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March 2006

READING MAPS – A Good Book Can Take You Anywhere!

A good book can transport the reader like nothing else and you are really only limited by your imagination. As you journey through one book and consider the themes and ideas presented by an author, you may begin to wonder how or where the author may have gotten their idea or you may want to further explore their ideas or location.

We can help with your journey of discover through a “reading map”. The map, designed just for you, can take you anywhere you want to go.

Start your journey with The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

This is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it--from garden seeds to scripture--is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

Staying in the Congo just a bit longer, hear of another childhood experience in Margaret Meyer’s Swimming in the Congo.

Set against the natural landscape of stunning beauty on the banks of the Congo River, this book explores and illuminates the contours of a human landscape just as complex and beguiling. Meyers paints the childhood experiences of seven-year-old Grace Berggren and offers a sensitive portrayal of mission life.

Traveling further East, Passionate Nomad: the life of Freya Stark by Jane Fletcher Geniesse is the account of a woman traveler, explorer and letters, who at the age of thirty-four began a journey to explore remote and often dangerous regions of the Middle East.

The life of another female explorer is chronicled in Ken McGoogan’s Lady Franklin’s Revenge.

With Lady Franklin’s Revenge, bestselling author Ken McGoogan (Fatal Passage, Ancient Mariner) delivers another page turning biography that brings a remarkable historical figure vividly to life. Denied a role in Victorian England’s male-dominated society, Jane Franklin (1791–1875) took her revenge by seizing control of that most masculine of pursuits, Arctic exploration, and shaping its history to her own ends.

Arguably the greatest woman traveler of the 19th century, Lady Franklin rode a donkey into Nazareth, sailed a rat-infested boat up the Nile, climbed mountains in Africa and the Holy Land, and, wearing petticoats, beat her way through the Tasmanian bush.

When Sir John Franklin, her husband, disappeared into the Arctic in 1845, she orchestrated an unprecedented 12-year search, contributing more to the discovery of the North than any celebrated explorer. Having failed to rescue the hapless Franklin, she turned failure into triumph by creating a legend.

Richly detailed, panoramic in scope, this biography of the unforgettable Jane Franklin is destined to become a classic.

Two fictional accounts of Arctic exploration can be found in Afterlands by Steven Heighton and The Navigator of New York by Wayne Johnston.

In Afterlands, Heighton tells the story of an 1871 US government expedition to the North Pole. The voyage failed and half the party was cast adrift on an ice floe. This novel focuses on three of the survivors of this event and how what occurred shaped their lives forever.

Johnston’s The Navigator of New York is the story of one young man’s search for his father. Johnston takes the reader from 19th century St. John’s to the streets of New York to the remote regions of the Arctic.