Non-Fiction - Results from #150

The Dream
Harry Bernstein, 2008
Random House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345503893

Summary
During the hard and bitter years of his youth in England, Harry Bernstein’s selfless mother never stops dreaming of a better life in America, no matter how unlikely. Then, one miraculous day when Harry is twelve years old, steamship tickets arrive in the mail, sent by an anonymous benefactor.

Suddenly, a new life full of the promise of prosperity seems possible—and the family sets sail for America, meeting relatives in Chicago. For a time, they get a taste of the good life: electric lights, a bathtub, a telephone. But soon the harsh realities of the Great Depression envelop them. Skeletons in the family closet come to light, mafiosi darken their doorstep, family members are lost, and dreams are shattered.

In the face of so much loss, Harry and his mother must make a fateful decision—one that will change their lives forever. And though he has struggled for so long, there is an incredible bounty waiting for Harry in New York: his future wife, Ruby. It is their romance that will finally bring the peace and happiness that Harry’s mother always dreamed was possible. (From the publisher.)

The Dream is the sequel to Bernstein's 2007 memoir, The Invisible Wall.

Author Bio
• Birth—May 30, 1910
• Where—Stockport, England, UK
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in Brick Township, New Jersey, USA

Harry Bernstein is the author of The Invisible Wall, which deals with his abusive, alcoholic father, the anti-Semitism he encountered growing up in a Lancashire mill town (Stockport— now part of Greater Manchester) in north west England, and the Romeo and Juliet romance experienced by his sister and her Christian lover. The book was started when he was 93 and published in 2007 when he was 96. The loneliness he encountered following the death of his wife, Ruby, in 2002 after 67 years of marriage was the catalyst for Bernstein to begin work on his book.

According to an article by Associated Press writer, Rebecca Santana, Bernstein first sent the finished manuscript to New York publishers but, having no luck, he sent it to the London office of Random House. There the book sat for about a year until it came across the desk of editor Kate Elton, who described it as "unputdownable."

"I think he's a most fantastic writer," Elton said. "He creates the characters of his family so vividly and tells such a moving story."

He finished writing his second book, The Dream, which centers on his family’s move to the United States when he was twelve. It was published in 2008.

Recently, he published his third book, The Golden Willow, which is the third memoir of his series involving his married life and later years.

Before his retirement at age 62, Bernstein worked for various movie production companies reading scripts and working as a magazine editor for trade magazines, and also wrote freelance articles for such publications as Popular Mechanics, Jewish American Monthly and Newsweek.

Bernstein currently lives in Brick Township, New Jersey. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
A wise, unsentimental memoir.... It’s hard to tell why Mr. Bernstein’s writings never blossomed into a career, or how he feels about this. He tells his tale without rhetorical fuss or disappointment, allowing even his father a moment of humanity, at Ada’s funeral. The tyrant has outlasted his victim, and now he is alone, the one thing he’d never wanted to be.
New York Times

Beneath the poignant descriptions of places and times past, beneath the rising and falling patterns of these characters’ lives, we hear what Wordsworth called "the still sad music of humanity."
Washington Post Book World

Packed with carefully crafted dialogue and descriptions that transport us, with keen verisimilitude, from working-class England to Depression-era Chicago.... Visceral, honest writing [makes] Bernstein’s memoir impossible to put down.
Jewish News Weekly

(Starred review.) Having mined his English upbringing in The Invisible Wall, Bernstein resumes a nine-decade reckoning in this gently observed memoir of a Jewish immigrant family riven from within. Eager to escape English mill town life, his mother promises her brood a better life in America-a dream providentially fulfilled with steamship tickets. But even after reuniting with family in Chicago, his father's "bloody 'ell" bellows and monstrous rage continue to smite. The author takes in his new surroundings with a keen adolescent eye, observing "back porches all piled on top of one another like egg crates," belying celluloid America—as do his ragamuffin elders, with his grandfather reduced to begging in secret. At school he confounds Midwestern types with his Lancashire accent, comically mistaken for an Egyptian named "Arry." Engulfed in the Roaring '20s, the Bernsteins revel in the luxuries of telephones and parlor rooms, only to feel the wallop of the Depression as the decade wanes. Uprooted to New York, Bernstein ekes out a living and falls quietly, desperately in love, achieving a joyful 67-year marriage. Coming on the heels of his first book, this one will delight readers eager for more of Bernstein's distinctive voice and gift for character.
Publishers Weekly

This coherent account of Bernstein’s life is a fascinating and well-written book.—George Cohen
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. Do you think Harry Bernstein achieved the American Dream? What about the other members of his family? Why did so many immigrants believe in the American Dream? Do you think it was really available to them?

2. How was Ava able to soldier on with a shred of optimism during difficult times? Do you think she truly believed that her dreams would come true? When did the dreams bolster her hope, and when did they cease to help?

3. What do you think contributed to Yankel’s behavior toward his family? If he hadn’t needed to work from the age of seven, began drinking as a child, or had fit a different role in his own family, might he have been a more loving father? Was he a product of nature or nurture?

4. Soon after the Bernsteins receive their tickets to America from the anonymous benefactor, Harry’s mother says,"We can’t go to America looking like beggars...." She would remember those words later and the irony they contained. (page 18). Later, when she finds out that Harry’s grandfather is a panhandler, she is horrified that he takes money from others. Why, then, was she so willing to ask her husband’s family for the tickets to America? Discuss the many different definitions of charity in The Dream

5. Harry can’t understand why his mother cajoles his father to come with them to America, especially since he was hoping to leave his father behind once and for all. What were her motives? What might their lives have been like if he stayed in England?

6. Yankel’s story of desertion is the reason Ada falls in love with him, and the reason she cannot abandon him. Do you believe, as Harry’s grandfather insists, that Yankel refused to leave Poland as a boy, or do you think his mother left him behind? Is this story the sole reason Ada gave him so many chances, or do you think some part of her still loved him?

7. "I felt with a sinking sensation that we were back to what we had come from" (page 38). Had the dream bubble Harry refers to in the beginning of the memoir already burst, so soon after they arrived in America? Have you experienced a moment like this, when you got what you had hoped for, but found that a better life was still out of reach?

8. Why does Harry’s grandfather seem to have such fortitude against hardship? How does he protect himself emotionally in a way that much of the rest of the family cannot? Do you have a family member who seems remarkably able to roll with the punches?

9. When Harry finds out that his grandfather has died, he thinks, "What a strange man he was...and how little we really knew of him, of the depth of his generosity, the sense of responsibility to his family, the goodness that was in him" (page 238). Why did Harry’s grandfather continue to send money to the children who looked down on him, even after he wasn’t invited to the wedding he paid for?

10. Harry’s grandfather believed that he tricked Ada and pushed her into marrying Yankel. Do you think his financial assistance atoned for his lie about Ada’s first love, Samuel? Like Ada, have you ever experienced a moment that so completely changed the course of your life?

11. Harry’s grandfather gives him a free ticket to a dance, and that is where he meets Ruby, the love of his life. Do you believe in fate? Serendipity? Love at first sight?

12. "I was not angry with my mother. I realized how dependent she was on me, how much all her hopes and what was left of her dreams were fastened on me, and—perhaps most important—how much protection I gave her against my father. And now there was Ruby" (page 208). Harry married Ruby despite his mother’s fear of losing him. How often must we sacrifice the contentment of others to improve our own lives? Have you ever done so? Was it worth it?

13. Who do you most admire in The Dream? Why? Is there someone in your own family who is like this character?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Barack Obama, 1995
Crown Publishing
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400082773

Summary
Nine years before his Senate campaign—and 13 before his US presidential election—Barack Obama published this powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004.

Dreams from My Father tells the story of Obama’s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother—a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego.

Obama opens his story in New York, where he hears that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has died in a car accident. The news triggers a chain of memories as Barack retraces his family’s unusual history: the migration of his mother’s family from small-town Kansas to the Hawaiian islands; the love that develops between his mother and a promising young Kenyan student, a love nurtured by youthful innocence and the integrationist spirit of the early sixties; his father’s departure from Hawaii when Barack was two, as the realities of race and power reassert themselves; and Barack’s own awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the larger black and white worlds but within himself.

Propelled by a desire to understand both the forces that shaped him and his father’s legacy, Barack moves to Chicago to work as a community organizer. There, against the backdrop of tumultuous political and racial conflict, he works to turn back the mounting despair of the inner city. His story becomes one with those of the people he works with as he learns about the value of community, the necessity of healing old wounds, and the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity.

Barack’s journey comes full circle in Kenya, where he finally meets the African side of his family and confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life. Traveling through a country racked by brutal poverty and tribal conflict, but whose people are sustained by a spirit of endurance and hope, Barack discovers that he is inescapably bound to brothers and sisters living an ocean away—and that by embracing their common struggles he can finally reconcile his divided inheritance.

A searching meditation on the meaning of identity in America, Dreams from My Father might be the most revealing portrait we have of a major American leader—a man who is playing the nation's most prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented world. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 4, 1961
• Where—Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
• Education—B.A., Columbia University; J.D., Harvard University
• Currently—Chicago, Illinois, and Washington, DC

Prior to his 2008 election for President, Barack Obama spent his career as a community organizer, civil rights attorney, and leader in the Illinois state Senate and US Senate.

Sworn into office as US Senator on January 4, 2005, Senator Obama focused on the challenges of a globalized, 21st-century world. Recognizing the terrorist threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, he traveled to Russia with Republican Richard Lugar to begin a new generation of non-proliferation efforts designed to find and secure deadly weapons around the world. Understanding the threat we face to our economy and our security from America's addiction to oil, he worked to promote the greater use of alternative fuels and higher fuel standards in our cars. He has championed ethics reform in Washington.

He has served as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Veterans Affairs Committee, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

During his eight years in the Illinois state Senate, Senator Obama worked to create the state Earned Income Tax Credit, an expansion of early childhood education, and draft legislation requiring the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all capital cases.

Senator Obama was born on August 4th, 1961, in Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. and Ann Dunham. He graduated from Columbia University in 1983, and moved to Chicago in 1985 to work for a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment. In 1991, Senator Obama graduated from Harvard Law School where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.

Senator Obama has lived with his wife Michelle and two daughters on Chicago’s South Side. (From author's senatorial website.)

Book Reviews
Barack Obama...has somehow managed to live an uncommonly interesting life, and writes about it frankly and well.... His account moves from Kansas to Hawaii to Kenya, with an emphasis on the father who died when Mr. Obama was very young. If he could rewrite it now, he says, the mother who raised him (and died after the book was published) would play a bigger role. But Mr. Obama would still break the mold of most memoir writers, if only because "an autobiography promises feats worthy of record, conversations with famous people, a central role in important events." With this thought comes a truly unusual acknowledgment: "There is none of that here."
Janet Maslin - New York Times (9/10/04)

Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois and the Democratic Party’s new rock star, is that rare politician who can actually write — and write movingly and genuinely about himself.... Most memorably, the book gave the reader a heartfelt sense of what it was like to grow up in the 1960’s and 70’s, straddling America’s color lines: the sense of knowing two worlds and belonging to neither, the sense of having to forge an identity of his own.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times (10/17/06)

Fluidly, calmly, insightfully, Obama guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race.
Washington Post Book World

Elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama was offered a book contract, but the intellectual journey he planned to recount became instead this poignant, probing memoir of an unusual life. Born in 1961 to a white American woman and a black Kenyan student, Obama was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents, his father having left for further study and a return home to Africa. So Obama's not-unhappy youth is nevertheless a lonely voyage to racial identity, tensions in school, struggling with black literature-with one month-long visit when he was 10 from his commanding father. After college, Obama became a community organizer in Chicago. He slowly found place and purpose among folks of similar hue but different memory, winning enough small victories to commit himself to the work-he's now a civil rights lawyer there. Before going to law school, he finally visited Kenya; with his father dead, he still confronted obligation and loss, and found wellsprings of love and attachment. Obama leaves some lingering questions—his mother is virtually absent—but still has written a resonant book.
Publishers Weekly

Obama argues with himself on almost every page of this lively autobiographical conversation. He gets you to agree with him, and then he brings in a counternarrative that seems just as convincing. Son of a white American mother and of a black Kenyan father whom he never knew, Obama grew up mainly in Hawaii. After college, he worked for three years as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. Then, finally, he went to Kenya, to find the world of his dead father, his "authentic" self. Will the truth set you free, Obama asks? Or will it disappoint? Both, it seems. His search for himself as a black American is rooted in the particulars of his daily life; it also reads like a wry commentary about all of us. He dismisses stereotypes of the "tragic mulatto" and then shows how much we are all caught between messy contradictions and disparate communities. He discovers that Kenya has 400 different tribes, each of them with stereotypes of the others. Obama is candid about racism and poverty and corruption, in Chicago and in Kenya. Yet he does find community and authenticity, not in any romantic cliche, but with "honest, decent men and women who have attainable ambitions and the determination to see them through.
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 Dreams of My Father:

1. Describe the difficulties Obama had as a child—not fitting in with white children and fearing social "out-casts."

2. Is it possible for any individual born of two ethnic origins to find a society in which he or she truly belongs? Think of recent authors who have struggled with similar issues: Amy Tan (Chinese), Jhumpa Lahiri (Indian), Louise Erdrich (Native American). Also consider the classics of African-American writers like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Richard Wright's Native Son, Toni Morrison's Beloved.

3. Discuss Obama's family. What about his mother—would you have liked more attention paid to her in this work? Also consider his grandparents and they role they played in his life.

4. When he makes his trip to Kenya, what does he come to understand about his father—and his own heritage.

5. Do you feel Obama's attitude toward the all-white culture is one of blame, acceptance, resignation? Or something else?

6. Ultimately, Obama's memoir is a coming-of-age story in which a young man who straddles two cultures seeks his identity in the adult world. How—or how well—does he succeed? What conclusions does he reach?

7. Talk about his work as a community social worker on Chicago's south side. What does he learn or come to realize about his role in the African-American community?

8. Knowing now, as we do, of Obama's election as President of the United States, how do you view the primary events in his memoirs? In what ways have they shaped his political success and his political views?

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

top of page (summary)

Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods—My Mother's, My Father's and Mine
Noelle Howey, 2002
Macmillan Picador
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312422202

Summary
Throughout her childhood in suburban Ohio, Noelle struggled to gain love and affection from her distant father. In compensating for her father’s brusqueness, Noelle idolized her nurturing tomboy mother and her conservative grandma who tried to turn her into “a little lady.”

At age fourteen, Noelle’s mom told her the family secret: “Dad likes to wear women’s clothes.” As Noelle copes with a turbulent adolescence, her father begins to metamorphose into the loving parent she had always longed for—only now outfitted in pedal pushers and pink lipstick. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Noelle Howey is a freelance editor who has contributed to numerous magazines and web sites, including Ms., Self, Time Out, Mademoiselle, and Mother Jones. She is also the author Dress Codes. She lives with her husband and daughter in Cleveland, Ohio. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[Howey] never loses her sense of humor.... A clever writer, Howey takes this incredible material and creates a witty, warm, life-affirming memoir.
Washington Post Book World

A profoundly affecting account of her father’s long road to self-realization and a meditation on what it means to be female.
San Francisco Chronicle

Howey’s voice is chatty and clear, sassy at times, with all the aplomb of somebody used to explaining an unusual family structure. Dress Codes is a mix of contemporary references and timeless emotion.
Oregonian

It’s hard to imagine any memoir of recent years that better exemplifies "family values"—in the form of openness, love, and the sharing of intimacies.
Salon.com

Noelle Howey remembers her father, Dick, as a distant presence in her childhood; he would come home, fix a drink, and retreat to his corner of the living room. So Howey feels that she gained rather than lost a parent when Dick divorced her mother and became Christine. As Christine, she was “kinder, nicer, tidier, better with children, interested in flowers and birds and chick flicks,” Howey writes in Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods - My Mother's, My Father's and Mine. It was “like the transformation of Mr. Hyde into Miss Jekyll.” Yet she wonders, “If all these wonderful traits were inside my father all along, why was gender the only means to let them out? Why wasn’t loving me—or my mother—enough?”
Kate Taylor - The New Yorker

(Starred review.) In this rich memoir, Howey details not one life, but three. It's a difficult juggling act, but it pays off beautifully, for the story of her father's coming out as a male-to-female transsexual is only part of a larger narrative of growing up female in America. Howey's writing is neither sensationalistic nor condescendingly cheery; this is a loving portrait of a girl's complicated relationship to her father's femininity and her own. The author, co-editor of Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Parents, nicely juxtaposes her childhood dress-up games and clandestine sexual experimentation (she wanted to be Madonna) with her father's secret penchant for soft scarves and pumps (he dreamed of becoming Annette Funicello). As a teenager, Howey was impatient with the attention that her father's adventures always garnered and told her parents, both of whom she enjoyed a healthy relationship with, about her sex life: "It was a power maneuver on my part.... Dad kept raising the bar of what Mom and I could accept with equanimity, and I felt justified in doing the same." She is no less forthcoming about the odd celebrity status having a transsexual parent granted her at her ultra-liberal college, elevating her "above all the other upper-middle-class white chicks in thrift wear roaming the commons." Howey's candid, funny writing gives this memoir the cast of fiction, perhaps not surprising in a book honest enough to admit "we all reconstruct our lives in reverse, altering our own anecdotes and stories year after year in order to make them more congruent with our present-day selves." Agent, Karen Gerwin. (May)Forecast: Sure, there are lots of books out there on families with transgendered parents. But how many are memoirs? And how many are as funny and candid as this one? Howey's work will do splendidly.
Publishers Weekly

When we think of a typical American family, we do not often think of a family that comprises a transgendered father, a tomboy mother, and their daughter. However, this is the very dynamic of this touching autobiographical account of Howey's growing up under anything but ordinary circumstances. Dress Codes is a candid and compelling look back at how teenager Howey and her mother struggled with her father's transformation from a bad-tempered dad to a loving transgendered woman. Readers will both laugh and wince at the numerous issues Howey and her family have to come to terms with as they learn to grow both individually and as a family. Howey (coeditor, Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Parents), who has written for various publications, including Glamour, Jane, and Self, details her own evolution along with her family's with honesty, grace, and wit. Highly recommended for all public libraries. —Sheila Devaney Univ. of Georgia Libs., Athens
Library Journal

Introspective, honest, and intelligent, Howey's memoir will appeal to readers not just as a story of transgenderism but also simply as the story of a family that has to redefine itself. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. In many ways, Dick and Noelle experience their adolescence together, simultaneously making the transformation into womanhood. How does each girl cope with this situation? How does Dick approach becoming a woman differently than he did becoming a man?

2. Discuss Dinah and Dick’s relationship. Why is Dinah so invested in Dick despite the face that he is emotionally and sexually distant? Why does she pass up her other prospects to marry him? When Dick transforms into Christine, how does their relationship change? Does Dinah feel as responsible for Christine as she did for Dick? Why or why not?

3. Dinah knew Dick’s secret when she married him, yet it is the secret that keeps themc distant and unhappy. In what ways does the secret damage Dick’s relationship with Noelle?

4. Why is it so easy for Christine to repair her relationship with Noelle and so difficult with Dinah? What about Grandma H is so attractive to Noelle when she is a child? What changes? What does Grandma H later represent to Noelle that she is trying to hard to reject?

5. When they are first married, Dick and Dinah attend a few meetings for crossdressers but neither feels comfortable and they stop going. But later Christine attends meetings that she finds informative and friendly. Discuss what changes have occurred that allow Christine to attend transgender meetings with confidence?

6. Why does Dick take Noelle to see his father’s grave? What is he trying to tell her? What mistakes did Dick’s father make that Dick later repeats with Noelle?

7. Noelle has a turbulent adolescence in which she tries hard to find herself sexually. Why is having sex at a young age so important to Noelle? What is she trying to prove to herself? In what ways does sex dominate her relationships throughout high school and college?

8. On page 222, Dinah tells Dr. Smith, “I spent ages taking care of [Dick], and I don’t have anything to show for it. I don’t even know who I am anymore.” Dr. Smith tells her to try and remember. Does Dinah find herself? In what ways does she come into her own womanhood through Dick’s coming out? By the end of the narrative, how has Dinah changed? What about her is the same? Why does Noelle have a harder time dealing with her mother’s changes than her father’s transformation?

9. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Noelle relates better to her mother than her father. Yet in many ways she is a lot like Dick. Considering Dick’s boyhood, discuss Noelle’s tendencies towards her father’s behavior.

10. Publishers Weekly wrote, “The story of [Noelle’s} father’s coming out as a male-to-female transsexual is only part of a larger narrative of growing up female in America.” What does Dress Codes say about being female in America? What female stereotypes must each of the women in the book face? How does each cope with overcoming how society says women “should” be?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

The Dutiful Daughter's Guide to Caregiving: A Practical Memoir
Judith Henry, 2015
Broadcloth Books
164 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780996278805

Summary
For the sixty six million people in the U.S. who are assisting a disabled, sick or aging family member, stress has become a way of life.

Why? Because caregiving, even when performed with great love, is difficult work that few people are truly prepared for. For Judith Henry, it turned out to be a six year position with plenty of on-the-job training as she helped care for elderly parents.

Learning to laugh over the expanding contents of her leather life-support system, aka a purse, and making lemonade from her father’s tart comment about being a dutiful daughter, this experience has culminated in a book entitled, The Dutiful Daughter’s Guide to Caregiving: A Practical Memoir. It became her inspiration for creating a well-loved writer’s group in Tampa, Florida specifically for caregivers; and has garnered her national recognition by the U.S. Department of Women’s Health through their Spotlight interview series.

Her book, a reassuring combination of financial planner, family therapist, geriatric care manager, and cheeky best friend, offers personal stories and practical wisdom on topics such as:

Addressing financial and legal issues
Avoiding caregiver burnout
Choosing a rehab center
Dealing with grief and loss.

Filled with laughter, tears and lessons learned, it is a valuable resource for anyone taking on more responsibility for a parent’s well-being.

Author Bio
• Birth—May 8, 1953
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—M.A., Indiana University
• Currently—lives in Tampa, Florida

In addition to writing for online publications and working on her next book, Judith is the creator of a well-loved writer’s group for caregivers in Tampa, FL.

She also gives workshops and presentations on a variety of topics that include caring for elderly parents, the benefits of expressive writing, how to create a legacy letter for family and friends, and having the last word by writing your own obituary. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow Judith on Facebook.

Book Reviews
The Dutiful Daughter’s Guide to Caregiving is like having a close, smart friend guide me around the potholes of caring for an aging parent. She writes with humor and poignancy on this complex and sensitive subject.
Val Perry, Coordinator, Instructor, Bloomingdale Life Story Writing Program, Valrico, FL

The Dutiful Daughter’s Guide to Caregiving is a little gem of a book, packed with the kind of information that every caregiver needs. Delivered with laughter, and not a few tears, it’s a must-read.
Anne Lawrence, Caregiver, Tampa FL

Judith has delved with humor, complete seriousness, and full knowledge into one of the most complicated aspects of relationships – helping people leave their lives through the gift of active love. Readers will find meaning and support on their own journey as caregivers.
Marilyn Lairsey, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist, Portland Maine

Discussion Questions
1. What is the central idea discussed in this book? What issues or ideas does The Dutiful Daughter’s Guide explore? Are they personal, sociological, global, political, economic, spiritual, medical, or scientific?

2. Do the issues described affect your life now or will they in the future? How so?

3. Do you think the approach of offering advice and suggestions through the lens of memoir is an effective way to deliver the information? What does or doesn’t work?

4. What kind of language is used in the book? Is it objective and dispassionate or passionate and earnest? Does the language enhance or undercut the value of the book?

5. What are the implications for the future of both aging and caregiving? Are there long- term or short-term consequences to the issues raised in the book? Are they positive or negative, affirming or frightening?

6. What solutions does the author propose to assist you in the role of family caregiver?

7. What are some of the memorable passages that you found interesting, profound, amusing, illuminating, disturbing, or sad.

8. If you are currently a caregiver or see that as your role in the future, how does The Dutiful Daughter’s Guide prepare you for this?

9. Why do you think the author used humor to introduce such serious subjects? Did you find it enjoyable or inappropriate?

10. What have you learned after reading The Dutiful Daughter’s Guide? Did it address issues you hadn’t thought of before in terms of becoming a family caregiver?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

top of page (summary)

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War
Robert M. Gates, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
640 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307959478

Summary
From the former secretary of defense, a strikingly candid, vividly written account of his experience serving Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Before Robert M. Gates received a call from the White House in 2006, he thought he’d left Washington politics behind: after working for six presidents in both the CIA and the National Security Council, he was happy in his role as president of Texas A&M University. But when he was asked to help a nation mired in two wars and to aid the troops doing the fighting, he answered what he felt was the call of duty.

Now, in this unsparing memoir, meticulously fair in its assessments, he takes us behind the scenes of his nearly five years as a secretary at war: the battles with Congress, the two presidents he served, the military itself, and the vast Pentagon bureaucracy; his efforts to help Bush turn the tide in Iraq; his role as a guiding, and often dissenting, voice for Obama; the ardent devotion to and love for American soldiers—his “heroes”—he developed on the job.

In relating his personal journey as secretary, Gates draws us into the innermost sanctums of government and military power during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, illuminating iconic figures, vital negotiations, and critical situations in revealing, intimate detail. Offering unvarnished appraisals of Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Presidents Bush and Obama among other key players, Gates exposes the full spectrum of behind-closed-doors politicking within both the Bush and Obama administrations.

He discusses the great controversies of his tenure—surges in both Iraq and Afghanistan, how to deal with Iran and Syria, "Don’t Ask Don’t Tell," Guantánamo Bay, WikiLeaks—as they played out behind the television cameras. He brings to life the Situation Room during the Bin Laden raid.

And, searingly, he shows how congressional debate and action or inaction on everything from equipment budgeting to troop withdrawals was often motivated, to his increasing despair and anger, more by party politics and media impact than by members’ desires to protect our soldiers and ensure their success.

However embroiled he became in the trials of Washington, Gates makes clear that his heart was always in the most important theater of his tenure as secretary: the front lines. We journey with him to both war zones as he meets with active-duty troops and their commanders, awed by their courage, and also witness him greet coffin after flag-draped coffin returned to U.S. soil, heartbreakingly aware that he signed every deployment order. In frank and poignant vignettes, Gates conveys the human cost of war, and his admiration for those brave enough to undertake it when necessary.

Duty tells a powerful and deeply personal story that allows us an unprecedented look at two administrations and the wars that have defined them. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 25, 1943
• Where—Wichita, Kansas, USA
• Education—B.A., College of William & Mary; M.A., Indiana University;
Ph.D., Georgetown University
• Awards—Presidential Medal of Freedom
• Currently—president of William & Mary College, Williamsburg, Virginia

Robert Michael Gates is an American statesman and university president who served as the 22nd United States Secretary of Defense from 2006 to 2011.

Gates served for 26 years in the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, and under President George H. W. Bush became Director of Central Intelligence. Earlier, he was also an officer in the United States Air Force, and during the early part of his military career he was recruited by the CIA.

After leaving the CIA, Gates became president of Texas A&M University and was a member of several corporate boards. Gates served as a member of the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan commission co-chaired by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, that studied the lessons of the Iraq War.

Gates was nominated by Republican President George W. Bush as Secretary of Defense after the 2006 election, replacing Donald Rumsfeld. He was confirmed with bipartisan support. In a 2007 profile written by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Time named Gates one of the year's most influential people. In 2008, Gates was named one of America's Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report. He continued to serve as Secretary of Defense in President Barack Obama's administration.

In 2011 Gates retired from government. “He’ll be remembered for making us aware of the danger of over-reliance on military intervention as an instrument of American foreign policy,” said former Senator David L. Boren. Gates was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, by President Obama during his retirement ceremony. In his Washington Post book review of Gate's 2014 memoir Duty, Greg Jaffe said that Gates "is widely considered the best defense secretary of the post-World War II era."

Since leaving the Obama Administration, Gates has been elected President of the Boy Scouts of America, served as Chancellor of the College of William & Mary, and become a member of several corporate boards.

Background
Gates was born in Wichita, Kansas, the son of Isabel V. (nee Goss) and Melville A. "Mel" Gates. He attained the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) and received the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award from the BSA as an adult. He graduated from Wichita High School East in 1961. Gates is also a Vigil Honor member within the Order of the Arrow, Scouting's National Honor Society.

Gates then received a scholarship to attend the College of William and Mary, graduating in 1965 with a B.A. in history. At William & Mary, Gates was an active member and president of the Alpha Phi Omega (national service fraternity) chapter and the Young Republicans; he was also the business manager for the William and Mary Review, a literary and art magazine. At his William & Mary graduation ceremony, Gates received the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award naming him the graduate who "has made the greatest contribution to his fellow man."

Gates went on to earn an M.A. in history from Indiana University in 1966. He completed his Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet history at Georgetown University in 1974. The title of his Georgetown doctoral dissertation is "Soviet Sinology: An Untapped Source for Kremlin Views and Disputes Relating to Contemporary Events in China." He received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from both William & Mary (1998) and the University of Oklahoma (2011).

He married his wife Becky on January 7, 1967. They have two children.

Iran-Contra scandal
Gates was nominated to become the Director of Central Intelligence in early 1987. He withdrew his name after it became clear the Senate would reject the nomination due to controversy about his role in the Iran-Contra affair.

Because of his senior status in the CIA, Gates was close to many figures who played significant roles in the Iran-Contra Affair and was in a position to have known of their activities. In 1984, as deputy director of CIA, Gates advocated that the U.S. initiate a bombing campaign against Nicaragua and that the U.S. do everything in its power short of direct military invasion of the country to remove the Sandinista government.

Gates was an early subject of Independent Counsel's investigation, but the investigation of Gates intensified in the spring of 1991 as part of a larger inquiry into the Iran/contra activities of CIA officials. However, the final report of the Independent Counsel for Iran-Contra Scandal, issued on August 4, 1993, said that Gates "was close to many figures who played significant roles in the Iran/contra affair and was in a position to have known of their activities. The evidence developed by Independent Counsel did not warrant indictment..."

Gates was nominated, for the second time, for the position of Director of Central Intelligence by President George H. W. Bush on May 14, 1991. This time he was confirmed by the Senate on November 5 and sworn in on November 6, becoming the only career officer in the CIA's history (as of 2005) to rise from entry-level employee to Director.

Post CIA
After retiring from the CIA in 1993, Gates worked as an academic and lecturer. He evaluated student theses for the International Studies Program of the University of Washington. He lectured at Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Georgetown, Indiana, Louisiana State, Oklahoma, and the College of William and Mary. Gates served as a member of the Board of Visitors of the University of Oklahoma International Programs Center and a trustee of the endowment fund for the College of William and Mary, his alma mater, which in 1998 conferred upon him honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

In 1996, Gates published his autobiography, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War. He also wrote numerous articles on government and foreign policy and was a frequent contributor to the op-ed page of the New York Times.

Texas A&M
Gates was the interim Dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University from 1999 to 2001. In 2002, he became the 22nd President of Texas A&M. As the university president, he made progress in four key areas of the university's "Vision 2020" plan, to become one of the top 10 public universities by the year 2020. The four key areas include improving student diversity, increasing the size of the faculty, building new academic facilities, and enriching the undergraduate and graduate education experience.

Public service
In 2004, Gates co-chaired a Council on Foreign Relations task force on U.S. relations towards Iran. Among the task force's primary recommendation was to directly engage Iran on a diplomatic level regarding Iranian nuclear technology. Key points included a negotiated position that would allow Iran to develop its nuclear program in exchange for a commitment from Iran to use the program only for peaceful means.

At the time of his nomination by President George W. Bush to the position of Secretary of Defense, Gates was also a member of the Iraq Study Group, also called the Baker Commission, which was expected to issue its report in November 2006, following the mid-term election on November 7. He was replaced by former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.

Secretary of Defense
After the 2006 midterm elections, President George W. Bush announced his intent to nominate Gates to succeed the resigning Donald Rumsfeld as U.S. Secretary of Defense. He was sworn in on December 18, 2006.

Under the Bush administration, Gates directed the war in Iraq's troop surge, a marked change in tactics from his predecessor. With violence on the decline in Iraq, in 2008, Gates also began the troop withdrawal of Iraq, a policy continued into the Obama administration.

On December 1, 2008, President-elect Obama announced that Robert Gates would remain in his position as Secretary of Defense during his administration, reportedly for at least the first year of Obama's presidency. Gates was the fourteenth Cabinet member in history to serve under two Presidents of different parties, and the first to do so as Secretary of Defense.

Under Obama
One of the first priorities under President Barack Obama's administration for Gates was a review of U.S. policy and strategy in Afghanistan. While he continued the troop withdrawals in Iraq, which already had begun in the Bush administration, Gates also implemented a rapid, limited surge of troops in Afghanistan in 2009. He removed General David D. McKiernan from command in Afghanistan on May 6, 2009, replacing him with General Stanley A. McChrystal—which the Washington Post described as signaling a switch from "traditional Army" to Generals "who have pressed for the use of counter-insurgency tactics."

In a February 5, 2010 article, Time magazine's Elizabeth Rubin noted that Gates and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "forged a formidable partnership," speaking frequently, "comparing notes before they go to the White House," meeting with each other weekly and having lunch once a month at either the Pentagon or the State Department.

Gates officially retired as Secretary of Defense on July 1, 2011 and was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, by President Obama during his retirement ceremony.

Post Obama
In September of 2011, it was announced that Gates had accepted the position of chancellor at the College of William and Mary, succeeding Sandra Day O'Connor. He took the office of the chancellor on February 3, 2012.

In 2012, Starbucks Corporation announced that Gates had been elected to the Starbucks board of directors. He will serve on the board's nominating and corporate governance committee. In 2013, the Boy Scouts of America announced that Gates had been elected to the National executive board. While on this board, he will serve as the national president-elect. In May 2014, he will begin a two year long term as the BSA national president. Randall Stephenson, chairman and chief executive officer of AT&T Inc. will serve under Gates as the president-elect. Gates will be succeeding Wayne Perry as the national president.

In January 2014, Gates criticized Obama's handling of the war in Afghanistan in his autobiography, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, writing, "I never doubted [his] support for the troops, only his support for their mission." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/26/2014.)

Book Reviews
Robert M. Gates gives us a forthright, impassioned, sometimes conflicted account of his four and a half years as defense secretary in his fascinating new memoir Duty, a book that is highly revealing about decision making in both the Obama and Bush White Houses…. His writing is informed not only by a keen sense of historical context, but also by a longtime Washington veteran's understanding of how the levers of government work or fail to work. Unlike many careful Washington memoirists, Mr. Gates speaks his mind on a host of issues…[he] seems less intent on settling scores here than in trying candidly to lay out his feelings about his tenure at the Pentagon and his ambivalent, sometimes contradictory thoughts about the people he worked with.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

As I was reading Duty, probably one of the best Washington memoirs ever, I kept thinking that Robert M. Gates clearly has no desire to work in the federal government again in his life. That evidently is a fertile frame of mind in which to write a book like this one….The book is dotted with insider stuff reminiscent of the best of Bob Woodward's work
Thomas E. Ricks - New York Times Book Review

Touching, heartfelt...fascinating.... Gates takes the reader inside the war-room deliberations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and delivers unsentimental assessments of each man’s temperament, intellect and management style.... No civilian in Washington was closer to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than Gates. As Washington and the rest of the country were growing bored with the grinding conflicts, he seemed to feel their burden more acutely.”
Greg Jaffe - Washington Post

A breathtakingly comprehensive and ultimately unsparing examination of the modern ways of making politics, policy, and war…. Students of the nation’s two early twenty-first century wars will find the comprehensive account of Pentagon and White House deliberations riveting. General readers will be drawn to [Gates’] meditations on power and on life at the center of great political decisions…. His vision is clear and his tale is sad. Gates takes Duty as his title, but the account of his service also brings to mind the other two thirds of the West Point motto: "honor" and "country."
David M. Shribman - Boston Globe

A compelling memoir and a serious history…. A fascinating, briskly honest account [of a] journey through the cutthroat corridors of Washington and world politics, with shrewd, sometimes eye-popping observations along the way about the nature of war and the limits of power.… Gates was a truly historic secretary of defense…precisely because he did get so much done…. His descriptions of how he accomplished these feats—the mix of cooptation and coercion that he employed—should be read by every future defense secretary, and executives of all stripes, as a guide for how to command and overhaul a large institution.
Fred Kaplan - Slate

Gates's confirmation was a repudiation of his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, and his initial mission was to reverse a looming defeat in Iraq. As Gates, in this richly textured memoir, tells it, the Department of Defense had "alienated just about everyone in town" and the new secretary "had a lot of fences to mend." ... [H]is call for restoring "civility and mutual respect" is a cry from the heart.
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 start a discussion for Duty:

1. Robert Gates had no desire to take on the office of Defense secretary. First, why was he so reluctant; second, why did he agree to serve? Do you think his reluctance affected his conduct as head of Defense? Did it perhaps foster in him more objectivity, a greater sense of humility, less partisanship?

2. Twice in the memoir, Gates wonders why senior officers and others didn't come "screaming" to him, when he first took office, about the mess in Iraq. It's an interesting question—what are your thoughts?

3. Throughout the memoir Gates refers to the three distinct wars he had to fight: in Iraq and Afghanistan, within the Defense establishment itself, and with the U.S. Congress. Talk about each of those "wars"—

   • What were the issues?
   • What were the stakes?
   • What were the difficulties?
   • What were the outcomes?

   (This is an "overview" question, which pretty much covers the central idea of the entire book; in fact, it might be the sole question you tackle during your book discussion.)

3. What qualities did Gates bring to the office of the Secretary of Defense? From what you know of Donald Rumsfeld, Gates's predecessor, in what way did Gates's style differ? What most impressed you most about Gates's actions and/or personality?

4. How does Gates portray the major political figures of the day—starting, in particular, with each of the two presidents and vice presidents he worked under. Consider also Steven Hadley, Condi Rice (both in the Bush administration), Hillary Clinton (in Obama's administration), Iraqi Prime Minister Malaki, and Afghan President Karzai.

5. In an otherwise even-handed account, Gates reserves his sole displeasure for Congress, calling it at one point, "truly ugly." Talk about his experiences testifying before various committees and working to get budgets passed. Because we are privy only to Gates's point of view, it's hard not to side with his position and to view Congress as an irritating roadblock in the war effort. Yet, as Gates says himself (in a speech at West Point), Congress's oversight role is absolutely vital for democracy. Does Congress have an obligation to be skeptical of war operations...or should it be more compliant and unquestioning? Where should the line be drawn in a healthy democracy?

6. Talk about the two programs Gates initiated to get equipment to the field where it was most needed: the MRAP (IED proof vehicles to replace the vulnerable Humvee) and the IRS (Intelligence-Reconnaisance-Surveillance) drones and other cameras. What are some of the reasons Gates gives for why the troops did not receive the needed equipment? What was the military's rationale?

7. Gates is highly critical about the military culture and its "big war thinking." As a result, he says, "the difficulty of getting the Pentagon to focus on the wars we were in and to support the...troops in the fight left a very bad taste in my mouth (p.133). He also notes the ...

extraordinary power of the conventional war DNA...and of the bureaucratic and political power of those in the military, industry and Congress who wanted to retain the big procurement programs...and the predominance of big war thinking (p. 143).

Finally, he told West Point cadets that they must learn to "think and act creatively...in a different kind of world." He exhorted them to speak the truth to their superiors and to create an environment in which candor can survive (134).

How does Gates believe the military should evolve? What do he (and others) envision as the nature of future conflicts, and what kind of a military does he see as necessary for the military to prevail?

8. What are the difficulties Gates and other Defense chiefs have faced in trying to cut military budgets? (See p. 315 for one.) Why is it so difficult to trim projects? Can the military cut big weapons systems and still be ready for future wars?

9. In a press interview, Joint Chief of Staff General Mike Mullen called Iraq a "distraction" to the war effort in Afghanistan, something already sensed by many both in and outside the military. The remark was fairly damning of the administration. How does Gates view Iraq—as a distraction...or as a necessary fight?

10. Mullen angered both Presidents Bush and Obama by his frankness during press interviews. Does a president have a right to be served by loyal senior officers? Or do senior military officials have a duty to be frank to the American public? What are your thoughts? What do you think of Stanley McChrystal's conduct with respect to the Rolling Stone interview? Should he have been fired? What does Gates think?

11. Gates sees part of the Afghan problem as the "age-old" case of "too many high-ranking generals with a hand on the tiller" (p. 205). Talk about what he means and how that situation inhibited progress.

12. What other problems did Gates uncover regarding the progress of the war in Afghanistan. Aside from command structure, consider the problems of combat troop numbers, civilian reconstruction projects, intelligence gathering, and relations with President Hamid Karzai? (See especially pp.199-203 and pp. 335-344.)

13. Gates was unswerving in his love for the troops in the field and worked unstintingly on their behalf. At the end of his term, however, he questioned whether his feelings for them risked hampering his effectiveness as a leader (p. 594). What do you think? How much can a military commander be permitted to feel for the young men and women sent into battle?

14. Talk about the conditions uncovered at Walter Reed and the scandalous treatment for the returning wounded (pp. 109-114). How did things become so dire? What does Gates see as the underlying problems?

15. What do the terms "insurgency" and "counterinsurgency" mean? What are the differences between conventional combat operations and counterinsurgency? Consider, for instance, Gates's observations on his visit to Kabul in early December 2008 (p. 211).

16. Talk about the reasons Gates felt that General David McKiernan in Afghanistan needed to be replaced by General Stanley McChrystal?

17. Why did Gates come to see the democratization and modernization of Afghanistan as a "fantasy" (p. 336)? What were his prior experiences with Afghanistan and Pakistan which influenced his views?

18. What surprised you most, or shocked your most, in Gates's account of his five years as Defense Secretary? What have you taken away from reading this book: a better understanding of how military decisions are made, of the workings (or not workings) of military bureaucracy, of the shifting grounds of political life in D.C? What else?

19. Overall, how would you rate Robert Gates's effectiveness as secretary of Defense? Where did he succeed...and where did he fail (by his own admissions...or by others.)

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

top of page (summary)

Early Bird: A Memoir of Premature Retirement
Rodney Rothman, 2005
Simon & Schuster
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743270588

Summary
Everyone says they would like to retire early, but Rodney Rothman actually did it — forty years early. Burnt out, he decides at the age of twenty-eight to get an early start on his golden years. He travels to Boca Raton, Florida, where he moves in with an elderly piano teacher at Century Village, a retirement village that is home to thousands of senior citizens.

Early Bird is an irreverent, hilarious, and ultimately warmhearted account of Rodney's journey deep into the heart of retirement. Rodney struggles for acceptance from the senior citizens he shares a swimming pool with, and battles with cranky octogenarians who want him off their turf. The day-to-day dealings begin to wear on him. Before long he observes, "I don't think Tuesdays with Morrie would have been quite so uplifting if that guy had to spend more than one day a week with Morrie."

Rodney throws himself into the spirit of retirement, fashioning a busy schedule of suntanning, shuffleboard, and gambling cruises. As the months pass, his neighbors seem to forget that he is fifty years younger than they are. He finds himself the potential romantic interest of an aging femme fatale. He joins a senior softball club and is disturbed to learn that he is the worst player on the team. For excitement he rides along with a volunteer police officer on his patrols, hunting for crime. But even the criminals in his community seem to have retired.

Early Bird is a funny, insightful, and moving look at what happens to us when we retire, viewed from a remarkably premature perspective. Any reader who plans on becoming an old person will enjoy joining Rodney on his strange journey, as he reconsiders hisnotions of romance, family, friendship, and ultimately, whether he's ever going back to work. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Rodney Rothman is now living in Los Angeles. He is a former head writer for the Late Show with David Letterman, and was a writer and supervising producer for the television show Undeclared. His writing has appeared in the the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the Best American Nonrequired Reading, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and Men's Journal. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Funnyman Rothman has written a funny book. And like all good joke stories, this one contains more than a kernel of social truth. Rothman, a former joke writer for both Saturday Night Live and David Letterman, is 28 and burned-out. So what else to do but retire and head to a Florida retirement community? It turns out there's a pronounced social hierarchy here, too (mean girls at any age). Early Bird will facilitate excellent discussions about our expectations for retirement and longevity, and about the way life is, no matter the age.
A LitLovers LitPick (Oct. '06)

Rothman manages to be both an observer of these strange beings about three times his age and a sad-sack newcomer trying to blend in with them. He is working a bit of a stereotype, but his descriptions of the loneliness, the cliquishness, the slow-motion desperation of the place ring true and bittersweet.
Neil Genzlinger - The New YorkTimes

With its statistics and laugh-out-loud humor, the book feels more like a stand-up comedy routine with a sociological edge than a memoir. Rothman's seniors are gutsy, feisty, frugal and sometimes irritating, as when they awaken at 6 a.m. to begin waxing and washing their cars.
Diane Scharper - Washington Post

Rothman has been a head writer for David Letterman and has contributed articles to The New Yorker, the New York Times, and McSweeney's. He has also been, at the age of 25, a retiree. Burned out after a few hectic years of work, he decided to quit and move into a retirement village in Florida. This readable account of his exploration of the world of retirement four decades ahead of time provides a glimpse of a lifestyle known popularly only through stereotypes. Rothman becomes king of the shuffleboard court. He arranges an uneasy detente with his condo mate's cats. He infiltrates the Pool Group and inveigles an invitation to canasta. Rothman has done his research, and he applies his reading on retirement to his personal situation with humorous and occasionally poignant results. Nevertheless, the book reads like one extended sketch. Some sections work particularly well, as when Rothman discusses Maribel, the woman he met via JDate. His physical reaction to dancing with a seductive older woman, however, is fair game; and discerning Rothman's guidelines for what is fair game is occasionally more engrossing than the memoir itself. Still, this readable book is recommended for purchase by larger public libraries. —Audrey Snowden, John F. Kennedy Sch., Santiago de Queretaro, Mexico
Library Journal

A former comedy writer for David Letterman does some up-close research on a common South Florida species-the senior citizen retiree-with "findings" more suited to stand-up routine than anthropological tome. The result: lighthearted fluff with a flair, and not without its educational value. Out of work and pondering his not-so-immediate future, Rothman, 28, decides to get an early glimpse of retirement and soon finds himself sharing a Century Village condo with a widowed piano teacher, her several cats and one early rising parrot. Undaunted, the author dives into such delicacies as the ubiquitous nine-dollar "Early Bird" dinner special; a gambling cruise with an all-female social club; a late-night patrol with the volunteer senior citizen police, and "hard-core" bingo at a nearby strip-mall. He samples senior citizen softball, shuffleboard and canasta. He penetrates the cliquish Pool Club's daily poolside chats. He serves bagels at the local Jewish bakery, visits a Yoko Ono art exhibit with the very unappreciative Art Appreciation Club and, at one point, even tries Viagra. Rothman comes to no profound conclusions here. The mostly Jewish fugitives from the chilly Northeast he encounters conform in general to our imagined stereotypes. Still, seeing them up close-waxing their cars at 6:30 a.m., pilfering Equal packets from the local coffee shop, exchanging surprisingly racy jokes over breakfast bagels-makes for fun reading. And the author's fieldwork doesn't go entirely unrewarded, yielding such oddities as Amy Ballenger, a 93-year-old stand-up comic; Artie, a 63-year-old ex-heroin addict-turned real-estate-agent; and Vivian, a sultry 75-year-old Romanian with five ex-husbands and enough sex appeal to stir even the author's libido. Rothman also provides just enough serious data on aging (for example, the positive effects of staying active and socializing) to make this breezy, humorous tour both entertaining and rewarding. Witty and conversational prose, peppered alternately with sarcasm and compassion: easy, enjoyable reading.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Rodney has come down to South Florida to check out retirement early. Much of his time is spent at Century Village, where he admits he would never live. "I probably wouldn't want other people on top of me quite so much, though in some ways, it's not that bad." He's figuring out how we would want to retire. Have you thought about how you would want to retire? Has reading Early Bird given you any new insight into it?

