Book Clubs at Christ Church

Non Fiction Book Club

We will meet on Tuesday, May 19th at 3:00 pm to discuss Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel's Messiah by Charles King.  In Charles King’s Every Valley, the creation of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah is reimagined as a cinematic drama set against the turbulent backdrop of the early British Enlightenment. While the masterpiece is celebrated today as a work of triumphant joy, King reveals its origins within a society mired in war, enslavement, and political conspiracy. The narrative weaves together a diverse cast of struggling figures—including a depressive dissenter, a scorned actress, a captive African Muslim man, and a penniless philanthropist—whose lives intersect with a mid-career Handel as he battles ill health and fading fame. Ultimately, the book presents the Messiah not just as a musical feat, but as a hard-won beacon of hope emerging from an age of profound uncertainty.

We will take a break over the summer.

So our meeting will be on Tuesday, September 15th to discuss Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490 - 1700 by Diarmaid MacCullough.    The period between 1490 and 1700 was a time when men and women were willing to kill and be killed for their faith.  The Reformation was the most seismic event in European history over the past 1000 years, tearing the medieval world apart. It turned upside down not just European religion, but thought, culture, society, state systems, and personal relations—everything. Nearly everything that followed in European history can be traced back in some way to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation it provoked. The modern world painfully and dramatically began with the Reformation, and MacCulloch's great history of it is recognised as the best modern account.

While it is a very worthwhile, it is a long book (over 800 pages).  So the summer break will provide all of us with enough time to read it.

Our meetings are in hybrid format, with attendance both in person and by Zoom.  Details on Zoom access will be distributed prior to the meeting.

(jimbaroody@gmail.com).

Women's Book Club

Women’s Book Club 

Thursday, May 14 at 7:00 pm

The Women's Book Club will be discussing Master, Slave, Husband, Wife by Ilyon Woo at our next gathering May 14^th in the Fellowship Room and on Zoom and we hope you can join us.  "A rich narrative of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848, with light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white gentleman and William as her manservant, exploiting assumptions about race, class, and disability to hide in public on their journey to the North, where they became famous abolitionists while evading bounty hunters." --The Pulitzer Prizes

For more information please contact Pam Burch, pburch1@rochester.rr.com.