Non-Fiction - Results from #20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summary
The definitive account of the kidnapping and trial that defined an insane era in American history

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army.

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

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

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

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

Or did she? (From the publisher.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Talk about law enforcement's bungling of the case.

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

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

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

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

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

Why was he the subject of such loathing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Kyle writes honestly about the pain and suffering of war, especially the loss of two of his closest teammates. Did reading his account make you think about the costs of war and what it means for both soldiers and their families?

5. What wisdom is there to be gained by reading American Sniper? Did you come away with a different perspective of war? Did the book underscore your beliefs about our engagement in the Middle East...or did it challenge your beliefs?

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American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West
Nate Blakeslee, 2017
Crown/Archetype
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101902783

Summary
The enthralling story of the rise and reign of O-Six, the celebrated Yellowstone wolf, and the people who loved or feared her.

Before men ruled the earth, there were wolves. Once abundant in North America, these majestic creatures were hunted to near extinction in the lower 48 states by the 1920s. But in recent decades, conservationists have brought wolves back to the Rockies, igniting a battle over the very soul of the West.

With novelistic detail, Nate Blakeslee tells the gripping story of one of these wolves, O-Six, a charismatic alpha female named for the year of her birth. Uncommonly powerful, with gray fur and faint black ovals around each eye, O-Six is a kind and merciful leader, a fiercely intelligent fighter, and a doting mother.

She is beloved by wolf watchers, particularly renowned naturalist Rick McIntyre, and becomes something of a social media star, with followers around the world.

But as she raises her pups and protects her pack, O-Six is challenged on all fronts: by hunters, who compete with wolves for the elk they both prize; by cattle ranchers who are losing livestock and have the ear of politicians; and by other Yellowstone wolves who are vying for control of the park’s stunningly beautiful Lamar Valley.

These forces collide in American Wolf, a riveting multigenerational saga of hardship and triumph that tells a larger story about the ongoing cultural clash in the West — between those fighting for a vanishing way of life and those committed to restoring one of the country’s most iconic landscapes. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Nate Blakeslee is a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly. His first book, Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town, was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Texas Institute of Letters non-fiction prize, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2005. The Washington Post called it one of the most important books about wrongful convictions ever written. He lives in Austin, Texas with his family. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Most compelling is the story of O-Six, Yellow Stone’s biggest celebrity. Named for the year she was born, she is beautiful and mesmerizing, admired by thousands of fans across the U.S. who have been captivated by her exploits. We also follow a single hunter whose path she crosses.… But this story is larger than a single wolf and a single hunter. American Wolf Is an epic tale of generations of alphas and pups, of competing interests and declining fortunes, human resentments and grudging compromise — all played out against Nature’s eternal beauty. The book is thought-provoking and eye-opening — and a superb read. Highly recommended.
P.J. Adler - LitLovers

In American Wolf, Blakeslee does a fine job presenting the wolf’s basic biological requirements, from abundant prey source (in Yellowstone, the overpopulation of elk) to secure denning sites. But he also illustrates the far more complicated and ever-dynamic human elements affecting the wolves. The politics of ranchers — some for wolves, others against — and antigovernment zealots, hunting outfitters, Congress, courts and judges, and tourism operators all exert a sculpting pressure on where and how and if the wolf can live.
Rick Bass - New York Times Book Review

American Wolf…explores the clash over Canis lupus, the gray wolf, with a story told through the life of O-Six and the humans who loved her. Author Nate Blakeslee… tells a masterful and elegant tale. Nature enthusiasts or lovers of narrative-nonfiction will enjoy the book
Associated Press

Engaging.… [A] must read for researchers, citizen scientists, and visitors to Yellowstone, where the story of the wolves continues to evolve.
Science

[American Wolf] reads like a novel.… [A] testament to the genius of Blakeslee’s tautly constructed narrative.
Outside

Blakeslee takes readers into the snowy [Lamar Valley], and deep into a genuinely human tale told with the energy and verve of a bestselling thriller. A tight, dense narrative, American Wolf races along like a predator on the hunt.
Texas Observer

(Starred review.) Beautiful, detailed.… [American Wolf] centers on the rise, reign, and family life of O-Six, matriarch of the Lamar Canyon pack and so well-known to park visitors that the New York Times gave her an obituary.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Utterly compelling.… Blakeslee’s masterly use of fiction writing techniques to ratchet up the tension will hook a wide swath of readers
Library Journal

(Starred review.) The fight…[over] Yellowstone’s wolves is embodied in O-Six’s story, told with great immediacy and empathy in a tale that reads like fiction. This one will grab readers and impel them into the heart of the conflict.
Booklist

American Wolf is an essential read for anyone interested in a fascinating piece of American history and learning more about an important issue that continues to plague the West. —Stephanie Coleman, Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver, CO
Indie Next List

In the main, Blakeslee's well-rendered story will be familiar to anyone who has followed the Yellowstone wolves, but those who have not will find this a solid overview of recent events—evenhanded but clearly and rightly on the side of the wolves.
Kirkus Reviews

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

1. Start, perhaps, by putting the wolf in a historical context. Talk about the wolf's place in American history: the original numbers at the beginning of colonization, the eradication programs, the wolf's near extinction, its listing and de-listing as a protected animal.

2. What have you learned about wolves after reading Blakeslee's book? What do they feed on, how do they survive the harsh landscape and winters, what are the social hierarchies within their packs or between packs? Did anything surprise you about them, their behavior, their food sources?

3. In what way does the wolf reflect this country's cultural/political divide? Talk about the various factions … and lay out their respective points of view regarding the rights of wolves to populate and propagate in the West.

4. What side of the argument do you place yourself on? Does Blakeslee do a good job of giving all sides a say — is he fair? Can you understand the points on the opposing sides, even if you might disagree with them?

