Books

The Pember Book Club will continue their discussion of  1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann.

BookBrowse.com’s summary says:

A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492.

Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago; existed mainly in small, nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last thirty years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong.

In a book that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques came to previously unheard-of conclusions. Among them:

• In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe.
• Certain cities–such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital–were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets.
• The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids.
• Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science recently described it as “man’s first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering.”
• Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it–a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge.
• Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively “landscaped” by human beings.

Mann sheds clarifying light on the methods used to arrive at these new visions of the pre-Columbian Americas and how they have affected our understanding of our history and our thinking about the environment. His book is an exciting and learned account of scientific inquiry and revelation.

Join us at the Pember Library on October 18 at 6:00 PM as Michelle Yauger talks about the book she wrote about the World War II soldiers from Granville and the story of the clock honoring those soldiers.

Refreshments will be provided by our friends from the Slate Valley Museum.

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A clock is only an object. And like any object, it holds no meaning until we give it one. We Gave Our Best: A Small Town Honors Its Veterans begins as a story about what a clock came to mean to a community at three distinct moments in its history. In 1892, the citizens of Granville, New York, voted to purchase a tower clock and install it on their Main Street. For Granville, and for many towns across the United States in the late 1800s, the clock symbolized changes in their way of life and the growth of a new, bustling economy based on industry.

In 1943, that meaning changed. After a fire destroyed the first clock, the people of Granville came together to dedicate a new one as a memorial to its hundreds of young men and women serving in World War II. With materials and money in short supply, fundraising for the purchase took the full effort of the community. When the clock was installed on Main Street, its inscription read, “Lest We Forget Those Who Served.”

 Along with these historical details, We Gave Our Best also provides rare insight into the lives of the 32 Granville men who died in service to their country during World War II, as well as stories of those who survived POW camps, witnessed the D-Day invasion of Europe, and participated in special missions that were never widely publicized.

Several decades after the war ended, the clock fell into disrepair and eventually stopped working entirely. Sixty years after the D-Day invasion, Granville resident John Freed joined his father, a World War II veteran, on a trip to the beaches and cemeteries at Normandy, France. John was so moved by the sacrifices of his father’s generation that he took on the challenge of refurbishing the broken clock and restoring it as a monument to the community’s veterans. As he did so, his friends and neighbors were likewise inspired to reconnect to their past and each other as they celebrated the return of their town’s most important icon.

We Gave Our Best describes life in Granville from the late 1800s through 2010 with text and more than 160 photographs, and gives dimension to the lives of some of Granville’s World War II veterans, particularly the 32 who died in service. It also tells the story of how one man’s vision reignited his town’s determination to honor its veterans.

Michelle Yauger is a freelance writer and blogger. Her short story “Father’s  Day” received the Martindale Literary Prize for Short Fiction and was anthologized in Kaleidoscope (Pima Press, 2007). Michelle published a book on her family history entitled The Barringtons in 2010 and posts regularly to her blog, “Figment of My Cogitation.” Excerpts from We Gave Our Best can be found at (http://figmentofcogitation.wordpress.com).

Michelle grew up on her family’s farm in South Granville until moving to Arizona in 1973. She currently lives and writes in southern Arizona in the company of her husband, four grown children, and two excellent dogs.

Just in time for Father’s Day, join us at the Pember Library on Sunday, June 10 at 2:00 PM when Tim Bryant, author of “A Father’s Gift” will be doing a reading and book signing.

Tim’s book is a collection of stories from a time when the family farm was the economic center of Vermont. There are photographs and anecdotes describing the special relationship between father and son and the lessons learned in day-to-day life on the farm. Tim talks about how writing the book gives him insights into being a father himself.

Tim has lived his whole life in Vermont. He graduated from Burr and Burton and studied mechanical engineering at UVM. In 1972, Tim and his wife, Nancy, bought the Pawlet farm where they still live.

The Pember Library is located at 33 West Main St in Granville NY. Call 518 642-2525 for further information.

The Pember Book Club will not meet for March. The book they chose for April is The Paris Wife by Paula McLain.

Publisher’s Weekly reviewed The Paris Wife:

McLain … offers a vivid addition to the complex-woman-behind-the-legendary-man genre, bringing Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, to life. Meeting through mutual friends in Chicago, Hadley is intrigued by the brash “beautiful boy,” and after a brief courtship and small wedding, Hadley and Ernest take off for Paris, “the place to be,” according to Sherwood Anderson. McLain ably portrays the cultural icons of the 1920s—Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra and Dorothy Pound—and the impact they have on the then unknown Hemingway, casting Hadley as a rock of Gibraltar for a troubled man whose brilliance and talent were charged and compromised by his astounding capacity for alcohol and women. Hadley, meanwhile, makes a convincing transformation from an overprotected child to a game and brave young woman who puts up with impoverished living conditions and shattering loneliness to prop up her husband’s career. The historical figure cameos sometimes come across as gimmicky, but the heart of the story—Ernest and Hadley’s relationship—gets an honest reckoning, most notably the waves of elation and despair that pull them apart.