Village Readers
Fiction and Non-Fiction with a Texas Twist
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate
by Jacqueline Kelly
When:
Tuesday, January 26
6:00 p.m.
Where:
SMU Bookstore, 3060 Mockingbird Lane
Calpurnia Virginia Tate is eleven years old in 1899 when she wonders why the yellow grasshoppers in her
Texas backyard are so much bigger than the green ones. With a little help from her notoriously cantankerous
grandfather, an avid naturalist, she figures out that the green grasshoppers are easier to see against the
yellow grass, so they are eaten before they can get any larger. As Callie explores the natural world around
her, she develops a close relationship with her grandfather, navigates the dangers of living with six brothers,
and comes up against just what it means to be a girl at the turn of the century.
Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X
by Deborah Davis
When:
Tuesday, March 23
6:00 p.m.
Where:
SMU Bookstore, 3060 Mockingbird Lane
The subject of John Singer Sargent's most famous painting was twenty-three-year-old New Orleans Creole
Virginie Gautreau, who moved to Paris and quickly became the "it girl" of her day. A relative unknown
at the time, Sargent won the commission to paint her; the two must have recognized in each other a like-minded
hunger for fame.
Unveiled at the 1884 Paris Salon, Gautreau's portrait generated the attention she craved-but it led to infamy
rather than stardom. Sargent had painted one strap of Gautreau's dress dangling from her shoulder, suggesting
either the prelude to or the aftermath of sex. Her reputation irreparably damaged, Gautreau retired from public
life, destroying all the mirrors in her home.
Texas Tears and Texas Sunshine: Voices of Frontier Women
by Jo Ella Powell Exley
When:
Tuesday, May 25
6:00 p.m.
Where:
SMU Bookstore, 3060 Mockingbird Lane
A compilation of many voices from Texas’ past.
When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age
by Justin Kaplan
When:
Tuesday, July 20
6:00 p.m.
Where:
SMU Bookstore, 3060 Mockingbird Lane
Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, two heirs of arch-capitalist John Jacob Astor
battled with each other for social primacy. William Waldorf Astor (born 1848) and his cousin John Jacob
Astor IV (born 1864) led incomparably privileged lives in the blaze of public attention. In New York during
the 1890s and after, the two feuding Astors built monumental grand hotels, chief among them the original
Waldorf-Astoria on lower Fifth Avenue. The Astor hotels transformed social behavior. Home of the chafing dish
and the velvet rope, the Waldorf-Astoria drew the rich, famous, and fashionable. The celebrity-packed lobbies,
public rooms, lavish suites, and exclusive restaurants of the grand hotels became distinctive theaters of modern life.
After the Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals and the Party that Ignited the Great Wall
Street Scandal of 1905
by Patricia Beard
When:
Tuesday, September 28
6:00 p.m.
Where:
SMU Bookstore, 3060 Mockingbird Lane
James Hazen Hyde was twenty-three in 1899 when he inherited the majority shares in the billion-dollar Equitable
Life Assurance Society. Only five years later, he fell from grace in a Wall Street scandal that obsessed the
nation and commanded 115 front-page articles in the New York Times.
The bitter campaign to wrest control of the Equitable and its vast investment capacity from Hyde followed on the
heels of his elaborate ball. As the fight escalated, clandestine alliances between insurers and Wall Street burst
to the surface, exposing techniques that are the stuff of twenty-first-century scandals: self-dealing, insider trading,
accounting malpractice, and corporate funding of private pleasures.
- The Time It Never Rained by Elmer Kelton
- Goodbye to a River by John Graves
- Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett's Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution by James Crisp
- Hill Country by Janice Woods Windle
- Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz
- Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong by James W. Loewen.
- Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression turned Mexicans into Americans by Ben Johnson.
- A Woman of Independent Means by Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
- Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America by Linda Lawrence Hunt and Sue Armitage
Questions? Contact Melissa Prycer, Director of Education at 214-413-3671.
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