I’d been warned this group was like “herding cats” or “carrying a wheelbarrow full of frogs,” cats and frogs who love a good book and who are influenced by the times.
Within a half-hour of listening to them opine on E.L. Doctorow's "The Book of Daniel" the other night, I knew exactly what their fearless leader David Waldrop meant.
Truth is they were more like jumping jacks, all over the place in a manly sort of way.
Come to think of it, listening to them was much like reading Doctorow himself as he nudges you through his fictionalized account of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the communist activists electrocuted in 1953 at the height of Cold War hysteria for passing atomic secrets to the Russians.
But more on that later.
Trust me, the stars of this story are not Doctorow’s characters but rather the men seated here in a frosty lanai of Stephen Roberts’ home in Decatur; their plates piled with brisket, chicken wings and potato salad ordered in from Fox Bros. And beer, of course.
They proudly call themselves the Manly Men’s Book Club and have been gathering like this for more than 10 years now, sharing, of all things, their emotions about various and sundry literature.
That’s a muscle many of us stopped using, well, in college, so it’s not surprising the very notion of a men’s book club was new to David Godfrey, Roberts, Bill Turnipseed and the others.
Book clubs, though, had long been a part of Waldrop’s life.
Prior to his time in our nation's capital, where he worked for 13 years for the U.S. Department of Energy, Waldrop was a member of a club of husbands and wives in Orlando, Fla.
It made sense to start a club here.
“They seem to follow me wherever I go,” Waldrop said.
He rounded up about a dozen guys. Two retired engineers, two retired federal analysts, a state employee, a psychologist, a pilot who lives on a sailboat between Key West and Brunswick, three local attorneys and a Lockheed Martin financial analyst who flies up from Orlando from time to time.
Waldrop had always been an avid reader, but as a member of a club, he found himself reading books he wouldn’t otherwise read and revisiting the classics from his days in high school. John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” And more recently Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
For Waldrop, 63, the fish never bite and the golf course was out of the question. He was never that good with a club in his hand, but a book felt just right, especially when he read it with a group.
“Otherwise, you just end up with a story and no one with whom to share it,” he said.
And so here they were — eight white-collar men on this night trying to stay intellectually plugged in.
Halfway through the 90-minute session, they seem to find their rhythm. Could they fall victim to mob mentality?
Before they could turn the page, that standing rule that “everybody speaks once before anybody speaks twice” had quietly gotten up and left the room, thereby opening the door to mob rule.
But back to that looming question of the night: Could they join a mob if their life and property depended on it?
“Considering the right set of circumstances, we probably could,” Roberts, their host, intoned.
No one disagreed. All seem to draw parallels between the fear-based politics in "The Book of Daniel," and current events from the "capitulation of universities to the political demands of the students" to recent mass shootings and, of course, that lazy mob up on Capitol Hill.
“The point is that this is a timely topic and you don’t have to look far to see it,” Turnipseed said. “You even see it manifested in the political dialogue of both parties. It reminded me of a book I read 40 years ago. There’s nothing new under the sun. The horror stories are the same and innocent people are still being hurt because of unfounded fears and misinformation.”
The men were drawn to "The Book of Daniel" after reading the 2015 Pulitzer winner for fiction "All the Light We Cannot See," by Anthony Doerr. Nazi mob rule was the subject of that book.
But not everything is as heavy as all this.
Developing their book list, Waldrop quipped, is “random chaos in a democratic fashion.”
Seriously, they gather string from newspaper book reviews, television shows and a list Godfrey keeps.
They say slowing down to sit down and discuss “their feelings about and interpretation” of each book is what keeps them coming back.
“It’s important to think about things other than sports and cars,” said Roberts, who dreamed of becoming a professional ballplayer until he was 20.
Roberts became an attorney instead and has spent the past 30 years hanging around lawyers talking about their last cases.
“After 30 years of war stories, it’s nice to talk about something different,” he said. “This is 180 degrees opposite of watching football or playing poker, so I was delighted to be invited and included.”
So what’s on next month’s agenda?
Toni Morrison's controversial first novel, "The Bluest Eye."
“Late January, after we recover from Christmas,” Waldrop said as they headed for more beer.
