Book Club

Many thanks to all who participated last night and a big kuddos to Monique for hosting while 8 1/2 months pregnant and husband was out of town

Book Club Info for the next 3 months is as follows:

February 17th, 7:30, Michelle C's house, "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, discussion led by Melissa Spencer. If you've ever wanted to figure out how to improve your relations with your spouse, family, children, co-workers then this book will be a wealth of info for you. REQUEST: please come to book club prepared with a personal experience to lend itself to any of the advice he uses in the book. Personal experiences make book club so interesting and relevant.

March 24th, 7:30 ****NOTE this is 1 week later to account for spring break- adjust your schedules now and PLEASE DON"T GRIPE!!! SORRY FOR THE CHANGE!!!!
A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich at Darbie W's house, led by Debbie Wager See Wikipedia info on the novel below.
There are only 3 copies of this in the library but you can get them used from Amazon starting at $3 or new for $11. Looks very interesting. This is a longer book so don't procrastinate getting it and reading it NOW

April 21st, 7:30 NEED HOST AND DISCUSSION LEADER for The Hobbit by J.R. Tolkien (precursor to The Lord of the Rings series)


Wikipedia's info on "A Midwife's Tale"

For many years historians ignored Martha Ballard's diary, dismissed as repetitive and ordinary. After eight years of research, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich produced A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812:
"When I finally was able to connect Martha's work to her world, I could begin to create stories."
Ulrich's history is an intimate and densely imagined portrait of the industrious and reticent Martha Ballard, and provides a vivid examination of ordinary life in the early American republic, including the role of women in the household and local market economy, and the nature of marriage and sexual relations. Each chapter in A Midwife's Tale represents one aspect of the life of a woman in the late 18th Century. The overriding theme is the nature of women's work at that time, in the context and community. Supporting documents construct Ulrich's interpretation of terse and circumspect diary entries, dealing with medical practice and the prevalence of violence and crime.

In 1991, "A Midwife's Tale" received the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the John S. Dunning Prize, the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women's History, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, the Society for Historians of the Early Republic Book Prize, the William Henry Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the New England Historical Association Award. Later, the PBS series "The American Experience" developed "A Midwife's Tale" into a documentary film, for which Ulrich served as a consultant, script collaborator, and narrator