Book Chat March 25: Scouts

This is a true story of secret identities and international intrigue; it is the gripping account of the history making collusion between Hollywood and high-stakes espionage. It relates the true account of the 1979 rescue of six American hostages from Iran. On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran and captured dozens of American hostages, sparking a 444-day ordeal. But there is a little-known footnote to the crisis:...

Sides chronicles the history of the nineteenth-century Southwest, focusing on the destruction of the Navajo nation from the 1820s to the 1860s, and looking at the role of trapper, soldier, and scout Kit Carson in the removal and deaths of the Native Americans.

"On the eve of her daughter's wedding, June Reid's life is completely devastated when a shocking disaster takes the lives of her daughter, her daughter's fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend, Luke--her entire family, all gone in a moment. And June is the only survivor. Alone and directionless, June drives across the country, away from her small Connecticut town. In her wake, a community emerges, weaving a beautiful and surprising web of connections...

"What should be a cozy and fun-filled weekend deep in the English countryside takes a sinister turn in Ruth Ware's suspenseful, compulsive, and darkly twisted psychological thriller. Leonora, known to some as Lee and others as Nora, is a reclusive crime writer, unwilling to leave her "nest" of an apartment unless it is absolutely necessary. When a friend she hasn't seen or spoken to in years unexpectedly invites Nora to a weekend away in an eerie...

"When Lord Worplesdon needs a discreet location to conclude a business merger, Bertie and Jeeves are forced to help by taking a cottage in Steeple Bumpleigh. Unfortunately, mayhem ensues when Edwin, the unhelpful Boy Scout, burns down the cottage. Confronted with Florence Craye, Bertie's pushy ex-fiancée; P. D'Arcy 'Stilton' Cheesewright, Florence's burly current fiancé; and Aunt Agatha, who 'eats broken bottles and conducts human sacrifices by...

Little Bighorn and Custer are names synonymous in the American imagination with unmatched bravery and spectacular defeat. Mythologized as Custer's Last Stand, the June 1876 battle was also, even in victory, the last stand for the Sioux and Cheyenne Indian nations. The author sketches in details about the two larger-than-life antagonists: Sitting Bull, and George Armstrong Custer.

In this story of survival, Hugh Glass is an expert trapper and frontiersman. After being viciously mauled by a massive grizzly bear and abandoned and left for dead by his fellow trappers, Hugh is pushed to survive by one thing --revenge.

Assigned to locate land in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma that can be purchased and converted into pig farms for his employer, Bob Dollar meets the residents of Woolybucket and comes to respect their fierce desire to retain their land.

One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views...

West with the Night is the story of Beryl Markham--aviator, racehorse trainer, beauty--and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and '30s.