We had a small, but happy meeting yesterday.
Liz made some sort of delicious cashews - which we all enjoyed. The
discussion was good because of the things we learned about that small time
period in American history. None of us were overly fond of the book, the
ratings ranged from a low of 1.5 to a high of 3.5. The reason for the low
ratings on the book was not because we didn't enjoy the information
presented. It was because the way the information was presented was 1)
more academic/drier than what we expected, and 2) the book was missing the
relationship piece of the story - which we all would have enjoyed. We
wanted to know more of the connections between the players, feel their story was
more personal. I will leave you with this question/discussion topic that
the author posed in an on-line book-talk I listened to.
He said -
A republic depends on the value of its ideas to succeed.
An empire depends on the power of its arms to succeed.
While we may consider ourselves a "republic", the rest of the world
considers us an "empire". Are our actions in the world today similar to
England's in 1776? Our core values are in conflict with us being an
imperial power. Our original intent was not to succeed by the power of our
arms. Joseph Ellis believes that our country should at least have this
discussion.
Our November book is November: A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers
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