July 2009

ELLIOTT BAY BOOK GROUP
Tuesday, July 7th at 6:30 p.m.
(first Tuesday of each month)

Each month, the Elliott Bay Book Club reads and discusses the best in contemporary fiction with the occasional classic thrown in for good measure. Our selection this month is Steven Galloway's The Cellist of Sarajevo. In a city ravaged by war, a defiant young musician decides to play his cello at the site of a mortar attack for twenty-two days, in memory of his fallen friends and neighbors. Drawn into the orbit of his music are three strangers, each living like fugitives in their homeland: a bakery worker, a young father, and finally, a woman—a sniper—who holds the fate of the cellist in her hands, even as her own fate becomes just as changeable with each passing day. The Chicago Sun-Times called the book, " A moving portrayal of the survival of the human spirit in times of conflict. [The cellist's] gesture ties the different strands to the book, involving three people who come to recognize both the futility of war and the insidious ways in which it threatens our shared humanity...Galloway gives us valulable insights into how compassion can blossom, unexpectedly, during mindless atrocities. The Cellist of Sarajevo is an accomplished, important work."

GLOBAL ISSUES & ETHICS BOOK GROUP
Tuesday, July 14th at 6:30 p.m.
(second Tuesday of each month)

Our Global Issues & Ethics Book Group is devoted to discussing books that cover the most relevant topics of our everyday lives. Our selection for July is Earth:The Sequel by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn. The forecasts are grim and time is running out, but that's not the end of the story. In this book, Fred Krupp, longtime president of Environmental Defense Fund, brings a stirring and hopeful call to arms: We can solve global warming. And in doing so, we will build the new industries, jobs, and fortunes of the twenty-first century.
In these pages readers will encounter the bold innovators and investors who are reinventing energy and the ways we use it. These entrepreneurs are poised to remake the world's biggest business and save the planet—if America's political leaders give them a fair chance to compete. Harvard Business Review said, "If you're worried that the world is heading toward climatic catastrophe, here's a book to lift your spirits...If only one-quarter of the projects were to reach commercial scale, the planet would have a bright future."

SPECULATIONS-SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY BOOK GROUP
Tuesday, July 21st at 6:30 p.m.
(third Tuesday of each month)

As the literature of ideas and imagination, Science Fiction and Fantasy simply demands discussion. Our selection for July is The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. The Earth's leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand—despite the fact that the fierce alien enemy they would oppose is inscrutable, unconquerable, and very far away. A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite military unit, Private William Mandella, has been propelled through space and time to fight in the distant thousand-year conflict; to perform his duties and do whatever it takes to survive the ordeal and return home. But "home" may be even more terrifying than battle, because, thanks to the time dilation caused by space travel, Mandella is aging months while the Earth he left behind is aging centuries... Jonathan Letham says, "There are a handful of moments when an American science fiction novel has abruptly and seemingly effortlessly satisfied every possible expectation conveyed not only by the genre's ambitions, but by the whole literary landscape with which it was contemporary: Sturgeon's More than Human, Dick's The Man in the High Castle, LeGuin's The Dispossessed, and Gibson's Neuromancer. The Forever War is one such book, and like those others, still carries with it that air of recognition and possibility."

STAGES - ELLIOTT BAY DRAMA BOOK CLUB
Tuesday, July 28th at 6:30 p.m.
(fourth Tuesday of each month)

Elliott Bay's Drama Book Group, Stages, meets once a month to read, enjoy and discuss great plays and dramatic works, contemporary and classic, from the U.S. and around the world. Our selection this month is Life After God by Michael Lewis MacLennan, adapted from the story by Douglas Coupland. This play is a lively, penetrating look at the first generation raised without religion. The play centers on the eccentric, sensitive Scout and six friends who went to school together, and how their lives unravel fifteen years later as they face the challenges and disillusionment of adulthood.