1185 Park Avenue: A Memoir
Anne Roiphe, 2000
Simon & Schuster (Touchstone)
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780684857329

In Brief  
From National Book Award nominee Anne Roiphe comes this moving memoir of growing up in a wealthy Jewish home with a family who had money, status, culture — everything but happiness.

While the nation was at war abroad, Roiphe, who was coming of age in 1940s New York City, saw her parents at war in their living room. Roiphe's evocative writing puts readers right in Apartment 8C, where a constant tension plays out between a disappointed and ineffectual mother, a philandering father who uses his wife's money to entertain other women, and a difficult brother. Behind the leisure culture of wealthy Jewish society — the mahjongg games, the cocktail parties, the summer houses — lurks a brutality that strikes a chord with a daughter who longs to heal the wounds of her troubled family.

Writing with a novelist's sensibility, Roiphe reveals the poignant story of a family that has finally claimed its material wealth in a prosperous America but has yet to claim its spiritual due. (From the publisher.)

top of page 

About the Author 

• Birth—December 25, 1935
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Sarah Lawrence College
• Currently—lives in New York City

Anne Roiphe is an American writer and journalist, best-known as a first-generation feminist and author of the novel Up The Sandbox (1970), which was filmed as a starring vehicle for Barbra Streisand in 1972. In 1996, Salon called the book "a feminist classic."

Over a four-decade career, Roiphe has proven so prolific that the critic Sally Eckoff of Salon observed—"tracing Anne Roiphe's career often feels like following somebody through a revolving door: the requirements of keeping the pace can be trying." (Eckoff described the writer as "a free-thinking welter of contradictions, a never-say-die feminist who's absolutely nuts about children").

Roiphe published her first novel, Digging Out, in 1967. Her second, Up The Sandbox (1970), became a national best-seller and made the author's career.

All told, Roiphe has published nine novels, six works of non-fiction, and three memoirs, while contributing essays and reviews to the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, and others.

In 1993, the New York Times described her as "a writer who has never toed a party line, feminist or otherwise." Her 1996 memoir Fruitfu: A Memoir of Modem Motherhood was nominated for the National Book Award.

From 1997 to 2002, she served as a columnist for the New York Observer. Roiphe is the mother of author and cultural critic Katie Roiphe. (From Wikipedia.)

top of page

Critics Say . . . 
By not trying to make many grand statements about the human experience, Roiphe ends up making a few rather eloquent statments about the human experience....[P]erhaps the larger point of this [book] is that not only can one survive parental.
Karen Lehrman - New York Times Book Review

Probing....Roiphe's [book] is an acute social history as well as a personal account.
Boston Globe

A noted author of fiction (her 1970 Up the Sandbox was a landmark portrayal of women's motherhood and career conflicts) as well as nonfiction (Fruitful was a 1996 National Book Award finalist), Roiphe recalls growing up in a loveless household marked by petty bitterness and fueled by murderous rage. Outwardly, it was a world of privilege, endowed by the fortune of Israel Phillips, her maternal grandfather, the founder of the Phillips Van Heusen shirt company. The family's wealth attracted a tall, handsome husband for Israel's daughter Blanche, but the union was miserable. Anne's mother was prey to neurotic insecurities that were resistant to lifelong psychiatric counseling, and she became a chain-smoking semi-invalid. Like her philandering husband, Blanche displayed little interest in the children, who were consigned to the care of a stern German governess. In this surprising and gripping memoir, Roiphe unflinchingly describes her savage jealousy at the birth of her brother and the anger that always underlay their relationship. Her extended family circle included Roy Cohn, whose attempt to fix Anne up for a blind date with his colleague David Schine's younger brother provides one of the book's lighter moments. She describes with telling detail her passage to adulthood, but the story of her inner journey—how she managed to escape the destructive atmosphere of her home and become a celebrated novelist and critic—remains a puzzle. Nevertheless Roiphe's devastating memoir fully engages the reader in her painful story of hatred and betrayal.
Publishers Weekly

With a rush of words, layer upon layer, acclaimed author Roiphe ( Fruitful; Up the Sandbox, 1970) dissects her childhood family, depicting as well a grim view of growing up rich and Jewish on Upper Park Avenue in the 1940s and 1950s. The daughter of a wealthy, frightened, chainsmoking mother and a handsome, philandering, cold, immigrant father who rejected his past, Roiphe watched her parents savage each other daily. Unable to connect with her asthmatic, hated, hateful younger brother (though later there is some reconciliation), Roiphe forged a relationship with her mother by becoming her confidante while still craving her father's love. The tragedy of her parents' disastrous marriage repeats itself in Roiphe's own life, when she marries a man like her father, who wants her money but not her. This is not pleasurable reading: the subject matter is deceptively brutal, and the writing is marred by too much detail and repetition. Nonetheless, it is hard to put down this mesmerizing memoir.  —Francine Fialkoff
Library Journal

There is sometimes too much obsessive detail, but Roiphe's acerbic, passionate sentences twist and turn and stop you short with their wit and painful insight. In simple words, she hears her brother's reason for having only one child: "He told me he would never do to his son what had been done to him, that is me, that is, a sibling." —Hazel Rochman
Booklist

top of page 

Book Club Discussion Questions 

Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for 1185 Park Avenue:

1. An obvious place to start discussing this memoir is with the author's parents. Describe them, their characteristics, and then talk their marriage and parenting (or lack thereof). In other words, what's wrong with these people?

2. What is the relationship between Anne and her younger brother...and why? What does Anne discover about why Johnny is always sick.

3. Why does Anne sit outside her mother's room, waiting for her? Why does she crave the attention of a mother who is so obviously deficient in mothering skills? And what about Johnny, of whom Anne says, "He waited for no one"?

3. At one point, Roiphe ponders: "Is this story literally true? I'm not sure exactly. As I tell the tale, and I have told it often, it rings somewhat untrue." Does that remark anger you as a reader...that it's your responsibility, rather than the author's, to ferret out what is true or untrue? Why might Roiphe have admitted such a thing? Is it objective truth she's after...or emotional truth? Is there a difference?

4. How would you describe the tone of Roiphe's writing—is it sensational...or matter-of-fact? Do you find the work more "observational" or more "confessional"? What's the distinction? Does she seek to place blame...and, if so, on whom?

5. When referring to Emma, Roiphe makes the observation that "equal was opportunity not result, but where Emma's opportunity?" What does she mean?

6. How difficult was it for Roiphe to escape the effects of her tortuous childhood? Is it possible for all of us to throw off the painful repercussions of our past—or is Roiphe able to do so because she is particularly gifted? Put another way: are we bound to repeat the patterns of our own upbringing?

7. Does Anne Roiphe see herself as a victim? What does she come to understand about herself and her family? How does she come to terms with familial betrayal—what greater, deeper truth does she arrive at?

8. Is this book an expose of appallingly bad parenting...or a work of social analysis, dissecting a select slice of life in Manhattan during the 1940s and '50s?

9. Which sections of this memoir particularly struck you—as troublesome or painful or interesting...or even funny?

10. Have you read other memoris similar to Roiphe's, books that talk about difficult, or pleasant, growing-up years? If so, how does 1185 Park Avenue compare?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page

2 Years 4 Months 2 Hours:  From Italy to the world. A Memoir of Love and Travel
Chiara B. Townley, 2015
CreateSpace
150 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781505302752


Summary
2 years 4 months 2 hours is a memoir of love and travel.

Chiara meets Tyler in London while she's working in a hotel. For her it's love at first sight. She is from Italy and he is American. There is no time for dating because he's leaving for a trip to South America then back to the US.

What happens next is the journey of a woman that follows her heart against all odds. This true story will push you to fight more for your dreams. And if you gave up on your dreams maybe you will think about getting them back. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 8, 1984
• Where—Milan, Italy
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California, USA


The story is told through different sources: the author's narrative, some letters and parts of personal diary.

Follow Chiara on Facebook.

Book Reviews
The story is not all flowers and sweet kisses—long distance breeds complications and at times the read is an emotional roller coaster. However, Chiara is persistent and courageous and pursues Tyler when perhaps others might have given up on such a relationship. This is the true, at times intensely personal story of a romantic dream that ultimately and perhaps surprisingly comes true.
Dave's Travel Corner

Below are comments excerpted from Amazon Customer Reivews:

—Amazing true story of love and courage.

—A nonstop page turner. Once you feel like you could predict the ending, a curveball keeps you intertwined with mixed emotions and hope.

—Tyler & Chiara's story is truly an inspiration and Chiara tells it with such passion and clarity that you can't help but feel like part of the story.

—Chiara and Tyler have clearly shown that love knows no boundaries.

—Chiara's willingness to follow her heart which leads her to "true love" is a beautiful journey filled with experiences around the globe.

Discussion Questions
1. Do you think that traveling is important?

2. Do you believe in dreams?

3. Do you think it's worth fighting for a dream?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

top of page (summary)

50 Children:  One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany
Steven Pressman, 2014
HarperCollins
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062237477


Summary
Two Ordinary Americans.
Fifty Innocent Lives.
One Unforgettable Journey.

In early 1939, few Americans were thinking about the darkening storm clouds over Europe. Nor did they have much sympathy for the growing number of Jewish families that were increasingly threatened and brutalized by Adolf Hitler's policies in Germany and Austria.

But one ordinary American couple decided that something had to be done. Despite overwhelming obstacles—both in Europe and in the United States—Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus made a bold and unprecedented decision to travel into Nazi Germany in an effort to save a group of Jewish children.

Fewer than 1,200 unaccompanied children were allowed into the United States throughout the entire Holocaust, in which 1.5 million children perished. The fifty children saved by the Krauses turned out to be the single largest group of unaccompanied children brought to America.

Drawing from Eleanor Kraus's unpublished memoir, rare historical documents, and interviews with more than a dozen of the surviving children, and illustrated with period photographs, archival materials, and memorabilia, 50 Children is a remarkable tale of personal courage and triumphant heroism that offers a fresh, unique insight into a critical period of history. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1955
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California, Berkley
• Currently—lives near San Francisco, California


Steven Pressman is an American legal journalist, freelance journalist and investigative journalist. He was born in Los Angeles in 1955 and obtained his B.A. 1977 in political science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Writing
Pressman is the author of a book about Werner Erhard, Outrageous Betrayal: The Dark Journey of Werner Erhard from est to Exile, published in 1993. Beginning in 2010, he wrote, produced, and directed a documentary film, To Save a Life, about the rescue of 50 Jewish children from Austria during World War II. His 2014 book, 50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany, is based on the film.

Pressman has worked as a newspaper and magazine journalist in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. While researching his first book on Erhard, Pressman continued writing for various publications including California Lawyer, Legal Times, California Republic (where he was senior editor), and the Columbia Law Review. He contributed an article on libel law in 1994, for the United States Department of State.

In 1998, Landmark Education spent months in an unsuccessful attempt to compel Pressman to respond to deposition questions aimed at obtaining the confidential sources (used during research on Outrageous Betrayal) for use in the then-active litigation involving the Cult Awareness Network.

Filmmaking
Pressman produced short videos for the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California. In 2010, he served as writer, director, and producer for the 2013 HBO documentary film To Save a Life (retitled 50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus) is the story of Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, a Jewish couple from Philadelphia who traveled to Nazi Germany in 1939. With the help of the B'rith Sholom fraternal organization, they saved Jewish children in Vienna from likely death in the Holocaust by finding them new homes in Philadelphia. The heroic Krauses were the grandparents of Pressman's wife, Liz Perle, and the film is based on the manuscript of a memoir left behind by Eleanor Kraus when she died in 1989. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/5/2014.)

Book Reviews
Both an extraordinary humanitarian act and a classic tale of American initiative and perseverance....A rich and rewarding read….Pressman paints a moving picture of the rescue.
Wall Street Journal

It can be challenging to create suspense in a tale for which the ending is known. Pressman does a good job with 50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple’s Extraordinary Rescue Mission in the Heart of Nazi Germany, a book whose title pretty much tells it all.
New York Journal of Books


A brilliantly written book that takes the reader on a journey back in time. Yet, it is relevant today because Gil and Eleanor’s story proves that individuals with courage and strength can overcome the odds. … A very insightful read.
Military Press


[S]tirring account of determination against overwhelming odds.... Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, worked to rescue 50 Viennese Jewish children from occupied territory during the early years of WWII.... In contrast to his praise for the Krauses...Pressman critiques American intransigence alongside more visible Nazi cruelties, and the whole makes for a story as troublingas it is inspirational.
Publishers Weekly


The astonishing story of a Philadelphia couple's resolve to help bring Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied Austria.... The details around selection of the children, leave-taking of their parents and the tearful travels are heart-rending.... With a careful eye to detail and dialogue, Pressman vividly re-creates this epic rescue.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)

A Land Twice Promised:  An Israeli Woman's Quest for Peace
Noa Baum, 2016
Familius
340 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781942934493


Summary
Israeli storyteller Noa Baum grew up in Jerusalem in the shadow of the ancestral traumas of the holocaust and ongoing wars. Stories of the past and fear of annihilation in the wars of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s shaped her perceptions and identity.

In America, she met a Palestinian woman who had grown up under Israeli Occupation, and as they shared memories of war years in Jerusalem, an unlikely friendship blossomed.

A Land Twice Promised delves into the heart of one of the world’s most enduring and complex conflicts. Baum’s deeply personal memoir recounts her journey from girlhood in post­-Holocaust Israel to her adult encounter with “the other.” With honesty, compassion, and humor, she captures the drama of a nation at war and her discovery of humanity in the enemy.

This compelling memoir demonstrates the transformative power of art and challenges each reader to take the first step toward peace. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Jerusalem, Israel
• Education—B.F.A., Tel Aviv University; M.A.E., New York University
• Awards—Parents' Choice Recommended Award; Storytelling World Award
• Currently—lives in Washington, D.C.


Born and raised in Jerusalem, Noa Baum is an award-winning storyteller who combines performance art with practical applications of storytelling in business, community and education.

Noa performs and teaches internationally with diverse audiences ranging from The World Bank, US. Defense Department, prestigious universities and congregations, to inner city schools and detention centers. She is a winner of a Parents' Choice Recommended Award and a Storytelling World Award, and a recipient of numerous Individual Artist Awards from Maryland State Arts Council and Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County. She has lived in the US since 1990. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
In this touching and honest memoir, Baum shares the story of how her search for peace informed her life.… Although not everyone will agree with her leftist political perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Baum's genuine desire to make a difference may well inspire others to do the same.
Publishers Weekly


Impressively well written, organized and presented, A Land Twice Promised: An Israeli Woman's Quest for Peace is a compelling, thoughtful and thought-provoking read.
Midwest Review


The book provokes empathy and insight, and will lead most readers to embrace a view of Israel and the Palestinian conflict that is both complex and compassionate."
Jewish Independent, Canada

Discussion Questions
The following questions have been graciously submitted to LitLovers by Maggie Bailey from Bull Valley, Illinois. Thank you Maggie!

1. Are there parallels you can draw between the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the current political situation in the US?

2. How has the press contributed to the divisiveness in both the US and Israel?

3. Have you ever experienced a friendship like the one between Noa and Jumana, where your perceived differences were so immense that a friendship was unlikely?

4. What role has storytelling played in your life? Are you a storyteller?  Who are the storytellers in your life?

5. The book seems to serve different listed purposes. It is the story of history told from different perspectives.

• It is the story of an incredible friendship between two women
• It is the story of a seemingly unending, unresolvable conflict
• It is the story of how Noa became a storyteller
• It is the story of one woman’s attempt to begin to bring peace to a troubled land
• It is the story of the evolution of Noa’s perception of and relationship with her mother

   —How successful was Noa in achieving each of these purposes?

6. Are there traumatic events from your childhood that you believe shaped your political and worldviews?

7. Yaakov, who was killed when he was only twenty-two, is sanctified and idolized my Noa’s mother. How have you reacted when a deceased (from your life) is portrayed as nothing short of perfection? Examples both personal and political, perhaps?

8. “We were never taught to hate them. It is only that they hate us, and what can we do? We have no choice but to defend ourselves.” How has this common attitude affected efforts toward building peace over the last few thousand years?

9. Give some examples from the story of the juxtaposition of the mundane and the elaborate ritual. (e.g. Noa worrying about getting an itch during the 120 seconds of standing during the yearly Holocaust Memorial Day.)

10. Noa began her storytelling career early with the saga of her imaginary brother Yigal, the heroic soldier. Have you (or your kids) ever woven such an elaborate story about an imaginary person?

11. (LitLovers Generic Questions): What are some specific passages that struck you as significant… What was memorable?
 
12.  Has this book changed your attitude toward Israel? Palestine? In what ways?

13. Can learning each other’s stories actually solve seemingly unsolvable conflicts? How? Consider the following quotations:

• "An enemy is one whose story we have not heard." —Gene Knudsen-Hoffman
• "People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell.” —Elie Wiesel
• “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” —Gandhi.

From Noa Baum: Hard questions remain:

• Who will control the important town of East Jerusalem, including the old city, which is home to ancient religious sites sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims?
  
  
• Will the Palestinians ever be permitted to establish a free state, independent of Israel? What will be its borders?
  
  
• What will happen to Palestinian refugee families, some of whom have now lived in camps for generations? Will they be allowed to return to a Palestinian State? Will any be allowed back into Israel, or will they be compensated economically?
  
  
• What will happen to the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories?

Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority insist that they have offered reasonable compromises, but that the other side will not accept them. Meanwhile, the violence continues. But citizen to citizen exchanges also continues, and the hope for reconciliation and peace is still alive in the hearts of many Israelis and Palestinians.

(Questions developed by Maggie Bailey and offered to LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

A Most Beautiful Thing: The True Story of America's First All-Black High School Rowing Team
Arshay Cooper, 2020
Flatiron Books
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250754769 


Summary
The moving true story of a group of young men growing up on Chicago's West side who form the first all-black high school rowing team in the nation, and in doing so not only transform a sport, but their lives.

Growing up on Chicago’s Westside in the 90’s, Arshay Cooper knows the harder side of life.

The street corners are full of gangs, the hallways of his apartment complex are haunted by drug addicts he calls "zombies" with strung out arms, clutching at him as he passes by.

His mother is a recovering addict, and his three siblings all sleep in a one room apartment, a small infantry against the war zone on the street below.

Arshay keeps to himself, preferring to write poetry about the girl he has a crush on, and spends his school days in the home-ec kitchen dreaming of becoming a chef.

And then one day as he’s walking out of school he notices a boat in the school lunchroom, and a poster that reads "Join the Crew Team."

Having no idea what the sport of crew is, Arshay decides to take a chance.

This decision to join is one that will forever change his life, and those of his fellow teammates. As Arshay and his teammates begin to come together to learn how to row—many never having been in water before—the sport takes them from the mean streets of Chicago, to the hallowed halls of the Ivy League.

But Arshay and his teammates face adversity at every turn, from racism, gang violence, and a sport that has never seen anyone like them before.

A Most Beautiful Thing is the inspiring true story about the most unlikely band of brothers that form a family, and forever change a sport and their lives for the better. (From the publisher.)

Now a documentary narrated by actor and hip-hop artist Common.

Author Bio
Arshay Cooper is a rower, author, motivational speaker, and volunteer for numerous community outreach organizations. He works with nonprofits focusing on opening the boathouse doors to everyone, and he was the recipient of a 2017 USRowing Golden Oars Award. He lives in Brooklyn with his family. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Uplifting and always enlightening.… [A Most Beautiful Thing] is a coming-of-age story told with the benefit of adult insights and mature hindsight.… This book is less about this specific sport than how that sport becomes transformative, empowering some kids, giving others a direction.
Chicago Tribune


The sport made intense demands on the young men, requiring them to train hard, learn how to swim, and make countless sacrifices—including not reacting to the racist jeers from competitors and spectators. The experience turned a team of strangers into brothers and unleashed their potential. The book is as uplifting as its title suggests, and sections detailing the races are downright heart-pounding.
Christian Science Monitor


Cooper details how he and his teammates experienced racism and discrimination in the community around the boathouses the team traveled to and how they took a risk in trying a mostly all-white sport that had never seen anyone like them before—and how it ultimately transformed his life.
Sports Illustrated


Spirited account of a pioneering all-black rowing team.… The narrative feels both familiar and memorable due to… well-rounded characterizations. Engrossing as a sports memoir but also relevant to any conversation about privilege and race.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

A Very Punchable Face: A Memoir
Colin Jost, 2020
Crown/Archetype
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101906323 


Summary
In these hilarious essays, the Saturday Night Live head writer and "Weekend Update" co-anchor learns how to take a beating.

If there’s one trait that makes someone well suited to comedy, it’s being able to take a punch—metaphorically and, occasionally, physically.

From growing up in a family of firefighters on Staten Island to commuting three hours a day to high school and "seeing the sights" (watching a Russian woman throw a stroller off the back of a ferry), to attending Harvard while Facebook was created, Jost shares how he has navigated the world like a slightly smarter Forrest Gump.

You’ll also discover things about Jost that will surprise and confuse you, like how Jimmy Buffett saved his life, how Czech teenagers attacked him with potato salad, how an insect laid eggs inside his legs, and how he competed in a twenty-five-man match at WrestleMania (and almost won).

You’ll go behind the scenes at SNL (where he’s written some of the most memorable sketches and characters of the past fifteen years) and "Weekend Update." And you’ll experience the life of a touring stand-up comedian—from performing in rural college cafeterias at noon to opening for Dave Chappelle at Radio City Music Hall.

For every accomplishment (hosting the Emmys), there is a setback (hosting the Emmys). And for every absurd moment (watching paramedics give CPR to a raccoon), there is an honest, emotional one (recounting his mother’s experience on the scene of the Twin Towers’ collapse on 9/11).

Told with a healthy dose of self-deprecation, A Very Punchable Face reveals the brilliant mind behind some of the dumbest sketches on television, and lays bare the heart and humor of a hardworking guy—with a face you can’t help but want to punch. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 29, 1982
• Raised—Staten Island, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Colin Jost is a head writer at Saturday Night Live, a "Weekend Update: co-anchor, and a touring stand-up comedian. His memoir, A Very Punchable Face (2020) is his first book.

He has five Writers Guild Awards, two Peabody Awards, and a PETA Elly Award for the sketch “Diner Lobster.” He’s also been nominated for thirteen Emmy Awards and lost every time. He lives in New York and in the hearts of children everywhere. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
There are no mainstream reviews for this title; listed below, instead, are dust jacket "blurbs" from colleagues:

Colin Jost is as funny as his face is punchable. Which is to say: very. He also knows a lot about Staten Island, soiling himself, internal parasites, and firemen’s pensions. He’s really the whole package. And if you care about comedy—writing it, performing it, watching it, or giving up any semblance of a normal adult life for it—so is his book.
Zadie Smith
 

Colin Jost is one of the best people I know and one hell of a writer. This book proves both to be true.
Seth Meyers


I was caught off guard by how much I enjoyed this book, considering how indifferent I feel about Colin as a person.
Amy Schumer


An inspiring story that reminds us that if you are born with looks and talent, you can still make it.
Conan O’Brien


I think this book is fantastic. I haven’t read a single word of it, but it’s got everything I want in a book—a front, a back, a good spine. And it’s got some heft. Whoever wrote this book knew what she was doing. Well done.
Michael Che

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for A VERY PUNCHABLE FACE … then take off on your own:

1. Which of Colin Jost's essays in his memoir …

1. Most powerfully affected you (perhaps the story about his mother) …
2. Made you laugh the hardest …
3. Most revealed the most about who Colin Jost really is …
4. Did you find…well, peurile, or childish …
5. Made you wonder how Jost ever survived  …
6. Answered the question about whether Jost's success is due to talent, hardwork, or luck …
7. Dished out the most interesting stuff on colleagues and what it is like working on SNL.

2. It's not uncommon for readers to pick up books by favorite comedians, only to find themselves let down by the lack of humor, lack of heft, or lack of good writing … or by the fact that it simply wasn't interesting. If A Very Punchable Face left you disappointed … how so? If, on the other hand, Colin Jost's memoir lived up to your hopes, even exceeded them … in what way did it do so?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

336 top of page (summary)

Abigail & John: Portrait of a Marriage
Edith B. Gelles, 2009
HarperCollins
338 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061354120


Summary
The story of Abigail and John Adams is as much a romance as it is a lively chapter in the early history of this country.

The marriage of the second president and first lady is one of the most extraordinary examples of passion and endurance that this country has ever witnessed. And it is a drama peopled with a pantheon of eighteenth-century stars: George and Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, his daughter Patsy, Ben Franklin, and Mercy Otis Warren.

Abigail and John were a uniquely compatible duo, and in their remarkable union we can see the strength of a people determined to achieve full independence in the face of daunting odds. Yet while much has been written about each as an individual, Abigail and John provides, for the first time, the captivating story of their dedication and sacrifice that helped usher in the founding of our country, a time that fascinates us still.

Married in 1764 by Abigail's reverend father, the young couple worked side by side for a decade, raising a family while John's status as one of the most prosperous, respected lawyers in Massachusetts grew. As his duties within the new republic expanded, the Adamses endured a long period of sporadic separations. But their loyalty and love kept their bond firm across the distance, as is evident in their tender letters. It's in this correspondence that Abigail comes into her own as a woman of politics, offering words of advice and encouragement to a husband whose absences were crucial to the independence they both cherished. And it's also in these exchanges that they worked through the familial tragedies that tested them: the death of their son Charles from alcoholism and the impoverishment and early death of their daughter Nabby.

Through its fifty-four years, the union of John and Abigail Adams was based on mutual respect and ambition, intellect and equality, that went far beyond the conventional bond. Abigail and John is an inspirational portrait of a couple who endured the turmoil and trials of a revolution, and in so doing paved the way for the birth of a nation. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Edith B. Gelles, Ph.D., holds degrees from Cornell, Yale, and the University of California-Irvine. She has taught at several universities and is a Senior Scholar at Stanford's Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research. She lives in Palo Alto, California (From the publisher.)

More
Edith B. Gelles is the author of Abigail & John: Portrait of a Marriage, published in 2009 by HarperCollins. She recently edited and wrote an extended biographical introduction to The Letters of Abigail Levy Franks (1733-1748), published by Yale University Press in 2004.

A historian of colonial America, Gelles has written two biographies of Abigail Adams. Portia: The World of Abigail Adams (1992), which was co-winner of the American Historical Association's Herbert Feis Award. First Thoughts: Life and Letters of Abigail Adams (1998) was published in paperback by Routledge with the title, Abigail Adams: A Writing Life.

Gelles wrote the centennial catalogue for the Libraries of Stanford University: "For Instruction and Research." She has published many articles and reviews and has taught in the Humanities as well as the Continuing Studies Programs at Stanford. (From Stanford University, Institute for Gender Research.)

Book Reviews
There have been numerous biographies, scholarly works, and even novels on the lives of both John Adams, the second President of the United States, and his wife, Abigail. However, few of these works treat the Adamses fully as a couple, struggling together to make it through revolutionary times. Gelles is no stranger to Abigail Adams, having previously written Abigail Adams: A Writing Life and Portia: The World of Abigail Adams. But what is most striking about her latest work is not only that it treats the two formative founding figures together but that it reads much like fiction. Gelles culled her research from the couple's letters, using their words to tell the story of their marriage. By intertwining the stories of John and Abigail, Gelles re-creates the world of revolutionary Boston and New England with marked success. She also reminds us that while the founding of the United States may have been a male enterprise, women were also involved, though their influence was private. Recommended for both lay readers and scholars.
Susan Alteri - Library Journal

Gelles’ focus here is on the relationship, even partnership, between two highly intelligent, strong-willed individuals.... [A] fine, well-documented examination of a long, successful partnership. —Jay Freeman
Booklist

A dual biography spotlighting one of the most remarkable partnerships in American history. The United States has had only a few First Couples in which the historical significance of the wife has approached that of the husband. John and Abigail Adams share this status almost entirely because of Abigail's letters, a correspondence Gelles (Gender Studies/Stanford Univ.; Abigail Adams: A Writing Life, 2002, etc.) rightly terms the revolutionary era's "best historical record written by a woman." In letters to her husband, children and friends like Mercy Warren, James Lovell and Thomas Jefferson, Abigail revealed her liveliness, strong affections, abiding faith and keen intelligence, all crucial to maintaining a marriage marked by frequent forced separations. Certain passages from this epistolary treasure have become famous: Abigail's eyewitness description of the Battle of Bunker Hill, her disquisition against slavery, her proto-feminist plea to her husband, occupied with theories of government at the Continental Congress, to "Remember the Ladies." Gelles uses these letters and many more including John's to Abigail to construct a moving picture of a marriage whose terms required constant renegotiation as events forced each partner to assume or relinquish tasks commonly ascribed to the other sex. Both subscribed to what the author terms their "family myth." From Braintree to Boston, Paris to London, Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., where they became the first occupants of what would later become known as the White House, the Adams's story is one of politics interwoven with family life. Notwithstanding some occasional, unfortunate academic locutions (e.g., "gender" used as a verb), Gelles pushes their marriage and family life vividly to the fore. She examines the couple's shared sorrows: a daughter's miserable marriage, an alcoholic son, as well as the many triumphs that would have been impossible, but for Abigail's wise management of her household and solicitous care for her brilliant, deeply insecure husband. A revealing exploration of an exceptional marriage marked by mutual understanding, empathy and deep love.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Abigail and John:

1. What did John Adams mean when he referred to his and Abigail's attraction to one another as "the Steel and the Magnet"? Who was the steel...and who the magnet?

2. How does one explain this remarkable 54-year-marriage between two strong and independent personalities? To what do you attribute it? What gave it the relationship strength? Was their marriage unique—was it typical of the 18th century? Is it unique by today's standards?

3. What were some of the worst hardships the couple endured? How, dear readers, would any of us have withstood those difficulties?

3. What can you discern of each personality through their letters? How would you describe Abigail...and how would you describe John? Have you learned anything new about either of them? What surprised you the most...or increased your admiration for them...or disappointed you?

4. Gelles says that both partners bought into "the family myth." What does she mean by that...what was the myth, and how did it work (according to the author) to keep them together? In fact, was it a myth—or was it as much truth as fiction?

5. Talk about the affect of the Alien and Sedition Acts on John Adams's reputation...and on the country. How influential was Abigail in their passage? What was her attitude toward them?

6. Discuss Abigail's relationships/friendships with others: Mercy Otis Warren, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and his daughter Patsy? What was Abigail's relationship with James Lovell? Why did she refer to him as "a dangerous man"?

7. What is Gelles' theory for why Adams picked up his pen (quill) and wrote to Jefferson—thus resuming their friendship after a bitter, protracted dispute?

8. Was Abigail a proto-feminist? (There is disagreement on the answer to this question. What do you think?)

9. Select one of your favorite letters, by either John or Abigail, and read it out loud. Why does it stand out to you?

10. How did Abigail define the role of First Lady? Is her version of First Lady relevant today—or has it changed?

11. As First Lady, how influential was Abigail in developing national policy?

12. Talk about the Adams's long separation when John was in Paris. How difficult would it have been to maintain their marriage over time and distance—without the ease of modern communications?!

13. Talk about John and Abigail as parents...and their relationships with their children.

14. What other works have you read about the Adamses? How does this compare with them?

15. Have you watched John Adams, the 2008 miniseries with Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney? You might consider playing segments of it during your meeting...and comparing film and book. (The series was based on David McCullough's 2001 biography, John Adams.)

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

The Accidental Anarchist:  From the Diaries of Jacob Marateck
Bryna Kranzler, 2010 *
Crosswalk Press
338 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780984556304


Summary
The Accidental Anarchist is the true story of Jacob Marateck, an Orthodox Jew who was sentenced to death three times in the early 1900s—in Russia—and lived to tell about it. He also happened to have been the author's grandfather.

The book is based on the diaries that Marateck began keeping in 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War. A Jew who was conscripted into the notoriously anti-Semitic Russian army, Marateck led soldiers during the war who wanted to kill him, simply for being a Jew, at least as much as the enemy did, simply for being in the way. Not content to merely survive, following the war Marateck joined the incompetent Polish revolutionary underground movement that sought to overthrow the Czar. 

It was in that capacity that he was caught, arrested, and casually sentenced to death for the third time. His life was saved by the intervention of a young girl who picked up a note he dropped he dropped in the street, which resulted in the third death sentence being commuted to ten years of hard labor in Siberia, followed by permanent exile.

But Marateck escaped from Siberia with Warsaw's colorful "King of Thieves." Together, the unlikely pair traveled 3000 miles by to Warsaw, without food, money or legal papers, where Marateck decided to search for the young girl who had saved his life. Her name was Bryna, and she became the author's grandmother and namesake.

The Accidental Anarchist, told in Marateck's own voice, is filled with rare humor and optimism that made it possible for him to survive. (From the publisher.)

* Translators: Shimon Wincelberg and Anita Marateck Wincelberg

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1957-1958
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard, M.B.A., Yale
   University
• Awards—see below
• Currently—N/A


Bryna Kranzler is a graduate of Barnard College where she studied playwriting, and received the Helen Price Memorial Prize for Dramatic Composition. Her first play was a finalist for the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theater Competition, and was scheduled for production twice: the first time, the theater owner died, and the season was shut down; the second time, the director committed suicide.

For the benefit of the arts community, she got out of playwriting and earned an MBA from Yale University to make up for her misspent youth. She spent 15 years in marketing for health-care, high tech and consumer products companies before returning to writing.

Her first book, The Accidental Anarchist, is the winner of multiple awards, including the 2012 Sharp Writ Book Award for General Non-Fiction, the 2012 Readers Favorite Award for Historical/Cultural Non-Fiction, the 2012 International Book Award, and National Indie Excellence Award for a Historical Biography, and the 2011 “USA Best Books” Award for a Historical Biography.

Born in Los Angeles, Kranzler is the daughter of Shimon Wincelberg, the first Orthodox writer in Hollywood. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Marateck is an extraordinary character facing certain death many times with consistent humor and steadfast faith in God. The reader certainly does not need to be an Orthodox Jew to appreciate the intense commitment Marateck has to his faith and his religious duty. His notes reveal a breathtaking ability to absorb the absurd that life dishes out to a lowly Jew in the Czar’s anti-Semitic army with aplomb and grace.
New York Journal of Books


“There was simply too much fun to be had.” Reality and three narrowly dodged death sentences kind of puts a damper on that  illusion as 13-year old Jacob Marateck, citing “the ignorance of youth and a desire for grand adventure,” leaves his small Polish hometown to seek some rudderless escapades in the Warsaw of the absorbing and often black-humored true story The Accidental Anarchist. Indeed, the adventures in this novel are many, and unforeseen. Variety-spiced life mixed with historical events of the 1900s in Russia and Poland sees Marateck moving on from student to baker’s assistant, labor organizer to an officer in the Russian army during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 against the Japanese in China.
Seattle Post Intelligencer


Bryna Kranzler has masterfully pulled together the notes and journal entries of her forbearer, Yakov (Jacob) Marateck, and turned them into a warm, enchanting, readable Jewish saga, with all the richness of pre-Bolshevik color and Polish-ethnic splendor. To dive into “The Accidental Anarchist,” at 334 pages, is to lunge into a whole different world and time that draws one into the spirit of the times and the mind of Yakov. Yet, the reader, whether a Goy (Gentile) like myself, an adult or a teen, is not left behind by incomprehensible words and phrases.
Reader Views.com


I found myself so fascinated by The Accidental Anarchist that I thought about it at work, wondered what would happen during dinner, and picked it up each night before bed. Several nights I went to sleep much later than I had intended because I was simply unaware how much time was passing. One reason for this is that Kranzler does a remarkable job of turning a life into a narrative. The reader knows what drives Marateck and wants to know whether or not he achieves his goal.
Kate Brauning - Bookshelf.com

Discussion Questions
1. Why did Jacob Marateck began keeping a diary?

2. What role did friendship play in the book?

3. What role did women play in Marateck’s survival?

4. Would you have made the same moral choices that Marateck made (eg., helping his army friend get transferred to another regiment, rejecting Pyavka’s suggestion for what they needed to do to get home) under the same circumstances?

5. What were the most important survival skills that Jacob Marateck demonstrated?

6. Who was your favorite character, and why?

7. How do the political, social and economic circumstances that preceded the Russian Revolutions compare with those in recent history in other countries?

8. Does this book have the same relevance for non-Jews as well as Jews?

9. What messages did you take from this book, and are they still relevant today?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

Bryna Kranzler has also provided additional information to enhance your understanding and discussion of The Accidental Anarchist.

Background
Jacob Marateck began keeping the diaries that were turned into The Accidental Anarchist in 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War. That was when he decided that he needed to overthrow the Czar. He filled about 282 pages with his impeccable Yiddish penmanship until he was distracted by the death sentences, sentence to and escape from Siberia, and the need to flee to the United States.

Once he arrived in the Polish mining town of Shenandoah, PA, to which two of his brothers had already emigrated, he began telling stories of his experiences as a Jewish soldier, and later officer, in the Russian army, as well as what it was like to live as a Jew in the Russian-occupied territories at a time when anti-Semitism was the official government policy.

But what distinguished his stories was not merely his eyewitness account of a period of time that we, in the United States, know very little about (despite the fact that it changed the balance of powers in the world); it was his unique take on the situation that he described with a rare sense of humor that was not irreverent or self-deprecating so much as it was ironic. His storytelling style makes it easy to read about what were intolerable circumstances

Historical Context
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 was ostensibly fought over a warm-weather port in Manchuria, but in reality the reason for the war was quite different: Czar Nicholas II, the last of the Romanov Dynasty, had been hearing rumblings about revolution (not surprisingly because everyone in the Russian-occupied territories was starving).

Rather than addressing the problem directly, such as by giving some of the noblemen’s land back to the peasants (which the nobility opposed, of course), the Czar decided that having a “quick and easy” war would be the best way to distract the population, raise their patriotism, and put to reset all that ‘nonsense’ about revolution. So the Czar violated terms of an earlier treaty with Japan, which provoked the Japanese to attack Port Arthur. Russia used this attack as an excuse to declare war.

Despite the fact that Russia declared what became known as the Russo-Japanese War (February 8, 1904-September 5, 1905) the Russian Army was completely unprepared to fight, going to war with technology and strategies that had last been employed thirty years earlier, during the Russo-Turkish War. The Russians completely underestimated the Japanese, and their defeats began almost immediately.

But since the War was not being fought so much for a strategic as much as for a political purpose, the Czar would not allow the War to end and kept sending young men to their deaths. And in 1905, Jacob Marateck began documenting the many ways that the Czar had let down his own people.

The War changed the balance of power in the world as Russia fell off its perch as a superpower, while Japan emerged onto the world stage as the first Asian nation to defeat a European nation. It took the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt to negotiate a truce between Russia and Japan to end the war, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

top of page (summary)

Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life 
Kathleen Norris, 2008
Penguin Group
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594484384


Summary
Kathleen Norris's masterpiece: a personal and moving memoir that resurrects the ancient term acedia, or soul-weariness, and brilliantly explores its relevancy to the modern individual and culture.

Kathleen Norris had written several much loved books, yet she couldn't drag herself out of bed in the morning, couldn't summon the energy for daily tasks. Even as she struggled, Norris recognized her familiar battle with acedia. She had discovered the word in an early Church text when she was in her thirties. Having endured times of deep soul-weariness since she was a teenager, she immediately recognized that this passage described her affliction: sinking into a state of being unable to care. Fascinated by this "noonday demon," so familiar to those in the early and medieval Church, Norris read intensively and knew she must restore this forgotten but utterly relevant and important concept to the modern world's vernacular.

Like Norris's bestselling The Cloister Walk, Acedia & me is part memoir and part meditation. As in her bestselling Amazing Grace, here Norris explicates and demystifies a spiritual concept, exploring acedia through the geography of her life as a writer; her marriage and the challenges of commitment in the midst of grave illness; and her keen interest in the monastic tradition. Unlike her earlier books, this one features a poignant narrative throughout of Norris's and her husband's bouts with acedia and its clinical cousin, depression. Moreover, her analysis of acedia reveals its burden not just on individuals but on whole societies—and that the "restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that we struggle with today are the ancient demon of acedia in modern dress."

An examination of acedia in the light of theology, psychology, monastic spirituality, the healing powers of religious practice, and Norris's own experience, Acedia & me is both intimate and historically sweeping, brimming with exasperation and reverence, sometimes funny, often provocative, and always important. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 27, 1947
• Where—Washington, DC, USA
• Raised—in Lemmon, South Dakota; Honolulu, Hawaii
• Education—B.A., Bennington College (Vermont)
• Currently—lives in South Dakota and Hawaii

Kathleen Norris is the award-winning poet, writer, and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. Norris has also published seven books of poetry.

