Nonfiction Book Discussion Group Meets at the Library

The Nonfiction Book Discussion meets once monthly, on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Hilton Garden Room. All are welcome! Whenever possible copies of each title are borrowed from New Hampshire libraries in advance. Books are available for check out with your PPL card.

July 21: Choose one of two!

An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny by Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski

According to an old Chinese proverb, there’s an invisible thread that connects two people who are destined to meet and influence each other’s lives. With Tresniowski (The Vendetta), Schroff tells how, as a busy advertising sales executive in New York, she easily passed panhandlers every day. One day, 11-year-old Maurice’s plea for spare change caused Schroff to turn around and offer to buy him lunch. Thereafter, Schroff and Maurice met for dinner each week and slowly shared their life stories.

AND/OR

In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving by Leigh Anne Tuohy and Sean Tuohy with Sally Jenkins

Those familiar with the film The Blind Side, or Michael Lewis’s best-selling book, will likely already know the inspiring story of how the Tuohys took future-NFL star Michael Oher into their home and adopted him. For anyone wondering what more there might be to say about it, the answer is: plenty. In a Heartbeat finds the Tuohys attempting to determine what it was that made them reach out to the homeless African-American boy they saw walking down the street in a t-shirt and shorts on a winter’s day.

Aug. 18: How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

In this fascinating book, Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From) presents a “history of ideas and innovation,” focusing on six important technical and scientific innovations that have shaped the modern world but that we often take for granted. The book reveals what Johnson calls “the hummingbird effect,” when “an innovation... in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.” We learn how Gutenberg’s press created a market for spectacles, which, in turn, led to the development of the microscope, the telescope, and the camera; how muckrakers were empowered by flash photography in the Progressive Era; and how the modern advertising business has roots in the germ theory of disease.

Sept. 15: Portsmouth Women: Madams & Matriarchs Who Shaped New Hampshire’s Port City edited by Laura Pope

In the history of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, countless women rose above a rigid society to make their marks on the seaport city. In the eighteenth century, Allice Shannon Hight became a successful tavern keeper, outliving two husbands and providing for ten children. Others flourished in more scandalous ventures, like Alta Roberts, otherwise known as the Black Mystery of Portsmouth--always donned in black, she operated a successful brothel at the Roberts House Saloon in the nineteenth century. Even greater achievements would come in later years from the likes of Mary Carey Dondero, who became one of the first women elected mayor in New England. This collection of essays, compiled by author and historian Laura Pope, celebrates the victories--large and small--of Portsmouth’s notable women.