5. Follow-up to Question 4: if there's a hero in the book, who would it be?

6. Is there a foreseeable solution to the wolf problem?

7. Ed Bangs, the Fish and Wildlife biologist who had directed the wolf recovery project since 1988, once observed that "What we normally mean by "education" is, I want someone else to know as much as I know so they'll have my values" (131 p.). Is that how you see the idea of educating the pubic — more as a means of rhetorical persuasion than providing information? Or do you believe Bangs's view is bit cynical? If so, then what does educating the public mean? Or what should it mean?

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

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And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready
Meaghan O'Connell, 2018
Little, Brown and Co.
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316393843

Summary
A raw, funny, and fiercely honest account of becoming a mother before feeling like a grown up.

When Meaghan O'Connell got accidentally pregnant in her twenties and decided to keep the baby, she realized that the book she needed—a brutally honest, agenda-free reckoning with the emotional and existential impact of motherhood—didn't exist.

So she decided to write it herself.

And Now We Have Everything is O'Connell's exploration of the cataclysmic, impossible-to-prepare-for experience of becoming a mother. With her dark humor and hair-trigger B.S. detector, O'Connell addresses the pervasive imposter syndrome that comes with unplanned pregnancy, the fantasies of a "natural" birth experience that erode maternal self-esteem, post-partum body and sex issues, and the fascinating strangeness of stepping into a new, not-yet-comfortable identity.

Channeling fears and anxieties that are still taboo and often unspoken, And Now We Have Everything is an unflinchingly frank, funny, and visceral motherhood story for our times, about having a baby and staying, for better or worse, exactly yourself. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Meaghan O'Connell's writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Longreads, and The Billfold, where she was an editor. She lives in Portland, OR, with her husband and young son. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
For every What to Expect When You're Expecting (and its ilk), there should be a What to Expect When You Weren't Expecting. But, strangely, there isn't, so Meaghan O'Connell has committed her experience of accidental pregnancy and motherhood to the page.
Elle

Stripping away the mythical fantasies of motherhood, O'Connell delivers a poignant and funny look at what it means to be a parent in our current time. The warts-and-all examination is powerful reading for anyone with or without kids.
Esquire

The kind of book I wished for when I was pregnant. Pulling no punches, the writing is blunt, honest...This should be required reading that your doctor hands you after you see the two pink lines on the pregnancy test.
BookRiot

Part memoir, part guidebook, And Now We Have Everything captures all the fears and anxieties mothers-to-be have, but still aren't allowed to say out loud. Smart, insightful, and searingly honest, Meghan O'Connell's exploration of motherhood should be on every expectant parent's baby registry.
Bustle

Frankly speaking, this is a must-read for anyone with a mother, anyone with a baby, anyone who knows anyone with a baby—anyone.
Refinery29

A well-written book that provides refreshingly candid insight into the physical and emotional changes that take place during pregnancy and early motherhood, times that are both "traumatic [and] transcendent.
Kirkus Reviews

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

THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS presume you are a woman and are pregnant or have been...

1. In the first essay of Meaghan O'Connell's book, she says, "A baby was the thing we were trying to keep out" and also "Part of me loved this feeling, of being steamrollled by life, of being totally fucked." Talk about those twin yet contradictory emotions as they relate to the author's experiences and to those you might have felt when you learned you were pregnant.

2. Follow-up to Question 1: In what other ways would you say that O'Connell explodes—or at the very least, undermines—the myth of the glories of motherhood?

3. How much of O'Connell's roller-coaster ride throughout her book resonantes with your own experiences, either in pregnancy, labor, or the earliest weeks with your first child?

4. Are parts of this book cringe-inducing? Do parts of it make you uncomfortable?

5. In the chapter "Maternal Instincts," O'Connell talks about feeling trapped between, again, two extremes: "nurturer and stalker, human and animal." What does she mean?

6. Early on, O'Connell obsesses over the baby's safety. Do you think that our culture, with the constant hype of life's dangers, has made parenthood feel more dangerous than it is? Not to say that we shouldn't be extra vigilant, but should we "be afraid, be very afraid!"—remaining in a constant state of heightened alert? Or is it wise to be extra cautious, given that new parenthood comes with no instruction manual?

7. Presuming you are already a mother, do you wish this book had been available to you during your pregnancy?

8. Talk about the toll on O'Connell's relationship with her new husband and on her career.

9. What is the significance of the book's title: And Now We Have Everything? Is it ironic or sincere?

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

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Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves
Laurel Braitman, 2014
Simon & Schuster
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451627008

Summary
For the first time, a historian of science draws evidence from across the world to show how humans and other animals are astonishingly similar when it comes to their feelings and the ways in which they lose their minds.

Charles Darwin developed his evolutionary theories by looking at physical differences in Galapagos finches and fancy pigeons. Alfred Russell Wallace investigated a range of creatures in the Malay Archipelago. Laurel Braitman got her lessons closer to home—by watching her dog.

Oliver snapped at flies that only he could see, ate Ziploc bags, towels, and cartons of eggs. He suffered debilitating separation anxiety, was prone to aggression, and may even have attempted suicide. Her experience with Oliver forced Laurel to acknowledge a form of continuity between humans and other animals that, first as a biology major and later as a PhD student at MIT, she’d never been taught in school. Nonhuman animals can lose their minds. And when they do, it often looks a lot like human mental illness.

Thankfully, all of us can heal. As Laurel spent three years traveling the world in search of emotionally disturbed animals and the people who care for them, she discovered numerous stories of recovery: parrots that learn how to stop plucking their feathers, dogs that cease licking their tails raw, polar bears that stop swimming in compulsive circles, and great apes that benefit from the help of human psychiatrists. How do these animals recover? The same way we do: with love, with medicine, and above all, with the knowledge that someone understands why we suffer and what can make us feel better.

After all of the digging in the archives of museums and zoos, the years synthesizing scientific literature, and the hours observing dog parks, wildlife encounters, and amusement parks, Laurel found that understanding the emotional distress of animals can help us better understand ourselves. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Ventura, California, USA
• Education— B.A. Cornell University; Ph.D., MIT
• Awards—TED fellowship
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California

Laurel Braitman is a science historian, writer, and a TED Fellow. She was born and raised on a citrus ranch in Southern California where she was surrounded, as she says on her website, by "a small herd of donkeys, two parrots, a series of sickly hamsters, three dogs, a bunch of barn cats that didn’t like me, a rabbit named Violetta, an armored catfish named Harold, and a tarantula."