A popular speaker, she is an editor at large at The Christian Century. A recipient of grants from the Bush and Guggenheim foundations, she has been in residence twice at the Collegeville Institute at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, and is an oblate of Assumption Abbey in North Dakota. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
In this penetrating theological memoir, Norris details her relationship with acedia, a slothful, soul-weary indifference long recognized by monastics. Norris is careful to distinguish acedia from its cousin, depression, noting that acedia is a failure of the will and can be dispelled by embracing faith and life, whereas depression is not a choice and often requires medical treatment. This is tricky ground, but Norris treads gingerly, reserving her acerbic crankiness for a section where she convincingly argues that despite Americans' apparently unslothful lives, acedia is the undiagnosed neurasthenia of our busy age. Much of the book is taken up with Norris's account of her complicated but successful marriage, which ended with her husband's death in 2003. The energy poured into this marriage, Norris argues, was as much a defiant strike against acedia as her spiritual discipline of praying the Psalms. Filled with gorgeous prose, generous quotations from Christian thinkers across the centuries and fascinating etymological detours, this discomfiting book provides not just spiritual hope but a much-needed kick in the rear.
Publishers Weekly


(Audio version.) Here, nationally best-selling poet Norris offers a difficult and intimate, almost naked look at the spiritual state of acedia that may be foreign to lay audiences. Though they may find parallels in their own relationships and/or careers as they listen to Norris probe her husband's and her own slide into this specialized relative of depression, it isn't an easy journey in audio format, as the book requires pauses for reflection and relistenings of certain sections to appreciate and grasp her concepts fully. Norris also uses this forum to address a spiritual void in our culture but ultimately suggests religious healing as the best antidote. Recommended for select audiences of scholars and philosophers.
Library Journal


(Starred review) Norris’ fascinating inquiry casts our predicament in a new light and maps a course out of this "enervating despair." Reading this strongly argued, paradigm-altering work may be the first strike against the demon it portrays. —Donna Seaman
Booklist


Memoir of a spiritual writer and poet who discovered relevance to her life and work in the longforgotten and difficult-to-define concept of acedia. When Norris first encountered the word "acedia" in the writings of a fourth-century monk, Evagrius Ponticus, she instantly recognized it as an apt description of her spiritual malaise. Here she struggles to pin down the meaning, naming its components as apathy, boredom, enervating despair, restlessness and the absence of caring. She also attempts, not entirely satisfactorily, to distinguish this spiritual state from the psychological state of depression, which her husband, fellow poet David Dwyer, experienced. She explores acedia's etymology and her personal history with it, sharing stories from her childhood, adolescence and long, crisis-plagued marriage. As a teenager, she responded by keeping busy, reading Kierkegaard's thoughts on despair and writing prodigiously. As a young adult, having lost the religious moorings of her upbringing, she found that John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress awakened in her a renewed sense of conscience. Years later, as she became her husband's full-time caregiver, acedia, which had never been totally absent from her spiritual life, renewed its grip on her, and with it, a temptation to doubt. Her attraction to monastic prayer and her strong interest in the monastic life—examined in her books Dakota (1993) and The Cloister Walk (1996)—is evident here in the numerous references to the writings of early monks and to conversations with Benedictines at the monastery near her home, where she is an oblate. In the final chapter, "Acedia: A Commonplace Book," Norris presents dozens of quotations on the subject, demonstrating convincingly that soul weariness has been a persistent and troubling phenomenon throughout recorded history. Surprisingly frank and moving.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Acedia and me:

1. What is acedia—how does Norris define it? What are its symptoms as well as its spiritual manifestations?

2. Take a moment and trace acedia's historical roots going back to the medieval church. What do monks have to say about acedia?

3. What is Norris's personal experience with acedia as a young person and as an adult? How did it reveal itself in her marriage? Did you find yourself identifying with Norris as you read her story? Can you find parallels in your own life?

4. How does Norris distinguish acedia from psychological, or clinical, depression? Is it too fine a line, or does she do a good job of separating the two?

5. As a young adult, Norris had lost her spiritual moorings from childhood. Why? And how did she regain her faith?

6. Talk about the ways in which Norris extends the concept of acedia to society as a whole. How does she see it revealed in our culture? Do you agree with her? Can you identify other manifestations?

7. What does Norris offer as a way of healing acedia—what does she suggest as a path out of what she calls "enervating despair"? Do you find these ideas helpful? Can you suggest other healing methods?

8. What parts of Norris's book do you find most moving—or most enlightening?

9. Has Acedia & me changed the way you see yourself ... others ... or the broader society?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man 
Steve Harvey, 2009
HarperCollins
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062351562


Summary
Steve Harvey, the host of the nationally syndicated Steve Harvey Morning Show, can't count the number of impressive women he's met over the years, whether it's through the "Strawberry Letters" segment of his program or while on tour for his comedy shows.

These are women who can run a small business, keep a household with three kids in tiptop shape, and chair a church group all at the same time.

Yet when it comes to relationships, they can't figure out what makes men tick. Why? According to Steve it's because they're asking other women for advice when no one but another man can tell them how to find and keep a man. In Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, Steve lets women inside the mindset of a man and sheds lights on concepts and questions such as:

• The Ninety Day Rule: Ford requires it of its employees. Should you require it of your man?
• How to spot a mama's boy and what if anything you can do about it.
• When to introduce the kids. And what to read into the first interaction between your date
   and your kids.
• The five questions every woman should ask a man to determine how serious he is.
• And more...

Sometimes funny, sometimes direct, but always truthful, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man is a book you must read if you want to understand how men think when it comes to relationships. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 17, 1956
• Where—Welch, West Virginia, USA
• Education—University of Virginia
• Awards—multiple NAACP Image Awards for The Steve
   Harvey Show (1966-2002)
• Currently—lives in New York City

Steve Harvey began doing stand-up comedy in the mid-1980s. His success as a stand-up comedian led to a WB network show, The Steve Harvey Show, which ran from 1996 to 2002. It was a huge hit and won multiple NAACP Image Awards. In 1997, Harvey continued his work in stand-up comedy, touring as one of the "Kings of Comedy," along with Cedric the Entertainer, D. L. Hughley, and Bernie Mac. The comedy team would later be reunited in a film by Spike Lee called The Original Kings of Comedy. Steve Harvey is now widely known as the host of the nationally syndicated Steve Harvey Morning Show, which has more than seven million listeners. Harvey continues his unending pursuit and commitment to furthering opportunities in high schools throughout the country with generous contributions from the Steve Harvey Foundation. (From the publisher.)

More
Harvey was born in Welch, West Virginia, the son of Eloise and Jesse Harvey, a coal miner. He moved to Cleveland, Ohio and graduated from Glenville High School in 1974. He has held jobs as both an insurance salesman and a boxer.

He began doing stand-up comedy in the mid-1980s, and was a finalist in Second Annual Johnnie Walker National Comedy Search in 1989, eventually leading to a long stint as host of It's Showtime at the Apollo, succeeding Mark Curry in that role. His success as a stand-up comedian led to a starring role on the ABC show, Me and the Boys in 1994. He would later star on the WB network show, The Steve Harvey Show, which ran from 1996 to 2002. While wildly popular in the African-American community (the show won multiple NAACP Image Awards), the show never achieved critical acclaim outside of the African-American community, a matter about which Harvey has often complained.

In 1997, Harvey continued his work in stand-up comedy, touring as one of the Kings of Comedy, along with Cedric the Entertainer, D.L. Hughley and Bernie Mac. The comedy act would later be put together into a film by Spike Lee called The Original Kings of Comedy. DVD sales of The Original Kings of Comedy and Don't Trip, He Ain't Through With Me Yet increased Steve Harvey's popularity. Harvey released a hip hop and R&B audio CD on a record label he founded, and authored a book, Steve Harvey's Big Time. That title was also used as the name of Harvey's comedy and variety television show (later renamed Steve Harvey's Big Time Challenge) which aired on The WB network from 2003 until 2005. Harvey also launched a clothing line which features the line of dress wear. In 2005 Steve co-starred with David Spade in the movie Racing Stripes. He had appeared in the 2003 movie The Fighting Temptations.

Harvey is the host of his own morning radio show, The Steve Harvey Morning Show, which was originally syndicated under Radio One, Inc. broadcasting company, from September 2000 until May 2005. Despite efforts to syndicate the show nationally, ultimately, it aired only in L.A., on KKBT, and in Dallas on KBFB, with Harvey splitting his time between the Dallas and L.A. studios. As a result, Harvey and Radio One decided to part ways shortly before his contract expired. In September 2005, Harvey signed a joint syndication deal with Premiere Radio Networks and Inner City Broadcasting Corporation for a new incarnation of The Steve Harvey Morning Show. The show is based out of WBLS, in New York. In March 2009, it was announced that The Steve Harvey Morning Show would replace The Tom Joyner Morning Show in Chicago and will be simulcast on both WGCI and WVAC, which was Tom Joyner's flagship station. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
This book offers surprising insights into the male mentality and gives woman a few a few strategies for taming that unruly beast.
Philadelphia Inquirer


Filled with practical principles, rules and tips, and illustrated with humorous and warm-hearted anecdotes from Harvey’s life and friendships, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man gives readers the real deal about the differences between the sexes and how to bridge them for a mutually rewarding partnership.
New York Beacon


As a popular comedian, radio host and red-blooded male, harvey doesn't have the bona fides typical to most women's relationship self-help, but he still manages a thorough, witty guide to the modern man. Harvey undertakes the task because "women are clueless about men," because "men get away with a whole lot of stuff" and because he has "some valuable information to change all of that." Harvey makes a game effort, taking a bold but familiar men-are-dogs approach: if you're "cutting back" on sex, "he will have another woman lined up and waiting to give him what he needs and wants-the cookie." several chapters later, however, he introduces the "ninety-day rule," asserting that, actually, he won't always have another woman lined up-and the only way to make sure is a three month vetting period. Harvey also tackles mama's boys, "independent-and lonely-women," and the matter of children in the dating world ("if he's meeting the kids after you decide he's the one, it's too late"). Feminists and the easily offended probably won't take to harvey's blanket statements and blunt advice, but harvey's fans and those in need of tough (but ticklish) love advice should check it out (especially the hysterical last chapter's Q & A). 
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man:

1. Harvey compares Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man to a playbook from an rival sports team—reading it will give women an advantage. In other words, he paints men as the opposition team to women. Is that a good way to approach a love relationship? Does it set up the right, or wrong, model? Might there be a different model to follow, a partnership, perhaps? Or something else? Or is team rivalry, in which each side wants to "win," actually a fair description of what male-female relationships are about?

2. Is Harvey's advice valuable for single women looking for a relationship...or married women already in a relationship...or both?

3. This book offers a wealth of topics for discussion! Certainly one approach is to take each chapter sub-heading (e.g., "Our Love Isn't Like Your Love," "Sports Fish vs. Keepers," or "Mama's Boys") and discuss its validity and its application to personal, real-life experiences.

4. For men: how do you experience Harvey's message? Does it apply to your lives? Does it ring true? Do you find it illuminating, tiresome, untrue? If yours is an all-women club, invite men—boyfriends, husbands, fathers, brothers—to read the book and join you for the discussion. Or just ask a few men to read and comment on certain sections. Talk about their reactions during discussion.

5. Overall, what is Harvey's message: that men need to change? Or that men don't need to, or can't, change and that women must learn to understand the male perspective? What about women—is Harvey suggesting they need to change?

6. What did you learn from Harvey's book? Anything new? What did you find funny, thought-provoking, irritating?

7. Do you think all women should read this book? Will it help relationships? What about men—required reading or not?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

The Address Book:  What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power
Deirdre Mask, 2020
St. Martin's Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250134769


Summary
An exuberant and insightful work of popular history of how streets got their names, houses their numbers, and what it reveals about class, race, power, and identity.

When most people think about street addresses, if they think of them at all, it is in their capacity to ensure that the postman can deliver mail or a traveler won’t get lost.

But street addresses were not invented to help you find your way; they were created to find you. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class.

In this wide-ranging and remarkable book, Deirdre Mask looks at the fate of streets named after Martin Luther King Jr., the wayfinding means of ancient Romans, and how Nazis haunt the streets of modern Germany.

The flipside of having an address is not having one, and we also see what that means for millions of people today, including those who live in the slums of Kolkata and on the streets of London.

Filled with fascinating people and histories, The Address Book illuminates the complex and sometimes hidden stories behind street names and their power to name, to hide, to decide who counts, who doesn’t—and why. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1980 (?)
• Where—Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., J.D., Harvard University; M.F.A., National University of Ireland
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK


Deirdre Mask graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude, and attended University of Oxford before returning to Harvard for law school, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She completed a master’s in writing at the National University of Ireland.

The author of The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power (2020), Deirdre's writing has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, and The Guardian.

Originally from North Carolina, she has taught at Harvard and the London School of Economics. She lives with her husband and daughters in London. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Read Deirdre Mask’s fascinating deep dive into the world of Mill Lane and Martin Luther King Street and you will begin to realise just how important these geographical markers are, how pregnant with meaning, and what a difference they make to everything from the proper functioning of society to questions of wealth, poverty and democracy.… Highly entertaining.
Sunday Times (UK)


(Starred review) [E]ntertaining…. [F]luid narration and impressive research…. [Mask] profiles a remarkable array of activists, historians, and artists…. This evocative history casts its subject in a whole new light.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) Engaging, illuminating, and with highly relevant current subject matter, this book is recommended for all readers, especially fans of popular history and politics. —Margaret Heller, Loyola Univ. Chicago Libs.
Library Journal


(Starred review) [I]mpressive…. Mask combines deep research with skillfully written, memorable anecdotes to illuminate the vast influence of street addresses…. A standout book of sociological history and current affairs.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

Adios to Tears: The Memoir of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps 
Seiichi Higashide, 1993, 2000
University of Washington Press
259 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780295979144


Summary
Adios to Tears is the very personal story of Seiichi Higashide, whose life in three countries was shaped by a bizarre and little-known episode in the history of World War II. Born in Hokkaido, Japan, Higashide emigrated to Peru in 1931. By the late 1930s he was a shopkeeper and community leader in the provincial town of Ica, but following the outbreak of World War II, he—along with other Latin American Japanese—was seized by police and forcibly deported to the United States. He was interned behind barbed wire at the Immigration and Naturalization Service facility in Crystal City, Texas, for more than two years.

After his release, Higashide elected to stay in the U.S. and eventually became a citizen. For years, he was a leader in the effort to obtain redress from the American government for the violation of the human rights of the Peruvian Japanese internees.

Higashide's moving memoir was translated from Japanese into English and Spanish through the efforts of his eight children, and was first published in 1993. This second (2000) edition includes a new Foreword by C.Harvey Gardiner, professor emeritus of history at Southern Illinois University and author of "Pawns in a Triangle of Hate: The Peruvian Japanese and the United States"; a new Epilogue by Julie Small, cochair of Campaign for Justice-Redress Now for Japanese Latin Americans; and a new Preface by Elsa H. Kudo, eldest daughter of Seiichi Higashide. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1909
• Where—Hokkaido, Japan
• Education—architectural degree, Hozen Technical Institute
• Death—1997
• Where—Honolulu, Hawaiik US

Born into rural poverty in a remote mountain village in Hokkaido, Japan, young Higashide eventually made his way to Tokyo. Engulfed there in a struggle to survive that included collecting and reselling bottles, selling newspapers, and performing hard manual labor, he engaged in night-school studies in engineering and architecture, fields yielding him no opportunity in Japan. Always a student and contemplating migration to Peru, he studies Spanish to ease his immersion into a strange world. Tears marked his sailing from his homeland in 1930, at the age of twenty-one.

Inured to hard work and uncertainty in Japan, Higashide encountered both in Peru, in addition to a language barrier, prejudice, and countless points of cultural collision. He labored many months, room and board his only remuneration. He taught school. His work ethic, earnestness, and other positive qualities gradually won him helpful contacts and advancement. In 1935 he married Angelica Yoshinaga. Launching into shopkeeping and family building, he prospered in both. By the late 1930's he was a community leader in Ica, a provincial town five hundred miles south of Lima. But just when he was savoring success and some affluence in his adopted homeland, storm clouds gathered.

Anti-Japanese rioting and the approaching collision of Japan and the US skewed Higashide's prospects. Events of December 7, 1941, and the swift issuance by the US of the Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals (blacklist) hit home when his name, as a community leader, appeared on the initial list. For a long time, however, he evaded deportation.

Seized finally early in January 1944 by four policemen while he dined with his family, Higashide was spirited north to a urine-soaked jail cell in Lima. Ten days later, his distraught wife, pregnant with their fifth child, saw him forced aboard ship in Callao by Peruvian police and American soldiers. Sailing away a second time, he again shed tears.

The family was reunited in July 1944 at the Immigration and Naturalization Service facility (guarded with barbed wire, watch-towers, and armed personnel) in Crystal City, Texas, in the US.

Released after more than two years of internment, the Higashides moved cautiously, haltingly into mainstream American life, another bumpy beginning in a strange land. Years mounted into decades; roots deepened. Citizenship, schooling, hard work—all contributed to their pursuit of the American dream.

For years Higashide was a leader in the effort to obtain redress from the American government for the violation of the human rights of the Peruvian Japanese internees. In 1981 he testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians.  (From the book's Forward.)

Book Reviews
What tears must have been shed by this former hostage of America in writing this heart-wrenching masterpiece. Readers will be inspired, enthralled, and will end up caring deeply.
Michi Nishiura Weglyn - Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of American's Concentration Camps (2000)


Adios to Tears mingles suffering with success. It is a very personal story, not a definitive history. It's structure— occasional disjunctions and repetitions, flashbacks, anticipations and heartfelt outbursts—add an extemporaneous and emotionally rich quality that is pricesless and sincere. The story mirrors one life in three countries on as many continents, relating family, immigrant community, and the wider world of radically differing cultures.... Adios to Tears does cry—for justice.
C. Harvey Gardiner, Ph.D. - Pawns in a Triangle of Hate: The Peruvian Japanese and the United States (1981)

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Adios to Tears:

1. Talk about young Seiichi's ambition to become educated. What did an education mean to him? What obstacles did he face in achieving his goal, both within his own family and society?

2. What are some of the cruelties and injustices in his homeland that shocked and angered Seiich, even as a young child?

3. Seiichi ran off to Sapporo for a possible job. During the interview, when asked if he had the approval of his parents, what prompted Seiichi to tell the truth? Why didn't he lie to get the job? Was his truthfulness a result of his own character, his upbringing, or Japan's cultural values...or all three?

4. Peru hosted one of the largest Japanese communities in the Americas. It would be interesting to research the community— how it developed, it's cultural practices, the development of social bonds within, and its connection to the larger Peruvian society.

5. What cultural differences did Higashide notice between the Peruvian Japanese and his Japanese homeland? In describing Mr. Karihara and his Electric Light Company, for instance—does his tone seem appreciative or condescending?

6. How did the maxim, "shortsightedness is a forbidden luxury," help Higashide build up his business? What other practices and philosophies helped him prosper? What role did his wife play in developing the business?

7. In the beginning of World War II, the first rumblings of anti-Japanese sentiment seemed just that...rumblings. Trace the gradual deterioration in the treatment of the Japanese Peruvians by the host country—from those initial rumblings to round-up and eventual deportation. Were you struck by parallels with Nazi Germany (in kind if not degree)?

8. Higashide felt guilty for naming Mr. Yamoshira as the past president of the Japanese Association, especially as Yamoshira was singled out before Hagashide was. Was Higashide at fault?

9. The Lima officer in charge of deportation told Higashide that he had to operate under "the demand of the United States. We are not in a position to take opposing measures," he claimed. What U.S. national interest was at stake in Peru at that time? How genuine, or serious, was the threat by Peruvian Japanese to the U.S. war effort?

10. Discuss this lengthy passage by Higashide. Its sentiment lies at the heart of his book. Higashide had always looked upon America as the "model for the rest of the world." He goes on to say, however, that regarding their deportation from Peru and internment on U.S. soil ...

Americans in the United States also were not blameless. Why had that country moved to take such unacceptable measures? Where was the spirit of individual rights and justice that filled the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. If I termed Peru, even provisionally, a "third rate country," was not American, in this instance, no different? [Sic]

Even if under emergency wartime conditions, was America not in violation of individual rights? This was not, I felt, only a matter of inter-national law, it was a broader issue of human rights. Of course, undeniably, the Axis powers perpetrated similar outrages, yet could I not hope that America alone would not do so?

Does American safety ever trump the protection of individual rights? If so, at what point, and who makes the determination? If not, how is American safety to be ensured? In either case, what kind of oversight should be put in place?

11. Eventually, the U.S. referred to the Japanese Peruvians as "enemy aliens" by the U.S. What similarities might exist with regards to suspected terrorists after 9/11?

12. Discuss conditions of the camp in Crystal City, Texas. At one point, Higashide called it a "barbed-wire utopia." What did he mean by that phrase? Did the conditions, even if humane... or even pleasant, justify the policy of internment or make it perhaps acceptable?

13. Talk about the irony that after the war 12 Central and South American counties refused to allow the Japanese internees re-entry—and, as a result, the internees came to be classified as "illegal immigrants" by the U.S.

14. Regarding the tragic circumstances of Mr. Wantanabe (who died shortly after his wife, the two having been reunited after a 10-year separation), Higashide said, "A life disrupted could not be healed and reconstructed as before." Couldn't this same statement apply equally to all peoples involved in war? Or was there something different about the Peruvian Japanese interned in the U.S?

15. Why did Higashide decide to remain in the U.S? And, again, what obstacles did he and his family face in creating a life and eventually becoming citizens.

16. One of the central questions this book raises, particularly in the forward by C. Harvey Gardiner, is the lack of redress by the U.S. for Latin American Japanese internees? In 1988 Japanese American internees received an official apology and $20,000 from the U.S.—and that took more than 45 years. In 1998, as part of a settlement in a lawsuit brought by Latin American Japanese, the U.S. offered an apology and $5,000. Some accepted, though hundreds refused the settlement as unfair. Other lawsuits since have been filed and dismissed. Discuss the fairness—or unfairness—of this lack of proper redress. (See Campaign for Justice press release, 8/7/08)

The ultimate questions raised by this book concern current U.S. policy:

• Could this kind of internment happen in the U.S. today?
• Is it happening now?
• Should internment (secret or otherwise) ever be permitted in order to protect U.S. lives?
• Who makes that determination?
• How do we safeguard human rights when some, inside or outside our borders, using covert means, would threaten American lives?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

After His Affair: Women Rising from the Ashes of Infidelity
Meryn G. Callandar, 2014
Akasha Publications
286 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780962588242


Summary
The discovery of your partner's cheating shatters the very core of your being. It's difficult to value and to allow our grieving, our anger, our rage, even our shame, the time and space to move us into a deeper life. We're supposed to just get over it, and move on.

Author Bio
• Birth—February 2, 1952
• Where—Portland, Victoria, Australia
• Education—B.A., Monash University
• Currently—Byron Shire, New South Wales, Australia


Meryn Callander with born in Portland, Australia, in 1952. She graduated from Monash University, Melbourne, with degrees in both economics and social work. At 25, she quit her position working with children in crisis, feeling she was doing little but applying Band-Aids to gaping wounds. Searching for that elusive something more, she headed to Europe, and then the U.S.

It was there she met John W. Travis, M.D., known to many as the founding father of wellness. Their marriage and professional partnership spanned almost three decades, during which time they pushed the leading edges of wellness—going well beyond the popular focus on nutrition and physical fitness, into the mental and emotional, interpersonal and spiritual dimensions of wellbeing. They co-authored several pioneering books on wellness, and facilitated seminars and retreats in the U.S. and internationally.

In 1993, Meryn became a mother. After decades of working in adult wellness, she gleaned a whole new appreciation of how profoundly our early years impact the wellbeing of the adults we become. In 1999 she co-founded, and served for several years as president of, the Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children. The Alliance emerged from a core group of interdisciplinary experts dedicated to supporting caregivers, professionals, and policymakers in practicing the art and science of nurturing children.

Why Dads Leave: Insights and Resources for When Partners Become Parents grew out of their journey through the early years of parenting. While John stayed well beyond the challenges of those early years, their experiences compelled her to identify the dynamics underlying the epidemic of men leaving their families—physically or emotionally—soon after the birth of a child, and how couples can grow together rather than apart. The book offers insights and practical ways of preventing the devastating impact of this dynamic.

Her latest book, After His Affair: Women Rising from the Ashes of Infidelity is a reflection of her concern at the escalating rates of infidelity and the devastation that is left in its wake. Meryn is a counselor, spiritual intuitive, and akashic reader. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.

Discussion Questions
1. What was the author¹s motivation for writing this book?

2. What kind of language does she use? Is it provocative or reassuring? Is it critical, inflammatory, accusatory? Is it passionate or compassionate?

3. Does the language help or undermine her motivation for writing?

4. What is one new fact of significance that you learned from reading this book?

5. Talk about specific passages or incidences that struck you as significant or interesting, profound, amusing, illuminating, disturbing, sad...? What was memorable?

6. Has the book in some way broadened your perspective or understanding of infidelity? If so, how?

7. Is there some other significant new perspective or understanding that you have learned from this book?

8. Did this book in some way offer you, hope and/or healing?

9. What are the implications for the future? Are there long- or short-term consequences to the issues raised in the book? Are they positive or negative...affirming or frightening? You may answer these questions for either our culture at large, or for you personally.
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

top of page (summary)

Agent ZigZag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal
Ben Macintyre, 2007
Crown Publishing
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307353412


Summary
Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty; inside the villain was a hero. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters, and his lovers was to know where one persona ended and the other began.

Based on recently declassified files, Agent Zigzag tells Chapman’s full story for the first time. It’s a gripping tale of loyalty, love, treachery, espionage, and the thin and shifting line between fidelity and betrayal. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—1963
• Where—England, UK
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK

Ben Macintyre is a British author, historian, and columnist writing for The Times newspaper (London). His columns range from current affairs to historical controversies.

Books
MacIntyre is the author of a book on the gentleman criminal Adam Worth, The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief (1992). He also wrote The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan (2004). In 2008 MacIntyre released an informative illustrated account of Ian Fleming, creator of the fictional spy James Bond, to accompany the For Your Eyes Only exhibition at London's Imperial War Museum, which was part of the Fleming Centenary celebrations.

Three of his most recent books center on World War II and have become international bestsellers. In 2007, he published Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy. The story centers on Chapman, a real-life double agent during the Second World War. Operation Mincemeat, issued in 2010, recounts the Allied deception their impending invasion of Italy. Double Cross, released in 2012, is about the Allies' D-Day spy network.

All three books have been made into BBC documentaries—Operation Mincemeat (in 2010), Double Agent: The Eddie Chapman Story (in 2011), and Double Cross (in 2012). His most recent book, published in 2014, is A Spy Among Friends: Phil Kilby and the Great Betrayal.  (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Agent Zigzag, known to friends, lovers and the police as Eddie Chapman, was by any measure Britain's most unlikely intelligence asset. He was a longtime criminal turned double agent who, in the course of his career as a spy, would flit back and forth between Britain and Germany, occupied France and occupied Norway on one top-secret mission after another. His incredible wartime adventures, recounted in Ben Macintyre's rollicking, spellbinding Agent Zigzag,blend the spy-versus-spy machinations of John le Carre with the high farce of Evelyn Waugh.
William Grimes - New York Times Book Review


Agent Zigzagis the amazing but true story of Eddie Chapman, a professional criminal who became a highly effective double agent during World War II, winning the trust of German intelligence services even as he reported back to the spymasters of MI5…Chapman's story has been told in fragments in the past, but only when MI5 declassified his files was it possible to present it in all its richness and complexity. Macintyre tells it to perfection, with endless insights into the horror and absurdity of war.... Chapman is an endlessly fascinating figure, a man who would save your life one day and steal your watch the next. It's amusing, at this point, to see how the more aristocratic Brits couldn't quite believe that this degenerate, this criminal, could be a patriot. But Eddie Chapman was a patriot, in his fashion, and this excellent book finally does him justice.
Patrick Anderson - Washington Post


[R]ichly descriptive, marvelously illuminating, and just plain brilliant.... One could not think of a better subject for Macintyre's curious mind than the man whom British intelligence dubbed Agent Zigzag in December 1942.... [A] plot—impossible and pointless to summarize—that is as briskly paced and suspenseful as any novel's. Macintyre's diligent research and access to once-secret files combine here with his gift of empathetic imagination and inspired re-creation. He writes with brio and a festive spirit and has quite simply created a masterpiece.
Boston Globe


London Times associate editor Macintyre (The Man Who Would Be King) adroitly dissects the enigmatic World War II British double agent Eddie Chapman in this intriguing and balanced biography. Giving "little thought" to the morality of his decision, Chapman offered to work as a spy for the Germans in 1940 after his release from an English prison in the Channel Islands, then occupied by the Germans. After undergoing German military intelligence training, Chapman parachuted into England in December 1942 with instructions to sabotage a De Havilland aircraft factory, but he surrendered after landing safely. Doubled by MI5 (the security service responsible for counterespionage), Chapman was used "to feed vital disinformation to the enemy" and was one of the few double agents "to delude their German handlers until the end of the war." Meticulously researched-relying extensively on recently released wartime files of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service-Macintyre's biography often reads like a spy thriller. In the end, the author concludes that Chapman "repeatedly risked his life... [and] provided invaluable intelligence," but "it was never clear whether he was on the side of the angels or the devils." Of the two Zigzag biographies this fall (the other, by Nicholas Booth), this is clearly superior.
Publishers Weekly


Sixty years after his incredible career as a double agent for the British, Eddie Chapman (1914-97) is the subject of two new books charting his experiences as one of World War II's most amazing spies. A cad, bounder, womanizer, safe cracker, and general bad guy before the war, Chapman was in a jail on the Channel Island of Jersey awaiting trial when the Germans took over the island and decided that he might make a good spy for them. After training in Germany, he was parachuted back into England to blow up an airfield. Instead, he immediately turned himself into the authorities and cooperated with MI5 (the UK's security intelligence agency) as one of England's double agents. The Germans were fooled into thinking that Chapman had indeed destroyed the airfield and rewarded him upon his return to Germany with the Iron Cross. Sent back to England, Chapman spent the latter part of the war giving incorrect information to the Germans about the success of their V-1 and V-2 rockets. He wired inaccurate coordinates to the German rocket launch crews who then sent their rockets to places of minor importance, causing little damage.
Ed Goedeken - Library Journal


A preternaturally talented liar and pretty good safecracker becomes a "spy prodigy" working concurrently for Britain's MI5 and the Nazi's Abwehr. London Times newsman and popular historian Macintyre (The Man Who Would be King: The First American in Afghanistan, 2004, etc) reports on the life and crimes of the late Eddie Chapman using interviews, newly released secret files and, cautiously, the English spy's less-reliable memoirs. Just launching his criminal career when World War II began, the dashing adventurer was jailed in the Channel Island Jersey. Volunteering his services to the occupying Fatherland, he was taken to France and schooled in the dark arts of espionage and the wicked devices of spies by the likes of convivial headmaster Herr von Groning and spymaster Oberleutnant Praetorius. Then the new German agent signed a formal espionage contract (under which his expected rewards were to be subjected to income tax). Dropped in England's green and pleasant land to commit sabotage, he instead reported directly to His Majesty's secret service. There they called their man "Agent ZigZag." The Germans had named him "Fritzchen." Little Fritz, with the help of a magician, fooled his Nazi handlers into believing he had wrecked an aircraft factory. After a crafty return to Germany, he made another parachute drop home to report on an anti-sub device and the accuracy of the new V-1 flying bomb. The energetic adventurer from a lower stratum of British society was being run by Oxbridge gentlemen and by aristocrats of Deutschland at the same time. Or perhaps he was running them. Adorning his exploits were several beautiful women and an Iron Cross. It is a remarkable cloak-and-dagger procedural and a fine tale of unusual wartime employment. Based on the same material, another first-rate text (Nicholas Booth's ZigZag, 2007) with much the same Hitchcockian contortions qualifies as an exciting black-and-white spy thriller. Macintyre's version is in full color. One of the great true spy stories of World War II, vividly rendered.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Agent ZigZag:

1. What kind of character traits make for a good spy—and how does Eddie Chapman reflect those traits? Is he typical of other successful spies you might have read about previously? Are the qualities it takes to become a spy present in your make-up?

2. Follow-up to Question #1: What in Chapman's character, if anything, would you say is admirable? One reviewer has commented that "there is something about a democracy that makes a spy untrustworthy to the public and unworthy of its respect.... Chapman was no exception." Do you agree...or disagree? Where does the author come down on this question? Does he attempt to convince readers, one way or another? Or does he let you make your own determination?

3. How does did Chapman convince the Nazis to use him as their spy—what enables him to convince them? Same with the British—how does he persuade the Allies to use him as a double agent?

4. What have you learned about how the secret intelligence services operated during World War II—both the Abwehr and MI5? What do you find most interesting...or disturbing? Same questions regarding the techniques used to train spies.

5. Talk about the relationship between spies and their "handlers." How would you describe Ryde and his handling of Chapman? Does Ryde run Chapman...or the other way around? Also, what role does class play in the relationship of spies to handlers?

6. Should agents' lives be considered expendable—or promises negotiable—in the overwhelming necessity of winning a war?

7. Talk about the dangers Chapman faced in Germany. How vulnerable was his position as a spy?

8. We rightfully herald the heroism of armed forces in World War II. Yet the story of intelligence gathering and analysis remained untold for years. (The story of the Ultra secret, for instance, wasn't written about till the 1970s.) Discuss role of intelligence operations—including code-breaking as well as spying—in the Allies' ultimate success? Would the war have been won in 1945 without their efforts?

9. Follow-up to Question #8: Overall, how vital was Chapman's role to the Allied victory? Did his work make a critical difference?

10. What in this story do you find humorous? The episode, for instance of Bobby the Pig? Any others? What about the hapless German agents in Britain? Were Nazi spies truly bunglers?

11. Chapman was dead by the time Macintyre wrote his book. Having read Agent ZigZag, do you feel you have a fairly complete picture? Or are there still unanswered questions—more you would like to know?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page

Alaric the Goth: An Outsider's History of the Fall of Rome
Douglas Boin, 2020
W.W. Norton & Company
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393635690


Summary
Denied citizenship by the Roman Empire, a soldier named Alaric changed history by unleashing a surprise attack on the capital city of an unjust empire.

Stigmatized and relegated to the margins of Roman society, the Goths were violent "barbarians" who destroyed "civilization," at least in the conventional story of Rome’s collapse.

But a slight shift of perspective brings their history, and ours, shockingly alive.

Alaric grew up near the river border that separated Gothic territory from Roman. He survived a border policy that separated migrant children from their parents, and he was denied benefits he likely expected from military service.

Romans were deeply conflicted over who should enjoy the privileges of citizenship. They wanted to buttress their global power, but were insecure about Roman identity; they depended on foreign goods, but scoffed at and denied foreigners their own voices and humanity.

In stark contrast to the rising bigotry, intolerance, and zealotry among Romans during Alaric’s lifetime, the Goths, as practicing Christians, valued religious pluralism and tolerance. The marginalized Goths, marked by history as frightening harbingers of destruction and of the Dark Ages, preserved virtues of the ancient world that we take for granted.

The three nights of riots Alaric and the Goths brought to the capital struck fear into the hearts of the powerful, but the riots were not without cause.

Combining vivid storytelling and historical analysis, Douglas Boin reveals the Goths’ complex and fascinating legacy in shaping our world. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Douglas Boin is an associate professor of history at Saint Louis University and the author of Alaric the Goth: An Outsider's History of the Fall of Rome (2020) and Coming Out Christian in the Roman World (2015), as well as two scholarly books on antiquity. He lives in Austin, Texas. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[R]ichly detailed.... Boin conveys this scholarly insight to general readers in a cogent, readable text that vividly conveys the fear and confusion that surrounded the issue of immigrants’ rights in a period of declining Roman power. He draws the contemporary parallels with a freedom that teeters on the brink of overstatement, but his handling of the relocated Gothic boys’ deaths is characteristic of his bold yet scrupulous reading of ancient sources.
Boston Globe


[A] smart book for the general reader.… Alaric can never emerge as a fully three-dimensional figure, but in Boin’s hands he is lifted convincingly from the realm of brutish caricature…. [Alaric the Goth is] not a polemic. It never invokes modern times explicitly… [but] intended perhaps to be slyly allusive, [which] comes across as winks.
Atlantic


[E]ye-opening…. Taking issue with depictions of Alaric and the Goths as violent barbarians in histories…[Boin's] brisk and well-documented account reveals the Roman Empire… rife with xenophobia and political conflict.… [An] invigorating rehash of ancient times.
Publishers Weekly


[T]he parallels Boin draws to current-day [immigration] issues… are effective, but the positioning of Alaric specifically as an immigrant child torn from his parents by Rome's border policies stumbles given the amount of mights and maybes that Boin must hedge his statements with. —Kathleen McCallister, William & Mary Libs., Williamsburg, VA
Library Journal


Anyone who appreciates vividly detailed stories of the past or is morbidly curious about the dying days of a wealthy, self-important, diverse, autocratic global power should pick this up.
Booklist


A fresh look at… the Roman Empire.… Although Alaric never comes fully to life…, Boin delivers a revealing account of the late Roman empire, which was misgoverned, retreating from its frontier provinces, and almost perpetually at war…. An admirable history of a lesser-known Roman era.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for ALARIC THE GOTH … then take off on your own:

1. What were you taught in history about the Goths, and how does Douglas Boin's account differ, perhaps even contradict, what you learned?

2. (Follow-up to Question 1) The same question can be asked about the sack of Rome in 410. What were you taught about those eventful three days, and what does Boin tell us? According to the author, the sack was not unjustified. Agree? Disagree?

3. Boin takes on a near impossible task as a historian vs. a novelist: he attempts to flesh out a real-life character about which little is actually known. How well do you think he does in putting flesh on old bones? Note that he makes ample use of "must have" and "not hard to imagine" and other conditional phrases. Do those phrases detract from the veracity of his portrait of Alaric? Or does his reasoning, even if conditional, make logical sense and help create to a vivid picture?

4. How would you describe the late Roman empire? Much has been made in book reviews and author interviews that Boin might intentionally be drawing out similarities to our own present culture. Do you see any connections?

5. What were the difficulties that Goths, including Alaric, faced as they made their way through Rome's social and military hierarchy?

6. How does Boin view the fact that Alaric turned against the Romans, who had raised and trained him. Deserting his former commrades, he fought on the side of—and led—the Goths? How do you view Alaric's decision?

7. What, according to Boin, did the Goths and other border peoples want from the Romans?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence—and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process
Irene Pepperberg, 2008
HarperCollins
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061673986


Summary
On September 6, 2007, an African Grey parrot named Alex died prematurely at age thirty-one. His last words to his owner, Irene Pepperberg, were "You be good. I love you."

What would normally be a quiet, very private event was, in Alex's case, headline news. Over the thirty years they had worked together, Alex and Irene had become famous-two pioneers who opened an unprecedented window into the hidden yet vast world of animal minds. Alex's brain was the size of a shelled walnut, and when Irene and Alex first met, birds were not believed to possess any potential for language, consciousness, or anything remotely comparable to human intelligence. Yet, over the years, Alex proved many things. He could add. He could sound out words. He understood concepts like bigger, smaller, more, fewer, and none. He was capable of thought and intention. Together, Alex and Irene uncovered a startling reality: We live in a world populated by thinking, conscious creatures.

The fame that resulted was extraordinary. Yet there was a side to their relationship that never made the papers. They were emotionally connected to one another. They shared a deep bond far beyond science. Alex missed Irene when she was away. He was jealous when she paid attention to other parrots, or even people. He liked to show her who was boss. He loved to dance. He sometimes became bored by the repetition of his tests, and played jokes on her. Sometimes they sniped at each other. Yet nearly every day, they each said, "I love you."

Alex and Irene stayed together through thick and thin—despite sneers from experts, extraordinary financial sacrifices, and a nomadic existence from one university to another. The story of their thirty-year adventure is equally a landmark of scientific achievement and of an unforgettable human-animal bond. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 1. 1949
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—B.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
   M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University
• Awards—Fellow, American Association for the Advancement
   of Sciences; Nominee, L'Oreal Women in Science; Purdue
   University "Old Masters" Award; Selby Fellowship, Australian
   Academy of Sciences; Fellow, American Psychological
   Society.
• Currently—lives in Massachusetts, USA

Irene M. Pepperberg is an associate research professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and teaches animal cognition at Harvard University. Her work has been featured in major newspapers and magazines in the United States, Europe, and Asia, as well as on television, including the now-famous interview of Alex by Alan Alda on Scientific American Frontiers. She is the author of one previous book, The Alex Studies (Harvard, 2000). (From the publisher.)

More
is a scientist noted for her studies in animal cognition, particularly in relation to parrots. She is an adjunct professor of psychology at Brandeis University and a lecturer at Harvard University. She is well known for her comparative studies into the cognitive fundamentals of language and communication, and was one of the first to try to extend work on language learning in animals other than humans (exemplified by the Washoe project) to a bird species. Dr. Pepperberg is also active in wildlife conservation, especially in relation to parrots.

Although parrots have long been known for their capacities in vocal mimicry, Pepperberg set out to show that their vocal behavior could have the characteristics of human language. She worked intensively with a single African Grey Parrot, Alex, and reported that he acquired a large vocabulary and used it in a sophisticated way, which is often described as similar to that of a two year old child. Pepperberg and her colleagues have sought to show that Alex can differentiate meaning and syntax, so that his use of vocal communication is unlike the relatively inflexible forms of "instinctive" communication that are widespread in the animal kingdom. Although such results are always likely to be controversial, and working intensively with a single animal always incurs the risk of Clever Hans effects, Pepperberg's work has strengthened the argument that humans do not hold the monopoly on the complex or semicomplex use of abstract communication.

Some researchers believe that the training method that Pepperberg used with Alex, (called the model-rival technique) holds promise for teaching autistic and other learning-disabled children who have difficulty learning language, numerical concepts and empathy. When some autistic children were taught using the same methods Dr. Pepperberg devised to teach parrots, their response exceeded expectations.

From work with the single subject Alex, Pepperberg and her colleagues have gone on to study additional African Grey Parrots, and also parrots of other species. A final evaluation of the importance of her work will probably depend on the success of these attempts to generalise it to other individuals.

Alex the African Grey Parrot was found dead on morning of September 6, 2007, and was seemingly healthy the previous day. On September 10, 2007, the necropsy of Alex revealed no discernible cause of death.

The model rival technique involves two trainers, one to give instructions, and one to model correct and incorrect responses and to act as the student's rival for the trainer's attention; the model and trainer also exchange roles so that the student sees that the process is fully interactive. The parrot, in the role of student, tries to reproduce the correct behavior.

The use of this model rival technique resulted in Alex identifying objects by color, shape, number and material at about the level of chimpanzees and dolphins. His language abilities were equivalent to those of a 2-year old child and he had the problem solving skills of a 5-year old. Alex was learning the alphabet, had a vocabulary of 150 words, knew the names of 50 objects and could count up to seven when he died. He could also answer questions about objects.

