Adventures in Classic Readings Sponsored by the FOL's Ruth D. Bogen Memorial Fund

This reading group, facilitated by Dr. Laury Magnus, Professor of English, will feature great classic works -- ancient to contemporary -- and participatory reading aloud of selected passages.  
Our following selection will be Regeneration, by Pat Barker. This profoundly moving anti-war novel is the first of Barker's World War I trilogy based upon the real-life story of Dr. W.H. Rivers, the psychiatrist who first diagnosed his patients with PTSD. Rivers worked with these hospitalized, "shell-shocked" warriors being sent back from the front to be "cured." Men nursing all manner of injuries were profoundly tormented by the aftershocks of witnessing their friends' and comrades' sufferings and deaths. Rivers' combatant patients included poets Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Burns, and Wilfred Owen, along with other less "famous" patients, who faced the dilemma of being profoundly against the war yet, completely unwilling to desert their comrades dying in the field. Instead, they want to be with them. Regeneration asks us to reevaluate our wartime/warrior notions of identity and heroism—and the ethics of "curing" men—only to send them back to the front to serve as cannon fodder.   
Copies of the book will be available at the Information Desk. In addition, all participants will receive a complimentary copy of the book provided by the Friends of the Library's Ruth D. Bogen Memorial Fund (while supplies last). Participants are invited to join us in person or via zoom.

Click Here to register for in person.

Click Here to Register for zoom.