Biography & Non-Fiction Book Club

The Biography and Nonfiction Book Club meets the second Sunday of each month (unless re-scheduled because of holidays/weather).  

New members are always welcome!

For more information, please call Roberta at 309-264-1966.

January 12 - The Revolutionary Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff

A singular figure at a singular moment, Adams amplified the Boston Massacre. He helped to mastermind the Boston Tea Party. He employed every tool available to rally a town, a colony, and eventually a band of colonies behind him, creating the cause that created a country. For his efforts he became the most wanted man in America: When Paul Revere rode to Lexington in 1775, it was to warn Samuel Adams that he was about to be arrested for treason. Schiff brings her masterful skills to Adams’s improbable life, illuminating his transformation from aimless son of a well-off family to tireless, beguiling radical who mobilized the colonies. Arresting, original, and deliriously dramatic

February 9 - The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson

Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”

March 9 - Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Doris Kearns and Dick Goodwins’ last great adventure involved finally opening the more than 300 boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had saved for more than 50 years. Their expedition gave Dick’s last years renewed purpose and determination. It gave Doris the opportunity to connect and reconnect with participants and witnesses of pivotal moments of the 1960s. And it gave them both an opportunity to make fresh assessments of the central figures of the time—John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and especially Lyndon Johnson, who greatly impacted both their lives. The voyage of remembrance brought unexpected discoveries, forgiveness, and the renewal of old dreams, reviving the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.

April 13 - The Situation Room by George Stephanopoulos

No room better defines American power and its role in the world than the White House Situation Room. And yet, none is more shrouded in secrecy and mystery. Created under President Kennedy, the Sit Room has been the epicenter of crisis management for presidents for more than six decades. Time and again, the decisions made within the Sit Room complex affect the lives of every person on this planet. Detailing close calls made and disasters narrowly averted, The Situation Room will take readers through dramatic turning points in a dozen presidential administrations.

May 18 - Lady Justice by Dahlia Lithwick

In the immediate aftershocks of Donald Trump’s victory over Hilary Clinton in 2016, women lawyers across the country, independently of one another, sprang into action. They were determined not to stand by while the Republican party did everything in their power to pursue devastating and often retrograde policies. Author Dahlia Lithwick, one of the nation’s foremost legal commentators, illuminates these many heroes of the Trump years. From Sally Yates and Becca Heller, who fought the Muslim travel ban, to Roberta Kaplan, who sued the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, to Stacey Abrams, who worked to protect the voting rights of millions of Georgians, Lithwick dramatizes in thrilling detail the women lawyers who worked tirelessly to hold the line against the most chaotic presidency in living memory.

June 8 - Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege.

July 13 - Another Word For Love by Carvell Wallace

Carvell Wallace excavates layers of his own history, situated in the struggles and beauty of growing up Black and queer in America. Wallace is an award-winning journalist who has built his career on writing unforgettable profiles, bringing a provocative and engaged sensitivity to his subjects. Now he turns the focus on himself, examining his own life and the circumstances that frame it―to make sense of seeking refuge from homelessness with a young single mother, living in a ghostly white Pennsylvania town, becoming a partner and parent, raising two teenagers in what feels like a collapsing world. With courage, vulnerability, and a remarkable expansiveness of spirit―not to mention a thrilling, and unrivaled, storytelling verve―this book makes an irresistible case for life, healing, the fullness of our humanity, and, of course, love.

August 10 - Empress of the Nile by Lynne Olson

In the 1960s, the world’s attention was focused on a nail-biting race against time: the international campaign to save a dozen ancient Egyptian temples from drowning in the floodwaters of the gigantic new Aswan High Dam. Without the intervention of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the temples—including the Temple of Dendur, now at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—would currently be at the bottom of a vast reservoir. It was an unimaginably complex project that required the fragile sandstone temples to be dismantled and rebuilt on higher ground. Willful and determined, Desroches-Noblecourt refused to be cowed by anyone or anything. In her fight to save the temples she defied two of the most daunting leaders of the postwar world, Egypt’s President Abdel Nasser and France’s President Charles de Gaulle. Desroches-Noblecourt also received help from a surprising source, Jacqueline Kennedy, who persuaded her husband to help fund the rescue effort. The story of the preservation of a crucial part of Egypt’s cultural heritage.

September 14 - The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? The Innovators is a masterly saga of collaborative genius destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution—and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. This is the story of how innovators' minds worked and what made them so inventive. It’s also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative. For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, this book is “a sweeping and surprisingly tenderhearted history of the digital age”

October 12 - The Wager by David Grann

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann’s recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O’Brian, his portrayal of the castaways’ desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.

November 9 - Daughters of the Samurai by Janice Nimura

In 1871, five young girls were sent by the Japanese government to the U.S. Their mission: learn Western ways a and return to help nurture a new generation of enlightened men to lead Japan. Based on in-depth research in Japan and in the U.S., including decades of letters from between the women and their American host families, this book is beautifully, cinematically written, a fascinating lens through which to view an extraordinary historical moment.

December 14 - The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger

It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents. An eye-opening and informative look at the ecosystem we live in, this book challenges us to rethink the role of plants--and our own place--in the natural world.