CBE Book Group

The CBE Book Group meets monthly from September through June. We take pride in the variety and caliber of our selections. In the past year (September 2011 - June 2012) the group has read the following books:

"Wolf Among Wolves" by Hans Fallada
"To the End of the Land" by David Grossman
"In the Country of Men" by Hisham Matar
"Out of Egypt" by Andre Aciman
"If this is a Man" by Primo Levi
"The Great House" by Nicole Krauss
"The Hare with Amber Eyes" by Edmund de Waal
"The Free World" by David Bezmozgis
"The Arrogant Years" by Lucette Lagnado
"In the Garden of Beasts" by Erik Larson
"The Invisible Bridge" by Julie Orringer
"Foreign Bodies" by Cynthia Ozick
"Scenes From Village Life" by Amos Oz
"The Yacoubian Building" by Alaa-Al-Aswany

March 18, 2013: "A Walker in the City" by Alfred Kazin
Set in the working-class Jewish community of Brownsville Brooklyn in the decade preceding the Great Depression, "this classic memoir of the first-generation American experience resonates universally. Kazin came to understand that the roots he had been so anxious to tear up were the source of his deepest identity. His loving portrait of his past acknowledges the crucial importance of belonging, even as it affirms the compelling necessity of escape."

April 22nd: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" by Nathan Englander
Eight new stories "grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction." The stories are "suffused with an intimacy and tenderness that break new ground for a writer who seems constantly to be expanding the parameters of what he can achieve in the short form."

May 20th: "The World Through the Eyes of Angels" by Mahmoud Saeed
Set in 1940s and 1950s Mosul, this partly autobiographical novel by Iraqi author Saeed, provides insights into the lives and cultures of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish characters, all of whom are friends of the main character, a young boy from Mosul, and his family.

June 24th: "Second Person Singular" by Sayed Kashua
The creator of the groundbreaking Israeli sitcom, “Arab Labor,” his new novel is considered internationally to be his most accomplished and entertaining work yet. An ambitious lawyer, considered one of the best Arab criminal attorneys in Jerusalem, with a thriving practice in the Jewish part of town and a beloved wife and children, picks up a copy of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata at a used bookstore, and inside finds a love letter, in Arabic, in his wife’s handwriting. Consumed with suspicion and jealousy, the lawyer hunts for the book’s previous owner—a man named Yonatan. "With enormous emotional power, and a keen sense of the absurd, a tale of love and betrayal, honesty and artifice," questioning whether it is possible to truly reinvent ourselves, Second Person Singular is a "deliciously complex psychological mystery and a searing dissection of the individuals that comprise a divided society."