History Book Club

Explore history through compelling fiction and nonfiction. For more information, please contact the branch at 305-668-4571 or booke@mdpls.org. Ages 19 yrs.+

January 2026:

A Mercy by Toni Morrison: 167pp: In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland.

February 2026:

They Dared Return: The True Story of Jewish Spies behind the Lines in Nazi Germany by Patrick K. O’Donnell: 264pp: At the height of World War II, with the Third Reich’s Final Solution in full operation, a small group of Jews who were naturalized American citizens, having themselves barely escaped the Nazis, did the unthinkable: they went back. Trained as spies, these men took on a perilous covert mission to strike back at the Third Reich behind enemy lines. They Dared Return is their story — a gripping tale of adventure, espionage, love, and revenge.

March 2026:

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Lisa See: 352pp: An immersive historical novel inspired by the true story of a woman physician in 15th-century China.

April 2026:

Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light by Susan Dunn: 272pp: The American and French revolutions presented the world with two very different visions of democracy. Although both professed similar Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, and justice and set similar political agendas, there were also fundamental differences. The French sought a complete break with a thousand years of history; the Americans were content to preserve many aspects of their English heritage. Why did the two revolutions follow such different trajectories? And what lessons do they offer us about democracy today?

May 2026:

Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay: 294pp: Paris, July 1942: Ten-year-old Sarah is brutally arrested with her family in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, the most notorious act of French collaboration with the Nazis. but before the police come to take them, Sarah locks her younger brother, Michel, in their favorite hiding place, a cupboard in the family's apartment. She keeps the key, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

June 2026:

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard: 371pp: An illuminating history of North America's eleven rival cultural regions that explodes the red state-blue state myth. North America was settled by people with distinct religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics, creating regional cultures that have been at odds with one another ever since. Subsequent immigrants didn't confront or assimilate into an "American" or "Canadian" culture, but rather into one of the eleven distinct regional ones that spread over the continent each staking out mutually exclusive territory.

July 2026:

The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick & William Lederer: 288pp: A piercing exposé of American incompetence and corruption in Southeast Asia, The Ugly American captivated the nation when it was first published in 1958. The book introduces readers to an unlikely hero in the titular “ugly American”—and to the ignorant politicians and arrogant ambassadors who ignore his empathetic and commonsense advice. In linked stories and vignettes set in the fictional nation of Sarkhan, William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick draw an incisive portrait of American foreign policy gone dangerously wrong—and how it might be fixed.

August 2026:

The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward: 245pp: One of the great works of Southern history, this book actually helped shape that history. Published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools desegregated, Strange Career was cited so often to counter arguments for segregation that Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement." Offering a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws, it presents evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1890s. Woodward shows that, even under slavery, the two races had not been divided as they were under the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s. In fact, during Reconstruction, there was considerable economic and political mixing of the races. The segregating of the races was a relative newcomer to the region.

September 2026:

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy: 302pp: Teenager John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of Texas ranchers, has nothing left to stay for. Across the border Mexico beckons—beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. With neighbor Rawlins, and scruffy boy, he rides toward an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

October 2026:

Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert F. Kennedy: 185pp: During the thirteen days in October 1962 when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over its installation of missiles in Cuba, few people shared the behind-the-scenes story as it is told here by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In this unique account, he describes each of the participants during the sometimes hour-to-hour negotiations, with particular attention to the actions and views of his brother, President John F. Kennedy.

November 2026:

The Able Archers by Brian J. Morra: 330pp: In 1983, the world stands at the brink of nuclear annihilation, and only a few people are aware of it. A riveting story of how two men's lives intersect in the midst of an existential crisis, The Able Archers is told through the eyes of two key a young American intelligence officer, Captain Kevin Cattani; and his more experienced Soviet counterpart, Colonel Ivan Levchenko.

December 2026:

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut Jr: 290pp: Second only to Slaughterhouse-Five of Vonnegut's canon in its prominence and influence, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) presents Eliot Rosewater, an itinerant, semi-crazed millionaire wandering the country in search of heritage and philanthropic outcome, introducing the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout to the world and Vonnegut to the collegiate audience which would soon make him a cult writer.

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