Braitman received her B.A. from Cornell University in biology and writing. She earned her Ph.D. in the history of science from MIT. In addition to her TED fellowship, she is an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts and frequently collaborates with musicians and visual artists.

Her book Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves was published in 2014. She has also written for Pop Up Magazine, The New Inquiry, Salon, and a variety of other publications. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/19/2014.)

Book Reviews
In this illuminating contribution to the burgeoning field of animal studies, senior TED fellow Braitman suggests that the key to understanding mental illness might lie in our pets..... [A[nalytical scrutiny would not be the way to approach this book, whose continuous dose of hope should prove medicinal for humans and animals alike.
Publishers Weekly

Eschewing statistics and experimental data in favor of her own stories and historical anecdotes, Braitman, a trained historian of science, appeals directly to her readers' emotions with tales of anguished elephants and heartsick gorillas.... [E]ngaging, compassionate read... but is unlikely to convert skeptics. Readers...may be put off by Braitman's inclusion of details from her personal life a. —Kate Horowitz, Washington, DC
Library Journal

Humans aren’t the only animals that suffer from emotional thunderstorms, and author Braitman came to the ...conclusion...that nonhuman animals can suffer from mental illnesses that mirror those that humans endure.... Acknowledging mental illness in other animals, and helping them recover, obviously can be a comforting experience. —Nancy Bent
Booklist

[Braitman] is thankfully willing to allow..."that other animals have many special abilities that we don't have and this may extend to emotional states." Braitman's gradual accretion of reasons to believe in animal emotional states that we can relate to, including the loopy ones, gives pause and sparks curiosity.
Kirkus Reviews

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Barbara Kingsolver, 2007
HarperCollins
370 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060852566

Summary
Hang on for the ride: with characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table.

Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life, and diversified farms at the center of the American diet. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 8, 1955
• Where—Annapolis, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., DePauw University; M.S., University of
Arizona
• Awards—Orange Prize
• Currently—lives on a farm in Virginia

Barbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955. She grew up "in the middle of an alfalfa field," in the part of eastern Kentucky that lies between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields. While her family has deep roots in the region, she never imagined staying there herself. "The options were limited--grow up to be a farmer or a farmer's wife."

Kingsolver has always been a storyteller: "I used to beg my mother to let me tell her a bedtime story." As a child, she wrote stories and essays and, beginning at the age of eight, kept a journal religiously. Still, it never occurred to Kingsolver that she could become a professional writer. Growing up in a rural place, where work centered mainly on survival, writing didn't seem to be a practical career choice. Besides, the writers she read, she once explained, "were mostly old, dead men. It was inconceivable that I might grow up to be one of those myself..."

Kingsolver left Kentucky to attend DePauw University in Indiana, where she majored in biology. She also took one creative writing course, and became active in the last anti-Vietnam War protests. After graduating in 1977, Kingsolver lived and worked in widely scattered places. In the early eighties, she pursued graduate studies in biology and ecology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she received a Masters of Science degree. She also enrolled in a writing class taught by author Francine Prose, whose work Kingsolver admires.

Kingsolver's fiction is rich with the language and imagery of her native Kentucky. But when she first left home, she says, "I lost my accent.... [P]eople made terrible fun of me for the way I used to talk, so I gave it upslowly and became something else." During her years in school and two years spent living in Greece and France she supported herself in a variety of jobs: as an archaeologist, copy editor, X-ray technician, housecleaner, biological researcher and translator of medical documents.

After graduate school, a position as a science writer for the University of Arizona soon led her into feature writing for journals and newspapers. Her numerous articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Nation, the New York Times, and Smithsonian, and many of them are included in the collection, High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. In 1986 she won an Arizona Press Club award for outstanding feature writing, and in 1995, after the publication of High Tide in Tucson, Kingsolver was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, DePauw University.

Kingsolver credits her careers in scientific writing and journalism with instilling in her a writer's discipline and broadening her "fictional possiblities." Describing herself as a shy person who would generally prefer to stay at home with her computer, she explains that "journalism forces me to meet and talk with people I would never run across otherwise."

From 1985 through 1987, Kingsolver was a freelance journalist by day, but she was writing fiction by night. Married to a chemist in 1985, she suffered from insomnia after becoming pregnant the following year. Instead of following her doctor's recommendation to scrub the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush, Kingsolver sat in a closet and began to write The Bean Trees, a novel about a young woman who leaves rural Kentucky (accent intact) and finds herself living in urban Tucson.

The Bean Trees, originally published in 1988 and reissued in a special ten-year anniversary edition in 1998, was enthusiastically received by critics. But, perhaps more important to Kingsolver, the novel was read with delight and, even, passion by ordinary readers. "A novel can educate to some extent," she told Publishers Weekly. "But first, a novel has to entertain—that's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessiblity. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with—who may not often read anything but the Sears catalogue—to read my books."

For Kingsolver, writing is a form of political activism. When she was in her twenties she discovered Doris Lessing. "I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do, if I could ever do that."

The Bean Trees was followed by the collection, Homeland and Other Stories (1989), the novels Animal Dreams (1990), and Pigs in Heaven (1993), and the bestselling High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now and Never (1995). Kingsolver has also published a collection of poetry, Another America: Otra America (Seal Press, 1992, 1998), and a nonfiction book, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of l983 (ILR Press/Cornell University Press, 1989, 1996). The Poisonwood Bible (1998) earned accolades at home and abroad, and was an Oprah's Book Club selection.

Barbara's Prodigal Summer (2000), is a novel set in a rural farming community in southern Appalachia. Small Wonder, April 2002, presents 23 wonderfully articulate essays. Here Barbara raises her voice in praise of nature, family, literature, and the joys of everyday life while examining the genesis of war, violence, and poverty in our world.

