October Book Choices

Ok so anticipation that we WILL be able to find a date for Oct. here are my selections.
Just an fyi - the author of Rising Road will be speaking at Samford on October 14, which is how i came across that book.
When you vote, please say what date works best for you, Thursday October 7, or Friday or Saturday Oct 15-16.

Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America

by Sharon Davies

It was among the most notorious criminal cases of its day. On August 11,1921, in Birmingham, Alabama, a fiercely xenophobic Methodist minister named Edwin Stephenson shot and killed a Catholic priest, James Coyle, in broad daylight and in front of numerous witnesses. The killer's motive? The priest had married Stephenson's eighteen-year-old daughter Ruth to Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican migrant and practicing Catholic.

Having all but disappeared from historical memory, Sharon Davies's Rising Road resurrects the murder of Father Coyle and the trial of his killer. As Davies reveals with novelistic richness, Stephenson's crime laid bare the most potent bigotries of the age: a hatred not only of Negroes, but of Catholics and "foreigners" as well. In one of the case's most unexpected turns, the minister hired future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to lead his defense. Through registered later in life as a civil rights champion, in 1921 Black was just months away from donning the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, the secret order that financed Stephenson's defense. Entering a plea of temporary insanity, Black defended the minister on claims that the Catholics had robbed Ruth away from her true Protestant faith, and that her Puerto Rican husband was actually a Negro—an unparalleled attack on the dominant religious and racial hierarchies of the day—to persuade the jury to condone the priest's murder.

Placing the story in social and historical context, Davies brings this heinous crime and its aftermath back to life, in a brilliant and engrossing examination of the wages of prejudice and a trial that shook the nation at the height of Jim Crow.

You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr

Anne Rosenbaum leads a life of quiet Los Angeles privilege, the wife of Hollywood executive Howard Rosenbaum and mother of their 17-year old son, Sam. Years ago Anne and Howard met studying literature at Columbia - she, the daughter of a British diplomat from London, he a boy from an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. Now on sleek blue California evenings, Anne attends halogen-lit movie premiers on the arm of her powerful husband. But her private life is lived in the world of her garden, reading books.

When one of Howads friends, the head of a studio, asks Anne to make a reading list, she casually agrees - thoug, as a director reminds her, "no one reads in Hollywood." To her surprise, they begin calling: screen-writers, producers and agents. Anne finds herself leading an exclusive book club for the industry elite. Emerging gradually from her seclusion, she guides her readers into the ideas and beauties of Donne, Yeats, Auden, and Mamet, with her brilliant and increasingly bold opinions. But when a crisis of identity unexpectedly turns an anguished Howard back toward the Orthodoxy he left behind as a young man, Anne must set out to save what she values above all else: her husband's love.

At once fiercly intelligent and emotionally gripping, "You or Someone Like You" confronts the fault lines between inherited faith and personal creed, and, through surprising transformation of one exceptional, unforgettable woman, illuminates literature's power to change our lives.

The Alchemist, by Paul Coelho

Paul Coelho's enchanting novel has inspired a devoted following around the world. This story, dazzling in its powerful simplicity and inspiring wisdom, is about an Andalusion shepherd boy named Santiago who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of a treasure buried in the Pyramids. Along the way he meets a Gypsy woman, a man who calls himself king, and an alchemist, all of whom point Santiago in the direction of his quest. no one knows what the treasure is, or if Santiago will be able to surmount the obstacles along the way. But what starts out as a jorney to find worldly goods turns into a discovery of the treasures found within. Lush, evocative, and deeply humane, the story of Santiago is an eternal testament to the transforming power of our dreams and the importance of listening to our hearts.