Founded over 60 years ago, the Blue Notes are a philanthropic group of women who volunteer their time and talent for a good cause. Singing music from Big Band to Broadway, the group performs in four-part harmony for senior centers, assisted living venues and for a variety of audiences throughout Southern Fairfield County. Their director, Dr. Craig Scott Symons, is also the director of the First Congregational Church of Greenwich choir.
Stuart circles the globe to help museums undergo rebirth and save cultural treasures in war-torn lands. Stuart was also a Chief Consultant to the UNESCO/Hermitage project and assisted the museum in its leap into the 21st century.
Bill Bellis and Taylor Strubinger are leading the Happy Wanderers to explore the High Line Park in NYC on November 20th. It’s always entertaining, educational and healthy! So get your walkin’ shoes on and join them.
The High Line is a 1.45-mile-long New York City linear park built on a section of a disused New York Central Railroad spur called the West Side.
Metro North Train Schedule:
Darien station at 8 58 AM
Noroton Heights at station 9 02 AM
Master storyteller Ben Macintyre’s most ambitious work to date brings to life the twentieth century’s greatest spy story.Harold ‘Kim’ Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain ’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War—while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s best friend and fellow officer in MI6. The two men had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs, grown close through the crucible of wartime intelligence work and long nights of drink and revelry. It was madness for one to think the other might be a communist spy, bent on subverting Western values and the power of the free world.
But Philby was secretly betraying his friend. Every word Elliott breathed to Philby was transmitted back to Moscow —and not just Elliott’s words, for in America , Philby had made another powerful friend: James Jesus Angleton, the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton’s and Elliott’s unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies to protect his cover, his two friends never abandoned him—until it was too late. The stunning truth of his betrayal would have devastating consequences on the two men who thought they knew him best, and on the intelligence services he left crippled in his wake.
Told with heart-pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, and based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files, “A Spy Among Friends” is Ben Macintyre’s best book yet, a high-water mark in Cold War history telling.
The Book Discussion will be held on January 14 at 12:30 p.m. in the Darien Library on the 2nd Floor in the Harris Room.
Copies are available at the Darien Library.
Tom Reifenheiser will lead this book club discussion of “Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century” by Christian Carrel
Review by Isaac Chotiner a senior editor at The New Republic:
If Christian Caryl had set out to write a book about 1968, showing how the many convulsions and uprisings of that astonishing year were connected, his task would have been an easy one. It might be difficult to prove cause and effect between, say, the May events in Paris and the chaos at the Democratic convention in August, but as people might have said at the time, something was in the air. It wasn’t mere coincidence that led to youth revolts all over the world. In the case of 1989, such connections are even more obvious.
Caryl, a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine and a former Newsweek correspondent, is faced with a much harder task in “Strange Rebels,” his engrossing new book of five case studies from 1979. This was the year Deng Xiaoping initiated the reforms that would spur the Chinese economy; the year an anxious Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan after its Communist allies faced resistance from local “freedom fighters”; the year Pope John Paul II made his momentous trip to Poland; the year Margaret Thatcher overturned an etiolated Labour government; and the year Iranian revolutionaries overthrew the shah, Our Man in Tehran.
As Caryl writes, in an effort to link stories that don’t, at first glance, hold together: “It was in 1979 that the twin forces of markets and religion, discounted for so long, came back with a vengeance.” Indeed, the power of both markets and religion registered in places beyond those covered in his main narrative. On the religious front, Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, the Pakistani military dictator who did so much to aid Afghanistan’s rebels, ordered his predecessor to be hanged and sped forward the Islamicization of his country. And as Caryl briefly mentions, the Moral Majority was formed in 1979. The following year saw the election of Thatcher’s ally Ronald Reagan and — compared with what preceded them — the relatively free-market policies in Indira Gandhi’s India.
The problem for Caryl is that concepts like “religion” and “markets” are much too broad. John Paul II may have helped undermine the Communist regime in Poland, and the young religious Muslims of Afghanistan may have forced complacent observers to realize that faith wasn’t going to disappear from the world. (The upheaval in Iran, where a theocracy replaced an autocrat, makes this point even more forcefully.) But it’s difficult to draw comparisons between the forces motivating the Polish pope’s admiring countrymen and Iran’s student revolutionaries.