Two additional books became best sellers. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle came in 2007, again to great acclaim. Non-fiction, the book recounts a year in the life of Kingsolver's family as they grew all their own food. The Lacuna, published two years later, is a fictional account of historical events in Mexico during the 1930, and moving into the U.S. during the McCarthy era of the 1950's.

Extras

• Barbara Kingsolver lives in Southern Applachia with her husband Steven Hopp, and her two daughters, Camille from a previous marriage, and Lily, who was born in 1996. When not writing or spending time with her family, Barbara gardens, cooks, hikes, and works as an environmental activist and human-rights advocate.

• Given that Barbara Kingsolver's work covers the psychic and geographical territories that she knows firsthand, readers often assume that her work is autobiographical. "There are little things that people who know me might recognize in my novels," she acknowledges. "But my work is not about me....

• If you want a slice of life, look out the window. An artist has to look out that window, isolate one or two suggestive things, and embroider them together with poetry and fabrication, to create a revelation. If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread. (Adapted from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
What is likely to win the most converts, though, is the joy Kingsolver takes in food. She isn’t just an ardent preserver, following the summertime canning rituals of her farming forebears. She’s also an ardent cook, and there’s some lovely food writing here.
Korby Kummer - New York Times

This is a serious book about important problems. Its concerns are real and urgent. It is clear, thoughtful, often amusing, passionate and appealing. It may give you a serious case of supermarket guilt, thinking of the energy footprint left by each out-of-season tomato, but you'll also find unexpected knowledge and gain the ability to make informed choices about what—and how—you're willing to eat.
Bunny Crumpacker - Washington Post

Anyone who read and appreciated The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan [see LitLovers Reading Guide] will want to read Barbara Kingsolver’s book.
Roanoke Times

Kingsolver dresses down the American food complex…These down-on-the-farm sections are inspiring and…compelling.
Outside Magazine

In her engaging though sometimes preachy new book, Kingsolver recounts the year her family attempted to eat only what they could grow on their farm in Virginia or buy from local sources. The book's bulk, written and read by Kingsolver in a lightly twangy voice filled with wonder and enthusiasm, proceeds through the seasons via delightful stories about the history of their farmhouse, the exhausting bounty of the zucchini harvest, turkey chicks hatching and so on. In long sections, however, she gets on a soapbox about problems with industrial food production, fast food and Americans' ignorance of food's origins, and despite her obvious passion for the issues, the reading turns didactic and loses its pace, momentum and narrative. Her daughter Camille contributes recipes, meal plans and an enjoyable personal essay in a clear if rather monotonous voice. Hopp, Kingsolver's husband and an environmental studies professor, provides dry readings of the sidebars that have him playing "Dr. Scientist," as Kingsolver notes in an illuminating interview on the last disc. Though they may skip some of the more moralizing tracks, Kingsolver's fans and foodies alike will find this a charming, sometimes inspiring account of reconnecting with the food chain.
Publishers Weekly

Best-selling novelist Kingsolver and her family moved from Tucson, AZ, to the fertile lands of Southern Appalachia, where agriculture is an accepted excuse for absence from school, to undertake an experiment of sorts. The family joined the locavore movement, which promotes eating only what is locally raised, grown, and produced. This account of their ongoing experiment is a family affair: daughter Lily morphs into a poultry entrepreneur; daughter Camille, a college student, sprinkles her own anecdotes and seasonal menus throughout; and essays by Kingsolver's husband, Hopp, an academic, warn of the high cost of chemical pesticides, fossil fuels, and processed foods environmentally, financially, and on our health. Patience is a virtue in this undertaking, which calls for eating only what is in season; however, Kingsolver's passion for food and near sensual delight in what she pulls from her garden make the enterprise seem enticing. The author's narration is homey, folksy, and warm; Camille and Hopp narrate as well. Part memoir, part how-to, and part agricultural education, this book is both timely and entertaining. With Kingsolver's broad readership; a large movement toward organic, healthful eating; and heavy media attention on the subject, expect demand. Recommended for public libraries.
Risa Getman - Library Journal

With some assistance from her husband, Steven, and 19-year-old daughter, Camille, Kingsolver (Prodigal Summer, 2000, etc.) elegantly chronicles a year of back-to-the-land living with her family in Appalachia. After three years of drought, the author decamped from her longtime home in Arizona and set out with Steven, Camille and younger daughter Lily to inhabit fulltime his family's farm in Virginia. Their aim, she notes, was to "live in a place that could feed us," to grow their own food and join the increasingly potent movement led by organic growers and small exurban food producers. Kingsolver wants to know where her food is coming from: Her diary records her attempts to consume only those items grown locally and in season while eschewing foods that require the use of fossil fuels for transport, fertilizing and processing. (In one of biologist Steven's terrific sidebars, "Oily Food," he notes that 17 percent of the nation's energy is consumed by agriculture.) From her vegetable patch, Kingsolver discovered nifty ways to use plentiful available produce such as asparagus, rhubarb, wild mushrooms, honey, zucchini, pumpkins and tomatoes; she also spent a lot of time canning summer foods for winter. The family learned how to make cheese, visited organic farms and a working family farm in Tuscany, even grew and killed their own meat. "I'm unimpressed by arguments that condemn animal harvest," writes Kingsolver, "while ignoring, wholesale, the animal killing that underwrites vegetal foods." Elsewhere, Steven explores business topics such as the good economics of going organic; the losing battle in the use of pesticides; the importance of a restructured Farm Bill; mad cow disease; and fairtrade. Camille, meanwhile, offers anecdotes and recipes. Readers frustrated with the unhealthy, artificial food chain will take heart and inspiration here.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What was your perception of America's food industry prior to reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle? What did you learn from this book? How has it altered your views on the way food is acquired and consumed?

2. In what ways, if any, have you changed your eating habits since reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle? Depending on where you live—in an urban, suburban, or rural environment—what other steps would you like to take to modify your lifestyle with regard to eating local?

