The MAC Book Club 2023 Reading List Continues

Thursday, Feb. 9 F 5:30 p.m. F West Clubhouse

Wednesday, March 8 F 6 p.m. F Downtown Clubhouse

On Thursday, Feb. 9, Cathy Beckette leads a discussion of Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel by Bonnie Garmus. Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. But it’s the early 1960s, and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans, the lonely, brilliant, Nobel Prize-nominated grudgeholder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results. Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and vibrant as its protagonist.

On Wednesday, March 8, John Salter guides us through a discussion of State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny.

After a tumultuous period in American politics, a new administration has just been sworn in. To everyone’s surprise, the president chooses a political enemy for the vital position of secretary of state.

There is no love lost between the president of the United States and Ellen Adams, his new secretary of state. With this appointment, he silences one of his harshest critics, since taking the job means Adams must step down as head of her multinational media conglomerate.

State of Terror is a unique and utterly compelling international thriller co-written by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 67th secretary of state, and Louise Penny, a multiple award-winning #1 New York Times bestselling novelist. For reservations, email Dr. Genie McKee, Book Club Chair, at evmckee@gmail.com.

MHC Welcomes Author Peter Shinkle

Tuesday, Feb. 7 F 11:30 a.m. F West Clubhouse

Tuesday, Feb. 28 F 12 p.m. F Downtown Clubhouse

St. Louis native and former PostDispatch reporter Peter Shinkle will visit both MAC Clubhouses in February. He will discuss the subject of his new book, Uniting America: How FDR and Henry Stimson Brought Democrats and Republicans Together to Win World War II.

As Adolf Hitler’s Nazi armies threatened Europe, Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt urged a divided America to mobilize to defend democracy and freedom. On June 20, 1940, FDR shocked the country by announcing that two prominent Republicans would take posts in his cabinet. Henry Stimson, former President Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state, became secretary of war, and Frank Knox, the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 1936, became secretary of the navy.

Uniting America is the first book to paint a complete portrait of this extraordinary collaboration, as Shinkle reveals the true extent of bipartisanship during the war.