• The Boys in the Boat by Daniel Brown
• The Distance Between Us: A Memoir by Reyna Grande
• The Children Act by Ian McEwan
• Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
• The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
• Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
• Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance

This is the true story of the rowing team of blue-collar students from the University of Washington who beat traditional championship teams from the East Coast and went on to defeat the Nazi team at the 1936 Olympics. The story centers on a farm boy who had been abandoned as a child during the Great Depression.

A fourteen-minute video with excellent background information on this rowing team.

A three-minute video of the race at the Olympics.

A two-minute video of the author talking about his first meeting Joe Rantz.

This review in the Seattle Times says that The Boys in the Boat quietly became a best-seller by word of mouth rather than a publisher's publicity campaign. The book's surprising success echoed in some ways the racing crew's story.

An interview with the author together with discussion questions from the publisher.

Joe Rantz worked on the construction of the Grand_Coulee_Dam situated in the Grand Coulee, an ancient river bed that was carved out when glacial Lake Missoula repeatedly and catastrophically burst through ice dams during the last ice age. Here is a five-minute video that explains how that happened.

The author points out that Der Sturmer, the viciously anti-semitic Nazi newspaper, was temporarily removed from newstands in Berlin during the Olympics as part of an effort to mislead visitors about what was happening in Germany.

The author's web site.

Every March we open our meeting to the general public to discuss the book chosen by Writers & Books for the "Rochester Reads" program.  This year's choice, The Distance Between Us, is a memoir of a young Mexican girl whose parents slipped across the border to the U.S., leaving her in the care of her negligent grantmother. The author spent much of her childhood in poverty in rural Mexico before crossing the border herself.

Writers & Books always provides an informative interview with the author and a discussion guide.

The author was raised by her grandmother in Iguala, a town of 110,000 people located southwest of Mexico City. The lived in a neighborhood called La Guadalupe southeast of the main part of the town. La Guadalupe is shown in this map outlined in red in the lower right of the screen.

In 2014, long after the author moved away, 43 students from the teachers' college in Iguala were kidnapped and killed by a drug gang, apparently because they were planning to protest the candidacy of a mayoral candidate. Here is the Wikipedia article.

The author's web site.

Book review in the Los Angeles Times

An eight-minute video interview with the author about immigration and writing.

The lengthy Wikipedia article on the U.S. Border Patrol has many photos that illustrate what they do.

In this novel, a judge who presides over family court issues finds herself dealing with a crisis in her own marriage. At the same time, she must decide the case of a boy who, three months too young to be able legally to make such decisions himself, is citing religious beliefs for refusing medical treatment that could save his life. His parents endorse his decision.

McEwan wrote an article in the Guardian about the origins of this novel in several real-world cases involving the intersection of law and religion.

This review in Family Law Week provides links to the texts of the actual judgements in those cases.

Here are the Wikipedia articles on Jehovah's Witnasses and their beliefs about blood transfusions.

A turning point in the novel occurs then Fiona sings the words to "Down by the Sally Gardens," a tune that Adam is playing without knowing the words. Here is "Down by the Sally Gardens", as sung by Maura O'Connell with Karen Matheson on YouTube. The Wikipedia article on the poem by Yeats explains what "sally" (or "salley") means.

Fiona lived in Gray's Inn, one of London's four Inns of Court, and walked to work in the nearby Royal Courts of Justice.

The opening words of this novel are, "London. Trinity term one week old. Implacable June weather." That's a reference to Charles Dickens's Bleak House, his classic novel about the London legal world, whose opening words are, "London. Michealmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather."

Here is a large collection of reviews of this novel. The reviewer for the Boston Globe liked it, but the reviewer for The Telegraph thought that McEwan's exasperation with religion in this novel "comes close to being damagingly shrill." The reviewer in the Washington Post disagreed, saying that McEwan was careful not to portray Adam's parents as "ignorant Bible-thumpers," and that the novel does not "enact the happy triumph of humanism."

A film version of this novel has been completed but apparently is not yet in general circulation.

