March Readers' Report

Our March read was Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice by Bill Browder. It is a memoir that tells the story of his rise and fall as a hedge fund manager in Russia, and his fight for justice after his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was killed by the Russian authorities. It is a gripping and shocking account of corruption, murder, and human rights violations in Putin’s Russia. Bill Browder was once the most successful foreign investor in Russia, until he became an enemy of the state for uncovering massive fraud and corruption. Sergei Magnitsky, one of his young lawyers in Moscow, reported the crimes that were committed by government agents and oligarchs connected to Vladimir Putin to the Russian authorities. Rather than investigating, they charged him with the crimes. Magnitsky paid the ultimate price for his bravery: he was arrested, tortured, and murdered in prison in 2009.  Years after his death he was tried and convicted in absentia. Browder committed to bringing his killers to justice and he is still trying 14 years later.

Browder launched a global campaign to seek justice for Magnitsky and to hold the perpetrators accountable. He faced death threats, smear campaigns, and legal battles, but he also gained allies and supporters around the world. Using social media such as YouTube, hundreds of media appearances and speeches, and Congressional testimony, his efforts led to the passage of the Magnitsky Act in the US Congress, which imposed sanctions on human rights abusers in Russia. It has since been replaced by the Global Magnitsky Program covering the rest of the world, and has been copied by dozens of countries.

Red Notice is more than just a personal story. It is also a warning about the dangers of authoritarianism and kleptocracy that threaten democracy and human dignity. All of the Readers liked the book and we rated it 4.5 out of 5 stars. Although not doubting the truth of the story, some thought that Browder tells the story only from one perspective and comes across as self-aggrandizing. In 2022, Browder published a follow-up called Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath and we would recommend it to anyone interested in this story.  

Join us on April 18^th at 5 pm when we will discuss Charming Billy, a novel by Alice McDermott that won the National Book Award.  We will meet at the home of Steve Wasinger, 15 Sycamore Lane, Grosse Pointe. RSVP to Steve at 313-884-2668.

January 2023 Readers' Report

October 2022 Readers' Report

At the October Readers’ meeting we discussed Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. This is a memoir that personalizes the struggle against injustice in the story of one activist lawyer. The Readers gave it five stars. Join us on November 15th when we will discuss Alice McDermott’s novel Someone . We will meet at 5 pm at the home of Bob Wrosch, 22801 Lakeshore Drive, St Clair Shores. Please RSVP to Bob at 313-310-8097. Note that we will not meet in December

August 2022 Readers' Report

The Readers met in August to discuss Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz. This is Larson’s eighth work of nonfiction, six of which have been best-sellers, including The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake. As with his others, this book is considered narrative nonfiction because it tells a story and contains scenes, themes, and dialogue to draw the reader in. It is an extensively researched description of Winston Churchill’s first year as Britain’s Prime Minister, beginning in May,1940. Larson relied on memoirs, recently released diaries, archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports. Although lengthy, it reads like a novel set during the Blitz when it was far from clear whether Hitler would ever be stopped. The Readers enjoyed this work and most felt it was worth the time invested. We particularly enjoyed how Larson worked in the lives of the Churchill family and his aides and advisors together with ordinary Londoners and used the accumulation of small details of their day-to-day lives to paint the big picture of the determination and courage shown by the British people. We rated it 4.5 stars and would strongly recommend it. As NPR stated, “A bravura performance by one of America’s greatest storytellers.”

Join us on September 20th when we will discuss Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness by Elizabeth Samet. We will meet at 5 pm at the home of Patrick Reid, 412 Lothrop Rd, Grosse Pointe Farms. RSVP to Patrick at 313-938-6567.

June 2022 Readers' Report

In June, we read and discussed A Chain of Thunder by Jeff Shaara, the second novel of his “war in the west” series about the Civil War – Grant’s relentless siege of Vicksburg, the campaign that changed the war. As with the prior book set in Shiloh, Shaara combines a well-researched description of the campaign with a few fictional characters to create a story that holds the attention of the reader to the final July 4, 1863, surrender of the Confederate forces. The Readers gave it a better than 4 out of 5-star rating and would recommend it to any with an interest in our country’s history.

