam B. Jena, M.D., PH.D. and Christopher Worsham, M.D.
Description: As a University of Chicago–trained economist and Harvard medical school professor and doctor, Anupam Jena is uniquely equipped to answer these questions. And as a critical care doctor at Massachusetts General who researches health care policy, Christopher Worsham confronts their impact on the hospital’s sickest patients. In this singular work of science and medicine, Jena and Worsham show us how medicine really works, and its effect on all of us. Relying on ingeniously devised natural experiments—random events that unknowingly turn us into experimental subjects—Jena and Worsham do more than offer readers colorful stories. They help us see the way our health is shaped by forces invisible to the untrained eye. Is there ever a good time to have a heart attack? Do you choose the veteran doctor or the rookie? Do you really need the surgery your doctor recommends? These questions are rife with significance; their impact can be life changing. Addressing them in a style that’s both animated and enlightening, Random Acts of Medicine empowers you to see past the white coat and find out what really makes medicine work—and how it could work better.
Genre: Adult nonfiction
Availability:
In Library:
Book: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/889085003
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb43491319
Club member comment(s): This book is an enjoyable and enlightening read. It focuses on how chance and circumstances influence the medical care each one of us receives.
Title and Author: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Description: Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.
Genre: Historical fiction
Availability:
In Library:
Book: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/159079307
Libby audiobook: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/597707714
Libby eBook: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/597701014
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb32914297
Audiobook: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb27062302
Club member comment(s): This haunting book explores the cruelties of war through the intersection of two lives.
Title and Author: The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
Description: Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him, as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers. One by one, from childhood to soldier to old age, Eddie's five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his "meaningless" life, and revealing the haunting secret behind the eternal question: "Why was I here?"
Genre: Inspirational
Availability:
In Library:
Book: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/147378568
CD Audiobook: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/147379330
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb10493145
Large print book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb17282662
Audiobook: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb29207589
Club member comment(s): This book was described as an excellent read.
Title and Author: The East Coast Girls: A Novel by Kerry Cletter
Description: Childhood friends Hannah, Maya, Blue and Renee share a bond that feels more like family. Growing up, they had difficult home lives, and the summers they spent together in Montauk were the happiest memories they ever made. Then, the summer after graduation, one terrible night changed everything. Twelve years have passed since that fateful incident, and their sisterhood has drifted apart, each woman haunted by her own lost innocence. But just as they reunite in Montauk for one last summer, hoping to find happiness once more, tragedy strikes again. This time it’ll test them like never before, forcing them to confront decisions they’ve each had to live with and old secrets that refuse to stay buried.
Genre: Adult fiction
Availability:
In Library: Not available
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb40646635
Audiobook: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb41375564
Club member comment(s): The club member reviewing this book listened to the audiobook version. She enjoyed the book but felt that if a different narrator had been used for each of the 4 friends (main characters), the audiobook experience would have been better.
Title and Author: Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy
Description: There’s a new invisible force at work in our economic and cultural lives. It affects every advertisement we see and every product we buy, from our morning coffee to a new pair of shoes. “Stakeholder capitalism” makes rosy promises of a better, more diverse, environmentally-friendly world, but in reality this ideology championed by America’s business and political leaders robs us of our money, our voice, and our identity. Vivek Ramaswamy is a traitor to his class. He’s founded multibillion-dollar enterprises, led a biotech company as CEO, he became a hedge fund partner in his 20s, trained as a scientist at Harvard and a lawyer at Yale, and grew up the child of immigrants in a small town in Ohio. Now he takes us behind the scenes into corporate boardrooms and five-star conferences, into Ivy League classrooms and secretive nonprofits, to reveal the defining scam of our century. The modern woke-industrial complex divides us as a people. By mixing morality with consumerism, America’s elites prey on our innermost insecurities about who we really are. They sell us cheap social causes and skin-deep identities to satisfy our hunger for a cause and our search for meaning, at a moment when we as Americans lack both. This book not only rips back the curtain on the new corporatist agenda, it offers a better way forward. America’s elites may want to sort us into demographic boxes, but we don’t have to stay there. Woke, Inc. begins as a critique of stakeholder capitalism and ends with an exploration of what it means to be an American today—a journey that begins with cynicism and ends with hope.
Genre: Adult nonfiction
Availability:
In Library:
Book: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/898789723
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb41996691
Audiobook: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb42915287
Club member comment(s): The club member reviewing this book indicated that the author is currently a GOP candidate for the presidency. This book offers insights into Vivek’s background and his corporate and political viewpoints.
Title and Author: The Stranger by Harlan Coben
Description: The Stranger appears out of nowhere, perhaps in a bar, or a parking lot, or at the grocery store. His identity is unknown. His motives are unclear. His information is undeniable. Then he whispers a few words in your ear and disappears, leaving you picking up the pieces of your shattered world. Adam Price has a lot to lose: a comfortable marriage to a beautiful woman, two wonderful sons, and all the trappings of the American Dream: a big house, a good job, a seemingly perfect life. Then he runs into the Stranger. When he learns a devastating secret about his wife, Corinne, he confronts her, and the mirage of perfection disappears as if it never existed at all. Soon Adam finds himself tangled in something far darker than even Corinne’s deception, and realizes that if he doesn’t make exactly the right moves, the conspiracy he’s stumbled into will not only ruin lives—it will end them.
Genre: Mystery
Availability:
In Library:
Book: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/211795661
Libby eBook: https://marcellus.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/590206520
MeLCat:
Book: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb27885808
Audiobook: http://search.mel.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb28343580
Club member comment(s): The club member reviewing this book listened to the audiobook version and enjoyed the premise and the unexpected plot twists. She recommended it to the others.
The next meeting of the Marcellus Township Wood Memorial Library’s First Thursday Book Club will be held on October 6, 2023, at 12 NOON in the library. We look forward to seeing you here!
Tammy Terpstra
Interlibrary Loan Specialist/Library Assistant
Marcellus Township Wood Memorial Library