Pepperberg countered critics' claims that Alex had been taught a script by explaining that the controls and tests she used made it impossible for him simply to recite words when she asked questions. The Clever Hans effect did not apply, she argued, as Alex would talk to anyone, not just to her. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
In her charming new book, ... Dr. Pepperberg—an associate research professor at Brandeis and a teacher of animal cognition at Harvard—describes her three-decade-long relationship with [the grey parrot] Alex and her struggle to win recognition from the scientific establishment, which was dominated, when she began working with the parrot, by “the behaviorists’ gospel,” which held that “animals are automatons, responding mindlessly to stimuli.” ... Her book movingly combines the scientific detail of a researcher, intent on showing with “statistical confidence” that Alex “did indeed have this or that cognitive ability,” with the affectionate understanding that children (and children’s books about animals) instinctively possess: that “animals know more than we think, and think a great deal more than we know.”
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


This ornery reviewer tried to resist Alex’s charms on principle (the principle that says any author who keeps telling us how remarkable her subject is cannot possibly be right). But his achievements got the better of me. During one training session, Alex repeatedly asked for a nut, a request that Pepperberg refused (work comes first). Finally, Alex looked at her and said, slowly, “Want a nut. Nnn . . . uh . . . tuh.”
Elizabeth Royte - New York Times Book Review


Alex is the African gray parrot whose ability to master a vocabulary of more than 100 words and answer questions about the color, shape and number of objects-garnered wide notice during his life as well as obituaries in worldwide media after his death in September 2007. Pepperberg, who teaches animal cognition, has previously documented the results of her 30-year relationship with Alex in The Alex Studies. While this book inevitably covers some of the same ground, it is a moving tribute that beautifully evokes "the struggles, the initial triumphs, the setbacks, the unexpected and often stunning achievements" during a groundbreaking scientific endeavor spent "uncovering cognitive abilities in Alex that no one believed were possible, and challenging science's deepest assumptions about the origin of human cognitive abilities." Pepperberg deftly interweaves her own personal narrative-including her struggles to gain recognition for her research-with more intimate scenes of life with Alex than she was able to present in her earlier work, creating a story that scientists and laypeople can equally enjoy, if they can all keep from crying over Alex's untimely death.
Publishers Weekly


Pepperberg, an animal cognitive scientist and associate research professor at Brandeis University, made history with her landmark research involving Alex, an African Grey parrot. Her detailed findings based on two decades of research were published in 1999 in The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots. She was able to prove that African Greys possess cognitive and communicative abilities beyond what scientists had previously believed possible in animals other than humans. After her previous book, Pepperberg had almost another decade of interactions with Alex before his sudden death in September 2007. Her latest is more memoir than research work, focusing on her personal relationship with Alex while introducing lay readers to her extensive research on these remarkable birds. This is a nice companion to Pepperberg's more scientific writings. Recommended for academic and public libraries alike.
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, take a look at these LitLovers Talking Points to help get your discussion started for Alex and Me:

1. Would you like to have understood more about Pepperberg herself? She reveals little about her parents, failed marriage, and relationships with colleagues. Nor does she explain, as one critic puts it: "how she ended up in her 50s, alone and jobless, reduced to eating 14 tofu meals a week (to save money, not the earth). Her approach to herself is neither scientific nor humanistic: the woman remains an enigma."

2. Talk about the scientific community, which initially rejected Pepperberg's observations and papers about Alex.  Why? What did Pepperberg have to overcome to prove the scientific worth of her work with birds, especially Alex?

3. Questions have been raised about Pepperberg's cruelty of confining to a cage a creature that has the cognitive skills of a 5-year-old. Where do you stand on this?

4. When reading about Alex, did you get the sense that he reminded you of "someone you know?"

5. Discuss the degree of Pepperberg's grief over Alex's death. What is so profound about his dying—or the dying of any beloved pet ? Might Alex's death be different than a dog or cat?

6. What is the connection—the degree of affection—that bonds humans to? How can it be explained...whether cat or dog or bird or ferret or horse? Why are animals or birds so deeply appealing to humans...and what makes them relate to us? 

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker
Stacy A. Cordery, 2007
Viking Penguin
608 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781615581870


Summary
From the moment Teddy Roosevelt's outrageous and charming teenage daughter strode into the White House—carrying a snake and dangling a cigarette—the outspoken Alice began to put her imprint on the whole of the twentieth-century political scene. Her barbed tongue was as infamous as her scandalous personal life, but whenever she talked, powerful people listened, and she reigned for eight decades as the social doyenne in a town where socializing was state business.

Historian Stacy Cordery's unprecedented access to personal papers and family archives enlivens and informs this richly entertaining portrait of America's most memorable first daughter and one of the most influential women in twentieth-century American society and politics. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1961
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., M.A., Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin
• Currently—lives in Monmouth, Illinois, USA

Stacy A. Cordery is chair of the history department at Monmouth College (Illinois) and bibliographer for the National First Ladies' Library. (From .)

Book Reviews
Alice had grown up under the chilly eye of a stepmother, romped her way through a notorious White House girlhood, dazzled the American public as its first teenage celebrity, won her father’s admiration with her savvy political instincts and found a father surrogate to marry.... But by far the most interesting part of this detail-crammed, occasionally arid portrait is its account of the mature, married Alice, casting about for a durable adult persona. (She would live to the age of 97.) And Ms. Cordery constructs and analyzes the remarkable story of how Alice, despite her age and husband, gave birth to the only child of Senator William E. Borah, whose leonine bearing and adventurous Western spirit may have brought her father to mind.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


Cordery...has had more access to Mrs. Longworth’s private papers than previous writers, and she tries to make more of a case for her subject’s political significance. Even so, what she mostly has to deal with is Alice’s “reputation as the leading political wit in Washington.” Competition for that title has rarely been fierce, but Mrs. Longworth did have a claim to it while she lived on and on under her wide-brimmed hat, entertaining politicians in her Dupont Circle home near a pillow whose needlepoint instructed them: “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.”
Thomas Mallon - New York Times Book Review


In a country that professes to repudiate royalty but has a soft spot for it anyway, Alice Roosevelt was a princess if not a queen.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post


The fiercely intelligent eldest daughter of President Teddy Roosevelt (1884-1981) was rebellious and outspoken partly as the result of her desperation to gain the attention of an emotionally distant father, according to historian Cordery. Utilizing Alice's personal papers, Cordery describes how she was more devastated by the political infidelity of her husband, House speaker Nicholas Longworth, during the 1912 presidential election (he sided with Taft over TR) than by his sexual dalliances. Her own affair with powerful Idaho Sen. William Borah resulted in the birth of her only child, Paulina. When her beloved father died in 1919, the stoic Alice simply omitted it completely from her autobiography, and she was a poor mother to Paulina, who died in 1957, at 32, from an overdose of prescription medicines mixed with alcohol. Alice's independence of mind often led her against the grain: she worked to defeat Wilson's League of Nations and was a WWII isolationist and America First activist. Her witty syndicated newspaper columns criticized FDR and the New Deal, and she betrayed her cousin Eleanor by encouraging FDR's liaison with Lucy Mercer Rutherford. Cordery (Theodore Roosevelt: In the Vanguard of the Modern) pens an authoritative, intriguing portrait of a first daughter who broke the mold. (Includes photos.)
Publishers Weekly


Notorious for her acerbic wit, political acumen, and occasionally outrageous behavior, President Theodore Roosevelt's illustrious daughter, Alice, enjoyed a long life (1884-1980) at the center of American politics and foreign affairs. Her roles as presidential daughter and later as the wife of powerful Republican Congressman Nicholas Longworth placed her at the heart of the capitol's social life, where she wielded remarkable political influence. She actively opposed Wilson's League of Nations, disdained the New Deal politics of the "other" Roosevelts (FDR and Eleanor), and joined the isolationist America First Committee prior to America's entry into World War II. Her checkered personal life included extramarital romances, most notably with Sen. William Borah, who apparently fathered her only child, Paulina, born when Alice was 40. Cordery (history, Monmouth Coll.; Theodore Roosevelt: In the Vanguard of the Modern) undertook exhaustive research for her new book, referring to newly discovered letters and diaries not available to earlier researchers. Thus, her work should quickly take its place as the most complete biography, surpassing James Brough's Princess Aliceand Carol Felsenthal's Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Highly recommended for all academic libraries and appropriate for public libraries with strong political history collections.
Library Journal


Frank, thoroughgoing life of Teddy Roosevelt's oldest daughter, wife of the Speaker of the House, witty Washington hostess and blistering critic of FDR. Cordery (History/Monmouth Coll.; Theodore Roosevelt: In the Vanguard of the Modern, 2002) fully utilizes the personal papers of Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980), frequently inserting entries from her diary and letters to provide startlingly intimate material. Alice's life was ill-starred at the start. Her birth killed her mother, TR's beloved first wife, on the same day that his own mother died. Subsequently, Teddy ignored Alice, who spent much of her childhood and adolescence trying to capture his attention. By the turn of the century, with TR installed in the White House, Alice enjoyed a spectacular coming-out, embarking as a young celebrity on forays into the world and politics. To gain more independence (and spending money), she married an unsuitable, much older man. Ohio Congressman Nick Longworth was also a philanderer and a hard drinker, but Alice was his match in travel, entertaining and campaigning. Alienated by Nick's affairs and his decision to back Taft rather than her father in the decisive campaign of 1912, Alice teamed up with Idaho senator William Borah, a fellow opponent of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. They became lovers in 1919 and together rode the heady years of the '20s under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover; Cordery accepts as fact the widely held belief that Borah fathered Alice's daughter Paulina, though she was still married to Nick when he died in 1931. Alice's public drubbing of the New Deal and cousins FDR and Eleanor solidified her reputation as the leading political wit in Washington. But Cordery declines to be distracted by bon mots, cogently employing a plethora of detail to get at the character behind the hot air. A rigorous portrait of a woman of strong opinions who surely should have run for office herself. Promises to revive the old dame's reputation.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, try these LitLovers discussion pointers to help get you started for Alice:

1. Alice isn't always a likable figure, but she speaks her mind honestly—and to those in power. Do you admire her?Do you consider her forthright, courageous, or simply offensive? Take into account the era in which she came of age and "reigned"—an era when women were to seen but not heard?

2. To what extent did her father's neglect contribute to Alice's unconventional approach to life—all her attention-getting chicanery?

3. Though Alice was "never elected, but always involved" Cordery considers her a politician in her own right. What does Cordery mean by that? Do you agree with her?

4. Alice may well have been the smartest of all the Roosevelt children, and Cordery thinks she would have been capable of holding office. Had she lived in another era, do you see her running for office...and would you could have supported her?

3. Obviously, the most unsettling aspects of Alice's life was her marriage to Nicholas Longworth and subsequent affair and child by Senator William Borah. There's a lot of fodder to chew on for a good discussion! (Also, consider the role she played in FDR's life, encouraging his affair with Lucy Mercy Rutherford.)

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

Alicia, My Story
Alicia Appleman-Jurman, 1988
Bantam Press
433 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780833554192


Summary 
After losing her entire family to the Nazis at age 13, Alicia Appleman-Jurman went on to save the lives of thousands of Jews, offering them her own courage and hope in a time of upheaval and tragedy.

Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has a young voice so vividly expressed the capacity for humanity and heroism in the face of Nazi brutality. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 9, 1930
• Where—Rosulna, Poland
• Reared—Buczacz, Poland
• Awards—Christopher Award; Bernard Lecache Award
• Currently—lives in San Jose, California, USA (as of 1998)

Alicia Appleman-Jurman was the only daughter and the second-youngest of Sigmund and Frieda Jurman in a family of five children. Raised from the age of five in Buczacz, which was roughly 1/3 Jewish at that time, Alicia was sheltered relatively well from the anti-Semitism that plagued her town, as well as the rest of Europe. Unfortunately, this changed on September 1, 1939, when German troops invaded Poland, and she would gradually have her whole family brutally wrenched from her. (From Wikipedia.)

More
I was born in Rosulna, Poland, a small village in the Carpathian mountains. At the age of five, I moved with my family to the city of Buczacz (pronounced “boochach”) in eastern Poland. This city is located in the part of Poland which was annexed to the Soviet Union after World War II and is now part of the Ukraine.

My parents, four brothers and close relatives numbering about eighty were all killed by the Germans and their collaborators. During the war years I lived in the Ghettos of Buczacz and Kopechince and learned to survive in the forests and fields surrounding those cities. I escaped death several times. In our ghettos as well as in all of our region, the Germans killed us in “Actions”. They would surround the entire ghetto, or a neighborhood and those Jews who were found in homes and in hiding places were taken out to the meadows and forests and shot into open graves.

During my struggle to survive I was able to save several Jewish lives as well as those of two groups of Russian Partisans who were operating behind the German lines. As a witness to our tragedy I have related my story and the story of the Jewish community in our area both during and immediately after the war, in my autobiographical book Alicia-My Story which has been published by Bantam Books, Inc. The hardcover edition is now a collector’s item. A paperback edition was published in January 1990 and has been reprinted many times to date. The book has been translated into seven foreign languages and distributed throughout Europe and the countries called Six Cherry Blossoms, which is an allegory of the Holocaust.

After the Germans were defeated, I joined the "Brecha" and helped smuggle Jews out of Poland to Austria, from where others guided them to Eretz Israel. In early 1947 I sailed on the illegal immigrant ship, Theodore Herzl" hoping to land in Eretz Israel. We were caught by the British navy and sent to Cyprus, where I was interned in a British concentration camp for eight months.

In December 1947 I was one of the thousand Youth Aliyah children Golda Meier managed to get out of Cyprus. I was sent to study at a Youth Aliyah school, Mikve Israel, near Tel Aviv. When the War of Independence began in 1948 I took part in the fights against the Arab villages that threatened the lives of our students at Mikveh Israel. I was also part of the Palyam and later joined the navy's Chayl HaYam forces which fought in Jaffa.

While serving in Israeli Navy I met Gabriel Appleman, a volunteer from the United States. We were married in 1950 and came to the United States in 1952. We returned to Israel in 1969 and were there during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. We came back to the United States once more in 1975.

For the last 45 years, I have spoken in synagogues, churches and schools, telling my story and the story of the people in my part of Poland and how we survived. Most important, I tell the story of how we did fight back during those years…the story of brave people, mostly children, who did not survive to tell the story themselves. I have spent week-ends with youth groups such as Adat Noar and have been called upon to speak at teacher’s seminars and public schools by the ADL in Southern California.

When I speak I tell my story simply, but I can see that I reach into the hearts of my listeners. I do not use notes or read my talks. It is not necessary because I speak about my own experiences. Although I have a slight accent, I have a good command of English and have been told that I speak well and that I do not lose my audience. Some of the groups I have spoken to have been very large, the greatest being thirteen thousand people at the Long Beach Arena in California, where I addressed a convention of International Networking Enterprises, which is associated with the Amway Corporation. (From Wikipedia, courtesy of Ms. Appleman-Jurman.)

Book Reviews
A young girl's experience of the Nazi pogrom in her Polish hometown is related with an immediacy undimmed by time in her autobiography. In 1942, the author and her family undergo a brutal separation. Thirteen-year-old Alicia escapes her captors, fleeing through fields and woods, encountering fellow refugees and occasionally finding safe harbors. Although she sees her mother's wanton murder and endures physical and mental deprivation, the teenager is supported by faith in family and in the goodness of people. Capable of rallying others, she eventually heads a group who settle in Palestine. In 1949, she marries an American in Haifa and moves to the United States. Long and on occasion rambling, her story contributes to an infamous history as a tale, not only of survival, but of active resistance to oppression.
Publishers Weekly


A Polish Jew, the author re-creates her efforts to survive in Nazi-dominated, war-torn Poland. Between the ages of ten and 15, she suffered terrible hardships and encountered numerous brushes with death. This is a potentially useful addition to Holocaust literature, for although she never experienced the death camps, Appleman-Jurman lived in constant peril and managed to survive only through an extraordinary combination of luck and street sense. Unfortunately, the heavy use of dialogue reconstructed more than 40 years later has an unsettling effect on the mood and plausibility of this interesting and frequently horrifying survival narrative. Still, public libraries should consider. —Mark R. Yerburgh, Trinity Coll. Lib., Burlington, Vt.
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Alicia, My Story:

1. The obvious place to start any discussion is with the remarkable courage of the book's real-life heroine—Alicia Jurman. From where do you suppose her inner-strength comes? Point out specific instances in the book where you find her perseverance and fortitude especially remarkable. Can you imagine how you might have acted under those same circumstances?

2. What did it mean, as Alice describes it, to be a Jew in Eastern Europe in the years leading up to World War II? Describe her experiences of anti-Semitism in her community? Once the Nazi invasion begins, how do the family's Polish neighbors react? Are all Poles in this book anti-Semitic?

3. What inspires anti-Semitism, then and now? Do you believe that hostility toward Jews has declined in post-war Eastern Europe?

4. Talk about Alicia's capture and ordeal in Chortkov prison. What prompts such selfless bravery as that of Jules and Sala Gold?

5. Alicia's friend Milek is another remarkable child. Talk about all he does to save Alicia's life? What do we later learn about him?

6. In her disguise as a gentile presant girl working the fields, how does she mistakenly reveal her true identity?

7. What can we learn about the redemptive power of aiding others in times of great danger—especially Alicia's protection of orphans even younger than she, as well as her work to save members of the Soviet resistance?

8. Even once the war was over, Alicia's struggles continue. Describe her efforts to smuggle Jews to Palestine. Why were the British intent on preventing Holocaust survivors from settling in there? What was your reaction when British frigates ram the Theodor Herzl?

9. In what way is Alicia changed by her ordeals? How does the Holocaust and all she has experienced affect her faith, both her religious beliefs and her beliefs in humanity?

10. What was your experience reading Alicia, My Story? How did it make you feel? Has this memoir altered your view of humanity...or affected your personal faith?

11. Have you read other memoirs of the Holocaust—The Diary of Anne Frank, or Elie Weisel's Night? Perhaps you've read (or watched films of) fictional accounts: The Reader...or The Boy in the Striped Pajamas? How does Alicia, My Story compare to these other works?

12. Reading Alicia, My Story, what have you learned about this period of history that you didn't know before? What lessons can we—people and nations—learn from Alicia's memoir?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

All Over But the Shoutin'
Rick Bragg, 1998
Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679774020


Summary
When childhood is complicated by poverty and an abusive, alcoholic father, it vecomes focused on survival. Were it not for the dedication and strength of his mother, Rick Bragg may have never left northeast Alabama and become a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. His memoir captures the essence of the South, explores the bonds and responsibilities of family, and, in the end, celebrates his own coming-of-age. (From the publisher.)

 Author Bio
• Birth—July 26, 1959
• Where—Possum Trot, Alabama, USA
• Education—Attended Jacksonville State University for six
   months in 1970; attended Harvard University, 1992-1993
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, 1996
• Currently—New Orleans, Louisiana

Rick Bragg caught his first break as a journalist when the competition for his first newspaper job decided to stick with his current position in a fast-food restaurant. From there, Bragg has moved from small newspapers in Alabama to the likes of the St. Petersburg Times, the Los Angeles Times and, finally, the New York Times.

He eventually won a reputation in one newsroom as "the misery writer." His assignments: Hurricane Andrew, Miami rioting, Haiti, and Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman accused of drowning her two boys in 1994 by driving her car into a lake. In 1996, while at the Times, Bragg covered the terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City and won the Pulitzer Prize.

"I've really served at all stations of the cross," Bragg said in a December 2002 interview with Writer magazine. "I've been pretty much everywhere. I don't think there's a difference between writing for a newspaper or magazine and doing a chapter in a book. People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant. The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background. There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their laptops, then they're not real writers. That's ridiculous."

[Bragg left the New York Times in 2003 after questions surfaced regarding his use of uncredited stringers for some of his reporting. Bragg's departure was part of a larger ethics scandal that also claimed the newspaper's top two editors.]

Bragg's memoir, All Over but the Shoutin', recounts these stations, particularly his hardscrabble youth in rural Alabama, where he was brought up by a single mother who sacrificed everything for her children.

"In his sad, beautiful, funny and moving memoir...Rick Bragg gives us a report from the forgotten heart of 'white trash' America, a sort of Pilgrim's Progress or Up from Slavery about how a clever and determined young man outwitted fate," The New York Times Book Review wrote in 1997." The story he tells, of white suffering and disenfranchisement, is one too seldom heard. It is as if a descendant from one of the hollow-eyed children from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men had stepped out of a photograph to tell his own story, to narrate an experience that even Agee could not penetrate because he was not himself 'trash.' "

In 2001, Bragg went back a generation in his family's story and wrote about his grandfather, a hard-drinking fighter who made whiskey in backwoods stills along the Alabama-Georgia border and died at 51. His widow would rebuff her grandchildren's questions about remarrying: "No, hon, I ain't gonna get me no man...I had me one."

The Los Angeles Times called Ava's Man "a big book, at once tough and sentimental," while The New York Times said, "It is hard to think of a writer who reminds us more forcefully and wonderfully of what people and families are all about."

Bragg acknowledges that his language is stolen—plucked from the mouths of the family members he has interviewed, filling notebooks and jotting stories on whatever was at hand—the back of airplane tickets, for example. The biggest challenge, he would later say, was finding an order in the mess of folksy storytelling. "Talking to my people is like herding cats," he told The Kansas City Star in 2002. "You can't rely on them to walk down the road and not run into the bushes."

And, then, there would be the recollection that would come along just a little too late.

"The most agonizing thing was to finish the manuscript, know that I had pleased [the family], then have one of them say, 'Oh, yeah, hon, I just thought of something else'—and it would be the best story you ever heard," he told the Star.

Extras
• Bragg brought his mother, Margaret, to New York for the Pulitzer Prize ceremony. She had never been to the city, never been on an airplane, never ridden on an escalator, and hadn't bought a dress for herself in 18 years.

• In an interview with Writer, Bragg describes life as a newspaper correspondent: "If I travel for the paper, that means I fly to a city I've probably never been to, get off a plane, rent a car, drive out in bumper-to-bumper traffic heading for a little town that nobody knows the name of and can't give me directions to, and it's not on the map. When I get there, I try to get information in 15 minutes for a story I have to write in 45."

• He wrote Ava's Man because his fans wanted to know more about his mother's childhood. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Tells about the South with such power and bone-naked love...that he will make you cry.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution


There's one thing for sure about the life story of New York Times national correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg, as he tells it in this angry memoir: He hasn't had it easy. All Over but the Shoutin' details a childhood spent dirt-poor and fatherless in Alabama, protected by a loving mother who sacrificed everything for her children. It's the story of a have-not, resentful of the haves, who overcomes crushing limitations to become a newspaper reporter and who eventually scrambles his way into a job at what he calls "the temple" of his profession, the New York Times. In the end he triumphs, buying his mother the decent house she's always wanted—with cash.

It's a tough story all right—too bad that from the first page you can hear Bragg, in the measured spit-and-polish prose newspapermen use when they're being sensitive, milking it for all it's worth. The novelist Lee Smith, and Dolly Parton (in a number like her "Coat of Many Colors"), understand the power of understatement when it comes to conveying the heartbreak of poverty, and that's what makes their work so rich. But Bragg's litany of major bummers reads like a bid for sympathy. It's as if he believes that piled-on layers of hardship and woe are likely to wrench that many more tears out of us, as if we should be wowed by the sheer bulk and weight of his experiences.

He recalls how his mother "scraped together money for my high school class ring, even though her toes poked out of her old sneakers and she was wearing clothes from the Salvation Army bin in the parking lot of the A&P. It was not real gold, that ring, just some kind of fake, shiny metal crowned with a lump of red glass, but I was proud of it ... If the sunlight caught it just right, it looked almost real." In case that reference to his mother's holey sneakers slips by you the first time, Bragg mentions them at least twice more during the course of the book.

What makes All Over but the Shoutin' truly annoying, though, are Bragg's rooster-size ego and his sanctimoniousness about his profession. Of course, all journalists have big egos -- it comes with the territory. And on some level, you can't blame Bragg for being proud that he was able to crack the stuffy establishment that is the New York Times. But after he's mentioned his numerous journalism awards for the third time, and after you've caught onto his trick of sprinkling down-home cracker words like "ain't" amid his crisp, crafty Times-style prose, the whole thing starts to smell like yesterday's catfish. Bragg tells how he got a promotion at one of his pre-Times newspaper jobs by purposely "overwriting" a story about a chicken that fought off a bobcat. "The moral, I suppose, was this: Do not, on purpose, write a bunch of overwritten crap if it looks so much like the overwritten crap you usually write that the editors think you have merely reached new heights in your craft." Bragg thinks he's making a funny at his own expense, but by the time you read those words, a good two-thirds of the way through the book, you may wonder if the joke is really on you.
Stephanie Zacharek - Salon


"A common condition of being poor white trash," explains New York Times correspondent Bragg on learning he won a Pulitzer Prize last year, is that "you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away." Having won that prize for stories about others, he tells his own here in a mixture of moving anecdotes and almost masochistic self-analysis. He brings alive his childhood of Southern poverty, his absentee father dead at 40, one brother scavenging coal for the family at nine, the other in and out of jail. Someone advised Bragg, "'[T]o tell a story right you have to lean the words against each other so that they don't all fall down," and his gift for language shines through every scene of violence and deprivation. If only he would let events speak for themselves, but all too often the tone falters and Bragg takes time out to excoriate some long-gone colleague and to pass out guilt badges. What saves this uneven, jolting narrative is his love and respect for his mother, who dragged him behind her as a toddler while she picked cotton in the fields. His ambition to buy her a house was realized last year: "'She never had a wedding ring, or a decent car, or even a set of furniture that matched. Or teeth that fit. But she had a home now... of her own."
Publishers Weekly


On Palm Sunday, 1994, a tornado ripped through a church in Piedmont, AL, killing 20 people. This is Bragg's hometown, and he began his story on the tragedy for the New York Times as follows: '"This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven. This is a place where the song 'Jesus Loves Me' has rocked generations to sleep, and heaven is not a concept, but a destination.' It is writing of this quality that won the author his job as a national correspondent and the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. He grew up in poverty, the second of three sons of an alcoholic, abusive father and a loving mother. The early chapters give a beautiful description of warm and happy moments he enjoyed with her and his family even as she struggled to provide for them after they'd been abandoned. Teens will enjoy reading about the resourceful, talented, and lucky young man's career as he moved from local reporter to working for regional and national papers. —Patricia Noonan, Prince William Public Library, VA.
School Library Journal


A celebrated Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter turns his investigative attention to his own past: growing up poor and making his way from rural Alabama to the top of his profession. Bragg, who was born in 1959, is poetic and convincing on his family's poverty and how it chipped away at their dreams "to the point that the hopelessness show[ed] through." His father, violent and an alcoholic, figures here, as do his siblings, but this is above all a son's story of love and respect for a mother who picked cotton, cleaned houses, and took in washing and ironing, determined to secure for her children the chance at a successful life that poverty had denied her. Bragg explores the ambivalence he felt about leaving home and his growing awareness that such choices will allow him to achieve at a level he's scarcely imagined. His labors lead eventually to a job at the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, and then to Harvard in 1992, when he receives a Nieman Fellowship that allows him to make up in reading and coursework some of what he'd missed by having left college early. Bragg won his Pulitzer in 1996 for his human interest stories, profiles of such figures as a courageous bodega owner, defying robbers, and of the 87-year-old Mississippi washerwoman who donated her life savings to a university. He realizes a long-cherished plan when he has enough money to buy a home for his mother. Says Bragg, "you do the best you can for the people...you love with all the strength in your body, once you finally figure out that they are who you are, and, in many ways, all there is. Bragg, who now lives in Atlanta, has a strong voice and a sweeping style that, like his approach tonewspaper writing, is rich, empathetic, and compelling. His memoir is a model of humility combined with pride in one's accomplishments.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Why does Bragg begin his memoir with the image of redbirds fighting? Why do you think he includes the story of a bird attacking its own image in the mirror?

2. In the prologue, Bragg claims several times that "this is not an important book." Does he convince us that in fact it is important? If so, how? Why does he feel that he "cannot take the chance of squandering the knowledge and the stories that [my mother] and my people hold inside them" [p. xvi]?

3. Bragg describes a memory of himself on a gunny sack that his mother is pulling through a cotton field as she works; at three, he "rides the back of the six-foot-long sack like a magic carpet" [p. 23]. How does this particular image sum up his mother's love for him? Is his mother's devotion to her sons' welfare out of the ordinary?

4. Does Bragg regret his inability to forgive his dying father? Would reconciliation have alleviated Bragg's need to compensate his mother for his father's failures? What is the significance of the gift of books by an illiterate father to his clever son?

5. Although many aspects of his family's life were ruled by poverty, Bragg was immersed in the traditions of the pinewoods, where self-reliant people were adept at music, building, and handcrafts, where "likker and religion flowed together" [p. 34]. Are certain elements of the life he describes enviable? Do you get the impression that his memories of childhood are colored by nostalgia? To what extent do you think nostalgia plays a role in the memories and experiences of everyone?

6. While many African-Americans—from Frederick Douglas to Maya Angelou--have given us their stories of growing up poor and black, thesegment of society disparagingly called "poor white trash" has produced relatively few writers. Does this book change your view of the large segment of whites who live in rural poverty?

7. Although Bragg sees his background as a handicap in his profession, the unmistakably Southern way he uses the English language can be part of the appeal of his writing. One editor warned him about exploiting his gift to produce "too many pretty lines" [p. 228]. Do you agree that this is a danger for Bragg? What do you notice about his style, imagery, humor, and approach to news stories that is distinctive?

8. Did luck make the difference between Rick Bragg's life and the lives of his two brothers? Or do their different choices have more to do with temperament and character than with the hazards of fortune? Do you see Rick Bragg as a man who is more determined and driven than he admits? Why does he insist on attributing his success to luck?

9. Race relations, as Bragg shows, are complicated for poor whites in the South. What do you learn from the story of the black family down the road bringing food to Rick's mother? From his family's devotion to the demagogue George Wallace? From his work in Haiti?

10. Why is Bragg particularly drawn to stories about "living and dying and the trembling membrane in between" [p. 139]? Why is he so good at writing about violence and tragedy? What is it about journalism that most disturbs him?

11. Has Bragg's attempt to compensate for his mother's unhappy life contributed to his inability to settle down with someone? Is his avoidance of intimacy a legacy from his father or is it simply the syndrome of a successful and driven man who doesn't have time to attend to the emotional side of life?

12. Despite the revolution in American life that was brought about by the women's movement, the culture of the South is well known for its lingering devotion to ideals of chivalry. Does Rick Bragg raise his mother onto a pedestal? Does he risk turning her into a passive heroine who depends upon his help?

13. What, if any, are the definitive class barriers in our society? Does having been born poor mean that a person will always feel inferior to those who weren't? Do financial or professional achievements raise a person's "class" level? Is Bragg justified in his resentment of those who seem sophisticated or "elite" to him--the wealthy people of the South or people he meets at Harvard and at The New York Times?

14. Bragg's response to the Susan Smith case is particularly interesting. What does he identify with in her? Why is he so scornful of her?

15. What aspect of Bragg's youth was most damaging to his sense of himself? Is it possible for him to "belong" anywhere? Can winning the Pulitzer Prize make him an insider in the profession of journalism? Is the rootless life of a journalist appropriate for him?

16. With his urgent desire to make up his mother's losses, Bragg struggles between his impulse to "rewrite history so late in the volume of our lives" [p. 272] and the more realistic, if discouraging, realization that "you can't fix everything" [p. 312]. Is he sacrificing himself for his mother? Or is he what he does more for his own sake than hers?

17. Why does Bragg address one of the final chapters of his book to his father? How accurate is he in saying to his father, "I am just like you" [p. 318]? What has he learned in the process of writing this memoir? Why is his honesty so moving?
(Questions issued by publisher.) 

top of page (summary)

All the Single Ladies:  Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
Rebecca Traister, 2016
Simon & Schuster
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476716565


Summary
In 2009, the award-winning journalist Rebecca Traister started All the Single Ladies—a book she thought would be a work of contemporary journalism—about the twenty-first century phenomenon of the American single woman.

It was the year the proportion of American women who were married dropped below fifty percent; and the median age of first marriages, which had remained between twenty and twenty-two years old for nearly a century (1890–1980), had risen dramatically to twenty-seven.

But over the course of her vast research and more than a hundred interviews with academics and social scientists and prominent single women, Traister discovered a startling truth: the phenomenon of the single woman in America is not a new one.

And historically, when women were given options beyond early heterosexual marriage, the results were massive social change—temperance, abolition, secondary education, and more.

Today, only twenty percent of Americans are wed by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly sixty percent in 1960. The Population Reference Bureau calls it a "dramatic reversal." All the Single Ladies is a remarkable portrait of contemporary American life and how we got here, through the lens of the single American woman.

Covering class, race, sexual orientation, and filled with vivid anecdotes from fascinating contemporary and historical figures, All the Single Ladies is destined to be a classic work of social history and journalism.

Exhaustively researched, brilliantly balanced, and told with Traister’s signature wit and insight, this book should be shelved alongside Gail Collins’s When Everything Changed. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1975
• Raised—near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Northwestern University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Rebecca Traister is a senior writer at Salon.com, where she has covered women in media, politics, and entertainment since 2003. She covered, with much attention and acclaim, the 2008 campaign from a feminist (and personal) perspective. She received a huge response to her pieces on Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, the media’s coverage of the candidates, and the role of women within the media. Her first book Big Girls Don't Cry is the result. It makes sense of this moment in American history, in which women broke barriers and changed the country’s narrative in completely unexpected ways.

Traister's 2016 New York Times' best-seller All the Single Ladies has been met with wide critical acclaim, leaving the Boston Globe proclaiming "We're better off reading Rebecca Traister on women, politics, and America than pretty much anyone else." Today, only twenty percent of Americans are wed by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly sixty percent in 1960. The Population Reference Bureau calls this a "dramatic reversal."

All the Single Ladies is a remarkable portrait of contemporary American life and how we got here, through the lens of the single American woman. Covering class, race, sexual orientation, and filled with vivid anecdotes from fascinating contemporary and historical figures, All the Single Ladies is destined to be a classic work of social history and journalism. Exhaustively researched, brilliantly balanced, and told with Traister’s signature wit and insight, this book explores the rise of the unmarried woman as a political and cultural force.

At the podium, Traister shares her first-person account of being a young woman navigating this turbulent and exciting time while keeping track of the modernization of the women's movement and the explosion of a new generation of feminism. She explains how—thanks to the campaigns of Clinton and Palin, and the history-making work and visibility of Michelle Obama, Tina Fey, and Rachel Maddow, Katie Couric, and others—America got a powerful view of the ways and directions in which roles for women had expanded in the forty years since the second wave, as well as the limitations that remained.

An in demand speaker, Traister speaks regularly at prominent national events, including on panels at the EMILY’s List annual gathering, NARAL events, among other women’s organizations, and at events surrounding the Democratic National Convention. She is perfect for universities, town halls, in addition to other conventions, conferences, and organizations looking for an intelligent and contemporary take on feminism and its evolution in politics, media, entertainment, and society at large.

Traister has also written for a range of national publications, including a profile of a trip to Africa with Bill Clinton for Elle, the New York Times, Vogue, and a profile on Rachel Maddow for the Nation. She has appeared on CNN, CNN Headline News, MSNBC, NPR’s Brian Lehrer Show, and other TV and radio outlets.

Traister started out in the media as an entry level assistant at Talk magazine, and then as a fact checker at the New York Observer, where she soon became the most unwilling gossip columnist in the history of New York nightlife, before reporting on the film industry in the city. In 2003, she moved to Salon.com, where she had been hired as the Life section’s staff writer. She wound up writing so many stories from a feminist point of view that soon her beat simply became about women.

Traister was raised outside Philadelphia, where she attended Quaker high school, and then went on to major in American Studies at Northwestern University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York City. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Traister brings a welcome balance of critique and personal reflection to a conversation that is often characterize more by moral policing than honest discussion.... Perhaps one of the most important aspects of [her] narrative is her acknowledgement that the experiences of single women are far from identical.... An informative and thought-provoking book for anyone--not just the single ladies—who want to gain a greater understanding of this pivotal moment in the history of the United States.
Gillian B. White - New York Times Book Review


[I]mpressively well researched...it's the personal narratives drawn from more than 100 interviews...that make the book not just an informative read but also an entirely engaging one.... Some of what's covered in the book is already well-trod ground...but the exemplary framework of cultural inclusion, the personal candor and palpable desire to lift up each and every one of us, is what makes All the Single Ladies a singularly triumphant work of women.
Rebecca Carroll - Los Angeles Times


[Traister is] one of the nation’s smartest and most provocative feminist voices.... All the Single Ladies is a multifaceted endeavor. Bringing together US history and life in this 21st century, through data, interviews, and an enormous stack of reading and viewing material,...Traister produces an invigorating defense of a demographic too often criticized and caricatured, rather than recognized for its profound effect on American society
Rebecca Steintz - Boston Globe


The enormous accomplishment of Traister's book is to show that the ranks of women electing for nontraditional lives...have also improved the lots of women who make traditional choices...This rich portrait of our most quietly explosive social force makes it clear that the ladies still have plenty of work to do.
slate


Wonderfully inclusive, examining single women from all walks of life—working-, middle-, and upper-class women; women of color and white women; queer and straight ones…With All the Single Ladies she brings her trademark intelligence and wit to bear.
Roxanne Gay - Elle


Incorporating a lively slew of perspectives of single ladies past and present, Traister....sticks to her central argument that the world is changing and policies need to catch up to the social reality. The result is an invigorating study of single women in America with refreshing insight into the real life of the so-called spinster.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) This fast-paced, fascinating book will draw in fans of feminism, social sciences, and U.S. history.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Exploring all aspects of single life—social, economic, racial, and sexual—Traister’s comprehensive volume, sure to be vigorously discussed, is truly impressive in scope and depth while always managing to be eminently readable and thoughtful.
Booklist


A feminist journalist argues that single women, who now outnumber married women in the United States, are changing society in major ways.... An easy read with lots of good anecdotes, a dose of history, and some surprising statistics, but its focus on one segment of one generation of single women is a drawback.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for All the Single Ladies...then take off on your own:

1. If you are a single woman, does this book resonate with you? If married, does it?

2. Why, according to Rebecca Traister, has the resistance to independent women been so intense? She compares the growth of single womanhood as powerful as the sexual revolution and abolition of slavery. Do you agree—in other words, does Traister make a convincing case?

3. How does Traister draw distinctions between privileged women (uwually white) and underprivileged women (usually women of color)? How, for instance does each subset of women view the role of work in their lives?

4. Do you agree with Traister's assessment that one of the "unacknowledged truths of female life is that women's primary, foundational, formative  relations are as likely to be with each other as they are with men"? is that true for you or for other women you know? Is it true of men, as well?

4. Is marriage still the end goal for most women...or not? What does Traister think...and what do you think, on both a personal and cultural level?

5. Talk about one of the book's major premises—that the rise of the median age for a woman's first marriage, which has risen to 27, has had a momentous effect on the American cultural landscape.

6. Traister examines the lives of unmarried women throughout history who worked as abolitionists, fought for voting rights, who wrote for a living, or even ran countries. Which profiles do you find most interesting or most impressive?

7. How did literature once treat unmarried women (e.g., Wharton's Lily Bart or Dickens's Miss Havisham)? How are they treated in today's media (e.g., Sex and the City, Damages, or Scandal?)

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

All You Can Ever Know:  A Memoir
Nicole Chung, 2018
Catapult Books
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781936787975


Summary
What does it mean to lose your roots—within your culture, within your family—and what happens when you find them?

Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth.

She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee.

But as Nicole grew up—facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, finding her identity as an Asian American and as a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from—she wondered if the story she’d been told was the whole truth.

With warmth, candor, and startling insight, Nicole Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child.

All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets—vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1981
• Where—Seattle, Washington, USA
• Education—B.A. and M.A.
• Currently—lives in the Washington, DC, area


Nicole Chung is a writer, editor, and the author of the memoir All You Can Ever Know, published in 2018. She was born in Seattle in 1981 to Korean parents who put her up for adoption after she spent months on life support. She was raised in a small town outside of Portland, Oregon, by adoptive white Catholic parents.

In her mid-20s Chung took a nonfiction class and started writing essays. She later worked as the managing editor for The Toast from 2014 until the site closed in 2016, after which she became the editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine.

She has also written for the New York Times, GQ, Longreads, BuzzFeed, Hazlitt, and Shondaland, among other publications.

In All You Can Ever Know Chung's writes about her own life story as well as that of her birth sister, whom she met after reestablishing contact with their birth parents. The memoir is structured around Chung's efforts during her first pregnancy to reconstruct the story of her own origins, including searching for her birth family, contacting them, then discovering a history of abuse, divorce, and deception.

Chung lives in the Washington, D.C., area with her husband and two daughters. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/22/2018.)

Book Reviews
Chung’s search for her biological roots …has to be one of this year’s finest books, let alone memoirs.…Chung has literary chops to spare and they’re on full display in descriptions of her need, pain and bravery.
Bethanne Patrick - Washington Post


A Korean American adopted by white parents in Oregon, Chung writes movingly of her search to find her birth parents; her personal quest leads not only to her own story, but also to meditations on race, parenthood, and the construction of identity.
Kate Tuttle - Boston Globe


What gives All You Can Ever Know its power is the emotional honesty in every line, essential to the telling of a story so personal.… All You Can Ever Know, sometimes painfully and always beautifully, explores what it means to be adopted, to be a different race from the family you grew up in, and to later create a family of your own.
Seattle Times
 

In this much-anticipated memoir, Chung brings her clear and thoughtful prose to the task of untangling the legacy of her adoption to white parents in Oregon. Transracial adoption …looks far more complicated under Chung’s kind but implacably honest gaze.
Huffington Post


(Starred review) [A] stunning memoir.… Chung’s writing is vibrant and provocative as she explores her complicated feelings about her transracial adoption (which she "loved and hated in equal measure") and the importance of knowing where one comes from.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) This touching memoir explores issues of identity, racism, motherhood, and sisterhood with eloquence and grace. Highly recommended.
Library Journal


[An] insightful memoir.… Chung's clear, direct approach to her experience, which includes the birth of her daughter as well as her investigation of her family, reveals her sharp intelligence and willingness to examine difficult emotions.
Booklist


Highly compelling… [and a] poignant depiction of the irreducibly complex nature of human motives and family ties. A profound, searching memoir about "finding the courage to question what I'd always been told."
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The book opens with "The story my mother told me about them was always the same" (3)—how do stories and storytelling shape the author’s view of herself and her life?

2. Chung writes about not telling anyone that she is looking for her birth parents and that "long after the papers are signed, and the original familial bonds are severed, adoption has a way of isolating the adoptee" (63). What role does isolation take in Chung’s journey? What impact does her race and ethnicity have on these feelings of isolation?

3. Throughout her memoir, Chung openly asks questions to herself and others in equal measure. By the end of the memoir, do you feel as if she has answered the questions she asks? Does she need to?

4. Chung’s search for her birth parents coincides with her first pregnancy, and her first meeting with her birth father lines up with her second. How do these events happening at the same time inform one anoth-er? How does it affect how she views them?

5. Chung’s adoptive parents have what she sees as "an enviable sort of nonchalance about my adoption," but she writes that she "couldn’t turn other people’s nosiness into a joke, and [she] couldn’t make them regret it, either" (34). What do you think was behind her adoptive parents’ responses and their attitude about the adoption? How did these things impact Chung’s perception of herself?

