 SAGA President Carol Willis was delighted to present Sarah Wingfield of St. Francis Pet Care with a donation on behalf of our assembly. SFPC's mission is to help people in our most vulnerable communities remain together with their pets so both can benefit from the human-animal bond.
Learn more about the clinic at their website.  The SAGA Book Club selection for April is The Guernsey Literary and PotPeel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. The club will meet on Saturday, April 9 at 11am via Zoom. Interested in joining the club? Email hennie_mo@bellsouth.net for further details.
From GoodReads.com: January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she's never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb... As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends—and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island—boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all.  The SAGA Book Club's selection for March is The Yellow Bird Sings by Jennifer Rosner. The club will meet Saturday, March 12 at 11:00am via Zoom.
Interested in joining? Email hennie_mo@bellsouth.net for more information. From GoodReads: Poland, 1941. After the Jews in their town are rounded up, Roza and her five-year-old daughter, Shira, spend day and night hidden in a farmer's barn. Forbidden from making a sound, only the yellow bird from her mother's stories can sing the melodies Shira composes in her head. Roza does all she can to take care of Shira and shield her from the horrors of the outside world. They play silent games and invent their own sign language. But then the day comes when their haven is no longer safe, and Roza must face an impossible choice: whether to keep her daughter close by her side, or give her the chance to survive by letting her go . . . The Yellow Bird Sings is a powerfully gripping and deeply moving novel about the unbreakable bond between parent and child and the triumph of humanity and hope in even the darkest circumstances. As a follow-up to his presentation during SAGA's January assembly, Michael Cohen has kindly provided access to a document with handy links for the Gainesville community. The document includes links for contacting your representatives, information about storage, and much more. The link is below. 
 The SAGA Book Club has chosen The Liars' Club by Mary Karr as its February selection. The club will meet on Saturday, Feb. 12 at 11am via Zoom.
From GoodReads: When it was published in 1995, Mary Karr's The Liars Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, as well as bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger's—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. Now with a new introduction that discusses her memoir's impact on her family, this unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as "funny, lively, and un-put-downable" (USA Today) today as it ever was. Interested in joining the SAGA book club? Email hennie_mo@bellsouth.net for more information.  The January selection for the SAGA Book Club is "The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts" by Joshua Hammer. The club will meet Saturday, Jan. 8 at 11:00 am via Zoom to discuss the book.
Interested in joining? Email hennie_mo@bellsouth.net for more information. From GoodReads.com: To save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven. In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world’s greatest and most brazen smugglers.  Our speaker from November's assembly, Dr. Paul Ortiz, has kindly agreed to share his presentation slides with us. Dr. Ortiz presented “Defending History: The Struggle to Tell Historical Truths in the United States" on Sunday, Nov. 21. The presentation slides are available at the link below.
 The Sunday Assembly Book Club selection for December is Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves by Frans de Waal. The club will meet to discuss the book Saturday, Dec. 11 at 11:00am via Zoom.
From GoodReads.com: Mama’s Last Hug is a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional lives of animals—beginning with Mama, a chimpanzee matriarch who formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff. Her story and others like it show that humans are not the only species with the capacity for love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, joy, disgust, and empathy, and open our hearts and minds to the many ways in which humans and other animals are connected. Interested in joining? For details, contact the book club via email at hennie_mo@bellsouth.net.  The SAGA Book Club has made its selection for November--Issac's Storm by Erik Larson. November's discussion will be Saturday, Nov. 13 at 11:00 am via Zoom. Interested in joining? Email hennie_mo@bellsouth.net for further details.
From the author's website: At the turn of the last century, Isaac Cline, chief weatherman for Texas, believed no storm could do serious harm to the city of Galveston, a fast growing metropolis on the Gulf Coast destined for great things. In September 1900 a massive hurricane proved him wrong, at great personal cost. The storm killed as many as 10,000 people in Galveston alone, stole the city’s future, and caused hurricane experts to revise their thinking about how hurricanes kill. The book won the American Meteorology Society’s prestigious Louis J. Battan Author’s Award. |
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