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Book ClubA Case for Solomon: Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping That Haunted a Nation
Leader:
Leonard J. Nelson III “This book chronicles one of the most celebrated—and most misunderstood—kidnapping cases in American history. In 1912, four-year-old Bobby Dunbar, the son of an upper-middle-class Louisiana family, went missing in the swamps. After an eight-month search that electrified the country and destroyed Bobby’s parents, the boy was found, filthy and hardly recognizable, in the pinewoods of southern Mississippi. A wandering piano tuner who had been shuttling the child throughout the region by wagon for months was arrested and charged with kidnapping—a crime that was punishable by death at the time. Atlas Shrugged
Leader:
Michael D. Floyd You’ve probably seen and heard the buzz about the influence of this author and this book on our current political discourse. You may have read this or a related book in high school or college. I read it in 10th or 11th grade; this summer I decided that I needed to re-read it, think about it more deeply than I did as a teenager, and see where that leads. I’d enjoy some company in that exercise. Failing Law Schools
Leader:
Brannon P. Denning
Leader:
John L. Carroll "On the surface, law schools today are thriving. Enrollments are on the rise, and their resources are often the envy of every other university department. Law professors are among the highest paid and play key roles as public intellectuals, advisers, and government officials. Yet behind the flourishing facade, law schools are failing abjectly. Recent front-page stories have detailed widespread dubious practices, including false reporting of LSAT and GPA scores, misleading placement reports, and the fundamental failure to prepare graduates to enter the profession. Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption
Leader:
Andrea L. Shaw "Law Man is an improbable-but-true memoir of redemption -- the story of a young bank robber who became the greatest jailhouse lawyer in American history, and who changed not just his own life, but the lives of everyone around him." http://www.randomhouse.com/book/210084/law-man-by-shon-hopwood-and-denni... The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America’s Most Powerful Trial Lawyer
Leader:
LaVone R. Warren Former Boston Globe reporter and Mississippian Curtis Wilkie charts the meteoric career of lawyer Richard "Dickie" Scruggs in this riveting if labyrinthine account that in Wilkie's telling, involves treachery, professional jealousy, and zealous prosecution. Known as the "King of Torts," Scruggs had made a fortune with class action lawsuits involving asbestos claims in Pascagoula, Miss., and then tobacco lawsuits in the mid-1990s. The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the WorkplaceIt was the 1960s––a time of economic boom and social strife. Young women poured into the workplace, but the “Help Wanted” ads were segregated by gender and the “Mad Men” office culture was rife with sexual stereotyping and discrimination. Lynn Povich was one of the lucky ones, landing a job at Newsweek, renowned for its cutting-edge coverage of civil rights and the “Swinging Sixties.” Nora Ephron, Jane Bryant Quinn, Ellen Goodman, and Susan Brownmiller all started there as well. It was a top-notch job––for a girl––at an exciting place. But it was a dead end. The Hunger Games
Leader:
Alyssa DiRusso “In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, "The Hunger Games," a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the Games. The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln
Leader:
D. Wendy Greene “Stephen L. Carter’s thrilling new novel takes as its starting point an alternate history: President Abraham Lincoln survives the assassination attempt at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. Two years later he is charged with overstepping his constitutional authority, both during and after the Civil War, and faces an impeachment trial . . . The Origins of Political Order
Leader:
Michael E. DeBow The book is a sweeping and very well-written account of the origins and growth of basic political institutions. Beginning with the organization of prehuman primate groups, the book explores the emergence of human tribal societies, then the emergence of the first modern state in China and the beginnings of the rule of law in India and the Middle East. It ends with the development of political accountability in Europe up to the eve of the French Revolution. For more on the author, see http://fukuyama.stanford.edu/home The Trial
Leader:
Woodrow N. Hartzog “A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life--including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door--becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
Leader:
Andrew Robert Greene The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Great Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. The Worst Hard Time tells the epic story of this environmental disaster and its impact on the communities stricken with fear and choked by dust in the “dirty thirties”. 
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