2. At the start of his new life in South Florida, Rodney often finds himself trying to fit in amongst the retiree social circles. First with the Pool Group and later with the senior softball team. How does Rodney eventually make it into these groups and what are his general observations about joining retiree social networks?

3. When Rodney moves in with his new roommate Margaret, who he discovers through Roommate Finders, he starts off feeling on edge much of the time due to her jittery and hermit-like manner. Many of the community members also felt her to be strangely anti-social. Why do you think Rodney often began defending Margaret to the Pool Group?

4. While Rodney takes time out to observe Century Village, he explains many generalized habits of its senior members such as: a need to sleep less, up early, and socialize with others in groups. What do you think is the one observation he overlooked that he later faced when dealing with his good friend Shirley? Explain.

5. In creating new friendships Rodney quickly bonds with the women. He says, "I am trying to spend even more time with elderly women. Natural intuition would tell you that young men and old men would make better buddies, but this hasn't been my experience." What does Rodney gain from his relationships with women? Why do you think he finds it difficult to bond with men his age?

6. Rodney often takes a lighthearted approach in dealing with women who at times seem very set in their ways. Margaret, his roommate, is antisocial. Amy a fellow comedian, is 94 and raunchy. And Vivian is a sultry femme fatale. What qualities about Rodney do you think these women find interesting?

7. After spending time trying to understand how exactly to fit in with the Pool Group, Rodney often spends time interacting with many of the women. He goes to them for advice and asks to learn new things, such as the game Canasta, which they are very reluctant to teach. Why were they so reluctant to introduce him to their recreational activities?

8. Throughout the book, Rodney continually makes reference to the book Successful Aging, which was written based on the findings of a MacArthur study that differentiated "successful agers" from "bad agers." What were some of the qualities that Rodney discovered about good agers? How would you define Rodney's aging process? Do you think that you're a "good ager" or a "bad ager?" Do you know any bad agers?

9. After spending time trying to understand how exactly to fit in with the Pool Group, Rodney often spends time interacting with many of the women. He goes to them for advice and asks to learn new things, such as the game Canasta, which they are very reluctant to teach. Why were they so reluctant to introduce him to their recreational activities?

10. Most of the male senior citizens that Rodney meets in Florida are World War II veterans. "It's humbling to talk to them about those years. I hear a lot of heroic stories, the kind that have already filled numerous books written by television news anchors." How does Rodney make light of these veterans' stories? Do you get the impression that he lacks respect for their experiences, or that he is so humbled he has to poke a little bit of fun?

11. Rodney is not surprised to find that a large number of retired males want to become police officers. He concludes that the transition from breadwinner to doing nothing is difficult. He goes on to quote Successful Aging, which says, "leaving their job deprives men of a major source of stimulation. They need to find it in other ways." What other coping methods are used by many of the retired men in this book? Is it harder or easier for men to retire than women?

12. Throughout the novel, Rodney's empathetic and sometimes not-so-empathetic ways help him to continuously develop relationships with a number of elderly people. He also meets Christina, a 24-year-old woman with whom he ends up spending many of his last days in Florida. How do these new relationships shape Rodney's ideas and beliefs about growing old and what it means to be young?

13. In a conversation with his friend Jill, Rodney explains that he will begin telling people at parties that he is writing a book explaining the reason for his decision for making such a lifestyle change. How important are, and how attached are we as a society to job, titles? How obsessed are we in general with working?

14. Rodney is often very obliging and ready to lend a helping hand when it comes to the relationships he developed with some of the elderly women. With Margaret he agrees to start taking piano lessons to keep her busy, and with Amy he tries to keep her actively performing her stand-up comedy routines. What does Rodney learn about these women and himself in the process?

15. Throughout the book, Rodney often seems intrigued by books that discuss interesting facts about heath and aging. "I've been reading more books about aging, and it is quite clear that the more elderly retirees socialize, the longer they live and the happier they are." What sort of influences would inspire this young writer to retirement at this time in his life?

16. Do you think older and younger people interact enough in our society? How has the elderly migration to Florida changed America's attitudes about the elderly?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Eat Now; Talk Later: 52 True Tales of Family, Feasting, and the American Experience
James Vescovi, 2014
AuthorHouse
pp. 158
ISBN-13: 9781491831489

Summary
Unlike many memoirs, Eat Now; Talk Later doesn’t focus on a radically dysfunctional family; rather it celebrates the breadth of family life: struggle, humor, misunderstanding, and loyalty.

The book revolves around Desolina Vescovi, and her husband, Tony, who arrived in America in the 1920s—only to find they’d collided with the modern world. Born around 1900, on farms where little had changed for hundreds of years, the couple was stumped by telephones, banks, fast food, TV wrestling, and supermarkets.

It was up to their only child, a son, to serve as their shepherd, and it wasn’t easy. For example, how could he explain to his mother that his job was taking him and his family 700 miles away when, in her day, sons stayed put to work the family farm? Or that it wasn’t wise to hide $10,000 cash in the bedroom? How could he explain to his father that his grandson was attending graduate school, when Tony himself had quit school in the third grade to work in the fields?

It is not only the topic that’s original, but the way Tony and Desolina’s life is recounted: through fifty-two stories recalling incidents and ideas that reveal their character. Several of the stories previously appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Newsday, and Ancestry Magazine.

The book’s title comes from my grandmother, who disliked conversation during meals. To her, eating was sacred. Conversing while eating tortellini was like talking loudly during mass. You just didn’t do it. And you don’t have to be Italian to appreciate these stories, which have a universal quality about them because most of us have grandparents or aunts who are far behind the times
.
Prepare yourself for a feast consumed in delicious bites. Stories in this collection can be read before bed, on a lunch hour, or waiting in line. They can even be shared with friends who complain they have enough to read. And don’t miss the scrapbook of unusual family photos and recipes

Author Bio
• Birth—June 14, 1960
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Raised—Kalamazoo, Michigan
• Education—B.A., Miami University of Ohio; M.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in New York City

James Vescovi’s essays about his eccentric grandparents have appeared in The New York Times, Alimentum Journal: The Literature of Food, Creative Nonfiction, Newsday, Gazzetta Italiana, the anthology Our Roots Are Deep with Passion: New Essays by Italian-American Writers (Other Press), and other venues.

His fiction and essays been published in Midwestern Gothic, The New York Observer, the Georgetown Review, and Natural Bridge. He teaches high school English and lives in New York with his wife and three children. On warm Saturday afternoons, you can find him in his volunteer garden in Riverside Park trying desperately to make things grow. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow James on Facebook.

Discussion Questions
1. How do you think the author handled the portrayal of his grandparents? Was it honest? Patronizing? True to life?

2. Do you think the writer used the right structure in this memoir—telling about the lives of his grandparents through 52 stories, as opposed to a straight narrative. Why or why not?

3. Did any of these stories help you recall past, but important incidents involving your own family?

4. The author and his father do a great deal of caretaking of these elderly people? Is that a model we should aspire to, or do we simply live in a modern society where professionals must do this caretaking?

5. Immigration is a hot topic in the news today. Does this book—directly or indirectly—have anything to say about America’s immigration issues?

6. Did this book teach you anything about collecting your own family stories (even if not for publication)? If so, how?

7. If you could pick one story or passage that had a profound effect on you—was illuminating, significant, especially amusing—what would it be?

8. If there’s anything you could have added or subtracted from this book, what would it be?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

top of page (summary)

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia
Elizabeth Gilbert, 2006
Penguin Group USA
338 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143038412

Summary
This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life.

Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali.

By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise and funny author (whom Booklist calls "Anne Lamott's hip, yoga-practicing, footloose younger sister") is poised to garner yet more adoring fans. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 18, 1969
• Raised—Litchfield, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., New York University
• Awards—Pushcart Prize
• Currently—Frenchtown, New Jersey

Elizabeth M. Gilbert is an American author, essayist, short story writer, biographer, novelist and memoirist. She is best known for her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which spent 200 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and was also made into a film by the same name in 2010.

Gilbert was born in Waterbury, Connecticut. Her father was a chemical engineer, her mother a nurse. Along with her only sister, novelist Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Gilbert grew up on a small family Christmas tree farm in Litchfield, Connecticut. The family lived in the country with no neighbors, and they didn’t own a TV or even a record player. Consequently, they all read a great deal, and Gilbert and her sister entertained themselves by writing little books and plays.

Gilbert earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from New York University in 1991, after which she worked as a cook, a waitress, and a magazine employee. She wrote of her experience as a cook on a dude ranch in short stories, and also briefly in her book The Last American Man (2002).

Journalism
Esquire published Gilbert's short story "Pilgrims" in 1993, under the headline, "The Debut of an American Writer." She was the first unpublished short story writer to debut in Esquire since Norman Mailer. This led to steady—and well paying—work as a journalist for a variety of national magazines, including SPIN, GQ, New York Times Magazine, Allure, Real Simple, and Travel + Leisure.

Her 1997 GQ article, "The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon", a memoir of Gilbert's time as a bartender at the very first Coyote Ugly table dancing bar located in the East Village section of New York City, was the basis for the feature film Coyote Ugly (2000). She adapted her 1998 GQ article, "The Last American Man: Eustace Conway is Not Like Any Man You've Ever Met," into a biography of the modern naturalist, The Last American Man, which received a nomination for the National Book Award in non-fiction. "The Ghost," a profile of Hank Williams III published by GQ in 2000, was included in Best American Magazine Writing 2001.

Early books
Gilbert's first book Pilgrims (1997), a collection of short stories, received the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. This was followed by her novel Stern Men (2000), selected as a New York Times "Notable Book." In 2002 she published The Last American Man (2002), a biography of Eustace Conway, a modern woodsman and naturalist, which was nominated for National Book Award.

Eat, Pray, Love
In 2006, Gilbert published Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (Viking), a chronicle of her year of "spiritual and personal exploration" spent traveling abroad. She financed her world travel for the book with a $200,000 publisher's advance.

The memoir was on the New York Times Best Seller List of non-fiction in the spring of 2006, and in October 2008, after 88 weeks, the book was still on the list at number 2. Gilbert appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007, and has reappeared on the show to further discuss the book and her philosophy, and to discuss the film. She was named by Time as among the 100 most influential people in the world. The film version was released in 2010 with Julia Roberts starring as Gilbert.

After EPL
Gilbert's fifth book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, was released in 2010. The book is somewhat of a sequel to Eat, Pray, Love in that it takes up Gilbert's life story where her bestseller left off. Committed also reveals Gilbert's decision to marry Felipe, the Brazilian man she met in Indonesia as recounted in the final section of EPL. The book is an examination of the institution of marriage from several historical and modern perspectives—including those of people, particularly women, reluctant to marry. In the book, Gilbert also includes perspectives on same-sex marriage and compares this to interracial marriage prior to the 1970s. Gilbert and Felipe are still married and operate a story called Two Buttons.

In 2012, she republished At Home on the Range, a 1947 cookbook written by her great-grandmother, the food columnist Margaret Yardley Potter.

Gilbert returned to fiction in 2013 with The Signature of All Things, a sprawling 19th-century style novel following the life of a young female botonist. The book brings together that century's fascination with botany, botanical drawing, spiritual inquiry, exploration, and evolution. Kirkus Reviews called it "a brilliant exercise of intellect and imagination," and Booklist a "must read."

Literary influences
In an interview, Gilbert mentioned The Wizard of Oz with nostalgia, adding, "I am a writer today because I learned to love reading as a child—and mostly on account of the Oz books..." She is especially vocal about the importance of Charles Dickens to her, mentioning his stylistic influence on her writing in many interviews. She lists Marcus Aurelius' Meditations as her favorite book on philosophy. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/16/2013.)

Book Reviews
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of a broken heart must be in want of a good meal. Elizabeth Gilbert takes Jane Austen's maxim to extraordinary lengths in her smart, delightful book. On a year-long quest for inner peace, she first heads to Italy, where she eats four-months worth of pasta, gelato, calamari, stewed rabbit, pickled hyacinth bulbs, and the best pizza in the world.
A LitLovers LitPick (June '07)

The only thing wrong with this readable, funny memoir of a magazine writer's yearlong travels across the world in search of pleasure and balance is that it seems so much like a Jennifer Aniston movie.
Grace Lichtenstein - Washington Post

At the age of thirty-one, Gilbert moved with her husband to the suburbs of New York and began trying to get pregnant, only to realize that she wanted neither a child nor a husband. Three years later, after a protracted divorce, she embarked on a yearlong trip of recovery, with three main stops: Rome, for pleasure (mostly gustatory, with a special emphasis on gelato); an ashram outside of Mumbai, for spiritual searching; and Bali, for “balancing.” These destinations are all on the beaten track, but Gilbert’s exuberance and her self-deprecating humor enliven the proceedings: recalling the first time she attempted to speak directly to God, she says, “It was all I could do to stop myself from saying, ‘I’ve always been a big fan of your work.’
The New Yorker

Gilbert (The Last American Man) grafts the structure of romantic fiction upon the inquiries of reporting in this sprawling yet methodical travelogue of soul-searching and self-discovery. Plagued with despair after a nasty divorce, the author, in her early 30s, divides a year equally among three dissimilar countries, exploring her competing urges for earthly delights and divine transcendence. First, pleasure: savoring Italy's buffet of delights—the world's best pizza, free-flowing wine and dashing conversation partners—Gilbert consumes la dolce vita as spiritual succor. "I came to Italy pinched and thin," she writes, but soon fills out in waist and soul. Then, prayer and ascetic rigor: seeking communion with the divine at a sacred ashram in India, Gilbert emulates the ways of yogis in grueling hours of meditation, struggling to still her churning mind. Finally, a balancing act in Bali, where Gilbert tries for equipoise "betwixt and between" realms, studies with a merry medicine man and plunges into a charged love affair. Sustaining a chatty, conspiratorial tone, Gilbert fully engages readers in the year's cultural and emotional tapestry—conveying rapture with infectious brio, recalling anguish with touching candor-as she details her exotic tableau with history, anecdote and impression.
Publishers Weekly

An unsuccessful attempt at a memoir from novelist and journalist Gilbert (The Last American Man, 2002, etc.). While weeping one night on the bathroom floor because her marriage was falling apart, the author had a profound spiritual experience, crying out to and hearing an answer of sorts from God. Eventually, Gilbert left her husband, threw herself headlong into an intense affair, then lapsed into as intense a depression when the affair ended. After all that drama, we get to the heart of this book, a year of travel during which the author was determined to discover peace and pleasure. In Rome, she practiced Italian and ate scrumptious food. Realizing that she needed to work on her "boundary issues," she determined to forego the pleasure of sex with Italian men. In India, she studied at the ashram of her spiritual guru (to whom she had been introduced by the ex-lover), practiced yoga and learned that in addition to those pesky difficulties with boundaries, she also had "control issues." Finally she headed to Bali, where she became the disciple of a medicine man, befriended a single mother and fell in love with another expat. Quirky supporting characters pop up here and there, speaking a combination of wisdom and cliche. At the ashram, for example, she meets a Texan who offers such improbable aphorisms as, "You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be." Gilbert's divorce and subsequent depression, which she summarizes in about 35 pages, are in fact more interesting than her year of travel. The author's writing is prosaic, sometimes embarrassingly so: "I'm putting this happiness in a bank somewhere, not merely FDIC protected but guarded by my four spirit brothers." Lacks the sparkle of her fiction.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Gilbert writes that "the appreciation of pleasure can be the anchor of humanity," making the argument that America is "an entertainment-seeking nation, not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one." Is this a fair assessment?

2. After imagining a petition to God for divorce, an exhausted Gilbert answers her phone to news that her husband has finally signed. During a moment of quietude before a Roman fountain, she opens her Louise Glück collection to a verse about a fountain, one reminiscent of the Balinese medicine man's drawing. After struggling to master a 182-verse daily prayer, she succeeds by focusing on her nephew, who suddenly is free from nightmares. Do these incidents of fortuitous timing signal fate? Cosmic unity? Coincidence?

3. Gilbert hashes out internal debates in a notebook, a place where she can argue with her inner demons and remind herself about the constancy of self-love. When an inner monologue becomes a literal conversation between a divided self, is this a sign of last resort or of self-reliance?

4. When Gilbert finally returns to Bali and seeks out the medicine man who foretold her return to study with him, he doesn't recognize her. Despite her despair, she persists in her attempts to spark his memory, eventually succeeding. How much of the success of Gilbert's journey do you attribute to persistence?

5. Prayer and meditation are both things that can be learned and, importantly, improved. In India, Gilbert learns a stoic, ascetic meditation technique. In Bali, she learns an approach based on smiling. Do you think the two can be synergistic? Or is Ketut Liyer right when he describes them as "same-same"?

6. Gender roles come up repeatedly in Eat, Pray, Love, be it macho Italian men eating cream puffs after a home team's soccer loss, or a young Indian's disdain for the marriage she will be expected to embark upon at age eighteen, or the Balinese healer's sly approach to male impotence in a society where women are assumed responsible for their childlessness. How relevant is Gilbert's gender?

7. In what ways is spiritual success similar to other forms of success? How is it different? Can they be so fundamentally different that they're not comparable?

8. Do you think people are more open to new experiences when they travel? And why?

9. Abstinence in Italy seems extreme, but necessary, for a woman who has repeatedly moved from one man's arms to another's. After all, it's only after Gilbert has found herself that she can share herself fully in love. What does this say about her earlier relationships?

10. Gilbert mentions her ease at making friends, regardless of where she is. At one point at the ashram, she realizes that she is too sociable and decides to embark on a period of silence, to become the Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple. It is just after making this decision that she is assigned the role of ashram key hostess. What does this say about honing one's nature rather than trying to escape it? Do you think perceived faults can be transformed into strengths rather than merely repressed?

10. Sitting in an outdoor café in Rome, Gilbert's friend declares that every city-and every person-has a word. Rome's is "sex," the Vatican's "power"; Gilbert declares New York's to be "achieve," but only later stumbles upon her own word, antevasin, Sanskrit for "one who lives at the border." What is your word? Is it possible to choose a word that retains its truth for a lifetime?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Educated: A Memoir
Tara Westover, 2018
Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399590504

Summary
An unforgettable memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University.

Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom.

Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills” bag. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged metal in her father’s junkyard.

Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when an older brother became violent.

When another brother got himself into college and came back with news of the world beyond the mountain, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. She taught herself enough mathematics, grammar, and science to take the ACT and was admitted to Brigham Young University.

There, she studied psychology, politics, philosophy, and history, learning for the first time about pivotal world events like the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University.

Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty, and of the grief that comes from severing one’s closest ties.

With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes, and the will to change it. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1986
• Where—Idaho
• Education—B.A., Brigham Young University; M,Phil, Ph.D., Cambridge University,
• Currently—lives in London, England

Tara Westover was born in rural Idaho in 1986. Never having been in a classroom, she undertook her own education, receiving her BA from Brigham Young University in 2008. She was subsequently awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and earned an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2009.

In 2010 Westover was a visiting fellow at Harvard University and later returned to Cambridge where, in 2014, she was awarded a PhD.

Before decamping to London, where she now lives, Westover remained in Cambridge for several years, frequently joining folk singer/song-writer John Meed on stage. She has also sung in two of his albums.

Educated is her first book. (Adapted from the publisher and online sources.)

Book Reviews
A girl claws her way out of a claustrophobic, violent fundamentalist family into an elite academic career in this searing debut memoir.… Westover’s vivid prose makes this saga of the pressures of conformity and self-assertion that warp a family seem both terrifying and ordinary.
Publishers Weekly

Explicit descriptions of abuse can make for difficult reading, but…Westover's writing is lyrical and literary in style. With no real comparison memoir, this joins the small number of Mormon exposes of recent years. —Jessica Bushore, Xenia, OH
Library Journal

A recent Cambridge University doctorate debuts with a wrenching account of her childhood and youth in a strict Mormon family in a remote region of Idaho.… An astonishing account of deprivation, confusion, survival, and success.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Many of Tara’s father’s choices have an obvious impact on Tara’s life, but how did her mother’s choices influence her? How did that change over time?

2. Tara’s brother Tyler tells her to take the ACT. What motivates Tara to follow his advice?

3. Charles was Tara’s first window into the outside world. Under his influence, Tara begins to dress differently and takes medicine for the first time. Discuss Tara’s conflicting admiration for both Charles and her father.

4. Tara has titled her book Educated and much of her education takes place in classrooms, lectures, or other university environments. But not all. What other important moments of "education" were there? What friends, acquaintances, or experiences had the most impact on Tara? What does that imply about what an education is?

5. Eventually, Tara confronts her family about her brother’s abuse. How do different the members of her family respond?

6. What keeps Tara coming back to her family as an adult?

7. Ultimately, what type of freedom did education give Tara?

8. Tara wrote this at the age of thirty, while in the midst of her healing process. Why do you think she chose to write it so young, and how does this distinguish the book from similar memoirs?

9. Tara paid a high price for her education: she lost her family. Do you think she would make the same choice again?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Einstein: His Life and Universe
Walter Isaacson, 2007
Simon & Schuster
704 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743264747

Summary
A century after Albert Einstein began postulating his "Big Idea" about time, space, and gravity, a new biography examines the scientist whose public idolization was surpassed only by his legitimacy as one of humanity's greatest thinkers.

Walter Isaacson, the author of excellent profiles of Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger, utilizes a trove of material from recently opened Einstein archives to offer a probing look at a provocatively freethinking individual. (From Barnes & Noble.)

By the author of the acclaimed bestseller Benjamin Franklin, this is the first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available.

How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson's biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom.

Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk — a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate — became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.

These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 20, 1952
• Where—New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; M.A., Oxford University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—Washington, D.C. area

Walter Isaacson is an American writer and journalist. He was the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C. He has been the chairman and CEO of Cable News Network (CNN) and the Managing Editor of Time. He has written biographies of Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, and Leonardo da Vinci.

Early life and education
Isaacson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Irwin and Betty Lee (Seff) Isaacson. His father was a "kindly Jewish distracted humanist engineer with a reverence for science," and his mother was a real estate broker.

Isaacson graduated from Harvard University in 1974, where he earned an A.B. cum laude in history and literature. He later attended the Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, where he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) and graduated with first-class honors.

Journalism
Isaacson began his career in journalism at The Sunday Times of London, followed by a position with the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He joined Time magazine in 1978, serving as the magazine's political correspondent, national editor, and editor of new media before becoming the magazine's 14th editor in 1996.

Isaacson became chairman and CEO of CNN in July 2001, two months later guided CNN through the events of 9/11. Shortly after his appointment at CNN, Isaacson attracted attention for seeking the views of Republican Party leaders on Capitol Hill regarding criticisms that CNN broadcast content that was unfair to Republicans or conservatives.

He was quoted in Roll Call magazine as saying: "I was trying to reach out to a lot of Republicans who feel that CNN has not been as open to covering Republicans, and I wanted to hear their concerns." The CEO's conduct was criticized by the left-leaning Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) organization, which said that Isaacson's "pandering" behavior was endowing conservative politicians with power over CNN.

In 2003, Isaacson stepped down as president at CNN to become president of the Aspen Institute. Isaacson served as the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute from 2003 until 2017, when he announced that he would leave to become a professor of history at Tulane University and an advisory partner at the New York City financial services firm Perella Weinberg Partners.

Writing
Isaacson is the co-author, with Evan Thomas, of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986). He is the author of Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), and American Sketches (2009).

In 2011, Steve Jobs, Isaacson's authorized biography was published, becoming an international best-seller and breaking all sales records for a biography. The book was based on over forty interviews with Jobs over a two-year period up until shortly before his death, and on conversations with friends, family members, and business rivals of the entrepreneur.

Next came another bestseller, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), which explores the history of key technological innovations — notably the parallel developments of the computer and the Internet.

Isaacson's biography, Leonardo da Vinci, came out in 2017 to great fanfare and, even before it's actual publication, became the object of a Hollywood bidding war. Leonardo DiCaprio's production company won the film rights with DiCaprio planning to play the title role of da Vinci.

Government positions
In 2005, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco appointed Isaacson vice chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority to oversee spending on the recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

In 2007, President George W. Bush appointed him as chairman of the U.S.-Palestinian Partnership, which seeks to create economic and educational opportunities in the Palestinian territories.

He also served as the co-chair of the U.S.-Vietnamese Dialogue on Agent Orange, which in January 2008 announced completion of a project to contain the dioxin left behind by the U.S. at the Da Nang air base and plans to build health centers and a dioxin laboratory in the affected regions.

During the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed him vice-chair of the Partners for a New Beginning, which encourages private-sector investments and partnerships in the Muslim world.

In 2009, President Obama appointed him as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and the other international broadcasts of the U.S. government; he served until January 2012.

In 2014, he was appointed by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu to be the co-chair of the New Orleans Tricentennial Commission, charged with planning the city's 300th-anniversary commemoration in 2018.

In 2015, he was appointed to the board of My Brother's Keeper Alliance, which seeks to carry out President Obama's anti-poverty and youth opportunity initiatives.

Isaacson is the chairman emeritus of the board of Teach for America.

Honors
Time magazine selected Isaacson in 2012 to be on its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Isaacson is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was awarded its 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.

In 2014, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Isaacson for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. The title of Isaacson's lecture was "The Intersection of the Humanities and the Sciences." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/3/2017.)

Book Reviews
With the help of many witty, candid letters, Mr. Isaacson offers a wonderfully rounded portrait of the ever-surprising Einstein personality. Equally important is the Einstein myth, and the material on this subject is even more entertaining. Einstein horrified his colleagues by enjoying his vast celebrity. (“Einstein’s personality, for no clear reasons, triggers outbursts of a kind of mass hysteria,” the German consul reported to Berlin as the great man made one of his rock-star visits to New York.) He also stymied the press in its efforts to keep up with his accomplishments. Mr. Isaacson has great fun with the reportorial frenzy that surrounded each new pearl of Einsteinian wisdom...an illuminating delight.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

In a famous catchphrase, Einstein couldn't believe that God played with dice, and for decades he kept up the search for a "unified field theory" that would make sense of everything. Einstein: His Life and Universe covers all this and much else in a painstaking and reliable biography. You won't go wrong in reading and learning from it.
Michael Dirda - Washington Post

Acclaimed biographer Isaacson examines the remarkable life of "science's preeminent poster boy" in this lucid account (after 2003's Benjamin Franklin and 1992's Kissinger). Contrary to popular myth, the German-Jewish schoolboy Albert Einstein not only excelled in math, he mastered calculus before he was 15. Young Albert's dislike for rote learning, however, led him to compare his teachers to "drill sergeants." That antipathy was symptomatic of Einstein's love of individual and intellectual freedom, beliefs the author revisits as he relates his subject's life and work in the context of world and political events that shaped both, from WWI and II and their aftermath through the Cold War. Isaacson presents Einstein's research—his efforts to understand space and time, resulting in four extraordinary papers in 1905 that introduced the world to special relativity, and his later work on unified field theory—without equations and for the general reader. Isaacson focuses more on Einstein the man: charismatic and passionate, often careless about personal affairs; outspoken and unapologetic about his belief that no one should have to give up personal freedoms to support a state. Fifty years after his death, Isaacson reminds us why Einstein (1879–1955) remains one of the most celebrated figures of the 20th century.
Publishers Weekly

Although the author appropriately makes Einstein's extraordinary scientific achievements the center of attention, he also covers his subject's complex and often painful familial relationships, his political interventions and comments, and his remarkable celebrity status (for a scientist) with the American public. Isaacson himself does not have a strong scientific background, but professional specialists in physics and mathematics assisted him effectively. This work, the first full biography of Einstein since all his papers have been made available, is certainly one of the best and most complete Einstein biographies thus far.
Criticas

This biography of Albert Einstein (1879-1955) takes a cue from Isaacson's recent success, Benjamin Franklin, and is written for a general audience. Although the author appropriately makes Einstein's extraordinary scientific achievements the center of attention, he also covers his subject's complex and often painful familial relationships, his political interventions and comments, and his remarkable celebrity status (for a scientist) with the American public. Isaacson himself does not have a strong scientific background, but professional specialists in physics and mathematics assisted him effectively. This work, the first full biography of Einstein since all his papers have been made available, is well written and sensibly balanced in its treatment of the famed theoretical physicist, his family, and his friends. Certainly one of the best and most complete Einstein biographies thus far; strongly recommended for public and academic libraries.
Jack W. Weigel - Library Journal

A comprehensive and marvelously readable life of the eminent scientist—and more, the eminent counter-culturalist, rebel, humanist and philanderer. "A century after his great triumphs, we are still living in Einstein's universe," writes Aspen Institute president and former CNN head Isaacson (Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, 2003, etc.), "one defined on the macro scale by his theory of relativity and on the micro by a quantum mechanics that has proven durable even as it remains disconcerting to some." Brave enough to tread on such highly specialized ground, and working with newly available archival materials, Isaacson lucidly explains the finer points of Einstein's theories. One, the general theory of relativity, had its birth, Isaacson writes, while Einstein was struggling to write an article on his special theory of relativity; sitting in his office in Bern, where he worked as a patent-examiner, he had the thought, "If a person falls freely, he will not feel his own weight"-"the happiest thought in my life," Einstein recalled-but underlying it is some formidable work in physics and mathematics that took Einstein many subsequent years to express, and Isaacson acquits himself very well in taking readers along some strenuous paths of reasoning. Along with the science, Isaacson gives us an Einstein with whom it might have been fun to enjoy a stein of beer—unless you were married to him, a different story altogether, for by Isaacson's account, Einstein was sufficiently sure of his own genius and the needs it entailed that he refused to be tied down by the ordinary rules applied to husbands and fathers. One daughter he even abandoned without a look back, but this was typical of his nonconformity, which, Isaacson writes, was characteristic of Einstein until the very end of his life. An exemplary biography, at once sympathetic and unsparing. Readers will admire Einstein's greatness as a thinker, but they will now know that he, like all other idols, had feet of clay.
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 Einstein:

1. What kind of mind conceives of thought experiments like wondering what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam? In other words, how would you describe the mind that was Einstein's—even in his youth? (Words like brilliant or genius don't count.)

2.Talk about Einstein as a young man, especially his treatment of his first wife, Mileva and his newborn daughter. What kind of a person was he?

3. Overall, how would you describe the outsized personality of Albert Einstein? Consider for instance his reaction to his parents, as well as his teachers at Zurich Polytechnic. What part does Einstein's rebelliousness play in his ability to formulate his scientific breakthroughs? To what degree does he mature or change over the years?

4. How well does Isaacson deal with the science in this book? Do you find the discussion of Einstein's s discoveries lucid or understandable? Does Isaacson help you grasp the concepts of relativity, or the famous equation E=MC2? Or do you still find them too dense to comprehend?

5. In what way did Einstein attempt to justify religious faith with his understanding of the universe. What did he mean when he said that God "would not play dice by allowing things to happen by chance"? Consider, as well, this statement: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and doings of mankind."

6. Talk about Einstein's world view—the concepts that undergirded his geo-politics and philosophy toward life. Consider, for example, his stances on racial discrimination, Joseph McCarthy, the cold war, nuclear proliferation, and Nazism.

6. Consider Einstein's dismay regarding his role in creating the atomic bomb. especially his comment that "he would never have lifted a finger" to help the U.S. develop the bomb had he known that Germany could not successfully develop one.

7. What surprised you most about Albert Einstein as you read this book?

8. What particular passages struck you while reading the book: something insightful, controversial, or humorous— anything that strikes you.

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

top of page (summary)

The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild
Lawrence Anthony (with Graham Spence), 2009
St. Martin's Press
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250007810

Summary
When South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony was asked to accept a herd of "rogue" wild elephants on his Thula Thula game reserve in Zululand, his common sense told him to refuse. But he was the herd's last chance of survival: they would be killed if he wouldn't take them.

In order to save their lives, Anthony took them in. In the years that followed he became a part of their family. And as he battled to create a bond with the elephants, he came to realize that they had a great deal to teach him about life, loyalty, and freedom.

The Elephant Whisperer is a heartwarming, exciting, funny, and sometimes sad account of Anthony's experiences with these huge yet sympathetic creatures. Set against the background of life on an African game reserve, with unforgettable characters and exotic wildlife, it is a delightful book that will appeal to animal lovers and adventurous souls everywhere. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 17, 1950
• Where—Johannesburg, South Africa
• Death—March 2, 2012
• Where—Johannesburg, South Africa
• Education—N/A
• Awards—French 28th Prix Litteraire 30 Millions d'Amis

Lawrence Anthony was an international conservationist, environmentalist, explorer, and bestselling author.

He was the long-standing head of conservation at the Thula Thula game reserve in Zululand South Africa and the founder of The Earth Organization, a private conservation and environmental group with a strong scientific orientation. He was also an international member of the esteemed Explorers Club of New York and a member of the National Council of the Southern Africa Association for the Advancement of Science, South Africa’s oldest scientific association.

Anthony had a reputation for bold conservation initiatives, including the rescue of the Baghdad zoo at the height of the US lead Coalition 2003 invasion of Iraq, and negotiations with the infamous Lord's Resistance Army rebel army in Southern Sudan, to raise awareness of the environment and to protect endangered species, including the last of the Northern White Rhinoceros.

Details of his conservation activities appeared regularly in regional and international media including CNN, CBS, BBC, Al Jazeera and Sky TV and featured in magazines and journals such as Readers Digest, Smithsonian, Explorers Journal, Africa Geographic, Men's Journal, Shape magazine, Elle, and others.

Anthony was married to Francoise Malby and lived on the Thula Thula game reserve in Zululand. He has two sons (Dylan and Jason) and two grandsons. A brother-in-law, Graham Spence, co-authored his three books.

He died at age 61 of a heart attack before his planned March 2012 conservation gala dinner in Durban to raise international awareness of the rhino-poaching crisis. He was also to have launched his new book, The Last Rhinos: My Battle to Save One of the World's Greatest Creatures (2012).

Following his death, there were reports that some of the elephants he worked to save came to his family's home in accordance with the way elephants usually mourn the death of one of their own. two grandsons.

In April, 2012, he was posthumously awarded honorary Doctor of Science degree by College of Agriculture, Engineering and Science, University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Background
Anthony was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. His grandfather, who was a miner in Berwick-upon-Tweed, England had migrated to the area in the 1920s to work in the gold mines. His father, who ran an insurance business, went about establishing new offices across Southern Africa; Anthony was raised in rural Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe), Zambia, and Malawi, before settling in Zululand, South Africa.

Following his father, Anthony also started his career in the insurance sector, though subsequently started working the real estate development business. Meanwhile, he started working with Zulu tribespeople, and by mid-1990s his passion for the African Bush inspired him to switch careers. He purchased the Thula Thula game reserve, over 5,000-acres, in KwaZulu-Natal.

Career in conservation
A turning point in career came when he was called by a conservation group to rescue a group of nine elephants who had escaped their enclosure and were wreaking havoc across KwaZulu-Natal, and were about to be shot. He tried to communicate with the matriarch of the herd through the tone of his voice and body language, eventually rescued them and brought to the reserve, and in time came to be known as "Elephant-whisperer."

His work with the elephants became the subject of his second book, The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild (2009).

In 2003 he established a conservation group, The Earth Organization, and his efforts led to the establishment of two new reserves, the Royal Zulu Biosphere in Zululand and the Mayibuye Game Reserve in Kwa Ximba, to provide local tribes income through wildlife tourism.

Baghdad Zoo
During the 2003 Iraqi invastion, Anthony launched a private rescue initiative for the Baghdad Zoo, then the largest zoo in the Mideast. However, safety, bureaucratic and transportation problems delayed Anthony's arrival for eight days. By the time he was able to reach the zoo, only 35 out of 650 animals had survived: bombing, looting for food, and starvation had taken their toll. Only the larger animals—bears, hyenas, and the big cats—tended to survive.

In the chaos of the war, Anthony used mercenaries to help protect the zoo, and he worked with the remaining zookeepers to buy donkeys off the Baghdad streets to feed the carnivores. Additional aid came from US Army soldiers, Iraqi civilians and various other volunteers (including former Republican Guard soldiers). Eventually L. Paul Bremer, then head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, lended his support, and with with the help of American engineers, Anthony was able to reopen the zoo.

In 2007 he published his book about the wartime rescue: Babylon's Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo.

Africa
As an African wildlife expert, Anthony was long involved with programs to involve remote African tribes in conservation on their own traditional land, an activity he considered essential to the future well-being of conservation in Africa. He had created two new Game Reserves in South Africa. The Royal Zulu Biosphere in Zululand, which is expanding to join the world famous Umfolozi Hluhluwe reserve, and the Mayibuye Game Reserve in Kwa Ximba.

When he learned about the near extinction of the Northern White Rhino—only 15 were left—he journeyed into the Congo, an area controlled by the Lord's Resistance Army, to convince them to work with him in saving the animals. He gained their trust and saved the species...which, if lost, would have been largest land mammal to undergo extinction since the woolly mammoth.

Anthony's private focus was the rehabilitation of traumatized African elephant. He had developed a unique relationship with a wild herd of elephant on the Thula Thula Reserve in Zululand. Anthony's second book, The Elephant Whisperer (2009), tells the story of his working relationship with the African elephant.

(Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/4/2015.)

Book Reviews
In 1998, prize-winning conservationist Anthony...agreed to take in a herd of "troubled" wild elephants, the first seen in the area in more than a century.... An inspiring, multifaceted account, Anthony's book offers fascinating insights into the lives of wild elephants in the broader context of Zulu culture in post-Apartheid South Africa.
Publishers Weekly

Despite Anthony's awards and recognition for his conservation efforts, this book falls short in terms of holding reader interest. The writing doesn't do justice to Anthony's efforts to save these animals. It is drawn out and lacks the spark and engagement that descriptive writing creates in the reader. A disappointment even for those who like memoirs and African wildlife. —Edell M. Schaefer, Brookfield P.L., WI
Library Journal

The story of how Anthony saved his elephants by making friends with them...is both heartwarming and heartening. Life on a game reserve is never easy, particularly when elephants are added to the mix, but Anthony’s enthusiasm and obvious love for the bush shine through in hair-raising, sad, and funny tales. This life with elephants is a real winner. —Nancy Bent
Booklist

[An] uplifting story.... Though the prose occasionally becomes mawkish—as in his "born-free adolescence," remembered "as vividly as a lovelorn youth recalling his first heart-thudding kiss"—Anthony's bone-deep mission is bracing and his courage is inspiring. Energetic firsthand reportage from the heart of the African wild.
Kirkus Reviews

Setting up a refuge to receive so-called "bad elephants," working with and handling them;
Social aspects of the elephant family, including acceptance of a new member and isolation of a single male;
Elephant mother's attempt—and efforts by the author—to save the new baby elephant;
Gaining the friendship and support of the tribes surrounding the refuge.

4. The social interaction of the "family" at the refuge—Francoise, dogs, the workers, as well as the author's grandchildren and family visits, etc.

5. Importance of keeping in contact with the many agencies involved with animal refuges.

6. The marriage proposal: good or bad? Was Lawrence tricked into marriage?

7. We also mentioned the author's other books, especially The Last Rhinos.

8. Anthony's death.

Jean told us that her group felt The Elephant Whisperer gave them the opportunity to explore the workings of an animal refuges—from business operations to animal care. "I've always felt elephants were interesting animals and now think so more than ever," she wrote.

top of page (summary)

Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World
Alison Weir, 2013
Random House
608 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345521361

Summary
Many are familiar with the story of the much-married King Henry VIII of England and the celebrated reign of his daughter, Elizabeth I. But it is often forgotten that the life of the first Tudor queen, Elizabeth of York, Henry’s mother and Elizabeth’s grandmother, spanned one of England’s most dramatic and perilous periods.

Now New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed historian Alison Weir presents the first modern biography of this extraordinary woman, whose very existence united the realm and ensured the survival of the Plantagenet bloodline.

Her birth was greeted with as much pomp and ceremony as that of a male heir. The first child of King Edward IV, Elizabeth enjoyed all the glittering trappings of royalty. But after the death of her father; the disappearance and probable murder of her brothers—the Princes in the Tower; and the usurpation of the throne by her calculating uncle Richard III, Elizabeth found her world turned upside-down: She and her siblings were declared bastards.

As Richard’s wife, Anne Neville, was dying, there were murmurs that the king sought to marry his niece Elizabeth, knowing that most people believed her to be England’s rightful queen. Weir addresses Elizabeth’s possible role in this and her covert support for Henry Tudor, the exiled pretender who defeated Richard at the Battle of Bosworth and was crowned Henry VII, first sovereign of the House of Tudor.

Elizabeth’s subsequent marriage to Henry united the houses of York and Lancaster and signaled the end of the Wars of the Roses. For centuries historians have asserted that, as queen, she was kept under Henry’s firm grasp, but Weir shows that Elizabeth proved to be a model consort—pious and generous—who enjoyed the confidence of her husband, exerted a tangible and beneficial influence, and was revered by her son, the future King Henry VIII.

Drawing from a rich trove of historical records, Weir gives a long overdue and much-deserved look at this unforgettable princess whose line descends to today’s British monarch—a woman who overcame tragedy and danger to become one of England’s most beloved consorts. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where—Westminster, England, UK
• Education—North Western Polytechnic
• Currently—lives in Surrey, England

Alison Weir is a British writer of histories and historical novels, mostly in the form of biographies about British royalty. Her works on the Tudor period have made her a best-selling author—and the highest-selling female historian in the United Kingdom.

Weir has written biographies of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France, Katherine Swynford, and the Princes in the Tower. Other focuses have included Henry VIII of England and his wives and children, Mary Boleyn, Elizabeth I, and Mary, Queen of Scots, and most recently Elizabeth of York (Henry VIII's mother). She has published historical overviews of the Wars of the Roses and royal weddings, as well as historical fiction novels on Lady Jane Grey, Elizabeth I, and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Early life
Weir became interested in the field of history at the age of fourteen after reading a book about Catherine of Aragon. She was educated at City of London School for Girls and North Western Polytechnic and hoped to become a history teacher. But disillusioned with what she referred to as "trendy teaching methods," she abandoned teaching as a career.

In 1972 she married Rankin Weir in 1972 with whom she had two children in the early 1980s. Weir worked as a civil servant, and later as a housewife and mother to her children. Between 1991 and 1997, she ran a school for children with learning disabilities.

Nonfiction
In the 1970s, Weir spent four years researching and writing a nonfiction biography of the six wives of Henry VIII. Her work, deemed too long by publishers, was consequently rejected. A revised version of this biography would later be published in 1991 as The Six Wives of Henry VIII. In 1981, she wrote a book on Jane Seymour, which was again rejected by publishers—this time because it was too short.

Finally, in 1989, Weir became a published author with the publication of Britain's Royal Families, a compilation of genealogical information about the British Royal Family. She had spent the previous 22 years revising the book (eight times), finally deciding it might be "of interest to others." After organizing it into chronological order, The Bodley Head agreed to publish it.

It wasn't until the late 1990s, however, that Weir would begin writing full-time. While running the school for children with learning disabilities, she published the non-fiction works The Princes in the Tower (1992), Lancaster and York: The Wars of the Roses (1995), and Children of England: The Heirs of King Henry VIII (1996).

Eventually writing books as a full-time job, she produced Elizabeth the Queen (1998) (published in America as The Life of Elizabeth I), Eleanor of Aquitaine: By the Wrath of God, Queen of England (1999), Henry VIII: The King and His Court (2001), Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley (2003), and Isabella: She-Wolf of France, Queen of England (2005). Katherine Swynford: The Story of John of Gaunt and His Scandalous Duchess followed in 2007, The Lady in The Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn in 2009, and Traitors of the Tower in 2010. In 2011, she completed The Ring and the Crown: A History of Royal Weddings and Mary Boleyn: The Mistress of Kings, the first full non-fiction biography of Mary Boleyn, sister of Anne Boleyn. In 2013, Weir published an historical biography of Henry VIII's mother, Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World.

Many of Weir's works deal with the Tudor period, which she considers...

the most dramatic period in our history, with vivid, strong personalities... The Tudor period is the first one for which we have a rich visual record, with the growth of portraiture, and detailed sources on the private lives of kings and queens. This was an age that witnessed a growth in diplomacy and the spread of the printed word.

Fiction
Weir wrote historical novels while a teenager, and her novel in the genre of historical fiction, Innocent Traitor, based on the life of Lady Jane Grey, was published in 2006. When researching Eleanor of Aquitaine, Weir realized that it would "be very liberating to write a novel in which I could write what I wanted while keeping to the facts." She decided to make Jane Grey her focus because she "didn't have a very long life and there wasn't a great deal of material."

Weir said she found the transition to fiction easy:

Every book is a learning curve, and you have to keep an open mind. I am sometimes asked to cut back on the historical facts in my novels, and there have been disagreements over whether they obstruct the narrative, but I do hold out for the history whenever I can.

Her second novel, The Lady Elizabeth (2008) deals with the life of Queen Elizabeth I before her ascent to the throne. Her third novel, The Captive Queen (2010) is about Eleanor of Aquitaine, also the focus of a non-fiction biography Weir had written in 1999.

Writing style
Weir's writings have been catagorized as "popular history," a genre that has attracted criticism from academia. According to one source on sound academic writing, it's purpose is...

to inform and entertain a large general audience. In popular history, dramatic storytelling often prevails over analysis, style over substance, simplicity over complexity, and grand generalization over careful qualification. (Hamilton College )

Weir, however, argues that...

History is not the sole preserve of academics, although I have the utmost respect for those historians who undertake new research and contribute something new to our knowledge. History belongs to us all, and it can be accessed by us all. And if writing it in a way that is accessible and entertaining, as well as conscientiously researched, can be described as popular, then, yes, I am a popular historian, and am proud and happy to be one.

Kathryn Hughes, writing in The Guardian, said of Weir's popular historian label, "To describe her as a popular historian would be to state a literal truth—her chunky explorations of Britain’s early modern past sell in the kind of multiples that others can only dream of."

Reviews of Weir's works have been mixed.

The Independent said of The Lady in the Tower that "it is testament to Weir's artfulness and elegance as a writer that The Lady in the Tower remains fresh and suspenseful, even though the reader knows what's coming."
On the other hand, Diarmaid MacCulloch, in a review of Henry VIII: King and Court, called it "a great pudding of a book, which will do no harm to those who choose to read it. Detail is here in plenty, but Tudor England is more than royal wardrobe lists, palaces and sexual intrigue."
The Globe and Mail, reviewing the novel, The Captive Queen, said that she had "skillfully imagined royal lives" in previous works, "but her style here is marred by less than subtle characterizations and some seriously cheesy writing"
Roger Boyle in The New York Times said of Elizabeth of York, "Weir tells Elizabeth's story well…she is a meticulous scholar. The everyday minutiae of life are painstakingly described…Most important, Weir sincerely admires her subject, doing honor to an almost forgotten queen."

