Nominations for Discussion July 20th - Including Information About Relevant Videos

You will see below that I listed some "topical videos" with each nomination.  We have time on our hands these days so I thought it would be fun to read the chosen book and view a topic-related DVD; then during our discussion, go around the room and find out which DVD you watched (does not have to be on this list), and how watching the DVD enhanced (or not) your experience with the book.  Many of these videos are available at local libraries.  Watching a video is totally optional.  ...All these books are already available at B&N RR and most other local B&Ns as well.  The first 2 are more recent publications; the 3rd is a recent publication for the "anniversary".  ...Hope to see you at tomorrow's ZOOM Meeting - and come prepared to vote! ...Pam

Nominations for September’s RRNN Book Club (vote will be Monday, July 20)

BOOK (Memoir):  Ruthless River: Love & Survival by Raft on the Amazon’s Relentless Madre de Dios, Holly Fitzgerald, 2017, 336 pages, $16.00.

Holly FitzGerald and her husband Fitz, married less than 2 years, set out on a yearlong honeymoon adventure of a lifetime, backpacking around the world.  Five months into the trip their plane crashes at a penal colony in Peru that is walled in by jungle.  They survive, only to later raft hundreds of miles across Peru and Bolivia, ending up in a channel to nowhere, a dead end so flooded there is literally no land to stand on. Their raft—a mere four logs—separates them from the piranha-and-caiman-infested water until they finally realize that there is no way out but to swim.

Topical Videos: Into the Amazon, 2018, originally released as an episode of PBS The American Experience-about Teddy Roosevelt’s Amazon journey (112 minutes) Available on PBS; The River-Complete Series, 2012, ABC (344 minutes) (Stephen Spielberg) Maybe available on ABC; The Lost City of Z, 2017, Amazon Studios (140 minutes), available on Amazon Prime Videos, for $10 on YouTube .

BOOK (Memoir):  The Line Becomes a River, Francisco Cantu, 2019, 288 pages, $15.50.

For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the full extent of the violence it wreaks, on both sides of the line.

Topical Videos: The River and the Wall, 2019 (119 minutes), available on Hulu, Amazon Prime, Starz, and Gravitas for $6.99 - no subscription needed; Which Way Home, 2011, Bullfrog Films (90 minutes) available on HBO, Netflix, Hulu

BOOK (Nonfiction):  Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, 1959 (Anniversary Edition 2015), Alfred Lansing, 353 pages, $14.99.

In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot. In January 1915, after battling its way through a thousand miles of pack ice and only a day's sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. When their ship was finally crushed between two ice floes, they attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization.

Topical Videos: Shackleton’s Voyage of Endurance, 2005, PBS NOVA (120 minutes), probably available on PBS; The Endurance, Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition, 2012, Sony (97 minutes) .