Book Club , Events

Book Club – “The Antidote”

18751 Hogaboom Lane
St. Mary's City , 20686

11 Nov 2026

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2:00pm - 3:30pm

icford@smcm.edu

Book Club, Events

Book Club – “The Antidote”

18751 Hogaboom Lane
St. Mary's City , 20686

11 Nov 2026

2:00pm - 3:30pm

Overview

2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. | HSMC Visitor Center Auditorium

A Farthing’s for Your Thoughts book club is a monthly gathering hosted by Iris Ford, Ph.D. Each month the book club is invited to read a book of their choosing, then join Iris for a lively discussion that offers analysis and deepens understanding of the book and each other. The book club selections range from fiction to non-fiction, classics to new releases, reflecting the diverse reading habits of the group.

Listen in and join the conversation around author Karen Russell’s book, The Antidote.

Summary:

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell’s novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.

The book club is free and open to the public

INFO: icford@smcm.edu