The Sunday Assembly Gainesville Book Club has chosen Battle for the Big Top by Wes Standiford as its December selection. The club will meet Saturday, Dec. 10 at 11 am via Zoom.

From GoodReads.com: 
Millions have sat under the “big top,” watching as trapeze artists glide and clowns entertain, but few know the captivating stories behind the men whose creativity, ingenuity, and determination created one of our country’s most beloved pastimes.

In Battle for the Big Top, New York Times–bestselling author Les Standiford brings to life a remarkable era when three circus kings—James Bailey, P. T. Barnum, and John Ringling—all vied for control of the vastly profitable and influential American Circus. Ultimately, the rivalry of these three men resulted in the creation of an institution that would surpass all intentions and, for 147 years, hold a nation spellbound.

​Interested in joining? Contact the club by email at [email protected]​.

The Sunday Assembly Gainesville Book Club has chosen "The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek”   by Howard Markel as its selection for October. The club will meet Saturday, Oct. 8 at 11:00 am via Zoom. 

Interested in joining? Contact the club via email at [email protected]. 

From GoodReads.com:
From the much admired medical historian ("Markel shows just how compelling the medical history can be"--Andrea Barrett) and author of An Anatomy of Addiction ("Absorbing, vivid"--Sherwin Nuland, The New York Times Book Review, front page)--the story of America's empire builders: John and Will Kellogg.

John Harvey Kellogg was one of America's most beloved physicians; a best-selling author, lecturer, and health-magazine publisher; founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium; and patron saint of the pursuit of wellness. His youngest brother, Will, was the founder of the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which revolutionized the mass production of food and what we eat for breakfast.

In The Kelloggs, Howard Markel tells the sweeping saga of these two extraordinary men, whose lifelong competition and enmity toward one another changed America's notion of health and wellness from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and who helped change the course of American medicine, nutrition, wellness, and diet.

The Sunday Assembly Gainesville Book Club has chosen In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick as its selection for August. The club will meet Saturday, August 13 at 11 am via Zoom. Interested in joining? Contact the club via email at [email protected].

From GoodReads.com:
In 1820, the whaleship Essex was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale, leaving the desperate crew to drift for more than ninety days in three tiny boats. Nathaniel Philbrick uses little-known documents and vivid details about the Nantucket whaling tradition to reveal the chilling facts of this infamous maritime disaster. In the Heart of the Sea—and now, its epic adaptation for the screen—will forever place the Essex tragedy in the American historical canon.

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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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.

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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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.

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 [email protected].