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These Precious Days: Essays

Nonfiction Book Club: Wednesday, December 11, 2024
“Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart.
At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores “what it means to be seen, to find someone with whom you can be your best and most complete self.” When Patchett chose an early galley of actor and producer Tom Hanks’ short story collection to read one night before bed, she had no idea that this single choice would be life changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman—Tom’s brilliant assistant Sooki—with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both.
A literary alchemist, Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: engaging and moving pieces that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. Turning her writer’s eye on her own experiences, she transforms the private into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew, and reminds how fleeting and enigmatic life can be.
From the enchantments of Kate DiCamillo’s children’s books (author of The Beatryce Prophecy) to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Infused with the author’s grace, wit, and warmth, the pieces in These Precious Days resonate deep in the soul, leaving an indelible mark—and demonstrate why Ann Patchett is one of the most celebrated writers of our time.
Join us Wednesday, December 11, 2024, at Southbury Parks and Recreation Department from 10:00am - 11:00am!
Registration is requested, not required. Nonfiction Book Club selections may change. Final selections will weigh your feedback, book availability, and genre balance. Any changes made will be announced at book club meetings, in our newsletter, and on the library's website.
New members are always welcome to the Nonfiction Book Club! Please sign up so we know how many people to expect and to receive event updates! For more information call the Reference Desk at 203-262-0626 ext. 2.
Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America

Nonfiction Book Club: Wednesday, January 8, 2025
An intimate and revelatory dive into the world of the beaver—the wonderfully weird rodent that has surprisingly shaped American history and may save its ecological future.
From award-winning writer Leila Philip, Beaverland is a masterful work of narrative science writing, a book that highlights, though history and contemporary storytelling, how this weird rodent plays an oversized role in American history and its future. She follows fur trappers who lead her through waist high water, fur traders and fur auctioneers, as well as wildlife managers, PETA activists, Native American environmental vigilantes, scientists, engineers, and the colorful group of activists known as beaver believers.

Beginning with the early trans-Atlantic trade in North America, Leila Philip traces the beaver’s profound influence on our nation’s early economy and feverish western expansion, its first corporations and multi-millionaires. In her pursuit of this weird and wonderful animal, she introduces us to people whose lives are devoted to the beaver, including a Harvard scientist from the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, who uses drones to create 3-dimensional images of beaver dams; and an environmental restoration consultant in the Chesapeake whose nickname is the “beaver whisperer”.

What emerges is a poignant personal narrative, a startling portrait of the secretive world of the contemporary fur trade, and an engrossing ecological and historical investigation of these heroic animals who, once trapped to the point of extinction, have returned to the landscape as one of the greatest conservation stories of the 20th century. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, Beaverland reveals the profound ways in which one odd creature and the trade surrounding it has shaped history, culture, and our environment.
Join us Wednesday, January 8, 2025, at Southbury Parks and Recreation Department from 10:00am - 11:00am!
Registration is requested, not required. Nonfiction Book Club selections may change. Final selections will weigh your feedback, book availability, and genre balance. Any changes made will be announced at book club meetings, in our newsletter, and on the library's website.
New members are always welcome to the Nonfiction Book Club! Please sign up so we know how many people to expect and to receive event updates! For more information call the Reference Desk at 203-262-0626 ext. 2.
Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House

Nonfiction Book Club: Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Former presidents have an unusual place in American life. King George III believed that George Washington’s departure after two terms made him “the greatest character of the age.” But Alexander Hamilton worried former presidents might “[wander] among the people like ghosts.” They were both right.
Life After Power tells the stories of seven former presidents, from the Founding to today. Each changed history. Each offered lessons about how to decide what to do in the next chapter of life.
Thomas Jefferson was the first former president to accomplish great things after the White House, shaping public debates and founding the University of Virginia, an accomplishment he included on his tombstone, unlike his presidency. John Quincy Adams served in Congress and became a leading abolitionist, passing the torch to Abraham Lincoln. Grover Cleveland was the only president in American history to serve a nonconsecutive term. William Howard Taft became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Herbert Hoover shaped the modern conservative movement, led relief efforts after World War II, reorganized the executive branch, and reconciled John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter had the longest post-presidency in American history, advancing humanitarian causes, human rights, and peace. George W. Bush made a clean break from politics, bringing back George Washington’s precedent, and reminding the public that the institution of the presidency is bigger than any person.
Jared Cohen explores the untold stories in the final chapters of these presidents’ lives, offering a gripping and illuminating account of how they went from President of the United States one day, to ordinary citizens the next. He tells how they handled very human problems of ego, finances, and questions about their legacy and mortality. He shows how these men made history after they left the White House.
Join us Wednesday, February 12, 2025, at Southbury Parks and Recreation Department from 10:00am - 11:00am!
Registration is requested, not required. Nonfiction Book Club selections may change. Final selections will weigh your feedback, book availability, and genre balance. Any changes made will be announced at book club meetings, in our newsletter, and on the library's website.
New members are always welcome to the Nonfiction Book Club! Please sign up so we know how many people to expect and to receive event updates! For more information call the Reference Desk at 203-262-0626 ext. 2.
Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine

