Arsenal Cider House

April's selection for the DPL Book Club is the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in History winner The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, by Jack E. Davis.   Hailed as a “nonfiction epic . . . in the tradition of Jared Diamond’s best-seller Collapse, and Simon Winchester’s Atlantic” (Dallas Morning News), Jack E. Davis’s The Gulf is “by turns informative, lyrical, inspiring and chilling for anyone who cares about the future of ‘America’s Sea’ ” (Wall Street Journal). Illuminating America’s political and economic relationship … Read More

The next meeting of the DPL Book Club is scheduled for Wednesday, March 15, and next month's selection is We Were the Lucky Ones, by Georgia Hunter. It is the spring of 1939 and three generations of the Kurc family are doing their best to live normal lives, even as the shadow of war grows closer. The talk around the family Seder table is of new babies and budding romance, not of the increasing hardships threatening Jews in their hometown … Read More

February's selection is The Upside, also published as You Changed My Life, by Abdel Sellou. The memoir tells the extraordinary true story of the charming Algerian con-man whose friendship with a disabled French aristocrat inspired the record-breaking hit film, The Intouchables (remade in the US as The Upside (2019)). Sellou’s fictional reincarnation, Driss, played to critical acclaim by French comedian Omar Sy in the movie Les Intouchables, captured the hearts of millions. Already a bestseller in France and Germany, his … Read More

January's selection is The Good Sister, by Sally Hepworth. There's only been one time that Rose couldn't stop me from doing the wrong thing and that was a mistake that will haunt me for the rest of my life. Fern Castle works in her local library. She has dinner with her twin sister Rose three nights a week. And she avoids crowds, bright lights and loud noises as much as possible. Fern has a carefully structured life and disrupting her routine can … Read More

For November, the book will be The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans, with the club meeting on Wednesday, November 16. Copies of the book will be available for pickup at Dormont Public Library in late October, or in the Libby app. The book club will be held at Arsenal Tap House on West Liberty Ave. There is a $6 beverage fee, payable to the server. Must be 21 and over to attend.   To RSVP for the Book Club, please … Read More

September's selection is The Year of Fog, by Michelle Richmond. Life changes in an instant. On a foggy beach. In the seconds when Abby Mason—photographer, fiancée soon-to-be-stepmother—looks into her camera and commits her greatest error. Heartbreaking, uplifting, and beautifully told, here is the riveting tale of a family torn apart, of the search for the truth behind a child’s disappearance, and of one woman’s unwavering faith in the redemptive power of love—all made startlingly fresh through Michelle Richmond’s incandescent sensitivity … Read More

August's selection is Stephen Kurczy's The Quiet Zone. The Green Bank Telescope is the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world. By federal law, an area of 13,000 square miles around the telescope—the eponymous National Radio Quiet Zone—is supposed to be free from all sources of radio interference. Some writers have described the town of Green Bank, WV, as a "disconnected paradise", where residents are free of the incessant chatter of smartphones and Wi-Fi. But is that really the case? … Read More

July's book is The Rosie Project, by Australian author Graeme Simsion. The art of love is never a science: Meet Don Tillman, a brilliant yet socially inept professor of genetics, who’s decided it’s time he found a wife. In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which Don approaches all things, he designs the Wife Project to find his perfect partner: a sixteen-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the drinkers, the smokers, the late arrivers.   Rosie Jarman possesses all these qualities. … Read More