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:
June 2024: A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plan to Take Over America and the Woman who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan 432 pages, 2023
A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of the Klan’s rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them.
Our next book club meeting will be Monday June 10 at 6:30 pm. We will send out a Zoom meeting notice, plus since it will be summer, for those who want to meet in person we will also have an outdoor venue from which we will run Zoom.
The outdoor location will be one we tried before- the Wabun Picnic Area which is right next to Minnehaha Park. The address is 4655 46th Ave S, Minneapolis. Let’s meet at the top of the hill at a table near the parking lot.
If it rains or is threatening weather, the default will be Zoom.
August 2024: The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger
The latest novel by Minnesotan William Kent Krueger and nominated for the Edgar Award.
In 1958, a small Minnesota town is rocked by a shocking murder involving a wealthy landowner, a highly decorated war hero, and a native American WWII veteran pouring fresh fuel on old grievances in this dazzling novel, an instant New York Times bestseller and “a work of art” (The Denver Post)
October 2024: Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?
In this landmark book, Pulitzer Prize winning sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. This compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions.
December 2024: The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
A gripping historical mystery inspired by the life and diary of Martha Ballard, a renowned 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself into American history. Clever, layered, and subversive, Ariel Lawhon’s newest offering introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard.
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.