Nonfiction Book Club: Wednesday, March 12, 2025
In the early 1800s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and even painful. In addition, women faced stigma from illness—a diagnosis could greatly limit their ability to find husbands, jobs or be received in polite society.
Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman’s place in the male-dominated medical field. For the first time ever, Women in White Coats tells the complete history of these three pioneering women who, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same. Though very different in personality and circumstance, together these women built women-run hospitals and teaching colleges—creating for the first time medical care for women by women.
With gripping storytelling based on extensive research and access to archival documents, Women in White Coats tells the courageous history these women made by becoming doctors, detailing the boundaries they broke of gender and science to reshape how we receive medical care today.
Join us Wednesday, March 12, 2025, at Southbury Parks and Recreation Department from 10:00am - 11:00am!
Registration is requested, not required. Nonfiction Book Club selections may change. Final selections will weigh your feedback, book availability, and genre balance. Any changes made will be announced at book club meetings, in our newsletter, and on the library's website.
New members are always welcome to the Nonfiction Book Club! Please sign up so we know how many people to expect and to receive event updates! For more information call the Reference Desk at 203-262-0626 ext. 2.
Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided

Nonfiction Book Club: Wednesday, April 9, 2025
The “shocking” (The Wall Street Journal), must-read story of Charlie Chaplin’s years of exile from the United States during the postwar Red Scare, and how it ruined his film career, from bestselling biographer Scott Eyman.
Bestselling Hollywood biographer and film historian Scott Eyman tells the story of Charlie Chaplin’s fall from grace. In the aftermath of World War II, Chaplin was criticized for being politically liberal and internationalist in outlook. He had never become a US citizen, something that would be held against him as xenophobia set in when the postwar Red Scare took hold.
Politics aside, Chaplin had another problem: his sexual interest in young women. He had been married three times and had had numerous affairs. In the 1940s, he was the subject of a paternity suit, which he lost, despite blood tests that proved he was not the father. His sexuality became a convenient way for those who opposed his politics to condemn him. Refused permission to return to the US after a trip abroad, he settled in Switzerland and made his last two films in London.
In Charlie Chaplin vs. America, Scott Eyman explores the life and times of the movie genius who brought us such masterpieces as City Lights and Modern Times. “One of the finest surveys of the man and the artist ever written” (Leonard Maltin) this book is “a sobering account of cancel culture in action.” (The Economist).
Join us Wednesday, April 9, 2025, at Southbury Parks and Recreation Department from 10:00am - 11:00am!
Registration is requested, not required. Nonfiction Book Club selections may change. Final selections will weigh your feedback, book availability, and genre balance. Any changes made will be announced at book club meetings, in our newsletter, and on the library's website.
New members are always welcome to the Nonfiction Book Club! Please sign up so we know how many people to expect and to receive event updates! For more information call the Reference Desk at 203-262-0626 ext. 2.
Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming

Nonfiction Book Club: Wednesday, May 14, 2025
As the only child of a single mother in Queens, Ava Chin found her family’s origins to be shrouded in mystery. She had never met her father, and her grandparents’ stories didn’t match the history she read at school. Mott Street traces Chin’s quest to understand her Chinese American family’s story. Over decades of painstaking research, she finds not only her father but also the building that provided a refuge for them all.
Breaking the silence surrounding her family’s past meant confronting the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first federal law to restrict immigration by race and nationality, barring Chinese immigrants from citizenship for six decades. Chin traces the story of the pioneering family members who emigrated from the Pearl River Delta, crossing an ocean to make their way in the American West of the mid-nineteenth century. She tells of their backbreaking work on the transcontinental railroad and of the brutal racism of frontier towns, then follows their paths to New York City.
In New York’s Chinatown she discovers a single building on Mott Street where so many of her ancestors would live, begin families, and craft new identities. She follows the men and women who became merchants, “paper son” refugees, activists, and heads of the Chinese tong, piecing together how they bore and resisted the weight of the Exclusion laws. She soon realizes that exclusion is not simply a political condition but also a personal one.
Gorgeously written, deeply researched, and tremendously resonant, Mott Street uncovers a legacy of exclusion and resilience that speaks to the American experience, past and present.
Join us Wednesday, May 14, 2025, at Southbury Parks and Recreation Department from 10:00am - 11:00am!
Registration is requested, not required. Nonfiction Book Club selections may change. Final selections will weigh your feedback, book availability, and genre balance. Any changes made will be announced at book club meetings, in our newsletter, and on the library's website.
New members are always welcome to the Nonfiction Book Club! Please sign up so we know how many people to expect and to receive event updates! For more information call the Reference Desk at 203-262-0626 ext. 2.
What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds

Nonfiction Book Club: Wednesday, June 11, 2025
From the author of The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way, a brilliant scientific investigation into owls—the most elusive of birds—and why they exert such a hold on human imagination
With their forward gaze and quiet flight, owls are often a symbol of wisdom, knowledge, and foresight. But what does an owl really know? And what do we really know about owls? Some two hundred sixty species of owls exist today, and they reside on every continent except Antarctica, but they are far more difficult to find and study than other birds because they are cryptic, camouflaged, and mostly active at night. Though human fascination with owls goes back centuries, scientists have only recently begun to understand the complex nature of these extraordinary birds.