Join us for our July meeting at 5 pm on the 19th at the home of David Buckler, 562 N. Rosedale Ct., Grosse Pointe Woods, We will discuss The Sentence, the latest best-selling novel by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author, Louise Erdrich. RSVP to David at 313-407-1539

April 2022 Readers' Report

In April we discussed A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith by Timothy Egan. We found it an interesting and enjoyable combination of travelogue, history, and memoir and gave it 4.5 stars.

On May 17th we will discuss Circe , a novel by Madelaine Miller, “a bold and subversive retelling of the goddess’s story that manages to be both epic and intimate in its scope, recasting the most infamous female figure from the Odyssey as a hero in her own right.”―Alexandra Alter, New York Times.

February 2022 Readers' Report

In February, we read The Escape Line: How the Ordinary Heroes of Dutch-Paris Resisted the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe and discussed it with author Megan Koreman.

November 2021 Readers' Report

Evil Geniuses is “a work of towering importance,” according to Anand Giridharadas, who on the front page of the New York Times Book Review also called it an “essential, absorbing book” in which Andersen “carefully, meticulously, overwhelmingly, argues through facts” but “never loses the texture of actual human beings.” Andersen is the author of four prize-winning novels, the nonfiction work Fantasyland (2017) that won the Forkosch Award for the best humanist book of the year, and numerous magazine columns and reviews. He has also written for film, television and the stage. He was the host and co-creator of Studio 360, the cultural magazine show produced by Public Radio International and PRX from 2000 to 2020 that won two Peabody Awards.

Originally from Nebraska, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and taught at the Art Center College of Design (where he was Visionary in Residence) and the School of Visual Arts. Evil Geniuses begins with a summary of the US economy during the twentieth century, during which, despite some ups and downs, a huge, secure and contented middle class emerged. During the 1960s however, the approval rating of big business fell dramatically. Beginning in the early 1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled. Andersen describes this in detail, naming names and assigning blame to both the right and the left. He includes economists, legal scholars, Wall Street financiers, politicians beginning with Reagan, well-heeled conservative donors such as the Koch brothers, think tanks and lobbyists such as the Heritage Foundation and the Business Roundtable, right-wing media, those who create and retreat into nostalgia (both cultural and political), and neoliberal “useful idiots” who stood by or participated in tax cuts, deregulation, the failure to enforce antitrust laws, the weakening of unions, the erosion of the minimum wage, the loss of fixed pensions and good employer health care coverage, not to mention climate change inaction and other changes that have left the huge majority of Americans with dwindling economic prospects and hope and resulted in income inequality among the worst in the world.

Despite a sometime depressing narrative, Andersen does include suggestions about how we can begin to undo the work of the “evil geniuses” before it is too late.

Almost all the Readers enjoyed this book and gave it 4 stars out of 5. Although we felt that it was well written and held our interest, we did at times wish it was more of a novel and less of a textbook. The book is well researched and includes extensive footnotes, a bibliography and index. We would recommend it to anyone concerned about the future of our country.

The Readers will not meet in December. Our next meeting is on January 18, 2022, at 5 pm when we will discuss Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. We will meet at the home of Harry Thomalla at 771 Blairmoor Ct, Grosse Pointe Woods. Please RSVP to 313-882-7644.

September 2021 Readers' Report

A search for a lost city has long been a staple of adventure tales, and such stories continue to be popular today despite the shrinkage of wilderness areas such as jungles and rain forests. David Grann’s Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon was a bestseller in 2009 and later made into a movie. Douglas Preston was invited to join the expedition to find the Lost City of the Monkey God in 2012, and his book was published in 2017. It was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2017 and one of best books of the year by Amazon, the Boston Globe and National Geographic. Preston is the author of thirty-six books, both fiction and nonfiction, twenty-nine of which have been New York Times bestsellers, with several reaching the number 1 position. He has worked as an editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University. In addition to books, Preston writes about archaeology and paleontology for the New Yorker, National Geographic, and Smithsonian.