Personal life
Weir now lives in Surrey with her husband and two sons. She has called "Mrs Ellen," a fictional character from her novel about Jane Grey, most like her own personality and commented that, "As I was writing the book, my maternal side was projected into this character."

Weir is a supporter of the renovation of Northampton Castle, proclaiming the estate a "historic site of prime importance. It would be tragic if it were to be lost forever. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/09/2013.)

Book Reviews
Weir tells Elizabeth's story well…she is a meticulous scholar. The everyday minutiae of life are painstakingly described…Most important, Weir sincerely admires her subject, doing honor to an almost forgotten queen.
Roger Boylan - New York Times Book Review

[A]s a royal princess, Elizabeth was a pawn in the dynastic ambitions of England’s rulers: her father, Edward IV; her uncle, Richard III; her mother-in-law, Margaret Beaufort; and her husband, Henry VII.... Elizabeth’s life...[is] portrayed in great detail, from marriage ceremonies and royal itineraries to the food, books, gifts, and clothing of her day. Weir argues her positions clearly...balancing the scholarly with emphases on Elizabeth’s emotional and psychological life.
Publishers Weekly

We know all about Henry VIII's famous wives and daughters. But what about his mother, who legitimized the new Tudor dynasty as the only living descendant of Yorkist King Edward IV? The popular Weir...takes on Elizabeth of York in what appears to be the only biography currently available for lay readers.
Library Journal

[A] serious work definitely not aimed at a bodice-ripper audience. This Tudor Elizabeth (1466–1503) lived a century before her much better-known granddaughter, but she was important: the daughter, wife and mother of kings, including Henry VIII.... Weir portrays Elizabeth as a passive observer or victim and often ignores her entirely as she delivers an intensely researched... history of Britain during the turbulent last half of the 15th century.
Kirkus Reviews

top of page (summary)

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2010
Simon & Schuster
571 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439170915

Summary
Winner, 2011 Pulitzer Prize

The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.

Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years.

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.

From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave may have cut off her diseased breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive—and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease.

Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Where—New Dehli, India
• Education—B.A., Stanford; Ph. D, Oxford; M.D., Harvard
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—teaches at Columbia Medical School in New York City, New York

Siddhartha Mukherjee (born 1970) is an Indian-born American doctor and non-fiction writer. He is the author of the Pulitizer Prize winner The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010). In 2016 he published The Gene: An Intimate History.

Mukherjee was born in New Delhi, India. He went to school at St. Columba's School. He majored in biology at Stanford University, then won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University where he earned a Ph.D. in immunology. After graduation, he attended Harvard Medical School to train as an internist and won an oncology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital.

He is currently serving as Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University in New York City. He is also a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center.[3] He lives in New York and is married to the MacArthur award-winning artist Sarah Sze. They have two daughters.

HIs 2010 higly-regarded book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, details the evolution of diagnosis and treatment of human cancers from ancient Egypt to the latest developments in chemotherapy and targeted therapy. In addition to winning the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, it was listed in "The 10 Best Books of 2010" by the and the "Top 10 Nonfiction Books by Time magazine. In 2016 Mukherjee published The Gene: An Intimate History, which quickly reached the top of the New York Times Bestseller list. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
An informative, well-researched study....The Emperor of All Maladies is at its most honest in describing the push-pull dynamics of scientific progress.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

Mukherjee has undertaken one of the most extraordinary stories in medicine: a history of cancer.... He frames it as a biography, "an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality, to demystify its behavior." It is an epic story that he seems compelled to tell, the way a passionate young priest might attempt a biography of Satan.
Jonathan Weiner - New York Times

It’s time to welcome a new star in the constellation of great writer-doctors. With this fat, enthralling, juicy, scholarly, wonderfully written history of cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee vaults into that exalted company, inviting comparisons to...Lewis Thomas and...Stephen Jay Gould.
Washington Post

It’s hard to think of many books for a general audience that have rendered any area of modern science and technology with such intelligence, accessibility, and compassion. The Emperor of All Maladies is an extraordinary achievement.
The New Yorker

Mukherjee's debut book is a sweeping epic of obsession, brilliant researchers, dramatic new treatments, euphoric success and tragic failure, and the relentless battle by scientists and patients alike against an equally relentless, wily, and elusive enemy. From the first chemotherapy developed from textile dyes to the possibilities emerging from our understanding of cancer cells, Mukherjee shapes a massive amount of history into a coherent story with a roller-coaster trajectory: the discovery of a new treatment--surgery, radiation, chemotherapy--followed by the notion that if a little is good, more must be better, ending in disfiguring radical mastectomy and multidrug chemo so toxic the treatment ended up being almost worse than the disease. The first part of the book is driven by the obsession of Sidney Farber and philanthropist Mary Lasker to find a unitary cure for all cancers. (Farber developed the first successful chemotherapy for childhood leukemia.) The last and most exciting part is driven by the race of brilliant, maverick scientists to understand how cells become cancerous. Each new discovery was small, but as Mukherjee, a Columbia professor of medicine, writes, "Incremental advances can add up to transformative changes." Mukherjee's formidable intelligence and compassion produce a stunning account of the effort to disrobe the "emperor of maladies."
Publishers Weekly

(Audio version.) Taking a strictly Western approach to the study and treatment of cancer, clinical oncologist Mukherjee presents a comprehensive, fascinating, and informative view of the subject that is part historical treatise, part biography, part memoir, part case study, and part science textbook. Two-time Audie Award winner Stephen Hoye does a great job of conveying all of the nuances of the narrative, which can jump around at times and includes a large number of footnotes. This highly accessible and quality audio production will greatly satisfy audiences liking titles that similarly attempt to humanize otherwise clinical topics, such as Seth Mnookin's The Panic Virus, Mary Roach's Stiff, and Atul Gawande's Complications. —Nicole A. Cooke, Montclair State Univ. Lib., NJ
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Apparently researching, treating, and teaching about cancer isn’t enough of a challenge for Columbia University cancer specialist Mukherjee. He was also moved to write a biography of a disease whose name, for millennia, could not be uttered. The eminently readable result is a weighty tale of an enigma that has remained outside the grasp of both the people who endeavored to know it and those who would prefer never to have become acquainted with it. —Donna Chavez
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. Cancer is often described as a "modern" disease—yet its first description dates from 2500 B.C. In what sense, then, is cancer a disease of modern times? How does knowing its ancient history affect your notion of cancer?

2. Mukherjee frames the book around the story of his patient, Carla Reed, a teacher who is diagnosed with leukemia. What did you find interesting or important about Carla's experience? How do you think she shaped the author's life and thoughts?

3. Mukherjee writes how in the early 1950s The New York Times refused to print the word "cancer" (or "breast"). Compare this to how we view cancer today. Is there any difference in the way you discuss cancer as a political or news topic and how you discuss a cancer diagnosis among family and friends?

4. Looked at one way, Sidney Farber's early clinical trials with antifolates in 1947 and 1948 were a failure, with all of his young leukemia patients eventually dying of the disease. But with the results of these trials, Mukherjee writes, Farber "saw a door open—briefly, seductively" (p. 36). How so? Why do Farber's trials mark a turning point in the history of cancer research?

5. "The stories of my patients consumed me, and the decisions that I made haunted me," Mukherjee says about working in a cancer clinic (p. 5). But in the 1970s, during the height of aggressive combination chemotherapy trials, Mukherjee paints a different picture of doctor-patient interaction: "The language of suffering had parted, with the 'smiling oncologist' on one side and his patients on the other." How have the relationships between doctors and patients evolved along with cancer treatments? What could be done to restore some of the lapses in this relationship?

6. "'Li was accused of experimenting on people,' Freireich said. 'But of course all of us were experimenting… To not experiment would mean to follow the old rules—to do absolutely nothing.'" Review the case of Min Chiu Li (pp. 135-138), and explain Emil Freireich's quote. Do you think Li's actions were ethical? How can doctors and scientists draw the line between reckless, unproven treatment and necessary experimentation for drug development?

7. How did Mary Lasker borrow from the worlds of business, advertising and even the military to build a nationwide effort to combat cancer? How might Lasker's vision be invoked today to generate funding and national attention for breast or ovarian cancer?

8. So many of the scientific breakthroughs that impacted cancer research, such as Wilhelm RÖntgen's discovery of the X-Ray in 1895, occurred by accident. What other "chance" discoveries appear in the text?

9. Numerous advances in cancer research would have been impossible without patients willing to submit themselves to grueling experimental trials—experiences from which they did not benefit, but future cancer patients might. How would you counsel a friend or relative about submitting themselves to such experiments?

10. How is the early history of chemotherapy linked to the histories of colonialism, the Industrial Revolution, and World War Two?

11. Was the War on Cancer a failure? Why or why not?

12. How did the tobacco industry react to studies in the 1950s about the link between cigarettes and lung cancer? How did the industry's reaction differ to that of the general public? Do you think cigarette companies should be legally liable for cancer and other health problems likely caused by smoking?

13. The 1980 Canadian mammography trial (see pp. 298-300) was possibly flawed because technicians disproportionately steered women with suspected breast cancer to get mammograms, likely out of compassion. Put yourself in the technicians' shoes. Would you have allocated your friend to the mammogram group? If so, how can trials ever be randomized? Should a trial with a promising new drug be randomized—even if it means forcing some patients to be in the non-treatment group? What if a new treatment emerges for a deadly form of cancer? Should half the enrollees in the trial be forced to take sugar-pills to document the efficacy of the treatment?

14. On page 316, Mukherjee argues that "the trajectories of AIDS and cancer were destined to crisscross and intersect at many levels." Do you agree with Mukherjee's comparison? What did Susan Sontag mean when she said AIDS and cancer had both become "not just a biological disease but something much larger—a social and political category replete with its own punitive metaphors?"

15. Review the case of Nelene Fox (pp. 322-324), whose HMO, Health Net, refused in 1991 to pay for an expensive bone marrow transplant to treat her diagnosis of advances breast cancer, citing the procedure as "investigational." In your view, was it appropriate for Health Net to refuse reimbursement? Should patients pay for expensive experimental treatments out of their own pocket? What if these experimental treatments turn out not to extend survival—as with Fox's transplant?

16. The author says that he was motivated to write this book after a patient asked him, "What is cancer?" Mukherjee could not think of a book that would answer her question. So he wrote it. Does "knowing your enemy"—knowing cancer—bring some kind of comfort?

17. On page 459, Mukherjee writes, "As the fraction of those affected by cancer creeps inexorably in some nations from one in four to one in three to one in two, cancer, will indeed, be the normal—an inevitability." Mukherjee makes this assessment despite the approval of oncogene-targeting drugs like Herceptin, which have given new hope to cancer patients, as well as promising efforts to sequence the cancer genome. At the end of The Emperor of All Maladies, do you come away with optimism about science's efforts to combat cancer? Why or why not?

18. In the final chapter of the book, Mukherjee creates a fictional journey for Queen Atossa through time to demonstrate how cancer treatment has changed over the centuries. How might you have summarized this book? What image, or metaphor, emerges most powerfully at the end of this book?

19. Germaine Berne's story, which ends the book, is not superficially a story of hope, since she ultimately dies from relapsed cancer. Yet Mukherjee portrays her as a symbol of our war on cancer. In what sense does Germaine epitomize the battle against cancer? How is her story a story of hope?

20. Mukherjee calls this book a "biography." Can a "biography" be written of an illness? How might such a biography differ from the traditional biography of an individual? Are there other diseases that demand biographies, or is this project unique to cancer?

21. In what sense does history "repeat itself" in cancer research? In science, where new discoveries keep altering the landscape, what is the worth of reliving the past?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune
Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell , 2013
Random House
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345534538

Summary
When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history.

Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room, despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those managing her money?

Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark’s cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have frequent conversations with her. Dedman and Newell tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter, born into a family of extreme wealth and privilege, who secrets herself away from the outside world.

Huguette was the daughter of self-made copper industrialist W. A. Clark, nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his day, a controversial senator, railroad builder, and founder of Las Vegas. She grew up in the largest house in New York City, a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She owned paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls. But wanting more than treasures, she devoted her wealth to buying gifts for friends and strangers alike, to quietly pursuing her own work as an artist, and to guarding the privacy she valued above all else.

The Clark family story spans nearly all of American history in three generations, from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to mining camps in the Montana gold rush, from backdoor politics in Washington to a distress call from an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment. The same Huguette who was touched by the terror attacks of 9/11 held a ticket nine decades earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second voyage of the Titanic.

Empty Mansions reveals a complex portrait of the mysterious Huguette and her intimate circle. We meet her extravagant father, her publicity-shy mother, her star-crossed sister, her French boyfriend, her nurse who received more than $30 million in gifts, and the relatives fighting to inherit Huguette’s copper fortune. Richly illustrated with more than seventy photographs, Empty Mansions is an enthralling story of an eccentric of the highest order, a last jewel of the Gilded Age who lived life on her own terms. (From the publisher.)

Author Bios
Bill Dedman introduced the public to heiress Huguette Clark and her empty mansions through his compelling series of narratives for NBC, which became the most popular feature in the history of its news website, topping 110 million page views. He received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting while writing for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. (From the publisher.)

Paul Clark Newell, Jr., a cousin of Huguette Clark, has researched the Clark family history for twenty years, sharing many conversations with Huguette about her life and family. He received a rare private tour of Bellosguardo, her mysterious estate overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Santa Barbara. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
An amazing story of profligate wealth...an outsized tale of rags-to-riches prosperity.
New York Times

An exhaustively researched, well-written account.... [A] blood-boiling expose [that] will make you angry and will make you sad.
Seattle Times

An evocative and rollicking read, part social history, part hothouse mystery, part grand guignol.
Daily Beast

A childlike, self-exiled eccentric, [Huguette Clark] is the sort of of subject susceptible to a biography of broad strokes, which makes Empty Mansions, the first full-length account of her life, impressive for its delicacy and depth.
Town & Country

(Starred review.) [R]iveting..... [A] regular in the society pages during her youth and even married for a short time, Clark later slipped into her own world and stayed there, quietly buying multi-million dollar homes for her dolls..... The authors provide a thrilling study of the responsibilities and privileges that come with great wealth and draw the reader into the deliciously scandalous story of Clark's choices in later life.
Publishers Weekly

[A] comprehensive account of the late copper mining heiress Huguette Clark.... The authors describe her lavish estates, art, jewelry, and musical instrument collections. They convey how, despite her affluence, Clark strangely chose to live her latter days as a relatively healthy recluse in a modest New York City hospital room.... An enlightening read for those interested in the opulent lifestyles...and the mysterious ways of wealth. —Mary Jennings, Camano Island Lib., WA
Library Journal

An investigation into the secretive life of the youngest daughter and heiress to a Gilded Age copper tycoon.... [Huguette] Clark was certainly eccentric, and her decisions, both financial and otherwise, definitely capture the imagination..... Though her father's fortune is central to the story...so much focus on his exploits early on makes Huguette seem like a secondary character. Clark is an intriguing figure with a story that will interest many, but the book misses the mark as an in-depth expose.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Huguette Clark and Paris Hilton: compare and contrast. Using the theme of the burdens of inherited wealth, in which era would it be easier or harder to be a young heiress, the 1920s or today? Can you imagine being that wealthy and not sharing your opinions and daily ad ventures on social media?

2. The authors reject easy explanations for Huguette's eccentricity and reclusive nature, emphasizing that she was always shy, living a life of imagination and art. As they say in the epilogue:

We will never know why Huguette was, as she might say, "peculiar." The people in her inner circle say they have no idea. Outsiders speculate. It was being the daughter of an older father! It was her sister's death! Or her mother's! The wealth! It was autism or Asperger's or a childhood trauma! Easy answers fail because the question assumes that personalities have a single determinant. Whatever caused her shyness, her limitations of sociability or coping, her fears--of strangers, of kidnapping, of needles, of another French Revolution-Huguette found a situation that worked for her, a modern-day "Boo" Radley, shut up inside by choice, safe from a world that can hurt.

Do you accept the authors' embrace of complexity and uncertainty? Or do you think of Huguette's reclusivity as springing from a single cause--e.g., failed romances, her sister's death, a mental illness?

3. What is your reaction to nurse Hadassah Peri and the $31 million in gifts Huguette gave to her family? Do you agree with readers who say her behavior was despicable, that it's unethical for a caregiver to receive such gifts, that she should have refused the gifts? Or do you agree with readers who say Huguette certainly knew what she was doing, that Hadassah was her patient's closest caregiver for twenty years, that the gifts were only a small share of Huguette's net worth?

4. Was Huguette's life a happy one? What are the ingredients of a happy life? If you find her life to be sad, how do you reconcile that with her apparent lack of sadness?

5. If you had been on the jury deciding the battle over Huguette's will and her $300 million estate, would you have found that she was in competent and defrauded? Would you have given all her money to her Clark relatives? Or would you have followed the will, giving it all to the nurse, the Bellosguardo Foundation for the arts, the attorney Bock, the accountant Kamsler, Dr. Singman, Beth Israel Medical Center, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, her goddaughter Wanda, and the personal assistant Chris? Which of those people, on either side, do you trust?

6. Was W. A. Clark an admirable man? Or was he admirable only early on, when he was like a Horatio Alger character working arduously in dangerous circumstances to build a copper fortune? In light of the times in which he lived, was W.A. Clark justifiably vilified for his methods in seeking a Senate seat? Was he actually a robber baron? Is he accountable for environmental waste today from the copper mines he developed in the 1870s? Or was this simply business as usual in the sordid world of politics and development on the Western frontier? If Clark had been as generous to public charities as Carnegie or Rockefeller, would he have been absolved by history, as they largely were, of the sins of his business career?

7. Empty Mansions is based on facts, documents, and testimony. That leaves mysteries in the lives of its characters. Did the uncertainties add or detract from your enjoyment of the story? Would you have preferred that the authors psychoanalyze Huguette, creating dialogue and filling in missing scenes as a screenplay would? Considering the limits of what the authors could learn, what do you most want to know about W.A., about Anna, about Huguette? If you could have had conversations with Huguette, as author Paul Newell did, what would you have asked her?

8. Is there more to the American Dream than financial security? Does it require making a contribution to society? Did W.A.'s American Dream get out of control? Is Huguette an American Dreamer of another type?

9. On Huguette's death certificate, her occupation was listed as "artist." Beginning with W.A., consider what part creativity and imagination play in this story. Was W.A.'s imagination the source of his power? What did Huguette inherit from her father in the way of tastes or interests or capabilities? From her mother? Consider the words of the founder of Huguette's prep school, Clara Spence, who urged her students:

I beg you to cultivate imagination, which means to develop your power of sympathy, and I entreat you to decide thoughtfully what makes a human being great in his time and in his station. The faculty of imagination is often lightly spoken of as of no real importance, often decried as mischievous, as in some ways the antithesis of practical sense, and yet it ranks with reason and conscience as one of the supreme characteristics by which man is distinguished from all other animals...Sympathy, the great bond between human beings, is largely dependent on imagination that is, upon the power of realizing the feelings and the circumstances of others so as to enable us to feel with and for them.

Did Huguette follow those words? What role did imagination and sympathy play in her life? What role do they play in yours?

10. Did you like Huguette? Were there points in the book where you were frustrated by her and/or felt sympathy for her? By the end of the book, did you feel as if you knew her well? Did your view of her change throughout the book?

11. Many characters in Empty Mansions have moral dimensions of both good and bad. Do you believe W.A. was more good than bad? What about attorney Wally Bock? Accountant Irv Kamsler? Nurse Hadassah Peri? Personal assistant Chris Sattler? Dr. Henry Singman? Were there any characters who seemed to be simply good or rotten in their relationships with Huguette? Were you engaged or frustrated by the authors' insistence on showing the good and bad in characters?

12. If Empty Mansions were made into a movie, what actors would you like to see in the major roles? What movie that you've seen should it be most similar to? Would you make it a psychological drama? An epic family saga of Western bonanza wealth? A Gilded Age study of manners and family relationships? What scenes would be the most delicious to write?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection
Michael Harris, 2014
Current Hardcover
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781591846932

Summary
Every revolution in communication technology—from papyrus to the printing press to Twitter—is as much an opportunity to be drawn away from something as it is to be drawn toward something. And yet, as we embrace technology's gifts, we usually fail to consider what we're giving up in the process. Why would we bother to register the end of solitude, of ignorance, of lack? Why would we care that an absence had disappeared?

Soon enough, nobody will remember life before the Internet. What does this unavoidable fact mean?

For future generations, it won’t mean anything very obvious. They will be so immersed in online life that questions about the Internet’s basic purpose or meaning will vanish.

But those of us who have lived both with and without the crowded connectivity of online life have a rare opportunity. We can still recognize the difference between Before and After. We catch ourselves idly reaching for our phones at the bus stop. Or we notice how, mid-conversation, a fumbling friend dives into the perfect recall of Google.

In this eloquent and thought-provoking book, Michael Harris argues that amid all the changes we’re experiencing, the most interesting is the one that future generations will find hardest to grasp. That is the end of absence—the loss of lack. The daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished. There’s no true "free time" when you carry a smartphone. Today’s rarest commodity is the chance to be alone with your own thoughts.

To understand our predicament, and what we should do about it, Harris explores this "loss of lack" in chapters devoted to every corner of our lives, from sex and commerce to memory and attention span. His book is a kind of witness for the "straddle generation"—a burst of empathy for those of us who suspect that our technologies use us as much as we use them.

By placing our situation in a rich historical context, Harris helps us remember which parts of that earlier world we don’t want to lose forever. He urges us to look up—even briefly—from our screens. To remain awake to what came before. To again take pleasure in absence. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Michael Harris is a contributing editor at Vancouver magazine and Western Living. His writing has been published by Wired, Salon, Huffington Post, Globe & Mail, National Post, and The Walrus. He and has been nominated several times at the Western and National Magazine Awards. Harris lives with his partner, the artist Kenny Park, in Toronto, Canada. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
To pull away from our hyperconnected lives is painful; it is hard, and it is a muddle. Harris walks us through his particular muddle with wit, wry honesty, and compassion for the "strange suffering" of all who find themselves checking email at the dinner table.
Andrew Cleary - Christian Science Monitor

A personalized jeremiad against the state of constant distraction in which our benevolent technologies have ensnared us.... Harris' core argument...feels valid, and his prose is graceful, but as a social narrative, the book becomes repetitive and less focused.... A thoughtful addition to the bookshelf addressing the unintended consequences of a wired world.
Kirkus Reviews

top of page (summary)

End of Men: And the Rise of Women
Hanna Rosin, 2012
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594488047

Summary
A landmark portrait of women, men, and power in a transformed world.

Men have been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But Hanna Rosin was the first to notice that this long-held truth is, astonishingly, no longer true. At this unprecedented moment, by almost every measure, women are no longer gaining on men: They have pulled decisively ahead. And “the end of men”—the title of Rosin’s Atlantic cover story on the subject—has entered the lexicon as dramatically as Betty Friedan’s “feminine mystique,” Simone de Beauvoir’s “second sex,” Susan Faludi’s “backlash,” and Naomi Wolf’s “beauty myth” once did.

In this landmark book, Rosin reveals how this new state of affairs is radically shifting the power dynamics between men and women at every level of society, with profound implications for marriage, sex, children, work, and more. With wide-ranging curiosity and insight unhampered by assumptions or ideology, Rosin shows how the radically different ways men and women today earn, learn, spend, couple up—even kill—has turned the big picture upside down. And in The End of Men she helps us see how, regardless of gender, we can adapt to the new reality and channel it for a better future. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Israel
• Education—B.A., Stanford University
• Currently—Lives in Washington, D.C., USA

Rosin was born in Israel and grew up in Queens, where her father is a taxi driver. She graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1987, where she won a number of competitions on the debate team. She attended Stanford University, and is married to Slate editor David Plotz; they live in Washington, D.C. with their three children.

Hanna Rosin is a co-founder of DoubleX, a women's site connected to the online magazine Slate. She is also a writer for The Atlantic. She has written for the Washington Post, The New Yorker, GQ and New York after beginning her career as a staff writer for The New Republic. Rosin has also appeared on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central.

A character portrayed by actress Chloë Sevigny in the movie Shattered Glass about Rosin's colleague at The New Republic, Stephen Glass, was loosely based on Rosin.

Rosin has published a book based on her 2010 Atlantic story, The End of Men. She gave a TED talk on the subject in 2010. In this work she details the emergence of women as a powerful force of the American workplace. For Rosin, this shifting economy has allowed women to use their most gendered stereotypical strengths to succeed. In the past she has specialized in writing about religious-political issues, in particular the influence of evangelical Christians on the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign. She is the author of God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America, published in 2007. Based on a New Yorker story, the book follows several young Christians at Patrick Henry College, a new evangelical institution that teaches its students to "shape the culture and take back the nation." Rosin's portrayals of the students are part of a larger attempt to chronicle the cultural and political history of the modern Christian right.

In 2009, she published a controversial article in The Atlantic with the provocative title "The Case Against Breast-Feeding," questioning whether current social pressures in favor of breastfeeding were appropriate, and whether the science in support of the practice was conclusive. In 2009 she was nominated for a National Magazine Award for "Boy's Life," a story about a young transgendered boy. In 2010 she won the award for her contribution to a package of stories in New York magazine about circumcision. Her stories have also been included in anthologies of Best American Magazine Writing 2009 and Best American Crime Reporting 2009.

On February 27, 2012, following the death of children's author Jan Berenstain, Rosen wrote an article critical of the Berenstain Bears series of books and said "good riddance" to the beloved children's author. After negative public reaction to her use of the phrase "good riddance," Rosen issued an apology. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Makes us see the larger picture...this provocative book is not so much about the end of men but the end of male supremacy...The great strength of Ms. Rosin's argument is that she shows how these changes in sex, love, ambition and work have little or nothing to do with hard-wired brain differences or supposed evolutionary destiny. They occur as a result of economic patterns, the unavailability of marriageable men, and a global transformation in the nature of work.
Wall Street Journal

Ambitious and surprising....[The End of Men is] solidly researched and should interest readers who care about feminist history and how gender issues play out in the culture.... A nuanced, sensitively reported account of how cultural and economic forces are challenging traditional gender norms and behavior.
Boston Globe

Pinpoints the precise trajectory and velocity of the culture.... Rosin’s book, anchored by data and aromatized by anecdotes, concludes that women are gaining the upper hand.
Washington Post

Refreshing...Rosin's book may be the most insightful and readable cultural analysis of the year, bringing together findings from different fields to show that economic shifts and cultural pressures mean that in many ways, men are being left behind...The End of Men is buttressed by numbers, but it's a fascinating read because it transcends them... Rosin's genius was to connect these dots in ways no one else has for an unexpected portrait of our moment. The End of Men is not really about a crisis for men; it's a crisis of American opportunity.
Los Angeles Times

Especially timely.... Rosin has her finger squarely on the pulse of contemporary culture...fresh and compelling.
USA Today

Rosin is a gifted storyteller with a talent for ferreting out volumes of illustrative data, and she paints a compelling picture of the ways women are ascendant
Time

A persuasive, research-grounded argument.... The most interesting sections in The End of Men show that in the portions of the country where, through culture and money, something like equality between the sexes is being achieved, the differences between them collapse.
Esquire

Heralds the ways current economic and societal power shifts are bringing 'the age of testosterone' to a close and the consequences.
Vanity Fair

Following up on her Atlantic cover story of two summers ago, Rosin (senior editor, Atlantic; God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission To Save America) uses the same provocative title here to show that there has been a power shift in America, with men no longer dominant. She points to the fact that many more women are wage earners and that they are more likely than men to go to college, but she does not fully consider the additional reality that women wage earners still earn substantially less than men over a lifetime and that although they have made gains as lawyers and physicians, that is a narrow segment of American workers. The fact that women are virtually invisible among electricians, plumbers and masons, although they make up more than 96 percent of secretaries, 95 percent of childcare workers, and 88 percent of health-care aides, argues against there being a major shift in gender roles in American society as a whole, as Rosin believes. Verdict: Although Rosin thinks that all we have to do is wait to encounter a complete shift in the paradigm of gender in the United States, and although she presents many observations about progress for women, the facts on the ground make her argument unpersuasive: the end of men has been widely exaggerated. Consider this an optional purchase. —Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC
Library Journal

Atlantic senior editor Rosin (God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America, 2007), co-founder of Slate's women's section, DoubleX, argues that women are more likely than men to succeed in the modern workforce. The author conducted extensive interviews with women of various backgrounds, from the Midwest to Korea. She bases her argument partly on the flexibility of women and partly on the fact that employers are beginning to value characteristics stereotypically attributed to women, such as empathy. Rosin suggests that the world may be headed toward a matriarchy. It is refreshing to find optimism in a book about the gender gap, but in some cases it seems that women haven't progressed as much as men have fallen behind. In several of the households Rosin discusses, what has made the women the main breadwinners is not just drive, but the fact that their men don't hold steady jobs. Most of those men do not completely fulfill domestic duties either, leaving the women to work both outside and inside the home. Though she later takes up the issue of splitting household duties, Rosin glosses over it early on to paint a picture of matriarchal utopia. The author covers an impressive amount of ground about women, including the professions they dominate, how they can rise to the top, and their relationship to casual sex. Particularly interesting is Rosin's examination of female violence. She shows that as women gain power, they encompass the negative traits that were once only attributed to men, therefore countering the myth that a world ruled by women would be more peaceful. A great starting point for readers interested in exploring the intersecting issues of gender, family and employment.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In “Hearts of Steel,” Rosin depicts an extreme version of hook-up culture at an Ivy League business school. How did you feel about the women she depicts? Did you find them admirable? Off-putting? Do you view them as outliers or as trailblazers?

2. Rosin seems to agree with research showing that the hook up culture is necessary for women’s advancement. Do you? Or do you think women are getting a bad deal in their early romantic relationships?

3. If you had a daughter, what advice would you give her when she entered college?

4. If you are married, would you describe yourself as having a see-saw marriage, in which each partner gets the chance to be the main breadwinner at some point? Would you want such a marriage? What are the advantages and disadvantages for women? For men?

5. How did you feel about David Godsall, the young man in ”The See-Saw Marriage” who is resentful that his girlfriend is making more money? Do you think young men are adjusting to playing a more traditionally feminine role these days?

6. What did you think of Steven Andrews, the stay-at-home dad at the end of ”The See-Saw Marriage” chapter? Is he pulling his weight in the family?

7. In “The New American Matriarchy,” Rosin depicts the changes wrought by the decline of American manufacturing in Alexander City, Alabama. How does the image of manhood in such a place conflict with the reality? How are men and women responding to the changes? What is the effect on the younger generation coming of age in this new reality? What is lost and what is gained?

8. What did you make of the young women in ”Pharm Girls”? Do you admire the way they forge ahead? Do you think of them as feminists, even though they don’t think of themselves that way?

9. Do you think it’s true that women have more advantages in this economy than men?

10. Were you surprised that colleges were using affirmative action for white men? Do you think that such a step is warranted?

11. Why do you think women are more successful at school than men? Do you think that schools discriminate against boys?

12. The research Rosin cites in “A More Perfect Poison” suggests that the nature of female violence is changing, although the numbers of female offenders are still minuscule compared to men. Do you think women are potentially as violent as men? Why or why not?

13. In “The Top,” Rosin depicts new patterns of work in Silicon Valley, inspired to a great extent by the need to retain highly skilled women in the workforce. Do you think these patterns offer productive templates for companies everywhere? What are the advantages and disadvantages for companies? For workers?

14. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg comments that women in high places have a duty to stay there, so that they can create better policies for other women? Do you agree?

15. What do you think of the idea Rosin presents in the conclusion, that men may become more flexible as on the world around them continues to change? Have you noticed any signs of change in the culture around you? What is the next step for “Plastic Woman”?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

The End of Your Life Book Club
Will Schwalbe, 2012
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307594037

Summary
“What are you reading?”

That’s the question Will Schwalbe asks his mother, Mary Anne, as they sit in the waiting room of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In 2007, Mary Anne returned from a humanitarian trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan suffering from what her doctors believed was a rare type of hepatitis. Months later she was diagnosed with a form of advanced pancreatic cancer, which is almost always fatal, often in six months or less.

This is the inspiring true story of a son and his mother, who start a “book club” that brings them together as her life comes to a close. Over the next two years, Will and Mary Anne carry on conversations that are both wide-ranging and deeply personal, prompted by an eclectic array of books and a shared passion for reading. Their list jumps from classic to popular, from poetry to mysteries, from fantastic to spiritual. The issues they discuss include questions of faith and courage as well as everyday topics such as expressing gratitude and learning to listen. Throughout, they are constantly reminded of the power of books to comfort us, astonish us, teach us, and tell us what we need to do with our lives and in the world. Reading isn’t the opposite of doing; it’s the opposite of dying.

Will and Mary Anne share their hopes and concerns with each other—and rediscover their lives—through their favorite books. When they read, they aren’t a sick person and a well person, but a mother and a son taking a journey together. The result is a profoundly moving tale of loss that is also a joyful, and often humorous, celebration of life: Will’s love letter to his mother, and theirs to the printed page. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Will Schwalbe has worked in publishing (most recently as senior vice president and editor in chief of Hyperion Books); digital media, as the founder and CEO of Cookstr.com; and as a journalist, writing for various publications including The New York Times and the South China Morning Post. He is on the boards of Yale University Press and the Kingsborough Community College Foundation. He is the coauthor, with David Shipley, of Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Sharing books he loved with his savvy New Yorker mom had always been a great pleasure for both mother and son, becoming especially poignant when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, at age 73. Schwalbe, founder of Cookstr.com and former editor-in-chief of Hyperion, along with his father and siblings, was blindsided by the news; his mother, Mary Ann Schwalbe, had been an indomitable crusader for human rights, once the director of admissions at Harvard, and a person of enormous energy and management skills. Could a book club be run by only two people? Schwalbe and his mother wondered as they waited together over many chemotherapy sessions at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. It didn’t matter: “Books showed us that we didn’t need to retreat or cocoon,” he writes; they provided “much-needed ballast” during an emotionally tumultuous time when fear and uncertainty gripped them both as the dreaded disease (“not curable but treatable”) progressed rapidly. From Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach to Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey to Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar, Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book to John Updike’s My Father’s Tears: the books they shared allowed them to speak honestly and thoughtfully, to get to know each other, ask big questions, and especially talk about death. With a refreshing forthrightness, and an excellent list of books included, this is an astonishing, pertinent, and wonderfully welcome work.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) This touching and insightful memoir [will] appeal to readers of Tuesdays with Morrie and The Last Lecture, but also to people who love delving into books and book discussions.... While it is a story about death, it is mostly a celebration of life and of the way books can enrich it.
Booklist

Schwalbe (co-author: Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, 2007) chronicles his book-related conversations with his mother after she was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. Books provided the author with much-needed ballast during the chaos and upheaval of his mother's terminal illness.... Books provided an avenue for the author and his mother to explore important topics that made them uneasy.... Each chapter holds a subtle message fleshed out through their readings and discussions, and themes include gratitude, loneliness, feminism, faith, communication, trust and grief. In a heartfelt tribute to his mother, Schwalbe illustrates the power of the written word to expand our knowledge of ourselves and others.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Does this book have a central theme? What is it?

2. Why does Mary Anne always read a book’s ending first? How does this reflect her character?

3. Early in the book, Will writes, “I wanted to learn more about my mother’s life and the choices she’d made, so I often steered the conversation there. She had an agenda of her own, as she almost always did. It took me some time, and some help, to figure it out.” (page 6) What was Mary Anne’s agenda?

4. Mary Anne underlined a passage in Seventy Verses on Emptiness, which resonated with Will: “Permanent is not; impermanent is not; a self is not; not a self [is not]; clean is not; not clean is not; happy is not; suffering is not.” Why did this strike both of them as significant? What do you think it means?

5. Throughout the book, Will talks about books as symbols and sources of hope. How has reading books served a similar function for you?

6. While reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, Will and Mary Anne discuss three kinds of fateful choices: “the ones characters make knowing that they can never be undone; the ones they make thinking they can but learn they can’t; and the ones they make thinking they can’t and only later come to understand, when it’s too late, when ‘nothing can be undone,’ that they could have.” (page 41) What kind of choices did Mary Anne make during her cancer treatment? Did she or Will make any of the third type?

7. Mary Anne especially liked a passage from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson: “When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?” (page 96) Why do you think this moved her so much? What did it mean to Will?

8. How does religious belief help Mary Anne? How do you think it might have helped Will?

9. Mary Anne doesn’t believe her travels to war-torn countries were brave: “I wanted to go to all those places, so how could that be brave? The people I’m talking about, they did things they didn’t want to do because they felt they had to, or because they thought it was the right thing to do.” (page 167) In what ways is Mary Anne brave during her cancer treatments? Does she ever come to think of herself as brave?

10. Will is amazed by his mother’s ability to continue her efforts to fund the library in Afghanistan even while facing a death sentence, until he realizes that “she used her emotions to motivate her and help her concentrate. The emphasis for her was always on doing what needed to be done. I had to learn this lesson while she was still there to teach me.” (page 194) Did Will learn? What makes you think so?

11. Why did Mary Anne become so intent on certain things happening: Obama’s election, David Rohde’s safe return? Will talks about his own “magical thinking” several times in the book—what form do you think Mary Anne’s took?

12. “We’re all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.” (page 281) How did this realization affect Will’s final days with his mom?

13. After she dies, Will looks at Mary Anne’s copy of Daily Strength for Daily Needs, next to the bed. He believes this quote from John Ruskin was the last thing his mother ever read: “If you do not wish for His kingdom, don’t pray for it. But if you do, you must do more than pray for it; you must work for it.” (page 321) How did Mary Anne work for it throughout her life? Do you think Will found solace in this passage?

14. Several times in the book, Will talks about eBooks versus their physical counterparts. Why does he prefer one to the other? Does Mary Anne agree? If you read this book on an eReader, how do you think it affected your experience?

15. Which of the books discussed by Will and Mary Anne have you read? Which do you most want to read?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery
Scott Kelly, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524731595

Summary
A stunning memoir from the astronaut who spent a record-breaking year aboard the International Space Station—a candid account of his remarkable voyage, of the journeys off the planet that preceded it, and of his colorful formative years.

The veteran of four space flights and the American record holder for consecutive days spent in space, Scott Kelly has experienced things very few have.

Now, he takes us inside a sphere utterly inimical to human life. He describes navigating the extreme challenge of long-term spaceflight, both existential and banal:

♦ the devastating effects on the body;
♦ the isolation from everyone he loves and the comforts of Earth;
♦ the pressures of constant close cohabitation;
♦ the catastrophic risks of depressurization or colliding with space junk;
♦ the still more haunting threat of being unable to help should tragedy strike at home — an agonizing situation Kelly faced when, on another mission, his twin brother's wife, Gabrielle Giffords, was shot while he still had two months in space.

Kelly's humanity, compassion, humor, and passion resonate throughout, as he recalls his rough-and-tumble New Jersey childhood and the youthful inspiration that sparked his astounding career, and as he makes clear his belief that Mars will be the next, ultimately challenging step in American spaceflight.

A natural storyteller and modern-day hero, Kelly has a message of hope for the future that will inspire for generations to come. Here, in his personal story, we see the triumph of the human imagination, the strength of the human will, and the boundless wonder of the galaxy. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 21, 1964
• Where—Orange, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.S., State University of New York Maritime College; M.S., University of Tennessee
• Currently—lives in

Scott Joseph Kelly is an engineer, retired American astronaut, and a retired U.S. Navy Captain. A veteran of four space flights, Kelly commanded the International Space Station (ISS) on Expeditions 26, 45, and 46.

Personal life
He was born in Orange, New Jersey, to Patricia and Richard Kelly, and raised in the nearby community of West Orange. He attended Mountain High School along with his identical twin brother Mark. While in high school, Kelly worked as an emergency medical technician.

Following high school, Kelly attended the State University of New York Maritime College, where he received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering. He went on to earn an M.S. degree in Aviation Systems from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1996.

Kelly He was married to Leslie S. Yandell and has two daughters, Samantha and Charlotte. The couple is now divorced. Kelly's sister-in-law is Gabrielle Giffords, the former congresswoman from Arizona.

Naval career
Scott Kelly received his commission via the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC) following graduation from the State University of New York Maritime College in May 1987. He was designated a Naval Aviator in July 1989 at Naval Air Station Chase Field in Beeville, Texas.

He reported to Fighter Squadron 101 (VF-101) at Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia, for initial F-14 Tomcat training. Upon completion of this training, he was assigned to Fighter Squadron 143 (VF-143) and made overseas deployments to the North Atlantic, Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea and Persian Gulf aboard the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Scott Kelly was selected to attend the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland in January 1993 and completed training in June 1994. After graduation, he worked as a test pilot at the Strike Aircraft Test Squadron, Naval Air Warfare Center, Aircraft Division, at Patuxent River, flying the F-14A/B/D, F/A-18A/B/C/D and KC-130F.

Kelly was the first pilot to fly an F-14 with an experimental digital flight control system installed and performed subsequent high angle of attack and departure testing.

He has logged more than 8,000 flight-hours in more than 40 different aircraft and spacecraft. Kelly has more than 250 carrier landings.

After attaining the rank of Captain in the U.S. Navy, Kelly retired from active duty on June 1, 2012 after 25 years of Naval service and continued to serve as an astronaut and civil servant until his second retirement in April 2016.

NASA career
Selected by NASA in April 1996, Kelly reported to the Johnson Space Center in August 1996. On completion of training, he was assigned to technical duties in the Astronaut Office Spacecraft Systems/Operations Branch.

Kelly's first spaceflight was as pilot of Space Shuttle Discovery, during STS-103 in December 1999. This was the third servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, and lasted for just under eight days.

His second spaceflight was as mission commander of STS-118, a 12-day Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station in August 2007.

The third spaceflight was as commander of Expedition 26 on the ISS. He arrived 9 October 2010, on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, during Expedition 25, and served as a flight engineer until it ended. He took over command of the station on 25 November 2010, at the start of Expedition 26 which began officially when the spacecraft Soyuz TMA-19 undocked, carrying the previous commander of the station, Douglas H. Wheelock. Expedition 26 ended on 16 March 2011 with the departure of Soyuz TMA-01M. This was Kelly's first long-duration spaceflight.

In November 2012, Kelly was selected, along with Mikhail Korniyenko, for a special 340 day so called year-long mission to the International Space Station. Their year in space commenced 27 March 2015 with the start of Expedition 43, continued through the entirety of Expeditions 44, and 45, both of which Kelly commanded. He passed command to Timothy Kopra[8] on 29 February 2016, when the ISS 11 month mission ended. He returned to Earth aboard Soyuz TMA-18M on 1 March 2016.

In October 2015, he set the record for the total accumulated number of days spent in space by an American astronaut, 520. This record was broken in 2016 by astronaut Jeff Williams.

For the ISS year long mission, Kelly spent 340 consecutive days (11 months, 3 days) in space. Kelly's identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, is a former astronaut. The Kelly brothers are the only siblings to have traveled in space. On March 12, 2016, Kelly announced his retirement for April 2016. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/12/2017.)

Book Reviews
It’s fascinating stuff, a tale of aches and pains, of boredom punctuated by terror and worries about what’s happening in the dark and back down on Earth. A worthy read for space buffs, to say nothing of anyone contemplating a voyage to the stars.
Kirkus Reviews

top of page (summary)

Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens
Steve Olson, 2016
W.W. Norton & Co.
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393242799

Summary
Survival narrative meets scientific, natural, and social history in the riveting story of a volcanic disaster.

For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, sightseers, and nearby residents listened anxiously to rumblings in Mount St. Helens, part of the chain of western volcanoes fueled by the 700-mile-long Cascadia fault.

Still, no one was prepared when an immense eruption took the top off of the mountain and laid waste to hundreds of square miles of verdant forests in southwestern Washington State.

The eruption was one of the largest in human history, deposited ash in eleven U.S. states and five Canadian provinces, and caused more than one billion dollars in damage. It killed fifty-seven people, some as far as thirteen miles away from the volcano’s summit.

Shedding new light on the cataclysm, author Steve Olson interweaves the history and science behind this event with page-turning accounts of what happened to those who lived and those who died.

Powerful economic and historical forces influenced the fates of those around the volcano that sunny Sunday morning, including the construction of the nation’s railroads, the harvest of a continent’s vast forests, and the protection of America’s treasured public lands. The eruption of Mount St. Helens revealed how the past is constantly present in the lives of us all.

At the same time, it transformed volcanic science, the study of environmental resilience, and, ultimately, our perceptions of what it will take to survive on an increasingly dangerous planet.

Rich with vivid personal stories of lumber tycoons, loggers, volcanologists, and conservationists, Eruption delivers a spellbinding narrative built from the testimonies of those closest to the disaster, and an epic tale of our fraught relationship with the natural world. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1956-57
• Where—San Diego, California, USA
• Raised—eastern Washington State
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Awards—Science-in-Society Award (National Association of Science Writers)
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington, USA

Steve Olson is a US writer who specializes in science, mathematics, and public policy. He is the author of a number of nonfiction trade books and has written for numerous magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, Science, Scientific American, Wired, Yale Alumni Magazine, Washingtonian, Slate, and Paste. His articles have been reprinted in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003 and 2007.

Books
2002 - Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins
2004 - Count Down: Six Kids Vie for Glory at the World’s Toughest Math Competition
2010 - Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion... (with Greg Graffin)
2016 - Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens

Mapping Human History was a finalist for the National Book Awards and received the Science-in-Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers. Count Down was named a best science book of 2004 by Discover magazine.

Research on Ancestry
Mapping Human History contained a conjecture about human ancestry that was disputed when the book was published. The book claimed that the most recent common ancestor of everyone living on the Earth today must have lived just 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, a number that geneticists thought much too small.

However, a more formal version of the conjecture was proven by the author, working with coauthors Douglas Rohde and Joseph Chang, in a September 30, 2004, article in Nature. Using a model of the world’s landmasses and populations with moderate levels of migration, the authors calculated that the most recent common ancestor could have lived as recently as AD 55.

These results lead to some highly counterintuitive conclusions. In the generations before that of the most recent common ancestor, more and more people are common ancestors of everyone living on Earth today. At a time 2,000 to 3,000 years before the appearance of the most recent common ancestor, everyone in the world is either an ancestor of everyone living today or an ancestor of no one living today. Thus, everyone living today has exactly the same set of ancestors who lived 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, even though those ancestors are represented in very different proportions on a person’s family tree.

Da Vinci Code
In an article published in the Los Angeles Times on the day the movie The Da Vinci Code was released, Olson pointed to several other consequences of the analysis in the Nature paper. If Jesus has any descendants living in the world today, then almost everyone in the world is descended from Jesus. Furthermore, if a person living today has four or five grandchildren, so that his or her genealogical lineage is unlikely to go extinct within a few generations, that person is virtually guaranteed to be an ancestor of all humans in the Universe who will be living 2,000 to 3,000 years from now.