As for markets, it’s true that Thatcher preached their virtues, and that Deng took advantage of China’s awesome economic capacities. “The forces unleashed in 1979 marked the beginning of the end of the great socialist utopias that had dominated so much of the 20th century,” Caryl writes. But what does he mean by “socialist utopias”? Presumably he’s being ironic, but either way, it makes little sense to compare postwar Labour governments (which were certainly subject to diminishing returns but which also gave birth to a highly successful welfare state) to the pathological murderousness of Mao’s China. Caryl notes that Thatcher’s “belief in individual responsibility and the primacy of personal freedom had its roots in a spiritual stance rather than an economic theory” — an attempt to link the free-market “fundamentalism” of the prime minster with the religiosity on display in some of the book’s other sections. But the men Caryl terms the “religious thinkers” of the Iranian Revolution would hardly be conceptual allies of Margaret Thatcher.
“Strange Rebels” is a well-written and thorough work of history whose elements don’t really cohere. About one thing, however, Caryl is certainly right: “The political experiments of 1979 continue to define our world.” It has become something of a cliché to remark on the consequences of these various events, especially — post‑9/11 — the decision of the Soviet Union to invade the future haven of Osama bin Laden. But sometimes clichés exist for an appropriate reason. Noting that things didn’t have to play out the way they did and recognizing that contingencies are a large part of history, Caryl concedes that “to study 1979 is also to study the tyranny of chance.” The clearest conclusion of this book is that 1979 happened, by chance, to be a monumental year.
Fun was had by everyone on the Trip to Goodspeed Opera. First was a good lunch at the Gelston House followed by the Holiday Inn at the Goodspeed Opera House.
‘Norwalk’ includes a wonderful collection of vintage photographs of the area. In this presentation, she’ll talk about the history of the area with special attention given to the parts of Norwalk near or in Darien like Old MacDonald’s Farm, the trolley on Tokeneke Road leading to Rowayton, Roton Point Park, White Bridge, and more.
Located on the shores of Long Island Sound, Norwalk’s close proximity to New York City prompted the building of many summer residences and guest cottages along its coast. In the summer, steamships and trolleys arrived with passengers looking to enjoy the local amusement park, Roton Point. Norwalk’s earliest industries included farming as well as mills powered by its rivers. The area has been famous for its pottery, oystering, and hat manufacturing. Over time, this community has endured disasters; it was burned during the American Revolution, and the flood of 1955 wiped out much of the Wall Street area as well as several bridges on the Norwalk River. Norwalk shares vintage images from the mid-1800s through the 1960s, highlighting memorable sites such as Old MacDonald’s Farm and the Melton Automobile Museum. The revitalization of Norwalk’s downtown areas proves it is possible to respect the past and those that came before through the renewal of historical architecture.
Author Bio: Lisa Wilson Grant is a lifelong Norwalk resident and has been collecting images for many years. In addition to her own images, she has also included many from local historical societies and private collections. She also co-authored Postcard History Series: Roton Point with the Roton Point History Committee.
Arranged by Scott Hutchason
‘ Hell Before Breakfast ‘ is about the Russian Wars in the late 1800’s. It is a history of America’s first war correspondents.
Patton, 57, was born 12 years after “Old Blood and Guts,” as the general was known, died at 60 on Dec. 21, 1945 following a freak car accident in Germany, a few months after the end of the war.
“I thought ‘Patton’ was a great movie,” he said. “My favorite part was the general’s pampered childhood. He was called Georgie, was dyslexic and was kept at home until the age of 12. He barely graduated from West Point after being held back a year. He had that motor in him that never stopped and was never satisfied. He gave his all to the Army and he had a few days in a hospital bed to savor the victory of World War II before he uttered his last words — ‘I guess I wasn’t good enough’ — and died.”
The grandson grew up under a heavy shadow cast by famous warriors. He came of age during the ’60s anti-war movement and was drawn to poetry and literature rather than the military, the family business for two centuries. Patton was the first male on both sides of his family going back five generations who did not graduate from West Point.
When the proud son told his father he had been accepted for admission to Ivy League Brown University, his father, a career Army officer, asked: “What the hell is Brown?”