3. "It had felt arbitrary when we sat around the table with our shopping list, making our rules. It felt almost silly to us in fact, as it may now seem to you. Why impose restrictions on ourselves? Who cares?" asks Kingsolver in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle? Did you, in fact, care about Kingsolver's story and find it to be compelling? Why or why not? What was the family's aim for their year-long initiative, and did they accomplish that goal?

4. The writing of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was a family affair, with Kingsolver's husband, Steven L. Hopp, contributing factual sidebars and her daughter, Camille Kingsolver, serving up commentary and recipes. Did you find that these additional elements enhanced the book? How so? What facts or statistics in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle surprised you the most?

5. How does each member of the Kingsolver-Hopp family contribute during their year-long eating adventure? Were you surprised that the author's children not only participated in the endeavor but that they did so with such enthusiasm? Why or why not?

6. "A majority of North Americans do understand, at some level, that our food choices are politically charged," says Kingsolver, "affecting arenas from rural culture to international oil cartels and global climate change." How do politics affect America's food production and consumption? What global ramifications are there for the food choices we make?

7. Kingsolver advocates the pleasures of seasonal eating, but she acknowledges that many people would view this as deprivation "because we've grown accustomed to the botanically outrageous condition of having everything always." Do you believe that American society can—or will— overcome the need for instant gratification in order to be able to eat seasonally? How does Kingsolver present this aspect in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle? Did you get the sense that she and her family ever felt deprived in their eating options?

8. Kingsolver points out that eating what we want, when we want comes "at a price." The cost, she says, "is not measured in money, but in untallied debts that will be paid by our children in the currency of extinctions, economic unravelings, and global climate change." What responsibility do we bear for keeping the environment safe for future generations? How does eating locally factor in to this?

9. Kingsolver asserts that "we have dealt to today's kids the statistical hand of a shorter life expectancy than their parents, which would be us, the ones taking care of them." How is our "thrown-away food culture" a detriment to children's health? She also says, "We're raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket." What responsibility do parents have to teach their children about the value and necessity of a local food culture?

10. In what ways do Kingsolver's descriptions of the places she visited on her travels—Italy, New England, Montreal, and Ohio—enhance her portrayal of local and seasonal eating?

11. "Marketing jingles from every angle lure patrons to turn our backs on our locally owned stores, restaurants, and farms," says Kingsolver. "And nobody considers that unpatriotic." How much of a role do the media play in determining what Americans eat? Discuss the decline of America's diversified family farms, and what it means for the country as a whole.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition)
Anne Frank, 1947
Random House
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553577129

Summary
The journal of a Jewish girl in her early teens describes both the joys and torments of daily life, as well as typical adolescent thoughts, throughout two years spent in hiding with her family during the Nazi occupation of Holland.

For more than fifty years, Anne Frank's diary has moved millions with its testament to the human spirit's indestructibility, but readers have never seen the full text of this beloved book—until now. This new translation restores nearly one third of Anne's entries, excised by her father in previous editions, revealing her burgeoning sexuality, her stormy relationship with her mother, and more. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 12, 1929
• Where—Frankfurt, Germany
• Death—early March 1945
• Where—Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Germany
• Education: Jewish Lyceum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Anne and her family moved to Amsterdam in 1933 after the Nazis gained power in Germany, and were trapped by the occupation of the Netherlands, which began in 1940. As persecutions against the Jewish population increased, the family went into hiding in July 1942 in hidden rooms in her father Otto Frank's office building. After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps.

Seven months after her arrest, Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, within days of the death of her sister, Margot Frank. Her father Otto, the only survivor of the group, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that her diary had been saved, and his efforts led to its publication in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch and first published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl.

The diary, which was given to Anne on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944. It has been translated into many languages, has become one of the world's most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films. Anne Frank has been acknow-ledged for the quality of her writing, and has become one of the most renowned and discussed of Holocaust victims. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
It is a poignant, heartbreaking yet somehow heartwarming story, fresh with the dew of adolescence.
New York Herald Tribune

This startling new edition of Dutch Jewish teenager Anne Frank's classic diary-written in an Amsterdam warehouse, where for two years she hid from the Nazis with her family and friends-contains approximately 30% more material than the original 1947 edition. It completely revises our understanding of one of the most moving and eloquent documents of the Holocaust. The Anne we meet here is much more sarcastic, rebellious and vulnerable than the sensitive diarist beloved by millions. She rages at her mother, Edith, smolders with jealous resentment toward her sister, Margot, and unleashes acid comments at her roommates. Expanded entries provide a fuller picture of the tensions and quarrels among the eight people in hiding. Anne, who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, three months before her 16th birthday, candidly discusses her awakening sexuality in entries that were omitted from the 1947 edition by her father, Otto, the only one of the eight to survive the death camps. He died in 1980. This crisp, stunning translation provides an unvarnished picture of life in the "secret annex." In the end, Anne's teen angst pales beside her profound insights, her self-discovery and her unbroken faith in good triumphing over evil.
Publishers Weekly

This new translation of Frank's famous diary includes material about her emerging sexuality and her relationship with her mother that was originally excised by Frank's father, the only family member to survive the Holocaust.
Library Journal

A revision of this great document of WWII, considerably expanding the extraordinarily popular work originally published in 1947. A couple dozen entries have been added.
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. After the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, the Dutch people were immediately faced with the question of choice: how to respond to the Nazi occupation. Tens of thousands of Dutch people followed Hitler, and millions more looked the other way. Eventually, a resistance movement began to grow. The Nazis needed Dutch collaborators to carry out their fascist decrees.

What would have influenced someone to become a collaborator? What factors would have encouraged someone to join the resistance? Do you think these factors were based on personal characteristics or political beliefs? What was the price of resistance during the war? What was the price of collaboration?

2. Anne Frank and her family were German refugees who resettled and tried to build their lives in the Netherlands. Although the Franks were proud of their German heritage, their feelings toward Germany became very complicated during the war. Anne wrote: "Fine specimens of humanity, those Germans, and to think I'm actually one of them! No. that's not true, Hitler took away our nationality long ago. And besides, there are no greater enemies on earth than the Germans and Jews." (October 9, 1942.) Although Anne had lived in the Netherlands since 1934, she did not become a Dutch citizen.

