Laurentian Book Club

Participation is free! 

The Laurentian Book Club connects through a private forum where all participants can discuss the current book and network with each other.  Joining is completely free, you just have to get a copy of the book to enjoy. Don't forget to checkout your local library for a copy of each book! The Book Club will read one book every two months so that you'll have plenty of time for each book.

To login, or sign-up and create an online profile, please visit: https://www.pbc.guru/stlawu/ 

Current Book:

March 15 - May 3, 2024

American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World by David Baron

Book Synopsis: 

Longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing; Winner of the AIP Science Communication Award; An Amazon Best Book of the Year (Science); A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year; Finalist for the Colorado Book Award (Nonfiction); Booklist Editors’ Choice (Science & Technology).

This “suspenseful narrative history” (Maureen Corrigan, NPR) brings to life the momentous eclipse that enthralled a nation and thrust American science onto the world stage. On a scorching July afternoon in 1878, at the dawn of the Gilded Age, the moon’s shadow descended on the American West, darkening skies from Montana Territory to Texas. This rare celestial event―a total solar eclipse―offered a priceless opportunity to solve some of the solar system’s most enduring riddles, and it prompted a clutch of enterprising scientists to brave the wild frontier in a grueling race to the Rocky Mountains. Acclaimed science journalist David Baron, long fascinated by eclipses, re-creates this epic tale of ambition, failure, and glory in a narrative that reveals as much about the historical trajectory of a striving young nation as it does about those scant three minutes when the blue sky blackened and stars appeared in mid-afternoon.

Lauded as a “sweeping, compelling” (Wall Street Journal) work of science history, American Eclipse tells the story of the three tenacious and brilliant scientists who raced to Wyoming and Colorado to observe the rare event. Dedicating years of “exhaustive research to reconstruct a remarkable chapter of U.S. history” (Scientific American), award-winning writer David Baron brings to three-dimensional life these competitors―the planet-hunter James Craig Watson, pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell, and the ambitious young inventor Thomas Edison―to thrillingly re-create the fierce jockeying of nineteenth-century American astronomy. With spellbinding accounts of train robberies and Indian skirmishes, the mythologized age of the Wild West comes alive as never before. An “enthralling” (Daniel Kevles) and magnificent portrayal of America’s dawn as a scientific superpower, American Eclipse depicts a young nation that looked to the skies to reveal its towering ambition and expose its latent genius. (Synopsis Source: goodreads.com)

Next Book:

May - July, 2024

We Should Not Be Friends by Will Schwalbe

Questions?

Please contact our book club moderator, Jared, jared@pbc.guru and he will be happy to help!