6. What are some of the mainstream ideas and narratives about adoption that Chung pushes back on? Where and how does she complicate the choices and events that tend to get simplified, particularly regarding adoptees of color?

7. After corresponding with her birth family, Chung is left to confront the fact that the story she was told about her birth parents was not entirely accurate. How does she process this new information? What shifts does she make after being presented with it?

8. Chung writes, "The peace I’d so badly wanted to give my birth parents, all along, was never my power to give" (150). Who does have the power to give her birth parents peace? Why do you think they feel the way they do about the adoption,  despite knowing that Chung became who she is because of it?

9. How does Chung’s journey influence her ideas surrounding motherhood and becoming a mother? As she builds a relationship with her sister and birth father, do these ideas change?

10. How does being Korean American with white adoptive parents in a predominately white town affect Chung’s understanding of her racial and ethnic identity? How does this perception shift as she gets older? How does it change as she raises her own biological children?

top of page (summary)

America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines
Gail Collins, 2003
HarperCollins
608 pp.<
ISBN-13: 9780061227226


Summary
America's Women tells the story of more than four centuries of history. It features a stunning array of personalities, from the women peering worriedly over the side of the Mayflower to feminists having a grand old time protesting beauty pageants and bridal fairs. Courageous, silly, funny, and heartbreaking, these women shaped the nation and our vision of what it means to be female in America.

By culling the most fascinating characters — the average as well as the celebrated — Gail Collins, the editorial page editor at the New York Times, charts a journey that shows how women lived, what they cared about, and how they felt about marriage, sex, and work. She begins with the lost colony of Roanoke and the early southern "tobacco brides" who came looking for a husband and sometimes — thanks to the stupendously high mortality rate — wound up marrying their way through three or four. Spanning wars, the pioneering days, the fight for suffrage, the Depression, the era of Rosie the Riveter, the civil rights movement, and the feminist rebellion of the 1970s, America's Women describes the way women's lives were altered by dress fashions, medical advances, rules of hygiene, social theories about sex and courtship, and the ever-changing attitudes toward education, work, and politics. While keeping her eye on the big picture, Collins still notes that corsets and uncomfortable shoes mattered a lot, too.

"The history of American women is about the fight for freedom," Collins writes in her introduction, "but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's roles that wasaccepted by almost everybody of both genders."

Told chronologically through the compelling stories of individual lives that, linked together, provide a complete picture of the American woman's experience, America's Women is both a great read and a landmark work of history. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 25, 1945
• Where—Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Marquette University; M.A., University of
   Massachusetts


Gail Collins was the editorial page editor of the New York Times from 2001 to January 1, 2007. She was the first female Editorial Page Editor at the Times. Prior to that, she was an editorial board member and an op-ed columnist.

In January 2007 Collins stepped down as Editor to write a book; she returned to the Times to reprise her role as columnist six months later. Her column presently runs every Thursday and Saturday and usually covers contemporary American politics and other current events in a humorous or satirical light.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, as Gail Gleason, Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to the New York Times, Collins wrote for the New York Daily News, Newsday, Connecticut Business Journal, United Press International, and the Associated Press in New York City.

Collins also founded the Connecticut State News Bureau which operated from 1972 to 1977 and provided coverage of the state capital and Connecticut politics. When it was sold, the company served more than thirty weekly and daily newspaper clients.

Beyond her work as a journalist, Collins has published several books; Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics; America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines; The Millennium Book which she co-authored with her husband, CBS News producer Dan Collins; and most recently When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.

She also has been a journalism instructor at Southern Connecticut State University. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
It is in grappling with that contortionism that Collins, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, reveals her evenhandedness. The 19th-century obstetrician bungled as much because of women's modesty as because of the constraints of his profession. If there is a villain in this tale she may just wear a skirt; as Collins sees it, we have repeatedly tripped ourselves up. The enemy is not so much the other half of the human race as the mixed messages, our love-hate relationship with hearth and home.
Stacy Schiff - New York Times


In her lively and readable survey of women in America, Gail Collins shows how ideology about gender roles always gives way to economic necessity. Women who are considered constitutionally unable to do men's work do men's work as soon as war comes and men are needed to fight it...Collins has an eye for such ironies and a good-humored way of presenting them.
Phyllis Rose - Washington Post


The basis of the struggle of American women, postulates Collins, "is the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it." Today's issues—should women be in the fields, on the factory lines and in offices, or should they be at home, tending to hearth and family?—are centuries old, and Collins, editor of the New York Times's editorial page, not only expertly chronicles what women have done since arriving in the New World, but how they did it and why. Creating a compelling social history, Collins discovers "it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders." These confusing messages are repeated over 400 years and are typified in the 1847 lecture of one doctor who stated that women's heads are "almost too small for intellect and just big enough for love" (ironically, around this time Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from an American medical school). The narratives are rich with direct quotes from both celebrated and common women, creating a clear picture of life in the 16th through 20th centuries, covering everyday (menstruation, birth control, cooking, cleanliness) and extraordinary (life during war, the abolition movement, fighting for the right to vote) topics. Beginning with Eleanor Dare and her 1587 sail to the colonies and ending with the 1970s, Collins's work is a fully accessible, and thoroughly enjoyable, primer of how American women have not only survived but thrived.... Her book deserves a wide readership and is smooth enough to engage almost any kind of reader, academic or not.
Publishers Weekly


Illuminating cultural history of American women from the first colonists to the present day. New York Times editorial page editor Collins has turned a veritable mountain of research into an exceptionally readable, lively account of the contradictions and conflicts that have shaped women’s roles in the US. Her central theme is "the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it." Both sexes, she states, have accepted mixed messages about women’s proper role, and our history is full of about-faces on the subject. In an anecdote-laden text often relying on diaries and other contemporary records, she recounts how colonial women were not just housewives, midwives, and innkeepers, but religious dissidents (Anne Hutchinson) and Indian fighters (Hannah Dustin). During the Revolution, some donned men’s clothing and joined the army, but more traveled with their soldier husbands, doing the cooking and washing, or stayed home and ran the family farm. Juliette Brier, who walked 100 miles through Death Valley carrying one child on her back and another in her arms while leading a third, epitomizes the endurance and spirit of pioneer women. But it’s not all heroics and hardship. Collins fills her pages with fascinating details of everyday life over four centuries, including how women dressed, managed personal hygiene, and raised children. The roles they played in the temperance, abolition, and suffrage movements, the effects of the Civil War on southern women, white and black, the lives of 19th-century immigrant women are all explored. Collins shows how women, kept out of the workplace during the Depression, were brought into it by necessity duringWWII. Their retreat to the home in the ’50s, the subsequent sexual revolution, and the rise of feminism may be more familiar dramas than the earlier history, but the details are no less absorbing. Informative and entertaining, full of vivid stories that reveal not only what women were doing but how they felt about it.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. The book says that for American women "the center of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it." Do you agree?

2. Were the early colonial women very brave or easily led? If you had lived in 17th century England, would you have opted to stay home or brave the journey? Where would you have wanted to end up—in New England or Virginia?

3. America's Women seems to attribute the witch craze in Salem to "teenage girls in crisis who stumbled on a very bad but very effective way of trying to take control of their unhappy environment." Do you agree? The story can be told from any number of perspectives: economic, religious, social, psychological. Is any one, or combination, satisfactory?

4. When families moved from farms to the city after the Revolutionary War, women's role changed and their status fell. The whole concept of the True Woman who radiated goodness was an effort to raise their stature again. Was it a satisfactory strategy? Can you come up with alternatives?

5. There are two role models for women who wanted to have public lives in the early 19th centur—Sarah Josepha Hale and Elizabeth Blackwell. How did they differ? If you had been alive then, which would you have been like?

6. Women were the best clients for the growing medical profession in the period before the Civil War. Why do you think that was? How did it work out for them?

7. Some white Southern women had different views of slavery than their husbands. Why was that?

8. The book says the "emotional burden on middle-class black women in the 19th century was stupendous." Has this burden been duplicated in the 21st century?

9. The rise of department stores at the turn of the century meant a huge change for women—both as consumers and as workers. Why was that?

10. If you had been an immigrant around the turn of the century, what country would you have wanted to come from? Why?

11. Jeannette Rankin was the first woman to serve in Congress, and she wound up voting against not one, but both world wars. Do you approve or disapprove?

12. In the Twenties, women won freedom in areas like dress, dating and drinking but many lost interest in politics and "feminism" fell totally out of fashion. All in all, would you regard the decade as a step forward or back?

13. When women got the vote, the first president they helped elect was one of the worst—Warren Harding. How, if at all, does this reflect on suffrage?

14. Do you agree that Eleanor Roosevelt was the most important woman in American history? If not, who would you nominate?

15. Speaking about the American civilians during World War II, John Kenneth Galbraith said "Never in the long history of human combat have so many talked so much about sacrifice with so little deprivation." Do you agree?

16. In the 1950s, less than 10 percent of the population felt a person could live a happy life without being married. The status of single women seems to have gone up and down several times in our history. Why is that? Where do you think it is now?

17. Things changed so fast for women in the late 1960s. Why do you think that was? Will we ever go back to the way things were in the 1950s, when the full-time housewife was the universal American ideal?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

An American Childhood
Annie Dillard, 1987
HarperCollins
255 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060915186


Summary
A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.

Annie Dillard recalls a childhood of exuberance, exploration, and fun. She throws snowballs and pitches balls; she draws— everything from bugs to poets; and she reads with what will eventually become her lifelong fascination with language and story telling. This is a childhood filled with joy, humor, and charm—the story of a young girl awakening to the wonders of life around her. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 30, 1945
• Where—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., Hollins College
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize (1975); Academy Award for
   Literature, American Academy of Arts & Letters; National
   Endowment for the Arts Grant; New York Public LIbrary
   Literary Lion; Guggenheim Foundation Grant.
• Currently—lives in New York City


Annie Dillard is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, best known for her narrative nonfiction. She has also published poetry, essays, literary criticism, autobiography, and fiction. She is married to the historical biographer Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

Dillard describes her childhood at length in An American Childhood. She is the oldest of three daughters, born to affluent parents who raised her in an environment that encouraged humor, creativity, and exploration. Her mother was a non-conformist and incredibly energetic. Her father taught her everything from plumbing to economics to the intricacies of the novel On The Road. Dillard's childhood was filled with days of piano and dance classes, rock and bug collecting, and devouring the books on the shelves of the public library. But there were also many troubles—like the horrors of war, which she often read about.

After graduating from high school, Dillard attended Hollins College (Hollins University since 1998), in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied literature and creative writing. She married her writing teacher, the poet R. H. W. Dillard (her maiden name is Doak)—the person she says "taught her everything she knows" about writing. In 1968 she graduated with a Masters in English, after writing a 40-page thesis on Thoreau's Walden, which focused on the use of Walden Pond as "the central image and focal point for Thoreau's narrative movement between heaven and earth." The next couple of years after graduation Dillard spent painting and writing. During this time, she published several poems and short stories.

Dillard's family did not attend Presbyterian church but when she was a child she and her sister did.She also spent a few summers at a fundamentalist summer camp. During her rebellious teenage years, she quit church because of the "hypocrisy." When she told her minister, he gave her a stack of books by C. S. Lewis, which ended this rebellion. After her college years, Dillard became, as she says, "spiritually promiscuous," incorporating the ideas of many religious systems into her own religious understanding. Not only are there references to Christ and the Bible in her first prose book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but also to Judaism, Buddhism, Sufism, and even Eskimo spirituality. In the 1990s, Dillard converted to Roman Catholicism.

After a near-fatal bout of pneumonia in 1971, Dillard decided that she needed to experience life more fully and began work on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She spent four seasons living near Tinker Creek, a suburban area surrounded by forests, creeks, mountains, and myriad animal life. When she wasn't in the library, she spent her time outdoors, walking and camping. After living there for about a year, Dillard began to write about her experiences near the creek. She started by transposing notes from her twenty-plus-volume reading journal. It took her eight months to turn the notecards into the book. Towards the end of the eight months, she was so absorbed that she sometimes wrote for fifteen hours a day, cut off from society without interest in current events (like the Watergate scandal). The finished book brought her a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 at the age of twenty-nine. Her other books in this vein include Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk, and For the Time Being. She has also written a memoir about growing up in Pittsburgh, An American Childhood, and two novels, The Living, and 2007's The Maytrees.

Dillard spent some years as a faculty member in the English department at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Annie Dillard has turned her attention to her own world in An American Childhood, a lyrical look at her idyllic and privileged childhood in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.... [She] captures the genius loci of at least a part of the city then and lovingly describes her unorthodox, caring parents. Her father, who not only helped make the classic cult movie "Night of the Living Dead" but read On the Road at least as many times as she did ("approximately a million"), "walked lightly, long-legged, like a soft-shoe hoofer barely in touch with the floor." Her mother, an "unstoppable force," always reminded her that she didn't know everything yet and gave her "the freedom of the streets as soon as I could say our telephone number." Along with the idea that Annie and her two sisters were "expected to take a stand," her mother also clearly passed on her love of language. One of Dillard's hilarious retellings is of her mother overhearing the play-by-play of a Sunday afternoon baseball game and asking of the phrase "Terwilliger bunts one," "Is that English?" In summing up the compelling characters surrounding her, Dillard writes, "Everyone in the family was a dancing fool," making us all want that family. Reading, for Dillard, took on a life of its own. It became what W.D. Wetherell, in his review of this book for The Post, called her "most requited" love. She responded to the "dreamlike interior murmur of books" and "opened books like jars."
Washington Post - Book World


A vivid and thoughtful evocation of particular personal experiences that have an exuberantly timeless appeal."
Chicago Sun-Times


Every paragraph Dillard writes is full of information, presenting the mundane with inventive freshness and offering exotic surprises as dessert...[Annie Dillard] is one of nature's prize wonders herself--an example of sentient homo sapiens pushing the limits of the creative imagination. She deserves our close attentions.
St. Louis Dispatch


Dillard's luminous prose painlessly captures the pain of growing up in this wonderful evocation of childhood. Her memoir is partly a hymn to Pittsburgh, where orange streetcars ran on Penn Avenue in 1953 when she was eight, and where the Pirates were always in the cellar. Dillard's mother, an unstoppable force, had energies too vast for the bridge games and household chores that stymied her. Her father made low-budget horror movies, loved Dixieland jazz, told endless jokes and sight-gags and took lonesome river trips down to New Orleans to get away. From this slightly odd couple, Dillard (Teaching a Stone to Talk acquired her love of nature and taut sensitivity. The events of childhood often loom larger than life; the magic of Dillard's writing is that she sets down typical childhood happenings with their original immediacy and force.
Publishers Weekly


Dillard's account of her childhood until her entrance into Hollins College is delightful, fast-paced, and full of action. Written in three parts, with a prologue about her father's brief sea venture when she was eight and an epilogue about her own children, the book reads like a play: there is excellent character development, and the vivid descriptions make the reader almost a witness to the events. Dillard fans will especially appreciate the insight she offers into her early consciousness and development, while others will enjoy this picture of growing up in the 1950s or simply the humor and sensitivity of the writing. Highly recommended. —Carolyn M. Craft, English, Philosophy & Modern Languages Dept., Longwood Coll., Farmville, Va.
Library Journal


Dillard has amassed a following for her eloquently-written nature essays with their deeply philosophical, theolog ical slant. In this current work she re veals a personal view of her childhood and early adolescence in which she first awoke to the world and its implications. Dillard grew up with a relentlessly inquir ing mind in a moneyed Pittsburgh family during the '50s. Her liberal-minded par ents allowed her free rein to grow up exploring her city, taking up hobbies and projects, and reading everything she found on the public library's adult shelves. Especially compelling is her picture of her teenage years, the time when she ``morally disapproved most things in North America, and blamed her innocent parents for them.'' She cap tures that fine, open innocence of the '50s and that hungry pain of the '60s. This book should be read by young people far enough away from childhood to enjoy looking back at how they were, by young people just discovering themselves, and by those teenagers who can identify with Dillard's description of herself as ``a live wire. . .shooting out sparks that were digging a pit around me, and I sinking into that pit.'' Assuredly, it will be appreciat ed by those who enjoy reading wonder fully crafted prose. Her's is a smooth, knowing voice that can deliver a punch line. —Carolyn Praytor Boyd, Episcopal High School, Bellaire.
School Library Journal

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

top of page (summary)

American Fire:  Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
Monica Hesse, 2017
Liveright House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781631490514

Summary
A breathtaking feat of reportage, American Fire combines procedural with love story, redefining American tragedy for our time.

The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn’t stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion.

Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was desolate―there were hundreds of abandoned buildings. And by the dozen they were burning.

The culprit, and the path that led to these crimes, is a story of twenty-first century America. Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse first drove down to the reeling county to cover a hearing for Charlie Smith, a struggling mechanic who upon his capture had promptly pleaded guilty to sixty-seven counts of arson.

But as Charlie’s confession unspooled, it got deeper and weirder. He wasn’t lighting fires alone; his crimes were galvanized by a surprising love story. Over a year of investigating, Hesse uncovered the motives of Charlie and his accomplice, girlfriend Tonya Bundick, a woman of steel-like strength and an inscrutable past. Theirs was a love built on impossibly tight budgets and simple pleasures. They were each other’s inspiration and escape…until they weren’t.

Though it’s hard to believe today, one hundred years ago Accomack was the richest rural county in the nation. Slowly it’s been drained of its industry―agriculture―as well as its wealth and population. In an already remote region, limited employment options offer little in the way of opportunity.

A mesmerizing and crucial panorama with nationwide implications, American Fire asks what happens when a community gets left behind. Hesse brings to life the Eastern Shore and its inhabitants, battling a punishing economy and increasingly terrified by a string of fires they could not explain. The result evokes the soul of rural America―a land half gutted before the fires even began (8 pages of illustrations). (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1981-82
• Raised—Normal, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.,A., Bryn Mawr College
• Awards—Edgar Award
• Currently—lives in Maryland


Monica Hesse is the national bestselling author of the true crime love story American Fire and the Edgar Award-winning young adult historical mystery novel Girl in the Blue Coat, which has been translated into a dozen languages and was shortlisted for the American Booksellers Association's Indies Choice Award.

Hesse is a feature writer for the Washington Post, where she has covered royal weddings, dog shows, political campaigns, Academy Awards ceremonies, White House state dinners, and some events that felt like a mixture of all of the above. She has talked about these stories, and other things, on NBC, MSNBC, CNN, CSPAN, FOX and NPR.

She has been a winner of the Society for Feature Journalism's Narrative Storytelling award, and a finalist for a Livingston Award and a James Beard Award. Monica lives in Maryland. with her husband and a brainiac dog (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[Hesse] has talent to burn.… American Fire is an excellent summer vacation companion. It has all the elements of a lively crime procedural: courtroom drama, forensic trivia, toothsome gossip, vexed sex. It also happens to be a very good portrait of a region in economic decline.… As with S-Town and the best episodes of This American Life, Hesse has managed to wring tension and excitement out of a story with a known ending. One of the most elusive skills in narrative nonfiction, and Hesse has it, is knowing the proper order to arrange your facts. She also superbly conveys the folkways of the Eastern Shore and the disruptive, confusing effect the fires had on its community.… Hesse is a lovely stylist. She has a flair for creating a sense of place. Her character sketches are models of compression, easily collapsible into lockets.
Jennifer Senior - New York Times


The propulsive pleasure of American Fire rests in author Monica Hesse's decision not to force a thing. The book has the brisk diligence of big-city journalism (Hesse writes for the Washington Post) and the languid chattiness of the small town where she lived while researching it.… Hesse gathers the pieces but leaves connections to the reader. When they snap together, the feeling is a bit like gazing upon a blaze you've just lit.
Karl Vick - Time


In American Fire, journalist Monica Hesse faces…quandaries of interpretation, faulty memory and lies, and deals eloquently with the he-said-she-said elements of her story.… What emerges is a vivid depiction of a community that is struggling economically in present-day America, but is rich in its human connections.
Ilana Masad - NPR.org


One of the year's best and most unusual true-crime books.
Randy Dotinga - Christian Science Monitor


Accomack County, Virginia, is utterly unique, but not completely atypical of America’s forgotten places: bypassed by progress on the wrong side of Chesapeake Bay, dotted with houses rotting into literal tinder. Hesse, a Washington Post reporter, finds true-crime gold here.… Hesse forgoes paint-by-numbers suspense, revealing the culprits early on before backing up into their hard-knock love story, their eventual arrest, and perceptive snapshots of an unusually vivid corner of drug-racked Red America.
Boris Katchka - Vulture


American Fire is not only a twisted love story but also a portrait of Accomack County, Virginia, a once-wealthy farming community crumbling from economic hardship.
Nora Horvath - Real Simple


Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse has created a near-masterpiece in American Fire. This true crime book—about a series of arsons on the rural Virginia coast and the Bonnie-and-Clyde duo who committed them—is not just about the crimes themselves, but about the community those crimes affected. It's well-written and eye-opening, and I couldn't put it down. For fans of Hillbilly Elegy and In Cold Blood.
Annie Butterworth Jones - Tallahassee Democrat


Hesse offers sociological insight into a small town…. There is something metaphorical, she notes, about a rural county suffering through a recession being literally burned to the ground. The metaphor becomes belabored…but otherwise this is a page-turning story of love gone off the rails.
Publishers Weekly


Hesse enters the compelling narrative with restraint in probing, essayistic analyses. She tells the story of the fires and of the Eastern Shore and the people she got to know there with an earned familiarity that, at the same time, speaks of the unknowability of a vast, rapidly changing nation.
Booklist


(Starred review.) [C]aptivating.… [T]he surprises arrive in the manner of the arrest, the motives for the fires, and the outcomes of the multiple trials. Throughout, the author offers a nuanced portrait of a way of life…. A true-crime saga that works in every respect.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our talking points to help start a discussion for American Fire … then take off on your own:

1. Talk about the setting of American Fire, the isolated county on the far side of the Chesapeake Bay. How would you describe its economy, its residents, and history? In what way are rural areas like Accomack County tailor-made for arsonists?

2. At one point, the author tells us that the arson aroused suspicions throughout the community, that "people turned on friends and neighbors." Yet the arson also seems to have brought people together. How would you say the arson affected the community?

3. Consider, also, the human effort involved in fighting and investigating the fires: Hesse tells us that over 41,000 manpower hours were involved. What impressed you most about the authorities' responses?

4. It took the police months to solve the crime? How did they finally catch the culprits?

5. A group of profilers descended on Accomack County. Talk about their insights and whether or not they were helpful in solving the crime?

6. Hesse takes a chapter to compare Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick to Bonnie and Clyde Barrow. What are the similarities? Aside from the Barrows, how would you describe Charlie and Tony?

7. Follow-up to Question 6: What motivated the couple to turn to arson, especially on such a grand scale? What do you think of the two? Hesse spends a good deal of time detailing the specifics of their lives: does she build a sympathetic portrait? Do they spur your sympathy?

8. Hesse calls arson "a weird crime." What makes it so strange?

9. Fire itself interests the author—the way it's set, the way it moves, the way it's fought. Why do humans find fire so fascinating? What is the power it holds over us?

10. Even though we know the outcome in catching the arsonists, American Fire still thrums with suspense. How does Monica Hess do that?

11. What is the significance of the book's title, American Fire? Why "American"?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

American Gospel:  God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation
Jon Meacham, 2006
Random House
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812976663


Summary
The American Gospel—literally, the good news about America—is that religion shapes our public life without controlling it. In this vivid book, New York Times bestselling author Jon Meacham tells the human story of how the Founding Fathers viewed faith, and how they ultimately created a nation in which belief in God is a matter of choice.

At a time when our country seems divided by extremism, American Gospel draws on the past to offer a new perspective. Meacham re-creates the fascinating history of a nation grappling with religion and politics–from John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” sermon to Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence; from the Revolution to the Civil War; from a proposed nineteenth-century Christian Amendment to the Constitution to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call for civil rights; from George Washington to Ronald Reagan.

Debates about religion and politics are often more divisive than illuminating. Secularists point to a “wall of separation between church and state,” while many conservatives act as though the Founding Fathers were apostles in knee britches. As Meacham shows in this brisk narrative, neither extreme has it right. At the heart of the American experiment lies the God of what Benjamin Franklin called “public religion,” a God who invests all human beings with inalienable rights while protecting private religion from government interference. It is a great American balancing act, and it has served us well.

Meacham has written and spoken extensively about religion and politics, and he brings historical authority and a sense of hope to the issue. American Gospel makes it compellingly clear that the nation’s best chance of summoning what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” lies in recovering the spirit and sense of the Founding. In looking back, we may find the light to lead us forward. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 20, 1969
• Where—Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA
• Education—B.A., University of the South
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize
• Currently—lives in New York City and Sewanee, Tennessee

Jon Meacham is an American publisher, journalist and author of historical works. His books include Thomas Jefferson: the Art of Power (2012); American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (2008); American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (2006); and Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (2003). Meacham was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for American Lion.

Currently executive editor and executive vice president of Random House, Meacham is also a contributing editor to Time magazine, a former editor of Newsweek, and has written for the New York Times and Washington Post, among other publications. He is a regular contributor on Meet the Press, Morning Joe, and Charlie Rose. A Fellow of the Society of American Historians, Meacham serves on the boards of the New-York Historical Society, and the Churchill Centre.

Background
An only child, Meacham's parents divorced when he was young and he spent his middle and high school years living with his grandfather, Judge Ellis K. Meacham. A legendary figure in Chattanooga and a renowned author, the Judge is credited with giving Meacham his interest in history.

Meacham attended the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, graduating summa cum laude in English Literature. He studied religion under the revered professor Herbert S. Wentz, was salutatorian and elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Meacham began his journalistic career at the Chattanooga Times. In 1995 he joined Newsweek as a writer, became national affairs editor in June of that year, and was named managing editor in November 1998 at age 29. In September 2006, he was promoted to the position of editor. He supervises the magazine's coverage of politics, international affairs, and breaking news, and has written cover stories on politics, religion, race, guns in America, and the death of Ronald Reagan.

He and his wife, a Mississippi native, University of Virginia and Columbia University Teachers College graduate, and the former Executive Director of the Harlem Day Charter School, live in New York City and Tennessee. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/16/2014.)

Book Reviews
[E]xamines over 200 years of American history in its quest to prove the idea of religious tolerance, along with the separation of church and state, is "perhaps the most brilliant American success." Meacham's... insights into the religious leanings of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Co. present a new way of considering the government they created.... [A] remarkable grasp of the intricacies and achievements of a nascent nation.
Publishers Weekly


Meacham here holds that, despite the strong religious differences of the Founding Fathers, religion...shaped the Constitution and the nation without strangling it. This is quite an argument to make given the...Quakers were at odds with Anglicans, and New Englanders engaged in witch trials while building a "City of God." Others massacred Indians.... [Yet] it was recognized that... God provided could and would serve as a uniting factor. Meacham provides a balanced account. —George Westerlund, formerly with Providence P.L., Palmyra, VA
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for American Gospel:

1. Begin by talking about the religious views of each of the Founding Fathers. In their writings, they considered religion to be the basis for morality, but what were their individual, personal religious beliefs? Were they Deists, Christians, or aethists? Or doesn't it matter?

2. Why did the Founding Fathers consider religion important for the nation? What role did they envision it playing in communal life and in government? What was meant by "religious freedom"? What do we mean by it today? What about the phrase "separation of church and state"—where did it come from and what did it mean, then and now?

3. Jon Meacham says of the early years of this nation that "their time is like our time." What does he mean...and do you agree?

4. How would you describe the religious environment in colonial, revolutionary and post-revolutionary times? Why, for instance, in 1774 was there opposition to prayer in the Continental Congress? Why did the Episcopalians object?

5. In a treaty ratified by the Senate in 1797, John Adams wrote that "the Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion," a statement that has caused much discussion and controversy as to its intent. What does Meacham have to say about Adam's statement? In what context does he place it?

6. Overall do you find that Meacham's discussion of religion in politics—arguably America's most divisive issue—makes any progress in moderating the subject? Do you find his book satisfying...enlightening...or off the mark? Has it altererd, or confirmed, your understanding of the place of religion in America?

7. Meacham seems to place himself in the middle: neither a religious zealot nor a diehard aethist. What does it mean to be moderate, to be in the middle of the road when it comes to religion in public life? Is compromise weakness, a betrayal of deeply held principles? Or is moderation the basis of tolerance? Where do you place yourself?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

American Heiress:  The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst
Jeffrey Toobin, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385536714


Summary
The definitive account of the kidnapping and trial that defined an insane era in American history
 
On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army.

The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre "Tania."

The weird turns of the tale are truly astonishing—the Hearst family trying to secure Patty’s release by feeding all the people of Oakland and San Francisco for free; the bank security cameras capturing "Tania" wielding a machine gun during a robbery; a cast of characters including everyone from Bill Walton to the Black Panthers to Ronald Reagan to F. Lee Bailey; the largest police shoot-out in American history; the first breaking news event to be broadcast live on television stations across the country; Patty’s year on the lam, running from authorities; and her circuslike trial, filled with theatrical courtroom confrontations and a dramatic last-minute reversal, after which the term "Stockholm syndrome" entered the lexicon.

The saga of Patty Hearst highlighted a decade in which America seemed to be suffering a collective nervous breakdown. Based on more than a hundred interviews and thousands of previously secret documents, American Heiress thrillingly recounts the craziness of the times (there were an average of 1,500 terrorist bombings a year in the early 1970s).

Toobin portrays the lunacy of the half-baked radicals of the SLA and the toxic mix of sex, politics, and violence that swept up Patty Hearst and re-creates her melodramatic trial. American Heiress examines the life of a young woman who suffered an unimaginable trauma and then made the stunning decision to join her captors’ crusade.

Or did she? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 21, 1960
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., J.D., Harvard University
• Awards—Emmy Award; J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Jeffrey Ross Toobin is an American lawyer, author, and senior legal analyst for CNN and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He was born in New York City, the son of former ABC News and CBS News correspondent Marlene Sanders, and news broadcasting producer Jerome Toobin. His mother's family was of a relatively secular Jewish background.

Education
In 1982, Toobin graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a BA in classics. In 1986, he graduated from Harvard Law School, again magna cum laude, with a JD. He also served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. While a law student, Toobin began freelancing for The New Republic.

Legal work
 After law school, Tobin went on to clerk to a federal judge. Later during the Iran-Contra affair and Oliver North's criminal trial, Toobin worked as an associate counsel to Independent Counsel Lawrence Edward Walsh who was appointed to investigate and try the case.

Toobin wrote a book about his work with Walsh on the Oliver North case. According to journalist Michael Isikoff, he was caught "having absconded with large loads of classified and grand-jury related documents" from Walsh's office. Toobin, however, disputed the assertion of impropriety and went to court to affirm his right to publish. Judge John Keenan of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote vindicated the rights of Toobin and his publisher to release his book, which they did in 1991. An appeal for the case was dismissed.

Having objected to Toobin's decision take the documents, Walsh later wrote that he "could understand a young lawyer wanting to keep copies of his own work, but not copying material from the general files or the personal files of others."

After leaving the Independent Counsel, Toobin went to work for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Brooklyn. Three years later he left the DA's office, deciding to abandon the practice of law altogether.

Media
In 1993 Toobin joined The New Yorker as a staff writer, a position he occupies still. In 1994, he broke the story in the magazine that the O. J. Simpson legal team planned to play "the race card" by accusing Mark Fuhrman of planting evidence.

Also in 1994, Toobin became a television legal analyst for ABC. He joined CNN in 2002 as a senior legal analyst—one year later securing the first interview with Martha Stewart about the insider trading charges brought against her. He remains with CNN today.

Toobin has provided broadcast legal analysis on many high-profile cases, including Michael Jackson's 2005 child molestation trial, the O.J. Simpson civil case, and the Starr investigation of President Clinton. He received a 2000 Emmy Award for his coverage of the Elian Gonzalez custody saga.

Books
1991 - Opening arguments: A Young Lawyer's First Case, United States v. Oliver North
1997 - The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson*
1999 - A vast conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down a President
2001 - Too close to Call: The Thirty-six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election
2007 - The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize)
2012 - The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court
2016 - American heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst

Personal life
In 1986, Toobin married Amy Bennett McIntosh. The couple met in college while they worked at the Harvard Crimson. She is a 1980 Harvard graduate, holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and has held executive positions at Verizon and Zagat Survey. They have two children.

Toobin had a long-term extramarital affair with Casey Greenfield, daughter of American television journalist and author Jeff Greenfield. Toobin was eventually confirmed as the father of Casey's child (b. March 2009). Greenfield has sole custody. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/27/2016.)

* The Run of His Life became the basis for the FX miniseries, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story (2016), starring Cuba Gooding Jr.

Book Reviews
American Heiress, Jeffrey Toobins new book about Patty Hearst, is a clever companion piece to The Run of His Life (1996), his book about the O. J. Simpson case. Mr. Toobin has used the same winning formula of delving deeply into an American crime story that had tremendous notoriety in its day and retelling it with new resonance. Ms. Hearst's tale is much more bizarre than Mr. Simpson's. And much less of it has to do with legal proceedings, Mr. Toobin's specialty. But in an age of terrorism, the chronicle of how a sedate heiress named Patricia morphed into a gun-toting, invective-spouting revolutionary calling herself Tania holds a definite fascination…. Mr. Toobin's account makes the transformation understandable.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


[T]errifically engrossing…As in his earlier book The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson, Toobin uses his knowledge of the justice system and his examination of the evidence to pierce the veil of spectacle and make sense of many contradictory elements…His particulate telling is measured and understated, which is the right approach to such a high-mannerist American extravaganza…. The book's real power comes from Toobin's ability to convincingly and economically evoke a broad range of people…. Toobin's take on Hearst's state of mind is credible because he doesn't pretend clarity where there is none.
Dana Spiotta - New York Times Book Review


The abduction and subsequent radicalization of Patricia Hearst is one of the most bizarre but illuminating episodes of that tumultuous era of protest...and in American Heiress Jeffrey Toobin retells the story with a full-blown narrative treatment that may astonish readers too young to remember it themselves.... Toobin spins this complex chapter of recent history into an absorbing and intelligent page-turner.
Washington Post


[R]iveting…. American Heiress is a page-turner certainly, but Toobin, a gifted writer, infuses it with much more…. Even if he ridicules the ideas and condemns the violent deeds of this ragtag group of revolutionary wannabes, they emerge not as cardboard villains but flesh and blood protagonists.
Boston Globe


Toobin has crafted a book for the expert and the uninitiated alike, a smart page-turner that boasts a cache of never-before-published details.... Toobin’s book successfully captures the unrivaled spectacle of the Hearst drama.
San Francisco Chronicle


[A] spell-binding retelling.… In the end the real test of a writer’s worth is…how well they can tell a story that’s already been told many times before by many different people, including — in this case—by some of the main characters themselves. By that standard Toobin gets an A-plus for American Heiress… Everything about this book feels right: the structure, the style and the tone, which is the New Yorker meets Raymond Chandler. As always with great writing, it comes down to a strong, distinctive narrative voice spiced with the judicious use of juicy details.
LA Weekly 


(Starred review.) Toobin’s rigorous detective work is enhanced by his placement of the Hearst case in the context of its times.... His thorough research, careful parsing of all the evidence, and superior prose make the book read like a summertime thriller.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Toobin's meticulous research is the book's bedrock, but his flair for dramatic storytelling makes it a pleasure to read. Though the author never states directly whether he believes Hearst's conversion was real, he provides all of the pieces needed for readers to assemble the puzzle for themselves. —Stephanie Klose
Library Journal


[A] detailed but swiftly moving account of the 1974 kidnapping that mesmerized the nation.... Despite the lack of participation from Hearst, this is a well-informed, engaging work from a highly capable author.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for American Heiress...then take off on your own:

1. What was the ideology of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and what were its goals? How would you characterize the group and its tactics—clever, passionate, inept, foolish, or misguided? What did the SLA hope to gain by capturing Patty Hearst?

2. Toobin presents individual portraits of SLA members. Did those back stories generate any understanding or compassion on your part?

3. What was Patty Hearst like? How would you describe her: as a cossetted, spoiled, rich young woman...as haughty, humble, insecure, or shy? Does Toobin present her sympathetically or unsympathetically?

4. How do Patty's parents come off in this account, her father especially? Toobin praises Randy's "curiosity, his decency and above all his love for his daughter"? Do you agree? What about Patty's mother and her black dresses?
 
5. Talk about law enforcement's bungling of the case.

6. What prompted Hearst's decision to join the ranks of her captors? During the trial, her defense said she acted out of  “coercive persuasion” (what is now popularly referred to as "Stockholm Syndrome"). What was the basis of that defense...and is a convincing one to you? What does Toobin think?

7. Follow-up to Question 6: Was Patty Hearst a victim, or was she responsible for her crimes? Or does the truth fall somewhere in between? Put another way: do you think Hearst's conviction is fair? Should she have been cleared? Or do you think her sentence have been longer?

8. How does Toobin present the Hearst's lawyer, F. Lee Bailey?

9. Talk about Steven Weed. Toobin writes of him:

If there was one point of unanimity among the protagonists in the kidnapping...it was contempt for Patricia’s erstwhile fiance.

Why was he the subject of such loathing?

10. Describe Toobin's reaction toward Patty Hearst's campaign for a presidential pardon even though her sentence had been commuted. What do you think?

11. How familiar were you with the Hearst kidnapping before reading American Heiress? What have you learned after reading it? Were there any surprises?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
Jon Meacham, 2008
Random House
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812973464


Summary
Andrew Jackson, his intimate circle of friends, and his tumultuous times are at the heart of this remarkable book about the man who rose from nothing to create the modern presidency. Beloved and hated, venerated and reviled, Andrew Jackson was an orphan who fought his way to the pinnacle of power, bending the nation to his will in the cause of democracy. Jackson’s election in 1828 ushered in a new and lasting era in which the people, not distant elites, were the guiding force in American politics. Democracy made its stand in the Jackson years, and he gave voice to the hopes and the fears of a restless, changing nation facing challenging times at home and threats abroad. To tell the saga of Jackson’s presidency, acclaimed author Jon Meacham goes inside the Jackson White House. Drawing on newly discovered family letters and papers, he details the human drama–the family, the women, and the inner circle of advisers–that shaped Jackson’s private world through years of storm and victory.

One of our most significant yet dimly recalled presidents, Jackson was a battle-hardened warrior, the founder of the Democratic Party, and the architect of the presidency as we know it. His story is one of violence, sex, courage, and tragedy. With his powerful persona, his evident bravery, and his mystical connection to the people, Jackson moved the White House from the periphery of government to the center of national action, articulating a vision of change that challenged entrenched interests to heed the popular will–or face his formidable wrath. The greatest of the presidents who have followed Jackson in the White House—from Lincoln to Theodore Rooseveltto FDR to Truman—have found inspiration in his example, and virtue in his vision.

Jackson was the most contradictory of men. The architect of the removal of Indians from their native lands, he was warmly sentimental and risked everything to give more power to ordinary citizens. He was, in short, a lot like his country: alternately kind and vicious, brilliant and blind; and a man who fought a lifelong war to keep the republic safe—no matter what it took. Jon Meacham in American Lion has delivered the definitive human portrait of a pivotal president who forever changed the American presidency—and America itself. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 20, 1969
• Where—Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA
• Education—B.A., University of the South
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize
• Currently—lives in New York City and Sewanee, Tennessee

Jon Meacham is an American publisher, journalist and author of historical works. His books include Thomas Jefferson: the Art of Power (2012); American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (2008); American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (2006); and Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (2003). Meacham was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for American Lion.

Currently executive editor and executive vice president of Random House, Meacham is also a contributing editor to Time magazine, a former editor of Newsweek, and has written for the New York Times and Washington Post, among other publications. He is a regular contributor on Meet the Press, Morning Joe, and Charlie Rose. A Fellow of the Society of American Historians, Meacham serves on the boards of the New-York Historical Society, and the Churchill Centre.

Background
An only child, Meacham's parents divorced when he was young and he spent his middle and high school years living with his grandfather, Judge Ellis K. Meacham. A legendary figure in Chattanooga and a renowned author, the Judge is credited with giving Meacham his interest in history.

Meacham attended the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, graduating summa cum laude in English Literature. He studied religion under the revered professor Herbert S. Wentz, was salutatorian and elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Meacham began his journalistic career at the Chattanooga Times. In 1995 he joined Newsweek as a writer, became national affairs editor in June of that year, and was named managing editor in November 1998 at age 29. In September 2006, he was promoted to the position of editor. He supervises the magazine's coverage of politics, international affairs, and breaking news, and has written cover stories on politics, religion, race, guns in America, and the death of Ronald Reagan.

He and his wife, a Mississippi native, University of Virginia and Columbia University Teachers College graduate, and the former Executive Director of the Harlem Day Charter School, live in New York City and Tennessee. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/16/2014.)

