A CLOSER LOOK READING GROUP- For Women in Our Community
This group meets monthly (usually the first Thursday of the month) to discuss both fiction and non-fiction Christian themed book. Participants take turns providing a light meal for the group. Meal begins at 6PM with a discussion following. If interested, please contact the Cimarron City Library @ 855-3808 or smcfarland@cimarroncitylibrary.org.
SCHEDULE COMING SOON!
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READING LADIES BOOK CLUB- For Women in Our Community
This group meets on the second Sunday of every other month @ 3PM beginning in September to discuss both fiction and non-fiction books. If interested, please contact the Cimarron City Library @ 855-3808 or smcfarland@cimarroncitylibrary.org.
*Not the second Sunday due to schedule conflicts.
Sunday, September 11 @ 3PM…The Healer’s Daughter by Charlotte Hinger
Bethany Herbert, daughter of a legendary healer, leaves the South for the new black community of Nicodemus, Kansas. Despite the hardships, the community comes to love the prairie. Bethany’s mother, Queen Bess, comes to Nicodemus, as does the handsome lawyer Jed Talbot, who galvanizes the settlers. Bethany resists the call of her heart because Queen Bess warns her the best healers are chaste and single. When the Herbert women’s medical procedures are undermined, Bethany nearly succumbs to Queen Bess’s call for total segregation from the whites Bess hates. Sinister forces come into play through white politicians seeking the black vote, and sabotage by a woman within Nicodemus who yearns for the old color hierarchy. The people of Nicodemus fight back and ultimately triumph.
Sunday, November 13 @ 3PM…The Dressmakers of Auschwitz: The True Story of the Women Who Sewed to Survive by Lucy Addington
A powerful chronicle of the women who used their sewing skills to survive the Holocaust, stitching beautiful clothes at an extraordinary fashion workshop created within one of the most notorious WWII death camps.
At the height of the Holocaust twenty-five young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp—mainly Jewish women and girls—were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women in a dedicated salon. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers.
This fashion workshop—called the Upper Tailoring Studio—was established by Hedwig Höss, the camp commandant’s wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers. Here, the dressmakers produced high-quality garments for SS social functions in Auschwitz, and for ladies from Nazi Berlin’s upper crust.
Drawing on diverse sources—including interviews with the last surviving seamstress—The Dressmakers of Auschwitz follows the fates of these brave women. Their bonds of family and friendship not only helped them endure persecution, but also to play their part in camp resistance. Weaving the dressmakers’ remarkable experiences within the context of Nazi policies for plunder and exploitation, historian Lucy Adlington exposes the greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy of the Third Reich and offers a fresh look at a little-known chapter of World War II and the Holocaust.
Sunday, January 8 @ 3PM…The Last Flight by Julie Clark
Two women. Two flights. One last chance to disappear.
Claire Cook has a perfect life. Married to the scion of a political dynasty, with a Manhattan townhouse and a staff of ten, her surroundings are elegant, her days flawlessly choreographed, and her future auspicious. But behind closed doors, nothing is quite as it seems. That perfect husband has a temper that burns bright and he’s not above using his staff to track Claire’s every move.
What he doesn’t know is that Claire has worked for months on a plan to vanish. A plan that takes her to the airport, poised to run from it all. But a chance meeting in the airport bar brings her together with a woman whose circumstances seem equally dire. Together they make a last-minute decision.
The two women switch tickets, with Claire taking Eva’s flight to Oakland, and Eva traveling to Puerto Rico as Claire. They believe the swap will give each of them the head start they need to begin again somewhere far away. But when the flight to Puerto Rico crashes, Claire realizes it’s no longer a head start but a new life. Cut off, out of options, with the news of her death about to explode in the media, Claire will assume Eva’s identity, and along with it, the secrets Eva fought so hard to keep hidden.
Sunday, March 12 @ 3PM…Laby Girl by Hope Jahren
In these pages, Hope takes us back to her Minnesota childhood, where she spent hours in unfettered play in her father’s college laboratory. She tells us how she found a sanctuary in science, learning to perform lab work “with both the heart and the hands.” She introduces us to Bill, her brilliant, eccentric lab manager. And she extends the mantle of scientist to each one of her readers, inviting us to join her in observing and protecting our environment.
Warm, luminous, compulsively readable, Lab Girl vividly demonstrates the mountains that we can move when love and work come together.
*Sunday, May 21 @ 3PM…Fever by Mary Beth Keane
Mary Beth Keane has written a spectacularly bold and intriguing novel about the woman known as “Typhoid Mary,” the first person in America identified as a healthy carrier of Typhoid Fever.
On the eve of the twentieth century, Mary Mallon emigrated from Ireland at age fifteen to make her way in New York City. Brave, headstrong, and dreaming of being a cook, she fought to climb up from the lowest rung of the domestic-service ladder. Canny and enterprising, she worked her way to the kitchen, and discovered in herself the true talent of a chef. Sought after by New York aristocracy, and with an independence rare for a woman of the time, she seemed to have achieved the life she’d aimed for when she arrived in Castle Garden. Then one determined “medical engineer” noticed that she left a trail of disease wherever she cooked, and identified her as an “asymptomatic carrier” of Typhoid Fever. With this seemingly preposterous theory, he made Mallon a hunted woman.
The Department of Health sent Mallon to North Brother Island, where she was kept in isolation from 1907 to 1910, then released under the condition that she never work as a cook again. Yet for Mary—proud of her former status and passionate about cooking—the alternatives were abhorrent. She defied the edict.
Bringing early-twentieth-century New York alive—the neighborhoods, the bars, the park carved out of upper Manhattan, the boat traffic, the mansions and sweatshops and emerging skyscrapers—Fever is an ambitious retelling of a forgotten life. In the imagination of Mary Beth Keane, Mary Mallon becomes a fiercely compelling, dramatic, vexing, sympathetic, uncompromising, and unforgettable heroine.
Sunday, July 9 @ 3PM…Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill by Sonia Purnell
Late in life, Winston Churchill claimed that victory in the Second World War would have been “impossible” without the woman who stood by his side for fifty-seven turbulent years. Why, then, do we know so little about her? In this landmark biography, a finalist for the Plutarch prize, Sonia Purnell finally gives Clementine Churchill her due.
Born into impecunious aristocracy, the young Clementine Hozier was the target of cruel snobbery. Many wondered why Winston married her, when the prime minister’s daughter was desperate for his attention. Yet their marriage proved to be an exceptional partnership. “You know,”Winston confided to FDR, “I tell Clemmie everything.”
Through the ups and downs of his tumultuous career, in the tense days when he stood against Chamberlain and the many months when he helped inspire his fellow countrymen and women to keep strong and carry on, Clementine made her husband’s career her mission, at the expense of her family, her health and, fatefully, of her children. Any real consideration of Winston Churchill is incomplete without an understanding of their relationship. Clementine is both the first real biography of this remarkable woman and a fascinating look inside their private world.
Please visit our website www.cimarroncitylibrary.org and follow us on facebook for up-to-date library information.