The Lost City of the Monkey God tells the story of the discovery of a prehistoric city in an unexplored valley deep in the Honduran jungle. Legends of the city were heard by the first Spanish explorers in Central America in the 17th Century, and unsuccessful attempts to locate it were made in the 19th and 20th centuries, some by colorful characters who turned out to be con men. This expedition, however had something earlier efforts did not: Lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. After an aerial Lidar survey revealed evidence of an undiscovered city in a valley ringed by steep mountains in the forbidding region known as Mosquitia, it took three years to organize a ground expedition to confirm the finding. Because the expedition was financed with the help of a documentary producer, some in the academic world accused it of being an “Indiana Jones” stunt and not serious archeology. The expedition did include an archeologist and other scientists as well as jungle warfare experts for security together with Honduran Army soldiers. They came in by helicopter and found nearly impenetrable jungle with dangerous fer-de-lance pit vipers, quick mud that nearly sucked one of the women under, insects of all kinds, jaguars, and torrential rains. Progress was slow but eventually they found evidence of earthen pyramids, plazas and structures all along the valley. A cache of stone carvings displayed the artistic skills of the lost civilization and their probable worship of various animal gods. Preston discusses the current theories about when and why the cities were abandoned and why additional excavation and study will be needed.

The documentary with the same title as the book was released in 2018 and makes for fascinating viewing. Although the hardships overcome by members of the expedition were notable, for many the worst was the illness that nearly half of the members brought home with them. Leishmaniasis is a parasitic disease transmitted to humans by sand flies. Left untreated, skin sores can leave permanent scarring and cause your face to rot away. Treatments can be painful and may not be completely successful.

The Readers enjoyed this book and gave it a rating of better than 4.5 out of 5. We learned much about Central America today and in Pre-Columbian times. We are certain that we will not be taking any trips to the jungles of eastern Honduras anytime soon.  

Our next meeting of the Readers is on October 19th at 5 pm when we will discuss American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. We will meet at the home of Bob Wrosch at 22801 Lakeshore Drive, St Clair Shores. Please RSVP to 313-310-8097.  

The Readers meet at Joe Schneider’s for the September book discussion

July 2021 Readers' Report

The Tsarina’s Lost Treasure tells the true story of the loss of the Dutch merchant ship Vrouw Maria off the rocky Finnish coast in 1771. The ship was carrying cargo from Amsterdam to St Petersburg, including a dozen Dutch masterpiece paintings to Europe’s most voracious collector: Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. The book also tells the story of Gerrit Dou, a Dutch Golden Age painter who began as a student of Rembrandt and eventually surpassed his teacher in fame and wealth. The final part of the story is the nearly 230-year search for the wreck of the Vrouw Maria and the controversy over what to do with it after its discovery in 1999.

Gerald Easter is the chair of the Political Science Department at Boston College where he focuses on Eastern Europe and Russia. Mara Vorhees, daughter of Men’s Club member Roy Vorhees, is a graduate of University Liggett School and after attending Georgetown University became a travel writer for publications such as Lonely Planet. Their extensive research for The Tsarina’s Lost Treasure involved interviews and travel to numerous locales including Holland, Finland and Russia. Their volume is filled with art and maritime history, tales of the Court of Catherine the Great, and a description of wreck hunting and diving in the frigid Baltic Sea. It moves between the 17th Century when Dou painted in Leiden, Holland, the 18th Century, when Catherine the Great sought to upgrade Russian culture by acquiring works of art and attracting leading European thinkers to her Court, the 19th Century when Dou’s reputation peaked and then faded, the 20th Century when the famous wreck was finally found, into this century, when the debate about if and how the wreck should be salvaged continues.

The Readers found The Tsarina’s Lost Treasure a challenging but rewarding read, and we learned much from its pages. We were honored to have the authors attend our meeting by Zoom and patiently answer our many questions. We were convinced by their argument that Gerrit Dou may have been the leading artist of the Dutch Golden Age, despite falling out of favor in later years. We also agreed that the conservative approach to the wreck taken by Finnish cultural preservation officials may be depriving scholars and art lovers of an opportunity to better understand our shared history.

Our next meeting of the Readers is on August 17th at 5 pm when we will discuss Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, winner of both the Orange Prize for Fiction and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. We will meet at the home of Patrick Reid at 412 Lothrop Rd, Grosse Pointe Farms. Please RSVP to 313-938-6567. 