Book Reviews 
American Lion, Jon Meacham's carefully analytical biography, looks past the theatrics and posturing to the essential elements of Jackson's many showdowns. Mr. Meacham…dispenses with the usual view of Jackson as a Tennessee hothead and instead sees a cannily ambitious figure determined to reshape the power of the presidency during his time in office (1829 to 1837). Case by case, Mr. Meacham dissects Jackson's battles and reinterprets them in a revealing new light.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


The most readable single-volume biography ever written of our seventh president, drawing on a trove of previously unpublished correspondence to vividly illuminate the self-made warrior who "embodied the nation's birth and youth." Such new documents, many unearthed from the archives of the Hermitage, Jackson's Nashville estate, allow Meacham to offer fresh analysis on the central issues of his presidency: the so-called Bank War (in which Jackson abolished the government-controlled national bank) and the federal tariff on imports (which South Carolina tried to nullify, even threatening to secede). While in the hands of a lesser writer this economics-laden history might glaze a reader's eyes, Meacham skillfully brings to life such long-forgotten characters as Nicholas Biddle (president of the Second Bank of the United States) and William B. Lewis (second auditor of the Treasury).
Douglas Brinkley - Washington Post


Jon Meacham's splendid new book on Andrew Jackson shrewdly places presidential politics in the context of Jackson's family life—and vice versa. With an abundance of gripping stories, and with admirable fairness, Meacham offers a fresh portrait of one of the most controversial and consequential men ever to occupy the White House.
Sean Wilentz - historian, Princeton University


Every so often a terrific biography comes along that shines a new light on a familiar figure in American history. So it was with David McCullough and John Adams, so it was with Walter Isaacson and Benjamin Franklin, so it is with Jon Meacham and Andrew Jackson. A master storyteller, Meacham interweaves the lives of Jackson and the members of his inner circle to create a highly original book.
Doris Kearns Goodwin - author, Team of Rivals


Newsweek editor and bestselling author Meacham (Franklin and Winston) offers a lively take on the seventh president's White House years. We get the Indian fighter and hero of New Orleans facing down South Carolina radicals' efforts to nullify federal laws they found unacceptable, speaking the words of democracy even if his banking and other policies strengthened local oligarchies, and doing nothing to protect southern Indians from their land-hungry white neighbors. For the first time, with Jackson, demagoguery became presidential, and his Democratic Party deepened its identification with Southern slavery. Relying on the huge mound of previous Jackson studies, Meacham can add little to this well-known story, save for the few tidbits he's unearthed in private collections rarely consulted before. What he does bring is a writer's flair and the ability to relate his story without the incrustations of ideology and position taking that often disfigure more scholarly studies of Jackson. Nevertheless, a gifted writer like Meacham might better turn his attention to tales less often told and subjects a bit tougher to enliven.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

top of page (summary)

American Queen:  The Rise and Fall of Kate Chase Sprague—Civil War "Belle of the North" and Gilded Age Woman of Scandal
John Oller, 2014
Da Capo Press
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780306822803


Summary
Had Peoplee magazine been around during the Civil War and after, Kate Chase would have made its "Most Beautiful" and "Most Intriguing" lists every year.

The charismatic daughter of Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s treasury secretary, Kate Chase enjoyed unprecedented political power for a woman. As her widowed father’s hostess, she set up a rival "court" against Mary Lincoln in hopes of making her father president and herself his First Lady.

To facilitate that goal, she married one of the richest men in the country, the handsome "boy governor" of Rhode Island, in the social event of the Civil War. She moved easily between the worlds of high fashion, adorning herself in the most regal Parisian gowns, and politics, managing her father's presidential campaigns. "No Queen has ever reigned under the Stars and Stripes," one newspaper would write, "but this remarkable woman came closer to being a Queen than any American woman has."

But when William Sprague turned out to be less of a prince as a husband, Kate found comfort in the arms of a powerful married senator. The ensuing sex scandal ended her virtual royalty; after the marriage crumbled and the money disappeared, she was left only with her children and her ever-proud bearing. She became a social outcast and died in poverty, yet in her final years she would find both greater authenticity and the inner peace that had always eluded her.

Kate Chase’s dramatic story is one of ambition and tragedy, set against the seductive allure of the Civil War and Gilded Age, involving some of the most famous personalities in American history. In this beautifully written and meticulously researched biography, drawing on much unpublished material, John Oller captures the extraordinary life of a woman who was a century ahead of her time. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Huron, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Ohio State University; J.D., Georgetown University
• Currently—lives in both New York City and California


John Oller trained as a lawyer, becoming a litigator for a New York law firm and representing major league baseball figures, (most famously Pete Rose), as well as other corporate and commercial interests.

While practicing law, he wrote books in his off hours. His first, Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew, was published in 1977. In 2011, Oller made the decision to retire from law and devote himself to writing full-time.

Since then, he has published An All-American Murder (e-book), based on an actual murder in Columbus, Ohio, in 1975. In 2014 he published American Queen, the biography of Civil War era Kate Chase Sprague, the daughter of Salmon Chase (one of Lincoln's "team of rivals") and a famous Washington belle.

When not writing, John pursues his hobbies of golf, theater, film, and travel. He divides his time between New York City and a home in California wine country. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
In other hands such a story might have had more dimension; but although Oller has explored previous biographies (none recent) and a plethora of archives and family testimony, his account is too full of anachronistic cliches (Kate’s father wishes to "get her out of his hair," a cotton ­trader is "no dummy," Kate’s divorce petition is "a doozy"), too cumbered by undigested political minutiae, too hampered by explicatory backtracking to develop the kind of narrative sweep and psychological depth that make for fully satisfying biography.
Amanda Vaill - New York Times Book Review


[N]uanced and finely balanced.... The title for Oller's book echoes the one used in 2001 for a biography of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis by Sarah Bradford, America's Queen. Like the wife of John F. Kennedy, Chase was the epitome of elegance for Americans of her era, described as a "magnificent creature" and "the most splendid woman at the present time" and "the acknowledged queen of fashion and good taste."
Patrick T. Reardon - Chicago Times


Oller commands his sources in a riveting narrative that is all the more persuasive because he does not make large claims for his subject. It is enough, he realizes, for a biography to portray and assess a remarkable human being—one who struggled with and overcame many of the confining conventions of her age—in her own terms.
Carl Rollyson - Minneapolis Star-Tribune


Oller details [Kate Chase] Sprague’s fascinating life, introducing readers to an inspiring woman in spite of her faults.... The book’s analysis may not be well enough grounded in fact, verging on the speculative at times, but otherwise, Oller offers an accessible, attention-grabbing work.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) The author takes us through his subject's life as she moves from a high-class social butterfly...to a poverty-stricken divorcee.... Well written, fast paced, and with a compelling attention to detail, this work should be a fascinating read for Civil War buffs, fans of Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals (in which Salmon Chase is a main character). —Laura Marcus, Odenton, MD
Library Journal


Oller's work is less the story of a woman's political rise and fall and more one that reveals how the social limitations of the past created tragic outcomes for talented females. A well-researched, thoughtful biography of a woman who "became entirely her own person, a rare feat for women of her day."
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)

American Sniper:  The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History
Chris Kyle, Scott McEwan, 2015
HarperCollins
4416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062376336


Summary
A celebration of the remarkable life and legacy of fallen American hero Chris Kyle.

This commemorative memorial edition of Kyle's bestselling memoir features the full text of American Sniper, plus more than eighty ­pages of remembrances by those whose lives he touched personally—including his wife, Taya; his parents, brother, and children; Marcus Luttrell and other fellow Navy SEALs; veterans and wounded warriors; lifelong friends; and many others.

He was the top American sniper of all time, called "the legend" by his navy seal brothers, and a hero by those he served with on the home front.

From 1999 to 2009, Chris Kyle recorded the most career sniper kills in United States military history. Gripping and unforgettable, Kyle's account of his extraordinary battlefield experiences ranks as one of the greatest war memoirs of all time.

American Sniper also honors Kyle's fellow warriors, who raised hell on and off the battlefield. And in moving first-person accounts throughout, Kyle's wife, Taya, speaks openly about the strains of war on their marriage and children. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 8, 1974
• Where—Odessa, Texas, USA
• Death—February 2, 2013
• Where—Erath County, Texas
• Education—High School, Midlothian, Texas


Christopher Scott Kyle  was a United States Navy SEAL and the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history with 160 confirmed kills. Kyle served four tours in the Iraq War and was awarded several commendations for acts of heroism and meritorious service in combat.

Medals
He received two Silver Star Medals, five Bronze Star Medals, one Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal, two Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals and numerous other unit and personal awards.

Kyle was honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy in 2009 and wrote a bestselling autobiography, American Sniper, which was published in January 2012. A film adaptation of Kyle's autobiography, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Bradley Cooper, was released in December 2014. It won six Academy Award nominations and won for Best Sound Editing.

On February 2, 2013, Kyle was shot and killed at a shooting range near Chalk Mountain, Texas, with his friend, Chad Littlefield. The man accused of killing them, Eddie Ray Routh, was found guilty of both murders and later sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Early life
Kyle was born in Odessa, Texas, the first of two boys born to Deby Lynn (nee Mercer) and Wayne Kenneth Kyle, a Sunday school teacher and a deacon. Kyle's father bought his son his first rifle at eight years old, a bolt-action .30-06 Springfield rifle, and later a shotgun, with which they hunted pheasant, quail, and deer.

Kyle attended high school in Midlothian, Texas. After school, Kyle became a professional bronco rodeo rider and worked on a ranch, but his professional rodeo career ended abruptly when he severely injured his arm.

Military career
After his arm healed, Kyle went to a military recruiting office, interested in joining the U.S. Marine Corps with a special interest in special operations. A U.S. Navy recruiter convinced him to try for the SEALS. Initially, Kyle was rejected because of the pins in his arm, but he eventually received an invitation to the 24-week Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL school (BUDS), which he joined in 1999.

Assigned to SEAL Team 3, sniper element, platoon "Charlie" (later "Cadillac"), within the Naval Special Warfare Command, and with four tours of duty, Kyle served in many major battles of the Iraq War. His first long-range kill shot was taken during the initial invasion when he shot a woman approaching a group of Marines while carrying a hand grenade.

An article by CNN reported that the woman was cradling a toddler in her other hand. As ordered, he opened fire, killing the woman before she could attack. He later stated,

The woman was already dead. I was just making sure she didn't take any Marines with her. It was clear that not only did she want to kill them, but she didn’t care about anybody else nearby who would have been blown up by the grenade or killed in the firefight. Children on the street, people in the houses, maybe her child.

Because of his track record as a marksman during his deployment to Ramadi, the insurgents named him Shaitan Ar-Ramadi (The Devil of Ramadi), and put a $21,000 bounty on his head that was later increased to $80,000. They posted signs highlighting the cross on his arm as a means of identifying him.

In his book, American Sniper, Kyle describes his longest successful shot ever: in 2008, outside Sadr City, he killed an insurgent about to fire a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) at a U.S. Army convoy with "a straight-up luck shot" from his McMillan Tac-338 sniper rifle from about 2,100 yards (1.2 miles) away.

Kyle became known by the moniker "Legend" among the general infantry and Marines whom he was tasked to protect. This title initially originated in jest among fellow SEALs following his taking of a sabbatical to train other snipers in Fallujah. During four tours of duty in the Iraq War, Kyle was shot twice and survived six separate IED explosions.

Career as record setting sniper
To be counted as a "confirmed kill" the shot and the target must be witnessed to confirm the person was a combatant and was gravely wounded. Kyle's shooter’s statements, filled out by every sniper after a mission, were reported to higher command who kept them in case a shooting was contested as outside the Rules of Engagement.

The military has officially confirmed more than 150 of Kyles kills. Kyle never stated a specific number. In his biography, he wrote,

The Navy credits me with more kills as a sniper than any other American service member, past or present. I guess that’s true. They go back and forth on what the number is. One week, it’s 160 (the “official” number as of this writing, for what that’s worth), then it’s way higher, then it’s somewhere in between. If you want a number, ask the Navy—you may even get the truth if you catch them on the right day.

Kyle left the U.S. Navy in 2009 and moved to Midlothian, Texas, with his wife, Taya, and two children. He was president of Craft International, a tactical training company for the U.S. military and law enforcement communities.

In 2012, HarperCollins released Kyle's autobiographical book American Sniper. Kyle had initially hesitated to write the book but was persuaded to move forward because other books about SEALs were underway. In his book, Kyle wrote bluntly of his experiences. Of the battle for control of Ramadi he says "Force moved that battle. We killed the bad guys and brought the leaders to the peace table. That is how the world works."

In the book and in interviews following, Kyle stated he had no regrets about his work as a sharpshooter, saying, "I had to do it to protect the Marines." American Sniper has had a months-long run on the New York Times bestseller list and brought Kyle national attention. Following its release, media articles challenged some of Kyle's anecdotes, but the core of his narrative was widely accepted. "Tales of his heroism on the battlefield were already lore in every branch of the armed forces," writes Michael J. Mooney, author of a biography of Kyle.

Charity work
Kyle paired with FITCO Cares Foundation, a nonprofit organization which created the Heroes Project to provide free in-home fitness equipment, individualized programs, personal training, and life-coaching to in-need veterans with disabilities, Gold Star families, or those suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder.

Death
On February 2, 2013, Kyle and a companion, Chad Littlefield, were shot and killed at the Rough Creek Ranch-Lodge-Resort shooting range in Erath County, Texas. Both men were armed with .45-caliber 1911-style pistols when they were killed, but neither gun had been unholstered or fired. The safety catches were still on. Kyle was killed with a .45-caliber pistol, while Littlefield was shot with a 9mm SIG Sauer handgun. Both guns belonged to Kyle.

The shooter was Eddie Ray Routh, a 25-year-old U.S. Marine Corps veteran from Lancaster, Texas. Kyle and Littlefield had reportedly taken Routh to the gun range in an effort to help him with his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Routh had been in and out of mental hospitals for at least two years and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. His family also said he suffered from PTSD from his time in the military.

After the killings, Routh went to his sister's house in Midlothian and told her what he had done. His sister, Laura Blevins, called 911 and told the emergency operator: "They went out to a shooting range... Like, he's all crazy. He's fucking psychotic." Local police captured Routh after a short freeway chase, which ended when Routh, who fled the scene in Kyle's Ford F-350 truck, crashed into a police cruiser in Lancaster.

A memorial service was held for Kyle at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on February 11, 2013. Kyle was buried on February 12, 2013, at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin, after a funeral procession from Midlothian to Austin, stretching more than 200 miles (320 km). Hundreds of people lined Interstate 35 to view the procession and pay their final respects to Kyle.

On February 24, 2015, Routh was found guilty of the deaths of Kyle and Littlefield with the jury returning the verdict in under three hours of deliberations. He was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/15/2015.)

Book Reviews
[My] favorite book of the year. Chris Kyle’s American Sniper: It’s an amazingly detailed account of fighting in Iraq a humanizing, brave story that’s extremely readable. It will give you a much stronger appreciation of our troops, more awe for Navy SEALs and also insight into how wars are really fought today.
Patricia Cornwell - New York Times Book Review


(Refers to audio version.) One of the most feared soldiers to ever set foot on the battleground that was and still is Iraq, Kyle recounts his bloody tales of war with deadly accuracy. Skillfully narrated by John Pruden, these fascinating war stories offer insight into the perils of modern combat.... Kyle’s story is gripping.
Publishers Weekly


Reads like a first-person thriller narrated by a sniper. The bare-bones facts are stunning. .... A first-rate military memoir
Booklist


[T]his memoir...takes a more unassuming and approachable tone in narrating his improbable journey from a modest Texas childhood to becoming a sniper with SEAL Team 3 and serving four deployments in IraqEloquent ... An aggressively written account of frontline combat, with plenty of action.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion underway for American Sniper:

1. Some readers felt Chris Kyle used overly broad strokes to depict his time as a sniper; they wanted more detail in terms of the shot set-ups and engagement. Do you agree? Or does Kyle give an adequate description for you?

2. Is Chris a hero? If so what makes him one—is it his skill, bravery, self-sacrifice? He himself claimed that the real heroes are those in engaged in actual fighting, many of whom lost their vision, limbs, and in many cases their lives. What do you think?

3. Did you appreciate the sections written by Kyle's wife Taya? What perspective, in any, does she bring to Kyle's account, especially her discussion of the strains his service placed on the family?

4. Kyle writes honestly about the pain and suffering of war, especially the loss of two of his closest teammates. Did reading his account make you think about the costs of war and what it means for both soldiers and their families?

5. What wisdom is there to be gained by reading American Sniper? Did you come away with a different perspective of war? Did the book underscore your beliefs about our engagement in the Middle East...or did it challenge your beliefs?

top of page (summary)

American Wolf:  A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West 
Nate Blakeslee, 2017
Crown/Archetype
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101902783


Summary
The enthralling story of the rise and reign of O-Six, the celebrated Yellowstone wolf, and the people who loved or feared her.
 
Before men ruled the earth, there were wolves. Once abundant in North America, these majestic creatures were hunted to near extinction in the lower 48 states by the 1920s. But in recent decades, conservationists have brought wolves back to the Rockies, igniting a battle over the very soul of the West.

With novelistic detail, Nate Blakeslee tells the gripping story of one of these wolves, O-Six, a charismatic alpha female named for the year of her birth. Uncommonly powerful, with gray fur and faint black ovals around each eye, O-Six is a kind and merciful leader, a fiercely intelligent fighter, and a doting mother.

She is beloved by wolf watchers, particularly renowned naturalist Rick McIntyre, and becomes something of a social media star, with followers around the world.

But as she raises her pups and protects her pack, O-Six is challenged on all fronts: by hunters, who compete with wolves for the elk they both prize; by cattle ranchers who are losing livestock and have the ear of politicians; and by other Yellowstone wolves who are vying for control of the park’s stunningly beautiful Lamar Valley.

These forces collide in American Wolf, a riveting multigenerational saga of hardship and triumph that tells a larger story about the ongoing cultural clash in the West — between those fighting for a vanishing way of life and those committed to restoring one of the country’s most iconic landscapes. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Nate Blakeslee is a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly. His first book, Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town, was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Texas Institute of Letters non-fiction prize, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2005. The Washington Post called it one of the most important books about wrongful convictions ever written. He lives in Austin, Texas with his family. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Most compelling is the story of O-Six, Yellow Stone’s biggest celebrity. Named for the year she was born, she is beautiful and mesmerizing, admired by thousands of fans across the U.S. who have been captivated by her exploits. We also follow a single hunter whose path she crosses.… But this story is larger than a single wolf and a single hunter. American Wolf Is an epic tale of generations of alphas and pups, of competing interests and declining fortunes, human resentments and grudging compromise — all played out against Nature’s eternal beauty. The book is thought-provoking and eye-opening — and a superb read. Highly recommended. 
P.J. Adler - LitLovers


In American Wolf, Blakeslee does a fine job presenting the wolf’s basic biological requirements, from abundant prey source (in Yellowstone, the overpopulation of elk) to secure denning sites. But he also illustrates the far more complicated and ever-dynamic human elements affecting the wolves. The politics of ranchers — some for wolves, others against — and antigovernment zealots, hunting outfitters, Congress, courts and judges, and tourism operators all exert a sculpting pressure on where and how and if the wolf can live.
Rick Bass - New York Times Book Review


American Wolf…explores the clash over Canis lupus, the gray wolf, with a story told through the life of O-Six and the humans who loved her. Author Nate Blakeslee… tells a masterful and elegant tale. Nature enthusiasts or lovers of narrative-nonfiction will enjoy the book
Associated Press


Engaging.… [A] must read for researchers, citizen scientists, and visitors to Yellowstone, where the story of the wolves continues to evolve.
Science


[American Wolf] reads like a novel.… [A] testament to the genius of Blakeslee’s tautly constructed narrative.
Outside


Blakeslee takes readers into the snowy [Lamar Valley], and deep into a genuinely human tale told with the energy and verve of a bestselling thriller. A tight, dense narrative, American Wolf races along like a predator on the hunt.
Texas Observer


(Starred review.) Beautiful, detailed.… [American Wolf] centers on the rise, reign, and family life of O-Six, matriarch of the Lamar Canyon pack and so well-known to park visitors that the New York Times gave her an obituary.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Utterly compelling.… Blakeslee’s masterly use of fiction writing techniques to ratchet up the tension will hook a wide swath of readers
Library Journal


(Starred review.) The fight…[over] Yellowstone’s wolves is embodied in O-Six’s story, told with great immediacy and empathy in a tale that reads like fiction. This one will grab readers and impel them into the heart of the conflict.
Booklist


American Wolf is an essential read for anyone interested in a fascinating piece of American history and learning more about an important issue that continues to plague the West. —Stephanie Coleman, Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver, CO
Indie Next List


In the main, Blakeslee's well-rendered story will be familiar to anyone who has followed the Yellowstone wolves, but those who have not will find this a solid overview of recent events—evenhanded but clearly and rightly on the side of the wolves.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for American Wolf … then take off on your own:

1. Start, perhaps, by putting the wolf in a historical context. Talk about the wolf's place in American history: the original numbers at the beginning of colonization, the eradication programs, the wolf's near extinction, its listing and de-listing as a protected animal.

2. What have you learned about wolves after reading Blakeslee's book? What do they feed on, how do they survive the harsh landscape and winters, what are the social hierarchies within their packs or between packs? Did anything surprise you about them, their behavior, their food sources?

3. In what way does the wolf reflect this country's cultural/political divide? Talk about the various factions … and lay out their respective points of view regarding the rights of wolves to populate and propagate in the West.

4. What side of the argument do you place yourself on? Does Blakeslee do a good job of giving all sides a say — is he fair? Can you understand the points on the opposing sides, even if you might disagree with them?

5. Follow-up to Question 4: if there's a hero in the book, who would it be?

6. Is there a foreseeable solution to the wolf problem?
 
7. Ed Bangs, the Fish and Wildlife biologist who had directed the wolf recovery project since 1988, once observed that "What we normally mean by "education" is, I want someone else to know as much as I know so they'll have my values" (131 p.). Is that how you see the idea of educating the pubic — more as a means of rhetorical persuasion than providing information? Or do you believe Bangs's view is bit cynical? If so, then what does educating the public mean? Or what should it mean?

(Questions issued by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

And Now We Have Everything:  On Motherhood Before I Was Ready
Meaghan O'Connell, 2018
Little, Brown and Co.
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316393843


Summary
A raw, funny, and fiercely honest account of becoming a mother before feeling like a grown up.

When Meaghan O'Connell got accidentally pregnant in her twenties and decided to keep the baby, she realized that the book she needed—a brutally honest, agenda-free reckoning with the emotional and existential impact of motherhood—didn't exist.

So she decided to write it herself.

And Now We Have Everything is O'Connell's exploration of the cataclysmic, impossible-to-prepare-for experience of becoming a mother. With her dark humor and hair-trigger B.S. detector, O'Connell addresses the pervasive imposter syndrome that comes with unplanned pregnancy, the fantasies of a "natural" birth experience that erode maternal self-esteem, post-partum body and sex issues, and the fascinating strangeness of stepping into a new, not-yet-comfortable identity.

Channeling fears and anxieties that are still taboo and often unspoken, And Now We Have Everything is an unflinchingly frank, funny, and visceral motherhood story for our times, about having a baby and staying, for better or worse, exactly yourself. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Meaghan O'Connell's writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Longreads, and The Billfold, where she was an editor. She lives in Portland, OR, with her husband and young son. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
For every What to Expect When You're Expecting (and its ilk), there should be a What to Expect When You Weren't Expecting. But, strangely, there isn't, so Meaghan O'Connell has committed her experience of accidental pregnancy and motherhood to the page.
Elle


Stripping away the mythical fantasies of motherhood, O'Connell delivers a poignant and funny look at what it means to be a parent in our current time. The warts-and-all examination is powerful reading for anyone with or without kids.
Esquire


The kind of book I wished for when I was pregnant. Pulling no punches, the writing is blunt, honest...This should be required reading that your doctor hands you after you see the two pink lines on the pregnancy test.
BookRiot


Part memoir, part guidebook, And Now We Have Everything captures all the fears and anxieties mothers-to-be have, but still aren't allowed to say out loud. Smart, insightful, and searingly honest, Meghan O'Connell's exploration of motherhood should be on every expectant parent's baby registry.
Bustle


Frankly speaking, this is a must-read for anyone with a mother, anyone with a baby, anyone who knows anyone with a baby—anyone.
Refinery29


A well-written book that provides refreshingly candid insight into the physical and emotional changes that take place during pregnancy and early motherhood, times that are both "traumatic [and] transcendent.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for AND NOW WE HAVE EVERYTHING … then take off on your own:

THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS presume you are a woman and are pregnant or have been...

1. In the first essay of Meaghan O'Connell's book, she says, "A baby was the thing we were trying to keep out" and also "Part of me loved this feeling, of being steamrollled by life, of being totally fucked." Talk about those twin yet contradictory emotions as they relate to the author's experiences and to those you might have felt when you learned you were pregnant.

2. Follow-up to Question 1: In what other ways would you say that O'Connell explodes—or at the very least, undermines—the myth of the glories of motherhood?

3. How much of O'Connell's roller-coaster ride throughout her book resonantes with your own experiences, either in pregnancy, labor, or the earliest weeks with your first child?

4. Are parts of this book cringe-inducing? Do parts of it make you uncomfortable?

5. In the chapter "Maternal Instincts," O'Connell talks about feeling trapped between, again, two extremes: "nurturer and stalker, human and animal." What does she mean?

6. Early on, O'Connell obsesses over the baby's safety. Do you think that our culture, with the constant hype of life's dangers, has made parenthood feel more dangerous than it is? Not to say that we shouldn't be extra vigilant, but should we "be afraid, be very afraid!"—remaining in a constant state of heightened alert? Or is it wise to be extra cautious, given that new parenthood comes with no instruction manual?

7. Presuming you are already a mother, do you wish this book had been available to you during your pregnancy?

8. Talk about the toll on O'Connell's relationship with her new husband and on her career.

9. What is the significance of the book's title: And Now We Have Everything? Is it ironic or sincere?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

Animal Madness:  How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves
Laurel Braitman, 2014
Simon & Schuster
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451627008


Summary
For the first time, a historian of science draws evidence from across the world to show how humans and other animals are astonishingly similar when it comes to their feelings and the ways in which they lose their minds.

Charles Darwin developed his evolutionary theories by looking at physical differences in Galapagos finches and fancy pigeons. Alfred Russell Wallace investigated a range of creatures in the Malay Archipelago. Laurel Braitman got her lessons closer to home—by watching her dog.

Oliver snapped at flies that only he could see, ate Ziploc bags, towels, and cartons of eggs. He suffered debilitating separation anxiety, was prone to aggression, and may even have attempted suicide. Her experience with Oliver forced Laurel to acknowledge a form of continuity between humans and other animals that, first as a biology major and later as a PhD student at MIT, she’d never been taught in school. Nonhuman animals can lose their minds. And when they do, it often looks a lot like human mental illness.

Thankfully, all of us can heal. As Laurel spent three years traveling the world in search of emotionally disturbed animals and the people who care for them, she discovered numerous stories of recovery: parrots that learn how to stop plucking their feathers, dogs that cease licking their tails raw, polar bears that stop swimming in compulsive circles, and great apes that benefit from the help of human psychiatrists. How do these animals recover? The same way we do: with love, with medicine, and above all, with the knowledge that someone understands why we suffer and what can make us feel better.

After all of the digging in the archives of museums and zoos, the years synthesizing scientific literature, and the hours observing dog parks, wildlife encounters, and amusement parks, Laurel found that understanding the emotional distress of animals can help us better understand ourselves. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Ventura, California, USA
• Education— B.A. Cornell University; Ph.D., MIT
• Awards—TED fellowship
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California


Laurel Braitman is a science historian, writer, and a TED Fellow. She was born and raised on a citrus ranch in Southern California where she was surrounded, as she says on her website, by "a small herd of donkeys, two parrots, a series of sickly hamsters, three dogs, a bunch of barn cats that didn’t like me, a rabbit named Violetta, an armored catfish named Harold, and a tarantula."

Braitman received her B.A. from Cornell University in biology and writing. She earned her Ph.D. in the history of science from MIT. In addition to her TED fellowship, she is an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts and frequently collaborates with musicians and visual artists.

Her book Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves was published in 2014. She has also written for Pop Up Magazine, The New Inquiry, Salon, and a variety of other publications.  (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/19/2014.)

Book Reviews
In this illuminating contribution to the burgeoning field of animal studies, senior TED fellow Braitman suggests that the key to understanding mental illness might lie in our pets..... [A[nalytical scrutiny would not be the way to approach this book, whose continuous dose of hope should prove medicinal for humans and animals alike.
Publishers Weekly


Eschewing statistics and experimental data in favor of her own stories and historical anecdotes, Braitman, a trained historian of science, appeals directly to her readers' emotions with tales of anguished elephants and heartsick gorillas.... [E]ngaging, compassionate read... but is unlikely to convert skeptics. Readers...may be put off by Braitman's inclusion of details from her personal life a. —Kate Horowitz, Washington, DC
Library Journal


Humans aren’t the only animals that suffer from emotional thunderstorms, and author Braitman came to the ...conclusion...that nonhuman animals can suffer from mental illnesses that mirror those that humans endure.... Acknowledging mental illness in other animals, and helping them recover, obviously can be a comforting experience. —Nancy Bent
Booklist


[Braitman] is thankfully willing to allow..."that other animals have many special abilities that we don't have and this may extend to emotional states." Braitman's gradual accretion of reasons to believe in animal emotional states that we can relate to, including the loopy ones, gives pause and sparks curiosity.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:  A Year of Food Life
Barbara Kingsolver, 2007
HarperCollins
370 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060852566


Summary 
Hang on for the ride: with characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table.

Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life, and diversified farms at the center of the American diet. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—April 8, 1955
• Where—Annapolis, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., DePauw University; M.S., University of
   Arizona
• Awards—Orange Prize
• Currently—lives on a farm in Virginia


Barbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955. She grew up "in the middle of an alfalfa field," in the part of eastern Kentucky that lies between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields. While her family has deep roots in the region, she never imagined staying there herself. "The options were limited--grow up to be a farmer or a farmer's wife."

Kingsolver has always been a storyteller: "I used to beg my mother to let me tell her a bedtime story." As a child, she wrote stories and essays and, beginning at the age of eight, kept a journal religiously. Still, it never occurred to Kingsolver that she could become a professional writer. Growing up in a rural place, where work centered mainly on survival, writing didn't seem to be a practical career choice. Besides, the writers she read, she once explained, "were mostly old, dead men. It was inconceivable that I might grow up to be one of those myself..."

Kingsolver left Kentucky to attend DePauw University in Indiana, where she majored in biology. She also took one creative writing course, and became active in the last anti-Vietnam War protests. After graduating in 1977, Kingsolver lived and worked in widely scattered places. In the early eighties, she pursued graduate studies in biology and ecology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she received a Masters of Science degree. She also enrolled in a writing class taught by author Francine Prose, whose work Kingsolver admires.

Kingsolver's fiction is rich with the language and imagery of her native Kentucky. But when she first left home, she says, "I lost my accent.... [P]eople made terrible fun of me for the way I used to talk, so I gave it upslowly and became something else." During her years in school and two years spent living in Greece and France she supported herself in a variety of jobs: as an archaeologist, copy editor, X-ray technician, housecleaner, biological researcher and translator of medical documents.

After graduate school, a position as a science writer for the University of Arizona soon led her into feature writing for journals and newspapers. Her numerous articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Nation, the New York Times, and Smithsonian, and many of them are included in the collection, High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. In 1986 she won an Arizona Press Club award for outstanding feature writing, and in 1995, after the publication of High Tide in Tucson, Kingsolver was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, DePauw University.

Kingsolver credits her careers in scientific writing and journalism with instilling in her a writer's discipline and broadening her "fictional possiblities." Describing herself as a shy person who would generally prefer to stay at home with her computer, she explains that "journalism forces me to meet and talk with people I would never run across otherwise."

From 1985 through 1987, Kingsolver was a freelance journalist by day, but she was writing fiction by night. Married to a chemist in 1985, she suffered from insomnia after becoming pregnant the following year. Instead of following her doctor's recommendation to scrub the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush, Kingsolver sat in a closet and began to write The Bean Trees, a novel about a young woman who leaves rural Kentucky (accent intact) and finds herself living in urban Tucson.

The Bean Trees, originally published in 1988 and reissued in a special ten-year anniversary edition in 1998, was enthusiastically received by critics. But, perhaps more important to Kingsolver, the novel was read with delight and, even, passion by ordinary readers. "A novel can educate to some extent," she told Publishers Weekly. "But first, a novel has to entertain—that's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessiblity. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with—who may not often read anything but the Sears catalogue—to read my books."

For Kingsolver, writing is a form of political activism. When she was in her twenties she discovered Doris Lessing. "I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do, if I could ever do that."

The Bean Trees was followed by the collection, Homeland and Other Stories (1989), the novels Animal Dreams (1990), and Pigs in Heaven (1993), and the bestselling High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now and Never (1995). Kingsolver has also published a collection of poetry, Another America: Otra America (Seal Press, 1992, 1998), and a nonfiction book, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of l983 (ILR Press/Cornell University Press, 1989, 1996). The Poisonwood Bible (1998) earned accolades at home and abroad, and was an Oprah's Book Club selection.

Barbara's Prodigal Summer (2000), is a novel set in a rural farming community in southern Appalachia. Small Wonder, April 2002, presents 23 wonderfully articulate essays. Here Barbara raises her voice in praise of nature, family, literature, and the joys of everyday life while examining the genesis of war, violence, and poverty in our world.

Two additional books became best sellers. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle came in 2007, again to great acclaim. Non-fiction, the book recounts a year in the life of Kingsolver's family as they grew all their own food. The Lacuna, published two years later, is a fictional account of historical events in Mexico during the 1930, and moving into the U.S. during the McCarthy era of the 1950's.

Extras

• Barbara Kingsolver lives in Southern Applachia with her husband Steven Hopp, and her two daughters, Camille from a previous marriage, and Lily, who was born in 1996. When not writing or spending time with her family, Barbara gardens, cooks, hikes, and works as an environmental activist and human-rights advocate.

• Given that Barbara Kingsolver's work covers the psychic and geographical territories that she knows firsthand, readers often assume that her work is autobiographical. "There are little things that people who know me might recognize in my novels," she acknowledges. "But my work is not about me....

• If you want a slice of life, look out the window. An artist has to look out that window, isolate one or two suggestive things, and embroider them together with poetry and fabrication, to create a revelation. If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread. (Adapted from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews 
What is likely to win the most converts, though, is the joy Kingsolver takes in food. She isn’t just an ardent preserver, following the summertime canning rituals of her farming forebears. She’s also an ardent cook, and there’s some lovely food writing here.
Korby Kummer - New York Times


This is a serious book about important problems. Its concerns are real and urgent. It is clear, thoughtful, often amusing, passionate and appealing. It may give you a serious case of supermarket guilt, thinking of the energy footprint left by each out-of-season tomato, but you'll also find unexpected knowledge and gain the ability to make informed choices about what—and how—you're willing to eat.
Bunny Crumpacker - Washington Post


Anyone who read and appreciated The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan [see LitLovers Reading Guide] will want to read Barbara Kingsolver’s book.
Roanoke Times


Kingsolver dresses down the American food complex…These down-on-the-farm sections are inspiring and…compelling.
Outside Magazine


In her engaging though sometimes preachy new book, Kingsolver recounts the year her family attempted to eat only what they could grow on their farm in Virginia or buy from local sources. The book's bulk, written and read by Kingsolver in a lightly twangy voice filled with wonder and enthusiasm, proceeds through the seasons via delightful stories about the history of their farmhouse, the exhausting bounty of the zucchini harvest, turkey chicks hatching and so on. In long sections, however, she gets on a soapbox about problems with industrial food production, fast food and Americans' ignorance of food's origins, and despite her obvious passion for the issues, the reading turns didactic and loses its pace, momentum and narrative. Her daughter Camille contributes recipes, meal plans and an enjoyable personal essay in a clear if rather monotonous voice. Hopp, Kingsolver's husband and an environmental studies professor, provides dry readings of the sidebars that have him playing "Dr. Scientist," as Kingsolver notes in an illuminating interview on the last disc. Though they may skip some of the more moralizing tracks, Kingsolver's fans and foodies alike will find this a charming, sometimes inspiring account of reconnecting with the food chain.
Publishers Weekly


Best-selling novelist Kingsolver and her family moved from Tucson, AZ, to the fertile lands of Southern Appalachia, where agriculture is an accepted excuse for absence from school, to undertake an experiment of sorts. The family joined the locavore movement, which promotes eating only what is locally raised, grown, and produced. This account of their ongoing experiment is a family affair: daughter Lily morphs into a poultry entrepreneur; daughter Camille, a college student, sprinkles her own anecdotes and seasonal menus throughout; and essays by Kingsolver's husband, Hopp, an academic, warn of the high cost of chemical pesticides, fossil fuels, and processed foods environmentally, financially, and on our health. Patience is a virtue in this undertaking, which calls for eating only what is in season; however, Kingsolver's passion for food and near sensual delight in what she pulls from her garden make the enterprise seem enticing. The author's narration is homey, folksy, and warm; Camille and Hopp narrate as well. Part memoir, part how-to, and part agricultural education, this book is both timely and entertaining. With Kingsolver's broad readership; a large movement toward organic, healthful eating; and heavy media attention on the subject, expect demand. Recommended for public libraries.
Risa Getman - Library Journal


With some assistance from her husband, Steven, and 19-year-old daughter, Camille, Kingsolver (Prodigal Summer, 2000, etc.) elegantly chronicles a year of back-to-the-land living with her family in Appalachia. After three years of drought, the author decamped from her longtime home in Arizona and set out with Steven, Camille and younger daughter Lily to inhabit fulltime his family's farm in Virginia. Their aim, she notes, was to "live in a place that could feed us," to grow their own food and join the increasingly potent movement led by organic growers and small exurban food producers. Kingsolver wants to know where her food is coming from: Her diary records her attempts to consume only those items grown locally and in season while eschewing foods that require the use of fossil fuels for transport, fertilizing and processing. (In one of biologist Steven's terrific sidebars, "Oily Food," he notes that 17 percent of the nation's energy is consumed by agriculture.) From her vegetable patch, Kingsolver discovered nifty ways to use plentiful available produce such as asparagus, rhubarb, wild mushrooms, honey, zucchini, pumpkins and tomatoes; she also spent a lot of time canning summer foods for winter. The family learned how to make cheese, visited organic farms and a working family farm in Tuscany, even grew and killed their own meat. "I'm unimpressed by arguments that condemn animal harvest," writes Kingsolver, "while ignoring, wholesale, the animal killing that underwrites vegetal foods." Elsewhere, Steven explores business topics such as the good economics of going organic; the losing battle in the use of pesticides; the importance of a restructured Farm Bill; mad cow disease; and fairtrade. Camille, meanwhile, offers anecdotes and recipes. Readers frustrated with the unhealthy, artificial food chain will take heart and inspiration here.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. What was your perception of America's food industry prior to reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle? What did you learn from this book? How has it altered your views on the way food is acquired and consumed?

2. In what ways, if any, have you changed your eating habits since reading  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle? Depending on where you live—in an urban, suburban, or rural environment—what other steps would you like to take to modify your lifestyle with regard to eating local?

3. "It had felt arbitrary when we sat around the table with our shopping list, making our rules. It felt almost silly to us in fact, as it may now seem to you. Why impose restrictions on ourselves? Who cares?" asks Kingsolver in  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle? Did you, in fact, care about Kingsolver's story and find it to be compelling? Why or why not? What was the family's aim for their year-long initiative, and did they accomplish that goal?

4. The writing of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was a family affair, with Kingsolver's husband, Steven L. Hopp, contributing factual sidebars and her daughter, Camille Kingsolver, serving up commentary and recipes. Did you find that these additional elements enhanced the book? How so? What facts or statistics in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle surprised you the most?

5. How does each member of the Kingsolver-Hopp family contribute during their year-long eating adventure? Were you surprised that the author's children not only participated in the endeavor but that they did so with such enthusiasm? Why or why not?

6. "A majority of North Americans do understand, at some level, that our food choices are politically charged," says Kingsolver, "affecting arenas from rural culture to international oil cartels and global climate change." How do politics affect America's food production and consumption? What global ramifications are there for the food choices we make?

7. Kingsolver advocates the pleasures of seasonal eating, but she acknowledges that many people would view this as deprivation "because we've grown accustomed to the botanically outrageous condition of having everything always." Do you believe that American society can—or will— overcome the need for instant gratification in order to be able to eat seasonally? How does Kingsolver present this aspect in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle? Did you get the sense that she and her family ever felt deprived in their eating options?

8. Kingsolver points out that eating what we want, when we want comes "at a price." The cost, she says, "is not measured in money, but in untallied debts that will be paid by our children in the currency of extinctions, economic unravelings, and global climate change." What responsibility do we bear for keeping the environment safe for future generations? How does eating locally factor in to this?

9. Kingsolver asserts that "we have dealt to today's kids the statistical hand of a shorter life expectancy than their parents, which would be us, the ones taking care of them." How is our "thrown-away food culture" a detriment to children's health? She also says, "We're raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket." What responsibility do parents have to teach their children about the value and necessity of a local food culture?

10. In what ways do Kingsolver's descriptions of the places she visited on her travels—Italy, New England, Montreal, and Ohio—enhance her portrayal of local and seasonal eating?

11. "Marketing jingles from every angle lure patrons to turn our backs on our locally owned stores, restaurants, and farms," says Kingsolver. "And nobody considers that unpatriotic." How much of a role do the media play in determining what Americans eat? Discuss the decline of America's diversified family farms, and what it means for the country as a whole.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition)
Anne Frank, 1947
Random House
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553577129


Summary 
The journal of a Jewish girl in her early teens describes both the joys and torments of daily life, as well as typical adolescent thoughts, throughout two years spent in hiding with her family during the Nazi occupation of Holland.

For more than fifty years, Anne Frank's diary has moved millions with its testament to the human spirit's indestructibility, but readers have never seen the full text of this beloved book—until now. This new translation restores nearly one third of Anne's entries, excised by her father in previous editions, revealing her burgeoning sexuality, her stormy relationship with her mother, and more. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—June 12, 1929
• Where—Frankfurt, Germany
• Death—early March 1945
• Where—Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Germany
• Education: Jewish Lyceum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Anne and her family moved to Amsterdam in 1933 after the Nazis gained power in Germany, and were trapped by the occupation of the Netherlands, which began in 1940. As persecutions against the Jewish population increased, the family went into hiding in July 1942 in hidden rooms in her father Otto Frank's office building. After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps.

Seven months after her arrest, Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, within days of the death of her sister, Margot Frank. Her father Otto, the only survivor of the group, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that her diary had been saved, and his efforts led to its publication in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl.

The diary, which was given to Anne on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944. It has been translated into many languages, has become one of the world's most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films. Anne Frank has been acknow-ledged for the quality of her writing, and has become one of the most renowned and discussed of Holocaust victims. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews 
It is a poignant, heartbreaking yet somehow heartwarming story, fresh with the dew of adolescence.
New York Herald Tribune


This startling new edition of Dutch Jewish teenager Anne Frank's classic diary-written in an Amsterdam warehouse, where for two years she hid from the Nazis with her family and friends-contains approximately 30% more material than the original 1947 edition. It completely revises our understanding of one of the most moving and eloquent documents of the Holocaust. The Anne we meet here is much more sarcastic, rebellious and vulnerable than the sensitive diarist beloved by millions. She rages at her mother, Edith, smolders with jealous resentment toward her sister, Margot, and unleashes acid comments at her roommates. Expanded entries provide a fuller picture of the tensions and quarrels among the eight people in hiding. Anne, who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, three months before her 16th birthday, candidly discusses her awakening sexuality in entries that were omitted from the 1947 edition by her father, Otto, the only one of the eight to survive the death camps. He died in 1980. This crisp, stunning translation provides an unvarnished picture of life in the "secret annex." In the end, Anne's teen angst pales beside her profound insights, her self-discovery and her unbroken faith in good triumphing over evil.
Publishers Weekly


This new translation of Frank's famous diary includes material about her emerging sexuality and her relationship with her mother that was originally excised by Frank's father, the only family member to survive the Holocaust.
Library Journal


A revision of this great document of WWII, considerably expanding the extraordinarily popular work originally published in 1947. A couple dozen entries have been added.
Booklist

Discussion Questions 
1. After the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, the Dutch people were immediately faced with the question of choice: how to respond to the Nazi occupation. Tens of thousands of Dutch people followed Hitler, and millions more looked the other way. Eventually, a resistance movement began to grow. The Nazis needed Dutch collaborators to carry out their fascist decrees.

