Literary Giants Book Club

Literary Giants: The Tipping Point

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, December 30, 2013 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

Literary Giants: Unbroken

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, November 25, 2013 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane's bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War. The lieutenant's name was Louis Zamperini.

Literary Giants: Great House

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, September 30, 2013 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet's secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet's daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer's life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father's study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944.

Literary Giants: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, August 26, 2013 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

We all have dreams--things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi's dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail.

Literary Giants: Midnight's Children

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, July 29, 2013 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

The life of a man born at the moment of India's independence becomes inextricably linked to that of his nation and is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirror modern India's course, in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the Booker Prize-winning novel.

Literary Giants: Gone With the Wind

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, June 24, 2013 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

After the Civil War sweeps away the genteel life to which she has been accustomed, Scarlett O'Hara sets about to salvage her plantation home.

Literary Giants: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, April 29, 2013 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

Sherlock Holmes is the mastermind detective of the ages. Here, in one volume, are three of Sherlock's most celebrated cases -The Red Headed League, The Copper Beeches, The Speckled Band.

Literary Giants: The Night Circus

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, March 25, 2013 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

A fierce competition is underway--a duel between two young circus magicians who have been trained since childhood for this purpose. This is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will.

Literary Giants: The Swerve

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, February 25, 2013 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Non-Fiction One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

Literary Giants: The Forgotten Garden

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, January 28, 2013 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

In 1913 London, a little girl plays hide-and-seek on the deck of a ship while waiting for the woman who left her there to return. But as darkness comes, the girl is still alone when the ship pulls out from the dock and steams away on a long, grueling journey to Australia. There, the dock master and his wife take in the small castaway who is carrying nothing but a child's white suitcase containing a few clothes and a book of fairytales. They name her Nell and raise her as their own. It's not until her twenty-first birthday that they tell her the truth.

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