Personal
Olson is married to Lynn Olson, a long-time education journalist who is currently a senior program officer with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They have two children, Sarah and Eric. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/17/2016.)

Book Reviews
Olson brings cinematic structure to descriptions of the events surrounding the eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, finding in them a lesson for those tasked with mitigating the effects of future disasters.... ]A] detailed and human-centered look at a terrible disaster.
Publishers Weekly

A thoroughly sourced, compelling, and significant read.
Booklist

(Starred review.) [A]n engrossing explanation of volcanology during the 1980s and how the eruption of Mount St. Helens altered the prevailing science. He also...describes the political wrangling surrounding the status of the devastated area. A riveting trek combining enthralling nature writing with engaging social history.
Kirkus Reviews

top of page (summary)

Escape
Carolyn Jessop (with Laura Palmer), 2007
Crown Publishing
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780767927574

Summary
The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman’s courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.

When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband’s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy.

Carolyn’s every move was dictated by her husband’s whims. He decided where she lived and how her children would be treated. He controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He chose when they had sex; Carolyn could only refuse—at her peril. For in the FLDS, a wife’s compliance with her husband determined how much status both she and her children held in the family. Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. No woman in the country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get her children out, too. But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom over fear and fled her home with her eight children. She had $20 to her name.

Escape exposes a world tantamount to a prison camp, created by religious fanatics who, in the name of God, deprive their followers the right to make choices, force women to be totally subservient to men, and brainwash children in church-run schools. Against this background, Carolyn Jessop’s flight takes on an extraordinary, inspiring power. Not only did she manage a daring escape from a brutal environment, she became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS. And in 2006, her reports to the Utah attorney general on church abuses formed a crucial part of the case that led to the arrest of their notorious leader, Warren Jeffs. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 1, 1968
• Where—Hildale, Utah, USA
• Reared—Colorado City, Arizona
• Currently—West Jordan, Utah

Carolyn Jessop was born into the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a group splintered from and renounced by the Mormon Church, and spent most of her life in Colorado City, Arizona, the main base of the FLDS.

Since leaving the group in 2003, she has lived in West Jordon, Utah, with her eight children. Laura Palmer is the author of Shrapnel in the Heart and collaborated on five other books, the most recent being To Catch a Predator with NBC's Chris Hansen. She lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
It must be said up front that her narrative is inconsistent at times and irritatingly vague. You never know, for instance, whether she thinks that her escape has ruined her chance for salvation, whether she even believes in God, or whether, indeed, she ever did. But the book is fascinating for all that, mainly because of its close attention to the details of her everyday life and how it seemed to her. She took each event as it came, until her existence became unbearable, untenable, and then she came up with the courage to radically change her life…it's hard to get a handle on other people's religions, or even that salvation we hear so much about. Where should tolerance be exercised and where should it stop? Escape doesn't presume to answer these questions. It just tells a fascinating story that would properly horrify us if it occurred in Arabia or Afghanistan, but right here in America, it's just baffling.
Carolyn See - Washington Post

(Audio version.) Seventeen years after being forced into a polygamous marriage, Jessop escaped from the cultlike Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints with her eight children. She recounts the horrid events that led her to break free from the oppressive world she knew and how she has managed to survive since escaping, despite threats and legal battles with her husband and the Church. Though sometimes her retelling overflows with colorful foreshadowing and commentary on how exceptional she is, the everyday details she reveals about this polygamous society are devastating and tragic. Frasier delivers Jessop's words in a soft voice that develops intriguingly from an innocent and naïve tone into a more assertive and self-confident one that mirrors Jessop's journey. She maintains the same rhythm, but through the inspired words of the text, she really embraces Jessop's persona.
Publishers Weekly

Born into the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS), the author describes her life before, during and after her marriage at 18 to a 50-year-old man with three other wives. This painful memoir certainly doesn't bear much resemblance to the polygamous fantasies of the HBO series Big Love. The author's large family lived in grinding poverty, and Jessop was constantly subjected to humiliations at the hands of her husband, Merril. But she had inner resources. In a decidedly patriarchal culture, she often spoke her mind, and she talked Merril into letting her go to college. Her occasional questioning of his views, however, earned his suspicion and the condescension and mistrust of her fellow wives. So what kept Jessop in the community? Fear. From her earliest childhood, when she played a game called "apocalypse," she had been taught that God punished those who disobeyed his rules. Furthermore, she knew that no woman had ever managed to get herself and her children safely away from the community. Still, one night in 2003, Jessop snuck her eight children out of the house and fled to Salt Lake City. There, she found little in the way of support networks for women escaping polygamy. She was told that "there would be more legal and financial help for me if I were a refugee arriving from a foreign country." The chapters about her struggles to adjust to this new life are more riveting than the occasionally tedious descriptions of her earlier hardships. Especially wrenching are scenes featuring the two of Jessop's children who felt torn between their parents and resented their mother for taking them away from the FLDS church. The book's final pages recount triumphs large and small, from getting her first stylish haircut to standing up to her husband in court. Though Jessop's circumstances were unusual-and particularly harrowing—her memoir will appeal to many women who have left abusive relationships.
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 Escape:

1. Discuss the authoritarian roles of men versus the submissive roles of women in the FLDS, particularly in light of the following comment Carolyn Jessop, made elsewhere:

Women in the polygamist culture are looked at as property, as a piece of meat. We are not looked upon as human beings with rights. The Women are basically baby-producers. It's a difficult thing to break away from. You don't contest it.
— Nick Madigan, New York Times 6/29/05).

2. Why it is so difficult for women to break away from the FLDS? Recall Jessop's statement in the book that "there would be more legal and financial help for me if I were a refugee arriving from a foreign country." What about Jessop's sister?

3. Talk about Carolyn's own mother and her erratic behavior.

4. Discuss Merril and the kind of man he is. Also talk about the competition between Merril's wives. Wouldn't you think—at least hope—that they would have been supportive of one another?

5. Can children raised in such an isolated and sequestered culture, with few outside influences or alternatives available to them, be considered to choose FLDS "freely" when they arrive at adulthood?

6. In a society that respects religious freedom, what is the government's role with respect to FLDS—especially with polygamy, physical abuse, and under-aged marriage? Do laws to protect women and children against abuse trump Constitutional rights for religious freedom? In other words, if the state intervenes, is it protection...or is it interference in private religious and family matters? (For FLDS, religious salvation depends on a man's fathering many children from different wives.) Tricky questions.

7. Talk about religious fundamentalism in general—Christian, Jewish, or Islamic. To what degree are fundamentalists in any religion alike? What are the root causes of such strict beliefs? Does fundamentalism undermine a society (not counting threats of terrorism) or can it be a source of strength?

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

top of page (summary)

Everybody's Got Something
Robin Roberts, 2014
Grand Central Publishing
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455578450

Summary
Regardless of how much money you have, your race, where you live, what religion you follow, you are going through something. Or you already have or you will. As momma always said, "Everybody's got something."

So begins beloved Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts's new memoir in which she recounts the incredible journey that's been her life so far, and the lessons she's learned along the way. With grace, heart, and humor, she writes about overcoming breast cancer only to learn five years later that she will need a bone marrow transplant to combat a rare blood disorder, the grief and heartbreak she suffered when her mother passed away, her triumphant return to GMA after her medical leave, and the tremendous support and love of her family and friends that saw her through her difficult times.

Following her mother's advice to "make your mess your message," Robin taught a nation of viewers that while it is true that we've all got something—a medical crisis to face, aging parents to care for, heartbreak in all its many forms—we've also all got something to give: hope, encouragement, a life-saving transplant or a spirit-saving embrace. As Robin has learned, and what readers of her remarkable story will come to believe as well, it's all about faith, family and friends. And finding out that you are stronger, much stronger, than you think. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 23, 1960
• Raised—Pass Christian, Mississippi, USA
• Education—B.A., Southeastern Louisiana University
• Awards—Peabody Award; Arthur Ashe Courage Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York

Robin Rene Roberts is an American television broadcaster, most widely known as the anchor of ABC's morning show Good Morning America. Previously, Roberts was a sports anchor for local TV and radio stations and a sportscaster on ESPN for 15 years (1990–2005). She became co-anchor on Good Morning America in 2005. She has been treated for breast cancer and for myelodysplastic syndrome.

Early life
Though born in Alabama, Roberts grew up in Pass Christian, Mississippi. She is the youngest of four children of Lucimarian Tolliver and Colonel Lawrence E. Roberts. Her father was a pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen. In a 2006 presentation to the assembled student body at Abilene Christian University, Roberts credited her parents as cultivating the "three Ds: Discipline, Determination, and 'De Lord.'"

She attended Pass Christian High School, where she played basketball and tennis, among other sports, and graduated in 1979 as the class salutatorian. She attended Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana, graduating cum laude in 1983 with a degree in communication.

In the January 13, 2007, edition of Costas on the Radio, she said she had been offered a scholarship to play basketball at Louisiana State University but thought the school was too big and impersonal after visiting the campus. On her way back to Pass Christian from that visit, she saw a road sign for Southeastern Louisiana University, stopped to visit and decided to enroll. The only scholarship left was a tennis scholarship, and she was promised that there would be a journalism scholarship by the time she would graduate.

She went on to become a standout performer on the women's basketball team, ending her career as the school's third all-time leading scorer (1,446 points) and rebounder (1,034). She is one of the only three Lady Lions to score 1,000 career points and grab 1,000 career rebounds.

During her senior season, she averaged a career-high 15.2 points per game. On February 5, 2011, Southeastern hosted a ceremony to retire Roberts' number 21 jersey.

Radio
Roberts began her career in 1983 as a sports anchor and reporter for WDAM-TV in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In 1984, she moved to WLOX-TV in Biloxi, Mississippi. In 1986, she was sports anchor and reporter for WSMV-TV in Nashville, Tennessee. She was also a sports anchor and reporter at WAGA-TV in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1988 to 1990, as well as a radio host for radio station V-103 while in Atlanta.

Broadcasting
She joined ESPN as a sportscaster in February 1990, where she stayed until 2005. She became well known on Sportscenter for her catchphrase, "Go on with your bad self!" Roberts began to work for ABC News, specifically as a featured reporter, for Good Morning America in June 1995. In 2001, Roberts received the Mel Greenberg Media Award, presented by the WBCA.

For many years, Roberts worked at both ESPN and Good Morning America, contributing to both programs. During that time, she served primarily as the news anchor at GMA. In 2005, Roberts was promoted to co-anchor of Good Morning America. In December 2009, Roberts was joined by George Stephanopoulos as co-anchor of GMA after Diane Sawyer left to anchor ABC World News. Under their partnership, the Roberts-Stephanopoulos team led Good Morning America back to the top of the ratings; the program became the number-one morning show again in April 2012, beating NBC's Today, which had held the top spot for the previous 16 years.

In the fall of 2005, Roberts anchored a series of emotional reports from the Mississippi Gulf Coast after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina; her hometown of Pass Christian was especially hard hit, with her old high school reduced to rubble. On February 22, 2009, Roberts hosted the Academy Awards preshow for ABC, and did so again in 2011.

In 2010, Roberts guest starred on Disney Channel's Hannah Montana, appearing in season 4, episode 10, "Can You See the Real Me?" Miley Stewart (Miley Cyrus) is interviewed by Roberts after revealing she is Hannah Montana. Miley discusses her double life and relives some of her most memorable moments about her friends, her family, her dating life, and how she was able to manage two lives. On May 30, 2010, Roberts drove the Pace Car for the 2010 Indianapolis 500.

In 20912, Roberts was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame for her contributions to and impact on the game of women's basketball through her broadcasting work and play.

Personal life
Roberts is a practicing Christian. In 2007, she was diagnosed with an early form of breast cancer, undergoing surgery on August 3; by January 2008 she had completed eight chemotherapy treatments, followed by 6 weeks of radiation treatment.

In 2012, she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a disease of the bone marrow. Be the Match Registry, a nonprofit organization run by the National Marrow Donor Program, experienced a 1,800% spike in donors the day Roberts went public with her illness.

She took a leave from GMA to get a bone marrow transplant, and went home in October 2012, returning to GMA on February 20, 2013. She received a 2012 Peabody Award for the program. The Peabody citation credits her for "allowing her network to document and build a public service campaign around her battle with rare disease" and "inspir[ing] hundreds of potential bone marrow donors to register and heighten[ing] awareness of the need for even more donors." ESPN awarded its Arthur Ashe Courage Award to Roberts at the 2013 ESPYs.

On December 29, 2013, Roberts posted a photo on Facebook with a caption that read:

At this moment I am at peace and filled with joy and gratitude. I am grateful to God, my doctors and nurses for my restored good health...I am grateful for my entire family, my long time girlfriend, Amber, and friends as we prepare to celebrate a glorious new year together.

The post was a reflection of the past year and noted her health, the status of her bone marrow transplant, and her sexual orientation. Roberts and Amber Laign, a massage therapist, have been together for 10 years. Though friends and co-workers have known about her same-sex relationships, this was the first time Roberts publicly acknowledged her sexual orientation.

In 2014 Roberts published a memoir, Everybody's Got Something, detailing her illness, surgiers and recoveries. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/19/2014.)

Book Reviews
Roberts’s book is like one of those packets of heavily sweetened instant oatmeal you can pretend it’s healthy even as you search out the sugar bombs of drama (her medical crises, her mother’s death, her ratings war with the Today show) and celebrity gossip (her 10-year relationship with the girlfriend she met on a blind date: “I liked the fact that she had no idea who I was”). Roberts delivers all of this in the soothing, upbeat voice that has made her so formidable a presence on morning TV. “I’m no Pollyanna,” she says in the current issue of Good Housekeeping, “but I believe optimism is a choice—a muscle that gets stronger with use. Right foot, left foot...just keep moving.
Gregory Cowles - New York Times Book Review

Following her mother's time-honored advice to "make your mess your message," Roberts offers an inspiring memoir of her life, from her home base in Mississippi to her home in New York and the glamorous though grueling life of a television reporter...With the infectious personality for which she's known, Roberts details the support of family and friends and the people she's met in her life and career who've inspired her by overcoming their own challenges with the "something" that everybody inevitably faces.
Booklist

Roberts chronicles her struggles with myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare condition that affects blood and bone marrow.... However, despite the author's best efforts to communicate the challenges of her experience and inspire empathy, readers are constantly reminded of her celebrity status and, as a result, are always kept at arm's length. The sections involving Roberts' family partly counter this problem.... At-times inspirational memoir about a journalist's battle with a grave disease she had to face while also dealing with her mother's passing.
Kirkus Reviews

top of page (summary)

Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day
John H. Johnson, Ph.D. and Mike Gluck, 2016
Bibliomotion
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781629561011

Summary
While everyone is talking about “big data,” the truth is that understanding the “little data”—stock reports, newspaper headlines, weather forecasts, etc.—is what will help you make smarter decisions at work, at home, and in every aspect of your life.

The average person consumes approximately 30 gigabytes – equal to the amount of 30 pickup trucks filled with paper—of data every single day, but has no idea how to interpret it correctly.

Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day (Bibliomotion Books, April 12, 2016) explains, through the eyes of an expert economist and statistician, how to correctly interpret all of the small bytes of data we consume in a day. Each chapter of Everydata highlights one commonly misunderstood data concept, using both real-world and hypothetical examples from a wide range of topics, including business, politics, advertising, law, engineering, retail, parenting and more.

Author Bio
John H. Johnson, PhD is President and CEO of Edgeworth Economics, and a professional economist, expert witness, author, and speaker.

In 2009, Dr. Johnson left his role as Vice President of a globally-recognized consultancy to pursue the endeavor that would become Edgeworth Economics, a start-up that reimagined and innovated half-century old industry standards. In these few short years, Edgeworth has grown from six to 80 staff across the US and become one of the world’s premier economic consulting firms. Dr. Johnson is known internationally for his ability to explain highly sophisticated concepts in a simple, straightforward manner and brings this skill to his consulting, writing, and speaking.

At Edgeworth, Dr. Johnson provides consulting and expert testimony for Fortune 100 clients, trade groups, and government agencies. In his litigation work, he guides companies and outside counsel on the appropriate use and interpretation of complex data sets, and has served as expert witness in some of today’s most high-stakes corporate lawsuits.

On the business analytics side, Dr. Johnson helps companies translate their complex internal data sets into strategic, actionable information across a variety of business settings including human resources, finance, marketing, manufacturing, and business intelligence.

Both aspects share the need to understand—and properly apply—large, complex sets of data. He applies this same skill to his writing and speaking, where he helps audiences avoid the most common pitfalls people make when confronted with data, so they can become more confident and discerning consumers of data and make better decisions in their professional and personal lives.

Dr. Johnson is a frequent presenter on economic topics and the use of data, and has also authored numerous papers across his areas of expertise .(From the author.)

Book Reviews
Access to data is a critical driver of knowledge, curiosity, and innovation. But we need to understand how to interpret the data to tap into the wealth of possibility it creates. Johnson and Gluck help to spread that wealth by teaching us how, in everyday language, to confront the deluge of data we receive every day. An invaluable read!
Bradley Horowitz, VP of Photos and Streams at Google

As an obsessive and indiscriminate consumer of everydata in my day-to-day life...and someone whose professional life is entirely devoted to producing meaningful data and coercing it into telling us the truth, I greatly enjoyed this book. Johnson and Gluck take us, with fun and verve, through the essential steps to become a sophisticated consumer of the data that surrounds us. Don’t be fooled by the cheerful tone and the lack of grandiose claims: if they succeed in educating us (and I am sure they will), the result will be more discerning consumers, better stewards of their own health, and, most importantly, a better democracy.
Esther Duflo, Professor of Economics at MIT, and co-founder and co-director at J-PAL

In today’s data-saturated world, knowing how to use and interpret data is a true strategic advantage. In Everydata, Johnson and Gluck walk us through how we should and shouldn’t use data to make decisions in our lives. They do it simply, clearly, and with unexpected humor! I can’t imagine a more relevant read.
Paul Walsh, VP of Weather Analytics and Meteorologist at The Weather Company

The authors of Everydata have masterfully distilled an applied statistics textbook into a ‘best of,’ highlighting the most relevant and valuable parts we all need to navigate today's world of big data. I cannot recommend it enough.
Joshua D. Wright, Professor of Law and Economics at George Mason University and former Commissioner of The Federal Trade Commission

This book educates readers on how to navigate the increasingly dense information environment.... [Johnson and Gluck] hit key points on the importance of information literacy today.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
1. What’s the first step to consuming data better?

2. What is “Everydata”?

3. How does Everydata have an impact on our daily lives?

4. What are some specific data traps that people should be on the lookout for?

5. What are the main differences between Big Data and Small Data, and how we use them?
(Questions courtesy of author.)

top of page (summary)

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Matthew Desmond, 2016
Crown Publishing
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553447439

Summary
Winner, 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner, 2017 Pulitizer Prize

From Harvard sociologist and MacArthur "Genius" Matthew Desmond, a landmark work of scholarship and reportage that will forever change the way we look at poverty in America

In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Matthew Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge.

Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the $20 a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup after her hours are cut. All are spending almost everything they have on rent, and all have fallen behind.

The fates of these families are in the hands of two landlords: Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher turned inner-city entrepreneur, and Tobin Charney, who runs one of the worst trailer parks in Milwaukee. They loathe some of their tenants and are fond of others, but as Sherrena puts it, "Love don’t pay the bills." She moves to evict Arleen and her boys a few days before Christmas.

Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare. But today, most poor renting families are spending more than half of their income on housing, and eviction has become ordinary, especially for single mothers.

In vivid, intimate prose, Desmond provides a ground-level view of one of the most urgent issues facing America today. As we see families forced into shelters, squalid apartments, or more dangerous neighborhoods, we bear witness to the human cost of America’s vast inequality—and to people’s determination and intelligence in the face of hardship.

Based on years of embedded fieldwork and painstakingly gathered data, this masterful book transforms our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a devastating, uniquely American problem.

Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.(From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1980
• Raised—Winslow, Arizona,USA
• Education—B.A., Arizona State University; Ph.D., University of Wisconsin
• Awards—National Book Critics Circle Award; Pulitizer Prize
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Matthew Desmond is an American urban social scientist, author, and Harvard Associate Professor. He is also the 2015 recipient of the MacArthur "genius" Grant.

Raised in Winslow, Arizona, Desmond's father was a nondenominational minister while his mother worked at various jobs. The family lived on a tight budget, and during his college years, their home was repossessed by the bank.

Desmond earned two B.S. degrees from Arizona State University. It was during that time his family lost their home, and Desmond began volunteering with Habitat for Humanity and socializing with homeless people in Tempe.

After graduating from Arizona State, Desmond headed to the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 2010. Moving farther eastward, Desmond became a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University (2010–2013), and was eventually hired as associate professor by the school's Department of Sociology. He holds the department's John L. Loeb Chair.

Desmond achieved nationwide acclaim for his 2016 book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, in which he exposes the low end of the inner city real estate market, where evictions have become a highly profitable enterprise. Starting as a graduate student, Desmond spent eight years conducting fieldwork in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He followed the plight of eight families, eventually concluding that that eviction is a cause, rather than merely a symptom, of poverty.

Prior to Evicted, Desmond also published On the Fireline (2007), coauthored of Race in America (2015) and The Racial Order (2015), and edited the inaugural issue of RSF: Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, which focuses on severe poverty. (Adapted from New York Times and MacArthur Foundation articles. Retrieved 9/6/2016.)

Book Reviews
An exhaustively researched, vividly realized and above all, unignorable book—after Evicted, it will no longer be possible to have a serious discussion about poverty without having a serious discussion about housing.
Jennifer Senior - New York Times

It doesn't happen every week (or every month, or even year), but every once in a while a book comes along that changes the national conversation... Evicted looks to be one of those books.
Pamela Paul, Ed. - New York Times Book Review

Astonishing...Desmond is an academic who teaches at Harvard—a sociologist or, you could say, an ethnographer. But I would like to claim him as a journalist too, and one who, like Katherine Boo in her study of a Mumbai slum, has set a new standard for reporting on poverty.
Barbara Ehrenreich - New York Times Book Review

Written with the vividness of a novel, [Evicted] offers a dark mirror of middle-class America’s obsession with real estate, laying bare the workings of the low end of the market, where evictions have become just another part of an often lucrative business model.
Jennifer Schuessler - New York Times

Thank you, Matthew Desmond. Thank you for writing about destitution in America with astonishing specificity yet without voyeurism or judgment. Thank you for showing it is possible to compose spare, beautiful prose about a complicated policy problem. Thank you for giving flesh and life to our squabbles over inequality, so easily consigned to quintiles and zero-sum percentages. Thank you for proving that the struggle to keep a roof over one’s head is a cause, not just a characteristic of poverty.... Evicted is an extraordinary feat of reporting and ethnography. Desmond has made it impossible to ever again consider poverty in America without tackling the role of housing—and without grappling with Evicted.
Washington Post

[An] impressive work of scholarship...novelistically detailed.... As Mr. Desmond points out, eviction has been neglected by urban sociologists, so his account fills a gap. His methodology is scrupulous.
Wall Street Journal

[Desmond] tells a complex, achingly powerful story…. There have been many well-received urban ethnographies in recent years, from Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day to Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Desmond’s Evicted surely deserves to takes [its] place among these. It is an exquisitely crafted, meticulously researched exploration of life on the margins, providing a voice to people who have been shamefully ignored—or, worse, demonized—by opinion makers over the course of decades.
Boston Globe

[Evicted] is harrowing, heartbreaking, and heavily researched, and the plight of the characters will remain with you long after you close the book's pages.... Desmond's meticulousness shows how precision is not at odds with compassionate storytelling of the underprivileged. Indeed, [it] is the respect that Evicted shows for its characters' flaws and mistakes that makes the book impossible to forget.
Christian Science Monitor

[A] carefully researched, often heartbreaking book.
Chicago Tribune

Evicted should provoke extensive public policy discussions. It is a magnificent, richly textured book with a Tolstoyan approach: telling it like it is but with underlying compassion and a respect for the humanity of each character, major or minor.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

By immersing himself in the everyday lives of poor renters, Desmond follows in the tradition of James Agee, whose monumental 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men pounded the reader with clear-eyed and brutal descriptions of rural poverty in the Deep South.
Minneapolis StarTribune

Evicted is that rare work that has something genuinely new to say about poverty. Desmond makes a convincing case that policymakers and academics have overlooked the role of the private rental market, and that eviction "'is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty."... Evictions have become routine. Desmond’s book should begin to change that.
San Francisco Chronicle

Should be required reading in an election year, or any other.
Entertainment Weekly

Powerful, monstrously effective…[Evicted] documents with impressive steadiness of purpose and command of detail the lives of impoverished renters at the bottom of Milwaukee’s housing market…. In describing the plight of these people, Desmond reveals the confluence of seemingly unrelated forces that have conspired to create a thoroughly humiliated class of the almost or soon-to-be homeless…. But the power of this book abides in the indelible impression left by its stories.
Jill Leovy - American Scholar

Gripping and important…. Desmond, a Harvard sociologist, cites plenty of statistics but it’s his ethnographic gift that lends the work such force. He’s one of a rare academic breed: a poverty expert who engages with the poor. His portraits are vivid and unsettling…. It’s not easy to show desperate people using drugs or selling sex and still convey their courage and dignity. Evicted pulls it off.
Jason DeParle - New York Review of Books

A shattering account of life on the American fringe, Matthew Desmond’s Evicted shows the reality of a housing crisis that few among the political or media elite ever think much about, let alone address. It takes us to the center of what would be seen as an emergency of significant proportions if the poor had any legitimate political agency in American life.
New Republic

Wrenching and revelatory…. Other sociologists have ventured before into the realm of popular literature… but none in recent memory have so successfully bridged in a single work the demands of the academy (statistical studies and deep reviews of the existing literature) and the narrative necessity of showing what has brought these beautiful, flawed humans to their miseries…. A powerfully convincing book that examines the poor’s impossible housing situation at point-blank range.
Nation

(Starred review.) Gripping storytelling and meticulous research undergird this outstanding ethnographic study…. Desmond identifies affordable housing as a leading social justice issue of our time and offers concrete solutions to the crisis.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Highly recommended
Library Journal

(Starred review.) A groundbreaking work…. Desmond delivers a gripping, novelistic narrative… This stunning, remarkable book—a scholar’s 21st-century How the Other Half Lives—demands a wide audience.
Booklist

(Starred review.) A groundbreaking work… Desmond delivers a gripping, novelistic narrative… This stunning, remarkable book – a scholar’s 21st-century How the Other Half Lives – demands a wide audience.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
The following Questions are part of a Teacher's Guide written for Penguin Random House by Rachael Hudak. A short bio on Rachel can be found below:

1. Why was Arleen evicted from her apartment on Milwaukee’s near South Side? Were you surprised that her landlord made the decision to evict the family after the apartment door was damaged? Arleen later found an apartment where the rent, not including utilities, was 88% of her welfare check. How might a family like Arleen’s manage to cover rent, utilities, and all other expenses on such a small income? What kind of sacrifices do you think families in this situation must make in order to make ends meet?

2. Tenants are often given two options while being evicted from their residence—their possessions can be loaded into a truck and checked into bonded storage or movers can pile their belongings onto the sidewalk. What challenges and consequences may a tenant or family face when experiencing one of these two scenarios? If you were suddenly faced with the decision to move or store your possessions, which option would you choose?

3. Sherrena Tarver claimed to have found her calling as an inner-city entrepreneur, stating “The ’hood is good. There’s a lot of money there” (page 152). How did Sherrena profit from being a landlord in poor communities? Do you think her profits were justified? What responsibilities do landlords have when renting out their property? What risks do they take? Do you sympathize with Sherrena? Why or why not?

4. In Milwaukee, evictions spike in the summer and early fall and dip in November when the moratorium on winter utility disconnections begins. When tenants are unable to pay both the rent and the utilities, how might they make a decision about which expense to pay first? If you were forced to choose between paying rent or heat, which would you choose?

5. In an average month at the College Mobile Home Park, nearly 1/3 of tenants were behind on their rent. Why did park landlord Tobin Charney select a handful of tenants to evict each month? How did some tenants escape eviction? Tobin lived 70 miles away from the trailer park he owned. How might this kind of distance benefit a landlord? What problems might it create?

6. How did Tobin benefit from offering his tenants the “Handyman Special” (page 46)—giving families their trailers for free but charging them for lot rent? Why might tenants see this as a better deal than paying the equivalent in rent? How did the high demand for low-cost housing impact Tobin’s decisions about whether or not to repair property or forgive late payments? What incentives could be put in place to motivate landlords to maintain their properties? What risks do tenants take when filing a report with a building inspector?

7. Many Americans still believe that the typical low-income family lives in public housing. But only one in four families who qualify for housing assistance receive it. What challenges did Arleen face when trying to get approved for subsidized housing? Assistance programs in Milwaukee either require that tenants have dependent children or have experienced a sudden loss of income. How do these services assist people experiencing short-term crises but not those facing more serious long-term poverty? Are there other forms of housing assistance available to low-income individuals and families?

8. How does the process of screening tenants lead to a “geography of advantage and disadvantage” (page 89)? How can landlord decisions impact neighborhood characteristics like schools, crime rates, and levels of civic engagement? How can a criminal background or history of past evictions impact a person’s ability to rent property? Do you think a tenant should have to disclose this information? Why or why not?

9. Why do you think landlords like Sherrena rely so heavily on hiring tenants and jobless men to maintain their property? Do you think this affects the employment prospects for people in the neighborhood?

10. What benefits do landlords like Sherrena receive when they rent to tenants who have housing vouchers? Why do some tenants who spend more than 30% of their income on housing receive assistance while others do not? How do landlords like Sherrena and Tobin benefit financially from the Fair Market Rent set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development? How does this program bring large gains to landlords? How does it prevent gains in racial and economic integration?

11. Why do you think Crystal made the decision to let Arleen and her sons stay until they found another residence? How do tenants like Crystal and Arleen rely on friends and extended kin networks to get by? Does this do anything to lift them out of poverty or distress?

12. Desmond writes, “No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves” (page 180). How do you see this attitude reflected in residents of the trailer park? Do you see it reflected in Arleen’s actions?

13. What motivated Crystal to call 911 after hearing a domestic disturbance upstairs? How did this strain her relationship with her landlord, Sherrena? What risks do landlords incur once their property becomes a designated nuisance? Should landlords be penalized for their tenants’ behavior? Why or why not?

14. Crystal was diagnosed with a wide range of mental illnesses. What struggles did Crystal face throughout her search for stable housing? How might mental illness present additional challenges to a person already living in poverty? How might mental illness contribute to a person’s history of eviction? What protections do people with mental illnesses have?

15. Why do you think Larraine chose to spend all of her food stamps on expensive food like lobster and king crab? What personal reaction did you have to her decision? Do you agree with Pastor Daryl that Larraine is careless with her money because she is operating under a “poverty mentality”? Why might it be difficult for Larraine to lift herself out of poverty by practicing good behavior or self-control? What options do you believe Larraine has?

16. Landlords repeatedly turned down Pam and Ned’s rental applications because they have children. Why? Do you think families with children should receive any protection when seeking housing? Why do you think families with children were not considered a protected class when Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968? Do you think it is fair for landlords to charge tenants with children monthly surcharges and children-damage deposits? Why or why not?

17. Why did Doreen choose not to call Sherrena when the house was in desperate need of repair? Do you agree that “The house failed the tenants, and the tenants failed the house” (page 256)? What effects does living in a home that is not decent or functional have on a person’s psychological and emotional health?

18. Why did Vanetta participate in an armed robbery? Do you think the 81-month sentence Vanetta received was too harsh? Why or why not? What challenges do you think Vanetta will face while serving a 15-month prison sentence? What challenges will she face while serving 66 months on parole? Why do you think Vanetta’s public defender failed to mention that she was attending GED classes, providing childcare, and looking for housing every morning? How might that information have impacted her sentencing?

19. What challenges did Scott face while maintaining his sobriety? Do you think the process for Scott to get his nursing license back was reasonable? Why or why not? What relief did Scott receive after receiving subsidized housing and county-subsidized methadone treatment?

20. Arleen received 89 negative responses and one positive from prospective landlords. What impact did this have on her children, Jori and Jafaris? How do children expose families to eviction rather than shield them from it? What happened to Arleen when she was evicted from her apartment? After losing her possessions in storage and having her welfare case closed, what options did Arleen have?

21. If you were unexpectedly evicted from your home, what would the fallout be? How would this impact your education, employment, and relationships? How might a sudden change like eviction affect your physical and mental well-being?

22. Why do you think 90% of landlords are represented by attorneys in housing courts while 90% of tenants are not? What would you do if you were facing eviction and in need of legal assistance? Do you think attorneys should be provided to low-income tenants at no cost?

23. Why did Desmond believe it was important to live in the Milwaukee communities most affected by eviction? How did his presence impact the lives of his neighbors? How was his personal experience different from the experiences of the people he interviewed?

24. Why do you think there is so much research on public housing and other housing policies but very little research on the private rental market? What solutions to the lack of affordable housing does Desmond propose? Do you have other ideas for how this issue could be addressed in your community?(Questions issued by the publisher.)

Rachael Hudak is the author of several discussion guides, including Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. She currently serves as the Director of the Prison Education Program at New York University. She has led creative arts and meditation workshops in prisons and jails in Michigan, Illinois, and New York, and has worked on anti-violence initiatives throughout the United States. Rachael holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan.

top of page (summary)

Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family
Condoleezza Rice, 2010
Crown Publishing
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307888471

Summary
Condoleezza Rice has excelled as a diplomat, political scientist, and concert pianist. Her achievements run the gamut from helping to oversee the collapse of communism in Europe and the decline of the Soviet Union, to working to protect the country in the aftermath of 9-11, to becoming only the second woman—and the first black woman ever—to serve as Secretary of State.

But until she was 25 she never learned to swim.

Not because she wouldn't have loved to, but because when she was a little girl in Birmingham, Alabama, Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor decided he'd rather shut down the city's pools than give black citizens access.

Throughout the 1950's, Birmingham's black middle class largely succeeded in insulating their children from the most corrosive effects of racism, providing multiple support systems to ensure the next generation would live better than the last. But by 1963, when Rice was applying herself to her fourth grader's lessons, the situation had grown intolerable. Birmingham was an environment where blacks were expected to keep their head down and do what they were told—or face violent consequences. That spring two bombs exploded in Rice’s neighborhood amid a series of chilling Klu Klux Klan attacks. Months later, four young girls lost their lives in a particularly vicious bombing.

So how was Rice able to achieve what she ultimately did?

Her father, John, a minister and educator, instilled a love of sports and politics. Her mother, a teacher, developed Condoleezza’s passion for piano and exposed her to the fine arts. From both, Rice learned the value of faith in the face of hardship and the importance of giving back to the community. Her parents’ fierce unwillingness to set limits propelled her to the venerable halls of Stanford University, where she quickly rose through the ranks to become the university’s second-in-command. An expert in Soviet and Eastern European Affairs, she played a leading role in U.S. policy as the Iron Curtain fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated. Less than a decade later, at the apex of the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, she received the exciting news—just shortly before her father’s death—that she would go on to the White House as the first female National Security Advisor.

As comfortable describing lighthearted family moments as she is recalling the poignancy of her mother’s cancer battle and the heady challenge of going toe-to-toe with Soviet leaders, Rice holds nothing back in this remarkably candid telling. This is the story of Condoleezza Rice that has never been told, not that of an ultra-accomplished world leader, but of a little girl—and a young woman—trying to find her place in a sometimes hostile world and of two exceptional parents, and an extended family and community, that made all the difference. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 14. 1954
• Where—Birmingham, Alabama, USA
• Education—B.A., Ph.D, University of Colorado;
M.A., University of Notre Dame
• Currently—teaches at Stanford, Palo Alto, California

Condoleezza Rice is an American political scientist and diplomat. She served as the 66th US Secretary of State, and was the first African-American woman secretary of state, as well as the second African American (after Colin Powell), and the second woman (after Madeleine Albright). Rice was President Bush's National Security Advisor during his first term, making her the first woman to serve in that position.

Before joining the Bush administration, she was a professor of political science at Stanford University where she served as Provost from 1993 to 1999. Rice also served on the National Security Council as the Soviet and East European Affairs Advisor to President George H.W. Bush during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification.

Following her confirmation as Secretary of State, Rice pioneered a policy of Transformational Diplomacy, with a focus on democracy in the greater Middle East. Her emphasis on supporting democratically elected governments faced challenges as Hamas captured a popular majority in Palestinian elections, and influential countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt maintained authoritarian systems with U.S. support. While Secretary of State, she chaired the Millennium Challenge Corporation's board of directors.

In March 2009, Rice returned to Stanford University as a political science professor and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution. In September 2010, Rice became a faculty member of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a director of its Global Center for Business and the Economy. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Extraordinary, Ordinary People ends where most readers would probably rather it began: with the 2000 election.... [It]is instead an origins story, a minor-key memoir mostly about Ms. Rice’s upbringing in Birmingham, Ala.... This memoir is teeming with fascinating detail...[yet] often aloof. There are few unguarded moments, little humor....Surely there’s a keen and kaleidoscopic mind in there. But that mind is rarely apparent in this softly flowing book.
Dwight Garner - New York Times

Prose so spare it lays bare a child’s pain…full of raw vignettes, episodes that should jolt our post-racial sensibilities…The key to Rice’s composure in office—which was a mix of womanly grace and analytical rigor—lies in the manner in which she was raised. In this, America owes a debt to John and Angelena Rice, parents extraordinarily pushy, parents extraordinarily brave.
Wall Street Journal

Former secretary of state Rice only briefly treats her tenure during the second Bush administration in favor of a straightforward, reverential chronicle of her upbringing under two teachers in the segregated Deep South. Rice acknowledges upfront the complicated, intertwined history of blacks and whites in America, which lent a lightening of skin to her forebears that was looked upon favorably at the time. Her father, John Wesley Rice Jr., came from a family of well-educated itinerant preachers in Louisiana, while the family of her mother, Angelena Ray, were Birmingham, Ala., landowners; both were teachers at Fairfield Industrial High School and determined to live "full and productive lives" in Birmingham, despite the blight of segregation (e.g., poll tests in the largely Democratic South resolved John Rice to become a lifelong Republican). Cocooned in an educational and musical environment, Rice was a high-achieving only child. Yet the encroaching racial tension broke open in Birmingham in the form of store boycotts, bombings, and demonstrations. Eventually, the family moved to Denver, where Rice attended the university, majoring first in piano then political science, due to the influence of professor and former Czech diplomat Josef Korbel. Rice moves fleetingly through her subsequent education at Notre Dame and Stanford. Swept into Washington Republican politics by Colin Powell and others, she sketches the "wild ride" accompanying the Soviet Union's demise, but overall records a thrilling, inspiring life of achievement.
Publishers Weekly

Vivid and heartfelt writing.... Rice’s graceful memoir is a personal, multigenerational look into her own, and our country’s, past.... Highly recommended.
Library Journal

Looking for a blow-by-blow account of Condoleezza Rice’s years as George W. Bush’s secretary of state? You would do well to find one of the many Rice biographies already on the shelves. In this remarkably clear-eyed and candid autobiography, Rice focuses instead on her fascinating coming-of-age during the stormy civil rights years in Birmingham, Alabama.
Bookpage

Rice presents a frank, poignant, and loving portrait of a family that maintained its closeness through cancer, death, career ups and downs, and turbulent changes in American society. —Vanessa Bush
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 Extraordinary, Ordinary People:

1. Discuss the Jim Crow environment of Birmingham, Alabama, where Rice was born. What were the roadblocks thrown in the way of African-Americans? If you've read The Help, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The Warmth of Other Suns, or The Dry Grass of August, how does Rice's memoir of that era compare with those books' accounts?

2. Talk about the environment that Rice's parents created for her, the ways in which they protected her from the worst excesses of Jim Crow. How did they encourage, inspire, and shape her life to become the accomplished woman she is today?

3. Rice's parents, she writes, held to the maxim that their daughter should be "twice as good" as any white people with whom she would eventually compete. "This was declared as a matter of fact, not a point for debate," she writes. Is she right—that during the 1960s-80's blacks needed to out perform whites in order to succeed? Is it true today?

4. Rice's IQ measures 136. Do you believe her own natural gifts would have allowed her to rise to the top despite parental influence? In other words, what is at stake here—nature or nurture?

5. At a time when society is concerned about over-scheduling childhood activities, Rice's childhood routine is breathtaking: up at 4:30 a.m for skating, school at 7:00, piano and more skating after school, and bedtime at 9:30. Do Rice's later accomplishments lend credence to the idea that a highly structured childhood—and its resulting discipline—leads to a lifetime of success?

6. As a child, Rich received her share of insults and exclusion. She writes that she developed a "retaliatory impulse." What does she mean—why "retaliatory"? What incidences created that impulse? Has that impulse been significant in shaping Rice's stellar career?

7. What about the political beliefs of Rice's father, John Wesley Rice? Talk about his support of the 2nd Amendment, his affiliation with the Republican Party, his decision not to march with the Rev. Martin Luther King in 1963, and his unlikely friendship with Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael? How unusual were those beliefs for his era, his class, his race? What does Condoleezza mean when she writes that her father liked "the contestation of ideas"?

8. Rice, herself, is a Republican—an unusual affiliation for most, or at least many, African-Americans. She explains that she would rather be ignored by Republicans than patronized by Democrats. What does she mean?

9. In what way does Rice support affirmative action? How is her support similar to, or different from, other Republicans...Democrats...or African-Americans?

10. Talk about Rice's philosophy, which she says was taught to her: "there are no excuses and there is no place for victims." Do you agree or disagree?

11. How much of her inner-life does Condoleezza Rice share with her readers? New York Times reviewer, Dwight Garner, wrote that her book "is not especially reflective. Her energy is directed out, not in." Do you agree—or disagree—with his observation? Does she go deep enough for you, would you have liked more personal reflection? Or is that not the purpose of her memoir?

12. Talk about the role that mentors play in Rice's rise. Talk about mentors in general—have you had a mentor, someone who has guided you through the labyrinth of life, school, or career? How important are mentors?

13. Have you come away from this book feeling differently about Condoleezza Rice? Did it change—or affirm—the way you view her? Do you feel the book enlightens you about who Condoleezza is as a person, not just as a title or position?

14. What about this book surprised you? What did you learn?

15. What does the future hold for Condoleezza Rice? Do you see her re-entering the arena of politics and government? Could she have a future as a possible candidate for national office?

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

top of page (summary)

Eye of the Hurricane: My Path from Darkness to Freedom
Rubin "Hurricane" Carter & Ken Klonsky, 2011
Chicago Review Press
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781569765685

Summary
Eye of the Hurricane: My Path from Darkness to Freedom is a self-portrait of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a twentieth-century icon and controversial victim of the U.S. justice system turned spokesperson for the wrongfully convicted. In this moving narrative Dr. Carter tells of all the "prisons" he has survived—from his childhood through his wrongful incarceration and after. A spiritual as well as a factual autobiography, Eye of the Hurricane explores Carter's personal philosophy, born of the unimaginable duress of wrongful imprisonment and conceived through his defiance of the brutal institution of prison and ten years of solitary confinement.

His is not a comfortable story or a comfortable philosophy, but it offers hope for those who have none and serves as a call to action for those who abhor injustice. Eye of the Hurricane may well change the way we view crime and punishment in the twenty-first century. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 6, 1937
• Where—Paterson, New Jersey, USA
• Education—self-taught
• Currently—lives in Tortonto, Ontario, Canada

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter fought professionally as a middleweight boxer from 1961 to 1966. In 1966, he was arrested for a triple homicide in the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey. He and another man, John Artis, were tried and convicted twice (1967 and 1976) for the murders, but after the second conviction was overturned in 1985, prosecutors chose not to try the case for a third time. From 1993 to 2005 Carter served as executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted. In 2011, Carter published his memoir, Eye of the Hurricane.

Early Life
Carter grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, the fourth of seven children. He acquired a criminal record and was sentenced to a juvenile reformatory for assault and robbery shortly after his 14th birthday. Carter escaped from the reformatory in 1954 and joined the Army. A few months after completing infantry basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he was sent to West Germany. He adopted Islam and changed his name for a while. In May 1956, he received an "Undesirable" discharge, having served 21 months of his three-year term of enlistment.

Carter was discharged from the Army on May 29, 1956, and was arrested less than a month later for his escape from the Jamesburg Home for Boys. After his return to New Jersey, Carter was picked up by authorities and sentenced to an additional 9 months for escaping from the reformatory, he was sent to Annandale prison for five months. Shortly after being released, Carter committed a series of muggings. He pleaded guilty to the charges and was imprisoned in East Jersey State Prison in Avenel, New Jersey, a maximum-security facility, where he would remain for the next four years.

Boxing Career
Upon his release from prison in September 1961, Carter became a professional boxer. His aggressive style and punching power drew attention, establishing him as a crowd favorite and earning him the nickname "Hurricane." The Ring first listed him as one of its "Top 10" middleweight contenders in July 1963.

He received an honorary championship title belt from the World Boxing Council in 1993 and was later inducted into the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame.

Murders
On June 17, 1966, two males entered the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey, and started shooting. The bartender, James Oliver, and a male customer, Fred Nauyoks, were killed instantly. A severely wounded female customer, Hazel Tanis, died almost a month later. A third customer, Willie Marins, survived the attack, despite a gunshot wound to the head that cost him the sight in one eye. Both Marins and Tanis told police that the shooters had been black males after being interrogated, although neither identified Carter or John Artis, both of whom were subsequently arrested, charged, tried, and convicted.

Petty criminal Alfred Bello was an eyewitness. Bello later testified that he was approaching the Lafayette when two black males came around the corner walking towards him. He ran from them, and they got into a white car that was double-parked near the Lafayette. Bello was one of the first people on the scene of the shootings, as was Patricia Graham. Graham told the police that she saw two black males get into a white car and drive westbound. Both Bello and Valentine provided a description of the car to the police, which changed at the second court case.

First Conviction
Carter's car matched this description, and police stopped it and brought Carter and another occupant, John Artis, to the scene about 31 minutes after the incident. There was little physical evidence; police took no fingerprints at the crime scene, and lacked the facilities to conduct a paraffin test on Carter and Artis. None of the eyewitnesses identified Carter or Artis as the shooter. The defense would later raise questions about this evidence, as it was not logged with a property clerk until five days after the murders.

Carter and Artis were taken to police headquarters and questioned. They were released later that day.

Several months later, Bello disclosed to the police that he had an accomplice during the attempted burglary, one Arthur Dexter Bradley. On further questioning, Bello and Bradley both identified Carter as one of the two males they had seen carrying weapons outside the bar the night of the murders; Bello also identified Artis as the other. Based on this additional evidence, Carter and Artis were arrested and indicted.

At the 1967 trial, Carter was represented by well-known attorney Raymond A. Brown. Brown's focus...was on inconsistencies in some of the descriptions given by eyewitnesses Marins and Bello. The defense also produced a number of alibi witnesses who testified that Carter and Artis had been in another nearby bar at about the time of the shootings. However, prosecutors were able to impeach the testimony given by these witnesses. Both men were convicted. Although prosecutors had sought the death penalty, jurors recommended that each defendant receive a life sentence for each murder.