What would have influenced someone to become a collaborator? What factors would have encouraged someone to join the resistance? Do you think these factors were based on personal characteristics or political beliefs? What was the price of resistance during the war? What was the price of collaboration?

2. Anne Frank and her family were German refugees who resettled and tried to build their lives in the Netherlands. Although the Franks were proud of their German heritage, their feelings toward Germany became very complicated during the war. Anne wrote: "Fine specimens of humanity, those Germans, and to think I'm actually one of them! No. that's not true, Hitler took away our nationality long ago. And besides, there are no greater enemies on earth than the Germans and Jews." (October 9, 1942.) Although Anne had lived in the Netherlands since 1934, she did not become a Dutch citizen.

Did Anne have a nationality? If not, were Anne's civil rights protected by any nation? By 1939 some 250, 000 Jews, half of Germany's Jewish population, had fled their homeland. Did these refugees have any guaranteed rights? After the war Otto Frank responded to references to "the Germans" by asking "which German?" He believed strongly that blaming all Germans was another form of stereotyping. What constitutes a stereotype? How is astereotype different from discrimination?

3. In the New York Times the writer Anna Quindlen asked, "Would our understanding of the Holocaust be quite the same if Anne Frank had not taken a small plaid diary into hiding with her?" What has most shaped your understanding of World War II: personal experience, Anne's diary, popular films such as Schindler's List, newsreel footage, academic or historical texts?

4. Otto Frank chose to edit out some of the negative comments Anne made about her mother and a number of the other residents of the Secret Annex—comments that have been restored in the new translation by Susan Massotty. He believed that Anne would have wanted him to do so. Do you think he was correct?

5. In her diary Anne opined: "... if you're wondering if it's harder for the adults here than for the children, the answer is no... Older people have an opinion about everything and are sure of themselves and their actions. It's twice as hard for us young people to hold on to our opinions at a time when ideals are being shattered..." (July 15, 1944.) When was the last time as an adult that you experienced the "shattering" of an ideal? Is the media a neutral force, or do you think it plays a role in supporting or destroying idealism?

6. Are there certain characteristics common among those few individuals who risked their own lives to rescue Jews during World War II? Why do so many of them deny their own heroism?

7. A disturbing number of neo-Nazi groups have taken hold in all parts of the world. What social conditions would be necessary for them to grow? What do you believe would be the most likely basis of another world war: pride, nationalism, fear, racism, economic interests, or religious intolerance?

8. Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was asked how he could explain the killing of 6 million Jews. He answered, "One hundred dead are a catastrophe, a million dead are a statistic." Have we become more or less tolerant of murder since he made this observation?

9. Anne Frank wrote: "I don't believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago!" (May 3, 1944.) How should accountability be assigned? So many say they never understood what was happening. How likely could that have been?

10. Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1925, describing his plan for the elimination of Jews. At that time, what steps might have been taken to stop Hitler's rise to power?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Another Good Dog:  One Famiy and Fifty Foster Dogs
Cara Sue Achterberg, 2018
Pegasus Books
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781681777931


Summary
A warm and entertaining memoir about what happens when you foster fifty dogs in less than two years—and how the dogs save you as much as you save them.

When Cara felt her teenaged children slipping away and saw an empty nest on the horizon, she decided the best way to fill that void was with dogs—lots of them—and so her foster journey began.

In 2015, her Pennsylvania farm became a haven for Operation Paws for Homes.

There were the nine puppies at once, which arrived with less than a day’s notice; a heart- worm positive dog; a deeply traumatized stray pup from Iraq; and countless others who just needed a gentle touch and a warm place to sleep. Operation Paws for Homes rescues dogs from high-kill shelters in the rural south and shuttles them north to foster homes like Cara’s on the way to their forever homes.

What started as a search for a good dog, led to an epiphany that there wasn’t just one that could ll the hole left in her heart from her children gaining independence—she could save dozens along the way. The stories of these remarkable dogs— including an eighty-pound bloodhound who sang arias for the neighbors—and the joy they bring to Cara and her family (along with a few chewed sofa cushions) fill the pages of this touching and inspiring new book that reveals the wonderful rewards of fostering.

When asked how she can possibly say goodbye to that many loveable pups, Cara says, “If I don’t give this one away, I can’t possibly save another.”

Filled with humanity and hope, Another Good Dog will take the reader on an journey of smiles, laughs, and tears—and lead us to wonder how many other good dogs are out there and what we can do to help. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1965-66
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., Averett University; B.A., Eastern University
• Currently—lives in New Freedom, Pennsylvania, USA


Cara Sue Achterberg is a writer of three novels, a self-help book, and a memoir. She is also a blogger, journalist, a wife and mother, and a serial dog foster mother.

In Living Intentionally, Achterberg shares stories, ideas, resources, and even recipes to help readers live a fuller, healthier and intentional life. The book came out in 2014.

Achterberg published her first novel, I'm Not Her, in 2015; her second novel, Girls' Weekend, and third, Practicing Normal, both came out in 2016.

In 2018 she issued Another Good Dog: One Family and Fifty Foster Dogs, a memoir about her family and family-life caring for foster dogs.

Her essays and articles have been published in anthologies, magazines, and on websites. She also writes frequently for the York (PA) Daily Record. Achterberg lives on a hillside farm in south-central Pennsylvania with her husband. She also has horses and two grown children. (Adapted from various online sources.)

Visit the author blogs HERE … and HERE.

Book Reviews
Saddened by her emptying nest, Cara Sue Achterberg started fostering dogs—dozens of them. Here she shares the journey (and some supercute photos).
Peope


What’s unexpected are Achterberg’s personal reveals: her husband’s "It has to stop" ultimatum…. Some readers may find the… drumbeat too repetitive, but the stories and photos will delight those who have a soft spot for dogs and the dog rescue mission.
Publishers Weekly


Witty and full of love, [this] memoir beautifully captures the personalities of the dogs she’s helped save…. This easy read is a must for animal lovers and those interested in volunteering with animals and a good choice for reluctant readers.
Booklist


Filled with humanity and hope, Another Good Dog will take the reader on an journey of smiles, laughs, and tears—and lead us to wonder how many other good dogs are out there and what we can do to help.
Shelf Awareness


A writer's account of how becoming a foster "dog parent" changed her life …and gave her a renewed sense of purpose …[T]his book blends insight and entertainment to tell an unforgettable story…. A compassionate and humane canine tale.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for ANOTHER GOOD DOG … then take off on your own:

1. The author describes the pain of losing her beloved hound of 17 years as having "left a gaping hole" in her family's "collective heart." Have you experienced the loss of a pet? What makes the loss of a creature so profound?

2. How easy or difficult would you find fostering dogs: taking them in, caring for them, and having to let them go?

3. Of the many dogs the author fostered in Another Good Dog, which ones were your favorites? Which dogs would have been hardest for you to say goodbye to? Were there any you would have glady (or reluctantly) given up on?

4. Talk about some of the particularly tough challenges she faced—perhaps working with dogs traumatized by cruelty …or the job of weaning nine puppies.

5. Achterberg talks about "how bad my addiction [to fostering] had become," a habit that was testing her marriage and her husband's patience. Did you feel any sympathy for him? Or were you impatient with his complaining?

6. Follow-up to Question 5: Achterberg faced other family complications, including her son's health issuses and her daughter's beauty pageant. How difficult was it for the author to juggle the various demands placed on her from all different directions? Did you ever reach the point where you felt she had over committed herself—that her husband was right to present her with his enough-is-enough ultimatum?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

Apples & Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found
Marie Brenner, 2008
Macmillan Picador
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374173524


Summary
How can two people share the same parents and turn out to be entirely different?  Marie Brenner’s brother, Carl—yin to her yang, red state to her blue state—lived in Texas and in the apple country of Washington state, cultivating his orchards, polishing his guns, and (no doubt causing their grandfather Isidor to turn in his grave) attending church, while Marie, a world-class journalist and bestselling author, led a sophisticated life among the "New York libs" her brother loathed.

After many years apart, a medical crisis pushed them back into each other’s lives. Marie temporarily abandoned her job at Vanity Fair magazine, her friends, and her husband to try to help her brother. Except that Carl fought her every step of the way. She trained her formidable investigative skills on finding treatments to help her brother medically. And she dug into the past of the brilliant and contentious Brenner family, seeking in that complicated story a cure, too, for what ailed her relationship with Carl.

Marie Brenner has written an extraordinary memoir—one that is heartbreakingly honest, funny, and true. It’s a book that even her brother could love. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Marie Brenner is writer-at-large for Vanity Fair. Her expose of the tobacco industry, “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” was the basis for the 1999 movie The Insider, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. She is also the author of Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women and the best-selling House of Dreams: The Binghams of Louisville. (From the publisher.)

More
Marie Brenner joined Vanity Fair as a special correspondent in 1984, left in 1992 to become a staff writer at The New Yorker, and then returned to the magazine in 1995 as writer-at-large. Brenner began her career as a story editor for Paramount Pictures’ East Coast offices. She has served as a contributing editor at New York magazine, and has worked as a freelance foreign correspondent, covering the Middle East and Europe.

Brenner became the first female baseball columnist covering the American League, traveling with the Boston Red Sox for the Boston Herald during the 1979 season. Her explosive article on Jeffrey Wigand and the tobacco wars was made into the feature film The Insider, starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino.

Brenner is the recipient of five Front Page Awards and is the author of five books, including Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women (Crown, 2000) and the best-selling House of Dreams: The Bingham Family of Louisville (Random House, 1988). Sugarland, a movie based on Brenner’ s February 2001 Vanity Fair article, "In the Kingdom of Big Sugar" is currently being developed by Robert De Niro and Tribeca Productions. (From Vanity Fair website.)

Book Reviews 
Thanks to his sister's new book, Apples & Oranges, Carl Brenner did not succeed in vanishing without a trace. Rather, his life, with all its startling twists and turns, and his singular, sometimes maddening personality are magically conjured for us in these pages, as Ms. Brenner uses the prism of her love and grief for her brother—and her bewilderment too—to create a haunting portrait of him and their family. She has written a book that captures the nervous, emotionally strangled relationship she shared with him for the better part of their lives, a book that explores the difficult algebra of familial love and the possibility of its renewal in the face of impending loss…a beautifully observed and deeply affecting memoir, a book written with the unsparing eye of a journalist and the aching heart of a sister.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


In Apples and Oranges, Marie Brenner has delivered a majestic little book. She deepens a tragicomic story into a meditation on family and fate... In Brenner’s sympathetic portrait, Carl becomes a nuanced conservative character. ‘Sometimes you do not get to understand everything,’ she concludes. Family trumps politics, and Marie comes to accept her brother’s tough love. One day, brother and sister climb ‘through the Galas, up through the Bartletts, the valley stretched out before us. We’re standing in a row of saplings, just planted in this sandy loam soil that he has named after our father. The Milton bloc. ‘This is where I want my ashes scattered,’ he says. ‘Are you listening to me?’ Marie was listening closer than Carl ever imagined. His ashes are scattered throughout this mystical book.
James Panero - New York Times Book Review


At 3, Carl Brenner welcomed his baby sister into the world by tossing her out the window. The family joked that Carl gave Marie the gift of a hard head, an asset fully in evidence—along with her hungry heart—in her memoir, Apples & Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found. More than any other book in recent memory, this one grabs the problem of sibling rivalry by the throat and shakes relentlessly. Carl is dying as the book begins, and Marie, now a celebrated reporter, has found her way back into his life, after decades of soul-bashing standoffs, using her investigative skills to probe the mysteries of his disease—and of their tormented relationship. She may never learn what drove her imperious, obsessive-compulsive, "charm-free" brother to give up a career as a trial lawyer to grow apples in Washington State; or what entrenched family dynamic doomed the siblings to reach for each other only across a "canyon of rage." But it is Marie's furious search for answers that gives this book its power, exposing the sweetness at the core of an embattled love.
O, The Oprah Magazine


"Perplexing" was the family euphemism for Brenner's older brother Carl; the less tactful thought him "unknowable," "charm-free" or plain "weird." At 13, in San Antonio, Tex., where his father owned a discount store, Carl joined the John Birch Society. At 40, he left his career as a trial lawyer to become an apple farmer in Washington's Cascade Mountains. Brenner (House of Dreams) and he were on barely civil terms, but when he was 55, he was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma, glandular cancer, and asked Marie for help. She responded, leaving her family in New York to be with Carl, who rejected conventional treatment, and to follow him as far away as China for "scorpion patches," herbs and red meat for "yang deficit." The cancer spread quickly; meanwhile, Marie sought to investigate her family's present and past among her father's feuding siblings, including writer Anita Brenner (who became part of Mexico City's art scene that included Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo). And with this research, Brenner courageously and affectingly plumbs the depths of often complex family and sibling relationships.
Publishers Weekly


Vanity Fair writer-at-large Brenner pens an absorbing account of her fractious relationship with her brother. The granddaughter of a Texas discount-store magnate, the author flinched from the ultra-conventional assumptions of her affluent family. (As a college student in the 1960s, she was chagrined to receive an unrequested package of panty girdles from her mother.) Inspired by the example of her aunt Anita, who ran away to Mexico at age 19, befriended Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and became a freelance writer, Brenner thwarted expectations and forged a successful career in journalism that included a pioneering stint as a baseball columnist in Boston. In the autumn of 2001, she traveled from New York to Washington state, determined to explore long-standing tensions with her ailing older brother Carl, a fiery-tempered trial lawyer who'd left his career to cultivate apples. In deft, nuanced prose, Brenner crafts a saga that is part family memoir, part psychological thriller and riveting overview of the U.S. apple-growing industry. The nonlinear narrative never falters as it moves adeptly back and forth in time. Readers will be captivated by the author's unvarnished yet balanced portrait of her difficulties with a combative sibling who routinely ridiculed her leftist politics and peppered his conversations with tirades about bruised apples and pears. Brenner, who accompanied the ill Carl on a medical research trip to China, details the hurt, hostilities and betrayals she endured with deep compassion and an understanding heart. She also offers vivid examples of the tactics she used to counter her brother's outlandish behavior and belligerence. Foreshadowed in a stylish prose riff, the book's carefully executed denouement still packs a powerful punch. A rich and masterful memoir with great value for aspiring practitioners of the genre, as well as discerning readers.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. Marie Brenner's memories encompass a variety of settings, particularly central Texas, New York, and her brother's Washington orchards. What identities and cultures are captured in each of these settings? Where does she feel most at home? Which locale would you prefer? To what degree does birthplace shape our sense of self?

2. What is the effect of the memoir's timeline, weaving the near present with the distant past? In what way does this structure mirror the way memories enter our lives?

3. What accounts for the tremendous personality differences between Marie and Carl, despite their having had the same upbringing? What may have contributed to Carl's conservatism in the face of a family history that often embraced progressive ideas? In terms of temperament, did Marie and Carl share any similarities?

4. How did the past repeat itself in Brenner family history? How is Marie affected by her research into family lore, particularly her findings about Anita? Who are the most colorful figures in your family's past? How are we shaped by the knowledge of these legacies?

5. In what ways does religion as a cultural institution figure into the Brenner identity? As Marie captures the experience of Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States through Galveston, what costs and benefits are ascribed to assimilation, or life as a secular Jew? How does Ilene's approach to Christianity compare to Carl's?

6. Marie describes her sorrowful encounter with her ancestors' correspondence at the Harry Ransom Center, as well as her childhood home, filled with typewriters on which many carbon-copied letters were produced. What does it mean for her to come from a verbal family that left miles of documentation in its wake? Is the truth captured in such documents? Is the quest for answers a defense mechanism, as Marie proposes?

7. Discuss the experience of reading about Carl's beloved orchards and the landscape of rural Washington. What does his enthusiasm for agriculture—and his rejection of the family's apparel trade—say about him? In what ways does the perfectionistic process of nurturing, harvesting, and exporting world-class produce serve as a metaphor for his understanding of life?

8. Speaking before a crowded church, Ilene recalls that "we were going to weave a new family, and no longer be part of the tapestry of brainy squabblers that had ended their time together in silence and separation." What degrees of reconciliation are achieved in Carl's lifetime? What are the greatest hurdles to reconciliation?

9. How did Thelma and Milton, at the helm of the Brenner household, shape their children's lives? What did Marie learn from Thelma about being a woman, and what did Carl learn from Milton about becoming a man?

10. What does having a big brother signify to Marie? How does Carl seem to view the role of his little sister? What binds them together, despite their extreme differences? How does her perception of her brother differ from the way others see him?

11. How does Marie compare to the other women in Carl's life? What qualities does he appear to be drawn to? How do women respond to him?

12. With a reporter's precision, Marie describes the tumultuous emotions with which her brother confronted his illness as he tried both Chinese and western medicine, culminating in a loss of confidence in the possibility for healing. What controls our reaction to fate? What personality traits are reflected in the very different responses Carl and Marie showed to his prognosis?

13. The closing scenes capture a memory of peace and laughter between Carl and Marie as well as the beauty of the acreage he once tended. How will Casey's generation remember Carl's and Marie's? What will this sibling legacy be?

14. Marie's preface begins with an advertising line from a movie trailer: "Every life has moments that change us forever and make us who we are." She observes that, despite the hyperbole, it's a true statement. What were the most pivotal moments she encountered in her life? Which experiences have made you who you are?

15. How did you respond to the psychoanalytic theories described in the book regarding siblings? How would you describe your relationship with your siblings? Do these relationships affect (or reflect) the other interactions in your life—in love, at work, or within friendships?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen
Jacques Pepin, 2003
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780618444113


Summary
In this captivating memoir, the man whom Julia Child has called "the best chef in America" tells the story of his rise from a frightened apprentice in an exacting Old World kitchen to an Emmy Award-winning superstar who taught millions of Americans how to cook and shaped the nation's tastes in the bargain.

We see young Jacques as a homesick six-year-old boy in war-ravaged France, working on a farm in exchange for food, dodging bombs, and bearing witness as German soldiers capture his father, a fighter in the Resistance. Soon Jacques is caught up in the hurly-burly action of his mother's café, where he proves a natural. He endures a literal trial by fire and works his way up the ladder in the feudal system of France's most famous restaurant, finally becoming Charles de Gaulle's personal chef, watching the world being refashioned from the other side of the kitchen door.

When he comes to America, Jacques immediately falls in with a small group of as-yet-unknown food lovers, including Craig Claiborne, James Beard, and Julia Child, whose adventures redefine American food. Through it all, Jacques proves himself to be a master of the American art of reinvention: earning a graduate degree from Columbia University, turning down a job as John F. Kennedy's chef to work at Howard Johnson's, and, after a near-fatal car accident, switching careers once again to become a charismatic leader in the revolution that changed the way Americans approached food. Included as well are approximately forty all-time favorite recipes created during the course of a career spanning nearly half a century, from his mother's utterly simple cheese soufflé to his wife's pork ribs and redbeans.

The Apprentice is the poignant and sometimes funny tale of a boy's coming of age. Beyond that, it is the story of America's culinary awakening and the transformation of food from an afterthought to a national preoccupation. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 18, 1935
• Where—Bourg-en Bresse, France (near Lyon)
• Education—B.A. (1970), M.A. (1972), Columbia University
• Awards—Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des lettres;
   Chevalier de L'Ordre du Merite Agricole; Legion d'honneur;
   Emmy Award
• Currently—lives in Madison, Connecticut, USA


Jacques Pepin is the author of twenty-one cookbooks, including the best-selling The Apprentice and the award-winning Jacques Pepin Celebrates and Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home (with Julia Child).

He has appeared regularly on PBS programs for more than a decade, hosting over three hundred cooking shows. A contributing editor for Food & Wine, he is the dean of special programs at the French Culinary Institute in New York City. Before coming to the United States, he served as personal chef to three French heads of state. (From the publisher.)

More
Pepin was born in Bourg-en-Bresse near Lyon, and began cooking in his parents' restaurant, Le Pelican, at the age of 12. He went on to work in Paris, training under Lucien Diat at the Plaza Athénée. He eventually served as a personal chef for Charles de Gaulle and two other French premiers. Upon immigration to the United States in 1959, Pepin turned down a job offer at the Kennedy White House, and instead accepted a position as the director of research and new development for the Howard Johnson's chain of hotels. He stayed at Howard Johnson's for ten years.

Demonstrating interests beyond cooking, Pepin earned a bachelor's degree from the Columbia University School of General Studies in 1970, followed by a Master of Arts in 18th Century French poetry from Columbia in 1972.

Pepin has been featured in several highly acclaimed television shows and written eighteen books.

His celebrated La Technique is used to this day as a textbook for teaching the fundamentals of French cuisine. The success of La Technique prompted him to launch a televised version of the book, resulting in an acclaimed 1997 PBS series, The Complete  Pepin. Recently relaunched on PBS ten years after its initial run, the series included a new introduction by Pepin where he stressed that now more than ever the secret to being a successful chef and not a mere line cook lies in knowing and using the proper technique.

Pepin also co-starred in award-winning 1999 PBS series Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home with Julia Child. Their work together was honored with a Daytime Emmy in 2001.

A third series had Pepin cooking with his daughter, Claudine, wife of chef Rolland Wesen.

His show Jacques Pepin: Fast Food My Way (based on his 2004 book of the same name) ran on PBS, as did a follow-up show, Jacques Pepin: More Fast Food My Way. All of his programs have been produced by KQED-TV in San Francisco.

A time line of his life, based on his 2003 autobiography The Apprentice, is available on the KQED website.

Pepin was a guest judge on the Bravo television show Top Chef on season five, airing in 2008. He stated that his ideal "final meal" would be roast squab and fresh peas.

Pepin serves as Dean of Special Programs at the French Culinary Institute, part of the new International Culinary Center, in New York City. He is also an active contributor to the Gastronomy department at Boston University, where he teaches an online class on the cuisine and culture of France along with professor Kyri Claflin of Boston University's history department. Pepin also writes a quarterly column for Food & Wine and offers an amateur class each semester based on varied culinary topics.

Pepin currently resides with his wife, Gloria, in Madison, Connecticut. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews 
Pepin made his way late to the written word, having been a chef before he was a scholar, and a teacher and a restaurateur before he published. But first—the good luck is ours—he was a hungry child, in a country in which food was religion, and in which history imprinted itself culinarily.
Stacy Shiff - New York Times


Lest any reader think this is another saga of sex and drugs in the kitchen, it definitely is not. Instead, it's the story of just what it takes to turn a talented young Frenchman into one of the most admired figures in the culinary world. And anyone who thinks that all you need to do to be called "chef" is to survive a few months—or even a few years—in culinary school would do well to read it.
Judith Weinraub - Washington Post


In this beguiling memoir, the celebrated French chef and cooking-show host recounts his start as a scrappy thirteen-year-old country boy who arrived at his first restaurant apprenticeship still wearing short pants. An incorrigible prankster (he once coated a colleague's eyeglasses in aspic), Pépin never fully submitted to the strict regimen of the French kitchen, and, after a stint as a cook for Charles de Gaulle, he headed for New York, where he ended up working for the chain-restaurant entrepreneur Howard Johnson. Making clam chowder by the gallon was a quirky turn for a classically trained chef, but it enabled Pépin to revolutionize mass-produced food. With appealing modesty, he sees himself as essentially a blue-collar worker, whose "vantage point to history-in-the-making was the crack between two swinging kitchen doors."
The New Yorker


In this fast-moving and often touching memoir, Pepin recounts his journey from the kitchen of his mother's humble restaurant in rural France after World War II to his current position as author of 21 cookbooks, star of 13 PBS cooking shows and dean of special programs at the French Culinary Institute in New York City. Along the way he describes everything from the tough French apprenticeship system that saw him dropping out of school at 13 to work in Lyon to the beginnings of the Howard Johnson's chain. Pepin accepted a job in the Howard Johnson's test kitchen over a stint at the White House cooking for John F. Kennedy, but shows no signs of regret. In fact, if there's a flaw here, it's that Pepin's eternally upbeat attitude is sometimes a little hard to buy—although he does seem to have been born under a lucky star. Pepin came to the U.S. just when a culinary culture was building and fell into friendships with Craig Claiborne, then food editor of the New York Times, and Julia Child. Even a bad car accident when he was 39 turned out to be a godsend, as it got him out of the restaurant kitchen and into the teaching profession. Pepin mines a lot of humor from the differences between French and American attitudes toward food, as when he recounts how he and a French friend once stopped by a farm somewhere in the U.S. with a sign reading "Ducks for Sale" and wrung the neck of the duck they'd just bought in front of the horrified proprietress. Each chapter concludes with one or two recipes, many of them surprisingly earthy, such as Oatmeal Breakfast Soup with leeks and bacon.... This charming memoir will not disappoint.
Publishers Weekly


How does one become a chef? Aside from having a love for food, modern cooks are born from—diverse experiences, talents, and training. Pepin, who has given us numerous cookbooks and memorable television programs, now shares his story. Throughout his early years in the kitchens of family restaurants and highly structured apprenticeships throughout France to his move to the United States, years as a product development chef for Howard Johnson, and friendships with such famous foodies as Craig Claiborne, Pepin relates how his interest in food and culinary techniques developed into passions for cooking and teaching. He does this deftly, neatly capturing personalities and events with clear, concise writing. As a tantalizing bonus, each chapter concludes with a favorite recipe. Pepin's book is an essential counterpoint to Anthony Bourdain's cynical Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.
Library Journal


A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, The Apprentice is an earthy, honest, well-written autobiography by one of the century's best-known chefs. During WW II, Jacques' mother worked as a waitress to feed her three young sons. In 1947 Jacques' mother opened a restaurant, Chez Pepin, in a working class neighborhood in Lyon. Bigger restaurants followed and Jacques quit school at 13, determined to become a chef. In 1949 he began a three-year apprenticeship, learning to cook on a temperamental wood stove. Afterward he worked in a succession of hotels and then served in the navy during the Algerian War. He even served as chef to France's prime minister, a job that ended when the government collapsed in 1958. Soon, however, he was cooking for Charles de Gaulle. In 1959 Pepin came to the US and landed a job at the prestigious Le Pavillon in New York City. Eight months later this job ended and Pepin went to work for Howard Deering Johnson, improving the food served by his restaurant chain. Pepin also received a tempting offer—to become the White House chef, should John Kennedy be elected. But he had found a second father in Mr. Johnson, with whom he remained during the 1960s. He married, bought a house in the Catskills, fathered Claudine, and opened a soup restaurant in 1970. La Potagerie was a great success, but tragedy struck when Pepin was seriously injured in an auto accident in 1974. After this he became a teacher and TV personality. Pepin's charming memoir is enlivened with anecdotes, photos and 24 easy-to-follow recipes.
Janet Julian - KLIATT


From chef, author, and cooking-show veteran Pepin, an easygoing but proud memoir of his journey through the stations of the kitchen and the food world. Pépin doesn't gloss over the difficulties involved in scaling the French culinary ladder, but there is never any question that it was exactly what he wanted to be doing. His mother ran a series of comfortable, small-scale, well-received restaurants outside Lyon, and young Jacques took to "the hurly-burly noise of the kitchen. The heat. The sweat. The bumping of bodies. The raised voices. The constant rush of adrenaline." His apprenticeship, feudal in duration and circumstances, wasn't easy, but he reveled in the learning process of observation and imitation, a "visual osmosis" that he conveys in warm, willowy prose. Cooking in a restaurant, we realize, is a calling, not a job. Gradually introduced to a variety of French regional foods, Pépin learned thoroughly and from the ground up the responsibilities and techniques of each kitchen position. He landed a succession of jobs at great restaurants in Paris and as a private chef before moving to New York and immersing himself in the revolution overtaking American cooking. Hungry for work, he was also gratifyingly unpretentious; he took a job at Howard Johnson’s rather than the Kennedy White House because he liked his life in New York. At Ho Jo’s, he worked with chefs (many of them blacks from the American South) who lacked formal training but had "natural grace and gut-felt understanding." After a horrific car accident shattered too many bones to count and forced him to leave the kitchen, he turned to writing, teaching, and fostering the growing American awareness of good food. Pépin offers a worm's-eye view of culinary personalities and approaches, and there’s no doubt he has earned every ounce of bounty he has received from the kitchen. Prose as joyful and rich as the author’s food 
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Apprentice:

1. What personal and professional qualities does it take to become a top chef? How difficult is the road to earn the title "chef"? What would you say has made Jacques Pepin so successful?

2. Why does Pepin turn down a job as White House chef to stay with Howard Johnson? What does it say about the kind of person Pepin is? And what does the experience working at HoJo's gain him—what does he learn?

3. Why does Pepin turn to teaching and writing? What does he hope to achieve in the classroom or through books?

4. What has The Apprentice taught you about the different approaches to cooking? Have you learned any new culinary techniques that could be useful in your own kitchen?

5. Pepin shares part of the insider's world of cooking personalities. Talk about some of those culinary figures and some of the anecdotes.

6. For book clubs, have members cook and serve some of the recipes found in the book. Talk about which ones you like best.

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War
A.J. Baime, 2014
Houghton Mifflin
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780547719283


Summary
A dramatic, intimate narrative of how Ford Motor Company went from making automobiles to producing the airplanes that would mean the difference between winning and losing World War II.
 
In 1941, as Hitler’s threat loomed ever larger, President Roosevelt realized he needed weaponry to fight the Nazis—most important, airplanes—and he needed them fast. So he turned to Detroit and the auto industry for help.

The Arsenal of Democracy tells the incredible story of how Detroit answered the call, centering on Henry Ford and his tortured son Edsel, who, when asked if they could deliver 50,000 airplanes, made an outrageous claim: Ford Motor Company would erect a plant that could yield a "bomber an hour." Critics scoffed: Ford didn’t make planes; they made simple, affordable cars.

But bucking his father’s resistance, Edsel charged ahead. Ford would apply assembly-line production to the American military’s largest, fastest, most destructive bomber; they would build a plant vast in size and ambition on a plot of farmland and call it Willow Run; they would bring in tens of thousands of workers from across the country, transforming Detroit, almost overnight, from Motor City to the "great arsenal of democracy." And eventually they would help the Allies win the war.

Drawing on exhaustive research from the Ford Archives, the National Archives, and the FDR Library, A. J. Baime has crafted an enthralling, character-driven narrative of American innovation that has never been fully told, leaving readers with a vivid new portrait of America—and Detroit—during the war. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Raised—Caldwell, New Jersey
• Education—University of New Hampshire; M.A., New York University
• Currently—Chicago, Illinois


A.J. Baime is the author of Big Shots: The Men Behind the Booze (2003); Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans (2010) and The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War (2014). A magazine editor, Baime has written for numerous publications, including New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Popular Science, and Maxim. (Adapated from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
In A. J. Baime’s fast-paced book, The Arsenal of Democracy, the Ford Motor Company and its production of the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber take center stage. To be sure, this was one of many planes produced for the war, and Ford was neither the only car company to manufacture planes nor the largest military contractor. But as Baime points out, “Americans believed that no single Detroit industrialist was contributing more to the war effort than Henry Ford.... The book’s intent is not to be useful to contemporary policy debates but to tell a good story. However, ignoring some of the more challenging complexities of its subject makes The Arsenal of Democracy less rewarding than it might have been.
Charles N. Edel = New York Times Book Review


If anyone remembers Edsel Ford today, it is because of the Ford Edsel, the car created in 1957, 14 years after its namesake's death. It was one of the biggest flops in car-industry history. The only son of automotive wizard Henry Ford has deserved a better legacy, and A.J. Baime has given it to him. Although billed as a history of how the Detroit auto industry geared up to arm the United States, The Arsenal of Democracy is a touching and absorbing portrait of one the forgotten heroes of World War II.
Arthur Herman - Wall Street Journal


This accessible, surprising history is a welcome addition to the inexhaustible list of WWII studies, as Baime (Go Like Hell) claims that perhaps the most important battle was fought far from the battlefield—in the monolithic warehouses of Ford Motor Company in Detroit.... [A] forthright and absorbing look at "the biggest job in all history."
Publishers Weekly


At the core [is] an epic battle between father and son, the cantankerous industrialist Henry Ford, who despised war, and his sensitive son, Edsel, who could never emerge from his father’s shadow.... Baime details [the massive war effort] with great care and empathy for his principal subjects. —David Siegfried
Booklist


The Ford Motor Company goes to war...[is the] latest examination of the transition of American industry to wartime production.... Written in a hyperbolic tabloid style...the book falls well short of the standards set by similar recent works. See Arthur Herman's Freedom's Forge instead. A complex and worthy story reduced to a beach read.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)

The Art of Memoir 
Mary Karr, 2015
HarperCollins
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062223067


Summary
Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well.

For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse. (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.)

In The Art of Memoir, she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and black belt sinner, providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre.

Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers’ experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr’s own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told—and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.) As she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, she breaks open our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminates the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate.

Joining such classics as Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, The Art of Memoir is an elegant and accessible exploration of one of today’s most popular literary forms—a tour de force from an accomplished master pulling back the curtain on her craft. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 16, 1955
• Where—Groves, Texas, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Goddard College
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—teaches English at Syracuse University.


Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist, and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University and, in 2015, was chosen to deliver the commencement speech at the university.

Memoirs
Her memoir The Liars' Club, published in 1995, was a New York Times bestseller for over a year and was named one of the year's best books. It delves vividly and often humorously into her deeply troubled childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty industrial section of Southeast Texas in the 1960s. She was encouraged to write her personal history by her friend Tobias Wolff, but has said she only took up the project when her marriage fell apart.

She followed the book with another memoir, Cherry (2000), about her late adolescence and early womanhood.

A third memoir Lit details her "journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic," came out in 2009. She writes about her time as an alcoholic and the salvation she found in her conversion to Catholicism. She does, however, describe herself as a cafeteria Catholic.

In 2015 Karr published The Art of Memoir. Based on her writing class syllabus at Syracuse, the book is aimed at novice writers yet may also appeal to the general public for its humor and for its insights into the writing process. The book includes an extensive list of Karr's recommended memoirs in the appendix.

Poetry and essays on poetry
Karr won a 1989 Whiting Award for her poetry. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry in 2005 and has won Pushcart prizes for both her poetry and her essays. Karr has published four volumes of poetry: Abacus (1987), The Devil's Tour (1993), Viper Rum (1998), and Sinners Welcome (2006). Her poems have appeared in major literary magazines such as Poetry, New Yorker, and Atlantic Monthly.

Karr's Pushcart Award winning essay, "Against Decoration." was published in the quarterly review Parnassus (1991). The essay argues for content over poetic style—insisting that emotions need to be expressed directly and with clarity. She criticized the use of obscure characters, imprecise or "foggy" descriptions of the physical world, and "showy, over-used references. She also holds that abstruse language—polysyllables, archaic words, intricate syntax, "yards of adjectives"—serve only as an obstacle to readers' understanding.

Karr directly criticized well-known, well-connected, and award-winning poets such as James Merrill, Amy Clampitt, Vijay Seshadri, and Rosanna Warren (daughter of Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren). Karr favors controlled elegance to create transcendent poetic meaning out of not-quite-ordinary moments, presenting James Merrill's "Charles on Fire" as a successful example.

Another essay, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer," was published in Poetry (2005). Karr tells of her move from agnostic alcoholic to baptized Catholic of the decidedly "cafeteria" kind, yet one who prays twice daily with loud fervor from her "foxhole." In the essay Karr argues that poetry and prayer arise from the same sources within us.

Personal life
In the 90s, Karr dated David Foster Wallace, who once tried to push her out of a moving car.

Awards and honors
1989 - Whiting Award
1995 - PEN/Martha Albrand Award for The Liars' Club
2005 - Guggenheim Fellowship. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/30/2015.)

Book Reviews
There’s a textbook lurking at the heart of Mary Karr’s new book about how memoirs have and should be written. But it’s a chaotic one: Ms. Karr is, by her own admission, a passionate, messy teacher..... Ms. Karr acknowledges that this book began with the teaching syllabus she uses at Syracuse University.... She has fleshed it out with analyses of some of her favorite memoirists’ work, but she can’t help being more interesting than her lesson plans. The best parts of this book are those that veer off course and find her writing about herself again,
Janet Maslin - New York Times


The Art of Memoir is a hodgepodge of a book...[that] will appeal most to those hoping to write their own memoirs.... Though Karr’s own Texan voice strains a bit in the opening pages to achieve the swagger and folksy charm she is known for, her emphasis on finding an authentic, unpretentious voice will be useful to any novice writer.... Her close readings are full of smart insights about the problems writers overcome.... The Art of Memoir is full of Karr’s usual wit, compassion and, perhaps most reassuringly, self-doubt. Her fans should be delighted—and they can’t go wrong reading the books she discusses, including her own.
Janet Spear - Washington Post


Should be required reading for anyone attempting to write a memoir, but anyone who loves literature will enjoy it too.
Wall Street Journal;


A master class on memoir, from a memoirist who pulls no punches.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


Could have been called The Art of Living.
San Francisco Chronicle


A veritable blueprint for the genre…. Lovers of the form and aspiring scribblers alike will relish this comprehensive appreciation of and guide to writing the real self.
Oprah Magazine


(Starred review.) Karr write[s] exquisitely...(and without pretense, often with raw authenticity.... The text is a must-read for memoirists, but will also appeal to memoir lovers and all who are curious about how books evolve.... Karr wisely (and quite often humorously) guid[es] readers in their understanding and experience of the art.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [A]n enlightening review of the memoir as a medium for communicating carnal, lived experiences. Fresh and heartfelt, Karr's analysis of the form illustrates its variety and depth, the significance of voice, and the perception of truth. [A]n excellent challenge for readers and writers alike. —Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib.
Library Journal


[A] spirited commentary about memoir, the literary form that has become synonymous with her name.... Karr's sassy Texas wit and her down-to-earth observations ...make for lively and inspiring reading. A generous and singularly insightful examination of memoir.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. For years Mary Karr resisted writing autobiographical nonfiction and instead wrote poetry and fiction. Why was this? How is each of these genres different? What are the strengths and limitations of each?

2. What particular abilities and talents make a great memoirist?

3. Examine Karr’s emphasis on the importance of carnality in memoir writing. Why is unique, sensory detail so important? How does it have "psychological effects" on a reader?

4. Both memoir writing and psychotherapy require the act of revisiting and articulating past experience, telling the stories. In what other ways are these two complex pursuits similar or different?

5. How does revisiting and engaging with past trauma or difficulty potentially transform its effects?

6. How does the unreliability of human memory influence a person’s attempt to understand herself? In what ways might a writer bridge gaps of information on the page?

7. How much of a person’s identity is the result of arbitrary early experience? To what extent can she forge a new identity? How might this influence the writing of memoir?

8. Given that "from the second you choose one event over another, you’re shaping the past’s meaning," how should a memoir writer best think about and negotiate the truth of her experience? What is a necessary and appropriate balance of honesty and creativity in nonfiction writing?

9. Karr believes that lying is not just unethical for a writer but usually "carve[s] a lonely gap between your disguise and who you really are." What are the effects of such a personal disassociation? Karr adamantly claims "each great memoir lives or dies...on voice." What is voice? How does a writer develop it? How does "finding...inner truth about psychological conflicts" help?

10. What is the nature and importance of the "inner enemy" in a memoir? Why might a "blazing psychic struggle" be essential for the writer and the reader?

11. Karr admits that she "hid from readers on pages that sugarcoated any emotional truths," and finds many of her talented students doing the same. Why is this resistance so common even after one has decided to write memoir?

12. Karr believes that memoirs often fail because the narrator fails to change over time. Why is experiencing and articulating personal change or transformation so essential?

13. Karr says, every writer needs two selves—the generative self and the editor self. How are these essentially different? What’s the best way to balance them?

14. Considering writers like Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston and Michael Herr, in what ways can or should a memoir be a social or political act?

15. Considering G. H. Hardy’s self-evaluation in A Mathematician’s Apology, how might an earnest writer evaluate the value of her experience short of public recognition or financial success?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)

The Astronaut Wives Club:  A True Story
Lily Koppel, 2013
Grand Central Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455503247


Summary
As America's Mercury Seven astronauts were launched on death-defying missions, television cameras focused on the brave smiles of their young wives. Overnight, these women were transformed from military spouses into American royalty. They had tea with Jackie Kennedy, appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and quickly grew into fashion icons.

Annie Glenn, with her picture-perfect marriage, was the envy of the other wives; platinum-blonde Rene Carpenter was proclaimed JFK's favorite; and licensed pilot Trudy Cooper arrived on base with a secret. Together with the other wives they formed the Astronaut Wives Club, meeting regularly to provide support and friendship. Many became next-door neighbors and helped to raise each other's children by day, while going to glam parties at night as the country raced to land a man on the Moon.

As their celebrity rose—and as divorce and tragic death began to touch their lives—they continued to rally together, and the wives have now been friends for more than fifty years. The Astronaut Wives Club tells the real story of the women who stood beside some of the biggest heroes in American history. (From the publisher.)

Watch a video of the astronaut wives.

Author Bio
• Birth—1981
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College
• Currently—lives in New York, New York


Lily Koppel is a writer living in New York. She is known for her books, The Astronaut Wives Club (2013) and The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal (2008). Astronaut Wives traces the lives and marriages of the wives of the nation's astronauts from 1969-1971. Red Leather Diary is about her discovery of a young woman’s diary, kept in New York in the 1930s, and its return to Florence Wolfson Howitt, its owner, at age 90. The diary was recovered from a steamer trunk found in a dumpster outside of Koppel's apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The non-fiction book is based on Koppel's New York Times City section cover story.

