GenevaBookClub: Ta-Nehisi Coates is a 45 year old journalist and author and this is his first book. He has just published a brilliant first novel – The Water Dancer. The style is light, ironic at times also deeply moving at times - but never strident or lecturing. It is personal, intimate and revealing. He writes about growing up an African American man in Baltimore, the brutal location for the fabulous series ‘The Wire’. The book reveals a lot about African American urban America, the crack epidemic, fathers and sons, the difficulty of African American manhood and the role of the women in the family. Countless awards as well as a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grant.

GenevaBookClub: Margo Jefferson is a 73 year old journalist and academic. This is her autobiography. She writes as a wealthy, privileged, highly educated member of the elite social caste of African Americans, but with a very charming, self-critical eye and an easy style. She reveals how privileged African Americans blend into the worlds of both African Americans and privileged European Americans. It is like a series of conversations with a best friend. 256 pages, published in 2016. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award 2016. Negroland: A Memoir is a 2015 book by Margo Jefferson. It is a memoir of growing up in 1950s and 1960s America within a small, privileged segment of black American society known as the black bourgeoisie, or African-American upper class.

GenevaBookClub: Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.

GenevaBookClub: James Bamford has been the preeminent expert on the National Security Agency since his reporting revealed the agency’s existence in the 1980s. Now Bamford describes the transformation of the NSA since 9/11, as the agency increasingly turns its high-tech ears on the American public. The Shadow Factory reconstructs how the NSA missed a chance to thwart the 9/11 hijackers and details how this mistake has led to a heightening of domestic surveillance. In disturbing detail, Bamford describes exactly how every American’s data is being mined and what is being done with it. Any reader who thinks America’s liberties are being protected by Congress will be shocked and appalled at what is revealed here.

GenevaBookClub: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken.

GenevaBookClub: Steppenwolf is a poetical self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf. This Faust-like and magical story is evidence of Hesse's searching philosophy and extraordinary sense of humanity as he tells of the humanization of a middle-aged misanthrope. Yet his novel can also be seen as a plea for rigorous self-examination and an indictment of the intellectual hypocrisy of the period. As Hesse himself remarked, "Of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any of the others"

GenevaBookClub: 9th on the 100 best English novels of the 20th Century, D. H. Lawrence’s great autobiographical novel paints a provocative portrait of an artist torn between affection for his mother and desire for two beautiful women. Set in the Nottinghamshire coalfields of Lawrence’s own boyhood, the story follows young Paul Morel’s growth into manhood in a British working-class family. Gertrude Morel, Paul’s puritanical mother, concentrates all her love and attention on Paul, nurturing his talents as a painter. When she muses that he might marry someday and desert her, the attentive son swears he will never leave her. Then Paul falls in love—with not one woman but two—and must eventually choose between them.