The book club selects books once per year from nominations suggested by the participants. The club alternates between fiction and non-fiction, published within the last two years. Our meetings are now Zoom only. Any U of M Alumni or significant others who would like to participate can contact us and they will be provided with the Zoom link.
Selections for the upcoming year:
February 2025: The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak and Heroism and the Dawn of the Civil War 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.”
Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledges, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink.