The Book Club usually meets at 1:30 p.m. on the 3rd Thursday of each month from September to June.

We read and discuss books connected with our interest in archaeology. All books we have read since 2005 are listed below

New members are welcome to come to our meetings, and if you would like to know more about the book group, please call or email Myrna Silverman: at 914-769-5389 or myrnaws@aol.com

List of Books Read by the Club

2020

2019

Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century by Charles King

Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes our Past by Sara Parcak

Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson

Cannibalism: a perfectly natural history by Bill Schutt

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester

The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox

The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth’s Ultimate Trophy by Paige Williams

The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey

She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer

She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer

Milk! A 10,000-Year Fracas by Mark Kurlansky

2018

2017

2016

2015

Yeman: The Unknown Arabia by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Turn Right at Machu Picchu by Mark Adams

Mesopotamia: Eyewitness Series by Philip Steele

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Paabo

Travels with Herodotus by Richard Kapuscinski

Walking the Bible by Bruce Feiler

Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson

Digging Up Richard III by Michael Kitts

Lives in Ruins, Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble by Marilyn Johnson

2014

The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease by Daniel Lieberman

Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind’s Beginnings by Virginia Morell

Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City by Anne-Marie E. Cantwell

The Phoenicians: The Purple Empire of the Ancient World by Gerhard Herm

The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers discovered the Hidden Gospels by Janet Soskice

The Parthenon Enigma by Joan Breton Connelly

The Great Journey: Peopling Ancient America by Brian Fagan

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen

My Father’s Paradise by Ariel Sabar

The Silk Road: A New History by Valerie Hansen

2013

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson

Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell, Adventurer, Advisor to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia by Janet Wallach

The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox

River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard

Beneath the Sands of Egypt: Adventures of an Unconventional Archeologist by Donald P. Ryan

Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization by Richard Miles

2012

Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization by Paul Kriwaczek

The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard

Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi by Timothy R. Pauketat

Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino

In Search of Zarathustra by Paul Kriwaczek

Ghost on the Throne: the Death of Alexander the Great and the War For Crown and Empire by James Romm

Why the West Rules — For Now by Ian Morris

To Wake the Dead: A Renaissance Merchant and the Birth of Archaeology by Marina Belozerskaya

Mapping Human History by Steve Olson

2010-2011

Beak of the Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time by Jonathan Weiner

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham

Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity by David Hurst Thomas
alternately: Every Bone Tells a Story by Jill Rubalcaba and Peter Robertshaw

The War That Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander

The Maya by Michael D. Coe and other books about the Mayas

The Far Traveler, Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown

The Aztecs by Michael E. Smith and other books about the Aztecs

The Olmecs by Richard A. Diehl and other books about the Olmecs

Portrait of a Priestess by Joan Breton Connelly

Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff

Alexander’s Tomb, The 2000 Year Obsession To Find The Lost Conqueror by Nicholas J. Saunders

In Search of the Old Ones by David Roberts

The Lost Tomb by Kent R Weeks

Language Visible by David Sachs

2009-2010

The Etruscans by Michael Grant or other books about the Etruscans

Bandelier, The Life and Adventures of Adolf Bandelier by Charles H. Lange & Carroll L. Riley

Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

Apocalypse, Earthquakes, Archaeology and the Wrath of God by Amos Nur and Dawn Burgess

Ur of the Chaldees, a revised and updated edition of Sir Leonard Wooley’s Excavations at Ur by P.R.S. Moorey

Man in the Ice: The Discovery of a 5,000 Year-Old Body Reveals the Secrets of the Stone Age by Konrad Spindler

Libraries in the Ancient World by Lionel Casson

2008-2009

China’s First Emperor and his Terracotta Warriors by Frances Wood

Who Owns Antiquity? by James Cuno

Loot by Sharon Waxman

A Rage to Live, A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton by Mary S. Lovell

Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Turbron

The Road to Ubar, Finding the Atlantis of the Sands by Nicholas Clapp

A Splendid Exchange, How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel by William G. Dever

Thieves of Baghdad by Matthew Bogdanos

2007-2008

The Goddess and the Bell: Catalhoyuk, An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilization
by Michael Balter

Dragon Sea: A True Tale of Treasure, Archaeology and Greed Off the Coast of Vietnam by Frank Pope

The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh by David Damrosch

The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Catalhoyuk by Ian Hodder

Return to Sodom and Gomorrah by Charles R. Pellegrino

The Singing Neanderthals: The Origin of Music, Language, Mind and Body by Steven Mithen

Napoleon’s Lost Fleet: Bonaparte, Nelson and the Battle of the Nile by Laura Foreman & others

Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions by Charles Gallenkamp

The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists and Archaeologists in Egypt by Brian Fagan

2006-2007

Breaking the Maya Code by Michael Coe

Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings translated and comments by Dennis Tedlock

1491 – New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto

Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick

Unearthing Atlantis: An Archaeological Odyssey by Charles Pellegrino

The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams

The Archeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls by Jodi Magness

Jamestown, the Buried Truth by William M. Kelso

2005-2006

Stealing History by Roger Atwood

Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit by David A. Traill

Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell, Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia by Janet Wallach

Born To Rebel: The Life of Harriet Boyd Hawes by Mary Allsebrook

Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About The Event That Changed History by Walter Pitman and William Ryan

The Mummies of Urumchi by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

Pompeii by Robert Harris