The Museum & Library is excited to offer two Book Club meetings for each 2016 book selection. Meetings will be held on Saturdays at 11am and Wednesdays at 12pm, in which those who work in the area may bring their own lunch to the Museum & Library. Most Book Club discussions are open to both members and non-members, and are free with the price of admission. Limited copies of each book up for discussion are made available for borrowing, and some can be checked out as e-books by our members. Unless otherwise noted, meetings of the PMML Book Club are led by one or more members of our staff, and authors are not in attendance. Please see below for dates and titles.
Wednesday, April 20 | 12 p.m.
Join us for the first 2016 Book Club selection, Patrick K. O'Donnell's Washington's Immortals. Our new week-day meeting, on Wednesday, April 20th at 12pm, invites patrons to bring their lunch for a lively discussion of O'Donnell's new Revolutionary War research. Learn more.
Saturday, April 23 | 11 a.m.
Join us for the Saturday discussion of Patrick K. O'Donnell's book on the an elite regiment that changed the course of the Revolutionary War, Washington's Immortals. Learn more.
Saturday, Oct. 17 | 11 a.m.
A cinematic recounting of World War I's final, bloody climax, bestselling author Joseph Persico's Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour puts the reader in the trenches with the forgotten and the famous, illuminating their fate as the end of the war approaches. Learn more.
Saturday, Nov. 7 | 10:30 a.m.
In a special, members-only meeting of the PMML Book Club, bestselling author and 2015 Pritzker Literature Award winner David Hackett Fischer joins us for a discussion of his greatest work. Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for history, Washington's Crossing is an impeccably researched, brilliantly executed history and analysis of George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River in December 1776, and the resulting destruction of the Hessian garrison at Trenton. Tickets for this event are required. Learn more.
Saturday, Sept. 19 | 11 a.m.
The nonfiction book that served as inspiration for the popular film, Robert Edsel's The Monuments Men traces the remarkable exploits of a group of museum curators and art historians tasked during World War II with preserving and safeguarding from war damage the world's great historic and cultural monuments.
Saturday, July 18, 2015
Join the PMML Book Club for a discussion of Hemingway's classic World War I novel, A Farewell to Arms—widely regarded among the greatest works of American literature on the subject. Inspired in part by his own experiences as an ambulance driver in Italy during the war, this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep.
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Join the PMML Book Club to discuss Ben Macintyre's book Double Cross, a captivating narrative of the spies who wove a web so intricate it ensnared Hitler’s army and carried thousands of D-Day troops across the Channel in safety.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
Join the May PMML Book Club as we visit a unique retelling of the Custer saga and its aftermath—from a medical perspective- in Joan Nabseth Stevenson's Deliverance from the Little Big Horn.
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Join the PMML Book club this April as we will read the first ever biography of a Purple Heart award-winning horse, Reckless, who served with the United States Marine Corps in the Korean War.
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Join the PMML Book Club for a discussion of James McBride's historical novel, The Good Lord Bird — winner of the 2013 National Book Award for fiction. An absorbing mixture of history and imagination, and told with McBride’s meticulous eye for detail and character, The Good Lord Bird is both a rousing adventure and a moving exploration of identity and survival.
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Join the PMML Book Club for a small-group discussion of Chris Kyle's American Sniper, following Kyle's incredible journey from his youth in Texas to becoming one of the most famed snipers in history. Recently adapted into a motion picture by director Clint Eastwood.
Saturday, January 17, 2015
The subject of the first PMML Book Club meeting of 2015 is Laura Hillenbrand's #1 best-seller, Unbroken—the inspiring true story of a World War II officer who survived a series of catastrophes almost too incredible to be believed. Now a major motion picture.
In a special meeting of the PMML Book Club, 2014 Pritzker Literature Award recipient Antony Beevor joins us for a discussion of one of his finest works. An extraordinary story of tactical genius, civilian bravery, obsession, carnage and the nature of war itself, Stalingrad has been hailed by historians as the definitive account of World War II's most harrowing battle. Tickets for this event are required.
For two torrid weeks in September 1918, Frank Luke Jr. was the deadliest man on the Western Front, shooting down 14 heavily defended German observation balloons and four airplanes on his way to becoming America's leading flying ace and the first airman to be awarded the Medal of Honor.
As a Rhodes Scholar and Navy SEAL, Eric Greitens worked alongside volunteers who taught art to street children in Bolivia and led U.S. Marines who hunted terrorists in Iraq. He’s learned from nuns who fed the destitute in one of Mother Teresa’s homes for the dying in India, from aid workers who healed orphaned children in Rwanda, and from Navy SEALs who fought in Afghanistan. He excelled at the hardest military training in the world, and today he works with severely wounded and disabled veterans who are rebuilding their lives as community leaders at home.
Based on remarkable new research, acclaimed historian Alexander Rose brings to life the true story of the spy ring that helped America win the Revolutionary War. For the first time, Rose takes us beyond the battlefront and deep into the shadowy underworld of double agents and triple crosses, covert operations and code breaking, and unmasks the courageous, flawed men who inhabited this wilderness of mirrors—including the spymaster at the heart of it all.
In a special meeting of our Book Club, award-winning author Tim O'Brien visited the Museum & Library to lead a small-group discussion of his novel about Vietnam.
The Museum & Library's Book Club discussed Pulitzer-Prize winning author Rick Atkinson's The Guns at Last Light, the final installment in his WWII Liberation Trilogy.
In this riveting autobiography, World War II veteran and U.S. Marine Robert Leckie chronicles his wartime experiences—from basic training at Parris Island, SC to his deployment and service with the 1st Marine Division on the war's Pacific Front.
Based on the remarkable true story of a freed African American slave who returned to Virginia at the onset of the Civil War to spy on the Confederates,The Secrets of Mary Bowser is a historical novel celebrating the courageous achievements of a little known but truly inspirational American heroine.
.
From Pritzker Literature Award winner Max Hastings—one of the world's finest military historians—Inferno is a monumental work that shows us at once the truly global reach of World War II and its deeply personal consequences.
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Join the PMML Book Club for a discussion of Philip Keith's award-winning Blackhorse Riders—the incredible true story of a brave military unit in Vietnam that risked everything to rescue an outnumbered troop under heavy fire, and the 39-year odyssey to recognize their heroics.
