USF Book Club: June & July Selections

The USF Book Club will meet to discuss the following two books in the upcoming months:

An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin. Friday, June 8, 2012. Room 209 of Gleeson Library, 12 noon – 1 pm. Request this one through Link+ or get it at SFPL.

Lacey Yeager appears on New York’s art scene as a clever, funny young Sotheby’s intern. With charm, ambition, and occasionally illegal tactics, she climbs the city’s cultural ladder to success in the labyrinthine art world. Her knowledge of art and its collectors quickly grows alongside a list of men she enchants and inevitably destroys. Her rise to society’s highest tiers parallels the soaring heights – and, at times, the dark lows – of the art world and the country from the early ’90s through today. –stevemartin.com

Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick. Friday, July 6, 2012. Room 209 of Gleeson Library, 12 noon – 1 pm. Request this one through Link+ or get it at SFPL.

Ozick reworks Henry James’s The Ambassadors, setting it in 1950s Paris, a seedy, impractical place for well-to-do and disaffected youth. Bea is a divorcee, long shut off from her feelings, who is bullied by her unbearable brother into traveling to Paris to bring back his errant son, Julian. While Bea begins to break through her emotional morass, her actions lead to dreadful results for her niece, her nephew, and his Jewish wife with a tragic past. While it is difficult to comprehend why everyone is so obsessed with Julian, the other characters are beautifully delineated with great sensitivity. Tandy Cronyn is the perfect reader here. Her portrayal of Bea’s emotional fog, the ennui of the Americans in Paris, and the bully Marvin is simply superb, and the pacing is excellent. –Library Journal