AAUW Book Group Selections for 2009-2010
Date: March 18, 2010
Time: 7:00 pm
Place: Mary Sandford’s house, 1724 Sandy Lane
Discussion Leader: Signe Henderson
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy (Author)
The story is simple. A man and young boy (father and son) are traveling the roads of post apocalyptic America in hopes of finding warmer climes and perhaps a colony of people. The landscape is a bleak, gray, ash covered vision of a terrifying future for mankind. Dried out hulks of corpses litter the road, lay in the beds of long abandoned houses, and even sit propped on porches like "straw men set out to announce some holiday". When it's not raining or snowing, light soot falls and covers everything. There is hardly anything in the way of food left on the planet for the remaining survivors. But people will eat, even when all other food sources have been exhausted, if you know what I mean.
The road for the man and the boy is treacherous, and each page is flipped in anticipation and hopes that the two will not be separated and captured by the bad people. Always the two drive for the coast. Hellish scenes pass along the road, and encounters with other survivors become more frequent and serve to crank the tension level up until it is almost unbearable.
The Road is about evil and good. So much of the book is spent describing the absolute evil that man can be and do, and yet the message of the book is clear: even in the darkest of nights, when faith seems like a cliché or a slap in the face of so much despair, the love shared between a father and son is enough to create hope for the future. And hope for humanity.
Date: May 27, 2010
Time: 7:00 pm
Place: Virginia Spruiell’s house, 918 N. Alameda
Discussion Leader: Shila Marek
Wildflower: An Extraordinary Life and Untimely Death in Africa
By Mark Seal
Wildflower is a compelling work of narrative nonfiction in which the shocking death of a dedicated environmentalist becomes a broader story of a beautiful, breathtaking country in peril.
In January 2006, Joan Root, a sixty-nine-year-old naturalist, Oscar-nominated wildlife filmmaker, and staunch conservationist, was murdered by two masked men armed with an AK-47 shortly after midnight in her bedroom on the shore of Kenya’s beautiful Lake Naivasha. Was it a random robbery gone bad, as the local police seemed to think, or was it a cold-blooded contract killing carried out at the behest of enemies Root had made in her efforts to protect Kenya’s wildlife? Veteran journalist Mark Seal set out to investigate this gripping real-life murder mystery–and instead found an unforgettable story not only of a tragic death but of the remarkable life that preceded it.
With compassion and an unswerving regard for the truth, Seal lays bare the deeply moving, inspirational history of Joan Root, covering her early days in Kenya as a shy young woman with an almost uncanny ability to connect to animals; her whirlwind courtship with the dashing Alan Root, their marriage, and the twenty years of nonstop adventure, passionate romance, and groundbreaking wildlife filmmaking that followed, both in Africa and around the world; the shattering disintegration of the marriage and partnership; and Joan’s triumphant struggle to reinvent herself as the protector of her lakeshore community’s fragile ecosystem–a struggle that would lead to her death.
Wildflower is also the story of Kenya itself. A country blessed with unmatched beauty that is one of the last repositories of rare wildlife on the African continent, Kenya has also been scarred by decades of colonization and a culture of corruption fueled by the frequently competing agendas of conservationists and business interests. Joan Root dreamed of a bright future for Kenya and spent her life fighting with quiet heroism and courage to make that dream a reality. Her life ended too soon, but her legacy lives on.
