Book Choices - May 2016

Our next meeting will be on Thursday 19^th May 2016 at 8pm in The Hundred of Ashendon when we will be discussing The Help by Kathryn Stockett. 

Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Chang

A first-hand account of China's cultural revolution. Nien Cheng, an anglophile and fluent English-speaker who worked for Shell in Shanghai under Mao, was put under house arrest by Red Guards in 1966 and subsequently jailed. All attempts to make her confess to the charges of being a British spy failed; all efforts to indoctrinate her were met by a steadfast and fearless refusal to accept the terms offered by her interrogators. When she was released from prison she was told that her daughter had committed suicide. In fact Meiping had been beaten to death by Maoist revolutionaries

Clochemerle by Gabriel Chevallier 

Gabriel Chevallier's delightful novel Clochemerle satirizes the titanic confrontation of secular and religious forces in a small wine-growing village in Beaujolais. The eruption begins when the socialist mayor decides that he wants to leave behind a monument to his administration's achievements. He takes as his model the ancient Romans, who were famous for two things: hygiene and noble edifices. Thus, he decides to unite the two concepts...by constructing a public urinal in the centre of town. There is one problem, however. The chosen locale is next to the village church, and this outrages the ecclesiastical party.

Alternative/Optional Follow on: Clochemerle-Babylon

Ignorant of the outside world, the Clochemerlins had only one wish, to sell their wine and to sell it at a fair price. Was that an unreasonable demand? The thing to do was to find out what the big shots, those in power, had to say about it. Not being in office, the Opposition parties were ready to promise you the earth. They could offer to share out the moon in slices, it cost them nothing. The Socialist theory, founded on equal shares in all wealth, attracted numerous Clochemerlins. Not that they were disposed to share what they had. On the contrary they hoped, when the great share-out took place, to receive more from those who had more than themselves.

 

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

1918, the closing months of the war. Army psychiatrist William Rivers is increasingly concerned for the men who have been in his care - particularly Billy Prior, who is about to return to combat in France with young poet Wilfred Owen. As Rivers tries to make sense of what, if anything, he has done to help these injured men, Prior and Owen await the final battles in a war that has decimated a generation ... The Ghost Road is the Booker Prize-winning account of the devastating final months of the First World War.