Pages Through the Ages is a book discussion group focused on both historical nonfiction and fiction. This month the group will discuss Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War.
Best-selling author Tony Horwitz tells the electrifying tale of the daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody war.
Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South. Now, Midnight Rising portrays Brown's uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict.
Horwitz's riveting book travels antebellum America to deliver both a taut historical drama and a telling portrait of a nation divided — a time that still resonates in ours.
All history buffs are welcome! Copies of the books are available at The Westport Library patron service desk or electronically.
History 101
History of the World
Pages Through the Ages is a book discussion group focused on both historical nonfiction and fiction. This month the group will discuss George Orwell's 1984.
Winston Smith toes the party line, rewriting history to satisfy the demands of the Ministry of Truth. With each lie he writes, Winston grows to hate the party that seeks power for its own sake and persecutes those who dare to commit thoughtcrimes. But as he starts to think for himself, Winston can’t escape the fact that Big Brother is always watching...
A startling and haunting novel, 1984 creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the novel’s hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions — a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.
All history buffs are welcome! Copies of the books are available at The Westport Library patron service desk or electronically.
History 101
History of the World
Pages Through the Ages is a book discussion group focused on both historical nonfiction and fiction. Celebrate William Shakespeare's 460th birthday by discussing Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson.
Bryson’s best-selling biography of William Shakespeare takes the reader on an enthralling tour through Elizabethan England and the eccentricities of Shakespearean scholarship — updated with a new introduction by the author to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.
Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. His Shakespeare is like no one else's — the beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivaled in our time.
All history buffs are welcome! Copies of the books are available at The Westport Library patron service desk or electronically.
History 101
History of the World
Pages Through the Ages is a book discussion group focused on both historical nonfiction and fiction. This month the group will discuss Adam Hochschild's American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis. A Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Chicago Tribune, Kirkus, and New York Post.
Legendary historian Adam Hochschild wrote a "masterly" (New York Times) reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring '20s, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor.
In American Midnight, award-winning historian Adam Hochschild brings alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. entry into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured country — and showing how their struggles still guide us today.
Read a review from the Los Angeles Review of Books.
All history buffs are welcome! Copies of the books are available at The Westport Library patron service desk or electronically.
History 101
History of the World
Pages Through the Ages is a book discussion group focused on both historical nonfiction and fiction. This month the group will discuss David Grann's The Wager.
The Wager is a mesmerizing story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court-martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.
RELATED: Watch: David Grann at The Westport Library
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.
All history buffs are welcome! Copies of the books are available at The Westport Library patron service desk or electronically.
History 101
History of the World
Pages Through the Ages is a book discussion group focused on both historical nonfiction and fiction. This month the group will discuss The Art Thief by Michael Finkel, this year's WestportREADS selection.
For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than 200 heists over nearly eight years — in museums and cathedrals all over Europe — Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.
In The Art Thief, Finkel brings us into Breitwieser’s strange and fascinating world. Unlike most thieves, Breitwieser never stole for money. Instead, he displayed all his treasures in a pair of secret rooms where he could admire them to his heart’s content. Possessed of a remarkable athleticism and an innate ability to circumvent practically any security system, Breitwieser managed to pull off a breathtaking number of audacious thefts. Yet these strange talents bred a growing disregard for risk and an addict’s need to score, leading Breitwieser to ignore his girlfriend’s pleas to stop — until one final act of hubris brought everything crashing down.
All history buffs are welcome! Copies of the books are available at The Westport Library patron service desk or electronically.
History 101
History of the World
Pages Through the Ages is a book discussion group focused on both historical nonfiction and fiction. This month the group will discuss How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr.
In How to Hide an Empire, Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the 19th century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress.
In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.
All history buffs are welcome! Copies of the books are available at The Westport Library patron service desk or electronically.
History 101
History of the World
Pages Through the Ages is a book discussion group focused on both historical nonfiction and fiction. This month the group will discuss Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts. “A thrilling tale of military and political genius… Roberts is an uncommonly gifted writer.” —The Washington Post
Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo. His battles are among the greatest in history, but Napoleon Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and astute leader of men. Like George Washington and his own hero Julius Caesar, he was one of the greatest soldier-statesmen of all times. Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon is the first one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon’s 33,000 letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine. Like Churchill, he understood the strategic importance of telling his own story, and his memoirs, dictated from exile on St. Helena, became the single best-selling book of the 19th century.
An award-winning historian, Roberts traveled to 53 of Napoleon’s 60 battle sites, discovered crucial new documents in archives, and even made the long trip by boat to St. Helena. He is as acute in his understanding of politics as he is of military history. Here at last is a biography worthy of its subject: magisterial, insightful, beautifully written, by one of our foremost historians.
Copies of the books are available at The Westport Library patron service desk or electronically.
History 101
History of the World
Pages Through the Ages is a book discussion group focused on both historical nonfiction and fiction. This month the group will discuss Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, which was a National Book Award finalist. This is your chance to read the book before it becomes a major motion picture!
Related: David Grann on 'The Wager' live at The Westport Library, June 22
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered.
As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
Copies of the books are available at The Westport Library patron service desk or electronically.
History 101
History of the World
Pages Through the Ages is a book discussion group focused on both historical non-fiction and fiction. This month the group will discuss the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. This is your chance to read the book before it becomes a major motion picture!
Copies of the books are available at The Westport Library patron service desk or electronically.
History 101
History of the World
Pages Through the Ages is a book discussion group focused on both historical non-fiction and fiction. This month the group will discuss And There Was Light by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham.
Copies of the books are available at The Westport Library patron service desk or electronically.
History 101
History of the World
