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Book Club

For more than a decade, the PBKACA Book Group has gathered on Sunday afternoons to discuss, debate, and share in-depth, collaborative explorations of great books. Book group members come from an array profession and backgrounds. The quality of discussions that results is lively and elicits many diverse observations that stretch the mind.

The book group meets mainly on Sundays from 12:00 p.m. to 2:0 p.m. We are meeting online. When the restaurant is open, we will resume meeting at Nix Restaurant at the Knickerbocker Hotel, 163 East Walton Place, Chicago. Join us for one or all of the following dates. For more information, contact Gerry Piorkowski at drpiork@aol.com.

2025

Jan 5: Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
Feb 2: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
Mar 2: Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips
Apr 6: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
May 4: The Human Stain by Philip Roth
Jun 1: Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong[…] by Dr. Marty Makary
Jul 13: The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien
Aug 3: Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America[…] by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Sep 7: What You Are Looking for Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama
Oct 5: When Brains Dream by Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold
Nov 2: Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Dec 7: The Information by James Gleick

2024

Jan 8: Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Feb 4: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Mar 3: Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World by Simon Callow
Apr 7: First Person Singular: Stories by Haruki Murakami
May 5: Flirting with Danger by Janet Wallach
Jun 2: Trust by Hernan Diaz
Jul 7: Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
Aug 4: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Sep 8: Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv
Oct 6: American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Nov 3: Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow
Dec 1: The Peregrine by J. A. Baker

2023

Jan 8: The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James Baldwin
Feb 5: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
March 5: Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir by Marie Yovanovitch
April 2: The Lincoln Highway: A Novel by Amor Towles
May 7: Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein
June 4: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
July 9: The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson
Aug 6: The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger
Sept 10: Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams & Mark Carwardine
Oct 1: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Nov 5: The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown
Dec 3: The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katherine Green

2022

Jan. 2: Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty by Anderson Cooper & Katherine Howe
Feb. 6: The Alienist by Caleb Carr
Mar. 6: Caste by Isabelle Wilkerson
April 3: Bewilderment by Richard Powers
May 1: Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
June 5: When the Apricots Bloom by Gina Wilkinson
July 10: Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder
Aug. 7: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Sept. 11: The Heroine with a 1001 Faces by Maria Tatar
Oct. 2: Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life by Sherwood Anderson
Nov. 6: Greek to Me: Adventures of a Comma Queen by Marry Norris
Dec. 4: Circe by Madeline Miller

2021

Jan. 3: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
Feb. 7: The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Pioneers Who brought the American Ideal West by David McCullough
Mar. 7: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
April 11: Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton
May 2: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
June 6: Educated by Tara Westover
July 11: The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
Aug. 1: Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
Sept. 12: The Overstory by Richard Powers
Oct. 3: Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimaging Life by Louise Aronson
Nov. 7: Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
Dec. 5: The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time by Hugh Raffles

2020

Feb. 2: My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor
Mar. 1: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
June 7: Permanent Record by Edward Snowden
July 12: The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
Aug. 2: Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals by Jeremy McCarter
Sept. 13: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Oct. 4: The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Minae Mizumura
Nov. 1: A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz
Dec. 6: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

2019

Feb. 3: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
Mar. 3: There There by Tommy Orange
Apr. 7: The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court’s Assault on the Constitution by David Kaplan
May 5: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
June 2: The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder
July 7: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
Aug. 4: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Sept. 8: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Oct. 6: The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis
Nov. 3: The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami
Dec. 1: The Improbable Wendell Wilkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country and Conceived a New World Order by David Levering Lewis

2018

Feb. 4: Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
Mar. 4: Redeployment by Phil Klay
Apr. 8: Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
May 6: The Leavers – A Novel by Lisa Ko
June 3: The Unwomanly Face of War – An Oral History of Women in World War II by Svetlana Alexievich
July 8: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Aug. 5: Daughter of the Queen of Sheba – A Memoir by Jacki Lyden
Sept. 9: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Oct. 7: Hillbilly Elegy – A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
Nov. 4: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Dec. 2: The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