Koppel writes for the New York Times and other publications. She graduated from Barnard College in 2003 with a degree in English Literature and creative writing. Koppel began contributing reporting to the New York Times "Boldface Names" celebrity column in 2003.

She has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America and National Public Radio. (From .)

Book Reviews
A fair and accomplished reporter...Lily Koppel offers a grounded, irresistible and sociable social history.... Koppel's book deftly delivers The Wife Stuff.../ Koppel does an excellent job of capturing a group portrait with enough highlights, low points, sunny spots and shadows for individual features to emerge.... The Astronaut Wives Club is wholly and consistently in Koppel's voice: smart, evocative, informed and warm-an electric fireside chat with the women who put men on the moon.
Chicago Tribune


The men catapulted into space in the 20th century were interesting, sort of. The women they left back on earth were fascinating.... A lively account of how the wives coped with fame, fear, [and] loneliness.
People


This is one of those light, tasty summer reads you'll guzzle down like a milk shake.
Entertainment Weekly


[A] true (juicy) story. Gotta love non-fiction that feels like a beach read: Lily Koppel's The Astronaut Wives Club chronicles the wives of 1960s astronauts.... Put down that mystery and pick up some history!
Redbook


In this entertaining and quirky throwback, journalist Koppel revisits the ladies who cheered and bolstered their men to victory in the U.S. space program..., revealing public triumph and rarely private agony. Koppel looks at the history of the race to space...focusing on the wives...[who] had to be gracious to the Life magazine reporters who invaded their homes, concealing unpleasant domestic details..., and unseemly competition with other wives.... This is truly a great snapshot of the times.
Publishers Weekly


The author's aim was to uncover the real lives behind the "perfect" astronaut wives, and she hits the mark, crafting an exceptional story that seriously examines the imperfection and humanity of America's heroic astronauts, their wives, and their families. —Crystal Goldman, San Jose State Univ. Lib., CA
Library Journal


Mad Men fans and history buffs alike won't want to miss a new book about...the lives of the astronauts' wives.... We meet the Mercury Seven women in the first chapter of The Astronaut Wives Club, and author Lily Koppel does a nice job of staying close to their stories. By the time you see the women's faces in the pictures, you'll feel like you're a member of the gang.... It's hard to believe no one has already written their story, and this reader is glad Koppel finally did.
BookPage


Koppel explores the cohesiveness of a group of wives who formed an unofficial support group and their individual development during the early years of the Cold War. With the announcement on April 9, 1959, of the "nation's first astronauts," the women's lives changed, as they became instant celebrities along with their husbands.... Koppel describes their appearance on the pages of Life magazine, looking like "scoops of ice cream" in their "pressed pastel shirtwaists."... Insightful social history with a light touch.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Astronaut Wives Club:

1. Talk about the lives of the different women covered in the book. Whom did you most sympathize with, admire, or dislike?

2. What did you find most impressive regarding the level of support the women provided one another? Is there anything in your own life that resembles the bond that developed among the astronaut wives?

3. Discuss the various stresses the women were under: the invasion of privacy, the absense of husbands, the not infrequent infidelity, and  the anxiety for their husbands' lives. What was most difficult? What would you have found most difficult. Do you find any aspect of their lives enviable? Were the lives of the astronaut spouses any more difficult than other spouses whose husbands or wives go off to war?

4. Talk about Betty Grissom, Pat White and Martha Chaffee—the widows of the three men who were burned alive during a pre-launch test of their Apollo 1 mission. How did each woman handle the horrific tragedy? Pat White was considered "the final victim of the Apollo 1 fire," writes Lily Koppel. Is there any way in which Pat White's life might have had a better ending?

5. Talk about the marital relationships within the couples. Which marriages did you find solid and which were troubling...and why? Were you surprised at the number of marriages that ultimately failed?

6. To what degree, if any, might the lives of these women be different today given the change in society's attitudes toward women? Consider, for instance, their reactions to the Life magazine article:

The wives were completely shocked, worrying about how America would judge them. They would never wear such a bold colored lipstick. They were mothers, not vixens.

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2017
W.W. Norton & Co.
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393609394


Summary
The essential universe, from our most celebrated and beloved astrophysicist.

♦ What is the nature of space and time?
♦ How do we fit within the universe?
♦ How does the universe fit within us?

There’s no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil deGrasse Tyson.

But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in tasty chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.

While you wait for your morning coffee to brew, for the bus, the train, or a plane to arrive, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry will reveal just what you need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 5, 1958
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.S., Harvard University; M.S., University of Texas; M.S., Ph.D., Columbia University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Since 1996, he has been the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. The center is part of the American Museum of Natural History, where Tyson founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate in the department since 2003.

Born and raised in New York City, Tyson became interested in astronomy at the age of nine after a visit to the Hayden Planetarium. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, where he was editor-in-chief of the Physical Science Journal, he completed a bachelor's degree in physics at Harvard University in 1980.

After receiving a master's degree in astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin in 1983, he earned his master's (1989) and doctorate (1991) in astrophysics at Columbia University. For the next three years, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. In 1994, he joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist and the Princeton faculty as a visiting research scientist and lecturer. In 1996, he became director of the planetarium and oversaw its $210-million reconstruction project, which was completed in 2000.

From 1995 to 2005, Tyson wrote monthly essays in the "Universe" column for Natural History magazine, some of which were published in his books Death by Black Hole (2007) and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017). During the same period, he wrote a monthly column in Star Date magazine, answering questions about the universe under the pen name "Merlin." Material from the column appeared in his books Merlin's Tour of the Universe (1998) and Just Visiting This Planet (1998).

Tyson served on a 2001 government commission on the future of the U.S. aerospace industry, and on the 2004 Moon, Mars and Beyond commission. He was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal in the same year. From 2006 to 2011, he hosted the television show NOVA ScienceNow on PBS. Since 2009, Tyson hosted the weekly podcast StarTalk. A spin-off, also called StarTalk, began airing on National Geographic in 2015.

In 2014, he hosted the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a successor to Carl Sagan's 1980 series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences awarded Tyson the Public Welfare Medal in 2015 for his "extraordinary role in exciting the public about the wonders of science." (Excerpted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/72/2017.)

Book Reviews
Neil deGrasse Tyson is a rock star, and his newest book shows why: as small as it is — it practically fits in your pocket — its subject is nothing less than the universe itself. More remarkable, it’s a bestseller. Think about that: a book on astrophysics at the top of the charts. What’s the world coming to?… Astrophysics for People in a Hurry is written for…the layperson, for folks who don’t spend time in labs or at the chalkboard solving equations with Greek letters. Make no mistake, though: Tyson's lucid, accessible prose takes on complicated subjects without dumbing them  down. His tone is light, even funny….  READ MORE…
P.J. Adler - LitLovers


Tyson is a master of streamlining and simplification …taking mind-bogglingly complex ideas, stripping them down to their nuts and bolts, padding them with colorful allegories and dorky jokes, and making them accessible to the layperson.
Salon


This book will keep you fascinated with succinct and dynamic explanations of a wide variety of astronomical topics. A winner that every astronomy enthusiast should have on the bookshelf!
David J. Eicher - Astronomy


With wry humor, keen vision, and abundant humanity, Neil deGrasse Tyson distills the big questions of space, time, and reality into short, insightful chapters you can enjoy with your morning coffee.
Discover


This may have been written for people in a hurry, but I urge you to take your time. It will all be over far too soon.
BBC's Sky at Night (UK)


Tyson manifests science brilliantly …[his] insights are valuable for any leader, teacher, scientist or educator.
Forbes


Tyson…has revisited, modified, consolidated, and… updated a number of essays from his Universe column from Natural History magazine.… Tyson fans and newcomers alike — will enjoy this caper through the cosmos. —Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono
Library Journal


Even readers normally adverse to anything to do with physics or chemistry will find Tyson’s wittily delivered explanations compelling and disarmingly entertaining.
Booklist


[Q]uick and thoroughly enjoyable.… [The book] may fundamentally shift your perspective of our place in the universe — and convince you to pursue some of the many fine longer-form books on the subject. A sublime introduction to some of the most exciting ideas in astrophysics that will leave readers wanting more.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Astrophysics for People in a Hurry...then take off on your own:

1. What is your level of scientific education: have you ever had a physics class, for instance? How much do you know, as a non-scientist, of the cosmos — it's history, its present state, and it's possible future, as well as how it works? What have you learned from reading Neil deGrasse Tyson's book?

2. How accessible is Tyson's book to a non-scientist? How much of the information are you able to grasp? Consider the slenderness of the book — and the fact that there are only about 200 words on each page. Does the physical slightness of book detract from or enhance your reading experience? Is the book dumbed down?

3. Do you find Astrophysics for People in a Hurry interesting? Has it inspired you to want to learn more about the subject? Or does this book satisfy your level of curiosity?

4. Is there a particular chapter or topic that you find more interesting than others? Or perhaps find easier — or maybe more difficult — to grasp than others? Consider dark matter or Einstein's General Theory of Relativity? What about the chapter on exoplanets?

5. What does Tyson mean by "cosmic perspective"? Does his view resonate with you or not? Do you have a different sense of the universe than Tyson?

6. Tyson has a gift for picturesque facts and analogies like the fact that two cubic feet of iridium has the same weight as a Buick … or the fact that a pulsar has about as much density as 100 elephants crammed into a Chap Stick case. Are there others that struck you as particularly helpful or clever?

7. Talk about some of the areas of astrophysics for which we've amassed a fair amount of knowledge …as well as the many mysteries that we still don't have answers for.

8. How familiar were you with Neil deGrasse Tyson before reading this latest book of his. Have you read any of his other books or articles? Have you watched any of his television shows, his 2014 sequel to Carl Sagan's Cosmos, for instance. Or perhaps you've seen his Great Courses lectures or listened to StarTalk, his podcast?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

At Home 
Bill Bryson, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780767919388


Summary
Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.

Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to “write a history of the world without leaving home.” The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom, sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen, nutrition and the spice trade; and so on, as Bryson shows how each has fig­ured in the evolution of private life. Whatever happens in the world, he demonstrates, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture.

Bill Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and he is a master at turning the seemingly isolated or mundane fact into an occasion for the most diverting exposition imaginable. His wit and sheer prose fluency make At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 8 1951
• Where—Des Moines, Iowa, USA
• Education—B.A., Drake University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Norfolk, England, UK


William McGuire "Bill" Bryson is a best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and on science. Born an American, he was a resident of North Yorkshire, UK, for most of his professional life before moving back to the US in 1995. In 2003 Bryson moved back to the UK, living in Norfolk, and was appointed Chancellor of Durham University.

Early years
Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, the son of William and Mary Bryson. He has an older brother, Michael, and a sister, Mary Jane Elizabeth.

He was educated at Drake University but dropped out in 1972, deciding to instead backpack around Europe for four months. He returned to Europe the following year with a high school friend, the pseudonymous Stephen Katz (who later appears in Bryson's A Walk in the Woods). Some of Bryson's experiences from this European trip are included as flashbacks in a book about a similar excursion written 20 years later, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe.

Staying in the UK, Bryson landed a job working in a psychiatric hospital—the now defunct Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water in Surrey. There he met his wife Cynthia, a nurse. After marring, the couple moved to the US, in 1975, so Bryson could complete his college degree. In 1977 they moved back to the UK where they remained until 1995.

Living in North Yorkshire and working primarily as a journalist, Bryson eventually became chief copy editor of the business section of The Times, and then deputy national news editor of the business section of The Independent.

He left journalism in 1987, three years after the birth of his third child. Still living in Kirkby Malham, North Yorkshire, Bryson started writing independently, and in 1990 their fourth and final child, Sam, was born.

Books
Bryson came to prominence in the UK with his 1995 publication of Notes from a Small Island,  an exploration of Britain. Eight years later, as part of the 2003 World Book Day, Notes was voted by UK readers as the best summing up of British identity and the state of the nation. (The same year, 2003, saw Bryson appointed a Commissioner for English Heritage.)

In 1995, Bryson and his family returned to the US, living in Hanover, New Hampshire for the next eight years. His time there is recounted in the 1999 story collection, I'm A Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to American After 20 Years Away (known as Notes from a Big Country in the UK, Canada and Australia).

It was during this time that Bryson decided to walk the Appalachian Trail with his friend Stephen Katz. The resulting book is the 1998 A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. The book became one of Bryson's all-time bestsellers and was adapted to film in 2015, starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte.

In 2003, the Brysons and their four children returned to the UK. They now live in Norfolk.

That same year, Bryson published A Short History of Nearly Everything, a 500-page exploration, in nonscientific terms, of the history of some of our scientific knowledge. The book reveals the often humble, even humorous, beginnings of some of the discoveries which we now take for granted.

The book won Bryson the prestigious 2004 Aventis Prize for best general science book and the 2005 EU Descartes Prize for science communication. Although one scientist is alleged to have jokingly described A Brief History as "annoyingly free of mistakes," Bryson himself makes no such claim, and a list of nine reported errors in the book is available online.

Bryson has also written two popular works on the history of the English language—Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way (1990) and Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States (1994). He also updated of his 1983 guide to usage, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. These books were popularly acclaimed and well-reviewed, despite occasional criticism of factual errors, urban myths, and folk etymologies.

In 2016, Bryson published The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in England, a sequel to his Notes from a Small Island.

Honors
In 2005, Bryson was appointed Chancellor of Durham University, succeeding the late Sir Peter Ustinov, and has been particularly active with student activities, even appearing in a Durham student film (the sequel to The Assassinator) and promoting litter picks in the city. He had praised Durham as "a perfect little city" in Notes from a Small Island. He has also been awarded honorary degrees by numerous universities, including Bournemouth University and in April 2002 the Open University.

In 2006, Frank Cownie, the mayor of Des Moines, awarded Bryson the key to the city and announced that 21 October 2006 would be known as "Bill Bryson, The Thunderbolt Kid, Day."

In November 2006, Bryson interviewed the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair on the state of science and education.

On 13 December 2006, Bryson was awarded an honorary OBE for his contribution to literature. The following year, he was awarded the James Joyce Award of the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin.

In January 2007, Bryson was the Schwartz Visiting Fellow of the Pomfret School in Connecticut.

In May 2007, he became the President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. His first area focus in this role was the establishment of an anti-littering campaign across England. He discussed the future of the countryside with Richard Mabey, Sue Clifford, Nicholas Crane and Richard Girling at CPRE's Volunteer Conference in November 2007. (From Wikipedia. Adapted 2/1/2016.)

Book Reviews
Bryson (A Short History of Everything) takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, and finds it crammed with 10,000 years of fascinating historical bric-a-brac. Each room becomes a starting point for a free-ranging discussion of rarely noticed but foundational aspects of social life. A visit to the kitchen prompts disquisitions on food adulteration and gluttony; a peek into the bedroom reveals nutty sex nostrums and the horrors of premodern surgery; in the study we find rats and locusts; a stop in the scullery illuminates the put-upon lives of servants. Bryson follows his inquisitiveness wherever it goes, from Darwinian evolution to the invention of the lawnmower, while savoring eccentric characters and untoward events (like Queen Elizabeth I's pilfering of a subject's silverware). There are many guilty pleasures, from Bryson's droll prose—"What really turned the Victorians to bathing, however, was the realization that it could be gloriously punishing"—to the many tantalizing glimpses behind closed doors at aristocratic English country houses. In demonstrating how everything we take for granted, from comfortable furniture to smoke-free air, went from unimaginable luxury to humdrum routine, Bryson shows us how odd and improbable our own lives really are.
Publishers Weekly

Popular nonfiction writer Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything), an American-born UK resident, uses his home—a former Victorian parsonage—to explore how the contents of the rooms—in both his and others' dwellings—are reflections of our history. Changes in how we cope with hygiene, sex, death, sleep, amusement, nutrition, and various manufacturing and service trades all leave legacies on the domestic front. Looking at so many aspects of quotidian culture, Bryson understandably risks leaving out some parts, unlike microstudies such as Mark Kurlansky's Salt. Concentrating on the last 150 years of industrial society, thus including those advances showcased at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (the year his house was built), he often wanders back several centuries. The digressions can be overwhelming, especially as the chapters do not provide clear organization. A dedicated wordsmith writing in a colloquial style, Bryson evidently enjoys his musings and trusts that his public will do the same. Verdict: Readers might best use this anecdotally constructed book by dipping into, rather than methodically reading, it. Its eclectic, ambulatory arrangement will delight many but baffle others. Bryson fans will want to read it. With a bibliography listing print sources but no websites and no endnotes. —Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress
Library Journal

(Starred review.) [A] delightful stroll through the history of domestic life. Now living in a 19th-century church rectory in Norfolk, England, the author decided to learn about the ordinary things of life by exploring each room in his house.... In a sense, Bryson’s book is a history of “getting comfortable slowly".... Informative, readable and great fun.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for At Home:

1. This book is a series of loosely-connected essays about ... well, what has made life comfortable, indeed, habitable for all of us. What was your experience reading At Home—did you find the loose structure of the work enjoyable, or did find it disjointed and overly digressive? How did you read the book—sequentially, chapter by chapter...or did you "skip and dip," reading ones you felt might be interesting while skipping others?

2. What do you find most interesting in Bryson's historical accounts? What surprises you the most...or impresses you the most? Horrify you? Anything make you laugh?

3. Sometimes it seems as if historical events are inevitable, but Bryson seems to suggest otherwise. Talk about the ways in which coincidence has influcenced history.

4. Progress happens inspite of oursleves. Find examples in Bryson's book of those who resisted new ideas—and insisted that their traditional notions of how the world worked was the only correct way. (Hint: approaches to hygiene...)

5. Some have pointed out the lack of documentation for many of Bryson's claims. Does that bother you...or are footnotes unnecessary in a non-academic work like At Home?

6. Overall, what have you taken away from Bryson's book? Have you read other Bryson works...if so, how does this stack up?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

The Audacity of Self:  Dare to Put You First
Raquel A. Stuart, Ph.D., 2016
Balboa Press
112 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781504349048


Summary
The Audacity of Self: Dare to Put You First is a delightful must-read. This book pens a powerful account of emotional pain from not being genuine with self and others.

It takes you on a journey from insecurity and having a victim mentality to strength, love of self, and moving from victim to victor. This journey is not an easy one; then again, nothing worth having ever is.

This book is interactive in the sense that it will challenge you from beginning to end. It is a reminder to give yourself permission to live authentically through your words and actions.

The author encourages you to believe in yourself and declare that you are worthy to live an awesome and amazing life. It is up to you to create the space and dare to put you first.

Author Bio
• Birth—October 27, 1972
• Where—St. Michael, Barbados
• Education—Ph.D., Capella University
• Currently—lives in the state of New Jersey, USA


First...in her own words:
I was born on a small island in the West Indies where I lived with my mom for the first six years of my life. I vaguely remember my dad being around, but as far as I can remember, he didn’t live with us. He lived with his mother and brother and I visited them. I did not know it then, but my mom had been a victim of domestic violence; she had suffered at the hands of my father. They were teenagers when they had me, my mom, 18, and my dad, 19.

At the age of six, I immigrated with my mom to America, where we came to live with my grandmother and uncle in Brownsville, a community in Brooklyn, New York City. I lived in NYC for the majority of my life and attended school and college in NYC.

Dr. Raquel A. Stuart is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with a Ph.D. in Human Services with a specialization in Counseling. She has subject matter expertise in high engagement presentations and workshops dealing with sexuality, body image, relationships, and self-esteem. She has served as a Psychology Professor for numerous years at various universities.

Dr. Stuart is the host of a weekly talk show, Bare It All. She is the Founder and CEO of Sistas Speak, LLC, a transformational movement which teaches women and girls to live beyond their reasons and justifications and to understand that if they want something different they have to do something different. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow the author on Facebook.

Book Reviews
The Audacity of Self: Dare to Put You First is a delightful must read. This book is raw, and Dr. Stuart pens a powerful account of her struggles that inspires her readers to push forward in the face of adversity. She displays pure strength and authenticity in this awe inspiring chronicle despite hurt, pain, and shame to shed her victim mentality in a fight to transform and reclaim her life.
Dr. Leslie E. Brown, Author of The Thorns Within

 
Raquel writes authentically from the heart. She is real and shares her journey of what she has gone through to where she is now in her life, which is living her life with purpose, power, courage, freedom from the past, with a sprinkle of fun and humor. I feel this book is a MUST read for everyone. We only have 1 life and it's now to live it, why not let Raquel share her journey in supporting our journey in living life Audaciously.
Regina Rossi Lamothe, LCSW

Discussion Questions
1. When we walk around with a negative attitude, where does that attitude get us?

2. How do you know you are walking in your purpose?

3. When you are having a conversation with yourself, what does it sound like?

4. How do you know if the relationships you have are stretching you beyond your comfort zone?

5. What are you seeking from your life?

6. What does self-love look like for you?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

top of page (summary)

Audition
Barbara Walters, 2008
Knopf Doubleday
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307269546


Summary
Young people starting out in television sometimes say to me: “I want to be you.” My stock reply is always: “Then you have to take the whole package.”

And now, at last, the most important woman in the history of television journalism gives us that “whole package,” in her inspiring and riveting memoir. After more than forty years of interviewing heads of state, world leaders, movie stars, criminals, murderers, inspirational figures, and celebrities of all kinds, Barbara Walters has turned her gift for examination onto herself to reveal the forces that shaped her extraordinary life.

Barbara Walters’s perception of the world was formed at a very early age. Her father, Lou Walters, was the owner and creative mind behind the legendary Latin Quarter nightclub, and it was his risk-taking lifestyle that made Barbara aware of the ups and downs that can occur when someone is willing to take great risks.

The financial responsibility for her family, the fear, the love all played a large part in the choices she made as she grew up: the friendships she developed, the relationships she had, the marriages she tried to make work. Ultimately, thanks to her drive, combined with a decent amount of luck, she began a career in television. And what a career it has been! Against great odds, Barbara has made it to the top of a male-dominated industry.

She has spent a lifetime auditioning, and this book, in some ways, is her final audition, as she fully opens up both her private and public lives. In doing so, she has given us a story that is heartbreaking and honest, surprising and fun, sometimes startling, and always fascinatings. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 25, 1929
• Where—Brookline, Massachesetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Sarah Lawrence College
• Currently—lives in New York City


Barbara Jill Walters is an American journalist, writer, and media personality who was first known as a popular TV morning news anchor for over 10 years on NBC's Today, where she worked with Hugh Downs and later hosts Frank McGee and Jim Hartz. Walters later spent 25 years as co-host of ABC's newsmagazine 20/20. She was the first female co-anchor of network evening news, working with Harry Reasoner on the ABC Evening News and was later a correspondent for ABC World News Tonight (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
A woman with an impeccable sense of timing…There will never be another television news career like this one.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


Breaking news: Barbara Walters wears fake eyelashes, is afraid to drive, gave up her black married lover to save her career (while his went down the tubes). These and other true confessions provide the tabloid interest through 600 pages of the network diva's new memoir, Audition. But it's her heartfelt candor that lifts this book above mere titillation. Finally we learn why Walters is so relentless. It's a question I've often pondered watching her on television after beginning my own TV news career 30 years ago. In this engaging and chatty look back at a life largely lived in public view, Walters provides the answer.
Kathleen Matthews - Washington Post


An unusually ambitious and successful book.... suffused with an emotional intensity…it belongs to a part of American culture that Walters helped invent.
The New Yorker


Audition is brutally honest, both about Walters and those she's worked with. Readers won't be left wondering what she thinks of anything, or anyone, for that matter.... It's a fascinating look at a woman who has lived a fascinating life.
Laura L. Hutchinson - Free Lance-Star


Although Walters writes, "It was not in my nature to be courageous, to be the first," her compulsively readable memoir proves otherwise. No one lasts on TV for more than 45 years without the ability to make viewers feel comfortable, and Walters's amiable persona perfectly translates to the page. She gives us an entertaining panorama of a full life lived and recounted with humor and bracing honesty. Walters is surprisingly candid: about her older sister's retardation, her father's suicide attempt, her midlife affairs (including ones with John Warner—before and after his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor—and a very married Edward Brooke, the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction), her daughter's troubled teen years and her acrimonious relationships with coanchors Frank McGee and Harry Reasoner. She vividly recounts her decision to leave NBC's Today Show after 14 years to become the first female nightly news coanchor, and tells of the firestorm of criticism she endured for accepting that pioneering position and its million-dollar salary. Alternating between tales of her personal struggles, professional achievements and insider anecdotes about the celebrities and world leaders she's interviewed, this mammoth memoir's energy never flags.
Publishers Weekly


(Audio version.) Listeners have two recordings of Walters's 580-page tell-all from which to choose. The abridged version is read by the media personality herself, and other than affording listeners her authentic voice, complete with her trademark lisp, this version is not worthwhile—lasting just six hours, it omits massive amounts of information; notably, Walters's affair with former senator Edward Brooke.In the unabridged version, Bernadette Dunne does a fine job as a surrogate for Walters. The quality of both versions is excellent, and both are appropriate for audio and biography collections in all types of libraries.
Library Journal


and regret are as much the subjects here as religious controversy. Ruefully humorous and tenderly understanding.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to get your discussion started for Audition:

1. Talk about Walters' youth, especially her father's career in show business and its effect on Barbara's own career—her unflagging drive and energy.

2. Walters openly shares the knocks and insults that came her way, both while building her career and even when she reached the top: from Newsweek's "dumdum bullets swaddled in angora" to Saturday Night Live and Gilda Radner's "Baba Wawa." Why such relentless mockery? How well does she seem to handle it?

3. Even as she attained fame, Walter's career continued to stumble—when paired with NBC's Frank McGee or during her stint as co-host with Harry Reasoner on ABC. To what do you attribute this—to Walter's overreaching, to others' professional envy, to the fact that she was a pioneering woman in a male profession...or to something else?

4. Did reading her memoir, change your attitudes about Walters? How did you view her before you read Auditions ... and after? Overall, how does Barbara Walters come across, what kind of an individual is she, what kind of personal character traits does she possess? Do you admire her more...or like her less?

5. Do you feel Walter's self-assessment is frank and on-the-mark? Do you find it honest...or self-serving...or... defensive...or refreshing...or what?

6. Discuss the way Walters deals with her failed marriages and the difficulties she shares with readers in raising her daughter Jackie. How does she treat these painful episodes in her life? Does she accept responsibility for her failures and difficulties, or accept that they are part of the life she has chosen?

7. Which celebrity episode did you enjoy reading about most and why? Which interviewee did you like the most? Admire the most? Dislike the most?

8. When aspiring young newscasters tell Walters they want a career just like hers, what does she mean when she says, "Then you have to take the whole package"?

9. Walters rejects the notion that women can't have it all—"a great marriage, successful career, and well-adjusted children, at least not at the same time." What are your thoughts?

10. In your opinion, to what extent are female TV news personalities, such as Katie Couric and Christiane Amanpour, responsible to Walters for their careers?

11. A fascinating corollary to Walters' book is the question of whether or not women are selected as TV news personalities based on their looks or their talent. Which is more important? When women age, what happens to their careers? Are older women ever allowed to attain the status of a great "grey eminence," like Walter Cronkite or Harry Reasoner or Bob Schieffer? Are they allowed to gain weight like Bill O'Reilly—or even be homely like Dan Rather (well, unless you consider him good-looking.)

(Questions from LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X 
Malcolm X and Alex Haley, 1965
Random House
527 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345376718


Summary
With its first great victory in the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights movement gained the powerful momentum it needed to sweep forward into its crucial decade, the 1960s. As voices of protest and change rose above the din of history and false promises, one sounded more urgently, more passionately than the rest.

Malcolm X—once called the most dangerous man in America—challenged the world to listen and learn the truth as he experienced it. And his enduring message is as relevant today as when he first delivered it.

In his autobiography's searing pages, Malcolm X the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement to veteran writer and journalist Alex Haley. In a unique collaboration, Alex Haley worked with Malcolm X for nearly two years, interviewing, listening to, and understanding the most controversial leader of his time.

Raised in Lansing, Michigan, Malcolm Little's road to world fame was as astonishing as it was unpredictable. After drifting from childhood poverty to petty crime, Malcolm found himself in jail. It was there that he came into contact with the teachings of a little-known Black Muslim leader named Elijah Muhammed. The newly renamed Malcolm X devoted himself body and soul to the teachings of Elijah Muhammed and the world of Islam, and became the Nation's foremost spokesman.

When his own conscience forced him to break with Elijah Muhammed, Malcolm founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity, to reach African Americans across the country with an inspiring message of pride, power, and self-determination. The Autobiography of Malcolm X defines American culture and the African-American struggle for social and economic equality that has now become a battle for survival. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 19, 1925
• Where—Omaha, Nebraska, USA
• Death—February 21, 1965
• Where—New York, New York


Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, was an African-American Muslim minister and a human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of blacks, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans.

To his detractors he was a threat to social order, preaching racism and violence. Nonetheless, despite the criticism, he has been called one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history.

Early years
Malcolm X was effectively orphaned early in life. His father was killed when he was six and his mother was placed in a mental hospital when he was thirteen, after which he lived in a series of foster homes.

In 1946, at age 20, he went to prison for larceny and breaking and entering. While in prison he became a member of the Nation of Islam, and after his parole in 1952 quickly rose to become one of its leaders.

Nation of Islam
For a dozen years he was the public face of the controversial group; in keeping with the Nation's teachings he espoused black supremacy, advocated the separation of black and white Americans and scoffed at the civil rights movement's emphasis on integration.

By March 1964, Malcolm X had grown disillusioned with the Nation of Islam and its leader Elijah Muhammad. He ultimately repudiated the Nation and its teachings and embraced Sunni Islam. After a period of travel in Africa and the Middle East, he returned to the United States to found Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

While continuing to emphasize Pan-Africanism, black self-determination, and black self-defense, he disavowed racism, saying, "I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie then... pointed in a certain direction and told to march."]

Death
In February 1965, shortly after repudiating the Nation of Islam, he was assassinated by three of its members. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published shortly after his death, is considered one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/9/2012.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 11, 1921
• Raised—Ithaca, New York, USA
• Death—February 10, 1992
• Where—Seattle, Washington
• Awards—Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Pulitzer Prize


Alex Haley was an American writer. He is best known as the author of the 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. It was adapted by ABC as a TV mini-series of the same name and aired in 1977 to a record-breaking 130 million viewers. It had great influence on awareness in the United States of African-American history and inspired a broad interest in genealogy and family history.

Haley had previously written The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), a collaboration through numerous lengthy interviews with the subject, a major African-American leader.

He was working on a second family history novel at his death. Haley had requested that David Stevens, a screenwriter, complete it; the book was published as Alex Haley's Queen. It was adapted as a film of the same name released in 1993.

Early life
Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, on August 11, 1921, and was the oldest of three brothers and a sister. Haley lived with his family in Henning, Tennessee, before returning to Ithaca with his family when he was five years old. Haley's father was Simon Haley, a professor of agriculture at Alabama A&M University, and his mother was Bertha George Haley (nee Palmer) who was from Henning. The younger Haley always spoke proudly of his father and the obstacles of racism he had overcome.

Like his father, Alex Haley was enrolled at age 15 in Alcorn State University, a historically black college, and, a year later, enrolled at Elizabeth City State College, also historically black, in North Carolina. The following year he returned to his father and stepmother to tell them he had withdrawn from college.

His father felt that Alex needed discipline and growth, and convinced him to enlist in the military when he turned 18. On May 24, 1939, Haley began what became a 20-year career with the United States Coast Guard.

US Coast Guard
Haley enlisted as a mess attendant. Later he was promoted to the rate of petty officer third-class in the rating of steward, one of the few ratings open to African Americans at that time. It was during his service in the Pacific theater of operations that Haley taught himself the craft of writing stories. During his enlistment he was often paid by other sailors to write love letters to their girlfriends. He said that the greatest enemy he and his crew faced during their long voyages was not the Japanese forces but rather boredom.

After World War II, Haley petitioned the U.S. Coast Guard to allow him to transfer into the field of journalism. By 1949 he had become a petty officer first class in the rating of journalist. He later advanced to chief petty officer and held this grade until his retirement from the Coast Guard in 1959. He was the first Chief Journalist in the Coast Guard, the rating having been expressly created for him in recognition of his literary ability.

Haley's awards and decorations from the Coast Guard include the Coast Guard Good Conduct Medal (with 1 silver and 1 bronze service star), American Defense Service Medal (with "Sea" clasp), American Campaign Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, World War II Victory Medal, Korean Service Medal, National Defense Service Medal, United Nations Service Medal, and the Coast Guard Expert Marksmanship Medal.[7] Additionally, he was awarded the War Service Medal by the Republic of Korea ten years after his death.

Literary career
After retiring from the U.S. Coast Guard, Haley began another phase of his journalism career. He eventually became a senior editor for Reader's Digest magazine.

Playboy magazine
Haley conducted the first interview for Playboy magazine. His interview with jazz musician Miles Davis appeared in the September 1962 issue. Haley elicited candid comments from Davis about his thoughts and feelings on racism. That interview set the tone for what became a significant feature of the magazine. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Playboy Interview with Haley was the longest he ever granted to any publication.

Throughout the 1960s, Haley was responsible for some of the magazine's most notable interviews, including one with George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party. He agreed to meet with Haley only after gaining assurance from the writer that he was not Jewish. Haley remained professional during the interview, although Rockwell kept a handgun on the table throughout it. (The interview was recreated in Roots: The Next Generations, with James Earl Jones as Haley and Marlon Brando as Rockwell.)

Haley also interviewed Muhammad Ali, who spoke about changing his name from Cassius Clay. Other interviews include Jack Ruby's defense attorney Melvin Belli, entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., football player Jim Brown, TV host Johnny Carson, and music producer Quincy Jones.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Published in 1965, The Autobiography of Malcolm Xwas Haley's first book. It describes the trajectory of Malcolm X's life from street criminal to national spokesman for the Nation of Islam to his conversion to Sunni Islam. It also outlines Malcolm X's philosophy of black pride, black nationalism, and pan-Africanism. Haley wrote an epilogue to the book summarizing the end of Malcolm X's life, including his assassination in New York's Audubon Ballroom.

Haley ghostwrote the autobiography based on more than 50 in-depth interviews he conducted with Malcolm X between 1963 and the February 1965 assassination. The two men had first met in 1960 when Haley wrote an article about the Nation of Islam for Reader's Digest. They met again when Haley interviewed Malcolm X for Playboy.

The first interviews for the autobiography frustrated Haley. Rather than discussing his own life, Malcolm X spoke about Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam; he became angry about Haley's reminders that the book was supposed to be about Malcolm X. After several meetings, Haley asked Malcolm X to tell him something about his mother. That question drew Malcolm X into recounting his life story.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X has been a consistent best-seller since its 1965 publication. The New York Times reported that six million copies of the book had sold by 1977. In 1998, Time magazine ranked the book as one of the 10 most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.

In 1966, Haley received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Roots
In 1976, Haley published Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a novel based on his family's history, going back to slavery days. It started with the story of Kunta Kinte, who was kidnapped in the Gambia in 1767 and transported to the Province of Maryland to be sold as a slave.

Haley claimed to be a seventh-generation descendant of Kunta Kinte, and his work on the novel involved ten years of research, intercontinental travel and writing. He went to the village of Juffure, where Kunta Kinte grew up and which had continued, and listened to a tribal historian (griot) tell the story of Kinte's capture. Haley also traced the records of the ship, The Lord Ligonier, which he said carried his ancestor to the Americas.

Haley has stated that the most emotional moment of his life occurred in 1967 when he stood at the site in Annapolis, Maryland, where his ancestor had arrived from Africa in chains exactly 200 years before. A memorial depicting Haley reading a story to young children gathered at his feet has since been erected in the center of Annapolis.

Roots was eventually published in 37 languages. Haley won a special Pulitzer Prize for the work in 1977. The same year, Roots was adapted as a popular television miniseries of the same name by ABC. The serial reached a record-breaking 130 million viewers. Roots emphasized that African Americans have a long history and that not all of that history is necessarily lost, as many believed. Its popularity also sparked a greatly increased public interest in genealogy.

In 1979, ABC aired the sequel miniseries, Roots: The Next Generations, which continued the story of Kunta Kinte's descendants. It concluded with Haley's travel to Juffure. Haley was portrayed at different ages by Kristoff St. John, The Jeffersons actor Damon Evans, and Tony Award winner James Earl Jones.

Haley was briefly a "writer in residence" at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he began work on Roots. He enjoyed spending time at The Savoy, a local bistro in nearby Rome, where he would sometimes pass the time listening to the piano player. Today, there is a special table in honor of Haley, with a painting of Haley writing Roots on a yellow legal tablet

Later life and death
In the late 1970s, Haley began working on a second historical novel based on another branch of his family, traced through his grandmother Queen, the daughter of a black slave woman and her white master. Unable to finish the novel before his death, he had requested that David Stevens complete it. Published as Alex Haley's Queen, it was subsequently adapted as a movie of the same name in 1993.

Late in his life, Haley had acquired a small farm in Norris, Tennessee, adjacent to the Museum of Appalachia, intending to live there. After his death, the property was sold to the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) and is now known as The Alex Haley Farm. The CDF uses the property as a national training center and retreat site. An abandoned barn on the property was redesigned as a traditional cantilevered barn by architect Maya Lin and serves as a library for the CDF.

Haley died of a heart attack on February 10, 1992, in Seattle, Washington. He was 70 years old and is buried beside his childhood home in Henning, Tennessee. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/9/2012.)

Book Reviews
As this extraordinary autobiography shows, the source of Malcolm X's power was not alone in his intelligence, energy, electric personality or ability to grow and change, remarkable as these were. Its source was that he understood, perhaps more profoundly than any other Negro leader, the full, shocking extent of America's psychological destruction of its Negroes. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a brilliant, painful, important book.... The book raises many difficult questions.... But as a document for our time, its insights may be crucial; its relevance cannot be doubted.
Eliot Fremont-Smith - New York Times (November 5, 1965)


The prime document that has kept Malcolm’s story alive over the dec­ades since his assassination in 1965 is The Autobiography of Malcolm X. That book has changed countless lives and made Malcolm a central influence on generations of black men who admire his force, his courage, his brilliance, and his way of merging the protean trickster and the bold intellectual activist and the inspiring preacher. But all autobiographies are, in part, lies. They rely on memory, which is notoriously fallible, and are shaped by self-image. They don’t really tell us who you are but whom you want the world to see you as. Did Malcolm X consciously lie in his autobiography? In some cases, yes — he wanted us to believe he was a bigger criminal than he actually was, so that his growth into a Nation of Islam figure would seem a much more dramatic change.
Toure - New York Times Book Review (June 17, 2011)


What makes this book extraordinary is the honesty with which Malcolm presents his life: Even as he regrets the mistakes he made as a young man, he brings his zoot-suited, swing-dancing, conk- haired Harlem youth to vivid life; even though he later turns away from the Nation of Islam, the strong faith he at one time in that sect's beliefs, a faith that redeemed him from prison and a life of crime, comes through. What made the man so extraordinary was his courageous insistence on finding the true path to his personal salvation and to the salvation of the people he loved, even when to stay on that path meant danger, alienation, and death
Sacred Fire


While critics still debate the role Alex Haley played in the writing of this 1965 book, its importance is irrefutable. With Haley’s assistance, Malcolm X described a world of broken promises, injustice, and hatred from which he wanted his race to escape. Many social reformers and militants have been inspired by this dramatic story.
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. Having read his autobiography, how do you personally feel about Malcolm X and his philosophies about the plight of African Americans. Be sensitive to the fact that there may be a number of members in your group who disagree with his approaches. Keep in mind, too, that many African Americans were opposed to Malcolm X's philosophy.

2. Discuss the role that Ella played in Malcolm's life. Describe her as a person. How was she a positive influence?

3. How did Malcolm get "off track" as a young person? How could he have handled his early years differently?

4. Discuss the role of the welfare workers in the Little family after the death of the father. Were they effective? What would have been some other alternatives that might have been more appropriate for the family?

5. How is hair an expression of one's self? Ask each student to write an essay that expresses why he or she has chosen to wear his or her hair in its current fashion.

6. Many of the people Malcolm X preached to about the Nation of Islam were turned off by the strict code of discipline. How is strict discipline an advantage in developing moral character and fortitude? How is strict discipline a disadvantage?

7. Explain how travel helps a person become more well rounded.

8. Why are many young people drawn into criminal lifestyles?

9. Compare and contrast Civil Rights as a movement in the 1960s and 1990s. Identify specific situations and events that have shaped civil rights in both time periods.

10. What are the characteristics of a leader? How would you rate Malcolm X as a leader and why?

11. Malcolm X was disappointed by the actions of Elijah Muhammad that were inconsistent with their Muslim principles. How would you have handled your disappointment with this situation?

12. Malcolm X, the father and husband, presented a number of challenges. What were they? What are the risks associated with being the spouse of a public figure? Is the risk the same or different when the public figure is a woman and the spouse is a man?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Ava's Man
Rick Bragg, 2001
Knopf Doubleday
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375724442


Summary
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All Over but the Shoutin’ continues his personal history of the Deep South with an evocation of his mother’s childhood in the Appalachian foothills during the Great Depression, and the magnificent story of the man who raised her.

Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, a carpenter, a whiskey-maker, a fisherman who knew every inch of the Coosa River, made boats out of car hoods and knew how to pack a wound with brown sugar to stop the blood. He could not read, but he asked his wife, Ava, to read him the paper every day so he would not be ignorant. He was a man who took giant steps in rundown boots, a true hero whom history would otherwise have overlooked.

In the decade of the Great Depression, Charlie moved his family twenty-one times, keeping seven children one step ahead of the poverty and starvation that threatened them from every side. He worked at the steel mill when the steel was rolling, or for a side of bacon or a bushel of peaches when it wasn’t. He paid the doctor who delivered his fourth daughter, Margaret—Bragg’s mother—with a jar of whiskey. He understood the finer points of the law as it applied to poor people and drinking men; he was a banjo player and a buck dancer who worked off fines when life got a little sideways, and he sang when he was drunk, where other men fought or cussed. He had a talent for living.

His children revered him. When he died, cars lined the blacktop for more than a mile.

