The group meets the 2nd Monday of the month at 7:30 pm, usually at a member's house. All are welcome as we discuss a broad range of fiction and non-fiction, classical and modern.
ALL ARE INVITED TO ATTEND ~ OPEN DISCUSSION
Please contact the church office for Book Club Meeting locations when not listed here.
Ucoming selections:
August 14 - The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
Margarita is recognized as one of the essential classics of modern Russian literature. The novel's vision of Soviet life in the 1930s is so ferociously accurate that it could not be published during its author's lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1960s. Its truths are so enduring that its language has become part of the common Russian speech.
One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate; the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him. What ensues is a novel of inexhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth, a work whose nuances emerge for the first time in Diana Burgin's and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor's splendid English version.
September 11 - The Daughters of Mars (Thomas Keneally)
Is there more to say about World War I nurses and their patients after Hemingway's uber-classic A Farewell to Arms? The saga of ambulance driver Frederic Henry and his beautiful English nurse Catherine Barkley is generally thought to be an unrivaled fictional treatment of what was called, at the time, the Great War. Could a different novelist squeeze additional juice from this particular grape? Thomas Keneally handily manages the feat with his new historical novel, The Daughters of Mars. He does so by focusing on the lives of women... sharing a tale that is simultaneously sprawling and intimate.
The two Durance sisters, Sally and Naomi, farm girls from the fertile Macleay Valley of eastern Australia, journey from their home in 1914, volunteering as nurses for the war's duration. Sally is the younger country mouse to Naomi's more sophisticated Sydney persona. But the learning curve is steep for both of these barely-out-of-girlhood healers. Keneally tells us at the novel's start that "Sally was not sure what shrapnel was." She learns. We follow the siblings' intertwined experiences in the Mediterranean war theater. They serve aboard the hospital ship Archimedes and in Cairo. They treat survivors both from the Gallipoli campaign and the charnel house of the Western Front. The field hospitals move around a lot: The war is a movable bloodbath...At its heart this is a book about relationships, about two sisters who learn to accept each other's differences. (NPR book review - Jean Zimmerman) Enlarge this image
In good reading
***********
Reverend Marcia Curtis invites you to participate in a Buddhism-based meditation in a group setting. Join us Sundays at 7:30pm in the church sanctuary. Newcomers welcome. 
Beverly Unitarian Church 10244 S. Longwood Drive • Chicago IL 60643 • 773-233-7080