The Double Meaning of Athena's Life

It was a great reunion to talk about Athena and how we learned about her life through different people's perspective.

We saw Athena as a person like anyone else, with flaws and insecurities, and looking for what her life's mission is. Through the stories of others who knew her, we see that she has made a difference already, without being aware of it.

We are all curious about certain parts of her life that we never get to learn about, such as her love life and the mystery of this boyfriend from Scotland Yards. If anything, what Athena has taught us is whether we do have the courage to be who we are, no matter how against this might be to the status quo. Are we brave enough to follow our own destiny.

A Spiritual Beginning for 2009

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

We're starting our book club in 2009 with a more light, spiritual-oriented book: The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coehlo.

Here's a book summary:

Best-selling fabulist Coelho continues to transform his trademark combination of mysticism and storytelling into spellbinding examinations of the human soul. In this deceptively simple novel, a bereaved lover attempts to chronicle, dissect, and comprehend the often-twisted path followed by Athena, otherwise known as the Witch of Portobello Road.

An orphaned Romanian gypsy, adopted as an infant by adoring Lebanese parents, Athena recognized and struggled with the power of her magical gifts at an early age. Spurred on by truths and passions inaccessible to most of her contemporaries, she traipsed around Europe and the Middle East in search of acceptance, enlightenment, and a truer path. Developing a cultlike following, she became the object of a modern-day witch hunt that seemingly culminated in tragedy.

Please join us on Sunday January 11 at 2pm at a local coffeeshop (Cup & Cake Cafe in Inner Richmond) in San Francisco for an inspiritional discussion!

Remember: you get a 15% discount at BookSmith, when you purchase your book and say you're a WOW Book Club member* - Support your local bookstore!

Getting to know Julia Alvarez

Hi everyone!

If you would like to listen to a great presentation of Julia Alvarez on her book "Saving the World" I recommend listening to a program that Julia Alvarez did for New York Pulic Library, found at http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/pep/pepdesc.cfm?id=2674

Also, the owner of our partner bookstore, BookSmith, interviewed Julia Alvarez last year last year as part of their LitMinds literary innovators interviews and shared us this link to enjoy reading the interview...http://litminds.org/blog/2007/08/julia_alvarez_talks_about_stor.html

Happy Reading and Listening!

How do we save the world?

This was a wonderful discussion to end our last book club event of 2008!

This book provided a unique format to sharing two stories in one and we each shared which story attracted us more, Alma (the Dominican woman living in Vermont circa early 2000s) or Isabel (the Spanish rectoress who accompanied the orphaned children to the "New World" who were live carriers for the smallpox vaccine in the early 19th century).

We found parallels between the women as well as the male characters in both stories, where saving the world can be seen is different ways. It seems that with Alma and Isabel, saving the world started within themselves by figuring out their own life path and their own personal contribution to life in general. Whereas with the male charaters, Richard and Don Francisco, they are working towards saving the world, but does the ego and arrogance blinds them to forget the well intentions of doing something good in this world?

It was a great discussion and looking forward to more of them next year!

Title of Hope - Saving the World

We are at the end of 2008 and we'll have our final book discussion on Julia Alvarez's fifth novel: Saving the World (a loaded title, of course).
Here's a summary of her book:
In Alvarez's novel, two women living two centuries apart each face "a crisis of the soul" when their fates are tied to idealistic men whose commitments to medical humanitarian missions end in disillusionment.

Alma Heubner's husband, Richard, goes to the Dominican Republic to help eradicate AIDS, while Alma, a bestselling Latina writer, stays at home in Vermont to work on a story about a real, ill-fated 19th-century expedition chaperoned by Dona Isabel Sendales y Gomez, the spinster director of a Spanish orphanage who agrees to vaccinate 20 of her charges with cowpox and bring them from Spain to Central America to prevent future smallpox epidemics. While the leader of the anti-smallpox expedition, Dr. Francisco Balmis, and Richard see their missions collapse in defeat, Dona Isabel and Alma surmount their personal depressions to find inner strength.

Join us for another great conversation on Sun Dec 14th at 2pm in the Mission District, near 24th Street BART.

The discussion of continual enlightment

It was the story of Wangari Maathai's journey from rural Kenya to becoming a worldwide environmental leader trying to give Kenya and the world a secured sustainable future.

We started with an analysis of her memoir and how more factual than emotional it felt, and was this done on purpose or subconsciously?

We were quite intrigued by her divorce in so many ways: who was this man she married? who would have she become had she not divorced? as well as how discriminated she was for being divorced.

What about her role of mother? We felt her baby was the Green Belt Movement and not so much her children, but we're not exactly sure.

We couldn't stop talking about this book, and there was more to discuss had we not already gone over 2 hours of conversation! I think we all left the discussion with a feeling of inspiration and activism.

Who is Wangari Maathai and why did she win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004?

Read our next book written by 2004 Nobel Peace Price winner from Kenya, Wangari Maathai, who wrote her memoir "Unbowed" about her life and the starting of the Green Belt movement.

Here's a summary of the book:
Born in 1940, Matthai attended primary school at a time when Kenyan girls were not educated; went on to earn a Ph.D. and became head of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy at the University of Nairobi before founding Kenya's Green Belt Movement in 1977, which mobilized thousands of women to plant trees in an effort to restore the country's indigenous forests.

Because Kenya's environmental degradation was largely due to the policies of a corrupt government, she then made the Green Belt Movement part of a broader campaign for democracy. Maathai endured personal attacks by the ruling powers-President Moi denounced her as a "wayward" woman-and engaged in political activities that landed her in jail several times. This memoir (after The Green Belt Movement) documents the remarkable achievements of an influential environmentalist and activist.

Come and join us on our book club discussion on Sunday November 2nd at 2pm in the North Beach district at Cafe Greco (423 Columbus Avenue).

November 2nd is daylight savings day so please take this into account when coming to the book club.