A two-minute video of the author discussing this novel.

Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death sentence in 1989 against Salman Rushdie and his publishers after the publication of The Satanic Verses, a novel by Rushdie based partly on the life of Muhammad. McEwan was one of those who sheltered Rushdie, hiding him for while in his cottage in the English countryside.

This novel is based on a true story about a woman convicted of murder in Iceland in the early 1800s who, for lack of jails, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution. The farm family, at first horrified at the idea of sharing their house with a murderer, learn that there is another side to her story. The author, who is from Australia, was an exchange student in Iceland, whose population is less than half that of Monroe County.

The author's collection of photos of the area in which this story takes place.

Hannah Kent's answers to questions submitted by a book club.

Here is a review of the novel in the Guardian.

The Sydney Review of Books has a long and technical review of the novel that veers off to a lengthy description of how publishers generate the perception of a "Big Book" and then ends with summaries of reviews of this novel in Australian newspapers.

The author's web site.

If you have the time, here is a half-hour video of the author answering questions about Burial Rites plus a half-hour Australian TV show about the making of this novel.

Here are Wikipedia articles on Iceland, Icelandic turf houses and Icelandic Sagas, including the Laxdaela saga, which contains the line "To him I was worst whom I loved most."

The Google Maps view of the area of northern Iceland that is the setting for story shows it be quite green. Most prople would expect more dramatic landscapes, like those in this tourist guide to Iceland's "Ring Road" around the island. More images can be found in this web site devoted to travels in 19th century Iceland, expecially Sir Richard Burton's account of his summer there, which says that the best Icelandic farms are on the north of the island.

If you like novels about Iceland, you might like Independent People by Halldor Laxness, who won the Nobel Prize for literature. Written in the 1930s, it is a classic Icelandic novel about the rugged life of small farmers. (Try swimming across an isolated ice-laden river with no way to dry off on the other side and miles to go before you reach home.)

This is a history of the nation's oldest hospital and its largest public hospital. The author, who is director of the Division of Medical Humanities at the NYU School of Medicine, won the Pulitzer Prize for an earlier book on the history of polio.

The Wikipedia article on Bellevue.

Wikipedia also has a large collection of historical photographs of Bellevue.

Google shows many of the often disturbing images of Bellevue patients by early photographer O.G. Mason.

Here are two news clips of the evacuation of Bellevue during Superstorm Sandy: First clip and Second clip.

A half-hour interview with the author about this book.

A collection of reviews of this book. (Click on the links to see the full review in each case.) They are mostly positive, although the review in the Washington Post listed several shortcomings.

The Wikipedia article on Electroconvulsive therapy, the controversial "shock treatment" discussed on pages 227-237 of the book.

Did you know that Bellevue has its own literary magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review?

Nelly Bly, a journalist who famously posed as a mental patient at Bellevue in 1887 (page 172 in the book), later published a delightful interview with Susan B. Anthony, shown here as reprinted in pages 858-860 of Volume 2 of the History of Woman Suffrage, which Anthony published.

Twin brothers born from a secret love affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon come of age in Ethiopia, where their love for the same woman drives them apart. One is studious and the other is a moody genius. The latter narrates their "long, dramatic, biblical story set against the backdrop of political turmoil in Ethiopia, the life of the hospital compound in which they grow up and the love story of their adopted parents, both doctors... The boys become doctors as well." This novel won the Indie's Choice Book Award, which is given by owners of independent book stores.

The author's web site includes a lengthy Q&A section that explains the origin of the phrase "cutting for stone".

A ten-part account, with lots of photos, of a bike journey through Ethopia, beginning with Addis Ababa.

An eighteen-minute TED talk in which the author movingly discusses the need for direct and personal interaction between doctors and parients.

On page 15, the book mentions the ancient community of Christians in southern India that is said to have been established by Saint Thomas the Apostle.

The author mentions in several places the Ethopian Orthodox Church, which likewise was established in ancient times.

