First Presbyterian Church 1793
Book Club
The dates for the Book Club meetings are chosen by the participants.
Contact the church office to be placed on the email list.
Polls are sent out to schedule the date and time for each month's discussion.
November 20, 2 p.m.
Marsha Nolf's Home
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder
A True Story
By
David Grann
A grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers.
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.
The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann’s recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O’Brian, his portrayal of the castaways’ desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.
December
Date to be Announced
Marsha Nolf's Home
The Only Witness
A Novel
By
Pamela Beason
An infant grabbed from her mother’s car. A dead end of evidence. A most unlikely source of help.
Detective Matthew Finn is a fish out of water. After relocating to a small town to please his wife only to be abandoned by the cheating woman, he’s left juggling her three irritating pets along with a high-profile missing baby case. And already under pressure with a severe lack of clues, he’s wary when an anonymous tip leads to the incident’s sole witness… a gorilla.
Working with a protective scientist to keep the animal out of the obsessed public’s eye, Finn frantically navigates the primate’s cryptic pictures and sign language. But with the tiny and vulnerable victim’s survival at stake, the overwhelmed investigator fears he’s rapidly running out of time.
Can a cop and his curious simian assistant work together to catch a callous culprit?
The Only Witness is the suspenseful first book in the Neema the Gorilla Mysteries. If you like intriguing characters, intelligent animal sidekicks, and sharp twists and turns, then you’ll love Pamela Beason’s captivating page-turner.
