November Book Club Information:
November 2026 BOOK CLUB: Tuesday, November 24, 2026 5pm Western/7pm Central/ 8pm Eastern on Zoom: Fiction: “The Stand” By Stephen King. (BARD: DB 12942). (ZOOM REGISTER HERE)
Below is a summary of October book club of “The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the original deaf-blind girl” By Elisabeth Gitter:
- Plot Summary (from Amazon website): “The Imprisoned Guest retrieves Laura Bridgman’s forgotten life, placing it in the context of nineteenth-century American social, intellectual, and cultural history. Her troubling, tumultuous relationship with Howe, who rode Laura’s achievements to his own fame but could not cope with the intense, demanding adult she became, sheds light on the contradictory attitudes of a “progressive” era in which we can find some precursors of our own.”
- Author information on John Jay College of Criminal Justice (where she taught for years).
- Author’s Biography (from author’s profile on university website(where she taught): “Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Gitter received her PhD degree from Yale University and specializes in the Victorian period. At John Jay, she was a founding member of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program, in which she has taught for most of her career.”
- Author’s other writings (a list of articles from Google Scholar)
- Author Interviews:
- Fresh Air Radio Interview (audio with transcript) with author Elizabeth Gitter from August 23, 2001
- Wayland Free Public Library video interview (with captions) with author Elisabeth Gitter
- A New York Times Review and article from 2001 (about Gitter’s book and another book about Laura Bridgman)
- Historical Significance:
- Of Place: Perkins Institute is now Perkins School For The Blind: Website and Wikipedia
- Of Disability: Charles Dickens visited Perkins and met Laura. He wrote about her (pages 35-50) in his work “American Notes for General Circulation” (at this link is the Google Books of Dickens’ book that you can read for free)
- A profile of Laura Bridgman on League of Women Voters website
- We talked about other disabilities/diseases that are misunderstood: Tourette Syndrome (Tourette Association of America, website)
- Critical Reception of Book:
Thank you to those who attended.