iRead Book Club for Adults

iREAD BOOK CLUB FOR ADULTS Select Mondays at 1:00 pm CT

Join us for a virtual book club for adults led by Museum historians and educators.

10/5 – Rescuing the Children: A Holocaust Memoir by Vivette Samuel

Rescuing the Children is the memoir of Vivette Samuel, who at age 22 began working for the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE, or Society for Assistance to Children). The OSE and similar organizations saved thousands of Jewish children in France from deportation to Nazi concentration and extermination camps.

REGISTER HERE

11/2 – Neighbors by Jan Gross

On a summer day in 1941 in Nazi-occupied Poland, half of the town of Jedwabne brutally murdered the other half: 1,600 men, women, and children - all but seven of the town’s Jews. In this shocking and compelling study, historian Jan Gross pieces together eyewitness accounts as well as physical evidence into a comprehensive reconstruction of the horrific July day remembered well by locals but hidden to history. Gross’s investigation sheds light on how Jedwabne’s Jews came to be murdered - not by faceless Nazis, but by people who knew them well.

REGISTER HERE

12/7 – All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo. In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.