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History Reads Book Club 2021 This book club, in partnership with the McLean County Museum of History, will focus on books about Illinois history. These may include fiction, nonfiction, biography, or books by local or other Illinois authors. History Reads meets quarterly in February, May, August, and November at 7pm in the Governor Fifer Courtroom** on the second floor of the Museum, with the exception of the November meeting, which will take place in the Library's Community Room.** We will be meeting virtually until further notice. Registration is required. Visit our events calendar to find upcoming meeting dates and registration links. Join us as we explore the richness of Illinois' history and its people. New participants are welcome at any time. Contact the Adult Services Desk at 309.590.6168 or reference@bloomingtonlibrary.org to reserve a print copy of the next title to be discussed. Digital copies of each title (eBook or eAudiobook) may be available through Overdrive/Libby or Hoopla. See below for details about the titles we'll discuss in 2021. |
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Lincoln in the Bardo : a novel
by George Saunders
A long-awaited first novel by the author of Tenth of December traces a night of solitary mourning and reflection as experienced by the 16th President after the death of his 11-year-old son at the dawn of the Civil War.
A #1 New York Times best-seller and winner of the Man Booker Prize.
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Ugly prey : an innocent woman and the death sentence that scandalized jazz age Chicago
by Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi
An Italian immigrant who spoke little English and struggled to scrape together a living on her primitive family farm outside Chicago, Sabella Nitti was arrested in 1923 for the murder of her missing husband. Within two months, she was found guilty and became the first woman ever sentenced to hang in Chicago. Journalist Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi leads readers through Sabella's sensational case, showing how, with no evidence and no witnesses, she was the target of an obsessed deputy sheriff and the victim of a faulty legal system. She was also--to the men who convicted her and the reporters fixated on her--ugly. For that unforgiveable crime, the media painted her as a hideous, dirty, and unpredictable immigrant, almost an animal. Lucchesi brings to life the sights and sounds of 1920s Chicago--its then-rural outskirts, downtown halls of power, and headline-making crimes and trials, including those of two other women (who would inspire the musical and film Chicago) also accused of killing the men in their lives. But Sabella's fellow inmates Beulah and Belva were beautiful, charmed the all-male juries, and were quickly acquitted, raising doubts among many Chicagoans about the fairness of the "poor ugly immigrant's" conviction. Featuring an ambitious and ruthless journalist who helped demonize Sabella through her reports, and the brilliant, beautiful, twenty-three-year-old lawyer who helped humanize her with a jailhouse makeover, Ugly Prey is not just a page-turning courtroom drama but also a thought-provoking look at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, class, and the American justice system.
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From slave to state legislator : John W. E. Thomas, Illinois' first African American lawmaker
by David A. Joens
David A. Joens traces Thomas’s trajectory from a slave owned by a doctor’s family in Alabama to a prominent attorney believed to be the wealthiest African American man in Chicago at the time of his death in 1899. Providing one of the few comprehensive looks at African Americans in Chicago during this period, Joens reveals how Thomas’s career represents both the opportunities available to African Americans in the postwar period and the limits still placed on them.
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