Named in honor of Political Science Professor Emerita Ruth W. Grant, who used fiction as a staple in her courses on ethics and political theory, this program supports Duke alumni book clubs.
Ruth W. Grant book clubs create space for Duke alumni to build community and deepen their engagement with the intellectual life of the University through regional book clubs. Clubs select a book to read and are then paired with a Duke professor who leads a discussion of the book with the club.
If you have interest in starting an alumni book club, please contact Margaret Campbell Krause at margaret.campbell@duke.edu.
Current Book Selection
Our book selections for 2024–2025 encompass a wide range of themes: climate change and its global impacts, war, racial injustice, incarceration, and personal and familial connections to place.
Short descriptions are provided below. You can also click on the cover image to visit the publisher’s website for more information about each book.
Is climate change today rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism? At the center of Amitav Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our current environmental crisis.
In 1965 twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath dares to follow her brother to Vietnam and join the Army Nurse Corps. She envisions contributing to a cause different than the traditional gender norms of her generation. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.
In this novel, a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of the Chain-Gang All-Stars — the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly popular, highly controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. “Chain-Gang All-Stars is a look at the American prison system’s alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration.” – Tommy Orange
When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. This magisterial and highly inventive novel follows the cycles of history, nature, and even language. North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment, to history, and to one another and asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone?
Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle, in 1865, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the same school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Charles envisions a future away from the institutional violence that has followed his bloodline.
A global protest movement broke the planet’s fossil fuel dependency, and the subsequent trials convicted executives and lobbyists for crimes against the environment. One of the convicted has escaped and is rumored to be living in Mexico. Who will benefit from the unmasking or capture of the convict? What is the nature of justice and punishment when the world is dying?
In India’s Malabar Coast, three generations of a family suffer a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, "The Covenant of Water" is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today.
Rosalie Iron Wing returns to her childhood home in a search for family, identity, and a community where she can finally belong. She learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron—women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools. "The Seed Keeper" is a beautifully told story of reawakening, of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and, through them, to our ancestors.
In 1848, Ellen and William Craft achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.
For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives. But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. By unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a world of wonder…where nothing is as it seems.
List by Title and Author
“The Nutmeg’s Curse” by Amitav Ghosh
“The Women” by Kristin Hannah
“Chain Gang All-Stars” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
“North Woods” by Daniel Mason
“Wandering Stars” by Tommy Orange
“Denial” by Jon Raymond
“The Covenant of Water” by Abraham Verghese
“The Seed Keeper” by Diane Wilson
“Master Slave Husband Wife” by Ilyon Woo
“The Lost Bookshop” by Evie Woods
About the Book Clubs’ Namesake
Ruth W. Grant is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Duke University, specializing in political theory with a particular interest in early modern philosophy and political ethics. She is the author of "John Locke's Liberalism and of Hypocrisy" and "Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau and the Ethics of Politics." Her most recent book is "Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives."