May 2021 Readers' Report

Chris Whipple is a filmmaker, producer, journalist, writer, and political pundit. He helped produce 60 Minutes for CBS and Primetime for ABC, and in 2013 got a call to partner in making a documentary on presidential chiefs of staff. It was a four-hour film that aired on the Discovery Channel, but Whipple felt it only scratched the surface. For the book version published 2017, he interviewed 17 former chiefs and many of their colleagues, including two presidents, and produced a group portrait of White House chiefs from Richard Nixon’s tenure to Barack Obama’s. He came back in 2018 and added a chapter about the first two chiefs for Donald Trump. In 2020, Whipple published The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future, a volume based on his Showtime documentary.

The Gatekeepers opens with a description of a fascinating meeting at the White House between Rahm Emanuel, who is about to take the reins as President Obama’s first chief of staff, and all but two of the living former chiefs of staff. Despite their differences in party and approach, they form a kind of club, and they are more than willing to pass on what they have learned.

According to Whipple, it was H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, who created the model for the modern White House chief. It involved the staff system, similar to the military. “Nothing goes to the president that is not completely staffed out first, for accuracy and form, …reviewed by competent staff concerned with that area…” Haldeman also warned about “end running,” going to the president without going through the chief. The first job of the chief of staff is to control access to the president. Some presidents such as Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter rejected this model and used a “spokes of the wheel” system where everyone reported directly to the president. In most cases, this approach had to be scrapped after it became clear that it wasn’t working.

All of the Readers enjoyed this book, and we gave it a 4.5 out of 5 stars. We thought it was well written and well researched, and surprisingly nonpartisan. We enjoyed the anecdotes arising out of successful and the less successful chiefs of staff. It was clear that each successful chief was willing to say no to the president he served. He was also willing to repress his ego and let the important decisions be made by the president, not the staff.

An important skill of any chief was his ability to keep the first lady happy. With the average tenure of a White House chief averaging less than two years, the book had a good number of people to keep track of. Some chiefs, like James Baker, served more than one president. Dick Cheney started out as deputy chief of staff for Gerald Ford and then moved up after Donald Rumsfeld moved on. Cheney went on to serve in the House, as Secretary of Defense for George H. W. Bush and then Vice President for George W Bush. The Readers discussed how our view of him changed over time, especially after 9/11.

Our next meeting of the Readers is on June 15th at 5 pm when we will discuss Lives Laid Away (August Snow #2) by Stephen Mack Jones, a novel by a Detroit author set in Detroit.

If you would like to attend but you have not gotten a Zoom invitation, please call David Morrow at 313-640-9756. Feel free to attend whether or not you have read the book, as our conversations frequently wander to other topics.

March 2021 Readers' Report

Fareed Zakaria is a well-known journalist and best-selling author with a show on CNN and a column in the Washington Post. A graduate of Yale with a PhD from Harvard, Zakaria is known for his foreign policy expertise. Since 1997, he has written five books and edited another.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World was published in October of 2020 and was highly anticipated. It looks at the long-term economic, medical, and biological effects of the coronavirus. The New York Times said “…read ‘Ten Lessons.’ It is an intelligent, learned and judicious guide for a world already in the making.”

Rather than reviewing the controversies that made the headlines, Zakaria focuses on the broad lessons that we should take from the pandemic. For example, his analysis of countries that did well in controlling the coronavirus showed that it isn’t the quantity of government that matters, it is the quality. While some authoritarian regimes were effective in protecting their citizens, many democracies handled the pandemic effectively. As for the US, he writes, “For many decades, the world needed to learn from America. But now America needs to learn from the world. And what it most needs to learn about is government—not big or small but good government.” Another one of Zakaria’s lessons is that we should listen to the experts. In the US, asking citizens to follow expert advice can be resented by those who feel expert elites are holding all the power and are unable to connect with common people. So Zakaria also says the experts must listen to the people. The author discusses numerous other issues, such as the increasing importance of the digital economy and access to the internet, the acceleration of income inequality, and the dichotomy of the well-off being able to work from home during the pandemic while lower-wage employees take the risk of exposure to the virus without being compensated.  

