As you may or may not know, there is a monthly History/Biography Book Group at Barnes and Noble which is organized by Dr. Mary Murphy, past President of the Framingham History Center. I didn’t even know these book groups went on until I started working here and when I saw the next few books in the line-up, I was excited to read them and attend the meetings.
So last night was my first book group and we were discussing “The Children’s Blizzard” by David Laskin. It’s about the devastating mid-west blizzard in 1888 which killed lots of children trying to get home from school that day. The discussion was lead by Ilene Hofrenning, a native of North Dakota and Director of Health Services at Framingham State College and her husband Chris.
Ilene is of almost pure Norwegian decent, like most of the people in the book and to have her describe what it’s like to live in North Dakota and the Norwegian culture helped me understand why people would want to live out there. After reading about the blizzard (and all winters out in the plains), lack of shelter and building materials, droughts in the summer, locust swarms the size of California (no joke!) which ate everything in their path and even just the solitude of being out in the middle of acres of field, it was rough living to say the least. It was really interesting to discuss this book and talk with Ilene, Mary did a great job of orchestrating the event.
I’m looking forward to the next one which will be discussing The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough on March 17th at 7:30pm at the Framingham Barnes and Noble. You can see other upcoming events on our events page.