2017

Feb. 5: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
Mar. 5: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Apr. 2: The Sellout by Paul Beatty
May 7: The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe by Ann Morgan
June 4: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
July 9: The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream by Thomas Deja
Aug. 6: News of the World by Paulette Jiles
Sep. 10: American Amnesia: How the War On Government Led Us To Forget What Made America Prosper by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
Oct. 1: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Nov. 5: Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequity and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil
Dec. 3: The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

2016

Feb. 7: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark
Mar. 6: Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano
Apr. 3: Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
May 1: Nora Webster by Colm Toibin
June 5: Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America by James Green
July 10: The Toughest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie
Aug. 7: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Sept. 11: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Oct. 2: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of All Cancer by Siddartha Mukerjee
Nov. 6: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin
Dec. 4: The 6th Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

2015

Mar. 1: The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier by Edward Glaeser
Apr. 12: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
May 3: No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald
June 7: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
July 12: Lila: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson
Aug. 2: Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow
Sept. 13: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
Oct. 4: Regeneration by Pat Barker
Nov. 1: The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
Dec. 6: English Creek by Ivan Doig

2014

Feb. 2: Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 by Gordon S. Wood
Mar. 2: The Progress of Love by Alice Munro
Apr. 6: The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t by Nate Silver
May 4: The March: A Novel by E.L. Doctorow
June 1: Reflections on Judging by Richard A. Posner
July 13: The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester
Aug. 3: The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
Sept. 7: The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
Oct. 5: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Nov. 2: The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind — and Changed the History of Free Speech in America by Thomas Healy
Dec. 7: Dissident Gardens: A Novel by Jonathan Lethem

2013

Feb. 3: Telegraph Avenue: A Novel by Michael Chabon
Mar. 3: Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff
Apr. 7: Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out: A Novel by Mo Yan
May 5: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
June 2: Shame: A Novel by Salmin Rushdie
July 14: Destiny Of The Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and The Murder of a President by Candice Millard
Aug. 4: The Art of Fielding: A Novel by Chad Harbach
Sept. 8: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Oct. 6: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Nov. 3: Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon
Dec. 1: The Round House by Louise Erdrich

2012

Feb. 5: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
March 4: Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age by Kurt Beyer
April 1: The Paris Wife: A Novel by Paula McLain
May 6: James Madison by Richard Brookhiser
June 3: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
July 1: Three Famines: Starvation and Politics by Thomas Keneally
Aug. 5: Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy By John Nichols, Robert McChesney, and Tom Tomorrow
Sept. 9: Palace Walk: The Cairo Trilogy, Volume 1 by Naguib Mahfouz
Oct. 7: In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson
Nov. 4: Cloud Atlas: A Novel by David Mitchell
Dec. 2: Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in a Digital Age by William Powers

2011

Feb. 6: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Mar. 6: The Last of the Mohicans by J. F. Cooper
Apr. 3: Eating Animals by Jonathan Foer
May 1: Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel
June 5: Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher
July 10: Chronicle of a Death Foretold by G. Garcia Marquez
Sept. 11: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
Oct. 2: The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Nov. 6: Francis Perkins: The Woman Behind The New Deal by Kristin Downey
Dec. 4: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

2010

Feb. 7: The Sound of Wings: The Life of Amelia Earhart by Mary S. Lovell
Mar. 7: The Land of Green Plum by Herta Mueller
Apr. 11: The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper
May 2: Homer & Langley: A Novel by E.L. Doctorow
June 6: My Father’s Secret War by Lucinda Franks
July 11: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by A. Solzhenitsyn
Sept. 12: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin
Oct. 3: Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
Nov. 7: The Life of Andrew Jackson by Robert Remini
Dec. 5: Midnight’s Children: A Novel by Salman Rushdie