Thursday,October 30, 7:30 pm

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

A summer evening's ghost stories, lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine's room, and a runaway imagination -- fired by philosophical discussions with Lord Byron and Percey Blyshe Sheely about science galvanism, and the origins of life -- conspired to produce for Mary Shelley this haunting night specter.  By morning, it had become the germ of her Romantic masterpiece, Frankenstein.  Written in 1816 when she was only 19, Mary Shelley's novel of "The Modern Prometheus" chillingly dramatized the dangerous potential of life begotten upon a laboratory table.  A frightening creation myth for our own time, Franknenstein remains one of the greatest horror stories every written and is a undisputed classic of its kind.

Monday, November 24, 7:00 pm

Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story, by Diane Ackerman

(Please note new date and time for November only!)

The 1939 Nazi bombing of Warsaw left its beloved zoo in ruins with many of its animals killed or wounded. Witnessing this horror was the zookeeper's wife, who wondered, as she recalled later in her memoirs, how many humans would die in the same manner in the coming months. As Antonina Zabinski and her husband, Jan, soon learned, the Nazis had targeted Poland's large Jewish population for extermination, and the couple, who were already supplying food to friends in the Warsaw Ghetto, pledged to help more Jews. And help they did. Ackerman's (A Natural History of the Senses) moving and eloquent narrative reveals how the zookeepers, with the aid of the Polish underground, boldly smuggled some 300 Jews out of the Ghetto and hid them in their villa and the zoo's empty cages. Based on Antonina's own memoirs and newspaper interviews, as well as Ackerman's own research in Poland, the result is an exciting and unforgettable portrait of courage and grace under fire.