Rick Bragg has built a soaring monument to the grandfather he never knew—a father who stood by his family in hard times and left a backwoods legend behind—ina book that blazes with his love for his family, and for a particular stretch of dirt road along the Alabama-Georgia border. A powerfully intimate piece of American history as it was experienced by the working people of the Deep South, a glorious record of a life of character, tenacity and indomitable joy and an unforgettable tribute to a vanishing culture, Ava’s Man is Rick Bragg at his stunning best. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 26, 1959
• Where—Possum Trot, Alabama, USA
• Education—Attended Jacksonville State University for six
   months in 1970; attended Harvard University, 1992-1993
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, 1996
• Currently—New Orleans, Louisiana

Rick Bragg caught his first break as a journalist when the competition for his first newspaper job decided to stick with his current position in a fast-food restaurant. From there, Bragg has moved from small newspapers in Alabama to the likes of the St. Petersburg Times, the Los Angeles Times and, finally, the New York Times.

He eventually won a reputation in one newsroom as "the misery writer." His assignments: Hurricane Andrew, Miami rioting, Haiti, and Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman accused of drowning her two boys in 1994 by driving her car into a lake. In 1996, while at the Times, Bragg covered the terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City and won the Pulitzer Prize.

"I've really served at all stations of the cross," Bragg said in a December 2002 interview with Writer magazine. "I've been pretty much everywhere. I don't think there's a difference between writing for a newspaper or magazine and doing a chapter in a book. People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant. The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background. There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their laptops, then they're not real writers. That's ridiculous."

[Bragg left the New York Times in 2003 after questions surfaced regarding his use of uncredited stringers for some of his reporting. Bragg's departure was part of a larger ethics scandal that also claimed the newspaper's top two editors.]

Bragg's memoir, All Over but the Shoutin', recounts these stations, particularly his hardscrabble youth in rural Alabama, where he was brought up by a single mother who sacrificed everything for her children.

"In his sad, beautiful, funny and moving memoir...Rick Bragg gives us a report from the forgotten heart of 'white trash' America, a sort of Pilgrim's Progress or Up from Slavery about how a clever and determined young man outwitted fate," The New York Times Book Review wrote in 1997." The story he tells, of white suffering and disenfranchisement, is one too seldom heard. It is as if a descendant from one of the hollow-eyed children from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men had stepped out of a photograph to tell his own story, to narrate an experience that even Agee could not penetrate because he was not himself 'trash.' "

In 2001, Bragg went back a generation in his family's story and wrote about his grandfather, a hard-drinking fighter who made whiskey in backwoods stills along the Alabama-Georgia border and died at 51. His widow would rebuff her grandchildren's questions about remarrying: "No, hon, I ain't gonna get me no man...I had me one."

The Los Angeles Times called Ava's Man "a big book, at once tough and sentimental," while The New York Times said, "It is hard to think of a writer who reminds us more forcefully and wonderfully of what people and families are all about."

Bragg acknowledges that his language is stolen—plucked from the mouths of the family members he has interviewed, filling notebooks and jotting stories on whatever was at hand—the back of airplane tickets, for example. The biggest challenge, he would later say, was finding an order in the mess of folksy storytelling. "Talking to my people is like herding cats," he told The Kansas City Star in 2002. "You can't rely on them to walk down the road and not run into the bushes."

And, then, there would be the recollection that would come along just a little too late.

"The most agonizing thing was to finish the manuscript, know that I had pleased [the family], then have one of them say, 'Oh, yeah, hon, I just thought of something else'—and it would be the best story you ever heard," he told the Star.

Extras
• Bragg brought his mother, Margaret, to New York for the Pulitzer Prize ceremony. She had never been to the city, never been on an airplane, never ridden on an escalator, and hadn't bought a dress for herself in 18 years.

• In an interview with Writer, Bragg describes life as a newspaper correspondent: "If I travel for the paper, that means I fly to a city I've probably never been to, get off a plane, rent a car, drive out in bumper-to-bumper traffic heading for a little town that nobody knows the name of and can't give me directions to, and it's not on the map. When I get there, I try to get information in 15 minutes for a story I have to write in 45."

• He wrote Ava's Man because his fans wanted to know more about his mother's childhood. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
In less capable hands, this biography could have been mawkish and mundane. Instead, Bragg's telling of his maternal grandfather's life is eloquent and touching, and his spare prose is alive with fresh metaphors and memorable sentences. Bragg never knew Charlie Bundrum, who died prematurely at age 51 in 1958; the story of this proud, flawed, loving and much-loved hero of Depression-era Appalachia is derived from family and community oral history. Interestingly, this book emerged because readers of Bragg's bestselling book about his mother, Ava (All Over but the Shoutin'), wanted to understand the force that drove her to be such a strong figure. Few actors could have read this work as well as the author has. Bragg's Appalachian accent, slightly polished by Northern living, adds authenticity to the fine, funny and painful anecdotes that made up his grandfather's life and to the feelings each story encompasses. His smooth reading enhances the rhythms and sounds of his prose, rendering with genuine sincerity his deep admiration for his people and for the vanishing culture they represent.
Publishers Weekly


After the publication of Bragg's best-selling memoir All Over but the Shoutin', readers accused the author of "leaving out the good part." They wanted to know where he believed his mother's "heart and backbone came from, and where she inherited the strength and character to raise three boys alone." They also felt he had "short-shrifted" Charlie and Ava Bundrum, his mother's parents. Bragg's grandfather died before he was born, and his extended family, filled with fine storytellers, were conspicuously silent about his life. Upon questioning, he discovered that talking about his grandfather's life led to talking about his death and the grief all of his children still felt 42 years after he "was preached into the sky." On the day of Charlie's funeral, cars lined the blacktop for more than a mile. Deciding "a man like that deserved a book," Bragg interviewed family members and neighbors to tell his grandfather's story. As with his previous book, Bragg writes about poor people of the South with dignity and without condescension. The author reads with humor, affection, and pride; this is a splendid listening experience. —Pam Kingsbury, Alabama Humanities Fdn., Florence, AL.
Library Journal


The story of a man who could charm a bird off a wire, beat the tar out of a threat, dandle a baby, tend a still, and smile—no, live—right through the meanest poverty the South could throw at him, from New York Times reporter and Pulitzer-winner Bragg (All Over But the Shoutin'). Bragg's grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, died a year before Bragg was born, so the author "built him up from dirt level, using half-forgotten sayings, half-remembered stories, and a few yellowed, brittle, black-and-white photographs." Speaking in a lovely southern voice out of northern Georgia and Alabama, with a juke in its bones and metaphors to die for, Bragg brings not just Charlie but an entire time and place to life. Charlie was the son of another piece of work, a man who "largely disregarded any laws or influence outside his own will, and some people did not like to look him dead in the eye because it made them feel weak." No stranger to a dust-up himself, Charlie would take the law down a notch if it was too mettlesome, but he had a softer side—one that would play a white-hot banjo, buck-dance under the stars (and under the influence of his own good white whisky, which made him sing rather than cuss), and offer a helping hand whenever the need arose. Most important of Charlie's virtues, from the author's point of view, was the fact that "if he ever was good at one thing on this earth, it was being a daddy." Searching for work (sometimes, just for food), he'd move his family about the wild and dangerous South, a landscape of ridges and hollows and deep woods, ramshackle houses, muddy rivers, water moccasins, primeval catfish (which he caught from a boat made of two car hoods weldedtogether)—but he knew how to make his family feel secure and loved. A book that flashes with affection and respect for Charlie and the vanishing culture he represents, one we will be immensely the poorer for losing.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In the prologue, Rick Bragg wonders about his grandfather, “What kind of man was this...who is so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make [his family] cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky?” [p. 9] How does the book answer this question? What kind of man is Charlie Bundrum? Why does his memory evoke such powerful emotions in those who knew him?

2. Bragg says that he wrote this story “for a lot of reasons, ” one of which was “to give one more glimpse into a vanishing culture” [p. 13]. How does he create a vivid picture of that culture? What does he admire about it? How is it different from “the new South”? What other reasons compelled Bragg to write about a grandfather he never knew?

3. Bragg says that Charlie Bundrum was “blessed with that beautiful, selective morality that we Southerners are famous for. Even as a boy, he thought people who steal were trash, real trash. . . . Yet he saw absolutely nothing wrong with downing a full pint of likker . . . before engaging in a fistfight that sometimes required hospitalization” [p. 53]. What kind of moral code does Charlie live by? Are his frequent acts of violence justifiable? In what sense can Charlie be called a hero?

4. Charlie is a man of great physical strength and courage, but what instances of kindness, generosity, and caring balance the violence and recklessness in his life? How does the inclusion of this kind of behavior in Bragg’s description create a richer and fuller portrait of the man?

5. In speaking of his grandfather’s legacy, Bragg says, “A man like Charlie Bundrumdoesn’t leave much else, not title or property, not even letters in the attic. There’s just stories, all told second and thirdhand, as long as somebody remembers” [p. 18]. What is the value of preserving the kind of stories that Bragg gathers in Ava’s Man?

6. Ava’s Man is filled with dramatic confrontations and vivid scenes. What episodes stand out the most? What do these episodes reveal about the character of the Bundrum family?

7. In considering his grandfather’s drinking, Bragg writes, “I am not trying to excuse it. He did things that he shouldn’t have. I guess it takes someone who has outlived a mean drunk to appreciate a kind one” [p. 133]. What does this passage suggest about Bragg’s personal stake in reconnecting with his grandfather? What kind of portrait does he paint of his own father in Ava’s Man?

8. Charlie Bundrum “was a man who did the things more civilized men dream they could, who beat one man half to death for throwing a live snake at his son, who shot a large woman with a .410 shotgun when she tried to cut him with a butcher knife, who beat the hell out of two worrisome Georgia highway patrolmen and threw them headfirst out the front door of a beer joint called the Maple on the Hill” [p. 8]. In what ways is Charlie free from the constraints of society? What is the cost of this freedom? Is Bragg right in thinking that Charlie’s way of living is something that more civilized men envy?

9. Bragg writes that Ava could have had her sister Grace’s life, a life of relative wealth and comfort, of fine clothes, good food, and travel, instead of a life of rented houses, poverty, and hard labor in the cotton fields. “She could have hated her life, ” Bragg admits [p. 153]. Why doesn’t she? What does Charlie give her that other men cannot? What kind of woman is she?

10. Why does Charlie take in Hootie? What does this reveal about his character? What does Hootie bring out in Charlie?

11. Bragg writes that Charlie “could charm a bird off a wire” [p. 45]. What are the charms of Bragg’s own storytelling style? Where else does he use colorful similes? In what ways is his narrative voice perfectly suited to his subject matter?

12. What does Ava’s Man reveal about how the Great Depression affected people in the Deep South, especially those who lived in the foothills? How did it affect the Bundrums specifically? How are they treated by landlords, sheriffs, and others in positions of power?

13. For centuries, recorded history has largely been the account of those who have had the greatest impact on world events. Why is the history of a man like Charlie Bundrum important? In what ways does it offer a door into American history and culture that more conventional histories cannot provide?

14. In the epilogue, Bragg argues that when compared with the new South, Charlie Bundrum seems larger than life, because of “his complete lack of shame. He was not ashamed of his clothes, his speech, his life. He not only thrived, he gloried in it” [p. 248]. What accounts for Charlie’s pride? Why is Bragg so proud of him? What does Ava’s Man suggest about the way in which inner character is more important than external circumstances?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Bad Blood:  Secets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou, 2020
Knopf Doubleday
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525431992 


Summary
In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the next Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with its breakthrough device, which performed the whole range of laboratory tests from a single drop of blood.

Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.5 billion.

There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.

Erroneous results put patients in danger, leading to misdiagnoses and unnecessary treatments. All the while, Holmes and her partner, Sunny Balwani, worked to silence anyone who voiced misgivings—from journalists to their own employees.

Rigorously reported and fearlessly written, Bad Blood is a gripping story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron—a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
John Carreyrou is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal. For his extensive coverage of Theranos, Inc., Carreyrou was awarded the George Polk Award for Financial Reporting, the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism and the Barlett & Steele Award for Investigative Journalism in 2016. Carreyrou lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
John Carreyrou tells [the story] virtually to perfection in Bad Blood, which really amounts to two books. The first is a chilling, third-person narrative of how Holmes came up with a fantastic idea that made her, for a while, the most successful woman entrepreneur in Silicon Valley…. The author's description of Holmes as a manic leader who turned coolly hostile when challenged is ripe material for a psychologist; Carreyrou wisely lets the evidence speak for itself…. In the second part of the book the author compellingly relates how he got involved, following a tip from a suspicious reader. His recounting of his efforts to track down sources… reads like a West Coast version of All the President's Men.
Roger Lowenstein - New York Times Book Review -


A great and at times almost unbelievable story…. Theranos may be the biggest case of corporate fraud since Enron.
New York Magazine


Gripping.… Riveting.… [Told] with a momentum worthy of a crime novel.
Los Angeles Review of Books


Riveting.… For all its boomtime feel, there are timeless aspects to Theranos’ story. Venality is age-old, but so is courage, and that of the ex-employees who blew the whistle on its deceptions is restorative.… And more than an honorable mention should go to Carreyrou, a dogged old-school reporter uncowed by Theranos’ legal hardball.
San Francisco Chronicle


A veritable page-turning..… Gripping..… Presents comprehensive evidence of the fraud perpetrated by Theranos chief executive Elizabeth Holmes.… Unveils many dark secrets of Theranos that have not previously been laid bare.
Nature


Riveting..… Compelling.… [Carreyrou’s] unmasking of Theranos is a tale of David and Goliath.
Financial Times


A fascinating true story that reads like a suspense novel. . . . A telling parable of Silicon Valley magical thinking.
Vogue
 

In Bad Blood, Carreyrou tells the full, gripping tale of how he slayed the ‘unicorn’ in a fascinating look at how buzz and billions can blind people to facts.
Marie Claire


A parable about Silicon Valley delusion. . . . Gossipy fun comes from seeing which high-profile man (James Mattis, Joe Biden) gets drawn into Holmes’ scammy web next.
Elle


A thorough and devastating piece of reporting that deserves a place alongside the masterworks of the inside-the-boardroom business genre. . . . He quietly compiles detail after damning detail into a fascinating narrative.
Weekly Standard (UK)


(Starred review) An apparent scientific breakthrough rests on a quicksand of deception in this riveting account of the rise and downfall of notorious biotech firm Theranos…. The result is a bracing cautionary tale about visionary entrepreneurship gone very wrong.
Publishers Weekly


[C]learly written and accessible…. [T]he company believed it could "fake-it-until-you-make-it," a Silicon Valley flaw, per Carreyrou. Using aggressive tactics and pit bull attorneys, Theranos squelched dissent and threatened the author. Highly recommended —Harry Charles, St. Louis
Library Journal


(Starred review) Crime thriller authors have nothing on Carreyrou's exquisite sense of suspenseful pacing and multifaceted character development in this riveting, read-in-one-sitting tour de force.... Carreyrou's commitment to unraveling Holmes' crimes was literally of life-saving value.
Booklist


A deep investigative report…. The author brilliantly captures the interpersonal melodrama, hidden agendas, gross misrepresentations, nepotism, and a host of delusions and lies…. [A] vivid, cinematic portrayal of serpentine Silicon Valley. [Future film planned.]
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for BAD BLOOD … then take off on your own:

1. Really, the primary question is simple: what in Carreyrou's book angered you most?

2. The second question, of course, is … how in God's name did Theranos get away with its scam for as long as it did? CEO Elizabeth Holmes even had a visit from the vice president of the United States, who, along with others, was completely taken in. Such icons of wisdom and gravitas, such as Henry Kissenger and George Schultz, sat on the board of directors. What took so long for anyone to catch on?

3. How would you describe Elizabeth Holmes—what drove her? And what enabled her to pull the wool over the eyes of so many, even including some of her own employees? What kind of personality, or personality disorder, does she exhibit?

4. Consider Walgreens' actions: the company was warned by a consultant not to go ahead with instore clinics. Why did it refuse to listen to the advice?

5. How does David Boies, the well-known (some might say infamous) lawyer come across in this telling?

6. Does anyone in Bad Blood (other than the author) emerge as a hero of sorts? What about Rupert Murdock? Does it take someone with his wealth and power to stand up to a person like Holmes? He was a stockholder, after all.

7. Talk about the author's dogged approach to uncovering this story.

8. Ultimately, does Bad Blood encompase a broader issue than the story of a single company gone bad?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

Bad Feminist: Essays
Roxane Gay, 2014
HarperCollins
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062282712


Summary
A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay.

“Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink—all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I’m not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.”

In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.

Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1974-75
• Where—Omaha, Nebraska, USA
• Education—M.A., University of Nebraska; Ph.D., Michigan Technological University
• Currently—lives in Layfayette, Indiana, and Los Angeles, California


Roxane Gay is a writer, academician, editor, blogger, and commentator. She is an assistant professor of English at Purdue University, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, contributing editor for Bluestem Magazine, essays editor for The Rumpus, and co-editor of PANK, a nonprofit literary arts collective.

She is the author of the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), and the essay collection Bad Feminist (2014). She also edited the book Girl Crush: Women's Erotic Fantasies. In addition to her regular contributions to Salon and HTMLGIANT, her writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012 and The New York Times Book Review.

Gay was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to Haitian parents. She attended Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, received her Master's degree from University of Nebraska and her doctorate (in rhetoric and technical communication) from Michigan Technological University. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/20/2014.)

Book Reviews
Blunt and funny.... Gay floats the proposition that “feminism has, historically, been far more invested in improving the lives of heterosexual white women to the detriment of all others.” It might have been interesting to pair further discussion on this theme with Gay’s defense of Sheryl Sandberg and Nell Scovell’s self-help book Lean In, in which [Gay] argues that “Assuming Sandberg’s advice is completely useless for working-class women is just as shortsighted as claiming her advice needs to be completely applicable to all women.” But if I occasionally wish that Gay were a bit more formal in developing her arguments, her writing can also make a virtue of jarring compositions, of ideas that do not quite fit together.
Alyssa Rosenberg - Washington Post


Fascinating.... An important and pioneering contemporary writer.... Readers will immediately understand the appeal of Gay’s intimate and down-to-earth voice.... An important contribution to the complicated terrain of gender politics.
Boston Globe


A prolific and exceptionally insightful writer.... Bad Feminist doesn’t show us how Gay should be, but something much better: how Roxane Gay actually is.... Gay unquestionably succeeds at leading us in her way.
Globe and Mail (Toronto)


A thoughtful and often hilarious new collection of essays.
Chicago Tribune


What makes Bad Feminist such a good read isn’t only Gay’s ability to deftly weave razor-sharp pop cultural analysis and criticism with a voice that is both intimate and relatable. It’s that she’s incapable of blindly accepting any kind of orthodoxy.
San Francisco Chronicle


Roxane Gay is the gift that keeps on giving.... An entertaining and thought-provoking essay collection.
Time


One of our sharpest new culture critics plants her flag in topics ranging from trigger warnings to Orange is the New Black in this timely collection of essays.
Oprah Magazine


An assortment of comical, yet astute essays that touch on Gay’s personal evolution as a woman, popular culture throughout the recent past, and the state of feminism today.
Harper's Bazaar


Bad Feminist collects the very good essays of ‘It girl’ culture critic Roxane Gay.
Vanity Fair


Roxane Gay is the brilliant girl-next-door: your best friend and your sharpest critic.... She is by turns provocative, chilling, hilarious; she is also required reading.
People


Roxane Gay applies her discerning eye to everything from Paula Deen to The Bachelor.
Marie Claire


Roxane Gay delivers sermons that read like easy conversations. Bad Feminist is an important collection of prose—prose that matters to those still trying to find their voice.
Ebony


Toss Roxane Gay’s collection of witty, thoughtful essays, Bad Feminist into your tote bag. With musings on everything from Sweet Valley High to the color pink, Gay explores the idea of being a feminist, even when you’re full of contradictions.
Self


Alternately friendly and provocative, wry and serious, her takes on everything from Girls to Fifty Shades of Grey help to recontextualize what feminism is--and what it can be.
Time Out New York


Arresting and sensitive.... An author who filters every observation through her deep sense of the world as fractured, beautiful, and complex.
Slate


Gay’s essays expertly weld her personal experiences with broader gender trends occurring politically and in popular culture.
Huffington Post


[Gay’s] energetic and thought-provoking first essay collection will become as widely read as other generation-defining works, like Nora Ephron’s Crazy Salad and Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost.
Essence


(Starred review.) This trenchant collection assembles previously published essays and new work by cultural critic and novelist Gay.... Although Gay is aware of her privilege as a middle-class Haitian-American, she doesn’t refrain from advising inner-city students to have higher expectations. Whatever her topic, Gay’s provocative essays stand out for their bravery, wit, and emotional honesty.
Publishers Weekly


Essayist, novelist and pop-culture guru Gay sounds off on the frustrating complexities of gender and race in pop culture and society as a whole. In this diverse collection of short essays, the author launches her critical salvos at seemingly countless waves of pop-cultural cannon fodder.... An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
William Finnegan, 2015
Penguin
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594203473


Summary
Winner, 2016 Pulitizer Prize - Biography

A deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer by the acclaimed New Yorker writer.

Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.

Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter.

Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves.

Finnegan shares stories of life in a whitesonly gang in a tough school in Honolulu even while his closest friend was a Hawaiian surfer. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor.

He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the world’s greatest waves. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he becomes an improbable anthropologist: unpicking the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissecting the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, navigating the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria.

Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.

Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little understood art. Today, Finnegan’s surfing life is undiminished. Frantically juggling work and family, he chases his enchantment Long Island ice storms and obscure corners of Madagascar. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1952
• Raised—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California-Santa Cruz; M.F.A. University of Montana
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


William Finnegan is a staff writer at The New Yorker and well-known author of works of international journalism. He has specially addressed issues of racism and conflict in Southern Africa and politics in Mexico and South America, as well as poverty among youth in the United States, and is well known for his writing on surfing.

Finnegan currently resides in New York.

Early years
Finnegan was born in New York City in 1952. He was raised in Los Angeles and Hawaii. He graduated from William Howard Taft High School in Woodland Hills, California and received his B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1974 with a degree in Literature.

During his youth he took up surfing, which became a lifelong passion he still practices off Long Island when at home. Finnegan spent the next four years taking seasonal jobs and working on an MFA in creative writing at the University of Montana.

Finnegan then spent four years abroad, traveling in Asia, Australia, and Africa. He supported himself with freelance travel writing and other odd jobs, but upon reaching Cape Town, South Africa, Finnegan was in need of a job. He found a position as an English teacher at Grassy Park High School, a school for "coloured" students.

Finnegan’s teaching experience coincided with a nationwide school boycott, giving him fodder for his first book, Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid, which was published in 1986 and was selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best nonfiction books of the year.

Journalism career
Finnegan’s experience in South Africa transformed him from a novelist to a political journalist. His first short piece, about his experience living in Sri Lanka, was published in Mother Jones in 1979. Finnegan began contributing to The New Yorker in 1984 and has been a staff writer there since 1987. He has also contributed to Harper's and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.

Finnegan contributed a two-part series for The New Yorker in 1992 entitled "Playing Doc's Games." A surfer himself, Finnegan writes about the local surf scene in San Francisco revolving around Ocean Beach and Dr. Mark Renneker ("Doc") as well as Finnegan's own personal experiences. A remarkable piece of writing, it is widely considered to be one of the best pieces of journalism on surfing.

Finnegan’s next two books grew out of assignments for The New Yorker. In 1986, he was sent to Johannesburg, where he followed black reporters who gathered information for white reporters during Apartheid. This led to the 1988 publication of Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South African Reporters.

A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique, published in 1992, grew out of a series of correspondences about the war-torn nation for the magazine, and Finnegan's own travels throughout that war-torn nation. 1998 saw the publication of Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country, which deals with the bleak lives of American teenagers in spite of the United States’ economic affluence. It was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism in 1999.

In the July 20th, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, Finnegan profiled Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona and his role in the conflict over immigration in that border state. In the May 31st, 2010 issue, he reported from Michoacan state in Mexico on the rise of the "La Familia" drug gang and the increasing social and political instability in Mexico. His "Talk of the Town" comment on "Borderlines," which addresses the U.S. political stalemate over immigration reform, appeared in the magazine's issue for July 26, 2010.

Awards
Finnegan has twice received the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, given by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, in 1994 and 1996. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist, in 1990 and 1995. In 1994, his article “Deep East Texas” won the Edward M. Brecher Award for Achievement in the Field of Journalism from the Drug Policy Foundation.

His article “The Unwanted” won the Sidney Hillman Award for Magazine Reporting in 1998. His report from Sudan, “The Invisible War,” won a Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club in 2000. In 2002, Hunter College, City University of New York, honored him with the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for his article "Leasing the Rain" on the fight to control fresh water.  (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/23/2015.)

Book Reviews
No pretension or flab here. Just sturdy verbs, a casual flowing power, tantric masculine reticence, a melancholy sense of a sidewise-drifting life….The star is the surfing, and the waves, which the author studies all over the world, from a hundred different angles…one takes away from Barbarian Days a sense of a big, wind-chapped, well-lived life. Mr. Finnegan has moved about the earth like a man in a ballad, testing himself at every opportunity, always willing to obey "dog-whistle orders from the collective surf unconscious."
Dwight Garner - New York Times


[An] extraordinary book…. It is in many ways, and for the first time, a surfer in full. And it is cause for throwing your wet-suit hoods in the air…if the book has a flaw, it lies in the envy helplessly induced in the armchair surf-traveler by so many lusty affairs with waves that are the supermodels of the surf world. Still, Finnegan considerately shows himself paying the price of admission in a few near drownings, and these are among the most electrifying moments in the book.
Thad Ziolkowski - New York Times Book Review


Terrific… Elegantly written and structured, it’s a riveting adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, and a restless, searching meditation on love, friendship and family…. A writer of rare subtlety and observational gifts, Finnegan explores every aspect of the sport—its mechanics and intoxicating thrills, its culture and arcane tribal codes—in a way that should resonate with surfers and non-surfers alike. His descriptions of some of the world’s most powerful and unforgiving waves are hauntingly beautiful…Finnegan displays an honesty that is evident throughout the book, parts of which have a searing, unvarnished intensity that reminded me of Stop Time, the classic coming-of-age memoir by Frank Conroy.
Washington Post


Gorgeously written and intensely felt…With Mr. Finnegan’s bravura memoir, the surfing bookshelf is dramatically enriched. It’s not only a volume for followers of the sport. Non-surfers, too, will be treated to a travelogue head-scratchingly rich in obscure, sharply observed destinations…. Dare I say that we all need Mr. Finnegan…as a role model for a life fully, thrillingly, lived.
Wall Street Journal


Finnegan writes so engagingly that you paddle alongside, eager for him to take you to the next wave…It is a wet and wild run. He makes surfing seem as foreign and simultaneously as intimate a sport as possible…Surfing is the backbone of the book, but Finnegan’s relationships to people, not waves, form its flesh…[A] deep blue story of one man’s lifelong enchantment.
Boston Globe


A demonstration of gratitude and mastery. [Finnegan] uses these words to describe the wave, but they might as well apply to the book. In a sense, Barbarian Days functions as a 450-page thank you letter, masterfully crafted, to his parents, friends, wife, enemies, ex-girlfriends, townsfolk, daughter—everyone who tolerated and even encouraged his lifelong obsession. It’s a way to help them—and us—understand what drives him to keep paddling out half a century after first picking up a board.
NPR.org


An evocative, profound and deeply moving memoir…The proof is in the sentences. Were I given unlimited space to review this book, I would simply reproduce it here, with a quotation mark at the beginning and another at the end. While surfers have a reputation for being inarticulate, there is actually a fair amount of overlap between what makes a good surfer and a good writer. A smooth style, an ability to stay close to the source of the energy, humility before the task, and, once you’re done, not claiming your ride. In other words, making something exceedingly difficult look easy. The gift for writing a clean line is rare, and the gift for riding one even rarer. Finnegan possesses both.
San Francisco Chronicle


[A] sweeping, glorious memoir…Oh, the rides, they are incandescent…I’d sooner press this book upon on a nonsurfer, in part because nothing I’ve read so accurately describes the feeling of being stoked or the despair of being held under. But also because while it is a book about ‘A Surfing Life’…it’s also about a writer’s life and, even more generally, a quester’s life, more carefully observed and precisely rendered than any I’ve read in a long time.
Los Angeles Times


Vivid and propulsive…. Finnegan…has seen things from the tops of ocean peaks that would disturb most surfers’ dreams for weeks. (I happily include myself among that number.)…. A lyrical and enormously rewarding read…Finnegan’s enchantment takes us to some luminous and unsettling places—on both the edge of the ocean, and the frontiers of the surfing life.
San Diego Union-Tribune


Finnegan’s epic adventure, beautifully told, is much more than the story of a boy and his wave, even if surfing serves as the thumping heartbeat of his life.
Dallas Morning News


Fans of [Finnegan’s] writing have been waiting eagerly for his surfing memoir…Well, Barbarian Days is here. And it’s even better than one could have imagined…This is Finnegan’s gift. He’s observant and expressive but shows careful restraint in his zeal. He says only what needs to be said, enough to create a vivid picture for the reader while masterfully giving that picture a kind of movement.
Honolulu Star-Advertiser
 

That surfing life is [Finnegan’s], and it’s a remarkably adventurous one sure to induce wanderlust in anyone who follows along, surfer or not…. Lyrical but not overbaked, exciting but always self-effacing. It captures the moments of joy and terror Finnegan’s lifelong passion has brought him, as well as his occasional ambivalence about the tenacious hold it has on him. It’s easily the best book ever written about surfing. It’s not even close.b
Florida Times-Union
  
 
The kind of book that makes you squirm in your seat on the subway, gaze out the window at work, and Google Map the quickest route to the beach. In other words, it is, like Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, a semi-dangerous book, one that persuades young men…to trade in their office jobs in order to roam the world, to feel the ocean’s power, and chase the waves.
Paris Review Daily
 

An engrossing read, part treatise on wave physics, part thrill ride, part cultural study, with a soupçon of near-death events. Even for those who’ve never paddled out, Finnegan’s imagery is as vividly rendered as a film, his explanation of wave mastery a triumph of language. For surfers, the book is The Endless Summer writ smarter and larger, touching down at every iconic break.
Los Angeles Magazine
 

Barbarian Days gleams with precise, often lyrical recollections of the most memorable waves [Finnegan has] encountered…He carefully mines his surfing exploits for broader, hard-won insights on his childhood, his most intense friendships and romances, his political education, his career. He’s always attuned to his surroundings, and his reflections are often tinged with self-effacing wit.
Chicago Reader


Which is precisely what makes the propulsive precision of Finnegan’s writing so surprising and revelatory… Finnegan’s treatment of surfing never feels like performance. Through the sheer intensity of his descriptive powers and the undeniable ways in which surfing has shaped his life, Barbarian Days is an utterly convincing study in the joy of treating seriously an unserious thing…As Finnegan demonstrates, surfing, like good writing, is an act of vigilant noticing.
New York Review of Books


Finnegan is an excellent surfer; at some point he became an even better writer. That pairing makes Barbarian Days exceptional in the notoriously foamy genre of surf lit: a hefty, heavyweight tour de force, overbrimming with sublime lyrical passages that Finnegan drops as effortlessly as he executed his signature ‘drop-knee cutback’ in the breaks off Waikiki…Reading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting; William Burroughs on controlled substances; Updike on adultery…Finnegan is a virtuoso wordsmith, but the juice propelling this memoir is wrung from the quest that shaped him…A piscine, picaresque coming-of-age story, seen through the gloss resin coat of a surfboard.
Sports Illustrated


Overflowing with vivid descriptions of waves caught and waves missed, of disappointments and ecstasies and gargantuan curling tubes that encircle riders like cathedrals of pure stained glass…These paragraphs, with their mix of personal remembrance and subcultural taxonomies, tend to be as elegant and pellucid as the breakers they immortalize…This memoir is one you can ride all the way to shore.
Entertainment Weekly


That’s always Finnegan’s M.O.: examining the ways in which surfing intertwines with anthropology, economics, politics, and, of course, writing. Finnegan is a sober, straightforward author, but the level of detail, emotion, and insight he achieves is unparalleled…. A must-read for all surfers—not just because of its unblinking prose and subtle wit, but because it’s the only book that properly details what it’s like to cultivate both an award-winning career and a dedicated surfing life.
Eastern Surf Magazine


Finnegan describes, with shimmering detail, his adventures riding waves on five continents. Surfing has taken him places he'd never otherwise have thought to go, but it also buoyed him through a career reporting on the politics of intense scarcity, limitless cruelty, and unimaginable suffering. It's a book about travel and growing up, and the power of a pastime when it becomes an obsession.
Men's Journal


(Starred review.) [P]anoramic and fascinating memoir.... [Finnegan] set out in pursuit of a perfect wave, and spent five years circumnavigating the globe with long stops in Polynesia, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, and South Africa.... [H]e has written a revealing and magisterial account of a beautiful addiction.
Publishers Weekly


[A]n up-close and personal homage to the surfing lifestyle through the author's journey as a lifelong surfer. Finnegan's writing is polished and bold, but the lengthy descriptions of individual waves and their personalities may be daunting to the average reader.... [H]igh-caliber memoir.... —Stacy Shaw, Orange, CA
Library Journal


As brilliant and lucid as some of [Finnegan's] descriptions are, they sometimes overwhelm the rest of the narrative.... [N]evertheless...a fascinating look inside the mind of a man terminally in love with a magnificent obsession. A lyrical and intense memoir.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
Amy Chua
Penguin Group USA
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594202841


Summary
An awe-inspiring, often hilarious, and unerringly honest story of one mother's exercise in extreme parenting, revealing the rewards-and the costs-of raising her children the Chinese way.

All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. What Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother reveals is that the Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that. Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions and providing a nurturing environment. The Chinese believe that the best way to protect your children is by preparing them for the future and arming them with skills, strong work habits, and inner confidence. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother chronicles Chua's iron-willed decision to raise her daughters, Sophia and Lulu, her way—the Chinese way—and the remarkable results her choice inspires.

Here are some things Amy Chua would never allow her daughters to do:

• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• not be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin

The truth is Lulu and Sophia would never have had time for a playdate. They were too busy practicing their instruments (two to three hours a day and double sessions on the weekend) and perfecting their Mandarin.

Of course no one is perfect, including Chua herself. Witness this scene—"According to Sophia, here are three things I actually said to her at the piano as I supervised her practicing:

1. Oh my God, you're just getting worse and worse.
2. I'm going to count to three, then I want musicality.
3. If the next time's not PERFECT, I'm going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them!"

But Chua demands as much of herself as she does of her daughters. And in her sacrifices-the exacting attention spent studying her daughters' performances, the office hours lost shuttling the girls to lessons-the depth of her love for her children becomes clear.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is an eye-opening exploration of the differences in Eastern and Western parenting- and the lessons parents and children everywhere teach one another. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Champaign, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., J.D., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in New Haven, Connecticut

Amy L. Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She joined the Yale faculty in 2001 after teaching at Duke Law School. Prior to starting her teaching career, she was a corporate law associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. She specializes in the study of international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization and the law. She is widely known for her parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), and The Triple Package (2014), co-authored with her husband Jed Rubenfeld.

Background
Chua was born in Champaign, Illinois. Her parents were ethnic Chinese from the Philippines who emigrated to the United States. Amy's father, Leon O. Chua, is an Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences professor at the University of California, Berkeley and is known as the father of nonlinear circuit theory, cellular neural networks, and discovered the memristor. She was raised as a Roman Catholic and lived in West Lafayette, Indiana.

When she was eight years old, her family moved to Berkeley, California. Chua went to El Cerrito High School and graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in Economics from Harvard College in 1984. She obtained her J.D. cum laude in 1987 from Harvard Law School, where she was an Executive Editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Books
Chua has written four books: two studies of international affairs, a memoir and her latest on Ethnic-American culture.

• World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003), explores the ethnic conflict caused in many societies by disproportionate economic and political influence of "market dominant minorities" and the resulting resentment in the less affluent majority. The book—a New York Times Bestseller, was selected by The Economist as one of the Best Books of 2003 and was named in The Guardian as one of the "Top Political Reads of 2003"—examines how globalization and democratization since 1989 have affected the relationship between market dominant minorities and the wider population.

• Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall (2007), examines seven major empires and posits that their success depended on their tolerance of minorities.

• Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), is a memoir that ignited a global parenting debate with its story of one mother’s journey in strict parenting techniques.

• The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America (2014) outlines three personal traits that make for individual success. It is co-authored with Jed Rubenfeld, her husband.

Personal
Chua lives in New Haven, Connecticut and is married to Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld. She has two daughters, Sophia and Louisa ("Lulu"). She is the eldest of four sisters: Michelle, Katrin, and Cynthia. Katrin is a physician and a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. Cynthia, who has Down Syndrome, holds two International Special Olympics gold medals in swimming. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/18/2014.)

Book Reviews
So many parenting memoirs capture the various ways the authors' children have taken them to hell and back. Refreshingly, and perhaps uniquely, Chua instead catalogs the various ways she tortured her two young daughters, all in the name of Chinese tradition and the goal of reaching Carnegie Hall…Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is entertaining, bracingly honest and, yes, thought-provoking.
Susan Dominus - New York Times Book Review


Readers will alternately gasp at and empathize with Chua's struggles and aspirations, all the while enjoying her writing, which, like her kid-rearing philosophy, is brisk, lively and no-holds-barred. This memoir raises intriguing, sometimes uncomfortable questions about love, pride, ambition, achievement and self-worth that will resonate among success-obsessed parents.
Elizabeth Chang - Washington Post


This is one outrageous book, partly thanks to Amy Chua's writing style - Chua is pugnacious and blunt, with an unerring nose for the absurd ...The cultural divide Chua so brilliantly captures is one we stand to witness more and more in our globalized age, after all; and what with Asia and Asian achievement looming ever larger in the American imagination, the issues inherent in Battle Hymn are as important as they are entertaining... I was riveted by this book.
Gish Jen - Boston Globe


Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother did more than speak to me. It screamed, shouted and lectured me. It made me simultaneously laugh with empathy and cringe with embarrassment and exasperation... Charming... Self-effacing... Guffaw-inducing.
Terry Hong - San Francisco Chronicle


Chua (Day of Empire) imparts the secret behind the stereotypical Asian child's phenomenal success: the Chinese mother. Chua promotes what has traditionally worked very well in raising children: strict, Old World, uncompromising values--and the parents don't have to be Chinese. What they are, however, are different from what she sees as indulgent and permissive Western parents: stressing academic performance above all, never accepting a mediocre grade, insisting on drilling and practice, and instilling respect for authority. Chua and her Jewish husband (both are professors at Yale Law) raised two girls, and her account of their formative years achieving amazing success in school and music performance proves both a model and a cautionary tale. Sophia, the eldest, was dutiful and diligent, leapfrogging over her peers in academics and as a Suzuki piano student; Lulu was also gifted, but defiant, who excelled at the violin but eventually balked at her mother's pushing. Chua's efforts "not to raise a soft, entitled child" will strike American readers as a little scary—removing her children from school for extra practice, public shaming and insults, equating Western parenting with failure—but the results, she claims somewhat glibly in this frank, unapologetic report card, "were hard to quarrel with.
Publishers Weekly


Most critics agreed that Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is an entertaining read—lively and humorous, written with the intent to shock. More controversial is Chua’s stereotyping of Chinese and Western cultures, not to mention her authoritarian parenting methods..
Bookmarks Magazine


She insists that Western children are no happier than Chinese ones, and that her daughters are the envy of neighbors and friends, because of their poise and musical, athletic, and academic accomplishments. Ironically, this may be read as a cautionary tale that asks just what price should be paid for achievement. —Colleen Mondor
Booklist

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother:

1. What is your overall reaction to Battle Hymn of the Mother Tiger?  Are you appalled or impressed, in agreement, disagreement...or something else?

2. What kind of mother is Amy Chua? Do you wish you'd had a mother like Chua? Or that you were a mother like Chua?

3. Is this a parenting manual? Are Western parents too soft on, or too permissive toward, their children? Does Amy Chua offer an alternative parenting model?

4. What is the most extreme example of Amy Chua's mothering? Which incidents stuck with you more than others—the piano practice threats? The birthday card rejection?

5. Success for Chua is important: how does she define success...and how do you define it? How important is success to you?

6. Consider whether Chua's children are such extraordinarily high achievers (musically and academically) because of their strict upbringing...or because of their innate abilities, i.e., genetics? (See her father's background in the Author Bio above.)

7. According to Chua, her parenting method is typical of Chinese families. Is their method—with its strict demands for high achievement—superior to that of Western parents? How would you describe the differences between parenting in the two cultures?

8. Chua wishes to reverse what she sees as "a remarkably common pattern" of decline in the Chinese immigrant family. According to Chua, first generation immigrants exercise strict discipline. Their children, the second generation, will "typically be high-achieving" but less strict with their children. And the third generation, "will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution"—an attitude that ultimately leads to to disobedience and generational decline. Is the decline Chua describes real? Have other immigrant populations experienced the same pattern?

9. Do you agree or disagree with Chua's criticisms of various aspects of Western culture—Facebook and junk food being two examples?

10. What does Chua think of the Western emphasis on self-esteem? Do you agree...or disagree with her assessment?

11. Chua dismisses the happy endings of Disney family movies by saying that that's "just Disney's way of appealing to all the people who never win prizes." What do you think—are the movies' soft-focus on parenting values pandering to low-achievers, to those who will never rise above average?

12. Part of Chua's rationale is that she understands what all Chinese parents understand: "that nothing is fun until you're good at it." Do you agree? Is playing the piano well as an adult, for instance, worth those toothmarks bitten into the piano as a child?

13. Chua says of herself, "the truth is I'm good at enjoying life." What do you make of her admission? Has she risked teaching her daughters the same attitude toward life?

14. What role does Chua's husband, Jed, play in all this? What should his role have been? What do you make of the fact that Chua is not unlike his own mother?

15. How did her sister's illness change Chua's views on life?

16. When Lulu had her outburst in Russia, did you root for her, or shrink back in horror?

17. How, eventually, is Chua "humbled" by her daughters—in what way do they prove wiser than their mother? Is, in fact, Chua truly humbled by Lulu? Does she have a genuine awakening?

18. What area some of the books humorous moments. Many reviewers talked about laughing out loud. What sections do you find especially funny, even hilarious?

19. Is success worth the time and effort it takes to maintain oversight and discipline...and, most especiallly, is it worth a child's unhappiness? Is that unhappiness only momentary in the larger scheme of life? In the end, is the payoff—a lifetime of accomplishment—worth the cost?

20. What do you predict for Chua's daughters? Do you think they will raise their children with the same strict standards their mother applied to them?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)