Due to flooring work happening inside the Washoe County Senior Center, the Senior Center Library will be closed on Tuesday, October 29.
Event box
SO Very Literary Book Club - Empress of the Nile by Lynne Olson
In the 1960s, the world’s attention was focused on a nail-biting race against time: the international campaign to save a dozen ancient Egyptian temples from drowning in the floodwaters of the gigantic new Aswan High Dam. But the coverage of this unprecedented rescue effort completely overlooked the daring French archaeologist who made it all happen. Without the intervention of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the temples—including the Temple of Dendur, now at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—would currently be at the bottom of a vast reservoir. It was an unimaginably complex project that required the fragile sandstone temples to be dismantled and rebuilt on higher ground.
Willful and determined, Desroches-Noblecourt refused to be cowed by anyone or anything. As a member of the French Resistance in World War II she survived imprisonment by the Nazis; in her fight to save the temples she defied two of the most daunting leaders of the postwar world, Egypt’s President Abdel Nasser and France’s President Charles de Gaulle. As she told one reporter, “You don’t get anywhere without a fight, you know.”
Desroches-Noblecourt also received help from a surprising source. Jacqueline Kennedy, America’s new First Lady, persuaded her husband to help fund the rescue effort. After a century and a half of Western plunder of Egypt’s ancient monuments, Desroches-Noblecourt helped instead to preserve a crucial part of that cultural heritage.
The SO Very Literary Book Club meets on the 3rd Thursday of every month from 2:00-3:30 pm.
For 2024, we will be taking a trip around the world with selections that take place in countries near and far.
Everyone is welcome. Come join us for a year of passionate book discussions!
Registration is appreciated.
Please stay at home if you or any member of your family are sick. Thank you
We look forward to seeing you!
2024 Titles:
1/18/24 - My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
2/15/24 - True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
3/21/24 - The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
4/18/24 - How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
5/16/24 - Girl at War by Sara Novic
6/20/24 - How Iceland Changed the World by Egill Bjarnason
7/18/24 - Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
8/15/24 - Human Acts by Han Kang
9/19/24 - Empress of the Nile by Lynne Olson
10/17/24 - On the Trail of the Jackalope by Michael P. Branch (with the author in attendance)
11/21/24 - Alamut by Vladimir Bartol
12/19/24 - Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
- Date:
- Thursday, September 19, 2024
- Time:
- 2:00pm - 3:30pm
- Location:
- Diamond Room
- Branch:
- South Valleys Library
- Categories:
- Book Club