The Jane Austen Book club meets on February 13, at 6:00 pm in the MacIntyre Room in the Carnegie Building at 244 W. Michigan Ave.  We are reading Margaret Maron this year. She's a North Carolina native whose first novel, "Bootlegger's Daughter" won every major mystery award for best first novel. That book was the first to feature Deborah Knott, whose colorful Daddy was a bootlegger. Deborah is an attorney who decides to take a stand against "mean-minded judicial pettiness" and take on the Old Boy's Club by running for a retiring judge's seat.

The subtitle of the above book is Predators, Parasites and Partners That Shape Who We are Today and it proved irrestible to me.  The author is a professor in the biology department of North Carolina State University and has written extensively for magazines like National Geographic, Scientific American, Natural History, BBC Wildlife and Seed. 

The theme of the book is how we evolved in a world of parasites and predators that we have mostly eliminated in our environment, but our bodies are still ticking along with the internal systems we evolved

DVD's - Upcoming & Current Releases

February 2, 2012                                                                                         

    Recommended by a teacher, the book Dope sick is based in the realism found in many of the popular urban fiction titles. But Myers gives the nod to acclaimed South American writers Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez by adding magical realism to his usual NYC inner-city setting. It opens with a young man, Lil J, on the run from the police with a bullet in his arm. Then the book takes a detour into fantastic realms when Lil J runs into an abandoned building.