At Brown, Patton spent two years in the ROTC program at nearby Providence College. “I realized I didn’t have the family calling,” he said. “My dad was bred to be a master sergeant. He did three tours of duty in Vietnam and would have done four if they let him. He had a certain hardness about him, but he was a patriot who loved his men. War was attractive to him, and by God he couldn’t wait to get back to the action. It’s a very complex phenomenon.”
Arranged by Tom Lom
Marc Thorne will lead our DMA book discussion for November of the chosen selection: “Look Me In the Eye” My Life with Asperger’s by John Elder Robison.
The meeting will be held on at the Darien Library in the Harris Room on the 2nd floor beginning at 12:30 p.m.
“Look Me in the Eye” is the moving, darkly funny story of growing up with Asperger’s at a time when the diagnosis simply didn’t exist. A born storyteller, Robison takes you inside the head of a boy whom teachers and other adults regarded as “defective.”
Media Reviews:
Robison succeeds in his goal of helping those who are struggling to grow up or live with Asperger’s to see how it is not a disease but a way of being that needs no cure except understanding and encouragement from others.” – PW.
“John Robison’s book is an immensely affecting account of a life lived according to his gifts rather than his limitations. His story provides ample evidence for my belief that individuals on the autistic spectrum are just as capable of rich and productive lives as anyone else.” – Daniel Tammet, author of Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant.
Copies of the book are available in the Book Club section behind the front desk.
Daryl Hawk, a documentary photographer, will present a slide show and speak about “Ladakh: Land of High Passes.”
Ladakh is a region of India in the state of Jammu and Kashmir that lies between the Kunlun mountain range in the north and the main Great Himalayas to the south, inhabited by people of Indo-Aryan and Tibetan descent. It is one of the most sparsely populated regions in Jammu and Kashmir and its culture and history are closely related to that of Tibet.
For the past twenty-five years, explorer and international documentary photographer Daryl Hawk has traveled alone to some of the most remote places in the world telling stories with his camera. Hawk spends months at a time documenting and immersing himself in different cultures and landscapes. He is a passionate defender of the world’s remaining wilderness areas and uses his photography to shine a light on why we need to protect them. His articles and images often appear in magazines and newspapers worldwide. He has also been featured several times on NBC’s Today Show and FOX 5 television. He is a member of the Explorers Club, founded in New York City in 1904 promoting the exploration of land, sea, air and space. He is also a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Professional Photographers Association. He is a lecturer and presenter for the World Explorers Bureau.
Hawk is also the producer and host of the Cablevision television show “The Unconventional Traveler” which features some of the world’s leading explorers, travel photographers and filmmakers sharing their work from various expeditions and documentaries. He has produced over 100 shows over the past 10 years. Some of his guests have included Buzz Aldrin, Jane Goodall and George Schaller.
In 2004 Hawk had the unique distinction of carrying the historic Explorers Club flag across the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan (“Bhutan West to East Traverse”, flag #73). A guest of the Royal family, he was hired to produce and host an indepth documentary for both American and Bhutanese television as well as international magazines. An Explorers Club flag expedition must further the cause of exploration and field science.
Arranged by Andre Guilbert
Kent Haydock will lead our DMA book discussion for September. The chosen selection is A Higher Call by Adam Makos.
On December 20, 1943, two enemy pilots met in the skies over Germany—an American, Charlie Brown—and a German, Franz Stigler. What transpired would be called: “WWII’s most incredible aerial encounter.” Now, for the first time, A Higher Call tells the complete story of Charlie and Franz’s WWII experiences, their gritty tales of aerial combat over the African desert, the seas of Sicily, the fog of England, and the ultimate battleground—the frozen skies of Germany. The library will have copies of the book available on or about August 1st.
The meeting will be held on at the Darien Library in the Harris Room on the 2nd floor beginning at 12:30 p.m.
Kevin Monahan has arranged with Sterling Farms for a DMA Golf Outing to be held on Friday, October 3 starting at 10:30 AM. We have 5 tee times starting at 10:30 AM enabling us to have 20 players. The cost per player is $42.00 including the golf cart. An announcement will be made at next week’s meeting at which we will have a sign up sheet. Kevin will be away that day and Alex Garnett will be covering for Kevin in his absence.
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