Historical Book Club

Important Update Regarding Meeting Usage During Library Renovation

During 2026, we will be undergoing a renovation to better serve the people of Dearborn County. 

Due to the renovation, access to the Youth Services Department will be closed to the public during January and February. You will still be able to use the Ewbank Meeting Room throughout this closure, but our procedures for using the room have been modified:

  • Please enter the library via the High St. entrance. This entrance provides direct access to the Ewbank Meeting Room only. To access other areas of the library, you must use the Mary St. or Parking Lot entrances.
  • Once inside, please call our Adult Services Department at 812-537-2775 Ext. 1125. Let us know that you have arrived and provide your group's name. A staff member will come to unlock the room for your group.
  • If you need any assistance at any time during your meeting, please call 812-537-2775 Ext. 1125 and a staff member will come to help.
  • When your meeting has finished, please call 812-537-2775 Ext. 1125 again to let us know. Please leave your clipboard in the room. A staff member will come to lock the room and collect the clipboard. There is no need to wait for us.

We are excited to share our upgraded spaces with you once renovations are complete. In the meantime, we appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to improve your library.

Program Type:

Book Club, Genealogy/Local History

Age Group:

Adults
Please note you are looking at an event that has already happened.

Program Description

Take a book back in time!  In September we will be reading In the Heart of the Sea, by Nathaniel Philbrick.

"With its huge, scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a white-water wake more than forty feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice its original speed - at least six knots. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, it struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cat-head on the port bow..."

In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex - an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick. In a harrowing page-turner, Nathaniel Philbrick restores this epic story to its rightful place in American history.

In 1820, the 240-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton bull sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, made for the 3,000-mile-distant coast of South America in three tiny boats. During ninety days at sea under horrendous conditions, the survivors clung to life as one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear.

Philbrick interweaves his account of this extraordinary ordeal of ordinary men with a wealth of whale lore and with a brilliantly detailed portrait of the lost, unique community of Nantucket whalers. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, the book delivers the ultimate portrait of man against nature, drawing on a remarkable range of archival and modern sources, including a long-lost account by the ship's cabin boy.

At once a literary companion and a page-turner that speaks to the same issues of class, race, and man's relationship to nature that permeate the works of Melville, In the Heart of the Sea will endure as a vital work of American history.