Book list

BANK OF BLUE VALLEY STATUS CLUB
BOOK CLUB
Book List for October 2009 – July 2010
October 23, 2009 – The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy
On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia–and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard. Both are obsessed with the Dahlia–driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl’s twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches–into a region of total
November 20, 2009 – Lunchmeat and Life Lessons: Sharing a Butcher’s Wisdom by

By Mary B. Lucas
John Bichelmeyer, who raised his 10 kids in Shawnee, Kansas, dispensed much more than ground beef and bacon to his customers. A man with only an eighth-grade education, he offered rare wisdom and compassion to his clientele, friends and family that came from the heart. Now, his daughter, Mary B. Lucas, tells the story of how she earned her B.D. ("Butcher's Daughter") by spending hours at the butcher-block table in the family kitchen, listening to her father's stories about how he achieved success by making deep connections with the people around him. In turn, Mary used her father's advice to find the passion and perseverance to rise to the top of the staffing industry. These are the lessons she learned from the time she spent with her father. "Laced with the wisdom and insight that only comes through experience, this book beautifully exemplifies the unbreakable bond between father and daughter."
December 18, 2009 – When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

"David Sedaris's ability to transform the mortification of everyday life into wildly entertaining art," (The Christian Science Monitor) is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this remarkable new book. Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside to a hilariously uncomfortable memory of buying drugs in a mobile home in rural North Carolina. In essay after essay, Sedaris proceeds from bizarre conundrums of daily life-having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger on a plane or armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds-to the most deeply resonant human truths. Culminating in a brilliant account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris's sixth essay collection is a new masterpiece of comic writing from "a writer worth treasuring" (Seattle Times). January 22, 2010 – Revolutionary Heart: The Life of Clarina Nichols and the Pioneering
Crusade for Women's Rights by Diane Eickhoff
Driven by a deep inner need to end the mistreatment of women, Clarina Nichols (1810-1885) left the comforts of her Vermont home and moved West to the wild frontier of "Bleeding Kansas," where her sons fought alongside John Brown and she helped shaped the state's new Constitution to free slaves and give women rights they had no where else in America. Now for the first time the story of Clarina Nichols comes alive thanks to Diane Eickhoff, whose meticulous, six-year quest to collect and analyze Nichols's scattered writings and papers has yielded a richer understanding of this remarkable pioneer in Revolutionary Heart: The Life of Clarina Nichols and the Pioneering Crusade for Women's Rights. It is more than an engaging biography; it is a window into an unjustly overlooked period in American history about the three great 19th century
February 26, 2010 – The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman

When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw—and the city's zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jews into empty cages. Another dozen "guests" hid inside the Zabinskis' villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing, and, during rare moments of calm, piano concerts. Jan, active in the Polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants—otters, a badger, hyena pups, With her exuberant prose and exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman engages us viscerally in the lives of the zoo animals, their keepers, and their hidden visitors. She shows us how Antonina refused to give in to the penetrating fear of discovery, keeping alive an atmosphere of play and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her.
March 26, 2010 – Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"—the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the
April 23, 2010 – Ordinary Heroes by Scott Turow

Stewart Dubinsky knew his father had served in World War II. And he'd been told how David Dubin (as his father had Americanized the name that Stewart later reclaimed) had rescued Stewart's mother from the horror of the Balingen concentration camp. But when he discovers, after his father's death, a packet of wartime letters to a former fiancée, and learns of his father's court-martial and imprisonment, he is plunged into the mystery of his family's secret history and driven to uncover the truth about this enigmatic, distant man who'd always refused to talk about his war. May 28, 2010 – The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
January 1946: writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. And so begins a remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name.
June 25, 2010 – Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there that he met Marlena, the beautiful equestrian star married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. And he met Rosie, an untrainable elephant who was the great gray hope for this third-rate traveling show. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and, ultimately, it was their
July 23, 2010 – Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

An epic on an intimate scale, Memoirs of a Geisha takes the reader behind the rice-paper screens of the geisha house to a vanished floating world of beauty and cruelty, from a poor fishing village in 1929 to the decadence of 1940s Kyoto, through the chaos of World War II to the towers of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where the gray-eyed geisha Sayuri unfolds the remarkable story of her life.

Source: http://www.bankbv.com/_FileLibrary/File/BookListOct2009-July2010NEW.pdf