Did Anne have a nationality? If not, were Anne's civil rights protected by any nation? By 1939 some 250, 000 Jews, half of Germany's Jewish population, had fled their homeland. Did these refugees have any guaranteed rights? After the war Otto Frank responded to references to "the Germans" by asking "which German?" He believed strongly that blaming all Germans was another form of stereotyping. What constitutes a stereotype? How is astereotype different from discrimination?

3. In the New York Times the writer Anna Quindlen asked, "Would our understanding of the Holocaust be quite the same if Anne Frank had not taken a small plaid diary into hiding with her?" What has most shaped your understanding of World War II: personal experience, Anne's diary, popular films such as Schindler's List, newsreel footage, academic or historical texts?

4. Otto Frank chose to edit out some of the negative comments Anne made about her mother and a number of the other residents of the Secret Annex—comments that have been restored in the new translation by Susan Massotty. He believed that Anne would have wanted him to do so. Do you think he was correct?

5. In her diary Anne opined: "... if you're wondering if it's harder for the adults here than for the children, the answer is no... Older people have an opinion about everything and are sure of themselves and their actions. It's twice as hard for us young people to hold on to our opinions at a time when ideals are being shattered..." (July 15, 1944.) When was the last time as an adult that you experienced the "shattering" of an ideal? Is the media a neutral force, or do you think it plays a role in supporting or destroying idealism?

6. Are there certain characteristics common among those few individuals who risked their own lives to rescue Jews during World War II? Why do so many of them deny their own heroism?

7. A disturbing number of neo-Nazi groups have taken hold in all parts of the world. What social conditions would be necessary for them to grow? What do you believe would be the most likely basis of another world war: pride, nationalism, fear, racism, economic interests, or religious intolerance?

8. Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was asked how he could explain the killing of 6 million Jews. He answered, "One hundred dead are a catastrophe, a million dead are a statistic." Have we become more or less tolerant of murder since he made this observation?

9. Anne Frank wrote: "I don't believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago!" (May 3, 1944.) How should accountability be assigned? So many say they never understood what was happening. How likely could that have been?

10. Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1925, describing his plan for the elimination of Jews. At that time, what steps might have been taken to stop Hitler's rise to power?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Another Good Dog: One Famiy and Fifty Foster Dogs
Cara Sue Achterberg, 2018
Pegasus Books
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781681777931

Summary
A warm and entertaining memoir about what happens when you foster fifty dogs in less than two years—and how the dogs save you as much as you save them.

When Cara felt her teenaged children slipping away and saw an empty nest on the horizon, she decided the best way to fill that void was with dogs—lots of them—and so her foster journey began.

In 2015, her Pennsylvania farm became a haven for Operation Paws for Homes.

There were the nine puppies at once, which arrived with less than a day’s notice; a heart- worm positive dog; a deeply traumatized stray pup from Iraq; and countless others who just needed a gentle touch and a warm place to sleep. Operation Paws for Homes rescues dogs from high-kill shelters in the rural south and shuttles them north to foster homes like Cara’s on the way to their forever homes.

What started as a search for a good dog, led to an epiphany that there wasn’t just one that could ll the hole left in her heart from her children gaining independence—she could save dozens along the way. The stories of these remarkable dogs— including an eighty-pound bloodhound who sang arias for the neighbors—and the joy they bring to Cara and her family (along with a few chewed sofa cushions) fill the pages of this touching and inspiring new book that reveals the wonderful rewards of fostering.

When asked how she can possibly say goodbye to that many loveable pups, Cara says, “If I don’t give this one away, I can’t possibly save another.”

Filled with humanity and hope, Another Good Dog will take the reader on an journey of smiles, laughs, and tears—and lead us to wonder how many other good dogs are out there and what we can do to help. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1965-66
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., Averett University; B.A., Eastern University
• Currently—lives in New Freedom, Pennsylvania, USA

Cara Sue Achterberg is a writer of three novels, a self-help book, and a memoir. She is also a blogger, journalist, a wife and mother, and a serial dog foster mother.

In Living Intentionally, Achterberg shares stories, ideas, resources, and even recipes to help readers live a fuller, healthier and intentional life. The book came out in 2014.

Achterberg published her first novel, I'm Not Her, in 2015; her second novel, Girls' Weekend, and third, Practicing Normal, both came out in 2016.

In 2018 she issued Another Good Dog: One Family and Fifty Foster Dogs, a memoir about her family and family-life caring for foster dogs.

Her essays and articles have been published in anthologies, magazines, and on websites. She also writes frequently for the York (PA) Daily Record. Achterberg lives on a hillside farm in south-central Pennsylvania with her husband. She also has horses and two grown children. (Adapted from various online sources.)

Visit the author blogs HERE … and HERE.

Book Reviews
Saddened by her emptying nest, Cara Sue Achterberg started fostering dogs—dozens of them. Here she shares the journey (and some supercute photos).
Peope

What’s unexpected are Achterberg’s personal reveals: her husband’s "It has to stop" ultimatum…. Some readers may find the… drumbeat too repetitive, but the stories and photos will delight those who have a soft spot for dogs and the dog rescue mission.
Publishers Weekly

Witty and full of love, [this] memoir beautifully captures the personalities of the dogs she’s helped save…. This easy read is a must for animal lovers and those interested in volunteering with animals and a good choice for reluctant readers.
Booklist

Filled with humanity and hope, Another Good Dog will take the reader on an journey of smiles, laughs, and tears—and lead us to wonder how many other good dogs are out there and what we can do to help.
Shelf Awareness

A writer's account of how becoming a foster "dog parent" changed her life …and gave her a renewed sense of purpose …[T]his book blends insight and entertainment to tell an unforgettable story…. A compassionate and humane canine tale.
Kirkus Reviews

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

1. The author describes the pain of losing her beloved hound of 17 years as having "left a gaping hole" in her family's "collective heart." Have you experienced the loss of a pet? What makes the loss of a creature so profound?

