Literary Giants Book Club

Literary Giants: The Emperor of All Maladies

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, November 26, 2012 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane "biography" of cancer--from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision, a historian's perspective, and a biographer's passion.

Literary Giants: The Dovekeepers

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, October 29, 2012 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

Over five years in the writing, Alice Hoffman's most ambitious and mesmerizing novel ever, a triumph of imagination and research set in ancient Israel. The author of such iconic bestsellers as Illumination Night, Practical Magic, Fortune's Daughter, and Oprah's Book Club selection Here on Earth, Alice Hoffman is one of the most popular and memorable writers of her generation. Now, in The Dovekeepers, Hoffman delivers her most masterful work yet--one that draws on her passion for mythology, magic, and archaeology and her inimitable understanding of women.

Literary Giants: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, September 24, 2012 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author's most popular work.

Literary Giants: Year of Wonders

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, August 27, 2012 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

This gripping historical novel is based on the true story of Eyam, the "Plague Village", in the rugged mountain spine of England. In 1666, a tainted bolt of cloth from London carries bubonic infection to this isolated settlement of shepherds and lead miners. A visionary young preacher convinces the villagers to seal themselves off in a deadly quarantine to prevent the spread of disease.

Literary Giants: The Thirteenth Tale

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, July 30, 2012 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

Sometimes, when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny. Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for so long. Calling on Margaret Lea, a young biographer troubled by her own painful history, Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good.

Literary Giants: The Greater Journey

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, June 25, 2012 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

From two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough comes the inspiring, enthralling--and until now, untold--story of the American painters, writers, sculptors, and doctors who journeyed to Paris between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work, fell in love with the city, and changed America with what they achieved. After risking the hazardous journey across the Atlantic, these Americans embarked on a greater journey in the City of Light. That they achieved so much for themselves and their country profoundly altered American history.

Literary Giants: South of Broad

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, April 30, 2012 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

Leopold Bloom King has been raised in a family shattered-and shadowed-by tragedy. Lonely and adrift, he searches for something to sustain him and finds it among a tightly knit group of high school outsiders. Surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, as well as Charleston, South Carolina's dark legacy of racism and class divisions, these friends will endure until a final test forces them to face something none of them are prepared for.

Literary Giants: In the Garden of Beasts

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, May 21, 2012 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

In this readable narrative, author Larson (The Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck) offers a real-life, eyewitness perspective inside the Nazi hierarchy as Hitler came to power. William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered professor from Chicago, became the first US ambassador to Hitler's Germany in 1933. Dodd, his wife, their son, and their 24-year-old daughter Martha lived in Germany for about five years.

Literary Giants: A Visit from the Goon Squad

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, March 26, 2012 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

Working side-by-side for a record label, former punk rocker Bennie Salazar and the passionate Sasha hide illicit secrets from one another while interacting with a motley assortment of equally troubled people from 1970s San Francisco to the post-war future.

Literary Giants: The Warmth of Other Suns

Location: Madison Public Library
Date: Monday, February 27, 2012 - 6:30pm - 7:30pm

Presents an epic history that covers the period from the end of World War I through the 1970s, chronicling the decades-long migration of African Americans from the South to the North and West through the stories of three individuals and their families.

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