The second Tuesday of every month, the History Book Club members invite the public to join them between the stacks of the Park City’s Library to wrestle with historical topics. Regardless of age, background or even if they’ve never cracked open the selected reading, everyone is welcome. Depending on the date, up to 30 people might show up. The group renews itself through its rotating cast of voices, with seasonal members, living in their vacation homes stopping by in the warmer months or for the colder months and others driving up each month from Salt Lake City.

The History Book Club is quite flexible about its rules. Depending on who is leading the group, conversation might sway to local gossip or it might be on a straight and narrow path.

Jane Stone, who founded the book club with former Park City resident Tricia Clark, and leads the group with Chris Schaefer, says the idea was not to be pedantic, but stimulating, and to include all walks of life and all opinions. She’s stayed with the group over the years because of the anti-stuffy quality, she says. Before the History Book Club, Stone’s history class years in high school lingered. She never knew history to be so much fun she finds herself looking forward to it, she says.

“It’s a lot like a graduate seminar, everyone there is extremely intelligent and has interesting backgrounds, and usually a person will find something in their background that relates to what we’re discussing in some way some are even historical novelists like Chris Schaefer,” she explains. “We all contribute to the conversation and sometimes we get off on a tangent that’s interesting. That’s okay. We don’t insist we have to stay on topic. Every meeting is a learning experience that goes way beyond what the book has to say to personal experience.”

For a group that has decided to draw few boundaries when it comes to structure or club requirements, the theme that continues at the March 11 meeting makes for an interesting choice. This round, the club is delving into the question of who draws the borders that divide the world into nations, and why they are drawn in the first place.

The group’s chosen book this month is Lonnie Johnson’s “Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends.” Strike Fongeallaz, who will lead the discussion, anticipates the exchange of ideas will veer off into the personal. The issue of borders isn’t limited to Central Europe, she argues, it’s true in many parts of the world including her native country.

“I am French and I am Savoyarde,” Fongeallaz explains. “My home country, the Savoie, belonged to different countries before the particular region I was from joined France in 1860 Now the western side of the Alps is part of France, the eastern side is Part of Italy and other parts are part of Switzerland.”

Johnson, whose academic career includes teaching positions at institutions in Austria, is the executive director of the Fulbright Commission in Vienna, the country’s capital. “Central Europe” surveys both the distinct and integrated histories of Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia. Reviews praise the book’s pithy analysis of the often-overlooked pieces of the events and people in these countries that share a common heritage.

In his book, Johnson illuminates the struggles under imperial powers that many Central European nations endured, including the Ottoman Empire, the House of Hapsburg, Russian czars, Nazis and the Soviet Union, and the remaining challenges many states face post-Communism.

“Throughout the Cold War era, the Iron Curtain divided Central Europe into a Communist East and a democratic West,” the Oxford University Press summary explains, “Yet many people living on both sides of the Iron Curtain considered themselves Central Europeans, and the idea of Central Europe was one of the driving forces behind the revolutionary year of 1989 as well as the deterioration of Yugoslavia and its ensuing wars.”

“His goal is mostly to say where borders end up isn’t necessarily where borders naturally should fall,” Fongeallaz adds. “It’s a difficult and interesting question, I think: how do you decide where one country ends and another begins?”

The History Book Club’s book for April will be “Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell, Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia” about the woman who was instrumental in drawing the Middle East borders after World War I.