In 1974, Bello and Bradley recanted their identifications of Carter and Artis, and these recantations were used as the basis for a motion for a new trial. Judge Samuel Larner denied the motion, saying that the recantations "lacked the ring of truth."

Despite Larner's ruling, Madison Avenue advertising guru George Lois organized a campaign on Carter's behalf, which led to increasing public support for a retrial or pardon. Muhammad Ali lent his support to the campaign, and Bob Dylan wrote song called "Hurricane" (1975), which declared that Carter was innocent. In 1975 Dylan performed the song at a concert where Carter was temporarily an inmate.

However, during the hearing on the recantations, defense attorneys also argued that Bello and Bradley had lied during the 1967 trial. Prosecutor Burrell Ives Humphreys decided to try Carter and Artis again. It was concludede that Bello was telling the truth when he said that he had seen Carter, outside the Lafayette immediately after the murders.

Second Conviction and Appeal
During the new trial, witness Alfred Bello repeated his 1967 testimony, identifying Carter and Artis as the two armed men he had seen outside the Lafayette Grill. Bradley refused to cooperate with prosecutors, and neither prosecution nor defense called him as a witness.

The defense responded with testimony from multiple witnesses identifying Carter at the locations he claimed to be at the morning the murders happened.

After deliberating for almost nine hours, the jury again found Carter and Artis guilty of the murders. Judge Leopizzi re-imposed the same sentences on both men—a double life sentence for Carter, a single life sentence for Artis.

Artis was paroled in 1981. Carter, 48 years old, was freed without bail in November 1985. The prosecutors appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

Aftermath
Carter now lives in Toronto, Ontario, and was executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC) from 1993 until 2005. Carter resigned when the AIDWYC declined to support Carter's protest of the appointment (to a judgeship) of the prosecutor of Canadian Guy Paul Morin, who had to serve ten years in prison after a wrongful conviction for rape and murder.

Carter often serves as a motivational speaker. On October 14, 2005, he received two honorary Doctorates of Law, one from York University (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) and one from Griffith University (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia), in recognition of his work with AIDWYC and the Innocence Project. Carter received the Abolition Award from Death Penalty Focus in 1996. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Ken Klonsky
Ken Klonsky, co-author of Dr. Rubin Carter’s Eye of the Hurricane, is a former Toronto teacher and writer now living in Vancouver. He works as Director of Media Relations, and advocates for prisoners, at Innocence International, the organization conceived by Dr. Carter to help free wrongly convicted prisoners worldwide. Songs of Aging Children, Klonsky’s collection of short stories about troubled youth, was published in 1992, and Taking Steam, a play co-authored with the late Brian Shein, was staged in New York and Toronto in 1983. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
An uplifting tale of how a man can transcend shackles of all sorts.
Globe and Mail

Long story short, if Eye of the Hurricane doesn’t inspire you, nothing will.
Smooth Magazine

Carter was a top middleweight boxing contender of the early 1960s (who had already served time in prison) until he was arrested for a triple murder in 1966 and convicted—not once but twice. He was incarcerated until his conviction was finally overturned on appeal in 1985. Bob Dylan had protested his imprisonment in song; later Denzel Washington portrayed him on the screen. While in prison, Carter authored his first book, The Sixteenth Round. Perhaps the greatest proof of his innocence is his career after he was released from prison. As he relates here, he spent 13 years as chair and CEO of the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted, and since splitting with that organization in 2005 has been CEO of Innocence International, another group working to free innocent prisoners. While he harks back to his own legal tribulations, the core of his new book is his condemnation of the flaws in our criminal justice system: the book's protagonists are the wrongly convicted prisoners whose stories he imparts. The legal verdicts on Carter were impaired, but the verdict on this book is positive. It is not a sports book for the casual boxing fan, but it's essential for the socially conscious. —Jim Burns, Jacksonville P.L., FL
Library Journal

Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a former middleweight prizefighter whose 1967 imprisonment for a triple homicide at a...New Jersey bar became a cause celebre in the 1970s...was released from prison in 1985 by a federal judge who cited a conviction predicated on “an appeal to racism rather than reason.”.... For more information about Carter, check out Sam Chaiton and Terry Swinton’s Lazarus and the Hurricane (1991) and James Hirsch’s Hurricane.
Booklist

Discussion Questions
Thanks to Lauren Sommerfield of The BWB Bookclub, Massena, New York, for submitting her questions:

1. How does the tone of the book change from beginning to end? Do you feel differently about the author's message in different stages of the book?

2. Does Dr. Rubin Carter's struggle appear to be an internal struggle or an external struggle? Why?

3. If wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life in prison, do you think you would have chosen to "fall in line" of the prison system to make your time there easier, or been defiant like Dr. Carter, to fight for your innocence and freedom?

4. Dr. Carter believes many people and groups of people are to blame for wrongful conviction: investigating police officers, lawyers, judges, American society in general. Who do you think is to blame for wrongful convictions? What is something that could/should be changed to prevent it?

5. Did anything presented in this book change your opinion about capital punishment? Does it change your views on the interrogation process and the possibility of false confessions?

6. Dr. Carter describes instances in the book of different, specific, spiritual awakenings he has experienced. What do you make of these spiritual awakenings? Are they a result of past events or were they meant to help him with future events? Are they a coping mechanism?

7. Dr. Carter believes much of society is "asleep". Do you agree? Do you believe our country is more "asleep" than others?

8. Do you believe Dr. Carter's time in prison was worth it for him since upon his release he was and is able to help so many others in the same situations?

9. How do you think his life would be today had he been acquitted of all charges and never sent to prison?

10. Would you ever turn yourself in for a crime you committed knowing you would spend years in prison? Would you ever turn your child in for a crime they committed?
(Questions submitted by Lauren Sommerfield of Massena, New York.)

top of page (summary)

Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House or
How a Top CIA Agency Was Betrayed by Her Own Government
Valerie Plame Wilson, 2007
Simon & Schuster
412 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451623871

Summary
On 14 July 2003 in his syndicated column in the Washington Post, Robert Novak identified "Wilson's wife" publicly as "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction" named "Valerie Plame". The column was a response to another, published by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson in the New York Timeson July 6, 2003, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," in which Ambassador Wilson stated that the George W. Bush administration exaggerated unreliable claims that Iraq intended to purchase uranium yellowcake to support the administration's arguments that Iraq was proliferating weapons of mass destruction so as to justify its preemptive war in Iraq.

Novak's public disclosure of Mrs. Wilson's classified covert CIA identity led to a CIA leak grand jury investigation, resulting in the indictment and successful prosecution of Lewis "Scooter" Libby—Assistant to the President of the United States, Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, and Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs from 2001 to 2005—for perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators.

Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White Houseis a memoir that covers Mrs. Wilson tenure in the CIA, the leak of her secret identity, and the subsequent scandal. The book provoked a lawsuit even before its launching. In May, the publisher and Valerie Wilson sued J. Michael McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, and Michael V. Hayden, Director of the CIA, arguing that the CIA was "unconstitutionally interfering with the publication of her memoir, Fair Game, which is set to be published in October, by not allowing Plame to mention the dates she served in the CIA, even though those dates are public information."

The agency insisted that her dates of service remained classified and were not mentioned in the book, in spite of a letter published in the Congressional Record and available on the Library of Congress website from the C.I.A. to Ms. Wilson about her retirement benefits saying that she had worked for the agency since November 1985. The judged decided in favor of the agency. The CIA publication review board explained that the manuscript was "replete with statements" that "become classified when they are linked with a specific time frame", but cleared the way for the memoir to be published. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 19, 1963
• Where—Anchorage, Alaska, USA
• Education—B.A., Pennsylvania State University; M.A.,
London School of Economics; M.A., College of Europe,
(Bruges Belgium)
• Currently—lives in New Mexico

Valerie Elise Plame Wilson is a former United States CIA Operations Officer and the author of a memoir detailing her career and the events leading up to her resignation from the CIA.

Valerie Elise Plame was born on April 19, 1963, on Elmendorf Air Force Base, in Anchorage, Alaska, to Diane and Samuel Plame. Plame's paternal great-grandfather was a rabbi who emigrated from Ukraine; the original family surname was Plamevotski.

Growing up in "a military family ... imbued her with a sense of public duty"; her father was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force, who worked for the National Security Agency for three years, and, according to her "close friend Janet Angstadt," her parents "are the type who are still volunteering for the Red Cross and Meals on Wheels in the Philadelphia suburb where they live," having moved to that area while Plame was still in school

She graduated in 1981 from Lower Moreland High School, in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, and attended Pennsylvania State University, graduating with a B.A. in advertising in 1985. By 1991, Plame had earned two master's degrees, one from the London School of Economics and Political Science and one from the College of Europe (Collège d'Europe), in Bruges, Belgium.[1][4] In addition to English, she speaks French, German, and Greek.

After graduating from Penn State in 1985, Plame was briefly married to Todd Sesler, her college boyfriend. In 1997, while she was working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Plame met former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV "at a reception in Washington ... at the residence of the Turkish Ambassador." According to Wilson, because Plame was unable to reveal her CIA role to him on their first date, she told him that she was an energy trader in Brussels, and he thought at that time that she was "an up-and-coming international executive." After they began dating and became "close," Plame revealed her employment with the CIA to Wilson. They were married on April 3, 1998, Plame's second marriage and Wilson's third.

Professionally and socially, she has used variants of her name. Professionally, while a covert CIA officer, she used her given first name and her maiden surname, "Valerie Plame." Since leaving the CIA, as a speaker, she has used the name "Valerie Plame Wilson," and she is referred to by that name in the civil suit that the Wilsons brought against former and current government officials, Plame v. Cheney. Socially, and in public records of her political contributions, since her marriage in 1998, she has used the name "Valerie E. Wilson."

Prior to the disclosure of her classified CIA identity, Valerie and Joe Wilson and their twins lived in the Palisades, an affluent neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on the fringe of Georgetown. After she resigned from the CIA following the disclosure of her covert status, in January 2006, they moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. In a 2011 interview, Plame said she and Wilson had received threats while living in the D.C. metro area, and while she acknowledged an element of threat remains in their new home, the New Mexico location "tamps down the whole swirl."

After graduating from college, moving to Washington, D.C., and marrying Sesler, Plame worked at a clothing store while awaiting results of her application to the CIA. She was accepted into the 1985–86 CIA officer training class and began her training for what would become a twenty-year career with the Agency.[12] Although the CIA will not release publicly the specific dates from 1985 to 2002 when she worked for it, due to security concerns Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald affirmed that Plame "was a CIA officer from January 1, 2002, forward" and that "her association with the CIA was classified at that time through July 2003. Due to the nature of her clandestine work for the CIA, many details about Plame's professional career are still classified, but it is documented that she worked for the CIA in a clandestine capacity relating to counter-proliferation.

Plame served the CIA as a non-official cover (or NOC), operating undercover in (at least) two positions in Athens and Brussels. While using her own name, "Valerie Plame", her assignments required posing in various professional roles in order to gather intelligence more effectively. Two of her covers include serving as a junior consular officer in the early 1990s in Athens and then later an energy analyst for the private company (founded in 1994) "Brewster Jennings & Associates," which the CIA later acknowledged was a front company for certain investigations.

A former senior diplomat in Athens remembered Plame in her dual role and also recalled that she served as one of the 'control officers' coordinating the visit of President George H.W. Bush to Greece and Turkey in July 1991. After the Gulf War in 1991, the CIA sent her first to the London School of Economics and then the College of Europe, in Bruges, for Master's degrees. After earning the second one, she stayed on in Brussels, where she began her next assignment under cover as an "energy consultant" for Brewster-Jennings. Beginning in 1997, Plame's primary assignment was shifted to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The CIA’s Ishmael Jones confirmed her status as a NOC or “deep cover officer” and remarked that she was talented and highly intelligent, but decried the fact that her career largely featured US-based Headquarters service, typical of most CIA officers.

She married Wilson in 1998 and gave birth to their twins in 2000, and resumed travel overseas in 2001, 2002, and 2003 as part of her cover job. She met with workers in the nuclear industry, cultivated sources, and managed spies. She was involved in ensuring that Iran did not acquire nuclear weapons. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
[T]he story of how [Plame's] career was derailed and her C.I.A. cover blown also has its combative side. But the real proof of Ms. Wilson’s fighting spirit is the form in which her version of events has been brought into the light of day.... What emerges is a sense of Ms. Wilson as an ambitious, gung-ho professional, dedicated to her work yet colorful in ways no Hollywood storyteller would dare to make up.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

The government redacted much of the significant information in the first section of Wilson's memoir, which concerns her career in the CIA. In print, a black bar omitted the words and passages; on audio, a tone does the deleting. Once the novelty of the beeps wears off, the incompleteness of Wilson's narrative, at first tantalizing, becomes frustrating. The constant interruptions make it difficult for a listener to assemble a coherent story. Once Wilson's identity is leaked by White House insiders, the memoir's redactions cease for the most part. Unfortunately, her distress over the attempted destruction of her and her husband's professional reputations is considerably less riveting than her spy career. Whiles neither a prose stylist or an actress, Wilson reads clearly, with immediacy and sincerity and a note of barely suppressed anger. Laura Rozen's afterword (occupying the last two CDs) fills in the gaps removed by the CIA. It's intriguing and considerably more polished. The two narratives create an interesting, if not entirely satisfying, account of a disturbing contemporary scandal.
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 Fair Game:

1. What do you think of Valerie Plame Wilson? Did reading her memoir alter your view of her?

2. Why did Plame Wilson write this memoir? What was her purpose in doing so? Does the book accomplish her goals?

3. Why did Plame Wilson join the CIA? How does she describe the agency and the training the operatives through? Were you surprised by its rigor?

4. How does Plame describe the position of female officers vis-a-vis career advancement in the CIA?

5. How difficult, irritating, puzzling was it for you to read the memoir with all the redactions (blacked out text) by the CIA? Does it make sense that parts of Ms. Plame's career could not be published in her book...even though the information was already in the public domain and readily available for anyone to read?

6. What do you think of the book's Afterword by Laura Rozen? Is it helpful, illuminating, or dull and irritating? Is there anything in Rozen's revelations that might constitute a national security secret?

7. What was your understanding of the Plame Affair—in which members of the Bush administration revealed her identity as a CIA operative—before reading this book? Has your understanding changed as a result of reading the memoir?

8. Do you think it was wrong to have released—and published—Plame's name? Or do you agree with former White House officials that they did nothing wrong because Plame was no longer an undercover agent? Why was her cover blown in the first place?

9. Does this account by Plame of her activities convince you that she once worked under deep cover...which some in Washington had questioned?

10. What damage was been done by the publication of her identity?

11. Is Plame's use of "betrayal" in the subtitle the right word? In what way did the CIA betray her? What should they have done when her identity was revealed?

12. What were her friends' reactions when they found out Plame had been a spy? Were they justified in their feelings?

13. Talk about the impact her career derailment had on her marriage. Had you been a friend at the time, what advice might you have offered?

14. Plame writes "I would soon find out that in Washington, the truth is not always enough." What was she referring to...and why isn't truth enough?

15. Where does the book's title "fair game" come from?

16. How did Plame come to feel about the Bush administration? What does she mean when she says that the efforts to shut her and her husband up were "classic Karl Rove"? Do you agree, as Plame puts it that "their tactics would have made Joseph McCarthy proud"? In what way?

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

top of page (summary)

The Faith Club: A Muslim, a Christian, a Jew—
Three Women Searching for Understanding
Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver, Priscilla Warner, 2007
Simon & Schuster
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743290487

Summary
The Faith Club was started when Ranya Idliby, an American Muslim of Palestinian descent, recruited Suzanne Oliver, a Christian, and Priscilla Warner, a Jew, to write a children's book about their three religions. As the women's meetings began, it became clear that they had their own adult struggles with faith and religion, and they needed a safe haven where they could air their concerns, admit their ignorance, and explore their own faiths.

Ranya, Suzanne, and Priscilla began to meet regularly to discuss their religious backgrounds and beliefs and to ask each other tough questions. As the three women met and talked, there were no awkward silences — no stretches of time with nothing for them to say to each other. Honesty was the first rule of the Faith Club, and with that tenet as a foundation, no topic was off limits.

With courage, pain, and sometimes tears, Ranya, Suzanne, and Priscilla found themselves completely transformed by their experience inside the safe cocoon of the Faith Club, and they realized that they had learned things so powerful they wanted to share them with the rest of the world. This is their story. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Ranya Idliby was raised in Dubai and McLean, Virginia. She holds a bachelor of science from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, and earned her MS in international relations from the London School of Economics. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

• Suzanne Oliver was raised in Kansas City, Missouri, and has worked as a writer and editor at Forbes and Financial World magazines. She graduated from Texas Christian University and lives in New York City and Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire, with her husband and three children.

• Priscilla Warner grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, where she began her interfaith education at a Hebrew day school and then a Quaker high school. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she worked as an art director at various advertising agencies in Boston and New York. She lives with her family in a suburb of New York City. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
The dialogue among the three friends comes across as genuine and thoughtful. They try valiantly to be frank with one another, which becomes easier as they learn to trust one another's motives and to respect each other's integrity…The conversations recorded in this book engage our attention as the women search out spiritual values common to all the three faiths and learn more about their own in the process.
Naomi Harris Rosenblatt - Washington Post

In the wake of 9/11, Idliby, an American Muslim of Palestinian descent, sought out fellow mothers of the Jewish and Christian faiths to write a children's book on the commonalities among their respective traditions. In their first meeting, however, the women realized they would have to address their differences first. Oliver, an Episcopalian who was raised Catholic, irked Warner, a Jewish woman and children's author, with her description of the Crucifixion story, which sounded too much like "Jews killed Jesus" for Warner's taste. Idliby's efforts to join in on the usual "Judeo-Christian" debate tap into a sense of alienation she already feels in the larger Muslim community, where she is unable to find a progressive mosque that reflects her non-veil-wearing, spiritual Islam. The ladies come to call their group a "faith club" and, over time, midwife each other into stronger belief in their own respective religions. More Fight Club than book club, the coauthors pull no punches; their outstanding honesty makes for a page-turning read, rare for a religion nonfiction book. From Idliby's graphic defense of the Palestinian cause, Oliver's vacillations between faith and doubt, and Warner's struggles to acknowledge God's existence, almost every taboo topic is explored on this engaging spiritual ride.
Publishers Weekly

In writing a children's book highlighting the commonalities among the Abrahamic religions, Idliby, an American Muslim of Palestinian descent, sought Christian and Jewish collaborators. She was joined by Episcopalian-turned-Catholic Suzanne Oliver and Jewish children's book writer Warner, who both came to realize they needed to deal with their own questions, stereotypes, and concerns before starting the book. After several meetings, the trio's relationship and project seemed in jeopardy, but they painstakingly worked through their differences, accompanying one another at significant times to each of their places of worship, reading one another's Scripture, and supporting one another's doubts and fears. In the process, the women developed a strong bond that strengthened the way each practiced her own religion and moved them all toward deeper commitment to interfaith dialog, to justice, and to one another. This book, which concludes with suggestions to readers for forming their own Faith Club and includes sample questions for thought, is a documentation of Idliby, Oliver, and Warner's discussions, debates, and reflections. The world needs this book or others very similar! Highly recommended for all libraries. —Carolyn M. Craft, formerly of Longwood Univ., Farmville, VA
Library Journal

Three mothers' engaging account of their interfaith dialogue. At first glance, the authors don't seem to have much in common. Idliby is a Muslim of Palestinian descent; Warner is a Reform Jew; Oliver grew up Catholic but was drawn to the more liberal Episcopal Church as an adult. Beneath those differences lie some important similarities: All three are mothers who want to teach their children religious tolerance, and each places great stock in her religious identity. In order to learn about the religious traditions of their neighbors, the authors came together to form a "faith club," meeting regularly to discuss prayer and ritual, their beliefs about God and the relationship between spirituality and social justice. They never shy away from potentially explosive topics, such as the way that Christian descriptions of Jesus' crucifixion have been used to provoke anti-Jewish violence, or the question of whether people can criticize Israeli policy without being accused of anti-Semitism. Over time, the women's religious commitments evolved: Idliby, who had felt spiritually homeless, found a community of like-minded progressive American Muslims; Oliver began to question some of her commitments to classic Christian doctrine; and Warner became more comfortable praying to and talking about God. The three charming narrators transform potentially dry theological discourses into personal, intimate heart-to-hearts. For readers who wish they could pull up a chair and join Idliby, Oliver and Warner in their chats, the concluding chapter explains how to form your own faith club. The only weakness here is that all three authors represent decidedly liberal expressions of their religions. The conversations would have been even more interesting, albeit considerably more fraught, had they included an evangelical Christian or an Orthodox Jew or a Muslim woman who wears hijab. An invitation to discussion that's hard to turn down—and a natural for book groups.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. How did the book's format (a three-way memoir written in first person) contribute to the overall feel of the book? At what points did the women write different versions of the same event? (One specific example can be found when Ranya confronts Priscilla about the Israel/Palestinian conflict, pages 129-138.) How does each woman's individual prejudices and religion color her interpretations of the discussions?

2. How does each woman's role as amother influence the direction and tone of the Faith Club? Would the club have been different if it included both mothers and women with no children? How did the children play a role in the challenges to each woman's faith?

3. To which woman did you most relate, and why? Was it the one you expected to when you began the book? If you identified with one of the women because you share her religious beliefs, did you agree with her presentation of your faith? What did you disagree with, and why?

4. Much of the first half of the book deals with Suzanne's and Priscilla's struggles to define anti-Semitism and to confront their prejudices about the other's faith. Did you feel that Ranya was unfairly relegated to the role of "mediator" (p. 46), or did she welcome it? "For months, I had to bide my time patiently" (p. 126). Why do you think Ranya waited to bring up her own struggles with Suzanne's and Priscilla's faiths?

5. On page 106, Ranya says, "The more that science unravels about the wonders of life and the universe, the more I am in awe of it." Do you think this combination of science and faith is realistic, or must one ultimately take precedence over the other?

6. Suzanne's first sentence speaks of the "cozy, homogeneous community" at her Episcopal church. What is Priscilla's "comfort zone"? What is Ranya's? How does each woman step out of her individual cozy and homogeneous comfort zone, and in what ways does each of them remain there?

7. On page 147, Priscilla wonders if worrying is "a form of gratefulness." What do you think she means by this? Does Priscilla's worry ultimately strengthen her faith? How does each woman show gratitude in her life and in her faith?

8. On page 204, Craig Townsend tells Suzanne, "The opposite of faith is not doubt, it's certainty." What does he mean by this? Is doubt necessary for true faith?

9. In Chapter 12, "Intimations of Mortality," the women discuss their differing views about death and the afterlife. Which understanding of death was most comforting to you? Which image of the afterlife was most comforting? Are they from the same religion?

10. When Priscilla confronts Suzanne about her confession that she was uncomfortable being mistaken for a Jew, Ranya says, "She wouldn't want to be a Muslim either." Do you agree? Why or why not? Is Suzanne's discomfort an inevitable result of being a member of the majority, of "not [being] forced to accommodate [herself] to the culture, religion, or even friendship of minorities"?

11. Ranya provides a vivid description of her own method of prayer on page 175: "My prayer is essentially a form of meditation in which I singularly apply my limited human physical capacity to try to connect with that omnipresent universal unknown force: God." (Suzanne's description of her prayer is on page 162; Priscilla's is on page 175.) How is each woman's method of prayer different? How is it similar? How do Suzanne's, Ranya's, and Priscilla's prayer styles reflect the differences and similarities in their childhoods?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr
Nancy Isenberg, 2007
Penguin Group USA
560 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143113713

Summary
With Fallen Founder, Nancy Isenberg plumbs rare and obscure sources to shed new light on everyone's favorite founding villain.

The Aaron Burr whom we meet through Isenberg's eye-opening biography is a feminist, an Enlightenment figure on par with Jefferson, a patriot, and—most importantly—a man with powerful enemies in an age of vitriolic political fighting.

Revealing the gritty reality of eighteenth-century America, Fallen Founder is the authoritative restoration of a figure who ran afoul of history and a much-needed antidote to the hagiography of the revolutionary era. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Nancy Isenberg is Professor of History at Louisiana State University and the author of books and articles on American politics and culture. Isenberg teaches courses on gender, film and legal history. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Nancy Isenberg...in her fascinating new biography, Fallen Founder, argues that Burr has been misunderstood, and underappreciated, for two centuries.... Isenberg's call for a better, less fetishistic history of the founding fathers is eloquent and inspiring. And her study of Burr is full of insight and new research. It is an important and engaging account.
Jill Lepore - New York Times Book Review

Isenberg's meticulous biography reveals a gifted lawyer, politician and orator who championed civility in government and even feminist ideals, in a political climate that bears a marked resemblance to our own.
Washington Post

Does Burr belong in the pantheon of founding fathers? Or is he, as historians have asserted ever since he fatally shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel, a faux founder who happened to be in the right place at the right time? Was he really the enigmatic villain, the political schemer who lacked any moral core, the sexual pervert, the cherubic-faced slanderer so beloved of popular imagination? This striking new biography by Isenberg (Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America) argues that Burr was, indeed, the real thing, a founder "at the center of nation building" and a "capable leader in New York political circles." Interestingly, if controversially, Isenberg believes Burr was "the only founder to embrace feminism," the only one who "adhered to the ideal that reason should transcend party differences." Far from being an empty vessel, she says, Burr defended freedom of speech, wanted to expand suffrage and was a proponent of equal rights. Burr was not without his faults, she concludes, but then, none of the other founders was entirely angelic, either, and his actions must be viewed in the context of his political times. As this important book reminds us, America's founders behaved like ordinary human beings even when they were performing their extraordinary deeds. (Illustrations.)
Publishers Weekly

In this positive portrayal of the controversial Aaron Burr (1756-1836), Isenberg departs from all previous biographers, deploring their lack of basic research.... Making a strong case for revising received wisdom about Burr, Isenberg significantly contributes to the history of the early republic. —Gilbert Taylor
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 Fallen Founder:

1. How does Nancy Isenberg characterize Aaron Burr, his personality and character? How is her characterization different than what you previously believed about Burr?

2. What in this biography do you find to admire about Aaron Burr?

3. After reading Isenberg's account, was the aftermath of the 1800 election between Jefferson and Burr fair—particularly Jefferson's shutting Burr out of his cabinet and the subsequent choice of Madison as his future running mate?

4. What led up to the famous Hamilton-Burr duel? How much did you know previously about the episode? How does Isenberg challenge received wisdom regarding that fateful day in Weehawken, New Jersey? What still is left unknown?

5. "Everything we think we know about Aaron Burr is untrue," says Isenberg. What are some of those untruths? Why, according to the author, has Burr become one of history's favorite whipping boys? How culpable are historians in perpetrating Burr's scurrilous.

6. In what way does Isenberg see Aaron Burr as an early feminist? By the same token, in what way did Burr represent, through his actions and reputation, the era's masculine ideals?

7. What does Isenberg means when she insists that "the sexualized image of Burr was principally a function of political rivalry"?

8. In what way, according to Isenberg, was the nation "simply not as virtue-bound as we would like to imagine"?

9. Do you think Isenberg presents an accurate picture of Burr? Or does her desire to rehabilitate his reputation color her historical objectivity?

10. Have you read other accounts of Aaron Burr—books about him (Burr by Gore Vidal) or books in which he figures prominently? If so, how does Isenberg's depiction of Burr hold up? Is her account credible?

11. Has this book altered your view of Aaron Burr? What have you learned about the era's social and political culture? Have you come away supporting Nancy Isenberg's hypothesis—that Burr has been treated unfairly by historians and that his place in history deserves a rehabilitation?

12. Do you see any parallels between the political climate of Burr's era and our own?

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

top of page (summary)

Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity
Andrew Solomon, 2012
Scribner
976 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743236713

Summary
Winner, 2012 National Book Critic Circle Awards

From the National Book Award–winning author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression comes a monumental new work, a decade in the writing, about family. In Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon tells the stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children but also find profound meaning in doing so.

Solomon’s startling proposition is that diversity is what unites us all. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, as are the triumphs of love Solomon documents in every chapter.

All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves. Drawing on forty thousand pages of interview transcripts with more than three hundred families, Solomon mines the eloquence of ordinary people facing extreme challenges. Whether considering prenatal screening for genetic disorders, cochlear implants for the deaf, or gender reassignment surgery for transgender people, Solomon narrates a universal struggle toward compassion.

Many families grow closer through caring for a challenging child; most discover supportive communities of others similarly affected; some are inspired to become advocates and activists, celebrating the very conditions they once feared. Woven into their courageous and affirming stories is Solomon’s journey to accepting his own identity, which culminated in his midlife decision, influenced by this research, to become a parent.

Elegantly reported by a spectacularly original thinker, Far from the Tree explores themes of generosity, acceptance, and tolerance—all rooted in the insight that love can transcend every prejudice. This crucial and revelatory book expands our definition of what it is to be human. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 30, 1963
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.A.,
Cambridge University
• Awards— National Book Award, National Book Critics
Circle Award
• Currently—lives in New York City and London, England

Andrew Solomon is a writer on politics, culture and psychology who lives in New York and London. He has written for the New York Times, New Yorker, Artforum, Travel and Leisure, and other publications on a range of subjects, including depression, Soviet artists, the cultural rebirth of Afghanistan, Libyan politics, and deaf politics. His book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression won the 2001 National Book Award, was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, and was included in the London Times's list of one hundred best books of the decade.

Solomon attended the Horace Mann School, graduating cum laude in 1981. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Yale University in 1985, graduating magna cum laude, and later earned a Master's degree in English at Jesus College, Cambridge. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology, at Jesus College, Cambridge, working on attachment theory under the supervision of Professor Juliet Mitchell.

Personal
Solomon is the oldest son of Howard Solomon, the chairman of pharmaceutical manufacturer Forest Laboratories, and Carolyn Bower Solomon. Solomon described the experience of being present at his mother's planned suicide at the end of a long battle with ovarian cancer in an article for The New Yorker; in a fictionalized account in his novel A Stone Boat, and again in The Noonday Demon. Solomon's subsequent depression, eventually managed with psychotherapy and antidepressant medications, inspired his father to secure FDA approval to market citalopram (Celexa) in the United States.

Born and raised in New York City, as an adult Solomon became a dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom. He and journalist John Habich had a civil partnership ceremony on June 30, 2007, at Althorp, the Spencer family estate and childhood home of Diana, Princess of Wales. The couple married again on July 19, 2009, the eighth anniversary of their meeting, in Connecticut, so that their marriage would be legally recognized in the state of New York.

In 2003, Solomon and longtime friend Blaine Smith decided to have a child together; their daughter, Carolyn Blaine Smith Solomon, was born in November 2007. Mother and child live in Texas. A son, George Charles Habich Solomon, was born in April 2009, and lives in New York with Solomon and Habich, his adoptive father. Habich is also the biological father of two children, Oliver and Lucy, born to lesbian friends who live in Minneapolis. The development of this composite family was the subject of a feature article by Solomon published in Newsweek in January 2011.

Publications and career
In 1988, Solomon began his study of Russian artists, which culminated with the publication of The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost (1991). His first novel was A Stone Boat (1994), the story of a man's shifting identity as he watches his mother battle cancer.

From 1993 to 2001, Solomon was a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine.

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression was originally published in 2001, and has been translated into twenty-four languages. It was named a Notable Book of 2001 by the New York Times and included in the American Library Association's 2002 list of Notable Books. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

In 2003, Solomon's article, "The Amazing Life of Laura," a profile of diarist Laura Rothenberg, received the Clarion Award for Health Care Journalism, and the Angel of Awareness Award from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. In April 2009, his article, "Cancer & Creativity: One Chef’s True Story,"[33] received the Bert Greene Award for Food Journalism by the International Association of Culinary Professionals;.the story was also a finalist for the 11th Annual Henry R. Luce Award..Solomon's reminiscence on a friend who committed suicide won the Folio Eddie Gold Award in 2011.

In addition to his magazine work, Solomon has written essays for many anthologies and books of criticism, and his work has been featured on National Public Radio's Moth Radio Hour.

Solomon's 2012 book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, about how families accommodate children with physical, mental and social disabilities was named one of the 10 best books of 2012 by the New York Times. and won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

Activism and philanthropy
Solomon is an activist and philanthropist in LGBT rights, mental health, education and the arts. He is founder of the Solomon Research Fellowships in LGBT Studies at Yale University and a member of the boards of directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Trans Youth Family Allies. His articles on gay marriage have appeared in Newsweek, The Advocate, and on Anderson Cooper 360.

Solomon has lectured widely on depression. His work in the arts and education includes service on the boards of numerous arts organizations, including New York's Metropolitan Museum. He is also a fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University, a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and the Council on Foreign Relations. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
[Solomon's] winding volume sometimes tried my patience, but my respect for it rarely wavered…The bulk of Far From the Tree comprises profiles of families in extremis. Many of these will leave you weeping at the resilience so many display in the face of adversity. "I almost drowned him in the tears I shed over him," one mother says about a son with Down syndrome. That's a typical sentence here. This is a book that shoots arrow after arrow into your heart. Yet there's nothing maudlin. Mr. Solomon's prose is dry and epigrammatic.
Dwight Garner - New York Times

It’s a book everyone should read and there’s no one who wouldn’t be a more imaginative and understanding parent—or human being—for having done so.
Julie Myerson - New York Times Book Review

Solomon forcefully showcases parents who not only aren't horrified by the differences they encounter in their offspring, but who rise to the occasion by embracing them. In so doing, they reveal a "shimmering humanity" that speaks to our noblest impulses to nurture. Far From the Tree is massively ambitious and...often inspirational about the "infinitely deep" and mysterious love of parents for their children.
Lisa Zeidner - Washington Post

Solomon is a storyteller of great intimacy and ease…He approaches each family’s story thoughtfully, respectfully…Bringing together their voices, Solomon creates something of enduring warmth and beauty: a quilt, a choir.
Kate Tuttle - Boston Globe

[A] masterpiece of non-fiction, the culmination of a decade’s worth of research and writing, and it should be required reading for psychologists, teachers, and above all, parents.... A bold and unambiguous call to redefine how we view difference…A stunning work of scholarship and compassion.
Carmela Ciuraru - USA Today

A book of extraordinary ambition…Part journalist, part psychology researcher, part sympathetic listener, Solomon’s true talent is a geographic one: he maps the strange terrain of the human struggle that is parenting.
Brook Wilensky-Lanford - San Francisco Chronicle

Masterfully written and brilliantly researched…Far from the Tree stands apart from the countless memoirs and manuals about special needs parenting published in the last couple of decades.
Tina Calabro - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A brave, beautiful book that will expand your humanity.
Anne Leslie - People

Monumental.... Solomon has an extraordinary gift for finding his way into the relatively hermetic communities that form around conditions...and gaining the confidence of the natives.
Lev Grossman - Time

A profoundly moving new work of research and narrative.... Solomon explores the ways that parents of marginalized children—being gay, dwarf, severely disabled, deaf, autistic, schizophrenic...—have been transformed and largely enriched by caring for their high-needs children.... Sifting through arguments about nature versus nurture, Solomon finds some startling moments of discovery.... Solomon’s own trials of feeling marginalized as gay, dyslexic, and depressive, while still yearning to be a father, frame these affectingly rendered real tales about bravely playing the cards one’s dealt.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Years of interviews with families and their unique children culminate in this compassionate compendium…The truth Solomon writes about here is as poignant as it is implacable, and he leaves us with a reinvented notion of identity and individual value.
Booklist

Solomon writes about the transformative, "terrifying joy of unbearable responsibility" faced by parents who cherish severely disabled children, and he takes an in-depth look at the struggles of parents of autistic children who behave destructively. He also explores the fascinating mental lives of independently functioning autistic individuals and speculates on the possibility that geniuses such as Mozart and Einstein were at the far end of the spectrum. Throughout, Solomon reflects on his own history as a gay man who has been bullied when he didn't conform to society's image of masculinity. An informative and moving book that raises profound issues regarding the nature of love, the value of human life and the future of humanity.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
(Below are both discussion questions for book clubs and ideas for the classroom.)

1. In Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon tells the stories of dozens of parents raising children from across the spectrum of horizontal identities. Did any particular family remain etched in your memory?

2. Solomon describes how his reporting on deaf culture quickly challenged his assumption that deafness “was a deficit and nothing more” (P. 2). What did he discover? Were any of your own assumptions challenged by Far from the Tree?

3. On page 83 Solomon writes about visiting the village of Bengkala, Bali, where a congenital form of deafness has affected generations of residents. What struck Solomon about the way this community treated its deaf residents? Can we draw any lessons from Bengkala about the way we treat deaf people or those with other kinds of illnesses/identities?

4. One of the book’s recurring themes is the difficult decision parents face when a child could benefit from “corrective procedures” such as cochlear implants and limb-lengthening. At what stage in a person’s life do you think such interventions are appropriate? Should parents of young children be allowed to authorize such surgeries?

5. How has the Internet built community for people with horizontal identities?

6. Solomon notes that some dwarf couples use pre-natal testing to “screen out average size fetuses and ensure a dwarf child” (P. 156), and that some deaf people prefer to have deaf children. In contrast, Solomon describes “ever-increasing options to choose against having children with horizontal identities” for society at large (P. 6). He notes that most people who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome choose to abort. What moral burdens come with the existence of these tests? What does it mean for any individual to seek out or to avoid prenatal testing?

7. Emily Perl Kingsley’s son Jason became a public face for Down syndrome but went on to struggle with depression. “I’ll admit that lower-functioning Down’s kids are happier, less obsessed with how unfair it is,” she tells Solomon. What do you think of Emily’s quest to make Jason “the highest-functioning DS kid in history?” (P. 178). How would you approach parenting a Down syndrome child?

8. From your reading of the book, how do you think socioeconomic status affects the way parents cope with children with horizontal identities?

9. Imagine that you are the parent of a severely autistic child or a child with multiple disabilities. What strategies would you adopt from the parents profiled here? Any you would avoid? Is there a formula for maintaining mental, emotional, and financial health when one must be a constant caregiver?

10. What do you think of Andrew Solomon’s decision to include chapters on the families of children conceived in rape, prodigies, and criminals alongside those chronicling people with disabilities?

11. Solomon is puzzled to find that among the schizophrenic people he meets “there was surprisingly little railing at the disease itself” (P. 296). How do people with this horizontal identity differ from many others in the book? Why is it “in a class by itself for unrewarding trauma?” Could society do more to alleviate this burden?

12. What do you think is the proper role for government in the realm of research and treatment for people struggling with horizontal illnesses or identities? Are some identities more deserving of public funds than others? Why or why not?

13. One of the book’s most unforgettable stories involves the girl known as Ashley X, whose parents, controversially, asked doctors to perform procedures that would attenuate her growth, to preserve a childlike “body that more closely matched her state of mental development.” Review Ashley X’s story (pp. 385-393). Did her parents make the right decision?

14. In what context is the word “genocide” used in identity movements? Is it justified?

15. Solomon writes that, “more than any other parents coping with exceptional children, women with rape-conceived children are trying to quell the darkness within themselves in order to give their progeny light” (p. 536). Did you find it harder to read about the choices these parents make than about those made by other parents in this book?

16. In the “Crime” chapter, Solomon writes, “Love is not only an intuition but also a skill.” What do you think he means here? What do you ultimately make of the theme of love that permeates the book?

17. “Most adults horizontal with identities do not want to be pitied or admired; they simply want to get on with their lives without being stared at” (p. 31). How do you treat people with a noticeable horizontal identity, such as Down syndrome. Do you shy away from contact? Do you find yourself curious? Give an honest assessment of yourself. Will you alter your behavior after reading Far from the Tree?

18. In his conclusion, Solomon writes that he used to see himself “as a historian of sadness,” but he ends Far from the Tree on a decidedly hopeful note, writing about his newfound joy in parenthood. What was your state of mind as you finished the book? How do you ultimately view the parents in these pages, as “heroic” or “fools?” (P. 702).

Ideas for Teachers
1. Solomon spent over a decade researching and writing Far from the Tree. He drew on “forty thousand pages of interview transcripts with more than three hundred families.” Have your students find someone who belongs to one of the horizontal identities in the book (or another identity not in the book) and interview that person or his or her parent or caregiver. Ask your students to write a reflection paper. What were the challenges mentioned by the subject of the interview? What was surprising? Did their findings correspond with what Andrew Solomon describes in Far from the Tree, or did the student discover unique information?

2. Solomon describes numerous difficult and controversial issues affecting groups in the book. Assign your students a paper in which they must research an issue, explore moral and ethical considerations, and take a position on it. Topics may include the following:
• cochlear implants for deaf people
• limb-lengthening for dwarfs
• insurance coverage for gender-reassignment surgery
• genetic screening during pregnancy
• institutionalization of the disabled

3. Social attitudes and government policy toward the disabled, the mentally ill, transgender people, rape survivors, and criminals have evolved throughout modern history. Assign students to small groups and direct them to research how people in a horizontal identity category have been treated throughout history. Ask the students to assess whether attitudes today have improved over past conditions. Students can create a timeline of important events and people connected to their issue and present it to the class.
(Questions and teacher ideas issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Eric Schlosser, 2001
HarperCollins
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060838584

Summary
Fast Food Nation—the groundbreaking work of investigation and cultural history that has changed the way America thinks about the way it eats—and spent nearly four months on the New York Times bestseller list.

Are we what we eat? To a degree both engrossing and alarming, the story of fast food is the story of postwar America. Though created by a handful of mavericks, the fast food industry has triggered the homogenization of our society. Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelling the juggernaut of American cultural imperialism abroad. That's a lengthy list of charges, but Eric Schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning.

Schlosser's myth-shattering survey stretches from the California subdivisions where the business was born to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike where many of fast food's flavors are concocted. Along the way, he unearths a trove of fascinating, unsettling truths—from the unholy alliance between fast food and Hollywood to the seismic changes the industry has wrought in food production, popular culture, even real estate.

He also uncovers the fast food chains' efforts to reel in the youngest, most susceptible consumers even while they hone their institutionalized exploitation of teenagers and minorities. Schlosser then turns a critical eye toward the hot topic of globalization—a phenomenon launched by fast food. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 17, 1959
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Raised—Los Angeles, California
• Education—B.A., Princeton University; M.A., Oxford
University
• Awards—National Magazine Award; Sidney Hillman
Foundation Award for Reporting
• Currently—lives in California

Eric Schlosser has been investigating the fast food industry for years. In 1998, his two-part article on the subject in Rolling Stone generated more mail than any other item the magazine had run in years. In addition to writing for Rolling Stone, Schlosser has contributed to The New Yorker and has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. He won a National Magazine Award for "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana and the Law" and has received a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for Reporting. His work has been nominated for several other National Magazine Awards and for the Loeb Award for business journalism. (From the publisher.)

More
Schlosser was born in New York, New York; he spent his childhood there and in Los Angeles, California. His father, Herbert Schlosser, a former Wall Street lawyer who turned to broadcasting later in his career, eventually became the President of NBC in 1974.

Schlosser studied American History at Princeton University and earned a graduate degree in British Imperial History from Oxford.

Schlosser lives in California and is married to Shauna Redford, daughter of Robert Redford. They have two children. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Eric Schlosser's compelling new book, Fast Food Nation, will not only make you think twice before eating your next hamburger, but it will also make you think about the fallout that the fast food industry has had on America's social and cultural landscape: how it has affected everything from ranching and farming to diets and health, from marketing and labor practices to larger economic trends... Fast Food Nation provides the reader with a vivid sense of how fast food has permeated contemporary life and a fascinating (and sometimes grisly) account of the process whereby cattle and potatoes are transformed into the burgers and fries served up by local fast food franchises.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Schlosser is a serious and diligent reporter.... An avalanche of facts and observations.... Pretty compelling.... A fine piece of muckraking, alarming without being alarmist. At the very least, Schlosser makes it hard to go on eating fast food in blissful ignorance.
Rob Walker - New York Times Book Review

Fast Food Nation should be another wake-up call, a super-size serving of common sense.
Atlanta Journal Constitution

Fast Food Nation presents these sometimes startling discoveries in a manner that manages to be both careful and fast-paced. Schlosser is a talented storyteller, and his reportorial skills are considerable.
Hartford Courant

Schlosser's incisive history of the development of American fast food indicts the industry for some shocking crimes against humanity, including systematically destroying the American diet and landscape, and undermining our values and our economy. The first part of the book details the postwar ascendance of fast food from Southern California, assessing the impact on people in the West in general. The second half looks at the product itself: where it is manufactured (in a handful of enormous factories), what goes into it (chemicals, feces) and who is responsible (monopolistic corporate executives). In harrowing detail, the book explains the process of beef slaughter and confirms almost every urban myth about what in fact "lurks between those sesame seed buns." Given the estimate that the typical American eats three hamburgers and four orders of french fries each week, and one in eight will work for McDonald's in the course of their lives, few are exempt from the insidious impact of fast food. Throughout, Schlosser fires these and a dozen other hair-raising statistical bullets into the heart of the matter. While cataloguing assorted evils with the tenacity and sharp eye of the best investigative journalist, he uncovers a cynical, dismissive attitude to food safety in the fast food industry and widespread circumvention of the government's efforts at regulation enacted after Upton Sinclair's similarly scathing novel exposed the meat-packing industry 100 years ago. By systematically dismantling the industry's various aspects, Schlosser establishes a seminal argument for true wrongs at the core of modern America.
Publishers Weekly

It is not unusual, from time to time, to read expos s about the unhealthy quality of mass-produced American food. What makes this book special is its indictment of the enormous U.S. fast-food industry. The author, an award-winning contributor to Atlantic Monthly, contends that chains like McDonald's are significant contributors to global ill-health; ugly, homogeneous landscapes; an undertrained and unpromotable work force; and a widespread corporate conformity that discourages the very individualism that propelled these companies to their initial success. While excellently researched, Fast Food Nation is not at all dull but is peppered with acerbic commentary and telling interviews. Of critical importance is the end: just as the reader despairs of a solution, Schlosser outlines a set of remedies, along with steps to get them accomplished. Highly recommended. —Wendy Miller, Lexington P.L., KY
Library Journal

National Magazine Award-winning journalist Schlosser spent three years studying the history of fast food, the business practices of its major chains and the nexus of agribusiness and chemical concerns behind it. Schlosser makes a powerful argument against an industry that exploits its workers, destroys the environment and creates an obese society in the relentless pursuit of profit. We learn about the chemical factories in New Jersey that manufacture fast foods' realistic and delicious flavors, and tour the filthy, Dickensian hell-hole of a modern meatpacking plant, where each year one in every three of its migrant workers can expect to suffer a serious injury. Most troubling, Schlosser argues that the influence of the meatpacking lobby on Congress largely prevents federal agencies from regulating the industry that Upton Sinclair first exposed nearly a century ago in The Jungle. This is in many ways a disturbing book, about much more than the already well-known public health implications of addictive, fattening and potentially disease-carrying foods. Beyond revealing what is actually in those burgers and fries, it shows why their cheap prices do not reflect their true human costs. —Eric Wargo
Book Magazine

Discussion Questions
1. Schlosser discusses the eagerness of fast food companies to avoid hiring skilled workers and to rely instead upon highly unskilled workers. In fact, some chains openly embrace "zero training" as their ultimate goal. Since these companies are providing a steady paycheck, is it really the obligation of fast food chains to take an interest in their workers and to teach them job skills? Also, since many of the workers are recently arrived immigrants, doesn't employment at fast food restaurants offer them a toehold in the American economy and an opportunity to move onto a better job?