2. How easy or difficult would you find fostering dogs: taking them in, caring for them, and having to let them go?

3. Of the many dogs the author fostered in Another Good Dog, which ones were your favorites? Which dogs would have been hardest for you to say goodbye to? Were there any you would have glady (or reluctantly) given up on?

4. Talk about some of the particularly tough challenges she faced—perhaps working with dogs traumatized by cruelty …or the job of weaning nine puppies.

5. Achterberg talks about "how bad my addiction [to fostering] had become," a habit that was testing her marriage and her husband's patience. Did you feel any sympathy for him? Or were you impatient with his complaining?

6. Follow-up to Question 5: Achterberg faced other family complications, including her son's health issuses and her daughter's beauty pageant. How difficult was it for the author to juggle the various demands placed on her from all different directions? Did you ever reach the point where you felt she had over committed herself—that her husband was right to present her with his enough-is-enough ultimatum?

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

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Apples & Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found
Marie Brenner, 2008
Macmillan Picador
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374173524

Summary
How can two people share the same parents and turn out to be entirely different? Marie Brenner’s brother, Carl—yin to her yang, red state to her blue state—lived in Texas and in the apple country of Washington state, cultivating his orchards, polishing his guns, and (no doubt causing their grandfather Isidor to turn in his grave) attending church, while Marie, a world-class journalist and bestselling author, led a sophisticated life among the "New York libs" her brother loathed.

After many years apart, a medical crisis pushed them back into each other’s lives. Marie temporarily abandoned her job at Vanity Fair magazine, her friends, and her husband to try to help her brother. Except that Carl fought her every step of the way. She trained her formidable investigative skills on finding treatments to help her brother medically. And she dug into the past of the brilliant and contentious Brenner family, seeking in that complicated story a cure, too, for what ailed her relationship with Carl.

Marie Brenner has written an extraordinary memoir—one that is heartbreakingly honest, funny, and true. It’s a book that even her brother could love. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Marie Brenner is writer-at-large for Vanity Fair. Her expose of the tobacco industry, “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” was the basis for the 1999 movie The Insider, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. She is also the author of Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women and the best-selling House of Dreams: The Binghams of Louisville. (From the publisher.)

More
Marie Brenner joined Vanity Fair as a special correspondent in 1984, left in 1992 to become a staff writer at The New Yorker, and then returned to the magazine in 1995 as writer-at-large. Brenner began her career as a story editor for Paramount Pictures’ East Coast offices. She has served as a contributing editor at New York magazine, and has worked as a freelance foreign correspondent, covering the Middle East and Europe.

Brenner became the first female baseball columnist covering the American League, traveling with the Boston Red Sox for the Boston Herald during the 1979 season. Her explosive article on Jeffrey Wigand and the tobacco wars was made into the feature film The Insider, starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino.

Brenner is the recipient of five Front Page Awards and is the author of five books, including Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women (Crown, 2000) and the best-selling House of Dreams: The Bingham Family of Louisville (Random House, 1988). Sugarland, a movie based on Brenner’ s February 2001 Vanity Fair article, "In the Kingdom of Big Sugar" is currently being developed by Robert De Niro and Tribeca Productions. (From Vanity Fair website.)

Book Reviews
Thanks to his sister's new book, Apples & Oranges, Carl Brenner did not succeed in vanishing without a trace. Rather, his life, with all its startling twists and turns, and his singular, sometimes maddening personality are magically conjured for us in these pages, as Ms. Brenner uses the prism of her love and grief for her brother—and her bewilderment too—to create a haunting portrait of him and their family. She has written a book that captures the nervous, emotionally strangled relationship she shared with him for the better part of their lives, a book that explores the difficult algebra of familial love and the possibility of its renewal in the face of impending loss…a beautifully observed and deeply affecting memoir, a book written with the unsparing eye of a journalist and the aching heart of a sister.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

In Apples and Oranges, Marie Brenner has delivered a majestic little book. She deepens a tragicomic story into a meditation on family and fate... In Brenner’s sympathetic portrait, Carl becomes a nuanced conservative character. ‘Sometimes you do not get to understand everything,’ she concludes. Family trumps politics, and Marie comes to accept her brother’s tough love. One day, brother and sister climb ‘through the Galas, up through the Bartletts, the valley stretched out before us. We’re standing in a row of saplings, just planted in this sandy loam soil that he has named after our father. The Milton bloc. ‘This is where I want my ashes scattered,’ he says. ‘Are you listening to me?’ Marie was listening closer than Carl ever imagined. His ashes are scattered throughout this mystical book.
James Panero - New York Times Book Review

At 3, Carl Brenner welcomed his baby sister into the world by tossing her out the window. The family joked that Carl gave Marie the gift of a hard head, an asset fully in evidence—along with her hungry heart—in her memoir, Apples & Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found. More than any other book in recent memory, this one grabs the problem of sibling rivalry by the throat and shakes relentlessly. Carl is dying as the book begins, and Marie, now a celebrated reporter, has found her way back into his life, after decades of soul-bashing standoffs, using her investigative skills to probe the mysteries of his disease—and of their tormented relationship. She may never learn what drove her imperious, obsessive-compulsive, "charm-free" brother to give up a career as a trial lawyer to grow apples in Washington State; or what entrenched family dynamic doomed the siblings to reach for each other only across a "canyon of rage." But it is Marie's furious search for answers that gives this book its power, exposing the sweetness at the core of an embattled love.
O, The Oprah Magazine

"Perplexing" was the family euphemism for Brenner's older brother Carl; the less tactful thought him "unknowable," "charm-free" or plain "weird." At 13, in San Antonio, Tex., where his father owned a discount store, Carl joined the John Birch Society. At 40, he left his career as a trial lawyer to become an apple farmer in Washington's Cascade Mountains. Brenner (House of Dreams) and he were on barely civil terms, but when he was 55, he was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma, glandular cancer, and asked Marie for help. She responded, leaving her family in New York to be with Carl, who rejected conventional treatment, and to follow him as far away as China for "scorpion patches," herbs and red meat for "yang deficit." The cancer spread quickly; meanwhile, Marie sought to investigate her family's present and past among her father's feuding siblings, including writer Anita Brenner (who became part of Mexico City's art scene that included Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo). And with this research, Brenner courageously and affectingly plumbs the depths of often complex family and sibling relationships.
Publishers Weekly

