After Hours Book Club — “The Overstory” by Richard Powers

Thursday, August 18, 2022
7:30 pm - 8:30 pm

About the Book

An Air Force Loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech- impaired scientist discovers tress are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers- each summoned in different ways by tress- are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.

About the author

Richard Powers as born 18 June 1957 in Evanston, Illinois, the fourth of five children, two older sisters and a brother and one younger brother. Powers completed his M.A. at the University of Illinois in late 1979. But the humanities could not provide Powers a secure space. He elected not to pursue doctoral studies as he feared finding in literary theory and criticism the same limiting need to specialize.

About the event

Please note any accommodation requests in the Special Needs section of the registration form.

If you have any other questions, please contact Carrie Ratterman at cratterman@cc-pl.org

Alexandria Branch