2. Over the last several decades, fast food companies have aggressively targeted children in their marketing efforts. Should advertisers be permitted to target children who lack the sophistication to make informed decisions and are essentially being lured into eating high fat, high calorie food through toys and cute corporate mascots? Is it possible that fast food companies—like tobacco companies—are recruiting increasingly younger consumers in order to insure a steady customer base as their older constituents die from heart disease, diabetes, and other obesity-related disorders?

3. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was the first book to sound the clarion call about the appalling abuses inherent in mass-produced beef. In the decades since its publication, the state of meatpacking has received scant attention. Were you shocked that Fast Food Nation documents some of the same unsafe conditions and practices that Sinclair revealed nearly 100 years ago? Were you under the impression that the unsafe conditions in meatpacking had largely been eliminated and that the United States' beef and poultry industry set the standard for other countries? Does the author's contention that not enough has changed in the meat industry challenge the progressive belief in American capitalism—that it will lift all boats and make constant improvements in working and living conditions?

4. Fast food chains, despite the myriad problems documented by the author, have an undeniable appeal-they are convenient and offer inexpensive and tasty food. Even if you are disturbed by the practices of these corporations, could you realistically swear off your food, given its ubiquity and mainstream appeal? If you are driving home from work, tired and hungry, and your two choices are a familiar fast food restaurant or an unknown Mom-and-pop, which would you choose? What kinds of implications does this choice have?

5. If one accepts the author's assertions that the beef processors and fast food corporations are engaging in patterns of unethical conduct, what can the consumer do to modify their behavior? Can the conduct of an individual have an impact on a company's practices? Why is a company most likely to change its conduct? To generate public goodwill? To respond to its employees' concerns? To address diminishing profits?

6. Since few people would confuse fast food with health food, who bears the greater responsibility for the alarming rate of obesity in children in the United States: the fast food chains that market "supersize" meals to children, or parents who are not educating their children about the benefits of a balanced diet? Can well-intentioned parents maintain control over the eating habits of their children in an era when school districts are contracting to bring fast food into the school cafeteria?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
Kirk Wallace Johnson, 2018
Penguin Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101981610

Summary
A rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief.

On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History.

Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying.

Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness.

Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief …

What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins?

In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1980?
• Where—West Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Chicago
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California

Kirk W. Johnson is the author of To Be a Friend Is Fatal and the founder of the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, among others. He is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the American Academy in Berlin, and the USC Annenberg Center. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
A fascinating book …the kind of intelligent reported account that alerts us to a threat and that, one hopes, will never itself be endangered.
Wall Street Journal

Vivid and arresting.… Johnson [is] a wonderfully assured writer.
Times (UK)

Within pages I was hooked. This is a weird and wonderful book.… Johnson is a master of pacing and suspense.… It’s a tribute to [his] storytelling gifts that when I turned the last page I felt bereft.
Maggie Fergusson - Spectator (UK)

One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.… Johnson is an intrepid journalist … [with] a fine knack for uncovering details that reveal, captivate, and disturb.
Christian Science Monitor

An uncommon book… [that] informs and enlightens.… A heist story that manages to underline the enduring and continuing importance of natural history collections and their incredible value to science. We need more books like this one.
Science

Johnson succeeds in conveying the gravity of this natural-history "heist of the century," and one of The Feather Thief’s greatest strengths is the excitement, horror, and amazement it evokes. It’s nonfiction that reads like fiction, with plenty of surprising moments.
Outside

A riveting story about mankind’s undeniable desire to own nature’s beauty and a spellbinding examination of obsession, greed, and justice …[told] in engrossing detail.… A gripping page-turner.
Bustle

(Starred review) [An] enthralling account of a truly bizarre crime.… Johnson goes deep into the exotic bird and feather trade and concludes that though obsession and greed know no bounds, they certainly make for a fascinating tale. The result is a page-turner.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review) [M]ind-blowing…a riveting historical tour of the feather trade from the 1800s to the present. The resolution, however, is frustrating and demonstrates both the importance and difficulty of preserving our natural history. —Deirdre Bray Root, formerly with MidPointe Lib. Syst., OH
Library Journal

(Starred review) A remarkably compelling story of obsession and history.
Booklist

(Starred review) [C]aptivating.… Throughout, Johnson's flair for telling an engrossing story is, like the beautiful birds he describes, exquisite.… A superb tale about obsession, nature, and man's "unrelenting desire to lay claim to its beauty, whatever the cost."
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 THE FEATHER THIEF … then take off on your own:

m. Johnson reports that a fly-tier expert warned Johnson away from pursuing the story of the Tring theft. "I don’t think you want to write that story.… We’re a tight-knit community, fly-tiers, and you do not want to piss us off.” Johnson becomes frustrated by those who don't seem to grasp the seriousness of Rist's crime. Why is it such a serious crime?

m. What was Edwin Rist's motivation for his theft? Actually, is obsession a motivation?

m. What are your thoughts regarding Edwin Rist's legal penalty? Fair? Too light?

m. When the author interviews Rist, he shows little remorse for his theft. What do you think of Rist and his self-exoneration? He says at one point:

[A]ll of the scientific data that can be extracted from them has been extracted from them. You can no longer use DNA, because what you would want to do it for is to prolong and help living birds, which hasn’t really worked anyway, because they’re still going extinct, or will go extinct depending on what happens with the rainforests.

Is Rist correct? Or is that beside the point?

m. Follow-up to Question XXX: Juxtaposed to Rist's lack of remorse is the museum's science director who calls the theft a "catastrophic event," of "stealing knowledge from humanity." Is it catastrophic? What do the losses mean to science?

m. Talk about why the loss of the birds' identity tags is so devastating to the scientists.

m. In what way does the basic conflict at the heart of this book continue today? That conflict is the belief that nature is worth preserving for posterity vs. the belief that nature is put here for the use and betterment of humankind. In what other areas do we see this debate playing out, and where do you stand in regards to it?

m. Is The Feather Thief an important book or merely an entertaining book about an absurd obsession? Do we need care about what happened to the birds of Tring? What is their value to science? Johnson says that the curators had protected the specimens for years, because they "understood that the birds held answers to questions that hadn't yet even been asked." If the questions haven't been formulated by this juncture in history, are they really that important?

m. Of the three sections of the book—the story of the theft, the history of Alfred Russell Wallace and the Victorian era's "feather fever," the author's experiences researching this book—which do you find most interesting?

m. Alfred Russell Wallace once expounded on the importance of cataloguing the natural world:

[T]he individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth’s history; and, as a few lost letters make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will necessarily render obscure this valuable record of the past.

Do you think he is right?

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

top of page (summary)

Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence
Karen Armstrong, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307957047

Summary
From the renowned and best-selling author of A History of God, a sweeping exploration of religion and the history of human violence.

For the first time, religious self-identification is on the decline in American. Some analysts have cited as cause a post-9/11perception: that faith in general is a source of aggression, intolerance, and divisiveness—something bad for society. But how accurate is that view?

With deep learning and sympathetic understanding, Karen Armstrong sets out to discover the truth about religion and violence in each of the world’s great traditions, taking us on an astonishing journey from prehistoric times to the present.

While many historians have looked at violence in connection with particular religious manifestations (jihad in Islam or Christianity’s Crusades), Armstrong looks at each faith—not only Christianity and Islam, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Judaism—in its totality over time.

As she describes, each arose in an agrarian society with powerful landowners brutalizing peasants while also warring among themselves over land, then the only real source of wealth. In this world, religion was not the discrete and personal matter it would become for us but rather something that permeated all aspects of society. And so it was that agrarian aggression, and the warrior ethos it begot, became bound up with observances of the sacred.

In each tradition, however, a counterbalance to the warrior code also developed. Around sages, prophets, and mystics there grew up communities protesting the injustice and bloodshed endemic to agrarian society, the violence to which religion had become heir. And so by the time the great confessional faiths came of age, all understood themselves as ultimately devoted to peace, equality, and reconciliation, whatever the acts of violence perpetrated in their name.

Industrialization and modernity have ushered in an epoch of spectacular and unexampled violence, although, as Armstrong explains, relatively little of it can be ascribed directly to religion. Nevertheless, she shows us how and in what measure religions, in their relative maturity, came to absorb modern belligerence—and what hope there might be for peace among believers of different creeds in our time.

At a moment of rising geopolitical chaos, the imperative of mutual understanding between nations and faith communities has never been more urgent, the dangers of action based on misunderstanding never greater. Informed by Armstrong’s sweeping erudition and personal commitment to the promotion of compassion, Fields of Blood makes vividly clear that religion is not the problem. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 14,1944
• Where—Wildmoor, Worcestershire, England, UK
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in London, England

Karen Armstrong is a British author and commentator known for her books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic religious sister, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical Christian faith. She would become disillusioned and leave the convent in 1969.

Armstrong first rose to prominence in 1993 with her book A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Her work focuses on commonalities of the major religions, such as the importance of compassion and the Golden Rule.

In February, 2008, she received a $100,000 TED Prize. She used that occasion to call for the creation of a Charter for Compassion, which was unveiled the following year.

Early life
Armstrong was born into a family of Irish ancestry who, after her birth, moved to Bromsgrove and later to Birmingham. In 1962, at the age of 18, she became a member of the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus, a teaching congregation, in which she remained for seven years. Armstrong claims she suffered physical and psychological abuse in the convent, according to The Guardian newspaper:

But the sisters ran a cruel regime. Armstrong was required to mortify her flesh with whips and wear a spiked chain around her arm. When she spoke out of turn, she claims she was forced to sew at a treadle machine with no needle for a fortnight.

Once she had advanced from postulant and novice to professed nun, she enrolled in St Anne's College, Oxford, to study English. Armstrong left her order in 1969 while still a student at Oxford. After graduating with a Congratulatory First, she embarked on a DPhil on the poet Tennyson. According to Armstrong, she wrote her dissertation on a topic that had been approved by the university committee.

Nevertheless it was failed by her external examiner on the grounds that the topic had been unsuitable. Armstrong did not formally protest this verdict, nor did she embark upon a new topic but instead abandoned hope of an academic career. She reports that this period in her life was marked by ill-health stemming from her lifelong but, at that time, still undiagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy.

Career
In 1976, Armstrong took a job as teaching English at James Allen's Girls' School in Dulwich while working on a memoir of her convent experiences. This was published in 1982 to excellent reviews as Through the Narrow Gate. That same year she embarked on a new career as an independent writer and broadcasting presenter.

In 1984, the British Channel Four commissioned her to write and present a TV documentary on the life of St. Paul, The First Christian, a project that involved traveling to the Holy Land to retrace the steps of the saint. Armstrong described this visit as a "breakthrough experience" that defied her prior assumptions and was the inspiration for virtually all her subsequent work.

In A History of God (1993), she traces the evolution of the three major monotheistic traditions from their beginnings in the Middle East up to the present day and also discusses Hinduism and Buddhism. As guiding "luminaries" in her approach, Armstrong acknowledges the late Canadian theologian Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Protestant minister, and the Jesuit father Bernard Lonergan. In 1996, she published Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths.

Armstrong's The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2006) continues the themes covered in A History of God and examines the emergence and codification of the world's great religions during the so-called Axial age, identified by Karl Jaspers. As a result of her body of work, she has made considerable appearances on television, including appearances on Rageh Omaar's program, The Life of Muhammad. She was also an advisor for the award-winning, PBS-broadcast documentary Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet (2002), produced by Unity Productions Foundation.

In 2007, Armstrong was invited by the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore to deliver the MUIS Lecture.

Armstrong is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars and laypeople that attempts to investigate the historical foundations of Christianity. She has written numerous articles for The Guardian and other publications. She was a key advisor on Bill Moyers' popular PBS series on religion, has addressed members of the United States Congress, and was one of three scholars to speak at the UN's first ever session on religion. She is a vice-president of the British Epilepsy Association, otherwise known as Epilepsy Action.

Armstrong, who has taught courses at Leo Baeck College, a rabbinical college and center for Jewish education located in north London, says she has been particularly inspired by the Jewish tradition's emphasis on practice as well as faith:

I say that religion isn't about believing things. It's about what you do. It's ethical alchemy. It's about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.

She maintains that religious fundamentalism is not just a response to, but is a product of contemporary culture and for this reason concludes that,

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensable to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.

Awarded the $100,000 TED Prize in February 2008, Armstrong called for drawing up a Charter for Compassion, in the spirit of the Golden Rule, to identify shared moral priorities across religious traditions, in order to foster global understanding and a peaceful world. It was presented in Washington, D.C. in November 2009. Signatories include Queen Noor of Jordan, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Paul Simon.

Armstrong has been called "a prominent and prolific religious historian" and described as "arguably the most lucid, wide-ranging and consistently interesting religion writer today." She is a regular speaker on the Abrahamic tradition, and after the September 11 attacks she was in great demand as a lecturer, pleading for inter-faith dialogue.

Criticism
Atheist activist Sam Harris criticizes Armstrong's "benign" view of Islam, contending that "Islam, as it is currently understood and practiced by vast numbers of the world's Muslims, is antithetical to civil society." Harris is also strongly critical of Armstrong's "religious apology" of Islamic fundamentalism, accusing her and like-minded scholars of "political correctness."

Armstrong has also attracted the criticism of Christian philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig. Craig has criticized Armstrong's "anti-realist" views about statements concerning God, particularly her assertion that "'God' is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence." Craig argues that Armstrong's view of God as ineffable is "self-refuting" and "logically incoherent.

Honors
1999 - Media Award, Muslin Public Affairs Council
2000 - Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize, University of Tübingen
2006 - Doctor of Letters, Aston University
2008 - TED Prize
2008 - Freedom of Worship Award, Roosevelt Institute
2011 - Nationalencyklopedin's International Knowledge Award
2011 - Honorary Doctor of Letters, University of St. Andrews
2014 - Honorary Doctor of Divinity, McGill University
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/5/2014.)

Book Reviews
Elegant and powerful.... Both erudite and accurate, dazzling in its breadth of knowledge and historical detail.... [Armstrong] seeks to demonstrate that, rather than putting the blame on the bloody images and legends in sacred texts and holy history, we should focus on the political contexts that frame religion.
Mark Juergensmeyer - Washington Post

[A] bold new book.... Armstrong makes a powerful case that critics like Dawkins ignore the lessons of the past and present in favor of a "dangerous oversimplification."... [Her argument] is strong enough to change minds.
Randy Dotinga - Christian Science Monitor

A timely work....This passionately argued book is certain to provoke heated debate against the background of the Isis atrocities and many other acts of violence perpetrated around the world today in the name of religion.
John Cornwell - Financial Times

With exquisite timing, religious historian Karen Armstrong steps forth with Fields of Blood . . . Laden with example.... [Armstrong’s] overall objective is to call a time-out. Think before you leap to prejudice, she says.... Among the most interesting stuff in [her] book is her deconstruction of the modern Islamic stereotype.... In the end, the point Armstrong feels most adamant about is that by blaming religion for violence, we are deliberately and disastrously blinding ourselves to the real, animating issues in the Middle East and Africa.
Patricia Pearson - Daily Beast

Detailed and often riveting...a mighty offering.... Armstrong can be relied on to have done her homework and she has the anthropologist’s respect for the ‘otherness’ of other cultures . . . [Her] oeuvre is extensive, bringing a rare mix of cool-headed scholarship and impassioned concern for humanity to bear on the vexed topic of religion.... [And she] is nothing if not democratic in her exposition.
Salley Vickers - Guardian (UK)

Eloquent and empathetic, which is rare, and impartial, which is rarer.... [Armstrong] ranges across the great empires and leading faiths of the world. Fields of Blood is never less than absorbing and most of the time as convincing as it is lucid and robust.... [This] wonderful book certainly cleanses the mind. It may even do a little repair work on the heart.
Ferdinand Mount - Spectator (UK)

From Gilgamesh to bin Laden, [Armstrong covers] almost five millennia of human experience.... Supplying the context of what may look like religiously motivated episodes of violence, in order to show that religion as such was not the prime cause.... She is no doubt right to say that the aggression of a modern jihadist does not represent some timeless essence of religion, and that other political, economic and cultural factors loom large in the stories of how and why individuals become radicalized.
Noel Malcolm - Telegraph (UK)

Fluent and elegant, never quite long enough...as much about the nature of warfare as it is about faith.... [Armstrong] is taking issue with a cliché, the routine claim that religion, advertising itself as humanity’s finest expression, has been responsible for most of the woes of the species.... The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion, even modern "jihadi" terrorism: each is investigated.... The picture is bleak, but certainly accurate.... Exploitation and oppression continue...but these provide a challenge for the godly and the godless alike. The proposition, like the book, is noble.
Ian Bel - Sunday Herald (Scotland)

(Starred review.) Provocative and supremely readable...the comparative nature of [Armstrong’s] inquiry is refreshing.... Bracing as ever, [she] sweeps through religious history around the globe and over 4,000 years to explain the yoking of religion and violence and to elucidate the ways in which religion has also been used to counter violence.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) A well-written historical summary of what have traditionally been viewed as "religious" wars, showing convincingly that in pretty much all cases it was not so much religion as it was political issues that fueled the conflict. —Augustine J. Curley, Newark Abbey, NJ
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Armstrong again impresses with the breadth of her knowledge and the skill with which she conveys it to us.
Booklist

(Starred review.) Epic in scale...a comprehensive and erudite study of the history of violence in relation to religion.... Armstrong leads readers patiently through history...her writing is clear and descriptive, her approach balanced and scholarly.... An intriguing read, useful resource and definitive voice in defense of the divine in human culture.
Kirkus Reviews

5. Does Fields of Blood give you cause for hope of peace?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, on and off line, with attribution. And if you have developed questions for your book club and would like to share them, we'd love to include them here—and give you credit. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)

Fifty Acres and a Poodle: A Story of Love, Livestock
and Finding Myself on a Farm
Jeanne Marie Laskas, 2000
Random House
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553380156

Summary
Jeanne Marie Laskas had a dream of fleeing her otherwise happy urban life for fresh air and open space — a dream she would discover was about something more than that. But she never expected her fantasy to come true — until a summer afternoon’s drive in the country.

That’s when she and her boyfriend, Alex — owner of Marley the poodle — stumble upon the place she thought existed only in her dreams. This pretty-as-a-picture-postcard farm with an Amish barn, a chestnut grove, and breathtaking vistas is real ... and for sale. And it’s where she knows her future begins.

But buying a postcard — fifty acres of scenery — and living on it are two entirely different matters. With wit and wisdom, Laskas chronicles the heartwarming and heartbreaking stories of the colorful two- and four-legged creatures she encounters on Sweetwater Farm.

Against a backdrop of brambles, a satellite dish, and sheep, she tells a tender, touching, and hilarious tale about life, love, and the unexpected complications of having your dream come true. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1958
• Where—Western Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—M.F.A., University of Pittsburgh
• Currently—lives in Scenery Hill, Pennsylvania

Jeannne Marie Laskas is a columnist for the Washington Post Magazine, a GQ correspondent, and the author of Fifty Acres and a Poodle and the award-winning The Exact Same Moon.

A professor in the creative writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, she also writes the "My Life as a Mom" column for Ladies Home Journal. She lives with her husband and two children at Sweetwater Farm in Scenery Hill, Pennsylvania (From the publishers.)

Book Reviews
A delightful memoir about love and relocation... [by] an accomplished journalist and also a deft storyteller.... Hilarious....a pleasurable read indeed.
Newsday

Humorous...this true-life tale charts a big-city girl’s transformation to farm gal.
People

Jeanne Marie Laskas is the thinking woman’s Erma Bombeck ... [with] a talent for finding wisdom in daily life.... Even the most entrenched urbanite will be charmed by this book.
Time

One damn fine writer...a charming memoir about buying a farm in the country.
Esquire

In this spunky memoir of a dream come true, Laskas (columnist for the Washington Post Magazine, author of The Balloon Lady and Other People I Know, etc.) recounts her first year of living the country life after buying a farm. Before the move, Laskas lived comfortably with her beloved cat, Bob, and her mutt, Betty, in a small house set on a quarter-acre plot only 15 minutes by bike from downtown Pittsburgh. Her boyfriend, Alex, a devoted urban dweller, was a shrink and owner of a pet poodle who lived separately from her in the city. Her childhood dream of living on a farm unexpectedly became a reality after she found the embodiment of her dream—complete with a barn, a chestnut grove and breathtaking vistas—while looking at farms for sale as an excuse for a Sunday outing with Alex. Their first year together on the farm makes for an amusing and emotional tale, told in loving detail as Laskas recalls her own and Alex's adjustment from single, urban life to a committed relationship in wide-open spaces. She describes clearing the farm, meeting the neighbors, Alex's illness and the death of one of their animals with heartfelt honesty, offering many fresh pleasures for any city dweller who has ever dreamed of buying a farm.
Publishers Weekly

The back-to-the-land movement, as exemplified by the account in Helen Nearing's Living the Good Life, has often appealed to urbanites longing for a simpler, sustainable lifestyle. Magazine writer Laskas, too, had a farm dream, but hers had its roots in a desire to emulate the cuteness of the TV comedy Green Acres. So, at age 37, she purchased a farmhouse on 50 acres located an hour's drive from Pittsburgh and moved in with her commuting boyfriend. Her subtitle "Farm Lessons" is misleading; in reality, she merely moved her office to a rural area. There, she connected a plethora of telecommunications devices, added a few more pets to her household, and hired local handymen to do work around her property. Laskas's attempts at injecting humor into her narrative consistently fall flat. Her slang, repetition, and staccato sentences are as corny as her descriptions of her dogs' antics. She enjoys comparing herself and her boyfriend to various sitcom characters ("We've been behaving like Samantha and Darren") and, in boring detail, rehashes their dull conversations. City dwellers looking for farm lessons would get more inspiration from such memoirs as Frank Levering and Wanda Urbanska's Simple Living, about the couple's move to a Virginia farm, and Eugene Logsdon's You Can Go Home Again, about starting a homestead in Ohio. Not recommended. —Ilse Heidmann, San Marcos, TX
Library Journal

A professional, city-living woman up and moves herself and boyfriend to a farm, where everything is way different from what she's used to. Eventually, she and boyfriend find true happiness. It really happened, she says. The End.
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 Fifty Acres and a Poodle:

1. Is this a cautionary tale of "be careful what you wish for"? Or is it a "follow-your-bliss" tale?

2. Does Laskas really retreat to the country, given all her modern communications hook-ups?

3. What insights does Laskas gain from her experiences in the country?

4. Reviews of this book are mixed—some love it, find it funny, while others find it hackneyed and its humor clunky. Which side do you fall on?

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

top of page (summary)

A Fighting Chance
Elizabeth Warren, 2014
Henry Holt & Co.
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781627790529

Summary
An unlikely political star tells the inspiring story of the two-decade journey that taught her how Washington really works—and really doesn’t

As a child in small-town Oklahoma, Elizabeth Warren yearned to go to college and then become an elementary school teacher—an ambitious goal, given her family’s modest means. Early marriage and motherhood seemed to put even that dream out of reach, but fifteen years later she was a distinguished law professor with a deep understanding of why people go bankrupt. Then came the phone call that changed her life: could she come to Washington DC to help advise Congress on rewriting the bankruptcy laws?

Thus began an impolite education into the bare-knuckled, often dysfunctional ways of Washington. She fought for better bankruptcy laws for ten years and lost. She tried to hold the federal government accountable during the financial crisis but became a target of the big banks. She came up with the idea for a new agency designed to protect consumers from predatory bankers and was denied the opportunity to run it. Finally, at age 62, she decided to run for elective office and won the most competitive—and watched—Senate race in the country.

In this passionate, funny, rabble-rousing book, Warren shows why she has chosen to fight tooth and nail for the middle class—and why she has become a hero to all those who believe that America’s government can and must do better for working families. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 22, 1949
• Where—Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA
• Education—B.S., University of Houston; J.D., Rutgers University
• Currently—lives in Washington, DC and Massachusetts

Elizabeth Ann Warren (nee Herring) is an American academic and politician, who is the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts and a member of the Democratic Party. She was previously a Harvard Law School professor specializing in bankruptcy law. Warren is an active consumer protection advocate whose work led to the conception and establishment of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She has written a number of academic and popular works, and is a frequent subject of media interviews regarding the American economy and personal finance.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Warren served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). She later served as Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under President Barack Obama. In the late 2000s, she was recognized by publications such as the National Law Journal and the Time 100 as an increasingly influential public policy figure.

In September 2011, Warren announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate, challenging Republican incumbent Scott Brown. She won the general election on November 6, 2012, to become the first female Senator from Massachusetts. She was assigned to the Senate Special Committee on Aging; the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee; and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

Warren is in favor of increasing the minimum wage and has argued that if the minimum wage had followed increases in worker productivity in the United States, it would now be at least $22 an hour.

Early life, education, and family
Warren was born on June 22, 1949, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to working class parents Pauline (née Reed) and Donald Jones Herring. She was their fourth child, with three older brothers. When she was twelve, her father, a janitor, had a heart attack—which led to many medical bills, as well as a pay cut because he could not do his previous work. Eventually, this led to the loss of their car from failure to make loan payments. To help the family finances, her mother found work in the catalog-order department at Sears and Elizabeth began working as a waitress at her aunt's restaurant.

She became a star member of the debate team at Northwest Classen High School and won the title of "Oklahoma's top high-school debater" while competing with debate teams from high schools throughout the state. She also won a debate scholarship to George Washington University at the age of 16. Initially aspiring to be a teacher, she left GWU after two years to marry her high-school boyfriend, Jim Warren.

She moved to Houston with her husband, who was a NASA engineer. There she enrolled in the University of Houston and was graduated in 1970 with a degree in speech pathology and audiology. For a year, she taught children with disabilities in a public school, based on an "emergency certificate," as she had not taken the education courses required for a regular teaching certificate.

Warren and her husband moved to New Jersey for his work where, after becoming pregnant with their first child, she decided to become a stay-at-home mom. After her daughter turned two, Warren enrolled at the Rutgers School of Law–Newark. She worked as a summer associate at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. Shortly before her graduation in 1976, Warren became pregnant with her second child, and began to work as a lawyer from home, writing wills and doing real estate closings.

After having two children, Amelia and Alexander, she and Jim Warren divorced in 1978. In 1980, Warren married Bruce Mann, a Harvard law professor, but retained the surname, Warren.

Political affiliation
Warren voted as a Republican for many years saying, "I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets." She states that in 1995 she began to vote Democratic because she no longer believed that to be true, but she says that she has voted for both parties because she believed that neither party should dominate.

Career
During the late-1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s, Warren taught law at several universities throughout the country, while researching issues related to bankruptcy and middle-class personal finance. Warren taught at the Rutgers School of Law–Newark during 1977–1978, the University of Houston Law Center from 1978 to 1983, and the University of Texas School of Law from 1981 to 1987, in addition to teaching at the University of Michigan as a visiting professor in 1985 and as a research associate at the University of Texas at Austin from 1983 to 1987.

She joined the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1987 and became a tenured professor. She began teaching at Harvard Law School in 1992, as a visiting professor, and began a permanent position as Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law in 1995.

In 1995 Warren was asked to advise the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. She helped to draft the commission's report and worked for several years to oppose legislation intended to severely restrict the right of consumers to file for bankruptcy. Warren and others opposing the legislation were not successful; in 2005 Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.

From November 2006 to November 2010, Warren was a member of the FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion. She is a member of the National Bankruptcy Conference, an independent organization that advises the U.S. Congress on bankruptcy law. She is a former Vice-President of the American Law Institute and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Public life
Warren has had a high public profile; she has appeared in the documentary films, Maxed Out and Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story. She has appeared numerous times on television programs including Dr. Phil and The Daily Show, and has been interviewed frequently on cable news networks and radio programs.

TARP oversight
On November 14, 2008, Warren was appointed by United States Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to chair the five-member Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the implementation of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. The Panel released monthly oversight reports that evaluate the government bailout and related programs. During Warren's tenure, these reports covered foreclosure mitigation, consumer and small business lending, commercial real estate, AIG, bank stress tests, the impact of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) on the financial markets, government guarantees, the automotive industry, and other topics.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Warren was an early advocate for the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The bureau was established by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act signed into law by President Obama in July 2010. In anticipation of the agency's formal opening, for the first year after the bill's signing, Warren worked on implementation of the bureau as a special assistant to the president. While liberal groups and consumer advocacy groups pushed for Obama to nominate Warren as the agency's permanent director, Warren was strongly opposed by financial institutions and by Republican members of Congress who believed Warren would be an overly zealous regulator.

Reportedly convinced that Warren could not win Senate confirmation as the bureau's first director, Obama turned to former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray and in January 2012, over the objections of Republican Senators, appointed Cordray to the post in a recess appointment.

2012 election - U.S. Senate
On September 14, 2011, Warren declared her intention to run for the Democratic nomination for the 2012 election in Massachusetts for the United States Senate. The seat had been won by Republican Scott Brown in a 2010 special election after the death of Ted Kennedy. A week later, a video of Warren speaking in Andover became popular on the internet. In it, Warren replies to the charge that asking the rich to pay more taxes is "class warfare," pointing out that no one grew rich in America without depending on infrastructure paid for by the rest of society, stating:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.... You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

President Barack Obama later echoed her sentiments in a 2012 election campaign speech.

Warren ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination, and won it on June 2, 2012, at the state Democratic convention with a record 95.77% of the votes of delegates. She was endorsed by the Governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. Warren and her opponent Scott Brown agreed to engage in four televised debates, including one with a consortium of media outlets in Springfield and one on WBZ-TV in Boston.

Results by Municipality
Warren encountered significant opposition from business interests. In August 2012, Rob Engstrom, political director for the United States Chamber of Commerce, claimed that "no other candidate in 2012 represents a greater threat to free enterprise than Professor Warren." She nonetheless raised $39 million for her campaign, the most of any Senate candidate in 2012.

Warren received a primetime speaking slot at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, immediately before Bill Clinton, on the evening of September 5, 2012. Warren positioned herself as a champion of a beleaguered middle class that "has been chipped, squeezed, and hammered." According to Warren, "People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here's the painful part: They're right. The system is rigged." Warren said that Wall Street CEOs "wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs" and that they "still strut around congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them."

Native American controversy
In April 2012, the Boston Herald drew attention to Warren's law directory entries from 1986 to 1995, in which she had self-identified as having Native American ancestry. Because of these entries, Harvard Law School had added her to a list of minority professors in response to criticisms about a lack of faculty diversity. Warren said that she was unaware that Harvard had done so until she read about it in a newspaper. She said that Native American ancestry was a part of her family folklore.

The New England Historical Genealogical Society found no documentary proof of Warren having Native American lineage, but a spokesperson from the Oklahoma Historical Society said "finding a definitive answer about Native American heritage can be difficult, not only because of intermarriage, but also because some Native Americans opted not to be put on federal rolls, while others who were not Native American did put their names on rolls to get access to land."

Her ethnicity claims became the focus of the media's election coverage for a certain time, during which her opponents bought ads asking her for explanations and to "come clean about her motivations" and some members of the Cherokee Nation asked how her claim influenced universities interested in hiring her. Colleagues and supervisors at the schools where she had worked publicly supported her statement that she did not receive preferential treatment. In polls, 72% of voters said the issue would not impact their vote in the election.

Tenure
On November 6, 2012, Warren defeated incumbent Scott Brown with a total of 53.7% of the votes. She is the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts, as part of a sitting U.S. Senate that has 20 female senators currently in office, the largest female U.S. Senate delegation in history, following the November 2012 elections. In December 2012, Warren was assigned a seat on the Senate Banking Committee, the committee that oversees the implementation of Dodd-Frank and other regulation of the banking industry. Warren was sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden on January 3, 2013. Upon John Kerry's resignation to become United States Secretary of State, Warren became the state's senior senator after having served for less than a month, making her the most junior senior senator.

At Warren's first Banking Committee hearing on February 14, 2013, she pressed several banking regulators to answer when they had last taken a Wall Street bank to trial and stated, "I'm really concerned that 'too big to fail' has become 'too big for trial.'" Videos of Warren's questioning became popular on the internet, amassing more than 1 million views in a matter of days. At a Banking Committee hearing in March, Warren questioned Treasury Department officials why criminal charges were not brought against HSBC for its money laundering practices. With her questions being continually dodged and her visibly upset, Warren then compared money laundering to drug possession, saying "if you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to go to jail... But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night."

In May, Warren sent letters to Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve, questioning their decisions that settling rather than going to court would be more fruitful.

In May 2013, Warren introduced her first bill, the Bank on Student Loans Fairness Act, which would allow students to take out government education loans at the same rate that banks such as Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase pay to borrow from the federal government. Suggesting that students should get "the same great deal that banks get," Warren proposed that new student borrowers be able to take out a federally subsidized loan at 0.75%, the rate paid by banks, compared with the current 3.4% student loan rate. Endorsing her bill days after its introduction, Independent Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders stated: "the only thing wrong with this bill is that [she] thought of it and I didn't" on The Thom Hartmann Program. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/12/2014.)

Book Reviews
Warren, the freshman senator from Massachusetts turned Democratic rock star, serves up a frank and lively account of how she became the banking and finance industry's fiercest nemesis.... The book is more memoir than manifesto; Warren emerges as a committed advocate with real world sensibility, who tasted tough economic times at an early age and did not forget its bitterness.
Publishers Weekly

In the world of ordinary citizens vs. big banks, U.S. senator Warren sees the match as the battle between David and Goliath. She warns readers that often the story doesn't have a happy ending and that sometimes it ends with David getting the slingshot shoved down his throat—sideways. —Jill Ortner, SUNY Buffalo Libs.
Library Journal

A passionate memoir of one woman’s personal story and the larger story of corruption in financial circles and the need for reform that balances the interests of the American middle class against those of the corporate sector…. [Warren] offers a behind-the-scenes look at the political dealmaking and head-butting machinations in efforts to restore the nation’s financial system.
Booklist

In this engaging memoir, Massachusetts Sen. Warren introduces her family and recounts the battles that shaped her career as a teacher and politician.... A frankly partisan memoir that provides shrewd insights into both national politics and the state of the middle class.
Kirkus Reviews

top of page (summary)

Finding Tipperary Mary
Phyllis Whitsell, 2015
Mirror Books
244 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781910335338

Summary
Finding Tipperary Mary, is the astonishing first person account of Phyllis Whitsell’s search for the mother who left her in a Catholic orphanage in Birmingham.

While struggling to fit in with her adoptive family, growing up, becoming a nurse and starting a family of her own, Phyllis longed to discover the missing pieces of her early life.

Her search to learn more about her mother—and the reasons for abandoning her, led to a remarkable journey where the two women’s lives crossed each other unknowingly. When they both eventually sat down in the same room together, the circumstances were extraordinary, moving and ultimately life-changing.

The book touches on topical issues such as adoption, alcoholism, abuse, dementia and forgiveness. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May, 18 1956
• Where—Coventry, England, UK
• Education—R.N., City Hospital, Birmingham
• Currently—lives in Birmingham, England

Phyllis Whitsell British author. She is also a registered nurse who has worked in most hospital departments from A&E to midwifery as well as community nursing. Phyllis now cares for dementia patients in her home town of Birmingham.

She has three grown up children and enjoys travelling, particularly to Greece where she does most of her writing. Finding Tipperary Mary is her first book, painting a personal view of growing up in an orphanage in the 1950s, then as an adopted child and student nurse in Birmingham in the '60s and '70s. (From the author.)

Book Reviews
What an extraordinary story....very moving indeed!
Vanessa Feltz - BBC Radio 2, Jeremy Vine Show

Discussion Questions
1. Did the challenges Phyllis and / or Bridget faced strike a chord with your own childhood?

2. How did the actions of Bridget make you feel?

3. What observations about English society are made in the book?

4. What is different from your own culture? What do you find most surprising, intriguing or difficult to understand?

5. What is the central idea discussed in the book? What issues or ideas does the author explore? Are they personal, sociological, global, political, economic, spiritual, medical, or scientific

6. Talk about specific memorable passages that struck you as significant—or interesting, profound, amusing, illuminating, disturbing, sad...?

7. What have you learned after reading this book? Has it broadened your perspective about a difficult issue—personal or societal? Has it introduced you to a culture in another country?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy
Alistair Gee, Dani Anguiano, 2020
W.W. Norton
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781324005148

Summary
The harrowing story of the most destructive American wildfire in a century.

There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people.

The catastrophe seared the American imagination, taking the front page of every major national newspaper and top billing on the news networks. It displaced tens of thousands of people, yielding a refugee crisis that continues to unfold.

Fire in Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts.

Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano are California-based journalists who have reported on Paradise since the day the fire began. Together they reveal the heroics of the first responders, the miraculous escapes of those who got out of Paradise, and the horrors experienced by those who were trapped.

Their accounts are intimate and unforgettable, including…

• the local who left her home on foot as fire approached while her 82-year-old father stayed to battle it;
• the firefighter who drove into the heart of the inferno in his bulldozer;
• the police officer who switched on his body camera to record what he thought would be his final moments as the flames closed in;
• the mother who, less than 12 hours after giving birth in the local hospital, thought she would die in the chaotic evacuation with her baby in her lap.

Gee and Anguiano also explain the science of wildfires, write powerfully about the role of the power company PG&E in the blaze, and describe the poignant efforts to raise Paradise from the ruins.

This is the story of a town at the forefront of a devastating global shift—of a remarkable landscape sucked ever drier of moisture and becoming inhospitable even to trees, now dying in their tens of millions and turning to kindling.

It is also the story of a lost community, one that epitomized a provincial, affordable kind of Californian existence that is increasingly unattainable.

It is, finally, a story of a new kind of fire behavior that firefighters have never witnessed before and barely know how to handle. What happened in Paradise was unprecedented in America. Yet according to climate scientists and fire experts, it will surely happen again. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Alastair Gee is an award-winning editor and reporter at the Guardian who has also written for the New Yorker online, the New York Times, and the Economist. Gee lives in New York City.

Dani Anguiano writes for the Guardian and was formerly a reporter for the Chico Enterprise-Record, where she covered Butte County, including Chico and Paradise. Having lived in Butte County for a decade, Anguiano now resides in the San Francisco Bay area.
(Bios from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
The heart of the book… is the individual stories of bravery and tragedy that played out in Paradise…. The horror of the fire’s relentless advance is viscerally evoked, although the details sometimes verge on unbearable…. The authors temper the horror with stories of heroism and rescue…. [Fire in Paradise] has the narrative propulsion and granular detail of the best breaking-news disaster journalism…. The main takeaway from their book is sobering:… we will likely see more fires as destructive as the one in Paradise.
Rachel Monroe - New York Times Book Book Review

[T]ense and detailed…. Gee and Anguiano vividly describe the conflagration without sensationalizing it…. This impressive report makes a convincing case that such tragedies as the Camp Fire are not a freak occurrence, but a glimpse of the future.
Publishers Weekly

[A] gripping, in-depth account of the Camp Fire that devastated Paradise, CA…. A vividly descriptive, compelling, well-researched, page-turning work of narrative nonfiction, both heartbreaking and uplifting. —Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove, IL
Library Journal

Drawing heavily on the powerful interviews they conducted at the time and in the stunned aftermath, [Gee and Anguiano] have created a gripping account of the fire and how it affected the community.
Booklist

[A] powerful book debut… [drawing on] extensive reporting to produce a tense, often moving narrative about the fire that destroyed the northern California town of Paradise.… A riveting narrative that provides further compelling evidence for the urgency of environmental stewardship.
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 FIRE IN PARADISE … then take off on your own:

1. Talk about the causes of the wild fire, both the immediate and underlying causes.

2. (Follow-up to Question 1) What role did Pacific Gas and Electric play? Is the near-villainy that the authors tend to ascribe to the utility deserved or unfairly placed?

3. Discuss the many individual accounts included in Gee and Anguiano's account. Which stories do you find most horrific or most tragic—and which of them illustrate great courage, even heroism. Consider not only residents, old and young, but first responders, doctors, and nurses, and even the drivers stuck in traffic.

4. Talk about the town's preparedness to avert such a disaster, its evacuation plan and emergency alert system. What happened to a town that seemed to be so well prepared?

5. What do the authors suggest will be the long-term future for northern California and towns like Paradise?

6. Should Paradise be rebuilt?

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

top of page (summary)

First Family: Abigail and John Adams
Joseph J. Ellis, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307269621

Summary
The Pulitzer Prize–winning, best-selling author of Founding Brothers and His Excellency brings America’s preeminent first couple to life in a moving and illuminating narrative that sweeps through the American Revolution and the republic’s tenuous early years.

John and Abigail Adams left an indelible and remarkably preserved portrait of their lives together in their personal correspondence: both Adamses were prolific letter writers (although John conceded that Abigail was clearly the more gifted of the two), and over the years they exchanged more than twelve hundred letters. Joseph J. Ellis distills this unprecedented and unsurpassed record to give us an account both intimate and panoramic; part biography, part political history, and part love story.

Ellis describes the first meeting between the two as inauspicious—John was twenty-four, Abigail just fifteen, and each was entirely unimpressed with the other. But they soon began a passionate correspondence that resulted in their marriage five years later.

Over the next decades, the couple were separated nearly as much as they were together. John’s political career took him first to Philadelphia, where he became the boldest advocate for the measures that would lead to the Declaration of Independence. Yet in order to attend the Second Continental Congress, he left his wife and children in the middle of the war zone that had by then engulfed Massachusetts. Later he was sent to Paris, where he served as a minister to the court of France alongside Benjamin Franklin. These years apart stressed the Adamses’ union almost beyond what it could bear: Abigail grew lonely, while the Adams children suffered from their father’s absence.

John was elected the nation’s first vice president, but by the time of his reelection, Abigail’s health prevented her from joining him in Philadelphia, the interim capital. She no doubt had further reservations about moving to the swamp on the Potomac when John became president, although this time he persuaded her. President Adams inherited a weak and bitterly divided country from George Washington. The political situation was perilous at best, and he needed his closest advisor by his side: “I can do nothing,” John told Abigail after his election, “without you.”

In Ellis’s rich and striking new history, John and Abigail’s relationship unfolds in the context of America’s birth as a nation. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1943
• Where—USA
• Education—B.A. College of William and Mary; M.A., Ph.D.,
Yale University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 2001; National Book Award, 1997
• Currently—Amherst Massachusetts, USA

Joseph J. Ellis is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College. Educated at the College of William and Mary and Yale University, he served as a captain in the army and taught at West Point before coming to Mount Holyoke in 1972. He was dean of the faculty there for ten years.

Among his previous books are Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams, Founding Brothers, and American Sphinx, which won the 1997 National Book Award. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ellen, and their three sons. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
We may not learn anything appreciably new about the Adams family, per se, but in First Family Mr. Ellis employs his narrative gifts to draw a remarkably intimate portrait of John and Abigail s marriage as it played out against the momentous events that marked the birth of a nation.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Written with the grace and style one expects from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers...John Adams could not have a better biographer.
Los Angeles Times

Ellis’s strength is his ability to portray historical icons as real human beings, and his talent remains sharp.... Ellis has made himself into a sort of bard of our early Republic, and [First Family] is a fitting addition to his repertoire.
Anne Bartlett - Miami Herald

The author’s fluid style penetrates a correspondence studded with classical references, political dish, felicitous turns of phrases and unvarnished pleadings of affection and anxiety. America’s first power couple enjoyed, teased and rescued each other during 54 years of marriage.
John E. Lazarus - Newark Star-Ledger

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Ellis (Founding Brothers) gives "the premier husband-wife team in all American history" starring roles in an engrossing romance. His Abigail has an acute intellect, but is not quite a protofeminist heroine: her ambitions are limited to being a mother and helpmeet, and in the iconic correspondence she often strikes the traditional pose of a neglected wife who sacrifices her happiness by giving up her husband to the call of duty. The author's more piquant portrait of John depicts an insecure, mercurial, neurotic man stabilized by Abigail's love and advice. Ellis's implicit argument—that the John/Abigail partnership lies at the foundation of the Adams family's public achievements--is a bit over-played, and not always to the advantage of the partnership: "Her judgment was a victim of her love for John…," Ellis writes of Abigail's support for the Alien and Sedition Acts, the ugliest blot on John's presidency, all of which explains little and excuses less. Still, Ellis's supple prose and keen psychological insight give a vivid sense of the human drama behind history's upheavals.
Publishers Weekly

On the heels of Woody Holton's prize-winning Abigail Adams, renowned historian Ellis (history, Mount Holyoke Coll.) returns to the well-trod ground of the founding era, this time shifting his focus to America's "first family" and political dynasty, the Adamses. Bringing his talents for narrative writing to the task, Ellis recounts the compelling relationship that included an awkward courtship and a life of sacrifice along with raising a family and constructing a legacy. However, here—unlike in Edith B. Gelles's Abigail & John: Portrait of a Marriage and G.J. Barker-Benfield's forthcoming Abigail & John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility—Abigail is frequently relegated to the sidelines as the narrative becomes yet another biography of John. And there is nothing new here. Verdict: Lacking the intellectual depth of Ellis's previous American Sphinx and the originality of his Founding Brothers, his new book nevertheless imparts a poignant tale. Biography buffs who haven't yet read about John and Abigail may well enjoy this; those familiar with the subject have no need for it. —Brian Odom, Pelham P.L., AL
Library Journal

Ellis is that rare professional historian who can eloquently convey both information and insight with remarkable clarity... he has once again given us a consistently engaging dual biography and love story as well as an insightful exploration of early American history. —Roger Bishop
Bookpage

In addition to looking at the strengths of the Adams’ marriage, the book examines the toll taken by their years apart and the misfortunes in the lives of all their children except John Quincy. Ellis has produced a very readable history of the nation’s founding as lived by these two. —Mary Ellen Quinn
Booklist

(Starred review) The author’s beautiful writing draws the reader wholly into this relationship, bringing new perspective to the historical importance of this enduring love story. An impeccable account of the politics, civics and devotion behind the Adams marriage.
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 First Family:

1. Some reviewers say Ellis's book offers little new about Abigail and John Adams. Was it new to you? Have you learned something you didn't know before? Or is it rehashing old ground...things you've already read about the couple and their role in history? If you've read other works on the Adamses, how does this book compare?

2. The marriage of John and Abigail Adams is one of the most famous in U.S. history. What is it that draws the two to one another? Talk about their relationship as Ellis portrays it. What makes it work? What are its weak points ... and its strengths? Who was the more independent ... and who the more dependent—either...or neither?

3. Does the Adams marriage offer any lessons to those of us in the 21st century? Can we learn from a marriage that occurred over 200 years ago when cultural expectations were very different? How would you compare their relationship to one another with your own relationship(s)?

4. What does Ellis mean by "the paradox of proximity"?

5. How supportive is Abigail of John's growing political involvement and ambitions? What does she reveal in letters to friends and relatives? What affect does John's choice of career have on her and on their marriage? Male or female, how would your partner's absences and political involvements affect you?

