Feb 1 Zoom
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Feb Book |
On a cool June
evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal
Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist
boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of
Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological
collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird
specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts
of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian
art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion
fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years
earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace,
who'd risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the
darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature. |
March Book
|
Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author. Called “a tour de force” by the San Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—only begin to unlock its deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultranationalist fanatics. |
| Date | Title | Author | Chooser | Host | |
| Feb 1 |
The Feather Thief |
Kirk Wallace Johnson | Michele | Zoom | |
| Mar 1 |
People of the Book |
Geraldine Brooks | Lynn | zoom | |
| Apr 5 | Anne |