Several reviews of the book, none of them very deep, unfortunately. I liked the one in the San Francisco Chronicle, which describes this book as "a masterpiece of traditional storytelling."

The Wikipedia article on Bernini's sculpture of the Ectasy of St. Teresa, which is mentioned repeatedly in the book.

A collection of tizita music, which the author mentions several times.

In 1893, rumors appear that a mythical creature called the Essex Serpent has returned to a coastal area outside London. A young widow investigates, hoping to discover what she suspects is a new species. She is drawn into a relationship with the local vicar, who thinks the rumors are caused by moral panic felt by those who think they have strayed from the righteous path. This novel won the British Book Award for Fiction.

Bookmarks, an aggregator of book reviews, examined 15 reviews of this novel and reports that their average rating of it was "rave". The reviewer in the New York Times made this interesting point: "It's been a while since I've read a book in which a man and a woman quarrel quite so much, and quite so forcefully, without something devastating coming of it." The reviewer in the Washington Post said, "By the end, The Essex Serpent identifies a mystery far greater than some creature 'from the illuminated margins of a manuscript': friendship... Cora is determined to identify a species of devotion between men and women that doesn't involve subjugation. She may be digging in the past, but she's clearly looking to the future." The reviewer in The Guardian lists various things that the "serpent" seems to signify to characters in this story.

A three-minute video of the author talking about this book.

Cora mentions Mary Anning several times as a role model for her fossil hunting interests. Here is the Wikipedia article for this impressive person.

Aldwinter is a fictional village, but its approximate location is not difficult to establish. Here is a map of Essex that shows Colchester, where Cora stayed before she met Will and Stella, who lived in the fictional Aldwinter on the River Blackwater. Cora first met Will while both were out hiking. Zoom out on the map to see that this part of the world is not far from London. Colchester, an ancient town, was once the capital of Roman Britain.

Cora and Will collected chestnut conkers while out walking (page 353). Here is how to play the game of conkers.

Cora and Will saw a fata morgana illusion on the river (page 169, 171). This Wikipedia article has several photos of this illusion.

Martha was deeply affected by a report on poverty from a group of ministers called Bitter Cry of Outcast London. (If necessary, click on "read this book online.")

The author's web site.

This amusing, educational and often startling memoir features the author's relationship with her eccentric lab manager. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. The author is a prominent geobiologist who has won three Fulbright awards for her work.

Jahren's lab at the University of Oslo has its own web site, including a photo of her long-time lab partner Bill Hagopian. Her husband, Clint Conrad, is a professor in a different department at the same university.

Here are reviews. I liked the one in the Washington Post.

The author narrates a colorful three minute video of her life and work, based mainly on photos. There are also two informative seven-minute video interviews with the author, one from NPR and one from "Future in Five".

In 2014, Seventeen Magazine created a Twitter hashtag that was intended to be used by women for posting photos of how they had beautified their fingernails. Hope Jahren "hijacked" the hashtag and organized female scientists to use it to post photos of their hands doing scientific work. Here is a short MSNBC video of Jahren explaining the whole thing.

Jahren has become a mentor for young female scientists who are dealing with inappropriate advances from professors who have the power to make or break their careers. She wrote about this in a powerful article in the New York Times

The Wikipedia article on the author.

The author has an offbeat Twitter account.

Jahren works in the field of paleobiology, also known as geobiology.

The Wikipedia article on the author.

The Wikipedia articles on Scotch-Irish and Hillbilly.

A video interview with the author and his wife Usha.

The Atlantic has a long and thoughtful joint review of this book along with Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, which has a different analysis of the problem. In particular, Isenberg has little patience with the idea of Scotch-Irish culture as a determining force.

Here are several reviews. The review in The Guardian provids good insights. The one in the Washington Post covers events in Vance's life since the book's publication.

This writer from near Lexington, Kentucky, says he doesn't consider himself to be a hillbilly, and he doesn't consider Vance to be one either.

On page 226, the author discusses the effects of "adverse childhood experiences" (ACE), as measured on this test.