6. Talk about how Ellis presents John's famous temper and the possible reasons for it. How would you describe John Adams? Was he justified in his mistrust of his colleagues...or are his constant suspicions a sign of a deeper paranoia?

7. Describe Abigail Adams. Was she a feminist...or a forerunner of feminists? If so, why so...if not, why not?

8. What kind of parents are John and Abigail Adams? What about their clear favoritism of John Quincy?

9. The Jefferson-Adams friendship and enmity is long famous. Talk about that relationship, it's dissolution and the later reconciliation? What prompted the friendship...what dissolved it? How does this book affect your attitude toward Jefferson, a famously enigmatic figure?

10. Talk about the press in the early days of the nation—its reflection, even fueling, of a deep political divisiveness. Are there similarities to today's media coverage of politics? Or not.

11. In what way does Ellis take sides in the Adams-Hamilton debate. How does Hamilton come across in Ellis's portrayal of him?

12. Consider watching clips from the 2008 PBS John Adams mini-series, based on David McCullough's 2001 book, John Adams. The series stars Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. It's excellent! Make comparisons to Ellis's book.

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

top of page (summary)

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
Loung Ung, 2000
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060856267

Summary
From a childhood survivor of Cambodia's brutal Pol Pot regime comes an unforgettable narrative of war crimes and desperate actions, the unnerving strength of a small girl and her family, and their triumph of spirit.

Until the age of five, Lounge Ung lived in Phnom Penh, one of seven children of a high-ranking government official. She was a precocious child who loved the open city markets, fried crickets, chicken fights, and sassing her parents. While her beautiful mother worried that Loung was a troublemaker—that she stomped around like a thirsty cow—her beloved father knew Lounge was a clever girl.

When Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into Phnom Penh in April 1975, Ung's family fled their home and moved from village to village to hide their identity, their education, their former life of privilege. Eventually, the family dispersed in order to survive.

Because Lounge was resilient and determined, she was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, while other siblings were sent to labor camps. As the Vietnamese penetrated Cambodia, destroying the Khmer Rouge, Loung and her surviving siblings were slowly reunited.

Bolstered by the shocking bravery of one brother, the vision of the others—and sustained be her sister's gentle kindness amid brutality—Loung forged on to create for herself a courageous new life. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Where—Phnom Penh, Cambodia
• Awards—Excellence in Non-Fiction Award,
Pacific/Asian American Libraries Assn.
• Currently—lives near Cleveland, Ohio USA

Loung Ung is a national spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine Free World, a program of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. She is the author of Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind, and she lives with her husband in Ohio. (From the publisher.)

More
Loung Ung is a Cambodian American human-rights activist, an internationally-recognized lecturer, and the national spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World. Between 1997 and 2003 she served in the same capacity for the "International Campaign to Ban Landmines", which is affiliated with the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.

Ung was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the sixth of seven children and the third of four girls, to Sem Im Ung and Ay Chourng Ung. Her actual birthdate is unknown; the Khmer Rouge destroyed many of the birth records of the inhabitants of cities in Cambodia. At ten years of age, she escaped from Cambodia as a survivor of what became known as "the Killing Fields" during the reign of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime. After emigrating to the United States and adjusting to her new country, she wrote two books which related her life experiences from 1975 through 2003.

Ung's first memoir, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, details her experiences in Cambodia from 1975 until 1980:

"From 1975 to 1979—through execution, starvation, disease, and forced labor—the Khmer Rouge systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians, almost a fourth of the country's population. This is a story of survival: my own and my family's. Though these events constitute my own experience, my story mirrors that of millions of Cambodians. If you had been living in Cambodia during this period, this would be your story too."

Published in the United States in 2000, it became a national bestseller, and in 2001 it won the award for "Excellence in Adult Non-fiction Literature" from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians' Association. First They Killed My Father has subsequently been published in twelve countries in nine languages.

Her second memoir, Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind, chronicles her adjustment to life in the U.S. with and without her family, and the experiences of her surviving family members in Cambodia during the ensuing warfare between Vietnamese troops and the Khmer Rouge. It covers the period of 1980 until 2003, and HarperCollins published it in 2005.

In both of her memoirs, Ung wrote in the first person and, for the most part, in the present tense, describing the events and circumstances as if they were unfolding before the reader's eyes: "I wanted [the readers] to be there." (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
During the three years that the Khmer Rouge tried to create an agrarian utopia in Cambodia, two million people are believed to have died from execution, starvation and disease. Two million—a horrifying number, but so large as to seem almost an abstraction, like the distance to the nearest star. The number gains far greater psychological force with [this] new memoirs, whose author, a young girl in the Cambodia of the time, describes the terror and losses she suffered during the Khmer Rouge revolution in wrenchingly particular terms... [Ung] tells her stories straightforwardly, vividly, and without any strenuous effort to explicate their importance, allowing the stories themselves to create their own impact.
New York Times

A riveting memoir...an important, moving work that those who have suffered cannot afford to forget and those who have been spared cannot afford to ignore.
San Francisco Chronicle

In 1975, Ung, now the national spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World, was the five-year-old child of a large, affluent family living in Phnom Penh, the cosmopolitan Cambodian capital. As extraordinarily well-educated Chinese-Cambodians, with the father a government agent, her family was in great danger when the Khmer Rouge took over the country and throughout Pol Pot's barbaric regime. Her parents' strength and her father's knowledge of Khmer Rouge ideology enabled the family to survive together for a while, posing as illiterate peasants, moving first between villages, and then from one work camp to another. The father was honest with the children, explaining dangers and how to avoid them, and this, along with clear sight, intelligence and the pragmatism of a young child, helped Ung to survive the war. Her restrained, unsentimental account of the four years she spent surviving the regime before escaping with a brother to Thailand and eventually the United States is astonishing—not just because of the tragedies, but also because of the immense love for her family that Ung holds onto, no matter how she is brutalized. She describes the physical devastation she is surrounded by but always returns to her memories and hopes for those she loves. Her joyful memories of life in Phnom Penh are close even as she is being trained as a child soldier, and as, one after another, both parents and two of her six siblings are murdered in the camps. Skillfully constructed, this account also stands as an eyewitness history of the period, because as a child Ung was so aware of her surroundings, and because as an adult writer she adds details to clarify the family's moves and separations. Twenty-five years after the rise of the Khmer Rouge, this powerful account is a triumph.
Publishers Weekly

In this "Age of Holocaust," Ung's memoir of her childhood in Pol Pot's Cambodia offers a haunting parallel to the writings of Anne Frank in the Europe of Adolf Hitler. A precocious, sparkling youngster, Ung was driven from Phnom Penh in April 1975 to relatives in the countryside, then to Khmer Rouge work camps. Here she recalls her fear, hunger, emotional pain, and loneliness as her parents and a sister were murdered and another sister died from disease. By the 1979 freeing of Cambodia by Vietnamese troops, she was a hardened, vengeful nine year old. Although written nearly 20 years later, this painful narrative retains an undeniable sense of immediacy. The childlike memories are adroitly placed in a greater context through older family members' descriptions of the political and social milieu. Recommended for public and academic libraries. —John F. Riddick, Central Michigan Univ. Lib., Mt. Pleasant.
Library Journal

Ung was a headstrong, clever child who was a delight to her father, a high-ranking government official in Phnom Penh. She was only five when the Khmer Rouge stormed the city and her family was forced to flee. They sought refuge in various camps, hiding their wealth and education, always on the move and ever fearful of being betrayed. After 20 months, Ung's father was taken away, never to be seen again. Her story of starvation, forced labor, beatings, attempted rape, separations, and the deaths of her family members is one of horror and brutality. The first-person account of Cambodia under the reign of Pol Pot will be read not only for research papers but also as a tribute to a human spirit that never gave up. YAs will applaud Ung's courage and strength. —Katherine Fitch, Rachel Carson Middle School, Fairfax, VA
School Library Journal

A rare, chilling eyewitness account of the bloody aftermath of the Khmer Rouge's merciless victory over the Cambodian government in April 1975, as seen through the eyes of a precocious child. The authornational spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation's``Campaign for a Landmine Free World program, whose activities won her the 1997 Nobel Peace Prizewas, in 1970, the five-year-old daughter of a Cambodian government official when her loving, close-knit, middle-class family of seven children first learned of the Khmer Rouges approach to their hometown of Phnom Penh. The family fled, constantly moving, trying to hide their identity as educated urban people who would be regarded by their agrarian enemies as exploiters. Eventually they were captured, robbed, beaten, half-starved, and sent to forced-labor camps. In time, Loung's father and mother were killed, her older sister and baby sister died of malnutrition and disease, and her older brothers and she were recruited to serve the Khmer Rouge. The genocidal fury endured by Loungs family and other families caused a widespread and lasting hatred of the Khmer Rouge. Her surviving relatives split up to avoid being executed together, and through their courage and resourcefulness managed to stay alive despite the bloodbath. In time, Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia and Pol Pot's forces were destroyed, but not before millions of Cambodians perished. Ung, her older brother, and his family were rescued by a humanitarian group and came to the US to build a new life; ultimately, the surviving family members would meet again. A harrowing true story of the nightmare world that was Cambodia in those terrible times of mass murder and slow death through overwork, starvation, and disease. Will affect even readers who cannot find Ungs homeland on a map.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What fundamental problems existed in the Khmer Rouge's plan that caused the destruction of so many lives? Were there any values that the Khmer Rouge claimed to hold that you share?

2. What impact did the narrator's child's voice have on your experience as a reader? How would you characterize the transformation that takes place in her narrative voice throughout the story?

3. How did it affect your reading of the book that you were aware of Loung's father's impending death long before her?

4. Would you describe Loung as a feminist? How did the experiences of the Ung family differ during the war because of gender?

5. What was your impression of the final separation, both geographic and cultural, that Loung had with her surviving family? Did you sympathize with her eventual desire to assimilate into American culture, or had you expected her to be more aggressive about pursuing her family relationships earlier on?

6. Loung saw herself as a "strong" person, as did many other people in the book, and was eventually drafted into a soldier training camp as a result. What are the qualities of a survivor? How does one reconcile compassion with a will to survive? What qualities enabled her gentle sister Chou to survive as well?

7. With armed struggle a reality of life for people all over the world both past and present, how does one draw the line as to which means are ethical and unethical for coping with it, such as the author's current campaign against the use of landmines? Are there other tools of war that you believe should be broadly banned?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
Sheri Fink, 2013
Crown Publishing
576 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307718969

Summary
Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink’s landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina—and her suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice

In the tradition of the best investigative journalism, physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs 5 days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and to maintain life amid chaos.

After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths.

Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.

In a voice at once involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are in America for the impact of large-scale disasters—and how we can do better. A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1968-69 (?)
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., University of Michigan; Ph.D, M.D., Stanford University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize-Journalism; National Magazine Award
• Currently— a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center,
Washington, D.C.

Sheri Fink is an American physician, journalist, and a reporter on subjects covering health, medicine and science. A 1990 graduate of the University of Michigan, she received Ph.D. and M.D. from Stanford University in 1998 and 1999.

Career
Dr Fink is a a senior fellow with Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and a staff reporter at ProPublica in New York. Her articles have appeared in a number of high profiled publications such as the New York Times, Discover and Scientific American.

She has contributed to the public radio news magazine Public Radio International (PRI)’s The World covering a number of topics including the global HIV/AIDS pandemic and international aid in development, conflict and disaster settings.

Her first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival (2003), is about medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, published in 2013, is an account of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. The book is based on her Pulitizer Prize winning 2009 article published at ProPublica.org and in the New York Times Magazine.

Awards
In 2010, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for her article about the deadly choices faced at New Orleans' Memorial Hospital during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She also won a 2010 National Magazine Award for Reporting for the article and was a finalist for the 2010 Michael Kelly Award. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/19/2013 .)

Book Reviews
Although she had the material for a gripping disaster story, Dr. Fink has slowed the narrative pulse to investigate situational ethics: what happens when caregivers steeped in medicine's supreme value, preserving life, face traumatic choices as the standards of civilization collapse. This approach is a literary gamble, demanding more of readers than a standard-issue medical thriller would. But Dr. Fink...more than delivers. She writes with a seasoned sense of how doctors and nurses improvise in emergencies, and about the ethical realms in which they work.... Sheri Fink has written an unforgettable story. Five Days at Memorial is social reporting of the first rank.
Jason Barry - New York Times

Though not present during the disastrous days, [Fink] interviewed more than 500 participants, from hospital executives to family members, prosecutors and ethicists, recording their comments and descriptions so meticulously that her gripping narrative captures not only the facts of the situation, but the thoughts of her witnesses and the feverishly unfolding disorder, confusion and tragedy. Her choice of sentence structure, the almost staccato voice, and the starkness of style and language reflect the circumstances so well that the reader cannot help being pulled into the discordant rhythms of those chaotic hours…The tone is...visceral and very appropriate to the atmosphere created by the storm and its consequences. What we have here is masterly reporting and the glow of fine writing.
Sherwin B. Nuland - New York Times Book Review

Fink has done a masterful reporting job, and Five Days at Memorial is often engrossing, particularly those pages that take readers inside the hospital...Fink’s book is essential reading for anyone who cares about New Orleans, the breakdown of order in disaster zones, and medical dilemmas under crisis circumstances.
Boston Globe

A triumph of journalism...Fink re-creates this world with mastery and sensitivity, revealing the full humanity of each character. Unlike post-storm commentary that jumped to black and white conclusions, painting the doctors as heroes or villains, Fink’s narrative wades through the muck and finds only real people making tough choices under circumstances the rest of us, if we’re lucky, will never experience
Houston Chronicle

Every page gives evidence of meticulous research, thousands of hours spent interviewing, prowling the halls at Memorial, reviewing legal documents and transcripts...[Fink] offers no easy answers, no rush to judgment. But she does deliver an amazing tale, as inexorable as a Greek tragedy and as gripping as a whodunit.
Dallas Morning News

Fink’s descriptions of the flooded hospital, her extensive interviews with those who were there, profiles of investigators and study of the history and ethics of triage and euthanasia come very close to a full airing of how a disaster can upset society’s usual ethical codes, and how that played out at New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center....Fink has written a compelling and revealing account.
Seattle Times

In this astonishing blend of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism (Fink, who also has an M.D. and Ph.D., won the award for the investigative reporting on which this book is based) and breathtaking narration, she chronicles the chaotic evacuation of the hospital and the agonizing ethical, physical, and emotional quandaries facing Memorial nurses and doctors, including a nightmarish triage process that led to the controversial decision to inject critically ill patients with fatal doses of morphine..
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Fink’s six years of research and more than 500 interviews yield a rich narrative full of complex characters, wrenching ethical dilemmas, and mounting suspense. General readers and medical professionals alike will finish the book haunted by the question, "What would I have done?"
Library Journal

(Starred review.) [Fink] offers a stunning re-creation of the storm, its aftermath, and the investigation that followed.... She evenhandedly compels readers to consider larger questions, not just of ethics but race, resources, history, and what constitutes the greater good.... And, crucially, she provides context, relating how other hospitals fared in similar situations. Both a breathtaking read and an essential book for understanding how people behave in times of crisis.z
Booklist

Pulitzer Prize–winning medical journalist/investigator Fink War Hospital, 2003 submits a sophisticated, detailed recounting of what happened at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina. Fink draws those few days in the hospital’s life with a fine, lively pen, providing stunningly framed vignettes of activities in the hospital and sharp pocket profiles of many of the characters.
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 a discussion started for Five Days at Memorial:

1. To understand the pressures doctors and nurses faced, readers needed to know exactly what it felt like to be trapped in a sweltering hospital in a city that had descended into chaos. Do you think Sheri Fink does a good job of recreating those conditions?

2. What do you think of the behavior and decisions made by the medical staff at Memorial? Where you shocked by the lethal injections of morphine? According to Dr. Ewing Cook, "It was actually to the point where you were considering that you couldn’t just leave them; the humane thing would be to put ’em out.’’ What do you think?

3. What shocked, or disturbed, you the most? The actions of the staff? The unpreparedness (short-sightedness?) of the hospital? The horrific conditions everyone operated under?

4. How would you have fared under the conditions at New Orleans' Memorial?

5. What legal and ethical standards must doctors be expected to uphold in a disaster? Should they—or any professional—be held to the same standards that operate during normal conditions? In other words, is there a gray area in ethics when things go disastrously wrong?

6. In such situations as occured at Memorial, who should be saved first? Who should make those decisions?

7. Why did the local grand jury decline to bring charges against Anna Pou? Do you agree with its decision? To what degree should Pou be held accountable for her actions?

8. Ultimately, who is most responsible for the tragedy at Memorial Hospital? The hospital owners? The staff? The local, state, or federal government?

9. What lessons were learned from the hospital disaster at Memorial?

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

top of page (summary)

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
Michael Lewis, 2014
W.W. Norton & Co.
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393244663

Summary
Michael Lewis returns to Wall Street to report on a high-tech predator stalking the equity markets.

Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post–financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, and more controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, they come to this realization separately; but after they discover one another, the flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets. This they do by creating an exchange in which high-frequency trading—source of the most intractable problems—will have no advantage whatsoever.

The characters in Flash Boys are fabulous, each completely different from what you think of when you think “Wall Street guy.” Several have walked away from jobs in the financial sector that paid them millions of dollars a year. From their new vantage point they investigate the big banks, the world’s stock exchanges, and high-frequency trading firms as they have never been investigated, and expose the many strange new ways that Wall Street generates profits.

The light that Lewis shines into the darkest corners of the financial world may not be good for your blood pressure, because if you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you. But in the end, Flash Boys is an uplifting read. Here are people who have somehow preserved a moral sense in an environment where you don’t get paid for that; they have perceived an institutionalized injustice and are willing to go to war to fix it. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 15, 1960
• Where—New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton; M.B.A., London School of Economics
• Currently—Currently—lives in Berkeley, California

Michael Lewis is an American contemporary non-fiction author and financial journalist. His bestselling books include Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (2014); The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2010); The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (2006); Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003); and Liar's Poker (1989).

Background
Lewis was born in New Orleans to corporate lawyer J. Thomas Lewis and community activist Diana Monroe Lewis. He attended the private, nondenominational, co-educational college preparatory Isidore Newman School in New Orleans. Later, he attended Princeton University where he received a BA in art history in 1982 and was a member of the Ivy Club.

After graduating from Princeton, he went on to work with New York art dealer Daniel Wildenstein. Despite his degree in art history, he nonetheless wanted to break into Wall Street to make money. After leaving Princeton, he tried to find a finance job, only to be roundly rejected by every firm to which he applied. He then enrolled in the London School of Economics to pursue a Master's degree in economics.

While still in England, Lewis was invited to a banquet hosted by the Queen Mother at St. James's Palace. His cousin, Baroness Linda Monroe von Stauffenberg, one of the organizers of the banquet, purposely seated him next to the wife of the London Managing Partner of Salomon Brothers. The hope was that Lewis, just having obtained his master's degree, might impress her enough for her to suggest to her husband that Lewis be given a job with Salomon Bros.—which had previously turned him down. The strategy worked: Lewis was granted an interview and landed a job.

As a result of the job offer, Lewis moved to New York City for Salomon's training program. There, he was appalled at the sheer bravado of most of his fellow trainees and indoctrinated into the money culture of Salomon and Wall Street in general.

After New York, Lewis was shipped to the London office of Salomon Brothers as a bond salesman. Despite his lack of knowledge, he was soon handling millions of dollars in investment accounts. In 1987, he witnessed a near-hostile takeover of Salomon Brothers but survived with his job. However, growing disillusioned with his work, he eventually quit to write Liar's Poker and become a financial journalist.

Writing
Lewis described his experiences at Salomon and the evolution of the mortgage-backed bond in Liar's Poker (1989). In The New New Thing (1999), he investigated the then-booming Silicon Valley and discussed obsession with innovation.

Four years later, Lewis wrote Moneyball (2003), in which he investigated the success of Billy Beane and the Oakland A's. In August 2007, he wrote an article about catastrophe bonds entitled "In Nature's Casino" that appeared in the New York Times Magazine.

The Big Short, about a handful of scrappy investors who foresaw the 2007-08 subprime mortgage debacle, came out in 2010. Flash Boys, detailing high-speed trading in stock and other markets, was published in 2014. Like both The Big Short and Moneyball, the book features an underdog type who is ahead of the pack in understanding his industry.

Lewis has worked for The Spectator, New York Times Magazine, as a columnist for Bloomberg, as a senior editor and campaign correspondent to The New Republic, and a visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote the "Dad Again" column for Slate. Lewis worked for Conde Nast Portfolio but in February 2009 left to join Vanity Fair, where he became a contributing editor.

Film
The film version of Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, was successfully released in 2011. The Big Short, with its all-star cast—Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gossling, and Brad Pitt—came out in 2015 to top reviews.

Personal life
Lewis married Diane de Cordova Lewis, his girlfriend prior to his Salomon days. After several years, he was briefly married to former CNBC correspondent Kate Bohner, before marrying the former MTV reporter Tabitha Soren in 1997. Lewis lives with Tabitha, two daughters, and one son (Quinn, Dixie, and Walker) in Berkeley, California. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/11/2016.)

Book Reviews
[D]azzling… Because Mr. Lewis is at the helm finding clear, simple metaphors for even the most impenetrable financial minutiae, this tawdry tale should make sense to anyone. And so should its shock value. Flash Boys is guaranteed to make blood boil.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

When it comes to narrative skill, a reporter’s curiosity, and an uncanny instinct for the pulse of the zeitgeist, Lewis is a triple threat as he’s demonstrated in best-selling books like The Big Short and Moneyball. But those formidable talents are only intermittently on display in this ultimately unsatisfying probe of high-frequency traders, who may (or may not) be ripping off investors and destabilizing the global financial system.... Lewis might have pondered how frustrating it is for readers...to be told a story in which the villains aren’t named.
James B. Stewart - New York Times Book Review

Important to public debate about Wall Street… in exposing what one of his central characters calls the "Pandora's box of ridiculousness" that financial exchanges have become.
Philip Delves Broughton - Wall Street Journal

Michael Lewis is a genius, and his book will give high-frequency trading a much-needed turn under the microscope.
Kevin Roose - New York Magazine

A beautiful narrative, so well-written. You’ve got to get this.
Jon Stewart - Daily Show

Remarkable… Michael Lewis has a spellbinding talent for finding emotional dramas in complex, highly technical subjects.
Financial Times

Who knew high-frequency trading was such a sexy subject?
Bloomberg Business Week

Michael Lewis is one of the premier chroniclers of our age.
Huffington Post

Score one for the humans! Critics of high speed, computer-driven trading have a new champion.
CNN Money

If you own stock, you need to read Flash Boys… and then call your broker.
Entertainment Weekly

In 24 hours, I plowed through Michael Lewis' new blockbuster Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, a book about the huge changes that have occurred in financial markets in the last three decades. It's compelling reading.
John Aziz - The Week

Flash Boys richly deserves to be the first chapter in a new discussion of market rules and abuses… Lewis raises troubling and necessary questions.
American Conservative

In his latest captivating expedition into the marketplace jungle, Lewis (Moneyball) explores how the rise of computerized stock exchanges and their attendant scams started a battle for the soul of Wall Street.... The result is an engrossing true-life morality play that unmasks the devil in the details of high finance.
Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews
In trademark Lewis fashion, a data-rich but all-too-human tale of “heuristic data bullshit and other mumbo jumbo” in the service of gaming the financial system, courtesy of—yes, Goldman Sachs and company.... A riveting, maddening yarn that is causing quite a stir already, including calls for regulatory reform.

Discussion Questions
1. Does Michael Lewis do a good job of explaining the arcane practices of Wall Street high frequency trading? If you are not involved in the financial industry, do his explanations make sense to you.

2. Follow-up to Question 1: What are dark pools? Can you explain their role in this high stakes game?

3. Talk about the Wall Street personality "type" as experienced by Brad katsuyama, a Canadian. Do you believe it's a fair assessment...or an overly generalized one?

4. Talk about the skill set of the team that Katsuyama put together. Brad himself admits he was no computer wizard, and Ronan Ryan at one point had no idea what a millisecond was...and, when hired by Katsuyama, had no idea what he was to do. How was Katsuyama's group able to accomplish all they did?

5. What damage is caused by high-frequency trading? Or is it, perhaps, not as damaging as Lewis indicates? Defenders of the practice say it provides market liquidity and efficiency. And, mostly likely, the average investor hardly notices a few pennies here and there. What do you think? How does Lewis respond to defenders of the high-frequency trading?

6. Are there villains in this story? If so, who are they? Katsuyama doesn't want to name names. Why not? What about Goldman Sachs—what is its role?

7. What, if anything, should be done to halt the practice of high-frequency trades? Do you think anything will be done?

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

top of page (summary)

Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History
Chuck O'Brien, 2018
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781328876645

Summary
The untold story of five women who fought to compete against men in the high-stakes national air races of the 1920s and 1930s — and won

Between the world wars, no sport was more popular, or more dangerous, than airplane racing. Thousands of fans flocked to multi‑day events, and cities vied with one another to host them.

The pilots themselves were hailed as dashing heroes who cheerfully stared death in the face.

Well, the men were hailed. Female pilots were more often ridiculed than praised for what the press portrayed as silly efforts to horn in on a manly, and deadly, pursuit.

Fly Girls recounts how a cadre of women banded together to break the original glass ceiling: the entrenched prejudice that conspired to keep them out of the sky.

O’Brien weaves together the stories of five remarkable women: Florence Klingensmith, a high‑school dropout who worked for a dry cleaner in Fargo, North Dakota; Ruth Elder, an Alabama divorcee; Amelia Earhart, the most famous, but not necessarily the most skilled; Ruth Nichols, who chafed at the constraints of her blue‑blood family’s expectations; and Louise Thaden, the mother of two young kids who got her start selling coal in Wichita.

Together, they fought for the chance to race against the men—and in 1936 one of them would triumph in the toughest race of all.

Like Hidden Figures and Girls of Atomic City, Fly Girls celebrates a little-known slice of history in which tenacious, trail-blazing women braved all obstacles to achieve greatness. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
• Education—Northwestern Unniversity
• Awards—Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism
• Currently—lives in New Hampshie

The New York Times Book Review has hailed Keith O'Brien for his "keen reportorial eye" and "lyrical" writing style. He has written two books: Outside Shot: Big Dreams, Hard Times, and One County's Quest for Basketball Greatness (2013) and Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History (2018).

O'Brien has been a finalist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting, and contributed to National Public Radio for more than a decade. His radio stories have appeared on NPR's All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition, as well as Marketplace, Here & Now, Only a Game, and This American Life.

O'Brien has written for the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Politico, Slate, Esquire.com, and the Oxford American, among others.

He is a former staff writer for both the Boston Globe and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. As a newspaper reporter, he won multiple awards, including the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.

O'Brien lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two children. (From Amazon. Retrieved 8/25/2018.)

Book Reviews
Exhilarating…vibrant.… O’Brien’s prose reverberates with fiery crashes, then stings with the tragedy of lives lost in the cockpit and sometimes, equally heartbreaking, on the ground.
Nathalia Holt - New York Times Book Review

Mr. O’Brien, a former reporter for the Boston Globe working in the tradition of Hidden Figures and The Girls of Atomic City, has recovered a fascinating chapter not just in feminism and aviation but in 20th-century American history.
Wall Street Journal

Keith O’Brien has brought these women—mostly long-hidden and forgotten—back into the light where they belong. And he’s done it with grace, sensitivity and a cinematic eye for detail that makes Fly Girls both exhilarating and heartbreaking.
USA Today

Let’s call it the Hidden Figures rule: If there’s a part of the past you thought was exclusively male, you’re probably wrong. Case in point are these stories of Amelia Earhart and other female pilots who fought to fly.
Time

A riveting account that puts us in the cockpit with Amelia Earhart and other brave women who took to the skies in the unreliable flying machines of the ’20s and ’30s.
People

[E]xciting…. This fast-paced, meticulously researched history will appeal to a wide audience both as an entertaining tale of bravery and as an insightful look at early aviation.
Publishers Weekly

O'Brien details in crisp and engaging writing how his subjects came to love aviation, along with their struggles and victories with flying, the rampant sexism they experienced, and the hard choices they faced regarding work and family.
Library Journal

In the decades between the world wars, women took to the skies as daring, record-breaking fliers.… O'Brien vividly recounts the dangers of early flight…. A vivid, suspenseful story of women determined to… fulfill their lofty dreams.
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 FLY GIRLS … then take off on your own:

1. Overall, how were female aviators treated in the 1920s and '30s? How were all women defined during that era; what were society's expectations for them?

2. Follow-up to Question 1: Did you find yourself becoming angry as you read of the fly girls' treatment at the hand of males? Consider the explanation about women crashing their planes (as did men): "Women are lacking in certain qualities that men possess." Or consider the debate about allowing women to fly while menstruating. What else did you find demeaning? If you came of age before the woman's movement took hold in the late 1960s and '70s, do any of those arguments sound familiar to you?

3. Spend time talking about the women aviators. Of the five—Ruth Nichols, Louise Thaden, Ruth Elder, Florence Klingensmith, and Amelia Earhart—whose story most engaged you? Are some struggles more impressive than others? Discuss the women's different backgrounds. Despite those differences, however, what did they share in common?

4. The women were all connected in one way or another. Talk about their relationships and the formation of the Ninety-Nines.

5. What was the state of aviation in the era between the two wars? Talk about flight technology and the dangers all fliers faced.

6. When Louise Thaden became the first woman to win "The Powder Puff Derby" (nice, huh?), Charles Lindbergh had little to say other than, well... "I haven't anything to say about that." What is your reaction to Lindbergh's response?

7. Author Keith O'Brien says of the fliers: "each of the women went missing in her own way." Why does he make that observation, and what does he mean by the word "missing" other than, like Amelia Earhart, missing literally over the ocean? In what ways did the other fliers go "missing."

8. In the New York Times Book Review, Nathalia Holt makes note of the book's title, Fly Girls, pointing out that "girls" is an often derogatory term used to equate serious, mature women with children. Do you think O'Brien used the term "girls" without thinking (as well as the fact that "girl" titles are a major publishing trend—see our LibBlog on the 200+ girl titles)? Or maybe he meant the title ironically?

9. Holt also notices the way O'Brien describes the women's physical attributes and the way their clothes drape their bodies or fit snugly. She posits that the focus on women's appearances goes against the very grain of the book. Is Holt overly sensitive …or has O'Brien fallen back on a standard sexist trope? On the other hand, perhaps O'Brien is providing the grainy details of good journalism—writing the same of these women as he does of his male subjects (you know, how a man's suit jacket drapes his torso).

10. How much has changed today for women? Clearly, females have been accepted into jobs previously restricted to males. But what about the choices women continue to struggle with regarding work and family? Has that changed?

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

top of page (summary)

The Folded Clock: A Diary
Heidi Julavits, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385538985

Summary
A raucous, stunningly candid, deliriously smart diary of two years in the life of the incomparable Heidi Julavits

Like many young people, Heidi Julavits kept a diary. Decades later she found her old diaries in a storage bin, and hoped to discover the early evidence of the person (and writer) she’d since become. Instead, "The actual diaries revealed me to possess the mind of a paranoid tax auditor."

The entries are daily chronicles of anxieties about grades, looks, boys, and popularity. After reading the confessions of her past self, writes Julavits, "I want to good-naturedly laugh at this person. I want to but I can't. What she wanted then is scarcely different from what I want today."

Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. The dazzling result is The Folded Clock, in which the diary form becomes a meditation on time and self, youth and aging, betrayal and loyalty, friendship and romance, faith and fate, marriage and family, desire and death, gossip and secrets, art and ambition.

Concealed beneath the minute obsession with "dailiness" are sharply observed moments of cultural criticism and emotionally driven philosophical queries. In keeping with the spirit of a diary, the tone is confessional, sometimes shockingly so, as the focus shifts from the woman she wants to be to the woman she may have become.

Julavits's spirited sense of humor about her foibles and misadventures, combined with her ceaseless intelligence and curiosity, explode the typically confessional diary form. The Folded Clock is as playful as it is brilliant, a tour de force by one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1968
• Where—Portland, Maine, USA
• Education—B.A., Dartmouth College; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in New York City and Camden, Maine

Heidi Suzanne Julavits is an American author and co-editor of The Believer magazine. She has been published in The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2, Esquire, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, and McSweeney’s Quarterly. Her novels include The Mineral Palace (2000), The Effect of Living Backwards (2003), The Uses of Enchantment (2006), and The Vanishers (2012).

Background and education
Julavits was born and grew up in Portland, Maine, before attending Dartmouth College. She later went on to earn an MFA from Columbia University.

The Believer
For the debut issue of The Believer, she wrote one of the lead articles, titling it "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!: A Call For A New Era of Experimentation and a Book Culture That Will Support It." The Believer, is a literary magazine founded by Dave Eggers in 2003 and publised nine times a year from San Franciso. It urges its readers and writers to "reach beyond their usual notions of what is accessible or possible."

New York Times cultural critic A.O. Scott described the magazine as part of "a generational struggle against laziness and cynicism, to raise once again the banners of creative enthusiasm and intellectual engagement." It has a "cosmopolitan frame of reference and an eclectic internationalism," mixing pop genres with literary theory.

In 2005, Julavits told Scott how she decided on The Believer's tone:

I really saw 'the end of the book' as originating in the way books are talked about now in our culture and especially in the most esteemed venues for book criticism. It seemed as though their irrelevance was a foregone conclusion, and we were just practicing this quaint exercise of pretending something mattered when of course everyone knew it didn't.

She added that her own aim as book critic would be "to endow something with importance, by treating it as an emotional experience."

Personal
Julavits currently lives in Maine and Manhattan with her husband, the writer Ben Marcus, and their children. (Adapted from Wikipedia articles. Retrieved 10/12/2014.)

Book Reviews
[Julavits] tells of returning to her childhood diaries…looking for evidence of the writer she would become. "The actual diaries, however, fail to corroborate the myth I'd concocted for myself," she admits…With The Folded Clock, she corrects the record. Keeping a diary may not have made her a writer, but becoming a writer has made it possible for her to produce, now, an exquisite diary…[Julavits's] prose…is especially liquid, and her sentences are unimpeachable…The opportunity to inhabit another self, to experience another consciousness, is perhaps the most profound trespass a work of literature can allow. The Folded Clock offers all the thrill of that trespass, in a work so artful that it appears to be without artifice. This diary is a record of the interior weather of an adept thinker. In it, the mundane is rendered extraordinary through the alchemy of effortless prose. It is a work in which a self is both lost and found, but above all made.
Eula Bliss - New York Times Book Review

[A] well-written, sometimes entertaining, occasionally irritating portrait of an intelligent and accomplished woman struggling with identity and aging.... Each day describes an event...which over time reveal Julavits’s life: childhood in Maine, desperate to escape; infatuation with the lives of wealthy college peers; entering the New York literary scene; an erroneous first and successful second marriage; and professional success, which leaves her raggedly busy, missing her children, and yearning for her summers back in Maine.... [H]er search for identity, fear of time passing, and sense of her own aging can be poignant.
Rebecca Steinitz - Boston Globe

The Folded Clock replaces slavish chronological record-keeping with a playfulness that allows Julavits to thumb her nose at time. For starters, she scrambles the sequence of dates...with no identifying years attached. The lovely title...suggests a Dali-esque image of hours and days folding in on themselves to disappear altogether.... Julavits, as we know from her inventive novels...is a pro at spinning stories.... The Folded Clock is an engaging portrait of a woman's sense of identity, which continually shape-shifts with time. In her mid-40s, Julavits says she is "looking for the next age I will be."
Heller McAlpin - Los Angeles Times

[A] cleverly crafted, thoughtfully entertaining series of meditations on personhood and culture.... complex and captivating.... [Julavits] raises the questions, How do we curate our own lives when everything about them may wind up in print? Can we ever expect naked truth from a diary, or do we invariably receive a sanitized version? Maybe, Julavits's work suggests, the best we can hope for is a deeply mediated honesty—for words are always equal parts mask and revelation
Lydia Millet, O Magazine

[B]lur[s] the lines between contemplation and revelation, fact and fiction.... Julavits takes the novel approach of reinventing the form of the diary.... Julavits reveals a whole lot, in often-flawless prose, about motherhood, time, petty jealousies, grand debates, and the irresistible attractions of The Bachelorette (“8 Books You Need to Read This April”).
New York Magazine

Display[s] both charm and stark honesty... The diary angle makes for a clever hook, but masks what this really is—a compelling collection of intimate, untitled personal essays that reveal one woman's ever-evolving soul
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) [A] seamless narrative describing [Julavits's] life as a woman, wife, mother, and writer. Lyrically written, each entry is a brief but boundless meditation on time, identity, and constructions of selfhood. Julavits is a natural and gifted essayist. —Meagan Lacy, Guttman Community Coll., CUNY
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Reflections on being and becoming… Some entries are slyly funny, gossipy and irreverent; others, quietly intimate… An inventive, beautifully crafted memoir, wise and insightful.
Kirkus Reviews

top of page (summary)

Following Ezra: What One Father Learned About Gumby, Otters, Autism, and Love From His Extraordinary Son
Tom Fields-Meyer
Penguin Group USA
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451234636

Summary
When Tom Fields-Meyer's son Ezra was three and showing early signs of autism, a therapist suggested that the father needed to grieve.

"For what?" he asked.
The answer: "For the child he didn't turn out to be."

That moment helped strengthen the author's resolve to do just the opposite: to love the child Ezra was, a quirky boy with a fascinating and complex mind.

Full of tender moments and unexpected humor, Following Ezra is the story of a father and son on a ten-year journey from Ezra's diagnosis to the dawn of his adolescence. It celebrates his growth from a remote toddler to an extraordinary young man, connected in his own remarkable ways to the world around him. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Portland, Oregon, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California

Tom Fields-Meyer has been writing stories for popular audiences for nearly three decades, specializing in telling meaningful and worthwhile narratives with humanity, humor and grace.

In twelve years as senior writer at People, he produced scores human-interest pieces and profiles of newsmakers. He penned articles on some of the biggest crime stories of the day (from the O.J. Simpson trial to the murder of Matthew Shepherd), profiled prominent politicians and world leaders (Nancy Pelosi, Pope John Paul II, Sen. Ted Kennedy), and demonstrated a pitch-perfect touch writing tales of ordinary people overcoming life’s challenges in inspiring and compelling ways.

Tom also lends his skills to help others to put their compelling personal narratives into words. He teamed up with the late Eva Brown, a popular speaker at The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance, to write Brown’s memoir, If You Save One Life: A Survivor’s Memoir (2007). Wiesenthal executive director Rabbi Marvin Hier called the book “very significant and meaningful…an everlasting and important legacy…and a reminder to future generations that championing tolerance, justice and social change are everyone’s obligation.”

Tom collaborated with Noah Alper, founder Noah’s Bagels, the successful West Coast chain, on Alper’s memoir: Business Mensch: Timeless Wisdom for Today’s Entrepreneur (2009). Publisher’s Weekly said: “This earnest book shines with Alper’s conviction, business savvy and decency.”

Tom’s own memoir, Following Ezra: What One Father Learned About Gumby, Otters, Autism, and Love from His Extraordinary Son, was published in 2011. Full of tender moments and unexpected humor, the book tells the story of a father and son on a ten-year journey from Ezra’s diagnosis to the dawn of his adolescence. It celebrates Ezra’s evolution from a remote toddler to an extraordinary young man, connected in his own remarkable ways to the world around him.

Tom previously worked as a news reporter and feature writer for the Dallas Morning News, where he covered the kinds of stories that happen only in Texas (shootouts in Country-Western dance halls, culture pieces on the State Fair) and once was dispatched to Nevada to investigate a road designated by AAA as “America’s loneliest highway.” As a senior editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education, he traveled the nation’s campuses and once convinced his editor to send him on a 10-day junket aboard a schooner in the Bahamas (an assignment he came to regret, not just because of seasickness). Tom’s writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.

A graduate of Harvard University, Tom lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Rabbi Shawn Fields-Meyer, and their three sons. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Following Ezra is a revelation. I could not put it down. This inspiring memoir of a father raising (and being raised by) his autistic son is a great lesson about patience and the blessings that can come when we let our unique children lead us.
Rabbi Naomi Levy - Author (To Begin Again and Hope Will Find You)

A riveting account of raising one special boy, Following Ezra is a powerful story for parents of any child. This inspiring book shows us that seeing meaning and depth in our children's idiosyncrasies is crucial to raising strong, secure and resilient kids. Tom Fields-Meyer has written a beautiful, funny, tender book."
Michael Gurian - Author (The Wonder of Boys)

Anyone who is raising a child with special needs should read Following Ezra. It shows how warmth and humor—yes, humor—can help not just the child, but the family, more than most of us could ever imagine.
James Patterson - Author

When Tom Fields-Meyer's son Ezra was diagnosed with autism, the author decided to forego mourning for the child who might have been, and concentrate instead on the delightful kid he had. Following Ezra is at once a meticulous description of what it is to parent a child who has autism, and a salute to the kid whose mind takes both of"
Carolyn See - Author and Book Critic

Discussion Questions
1. A therapist tells Tom Fields-Meyer and his wife Shawn that they should grieve “for the child he didn’t turn out to be.” How do you respond to her advice, and to the author’s own reaction to it?

2. In the Prologue, the author introduces the book’s central metaphor: Rather than leading his son or walking by his side, the father opts to “follow” Ezra. What is your reaction to Tom Fields-Meyer’s choice, and how does it compare to your own parenting style—or to the way your parents raised you? How do you think you would react to having a child like Ezra?

3. Chapter One opens with a pivotal moment, the conference at which it becomes clear to the author that Ezra faces serious challenges. When in your life did you receive information that changed everything? How did you react?

4. “It wasn’t about finding the right expert, it was about learning to be the right parent.” What does the author mean by this statement (in the Prologue), and how does it play itself out in Following Ezra?

5. Chapter Ten opens with the author excitedly watching his son chase a boy at the park, only to learn that Ezra isn’t focused on the child, but the picture on his hat. What’s your emotional reaction to this scene, and how does it illustrate some of the book’s central themes?

6. Following Ezra paints a portrait of a highly unusual individual. Describe a person you have encountered who’s different in some extreme way. How have you reacted? How did the person make you feel? And how has reading this book made you think differently about encountering such people?

7. On one visit to the zoo, Ezra races through without stopping to look at a single animal. At first. the author finds this frustrating and confusing, but ultimately how does the incident help the father’s understanding of his son?

8. While Following Ezra is about one particular father and son, it’s full of valuable lessons for all kinds of parents. What parenting advice did you find most valuable?

9. After the author observes his son’s remarkable feats of memory (at the end of Chapter Nine), he contemplates “the impossibly thin line between ability and disability.” What does he mean by that? How does that theme emerge in Following Ezra, and how have you seen that line in your own experience?

10. When Ezra’s mother explains to him that he has autism (Chapter Thirteen), Ezra asks whether that’s “good” “bad.” What do you think of her answer? And what would yours be, and why?

11. How does the author both follow and lead his son? What are some benefits and challenges of following and leading for their relationship—and for parents in general.

12. Throughout the book, Ezra develops fixations—with animated characters, particular animals, toys. How does his unusual ability to focus on such things pose challenges for Ezra? How does it serve him?

13. Based on your reading of Following Ezra, what is your understanding of what autism is? How is it different from your impression before your read the book?

14. Several people help the author to understand and connect with his son: Debbie, the preschool teacher; Miriam, the therapist; Hugh, the barber; Dr. Miller, psychologist; Dawn, the preschool aide; Tito, the boy who can’t speak. Whose advice or example do you find most and least helpful, and why?
(Questions kindly provided by the author.)

top of page (summary)

For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards
Jen Hatmaker, 2015
Thomas Nelson Press
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780718031824

Summary
Best-selling author Jen Hatmaker is convinced life can be lovely and fun and courageous and kind.

She reveals with humor and style how Jesus’ embarrassing grace is the key to dealing with life's biggest challenge: people. The majority of our joys, struggles, thrills, and heartbreaks relate to people, beginning with ourselves and then the people we came from, married, birthed, live by, go to church with, don’t like, don’t understand, fear, compare ourselves to, and judge.

Jen knows how the squeeze of this life can make us competitive and judgmental, how we can lose love for others and then for ourselves. She reveals how to...

Break free of guilt and shame by dismantling the unattainable Pinterest life.
Learn to engage our culture’s controversial issues with a grace-first approach.
Be liberated to love and release the burden of always being right.
Identify the tools you already have to develop real-life, all-in, know-my-junk-but-love-me-anyway friendships.
Escape our impossible standards for parenting and marriage by accepting the standard of “mostly good.”
Laugh your butt off.

In this raucous ride to freedom for modern women, Jen Hatmaker bares the refreshing wisdom, wry humor, no-nonsense faith, liberating insight, and fearless honesty that have made her beloved by women worldwidea (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1973-74
• Where—state of Kansas, USA
• Education—Oklahoma Baptist University
• Currently—lives in Austin, Texas

Jen Hatmaker is a mom to five children, a pastor’s wife, sought-after speaker, best-selling author and star of the popular series My Big Family Renovation on HGTV.

She is best known for her books 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess (2012), Interrupted: When Jesus Wrecks Your Comfortable Christianity (2014), and For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards (2015). (From the publisher.)

Visit the author's website.

Book Reviews
There is humor out there in the real world we live in, and Jen points it out. She doesn't sugar coat things, so don't dig into this book expecting it to be all hilarious. There are some jagged points in there too. Maybe it is different for everyone. It will all depend on you, and what you need to get out of her writing.
AnotherChanceRanch.net

There’s wisdom doled out in Jen’s humorous style and I think all women should read this. From beautiful thoughts for her kids, to the chapter on marriage, to encouraging women, friendship, social justice, the church and our calling as believers, this book will not only make you smile (and laugh out loud), but encourage you in so many ways.

BooksandBeverages.org

The best we can do is give them Jesus. Not rules, not behaviors, not entertainment, not shame. I have no confidence in myself but every confidence in Jesus….Jesus is the only thing that will endure. He trumps parenting techniques, church culture, tight boundaries, and best-laid plans. Jesus can lead our children long after they’ve left our homes.

7. What other sections—or passages—in the book strike you as particularly powerful, insightful, or perhaps even controversial...and why?

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

top of page (summary)

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten City
Greg Grandin, 2009
Henry Holt
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312429621

Summary
The stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon

In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets.

Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford’s early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia’s eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest.

More than a parable of one man’s arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford’s great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1970-71
• Where—N/A
• Education—Brooklyn College, CUNY; Ph.D., Yale University
• Awards—Bryce Wood Award, Latin American Studies
Association
• Currently—teaches at New York University (New York City)

Greg Grandin is the author of Empire’s Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and the award-winning The Blood of Guatemala. A professor of history at New York University, and a Guggenheim fellow, Grandin has served on the United Nations Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan Civil War and has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Statesman, and the New York Times.

Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan Books), published to critical acclaim and commercial success, was the first book to draw parallels between the U.S. government’s actions in the "War on Terror" and its long-obscured and dubious history of intervention in our own backyard—Latin America. Grandin reminded us that before Iraq and Afghanistan, a political philosophy that embraced the deployment of military power to advance free-market economics was unleashed much closer to home. In the words of Naomi Klein: "Grandin has always been a brilliant historian; now he uses his detective skills in a book that is absolutely crucial to understanding our present."

The Last Colonial Massacre: The Latin American Cold War and its Consequence (University of Chicago Press), argues that the Cold War in Latin America was a struggle between two visions of democracy. Using Guatemala as a case study, Grandin demonstrates that the main effect of U.S. intervention in Latin America was not the containment of Communism, but the elimination of home-grown concepts of social democracy. Eric Hobsbawm described it as a "remarkable and extremely well-written work… about how common people discover politics, the roots of democracy and those of genocide, and the hopes and defeats of the twentieth-century left."

Grandin’s first book, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Duke University Press, 2000), a two-century history of the development of Mayan nationalism, was awarded the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Award for most outstanding book published in English in the humanities and social sciences on Latin America. In the London Review of Books, Corey Robin proclaimed it "remarkable… Grandin’s book performs a modest act of restorative justice: it allows Guatemalans to tell their own stories in their own words."

Grandin received his BA from Brooklyn College, CUNY in 1992 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1999. His many books and articles explore the connection between the diverse manifestations of everyday life and large-scale societal transformations that took place in Central America related to agricultural commodity production and state formation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Grandin has published extensively on issues of revolution, popular memory, US-Latin American relations, photography, genocide, truth commissions, human rights, disease, and the tensions that exist between legal and historical inquiries into political violence. In 1997-1998 Grandin worked with the Guatemalan Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico—the UN-administered truth commission set up to investigate political violence committed during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Haunting.... Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness resonates through every page of this book.
New York Times

Historian Greg Grandin has taken what heretofore seemed just such a marginal event...and turned it into a fascinating historical narrative that illuminates the auto industry’s contemporary crisis, the problems of globalization and the contradictions of contemporary consumerism. For all of that, this is not, however, history freighted with political pedantry. Grandin is one of blessedly expanding group of gifted American historians who assume that whatever moral the story of the past may yield, it must be a story well told.... Fordlandia is precisely that—a genuinely readable history recounted with a novelist’s sense of pace and an eye for character. It’s a significant contribution to our understanding of ourselves and engrossingly enjoyable.
Timothy Rutten - Los Angeles Times

Excellent history.... Fordlandia is keenly and emotionally observed and a potent record of the last hundred years of economic thinking and U.S./South American relations in the form of a blunt blow to the head.
Chicago Sun Times

Fordlandia was, ultimately, the classic American parable of a failed Utopia, of soft dreams running aground on a hard world—which tends to make the most compelling tale of all. It’s such an engrossing story that one wonders why it has never been told before in book-length form. Grandin takes full command of a complicated narrative with numerous threads, and the story spills out in precisely the right tone—about midway between Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh.
American Scholar

Gandin, an NYU professor of Latin American history, offers the thoroughly remarkable story of Henry Ford's attempt, from the 1920s through 1945, to transform part of Brazil's Amazon River basin into a rubber plantation and eponymous American-style company town: Fordlandia. Gandin has found a fascinating vehicle to illuminate the many contradictory parts of Henry Ford: the pacifist, the internationalist, the virulent anti-Semite, the $5-a-day friend of the workingman, the anti-union crusader, the man who ushered America into the industrial age yet rejected the social changes that followed urbanization. Both infuriating and fascinating, Ford is only a piece of the Fordlandia story. The follies of colonialism and the testing of the belief that the Amazon-where "7,882 organisms could be found on any given five square miles"-could be made to produce rubber with the reliability of an auto assembly line makes a surprisingly dramatic tale. Although readers know that Fordlandia will return to the jungle, the unfolding of this unprecedented experiment is compelling. Grandin concludes that "Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism—and by extension Americanism." Readers may find it a cautionary tale for the 21st century.
Publishers Weekly

Henry Ford's doomed attempt to establish a rubber industry and an attendant "work of civilization" in the rain forests of Brazil. The rising price of rubber and a threatened British-led cartel inspired the famously independent Henry Ford in 1927 to purchase a Connecticut-sized plot of land for the purpose of growing his own. The South American leaf blight and the advent of synthetic rubbers forced the company to abandon Fordlandia in 1945, long after Ford had poured millions of dollars and years of strenuous effort into the project. So why did he persist? Grandin convincingly argues that, for Ford, the enterprise was more than a purely economic venture. It was a missionary application of Ford-style capitalism—high wages, humane benefits, moral improvement—to a backward land. Ford's belief that he could harmonize industry and agriculture was always at war with the forces he had unleashed in the United States—mass-produced, affordable cars that encouraged mobility, and fear induced in workers by hired thugs like Harry Bennett, who assured that the company would remain nonunion. With his vision of an industrial arcadia slipping away at home—due to what Grandin acutely terms "a blithe indifference to difference"—Ford attempted to construct in the Amazon a world he had helped obliterate in America. The author follows a succession of Ford representatives and managers overwhelmed by the challenges of doing business where the implacable terrain, jungle diseases, mounting costs, floundering construction, government bumbling and worker resistance all conspired to sink the project. The plantation's original motive, to grow rubber, gave way to an unsustainable sociological experiment, which despite its amenities—weekly dances, movies, tennis courts, garden clubs, schools and hospitals—made no economic sense and became a mockery of the Ford Motor Company's reputation for orderliness, efficiency and synchronization. Works both as a nice bit of recovered history and a parable.
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 Fordlandia:

1. What first prompted Henry Ford in 1927 to buy the plot of land in Brazil? Did his motives change over the years? If so...into what?

2. Describe Ford's capitalistic ideal. What did he envision for Brazil, and how did he attempt to impose it on the Amazonian jungle?

3. How was that capitalistic ideal slipping away from him at home in the US? What forces had Ford unleashed in this country that undermined his core beliefs in a humane, moral order?

4. Talk about the many forces at work against Ford's vision in Brazil? What happened? Who—or what—was at fault in the project's many failures? Was failure inevitable?

5. Describe Henry Ford. Was he an idealist, an autocrat, an elitist or friend of the working man?

6. How did Ford's attempt 80 years ago, to convert the lush, naturally abundant Brazilian landscape into industrial agriculture, foreshadow today's destruction of the rainforest?

7. In what way might this account be seen as a parable for 21st-century attempts at globalization? Are there lessons to be learned? Or would that be reading too much into what is a single moment in history?

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

top of page (summary)

The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Edward Dolnick, 2008
HarperCollins
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060825423

Summary
As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art.

It was an almost perfect crime. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. But, as Edward Dolnick reveals, the reason for the forger's success was not his artistic skill. Van Meegeren was a mediocre artist. His true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling both the Nazis and the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life.

ARTnews called Dolnick's previous book, the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist, "the best book ever written on art crime." In The Forger's Spell, the stage is bigger, the stakes are higher, and the villains are blacker. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Marblehead, Massachusetts, USA
• Awards—Edgar Award
• Currently—lives in the Washington, DC area

Edward Dolnick is an American writer, formerly a science writer at the Boston Globe. He has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times Magazine, and Washington Post, among other publications.

His books include Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis (1998) and Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon (2001).

Dolnick's book The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece (2005)—an account of the 1994 theft, and eventual recovery, of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" from Norway's National Gallery in Oslo—won the 2006 Edgar Award in the Best Crime Fact category.

The Forger's Spell (2008), describes the 1930-40s forging of Johannes Vermeer paintings by a critic-detesting Dutch artist, accepted as "masterpieces" by art experts until the artist's confession and trial in 1945.

Dolnick lives in the Washington, D.C. area, is married, and has two children. His wife, Lynn Iphigene Golden, is a member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family, publishers of the New York Times, and is on the board of The New York Times Company. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Dolnick...tells his story engagingly and with a light touch. He has a novelist's talent for characterization, and he raises fascinating questions. How, for instance, could the forgeries have fooled anyone? (Dolnick says that van Meegeren was "perhaps the only forger whose most famous works a layman would immediately identify as fake.") How do forgers set about doing their work? One chapter is titled "Forgery 101"; it contains instructions from which any prospective forger would benefit. And why does our estimation of a work of art change when we discover it is a fake? Forgery is interesting in part because it demands great, if imitative, skill, and in part because copying itself has become a significant aspect of contemporary art-making. It is an art-crime that encourages reflections on the nature of art itself. This book is an aid to such reflections.
Anthony Julius - New York Times

Gripping historical narrative.... Dolnick, a veteran science writer, knows his way around a canvas.... The Forger's Spell has raised provocative questions about the nature of art and the psychology of deception.
Washington Post Book World

Edgar-winner Dolnick (The Rescue Artist) delves into the extraordinary story of Han van Meegeren (1889—1947), who made a fortune in German-occupied Holland by forging paintings of the 17th-century Dutch painter Vermeer. The discovery of a "new" Vermeer was just what the beleaguered Dutch needed to lift their spirits, and van Meegeren's Christ at Emmaus had already been bought by the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam in 1937 for $2.6 million. Collectors, critics and the public were blind to the clumsiness of this work and five other "Vermeers" done by van Meegeren. Dolnick asks how everyone could have been fooled, and he answers with a fascinating analysis of the forger's technique and a perceptive discussion of van Meegeren's genius at manipulating people. Van Meegeren was unmasked in 1945 by one of his clients, Hermann Goering. Later accused of treason for collaboration, he saved himself from execution and even became a hero for having swindled Goering. Dolnick's compelling look at how a forger worked his magic leads to one sad conclusion: there will always be eager victims waiting to be duped. (Illustrated.)
Publishers Weekly

In 1945, just after the end of World War II in Europe, a Dutch detective looking for artwork looted by the Nazis and for Nazi collaborators questioned a high-living Dutch artist named Han van Meegeren. Had van Meegeren, the detective inquired, been involved in the sale to Hermann Goring of a priceless Vermeer painting? Upon further questioning, van Meegeren confessed that he had painted this Vermeer himself, along with other Vermeers then in the collections of several major Dutch art museums, and so began the unraveling of "the greatest art hoax of the twentieth century." While other books—including Frank Wynne's I Was Vermeer and Lord Kilbracken's Van Meegeren: Master Forger—have covered this intriguing case of forgery, greed, and detection, this account by Dolnick, author of the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist, is especially strong in plot development and characterization. It also has a unique point of view: that van Meegeren was not a genius and master forger but rather his "true distinction was [that] he is perhaps the only forger whose most famous works a layman would immediately identify as fake." Recommended for public and academic library art and true-crime collections.
Marcia Welsch - Library Journal

Dolnick covers it all, from Van Meegeren’s technical brilliance to his shrewd choice of subject matter to his extraordinary manipulation of egos and perceptions. [His] zesty, incisive, and entertaining inquiry illuminates the hidden dimensions...of art and ambition, deception and war. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

Mesmerizing account of an amateur artist who made millions selling forged paintings to art-obsessed Nazis and business tycoons. Veteran science journalist Dolnick (The Rescue Artist: The True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece, 2005, etc.) brings his expertise in art theft, criminal psychology and military history to a scintillating portrait of Dutch painter Han van Meegeren (1889-1947). Humiliated by critics who dismissed his work as lackluster, Van Meegeren turned to cunningly crafting paintings that he peddled during the 1930s and '40s as the work of revered 17th-century master Johannes Vermeer. The polished, fast-paced narrative captures the surreal mood in Nazi-occupied Holland. As German forces killed more than 70 percent of the Jewish population, the highest toll in Europe, Hitler and his leading aide, Hermann Goering, pillaged museums and private homes for paintings, sculpture and jewelry. In a rivalry Dolnick likens to a perverse schoolyard competition, the men also vied for treasures from art dealers enticed by the Nazis' looted cash. Enter Van Meegeren, a disaffected artist who watched with glee as the same critics who had ridiculed his original work swooned over the technically competent but off-kilter compositions he sold for princely sums as "lost Vermeers." In compelling prose, Dolnick details the doctored canvases, phony paint and fake bills of sale Van Meegeren painstakingly created to achieve his grand deceit. In addition to Nazis and wealthy Europeans, the author notes, he also duped affluent Americans such as Andrew Mellon. After a high-profile 1947 trial during which the con artist demonstrated his techniques, the Dutch government found van Meegeren guilty of forgery and fraud. He died less than two months later, before serving his one-year prison sentence. Energetic and authoritative.
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 Forger's Spell:

1. What motivated Han van Meegeren to become a forger?

2. Van Meergeren mastered the scientific side of forgery through by using plastics in his paints. Would you consider him a genius?

3. Talk about the Nazis' passion for art, especially in light of the fact that the crates of confiscated masterpieces often lay unopened.

4. Why has Vermeer been so prized as an artist? What is it about his paintings, beyond their limited number, that is so alluring?

5. Dolnick says that laymen would not have been fooled by van Meergeren's fakes. How, then, was he able to fool scholars and curators, starting with Abraham Bredius? What is the psychology behind conning art dealers and collectors into accepting forgeries as genuine? What makes those who should know fall for fakery? Is "connossieurship" a hollow pretense...or does it have merit?

6. Van Meergeren became a sort of folk hero after the war when his deception was uncovered. Did he deserve that status? Does the fact that van Meergeren was able to swindle Goering, Hitler's second in command, increase your estimation of him?

7. Dolnick's book calls into question the nature of art itself, especially "great" art. If a painting is skillfuly imitative of a great artist, isn't the imitation something to be admired and valued in and of itself? If a work is good enough to fool the experts, isn't it good enough to be considered on its own merits as "art"?

8. What is the "Uncanny Valley"? How does it play out in van Meegeren's forgeries? Can you think of other instances in life where the Uncanny Valley theory applies?

9. Did you learn something new about the world of art—and the practice of forgery—by reading this book? What surprised, or intrigued, you most?

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

top of page (summary)

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Joseph J. Ellis
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375705243

Summary
Winner, Pulitizer Prize for History, 2001

An illuminating study of the intertwined lives of the founders of the American republic—John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.

During the 1790s, which Ellis calls the most decisive decade in our nation's history, the greatest statesmen of their generation—and perhaps any—came together to define the new republic and direct its course for the coming centuries. Ellis focuses on six discrete moments that exemplify the most crucial issues facing the fragile new nation: Burr and Hamilton's deadly duel, and what may have really happened; Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison's secret dinner, during which the seat of the permanent capital was determined in exchange for passage of Hamilton's financial plan; Franklin's petition to end the "peculiar institution" of slavery—his last public act—and Madison's efforts to quash it; Washington's precedent-setting Farewell Address, announcing his retirement from public office and offering his country some final advice; Adams's difficult term as Washington's successor and his alleged scheme to pass the presidency on to his son; and finally, Adams and Jefferson's renewed correspondence at the end of their lives, in which they compared their different views of the Revolution and its legacy.

In a lively and engaging narrative, Ellis recounts the sometimes collaborative, sometimes archly antagonistic interactions between these men, and shows us the private characters behind the public personas: Adams, the ever-combative iconoclast, whose closest political collaborator was his wife, Abigail; Burr, crafty, smooth, and one of the most despised publicfigures of his time; Hamilton, whose audacious manner and deep economic savvy masked his humble origins; Jefferson, renowned for his eloquence, but so reclusive and taciturn that he rarely spoke more than a few sentences in public; Madison, small, sickly, and paralyzingly shy, yet one of the most effective debaters of his generation; and the stiffly formal Washington, the ultimate realist, larger-than-life, and America's only truly indispensable figure.

Ellis argues that the checks and balances that permitted the infant American republic to endure were not primarily legal, constitutional, or institutional, but intensely personal, rooted in the dynamic interaction of leaders with quite different visions and values. Revisiting the old-fashioned idea that character matters, Founding Brothers informs our understanding of American politics—then and now—and gives us a new perspective on the unpredictable forces that shape history. (From the publisher.)

Among his previous books are Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams and American Sphinx, which won the 1997 National Book Award. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ellen, and their three sons. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
As historian Joseph J. Ellis points out in his compelling new book, the achievement of the American Revolution was considerably more improbable at the time.... [A] lively and illuminating, if somewhat arbitrary book that leaves the reader with a visceral sense of a formative era in American life.
Michiko Kakutan - New York Times

A splendid book—humane, learned, written with flair and radiant with a calm intelligence and wit. Even those familiar with 'the Revolutionary generation' will [find much] to captivate and enlarge their understanding of our nation's fledgling years.
Beson Bobrick - New York Times Book Review

(Starred review.) This subtle, brilliant examination of the period between the War of Independence and the Louisiana Purchase puts Pulitzer-winner Ellis among the finest of America's narrative historians. Six stories, each centering on a significant creative achievement or failure, combine to portray often flawed men and their efforts to lay the republic's foundation. Set against the extraordinary establishment of the most liberal nation-state in the history of Western Civilization... in the most extensive and richly endowed plot of ground on the planet are the terrible costs of victory, including the perpetuation of slavery and the cruel oppression of Native Americans. Ellis blames the founders' failures on their decision to opt for an evolutionary revolution, not a risky severance with tradition (as would happen, murderously, in France, which necessitated compromises, like retaining slavery). Despite the injustices and brutalities that resulted, Ellis argues, this deferral strategy was a profound insight rooted in a realistic appraisal of how enduring social change best happens. Ellis's lucid, illuminating and ironic prose will make a ... hit.
Publishers Weekly

Ellis holds the Ford Foundation Chair in American History at Mount Holyoke College and is the author of American Sphinx, a National Book Award-winning study of Thomas Jefferson. His new book contains six chapters on unconnected events in the formation of the American republic, featuring Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and George Washington as principal characters. Ellis is deeply steeped in the literature, and his style is crisp and full of subtle ironies. He brings fresh insights into such well-worn topics as the Hamilton-Burr duel and Jefferson's feelings about slavery. If there is a central theme that runs through the chapters, it concerns the fragility of the early years of the republic. Ellis calls the 1790s one long shouting match between those, like Hamilton, who championed the power of the central government and those, like Jefferson, who defended the rights of states and individuals. The question of slavery was so explosive that most Founding Fathers avoided discussing it at all. Ellis clearly admires the irascible John Adams. Perhaps surprisingly from the author of American Sphinx, however, the Founding Father who comes off least well here is Jefferson himself. Highly recommended for all academic and large public libraries. —T.J. Schaeper, St. Bonaventure Univ.
Library Journal

An outstanding biographer of Jefferson (American Sphinx, 1997), Ellis takes up new lines in this exploration of the "gestative" 1790s.... Palpably steeped in a career's worth of immersion in the early republic, Ellis' essays are angled, fascinating, and perfect for general-interest readers. —Gilbert Taylor
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. The anecdote that Benjamin Rush liked to repeat about an overheard conversation between Benjamin Harrison and Elbridge Gerry on July 4, 1776, makes clear that the signers of the Declaration of Independence felt some doubt about their chances of surviving their revolutionary act. As Ellis points out, if the British commanders had been more aggressive, "The signers of the Declaration would . . . have been hunted down, tried, and executed for treason, and American history would have flowed forward in a wholly different direction" [p. 5]. Why is it so difficult to grasp this notion of the new nation's utter fragility? How successful is Founding Brothers in taking the reader back in time, in order to witness the contingencies of a historical gamble in which "sheer chance, pure luck" [p. 5] were instrumental in determining the outcome?

2. Ellis has said, "We have no mental pictures that make the revolutionary generation fully human in ways that link up with our own time.... These great patriarchs have become Founding Fathers, and it is psychologically quite difficult for children to reach a realistic understanding of their parents, who always loom larger-than-life as icons we either love or hate." How does Founding Brothers address this problem, and how does it manage to humanize our image of the founders? How does the book's title relate to this issue?

3. What was really at stake in the disagreement and duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton? If Hamilton felt that the disparaging statements he had made about Burr were true, should he have lied in order to save his life? Was this merely a war over words? Did words havemore significance then than they do now? What role did newspapers play in the drama, and how is the media's role different or similar today?

4. In congressional debates in 1790 about the possible abolition of slavery, Georgia representative James Jackson attacked the abolitionist Quakers as "outright lunatics" [p. 97] and went on to say, "If it were a crime, as some assert but which I deny, the British nation is answerable for it, and not the present inhabitants, who now hold that species of property in question" [p. 98]. Does Jackson's refusal to name "that species of property" point to his own moral discomfort with owning enslaved human beings? To what degree were the founders complicit in this deliberate refusal to name and acknowledge the moral problem of slavery?

5. Because of the founders' refusal to press for abolition, the slavery question was bequeathed to Abraham Lincoln to solve—and the Civil War illustrated just how divisive the issue was. How accurate was George Washington's belief that "slavery was a cancer on the body politic of America that could not at present be removed without killing the patient" [p. 158]? Should the nation's leaders have pressed harder, given that "the further one got from 1776, the lower the revolutionary fires burned and the less imperative the logic of the revolutionary ideology seemed" [p. 104]? What difference might it have made in the racial currents of contemporary American life if slavery had been abolished in the early days of the nation?

6. What does Ellis mean when he says that the public figures on which he focuses in this book were "America's first and, in many respects, its only natural aristocracy" [p. 13]? In what sense is this true?

7. How does the character of George Washington come across, as Ellis presents him and in the quoted extracts of the farewell address? How does Washington measure up to the mythology that surrounded him even in his own time? What qualities made Washington so indispensable to the new nation?

8. Ellis focuses more intensively on the plight of the slaves than that of the Indians, but he does point out that Washington addressed their situation with the suggestion that they abandon their hunter-gatherer way of life and assimilate themselves into the general population as farmers [p. 159]. Was this a viable solution, or merely a pragmatic one? What other solutions might have been offered at the time?

9. What is most surprising about Thomas Jefferson's character, as presented by Ellis? Which aspects of his personality, or which particular actions or decisions, seem incongruous in the man who wrote the idealistic words of the Declaration of Independence?

10. What is most impressive about Abigail Adams's intervention on her husband's behalf in his quarrel with Thomas Jefferson? Is it possible to compare the political partnership of John and Abigail Adams with, for example, that of Hillary and Bill Clinton?

11. Ellis has said of Founding Brothers, "If there is a method to my madness in the book, it is rooted in the belief that readers prefer to get their history through stories. Each chapter is a self-contained story about a propitious moment when big things got decided. . . . In a sense, I have formed this founding generation into a kind of repertory company, then put them into dramatic scenes which, taken together, allow us to witness that historic production called the founding of the United States." Does his focus on creating separate narrative units succeed in making the complex history of the founders simpler to penetrate and understand? Are there any drawbacks to presenting history this way?

12. Ellis says that the founders were always self-conscious about how posterity would view their decisions and their behavior. For instance, Adams's efforts on behalf of a "more realistic, nonmythologized version of the American Revolution" were partly motivated by his wounded vanity, his effort to get rid of versions of the story that "failed to provide him with a starring role in the drama" [p. 217]. How similar or different are more recent presidents' efforts to shape the historical portrayal of their own terms in office, as with presidential libraries and such?

13. Ellis notes that his ambition with Founding Brothers was "to write a modest-sized account of a massive historical subject . . . without tripping over the dead bodies of my many scholarly predecessors." In search of a structure in which "less could be more" Ellis takes as a model Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918). Strachey wrote that the historian "will row out over the great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity" [p. ix]. How does this approach differ from other historical narratives or biographies of historical figures that you have read, and how does it affect your reading experience?

14. In the conflict between Republicans and Federalists described by Ellis throughout the book, readers can understand the origins of party factionalism that is a strong factor in American politics to this day. If, as Ellis writes, "The dominant intellectual legacy of the Revolution, enshrined in the Declaration of Indepen-dence, stigmatized all concentrated political power and even . . . depicted any energetic expression of governmental authority as an alien force that all responsible citizens ought to repudiate and, if possible, overthrow" [p. 11], what compromises were made in order to bring a stable national government to fruition? Does the apparent contradiction between Republican and Federalist principles still create instability in the American system?

15. In recent years historians have tended to avoid focusing on such issues as leadership and character, and more is being written about popular movements and working people whose lives exemplify a sort of democratic norm. Ellis clearly goes against this trend in offering Founding Brothers as "a polite argument against the scholarly grain" [p. 12]. Does he effectively convince his readers that the founding of the American nation was, in fact, largely accomplished by a handful of extraordinary individuals?
(Questions from the publishers.)

top of page (summary)

Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation
Cokie Roberts, 2004
HarperCollins
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060090265

Summary
While the "fathers" were off founding the country, what were the women doing? Running their husband’s businesses, raising their children plus providing political information and advice. At least that’s what Abigail Adams did for John, starting when he went off to the Continental Congress, which eventually declared the independence of the American colonies from the British. While the men were writing the rebellious words, the women were living the revolution, with the Redcoats on their doorsteps. John’s advice to Abigail as the soldiers approached Braintree: if necessary "fly to the woods with our children." That was it, she was on her own, as she was for most of the next ten years while Adams represented the newly independent nation abroad.

Abigail Adams is the best known of the women who influenced the founders, but there are many more, starting with Martha Washington, who once referred to herself as a “prisoner of state” for the constraints placed on her as the first First Lady. She was the one charged with balancing the demands of a Republic of the "common man" on the one hand, while insisting on some modicum of courtliness and protocol so that the former colonies would be taken seriously by Europe. She also took political heat in the press from the president’s political opponents when he was too popular to criticize.

And there are women like Esther Reed, married to the president of Pennsylvania, who, with Benjamin Franklin’s daughter Sarah Bache, organized a drive to raise money for Washington’s troops at Valley Forge. In 1780 the women raised more than three hundred thousand dollars. Reed wrote a famous patriotic broadside titled The Sentiments of an American Woman, calling on women to wear simpler clothing and hairstyles in order to save money to contribute to the cause. It worked! The women who ran the boarding houses of Philadelphia where the men stayed while writing the now sacred documents of America had their quite considerable say about the affairs of state as well.

This will be the story of some of those women, as learned through their seldom seen letters and diaries, and the letters from the men to them. It will be a story of the beginnings of the nation as viewed from the distaff side. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 27, 1943
• Where—New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
• Education—Wellesley College
• Awards—Emmy Award, Edward R. Murrow Award, Everett
McKinley Dirksen (all for journalism)
• Currently—outside Washington, D.C.

Cokie Roberts, author of We Are Our Mothers' Daughters, is the political commentator for ABC News and serves as Senior News Analyst for National Public Radio. From 1996-2002 she and Sam Donaldson co-anchored the weekly ABC interview program This Week. Roberts co-authored From This Day Forward with her husband Steven V. Roberts, and together they write a weekly column syndicated in newspapers around the country by United Media and serve as contributing editors to USA Weekend. (From Barnes & Noble.)

More
Cokie Roberts, née Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs received the sobriquet "Cokie" from her brother Tommy, who could not pronounce "Corinne". Cokie Roberts is the third child of former ambassador and long-time Democratic Congresswoman from Louisiana Lindy Boggs and of the late Hale Boggs, also a Democratic Congressman from Louisiana who was Majority Leader of the House of Representatives.

Roberts graduated from the Stone Ridge School outside Washington, D.C. in 1960 and then Wellesley College in 1964 where she received a BA in Political Science. She has been married to Steven V. Roberts, a professor and fellow journalist, since 1966. They currently reside in Bethesda, Maryland. She and her husband have two children, and six grandchildren. Her daughter, Rebecca Roberts, is also a journalist and was one of the hosts of POTUS '08 on XM Radio, which offered live daily coverage of the 2008 presidential election.

Cokie Roberts serves as a senior news analyst for NPR, where she was the congressional correspondent for more than 10 years. In addition to her work for NPR, Roberts is a political commentator for ABC News, serving as an on-air analyst for the network.

Roberts was the co-anchor of the ABC News' Sunday morning broadcast, This Week with Sam Donaldson & Cokie Roberts from 1996 to 2002, while also serving as the chief congressional analyst for ABC News. She covered politics, Congress and public policy, reporting for World News Tonight and other ABC News broadcasts.

Before joining ABC News in 1988, Roberts was a contributor to PBS in the evening television news program The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. Her coverage of the Iran-Contra Affair for that program won her the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting in 1988. Prior to joining NPR, Roberts was a reporter for CBS News in Athens, Greece. Roberts is also a former president of the Radio and Television Correspondent's Association.

Roberts has won numerous awards, such as the Edward R. Murrow Award, the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for coverage of Congress and a 1991 Emmy Award for her contribution to "Who is Ross Perot.

She is the author of the national bestseller We Are Our Mother's Daughters as well as Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Founding Mothers is essentially a series of entertaining mini-biographies and engaging vignettes. Roberts fleshes out familiar textbook figures like Abigail Adams or Dolley Madison, and rescues more obscure women from the footnotes of academic dissertations.
Amanda Fortini - New York Times

With Founding Mothers, Roberts fills a gap in our coverage of the era without straying far from the familiar story of colonial resistance, the struggle for independence and the climactic writing of the U.S. Constitution. We don't lose sight of the white male titans who built the nation; we just see them from the vantage point of the women they wooed and the families they worried about—usually at a distance—during America's longest war.
Joyce Appleby - Washington Post

Exploiting a wide range of historical evidence from military records to recipes, private correspondence, pamphlets and songs, Roberts succeeds in presenting something entirely new on a topic seemingly otherwise exhausted … Founding Mothers is a welcome addition to American Revolution biography, which is saturated by the lives of the Founding Fathers. It fills in blanks and adds substance, detail and dimension to what until now has seemed a strangely distant and utterly masculine mythology.
Maria Fish - USA Today

ABC News political commentator and NPR news analyst Roberts didn't intend this as a general history of women's lives in early America-she just wanted to collect some great "stories of the women who influenced the Founding Fathers." For while we know the names of at least some of these women (Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Eliza Pinckney), we know little about their roles in the Revolutionary War, the writing of the Constitution, or the politics of our early republic. In rough chronological order, Roberts introduces a variety of women, mostly wives, sisters or mothers of key men, exploring how they used their wit, wealth or connections to influence the men who made policy. As high-profile players married into each other's families, as wives died in childbirth and husbands remarried, it seems as if early America-or at least its upper crust-was indeed a very small world. Roberts's style is delightfully intimate and confiding: on the debate over Mrs. Benedict Arnold's infamy, she proclaims, "Peggy was in it from the beginning." Roberts also has an ear for juicy quotes; she recounts Aaron Burr's mother, Esther, bemoaning that when talking to a man with "mean thoughts of women," her tongue "hangs pretty loose," so she "talked him quite silent." In addition to telling wonderful stories, Roberts also presents a very readable, serviceable account of politics-male and female-in early America. If only our standard history textbooks were written with such flair!
Publishers Weekly

When most people think about those who helped fight for the independence of and create the government of the United States, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin come to mind. They rarely mention Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, or Eliza Pinckney. However, these and many other women played a significant role, including raising money for the troops, lobbying their spouses to fight for liberty and independence, and eventually hosting events where members of government could meet and discuss issues in a civilized manner. Roberts provides details on the lives and activities of these women and how they helped the country to survive. Though the book is fascinating, the author detracts from the work with her reading; she makes asides that do not appear to fit within the story and is overly strident as if she demands that we listen to her and believe what she is telling us or else. Another narrator might have been more effective. However, Founding Mothers will find a home in most public and academic libraries, especially those with strong women's studies and early American history collections. —Danna Bell-Russel, Library of Congress
Library Journal

Political correspondent Roberts...offers a look at the women—mostly wives and mothers—who supported the men credited with creating the U.S.... [She] offers a much-needed look at the unheralded sacrifices and heroism of colonial women. —Vanessa Bush
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. What inspired you to read Founding Mothers? Why do you suppose the contributions of women in the Revolutionary era have been largely overlooked by historians? Would the founding of the nation have occurred without these women?

2. Which woman would you say had the single greatest impact during the Revolution? How about during the first years of the new government?

3. Despite a lack of legal and social rights, including the right to own property and receive a formal education, how did the women presented in Founding Mothers assert their authority and exercise their intelligence?

4. How did life differ for women depending on where they lived—the North versus the South, the city versus rural areas? How else did geographical circumstances impact their lives?

5. Women often accompanied their husbands to army camps during the war, including Martha Washington, Kitty Greene, and Lucy Knox. Were you surprised they chose to do this? How did these three women in particular contribute to the often harsh life of a military camp and foster the war efforts?

6. By telling the stories of our Founding Mothers, this book also sheds light on the men of the time. Did you learn anything new about these men, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, seeing them from the perspective of their female contemporaries?

7. How important was the "civilizing" role that women played in the years leading up to, during, and after the Revolution? Can you reference examples from the book that show how integral it was for the women to be able to step in and "calm down the men," or even to act as intermediaries, as Abigail Adams did in the dispute between her husband and James Madison?

8. Catharine Macaulay supported the American Revolution and was a vocal proponent of democratic governments in general. Why did Macaulay, an Englishwoman, take such an interest in the American cause? How did she contribute to it?

9. How did Martha Washington define the role of First Lady? Are her influences still evident today? Her political savvy was remarkable, but is there anything that can be learned from Martha Washington on a personal level?

10. Only a limited number of women could have accomplished what Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren did — those who had access to the men shaping the future of the nation. What about the women who didn't have the advantage of providing direct counsel or publishing their discourses? How did they contribute to the Revolutionary War and the founding of the nation?

11. Cokie Roberts intersperses her thoughts and commentary throughout the book. Does this enhance the narrative? In what ways?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Four in the Garden
Rick Hocker, 2014
Hocker Press
342 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780991557707

Summary
An unusual retelling of the Garden of Eden story, Four in the Garden is a thought-provoking allegory of one's relationship with God. In this spiritual fantasy, Creator makes only one human, named Cherished. Instead of creating a second human to be a companion to Cherished, Creator desires to fill that role. Can this relationship work?

This inspirational book challenges the reader to trust in God because trust is the means by which we are transformed. To aid contemplation and spiritual growth, Four in the Garden is divided into short thematic chapters.

Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1960
• Where—Oakland, California, USA
• Education—B.S., California Polytechnic State University
• Currently—lives in Martinez, California

Rick Hocker is a game programmer and artist. In 2004, he sustained a back injury that left him bed-ridden in excruciating pain for six months, followed by a long recovery. He faced the challenges of disability, loss of income and mounting debt. After emerging from this dark time, he discovered that profound growth had occurred. Three years later, he had a dream that inspired him to write his book, Four in the Garden. His intent was to illustrate one's growth toward deep communion with God and to share the insights he gained from the personal transformation that resulted from his back injury. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow Rick on Facebook.

Book Reviews
"Four in the Garden is a well-told and inspired tale about learning to trust in God. A spiritual message - complete with action, suspense, mystery, and some unforgettable characters and spectacular imagery. I believe that it may be destined to be a modern-day classic, alongside the works of C.S. Lewis, Hannah Hurnard, and other great authors.”
—Shauna McFadden, Long Beach, CA

“Not often does a writer appear on the literary scene with such an unforgettable story as Four in the Garden. A beautifully written, emotionally fulfilling read.”
—Sue Clark
Award winning writer of Is Anybody Listening

“Awesome Book! Well written and thought provoking! CS Lewis meets Eckart Tolle meets George Lucas.”
—Anthony L. Sawyer, Eugene, OR

“How fortunate I feel to have stumbled onto this remarkable, beautifully written and immensely thought provoking book. I found myself highlighting sections and quotes, often rereading them because they were so articulately written and deeply meaningful. I was impressed by the author’s ability to take aspects of spirituality and create a work that is altogether new, fresh, and completely inspired.”
—Keli Martinez, Pleasanton, CA

“Four in the Garden is a symbolic narrative bathed in spiritual meaning. It is a treasure chest overflowing with nuggets of truth. It challenges the reader to search out their own soul. Four in the Garden is one book I will read again and again.”
—Cheryl E. Rodriguez for Readers' Favorite

“Four in the Garden is simply one of those books you just hate to put down. I was drawn into the story line immediately, and thought it was a great way to demonstrate "Creator" and all that a spiritual life entails.”
—Amy Vey, Friendship, WI

“Rick Hocker has written a unique spiritual fantasy of a transcendental ordeal. His description of the ecstatic mystical experience is unparalleled.”
—David Brin
Author of An American Musician Visits Cremona

“Your book really helped me. I am now extremely happy in life. I was struggling for years. Art that inspires one to seek within and find truth through the painful act of living is truly priceless. Keep it up!”
—Tony S., Oregon

“Four in the Garden brought a time of spiritual renewal for me. The author brought to light in a creative, refreshing way the potential we have for experiencing intimacy with God.”
—Jim Strouse, Vancouver, WA

“How often have we heard someone say that if there was just one person in existence God would have gone through the whole process for that one. Hocker's book develops that idea. I liked how Cherished, the lead character, didn't have any shortcuts to the conclusion. I recommend it highly. I know I'll be rereading it over and again!”
—Bill Caldwell, Joplin, MO

“I found the spiritual nature of the book genuine, wise and thoughtful. I underlined something, I cried at the end and I'll probably read it again.”
—Barbara Cole Brooks, Martinez, CA

“This is a great book that tells a story that somehow everyone has gone through. I just loved it.”
—Jorge Moreno, Mexico

“Four in the Garden is a delightful and multifaceted read. This is a perfect BOOK CLUB read to bring forth a great discussion. I plan to read it again, with highlighter in hand, to mark and remember the wisdom, beautifully stated on each page.”
—Janet Piper, San Leandro, CA

“This is probably the best description of a personal relationship with a higher power that exists anywhere!”
—Melinda Hills for Readers' Favorite

“The journey for Cherished was truly about learning to trust, and it made me look at myself in that aspect - I learned a lot from that reflection. The story was thought-provoking, emotional, and transforming.”
—Michael Darling, Palm Springs, CA

“Rick Hocker's Four in the Garden challenges the reader and offers guidance even when all seems lost. I enjoyed the fact that the book had a message of where true hope and direction comes from.”
—Cyrus Webb
media personality, literary advocate and award-winning author
http://www.cyruswebbpresents.com <http://www.cyruswebbpresents.com/>

“Four in the Garden is an allegorical story similar to the writings of C.S. Lewis. This book definitely inspired me to trust more fully in God. I highly recommend it!”
—Doug McCoy, Pleasant Hill, CA

“This is an interesting book from beginning to end, and it truly makes you think about a lot of different things. This book is an inspiration in many ways as well as being a solid, entertaining read.”
—Kathryn Bennett for Readers' Favorite

“I flew through the first hundred pages, devouring the richness of the imagery and the comfort of the author's writing style. With each chapter I find insights, gentle ways to view life very differently, without any attempt to drag me into a belief.”
—Glenn Gebhardt, Ripon, CA

“Four In The Garden is an amazing fantasy-allegory; a story about the creation of one human by God. Told with clarity, pathos, and vivid detail, Four In the Garden is a refreshing read about hope and human triumph.”
—Alex Davis, San Francisco, CA

“The spiritual journey is very rewarding and helps readers delve into their inner selves. A very original story that is inspirational and uplifting with its unique plot.”
—Mamta Madhavan for Readers' Favorite

“Creative, ingenious, enlightening! Each time I picked up the book I immediately was re-engaged and challenged to consider the nuggets of wisdom found in that chapter! If you were enamored with the colorful, creative Harry Potter series then you already know how fun reading this book will be.”
—Sandra Wing, Pleasanton, CA

“A beautiful story of man's relationship with God, through fantasy, that leads the reader step-by-step to discovery of life's greatest truths of love, trust and redemption.”
—Lucy Hart, Concord, CA

“It caused me to think about the deeper meaning of life. I highly recommend it.”
—Karen Lee, Orinda, CA

“A brilliant, thought provoking piece of work. The imagery, the fantastic descriptions, made me feel as if I was walking along in the Garden. A great read.”
—Dennis Carreiro, Orlando, Florida

Discussion Questions
1. The theme of the book is that life can transform us if we trust. How did the book illustrate that theme? What is your understanding of transformation and its importance?

2. The story is told in first person so that the reader would feel as though they were experiencing the story firsthand. In what situations did you relate to Cherished?

3. What section or scene was the most meaningful to you and why?

4. What situations surprised you? Looking back, can you see the clues and foreshadowing that led up to those surprises?

5. What elements of the Garden of Eden story did you see in the book? In what ways did the book differ?

6. Although the book is classified as fantasy, the author wrote about spiritual realities he believed to be true. What elements in the story do you believe are true?

7. How did Cherished grow in his understanding of Creator? How did his relationship with Creator change over time?

8. In what ways did Radiance change? How did Blaze change? In what ways was Blaze stuck?

9. Did you find it easy or difficult to sympathize with Blaze? Could you identify with him in any way?

10. The book covered a number of difficult topics, such as suffering, free will and forgiveness. Which of the author’s explorations of a topic impacted you the most and why?

11. The story explored the tension between dependence and independence. What conclusions did the story make regarding free will and independence?

12. Creator’s love was a constant in Cherished’s life, but that love sometimes expressed itself in discipline or withdrawal. Identify the various facets of love presented in the story. How might you define love in such a way as to include these facets?

13. Cherished often made mistakes and sabotaged his relationship with Creator. How did Creator respond to Cherished in these situations? What was Creator’s highest priority for Cherished?

14. How did the story affect your understanding of God and/or your relationship to God?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

top of page (summary)

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner, 2005
Harper Collins
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060731335

Summary
Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime?

These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life — from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing — and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives — how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.

What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and — if the right questions are asked — is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter.

Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world. (From the publisher.)

Author Bios
• Steven Levitt is a Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and an editor of the Journal of Political Economy. In January 2004 he was awarded the John Bates Clark medal—for the economist under 40 who has made the greatest contribution to the discipline—by the American Economic Association.

• Stephen J. Dubner is the author of Confessions of a Hero Worshiper and Turbulent Souls and is a former writer and editor at the New York Times Magazine. He lives in New York City with his family. (Author bios from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Economists can seem a little arrogant at times. They have a set of techniques and habits of thought that they regard as more ''rigorous'' than those of other social scientists. When they are successful — one thinks of Amartya Sen's important work on the causes of famines, or Gary Becker's theory of marriage and rational behavior — the result gets called economics. It might appear presumptuous of Steven Levitt to see himself as an all-purpose intellectual detective, fit to take on whatever puzzle of human behavior grabs his fancy. But on the evidence of Freakonomics, the presumption is earned.
Jim Holt - New York Times

Levitt (economics, U. of Chicago) and writing collaborator Dubner (a writer for the New York Times and The New Yorker) dub the material in this work "freakonomics" because Levitt uses analytical tools from economics to address a range of questions that, at first glance, might seem to be far removed from the discipline of the "dismal science." They consider questions such as how to determine if teachers are aiding in students' cheating on standardized tests, the impact of information asymmetry on the operation of the Ku Klux Klan, how the organizational structure of crack gangs resemble other businesses, and the influence of parents on child development.
Book News

(Starred review.) Forget your image of an economist as a crusty professor worried about fluctuating interest rates: Levitt focuses his attention on more intimate real-world issues, like whether reading to your baby will make her a better student. Recognition by fellow economists as one of the best young minds in his field led to a profile in the New York Times, written by Dubner, and that original article serves as a broad outline for an expanded look at Levitt's search for the hidden incentives behind all sorts of behavior. There isn't really a grand theory of everything here, except perhaps the suggestion that self-styled experts have a vested interest in promoting conventional wisdom even when it's wrong. Instead, Dubner and Levitt deconstruct everything from the organizational structure of drug-dealing gangs to baby-naming patterns. While some chapters might seem frivolous, others touch on more serious issues, including a detailed look at Levitt's controversial linkage between the legalization of abortion and a reduced crime rate two decades later. Underlying all these research subjects is a belief that complex phenomena can be understood if we find the right perspective. Levitt has a knack for making that principle relevant to our daily lives, which could make this book a hit. Malcolm Gladwell blurbs that Levitt "has the most interesting mind in America," an invitation Gladwell's own substantial fan base will find hard to resist.
Publishers Weekly

Economist Levitt and Dubner (Turbulent Souls) team up in this intriguing, quirky look at life and how to understand better the world in a new way. In 2003, the New York Times Magazine sent Dubner to do a profile of Levitt, and the idea for this book was born. Levitt looks at a variety of data, including KKK membership rolls, online dating services, and names for children, and finds in the math underlying answers to difficult questions that have a freakish quality. The quirky chapters include the commonality between schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers, why drug dealers still live with their mothers, and what makes a perfect parent. The crisp, bright narration by Dubner enlivens this title, which will appeal to fans of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point as well as to economists. Recommended for university libraries supporting a business and economics curriculum and larger public libraries. —Dale Farris, Groves, TX.
Library Journal

Why do drug dealers live at home? Levitt (Economics/Univ. of Chicago) and Dubner (Confessions of a Hero Worshiper, 2003, etc.), who profiled Levitt for the New York Times, team up to demolish conventional wisdom. To call Levitt a "rogue economist" may be a tad hyperbolic. Certainly this epitome of antistyle ("his appearance is High Nerd: a plaid button-down shirt, nondescript khakis and a braided belt, brown sensible shoes") views the workaday world with different eyes; the young economist teases out meaning from juxtapositions that simply would not occur to other researchers. Consider this, for instance: in the mid-1990s, just when the Clinton administration projected it was about to skyrocket, crime in the U.S. fell markedly. And why? Because, Levitt hazarded a few years ago, of the emergent effects of the Roe v. Wade decision: legalized abortion prevented the births of millions of poor people who, beset by social adversity, were "much more likely than average to become criminals." The suggestion, Dubner writes, "managed to offend just about everyone," conservative and liberal alike, but it had high explanatory value. Levitt hasn't shied away from controversy in other realms, either, preferring to let the numbers speak for themselves: a young man named Jake will earn more job interviews than one with the same credentials named DeShawn; the TV game show The Weakest Link, like society as a whole, discriminates against the elderly and Hispanics; it is human nature to cheat, and the higher up in the organization a person rises, the more likely it is that he or she will cheat. Oh, yes, and street-level drug dealers live at home with their moms because they have to; most earn well belowminimum wage but accept the bad pay and dangerous conditions to get a shot at the big time, playing in what in effect is a tournament. "A crack gang works pretty much like the standard capitalist enterprise," Levitt and Dubner write, "you have to be near the top of the pyramid to make a big wage." An eye-opening, and most interesting, approach to the world.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Most people think of economics as a dry subject matter concerning monetary and fiscal matters. How does Freakonomics change this definition?

2. Freakonomics argues that morality represent the way we'd like the world to work, whereas economics can show how the world really does work. Do you agree?

3. Freakonomics lists three varieties of incentives: social, moral, and financial. Can you think of others?

4. Freakonomics shows how the conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed. What are some instances of conventional wisdom that you've always doubted?

5. Does it seem as though "experts" truly hold too much power in the modern world, or are we lucky to have them?

6 .What are some issues in your daily life toward which you can apply some Freakonomics-style thinking?

7. What were some of the most convincing arguments put forth in Freakonomics? What were some of the least convincing?

8. How does the argument linking Roe v. Wade to a drop in crime change your thinking about abortion?

9. How does the view of parenting in Freakonomics jibe with your own view?

10. After reading Freakonomics, do you think that cheating is more prevalent or less prevalent than you thought it was before you read the book?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Page 4 of 15

GetLit

LitClub

LitResources

LitBlog

LitFood

LitCourse