The Readers enjoyed Ten Lessons and all of us gave it 5 stars. Some of the Readers noted that they would never have chosen to read such a book on their own, but they are glad they did. Although numerous complex subjects are addressed, the discussion was always clear and usually convincing. Unlike many contemporary writers on current issues, Zakaria has no partisan ax to grind. His sources are acknowledged and highly qualified. We particularly enjoyed his discussion of globalization in the world economy and the importance of the competition between China and the US. After looking at the many changes wrought by COVID-19, Zakaria concludes “We could turn inward and embrace nationalism and self-interest, or we could view this global pandemic as a spur to global cooperation and action.”

Our next meeting of the Readers is on April 20th at 5 pm when we will discuss The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. If you would like to attend but you have not gotten a Zoom invitation, please call David Morrow at 313-640-9756. Feel free to attend whether or not you have read the book, as our conversations frequently wander to other topics. 

January 2021 Readers' Report

Jeff Shaara, author of A Blaze of Glory: A Novel of the Battle of Shiloh (Civil War: 1861-1865, Western Theatre), did not plan on becoming a writer. A graduate of Florida State University, he had a career as a dealer in rare coins and precious metals when his father, Michael Shaara, died in 1988. Michael had won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1975 for his novel The Killer Angels, and it was adapted into the hit movie Gettysburg, released in 1993. Jeff was asked to administer his father’s estate and consider completing the Civil War trilogy his father had planned. Jeff’s first novel was Gods and Generals, the prequel to The Killer Angels, and it too became a bestseller and a movie. Jeff has now published sixteen works of historical fiction about America’s wars, all of which became best sellers. His latest about the Battle of Midway is due on June 1. Shaara has received the Boyd Award for Excellence in Military Fiction three times.

The Battle of Shiloh was fought in southwestern Tennessee on April 6 and 7, 1862, and was one of the major early engagements of the Civil War. After early disappointments in the East, the Union attempted to drive a wedge into the Confederacy in the West, meaning Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. After moving up the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers and capturing Forts Henry and Donelson, the Army of the Tennessee under U. S. Grant moved via the Tennessee River deep into Tennessee and was encamped principally at Pittsburg Landing. Their objective was a major rail junction in Corinth, Mississippi, defended by the Confederate Army of Mississippi under General Albert Sidney Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard. Johnston decided to launch a surprise attack on Grant’s army before Grant could be reinforced by Don Carlos Buell’s  Army of the Ohio. The Confederate attack went well on the first day until Johnston was killed and Beauregard decided his men were exhausted. After being reinforced overnight, Grant regained all the ground lost, resulting in a Union victory, but at a terrible cost.

The Readers enjoyed this novel and appreciated the author’s ability to bring history to life by creating dialogue and thoughts for the historical characters as well as a few fictional characters he used to illustrate the experience of the common soldier. He grounded these creations in extensive research of primary sources such as letters and journals. Almost all the Readers gave the book five stars despite its uncompromising descriptions of the horrors of Civil War combat.

Our next meeting of the Readers is on February 16th at 5 pm when we will discuss The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott, one of Time Magazine’s Top Ten books of 2017. We will probably be meeting online using Zoom. If you would like to attend but you have not gotten an email invitation, please call David Morrow at 313-640-9756.      

October 2020 Readers' Report

The Topeka School was acclaimed in The New York Times Book Review as “a high-water mark in recent American fiction” and called “the best book yet by the most talented writer of his generation” in The New York Times Magazine.

Like Adam Gordon, the protagonist in his novel, Lerner was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas and was a national champion in high school debate. Both of his parents were psychotherapists, his mother wrote a bestseller and appeared on Oprah, and his father made films and worked with troubled youth. Like Lerner, Adam writes poetry and becomes a college professor with two daughters. This sharing of biographical information between the author and the narrator is sometimes called “autofiction”, and by making the novel autobiographical attempts to make it true rather than invented. In addition to chapters narrated in the first person by Adam, there are chapters narrated by his father and mother that flesh out the family dynamic. But there are also italicized chapters narrated by Adam’s outcast classmate Darren. These chapters build toward a violent outburst that seems inevitable but also gives the novel some structure.

Lerner plays with time in his novel. He jumps from Adam’s senior year of high school in the 1990’s back to his youth and forward to the present, with stops to cover his parents and their history. In one of his mother’s chapters where she is telling Adam stories from his childhood, she says to him, “I bet you won’t put this in your novel,” before he does.

