Bistro Bookers
You MUST reserve your seat for this event by 3:00 PM on Friday, June 13, 2025 by calling 716-636-3051 and providing your name and phone number. If you call to reserve for more than one person, you must provide each person’s name and phone number.
Date: Tuesday, June 17, 2025 @ 4:00 PM
Venue: Amherst Center for Senior Services
370 John James Audubon Parkway
Amherst, NY 14228
Suggested donation of $2 per person is greatly appreciated. Your donation helps Bistro Bookers to continue to hold these reviews and donate back to our community literacy programs. Your donation also allows us to purchase the reviewer’s book if necessary and give them a gift for their time.
Masks are encouraged at this time. Please make sure to bring yours just in case.
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Book title: The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
Author: Erik Larson
Discussed by: Carol Ann Sackett (Co-President, Clarence Book Review Club)
Book summary from author’s website:
On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter.
Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”
At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave-owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous Secretary of State, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable—one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.
Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink—a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.
Upcoming Bistro Bookers events
Bistro Bookers will take a summer break in July and August. Keep an eye on your emails for the next Bistro Bookers event in September.
We look forward to seeing you in the Fall.
—The Bistro Booker Board