The Field Notes Book Group met to discuss Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, and while we were fairly evenly divided between those who liked the book and those who didn’t, we had an interesting discussion about Lucrezia, the young duchess of Ferrara, and her questionable husband, the interstices in historical records and how fiction sometimes fills in those spaces.
We had some difficulty choosing our book for next month, but ended up with another nonfiction choice, A Fever in the Heartland: the Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America and the Woman Who Stopped Them, by Timothy Egan. Copies of the book are available at the circulation desk for our meeting on May 18.
In addition to all the famous aspects of the Roaring 20’s (flappers, prohibition, gangsters), the era also saw the phenomenal growth of the Ku Klux Klan in the midwest and west of America, expanding from its post-Civil War home in the South, a story that is much less frequently told and studied. Leave it to Timothy Egan, Pulitzer Prize winning author, to bring to life the enthralling and horrifying story of how one con man, D.C. Stephenson, rose to the height of Grand Dragon of the Klan in the state of Indiana, making the Klan the power behind most of the legislature, the governor’s office and the police. Stephenson, a mysterious but charismatic man, wasn’t satisfied with just running one of the states; he had political ambitions on a national scale, and it’s entirely possible he would have succeeded if he hadn’t gone too far with one woman, whose deathbed confession spelled his doom.
It’s a riveting story, the kind of nonfiction that people describe as novelistic, and has the added advantage of bringing to light an aspect of our past that most people don’t know anything about, not to mention the echoes it provides for our own time.
Join us for what should be an exciting discussion, complete with refreshments.
Bookskill 