The book is short on dialogue but full of information on subjects from art to history, politics, psychology, debate, and more. This made it tough going for some of our Readers who questioned whether it was worth the effort. Others felt the rewards of the humor and the insights provided made up for the choppy narrative and the lack of a conventional plot. As a result, we rated this volume 3 out of 5 stars.

Our November meeting of the Readers is on the 17th at 5 pm when we will discuss Genius and Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947 by Norman Lebrecht.

Before then, on November 3rd at 5 pm, we will meet to choose our books for next year.

If you would like to attend either meeting but have not gotten an email Zoom invitation, please call David Morrow at 313-640-9756.

August 2020 Readers' Report

The readers group met via zoom on August 17 to discuss the August novel, The Dutch House, a work of fiction written by Ann Patchett. 

Beautifully drawn characters and how they influenced their lives make the story hum (servants in the mansion, random people that took an interest in them and provided them direction in the absence of parents, a not-so-nice stepmother who cuts them off financially and unceremoniously threw them out of the threw them out of the mansion in their late adolescence).

The readers found the book easy to read and engaging. All were enthusiastic and rated the book 4.5 or 5.0 (on a scale of 1 to 5). 

The next meeting of the readers will be on Tuesday September 15 at 5:00 using the Zoom app. The book for September is Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry. 

If you wish to join the group for scintillating discussion, request the zoom link from Dave Morrow: davidmorrow@comcast.net.

February 2020 Readers' Report

Our February book, The Survivor: A Novel Based on a True Holocaust Survivor by Marcel Moring, tells the story of Dr. Felix Zandman (1928-2011), who lived in Grodno in north-eastern Poland at the beginning of World War II. Grodno had a population of about 50,000, of which about half were Jewish. The Nazi’s herded them into two ghettos, but in late 1942, they liquidated the ghettos and sent all the Jews to concentration camps. A few escaped the roundup, including Zandman, then 14, his uncle and a couple who were friends of his uncle. They fled into the woods, reaching a summer cabin owned by his Felix’s grandmother but occupied by her former maid and her family. She took them in, first in an external potato cellar and then helping them dig a shallow pit below a bedroom. The pit was only wide enough for the four of them to lay side by side in the dark. A tube was led outside to provide some air, and the floorboards above were covered by some blankets and the bed. Once a day, the maid brought some bread, water and sometimes a potato, removed the slop bucket, and replaced the floorboards. Amazingly, they were able to survive for 17 months before the Russians drove the Germans out of the area in 1944. Felix eventually emigrated to France, graduated from university and obtained a PhD in physics from the Sorbonne. He worked as an electronics researcher for several companies in France and the US before founding his own company in the US in 1962. Today, Vishay Intertechnology has more than 22,000 workers around the world and a market capitalization of $3 billion.

The book is written in a series of short chapters, alternating between Felix’s life before the escape and his life after the war. The time in the pit is grim, but the occupants talk quietly, change positions every two hours, and try not to be overwhelmed by despair. Felix’s time after the war, in contrast, is a story of business success and prosperity, but accompanied by nightmares and an unwillingness to talk about the war. He kept in touch with the maid, her husband and the five children who lived in the cabin while four Jews hid in the pit, knowing that if the Germans ever found them both the Jews and the Catholic family that sheltered them would be shot or hung immediately. Felix had to deal with his desire to avenge the other 40 members of his extended family that were exterminated, but eventually he chose love and forgiveness. Late in his life, he nominated the maid and her husband for a place on Israel’s Righteous Among the Nations list of non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis.

The Readers found the book easy to read and of enough interest to continue reading to the end. The book was so simply written that several of us thought it was a Young Adult volume. We rated it 3 stars out of five, and might recommend it to those readers, especially younger readers, with an interest in the Holocaust.

Our next meeting of the Readers is on March 17th at 5 pm when we will discuss August Snow by Stephen Mack Jones, a recipient of the prestigious Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellowship. This crime novel is set in Detroit and Grosse Pointe and was called by the Wall Street Journal “[A] witty, mayhem-packed first novel.” We will meet at the home of Joe Schneider, 76 Lochmoor Blvd, Grosse Pointe Shores. RSVP to Joe at (313) 882-6156.