In What an Owl Knows, Jennifer Ackerman joins scientists in the field and explores how researchers are using modern technology and tools to learn how owls communicate, hunt, court, mate, raise their young, and move about from season to season. Ackerman brings this research alive with her own personal field observations; the result is an awe-inspiring exploration of owls across the globe and through human history, and a spellbinding account of the world’s most enigmatic group of birds.
Join us Wednesday, June 11, 2025, at Southbury Parks and Recreation Department from 10:00am - 11:00am!
Registration is requested, not required. Nonfiction Book Club selections may change. Final selections will weigh your feedback, book availability, and genre balance. Any changes made will be announced at book club meetings, in our newsletter, and on the library's website.
New members are always welcome to the Nonfiction Book Club! Please sign up so we know how many people to expect and to receive event updates! For more information call the Reference Desk at 203-262-0626 ext. 2.
A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire

Nonfiction Book Club: Wednesday, July 9, 2025
The history of Rome has long been narrow and one-sided, essentially a history of “the Doing of Important Things.” And as far as Roman historians have been concerned, women don’t make that history. From Romulus through the political stab-fest of the late Republic, and then on to all the emperors, Roman historians may deign to give you a wife or a mother to show how bad things become when women get out of control, but history is more than that.
Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own is the best kind of correction. This is a retelling of the history of Rome with all the things Roman history writers relegate to the background, or designate as domestic, feminine, or worthless. This is a history of women who caused outrage, led armies in rebellion, wrote poetry; who lived independently or under the thumb of emperors. Told with humor and verve as well as a deep scholarly background, A Rome of One’s Own highlights women overlooked and misunderstood, and through them offers a fascinating and groundbreaking chronicle of the ancient world.
Join us Wednesday, July 9, 2025, at Southbury Parks and Recreation Department from 10:00am - 11:00am!
Registration is requested, not required. Nonfiction Book Club selections may change. Final selections will weigh your feedback, book availability, and genre balance. Any changes made will be announced at book club meetings, in our newsletter, and on the library's website.
New members are always welcome to the Nonfiction Book Club! Please sign up so we know how many people to expect and to receive event updates! For more information call the Reference Desk at 203-262-0626 ext. 2.
The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

Nonfiction Book Club: Wednesday, August 13, 2025
Stéphane Bréitwieser is the most prolific art thief of all time.
He pulled off more than 200 heists, often in crowded museums in broad daylight.
His girlfriend served as his accomplice.
His collection was worth an estimated $2 billion.
He never sold a piece, displaying his stolen art in his attic bedroom.
He felt like a king.
Until everything came to a shocking end.
In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, Michael Finkel gives us one of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of our times, a riveting story of art, theft, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.
Join us Wednesday, August 13, 2025, at Southbury Parks and Recreation Department from 10:00am - 11:00am!
Registration is requested, not required. Nonfiction Book Club selections may change. Final selections will weigh your feedback, book availability, and genre balance. Any changes made will be announced at book club meetings, in our newsletter, and on the library's website.
New members are always welcome to the Nonfiction Book Club! Please sign up so we know how many people to expect and to receive event updates! For more information call the Reference Desk at 203-262-0626 ext. 2.
The Teachers: A Year Inside America's Most Vulnerable, Important Profession

Nonfiction Book Club: Wednesday, September 10, 2025
A riveting, must-read, year-in-the-life account of three teachers, combined with reporting that reveals what’s really going on behind school doors, by New York Times bestselling author and education expert Alexandra Robbins.

Alexandra Robbins goes behind the scenes to tell the true, sometimes shocking, always inspirational stories of three teachers as they navigate a year in the classroom. She follows Penny, a southern middle school math teacher who grappled with a toxic staff clique at the big school in a small town; Miguel, a special ed teacher in the western United States who fought for his students both as an educator and as an activist; and Rebecca, an East Coast elementary school teacher who struggled to schedule and define a life outside of school. Robbins also interviewed hundreds of other teachers nationwide who share their secrets, dramas, and joys.

Interspersed among the teachers’ stories—a seeming scandal, a fourth-grade whodunit, and teacher confessions—are hard-hitting essays featuring cutting-edge reporting on the biggest issues facing teachers today, such as school violence; outrageous parent behavior; inadequate support, staffing, and resources coupled with unrealistic mounting demands; the “myth” of teacher burnout; the COVID-19 pandemic; and ways all of us can help the professionals who are central both to the lives of our children and the heart of our communities.
Join us Wednesday, September 10, 2025, at Southbury Parks and Recreation Department from 10:00am - 11:00am!
Registration is requested, not required. Nonfiction Book Club selections may change. Final selections will weigh your feedback, book availability, and genre balance. Any changes made will be announced at book club meetings, in our newsletter, and on the library's website.
New members are always welcome to the Nonfiction Book Club! Please sign up so we know how many people to expect and to receive event updates! For more information call the Reference Desk at 203-262-0626 ext. 2.