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Wednesday, Jan 29 | 6:30 pm
The Big House by George Howe Colt
Colt offers a wonderfully tender yet frank history of his Boston Brahmin family and the 19-room Cape Cod summer house that brought them together for five generations. A powerful symbol of a vanishing way of life.
Wednesday, Feb 26 | 6:30 pm
Bread & Roses (Mills, migrants, and the struggle for the American dream) by Bruce Watson
The 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, was a watershed moment in labor history. Veteran journalist Bruce Watson provides a long-overdue account of the strike that began when textile workers stormed out of the mills in Lawrence on a frigid January day.
Wednesday, March 26 | 6:30 pm
Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Stephen Puleo
On January 15, 1919, a 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses. It demolished wooden homes, even the brick fire station. The number of dead wasn't known for days.
Wednesday, April 23 | 6:30 pm
The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute
A novel based on the lives of an oversized, impoverished family living in the rural area of Egypt, Maine, Chute introduces us to a life we may not want to face. How can there be people who are forced to live like the Beans in the United States during the late 20th century?
Wednesday, May 28 | 6:30 pm
The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea by Sebastian Junger
There is a wealth of information here about the practice and business of fishing and about weather, sea, and people, but Junger shapes it all with an almost novelistic sense of pace and timing. Rarely are works of nonfiction so deeply affecting.