Read the featured book below. Watch the video interview with the author. Watch the connection-themed featured video. Jumpstart your group conversation with our discussion questions. Pick a new themed topic, and repeat! |
|
Thunderstruck
Painstaking research and technological history combine in this suspenseful story about pushing the limits of inter-continental connection. Thunderstruck is a book where true events are depicted in novel-style prose. Erik Larson creates compelling characters and murderous twists while tracing Guglielmo Marconi’s struggle to generate enough electricity for a reliable trans-Atlantic transmission. Larson intertwines this narrative with the real-life search for one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers. Amazingly, Marconi’s newly launched technology allowed people on both sides of the pond to listen-in as Scotland Yard tracked and finally captured the villain. (read more)
|
Erik Larson Sneak Preview: Larson wasn’t compelled to tell Marconi’s story. And he wasn’t driven to write about the life of serial killer, Harvey Hawley Crippen. What fascinated Larson was the connection between the two men. The impact their lives made on one another. And how Marconi pushed personal and scientific limits to enhance the emerging technology that would strengthen the connection. Through this brief interview, you experience Erik Larson’s firsthand account of why and how he wrote Thunderstruck. As an author of six books that have made the New York Times bestseller list, Larson’s writing style is “narrative nonfiction” in which he invests years of research for each book. Every conversation and interaction he includes is factually backed up by primary source documentation–a feat of incredible scholarship and brilliant writing. (read more) > |
Pushing the Limits of Connection Roxanne Swentzell was born with a speech impediment that made it hard to communicate with the world around her — until the first time she created her message in clay. She’s now a renowned sculptor with works displayed around the world. Coming from a long line of Native pot makers, she uses the art to feel rooted in her heritage. And to express her contemporary links with her family and culture.
Roxanne feels part of the desert she calls home. Not only does she pull dirt from the ground to make clay, but her ancestral connection to the land goes back thousands of years. She and her grown children make a conscious effort to push their limits by listening to the past while leaving important messages for the future.
(read more)
|
Consider using these other suggested connection-themed books and media for future gatherings. Take a look at the other items below, curated for this theme. How do people push the limits of connection in each book or video? The joy is in the discovery! Making those connections as you read will enrich your follow-up conversations.
|
spacerline
Neawanaka is a Pacific Northwest community that takes shape through the stories of its inhabitants. Some quirky. Some not. And all of them living wholly realistic lives — even though they may, from time to time, take advice from talking animals. In a small fictional town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There's a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer, and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime committed, and there's an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it's thinking. It's the tale of a town, written in a distinct and lyrical voice. And readers will close the book more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka, on the wet coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world. (amazon.com) [Brian Doyle - Fiction] (read more)
Is loneliness actually dangerous? Research says the answer is a resounding “Yes!” In this video story, we hear from a woman struggling with her aloneness, a person who loves her, and concerned citizens trying to do something about our country’s loneliness problem. Nowadays, we are more connected to people than at any other time in history, thanks to technology. And yet many Americans report feeling lonelier and more isolated than ever before. Social isolation and loneliness have been shown to pose a growing threat to our health, having the same impact on mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Heart disease, a weakened immune system, depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues are just some of the negative effects social isolation can have on us. For older Americans, the consequences of social isolation could be even worse. In Brooklyn, New York, the public library wants to help with America's loneliness epidemic. [NBC Left Field] (read more)
Faith binds people together. And it tears them apart. We Sinners explores both truisms through characters who pull at our heart strings. Along the way, we’re also forced to think about the human tendency to rebel — and how that can possibly coincide with our need to belong. The Rovaniemis and their nine children belong to a deeply traditional church (no drinking, no dancing, no TV) in modern-day Michigan. A normal family in many ways, the Rovaniemis struggle with sibling rivalry, parental expectations, and forming their own unique identities in such a large family. But when two of the children venture from the faith, the family fragments and a haunting question emerges: Do we believe for ourselves, or for each other? Each chapter is told from the distinctive point of view of a different Rovaniemi, drawing a nuanced, kaleidoscopic portrait of this unconventional family. The children who reject the church learn that freedom comes at the almost unbearabl e price of their close family ties. And those who stay, struggle daily with the challenges of resisting the temptations of modern culture. With precision and potent detail, We Sinners follows each character on their journey of doubt, self-knowledge, acceptance, and — ultimately — survival. (goodreads.com) [Hanna Pylväinen - Fiction] (read more)
Eighty percent of the world's biodiversity is within Indigenous territories, yet these communities often don't have a say when it comes to protecting the lands they inhabit. Environmental... (read more)
|
"It's said that to be a poet, you have to go to hell and back." So says Cristina Domenech, who teaches writing at an Argentinian prison. In this Tedtalk, she tells the moving story of helping incarcerated people express themselves. Understand themselves. And revel in the freedom of language. Watch for a powerful reading from one of her students — an inmate — in front of an audience of 10,000. Speaker Cristina Domenech proposes using language not only as an instrument of liberation but as a way to change the world. (TEDtalk) (read more)
spacerline
Author Gabriela Wiener discovered an “emotional black hole” opened up when she first discovered she was going to be a mother. She chronicled her journey through pregnancy and her fight for... (read more)
It’s not exactly a horror story. Or a futuristic thriller. But it teeters on the edge of both categories. Never Let Me Go is, at its core, a story about relationships. And what it means to be human. As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time, she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is a modern classic. (amazon.com) [Kazuo Ishiguro - Fiction] (read more)
This collection of stories features characters whose lives lack heroism, and yet who continue to rebel against their challenges and find ways to survive. Long-listed for the National Book Award... (read more)
|
spacerline
At the heart of this book, the characters we most care about can’t find an effective way to communicate with one another. But they keep trying. And that’s the problem. With no common language, their misunderstanding takes them further and further into trouble. Scott and Maureen Torres-Thompson have always relied on others to run their Orange County home. But when bad investments crater their bank account, it all comes down to Araceli: their somewhat prickly Mexican maid. One night, an argument between the couple turns physical, and a misunderstanding leaves the children in Araceli's care. Their parents unreachable, she takes them to central Los Angeles in the hopes of finding Scott's estranged Mexican father — an earnest quest that soon becomes a colossal misadventure with consequences that ripple through every strata of the sprawling city. Héctor Tobar's The Barbarian Nurseries is a masterful tale of contemporary Los Angeles. A novel as alive as the city itself. - (barnesandnoble.com) [Héctor Tobar - Fiction] (read more)
spacerline
This book almost feels like a compilation of six compelling-but-disparate novellas. Each with their own storyline, era, and writing style. That said, as we read, we start to realize that the narratives are linked in numerous, subtle ways. And those commonalities eventually form themselves into an overarching message: everything in our universe is connected. Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. From there, we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neo capitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a post apocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. (amazon.com) [David Mitchell - Fiction] (read more)
spacerline
In this award-winning story, a 13-year-old boy crash-lands a plane in the forest. And his world only gets worse from there. He endures a constant barrage of nature’s fury with only... (read more)
|