Book Club

Sunday, April 28, 2019
2:00 pm
The BookBar
4280 Tennyson St, Denver, CO 80212

Our book selection for April is Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster by Stephen Carter. 

About Invisible by Stephen Carter

The bestselling author delves into his past and discovers the inspiring story of his grandmother’s extraordinary life

She was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s—and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected twenty lawyers to help him clean up the city’s underworld, she was the only member of his team who was not a white male.

Eunice Hunton Carter, Stephen Carter’s grandmother, was raised in a world of stultifying expectations about race and gender, yet by the 1940s, her professional and political successes had made her one of the most famous black women in America. But her triumphs were shadowed by prejudice and tragedy. Greatly complicating her rise was her difficult relationship with her younger brother, Alphaeus, an avowed Communist who—together with his friend Dashiell Hammett—would go to prison during the McCarthy era. Yet she remained unbowed.

Moving, haunting, and as fast-paced as a novel, Invisible tells the true story of a woman who often found her path blocked by the social and political expectations of her time. But Eunice Carter never accepted defeat, and thanks to her grandson’s remarkable book, her long forgotten story is once again visible.

---

Let us know if you’re interested in joining the Smith Club Book Club. 

The Smith Club Book Club meets on the fourth Sunday of the month (with some exceptions) at 2:00 pm on a bi-monthly schedule. Meetings are held at the BookBar in North Denver’s Tennyson District. The Book Club focuses on books (fiction and non-fiction) written by or about Smith women.

2019 Smith Club Book Club Dates and Selections

• February 24 – The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
• April 28 – Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster by Stephen Carter
• June 23
• August 25
• October 27
• December 22

2018 Smith Club Book Club Selections

• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
• The Velveteen Daughter by Laurel Davis Huber ’73
• Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction by Mary Ellen Hannibal ’81
• We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
• The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
• My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg

2017 Smith Club Book Club Selections

• A Spoonful of Sugar by Amanda Orr ’90
• Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love by Simran Sethi ’92
• My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem ’56
• Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper ’96
• Terrible Virtue by Ellen Feldman (Bryn Mawr College ’64, MA ’67).
• The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez