Welcome to Summer 2023 with the KVCC Book Club! For those of you who don't know me, my name is Margie Ticknor (husband Sam and mother in law Mandy). I am Director of a library in New Jersey but more importantly, I LOVE to read. And I really enjoy being a part of book groups. For the past few summers, I have volunteered to run the KVCC Book Club and am happy to do it again this summer. The KVCC Book Club is a wonderful chance to chat about books with others who share that passion, mingle with old friends and make some new ones.
Saturday, July 15 at 3p.m.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann
On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.
But then ... six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.
For a review from Kirkus Reviews, scroll down.
Saturday, August 12 at 3p.m.
Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (pub date July 18)
Whitehead brings back furniture salesman Ray Carney in this equally ambitious follow-up to Harlem Shuffle, moving the action to the grimy 1970s in a triptych of stories. In the first, Carney, who has gone legit since the events of the first novel, seeks red-hot Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter but soon realizes that the path to Madison Square Garden runs through a corrupt cop. In the second, Carney's associate Pepper works security on a blaxploitation film whose star has gone missing, a darkly amusing story that allows Whitehead to comment on the commodification of Black art. In the final section, set during the Bicentennial celebrations of 1976, Ray and Pepper look for the arsonist who lit up an apartment, introducing a political angle to the novel. Carney lives in a world where everyone is a potential mark and playing it straight is a sucker's game. The real star is Harlem, with troubles that seem more buried than during the tumultuous 1960s but are always a moment's notice from boiling over.
I don't think that it's necessary to have read Harlem Shuffle to enjoy this book.
I hope you can join us for both meetings. If you have any questions, email margieticknor@yahoo.com. Looking forward to seeing you this summer. Please spread the word.
For a review from Kirkus Reviews, scroll down.
| Kirkus Reviews | 03/15/2023 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann |
| The author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z returns with a rousing story of a maritime scandal. In 1741, the British vessel the Wager, pressed into service during England's war with Spain, was shipwrecked in a storm off the coast of Patagonia while chasing a silver-laden Spanish galleon. Though initially part of a fleet, by the time of the shipwreck, the Wager stood alone, and many of its 250 crew members already had succumbed to injury, illness, starvation, or drowning. More than half survived the wreckage only to find themselves stranded on a desolate island. Drawing on a trove of firsthand accounts--logbooks, correspondence, diaries, court-martial testimony, and Admiralty and government records--Grann mounts a chilling, vibrant narrative of a grim maritime tragedy and its dramatic aftermath. Central to his populous cast of seamen are David Cheap, who, through a twist of fate, became captain of the Wager; Commodore George Anson, who had made Cheap his protege; formidable gunner John Bulkeley; and midshipman John Byron, grandfather of the poet. Life onboard an 18th-century ship was perilous, as Grann amply shows. Threats included wild weather, enemy fire, scurvy and typhus, insurrection, and even mutiny. On the island, Cheap struggled to maintain authority as factions developed and violence erupted, until a group of survivors left--without Cheap--in rude makeshift boats. Of that group, 29 castaways later washed up on the coast of Brazil, where they spent more than two years in Spanish captivity; and three castaways, including Cheap, landed on the shores of Chile, where they, too, were held for years by the Spanish. Each group of survivors eventually returned to England, where they offered vastly different versions of what had occurred; most disturbingly, each accused the other of mutiny, a crime punishable by hanging. Recounting the tumultuous events in tense detail, Grann sets the Wager episode in the context of European imperialism as much as the wrath of the sea. A brisk, absorbing history and a no-brainer for fans of the author's suspenseful historical thrillers. |
| Kirkus Reviews | 05/01/2023 - Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead |
| Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Whitehead continues his boisterous, incisive saga of late-20th-century Harlem and of a furniture dealer barely keeping his criminal side at bay. The adventures of entrepreneur, family man, and sometime fence Ray Carney, which began with Harlem Shuffle (2021), are carried from the Black Citadel's harried-but-hopeful 1960s of that book to the dismal-and-divided '70s shown here. In the first of three parts, it's 1971, and Carney's business is growing even amid the city's Nixon-era doldrums and the rise of warring militant groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. Carney barely thinks about sliding back into his more illicit vocation until his teenage daughter, May, starts hankering to see the Jackson 5 perform at Madison Square Garden. And so he decides to look up an old contact named Munson, a seriously bent White NYPD officer and "accomplished fixer," who agrees to get free "up close" seats for the concert if Carney will fence stolen jewelry stuffed in a paper bag. But the job carries far more physical peril than advertised, culminating in a long night's journey into day with Carney getting beaten, robbed, and strong-armed into becoming Munson's reluctant, mostly passive partner in the cop's wanton rampage throughout the city. In the second part, it's 1973, and Pepper, Carney's strong, silent confidant and all-purpose tough guy, is recruited to work security on the set of a blaxploitation epic whose female lead inexplicably goes missing. The third and final part takes place in the bicentennial year of 1976, the nadir of the city's fiscal crisis, marked by widespread fires in vacant buildings in Harlem and elsewhere in New York's poorer neighborhoods. When an 11-year-old boy is seriously injured by a seemingly random firebombing, Carney is moved to ask himself, "What kind of man torches a building with people inside?" He resolves to find out with Pepper's help. What recurs in each of these episodes are vivid depictions of hustlers of varied races and social strata, whether old-hand thieves, crass showbiz types, remorseless killers, or slick politicians on the make with the business elite. Whitehead's gift for sudden, often grotesque eruptions of violence is omnipresent, so much so that you almost feel squeamish to recognize this book for the accomplished, streamlined, and darkly funny comedy of manners it is. If its spirits aren't quite as buoyant as those of Harlem Shuffle, it's because the era it chronicles was depressed in more ways than one. Assuming Whitehead continues chronicling Ray Carney's life and times, things should perk up, or amp up, for the 1980s. It's not just crime fiction at its craftiest, but shrewdly rendered social history. |