Vanity Fair writer-at-large Brenner pens an absorbing account of her fractious relationship with her brother. The granddaughter of a Texas discount-store magnate, the author flinched from the ultra-conventional assumptions of her affluent family. (As a college student in the 1960s, she was chagrined to receive an unrequested package of panty girdles from her mother.) Inspired by the example of her aunt Anita, who ran away to Mexico at age 19, befriended Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and became a freelance writer, Brenner thwarted expectations and forged a successful career in journalism that included a pioneering stint as a baseball columnist in Boston. In the autumn of 2001, she traveled from New York to Washington state, determined to explore long-standing tensions with her ailing older brother Carl, a fiery-tempered trial lawyer who'd left his career to cultivate apples. In deft, nuanced prose, Brenner crafts a saga that is part family memoir, part psychological thriller and riveting overview of the U.S. apple-growing industry. The nonlinear narrative never falters as it moves adeptly back and forth in time. Readers will be captivated by the author's unvarnished yet balanced portrait of her difficulties with a combative sibling who routinely ridiculed her leftist politics and peppered his conversations with tirades about bruised apples and pears. Brenner, who accompanied the ill Carl on a medical research trip to China, details the hurt, hostilities and betrayals she endured with deep compassion and an understanding heart. She also offers vivid examples of the tactics she used to counter her brother's outlandish behavior and belligerence. Foreshadowed in a stylish prose riff, the book's carefully executed denouement still packs a powerful punch. A rich and masterful memoir with great value for aspiring practitioners of the genre, as well as discerning readers.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Marie Brenner's memories encompass a variety of settings, particularly central Texas, New York, and her brother's Washington orchards. What identities and cultures are captured in each of these settings? Where does she feel most at home? Which locale would you prefer? To what degree does birthplace shape our sense of self?

2. What is the effect of the memoir's timeline, weaving the near present with the distant past? In what way does this structure mirror the way memories enter our lives?

3. What accounts for the tremendous personality differences between Marie and Carl, despite their having had the same upbringing? What may have contributed to Carl's conservatism in the face of a family history that often embraced progressive ideas? In terms of temperament, did Marie and Carl share any similarities?

4. How did the past repeat itself in Brenner family history? How is Marie affected by her research into family lore, particularly her findings about Anita? Who are the most colorful figures in your family's past? How are we shaped by the knowledge of these legacies?

5. In what ways does religion as a cultural institution figure into the Brenner identity? As Marie captures the experience of Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States through Galveston, what costs and benefits are ascribed to assimilation, or life as a secular Jew? How does Ilene's approach to Christianity compare to Carl's?

6. Marie describes her sorrowful encounter with her ancestors' correspondence at the Harry Ransom Center, as well as her childhood home, filled with typewriters on which many carbon-copied letters were produced. What does it mean for her to come from a verbal family that left miles of documentation in its wake? Is the truth captured in such documents? Is the quest for answers a defense mechanism, as Marie proposes?

7. Discuss the experience of reading about Carl's beloved orchards and the landscape of rural Washington. What does his enthusiasm for agriculture—and his rejection of the family's apparel trade—say about him? In what ways does the perfectionistic process of nurturing, harvesting, and exporting world-class produce serve as a metaphor for his understanding of life?

8. Speaking before a crowded church, Ilene recalls that "we were going to weave a new family, and no longer be part of the tapestry of brainy squabblers that had ended their time together in silence and separation." What degrees of reconciliation are achieved in Carl's lifetime? What are the greatest hurdles to reconciliation?

9. How did Thelma and Milton, at the helm of the Brenner household, shape their children's lives? What did Marie learn from Thelma about being a woman, and what did Carl learn from Milton about becoming a man?

10. What does having a big brother signify to Marie? How does Carl seem to view the role of his little sister? What binds them together, despite their extreme differences? How does her perception of her brother differ from the way others see him?

11. How does Marie compare to the other women in Carl's life? What qualities does he appear to be drawn to? How do women respond to him?

12. With a reporter's precision, Marie describes the tumultuous emotions with which her brother confronted his illness as he tried both Chinese and western medicine, culminating in a loss of confidence in the possibility for healing. What controls our reaction to fate? What personality traits are reflected in the very different responses Carl and Marie showed to his prognosis?

13. The closing scenes capture a memory of peace and laughter between Carl and Marie as well as the beauty of the acreage he once tended. How will Casey's generation remember Carl's and Marie's? What will this sibling legacy be?

14. Marie's preface begins with an advertising line from a movie trailer: "Every life has moments that change us forever and make us who we are." She observes that, despite the hyperbole, it's a true statement. What were the most pivotal moments she encountered in her life? Which experiences have made you who you are?

15. How did you respond to the psychoanalytic theories described in the book regarding siblings? How would you describe your relationship with your siblings? Do these relationships affect (or reflect) the other interactions in your life—in love, at work, or within friendships?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen
Jacques Pepin, 2003
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780618444113

Summary
In this captivating memoir, the man whom Julia Child has called "the best chef in America" tells the story of his rise from a frightened apprentice in an exacting Old World kitchen to an Emmy Award-winning superstar who taught millions of Americans how to cook and shaped the nation's tastes in the bargain.

We see young Jacques as a homesick six-year-old boy in war-ravaged France, working on a farm in exchange for food, dodging bombs, and bearing witness as German soldiers capture his father, a fighter in the Resistance. Soon Jacques is caught up in the hurly-burly action of his mother's café, where he proves a natural. He endures a literal trial by fire and works his way up the ladder in the feudal system of France's most famous restaurant, finally becoming Charles de Gaulle's personal chef, watching the world being refashioned from the other side of the kitchen door.

When he comes to America, Jacques immediately falls in with a small group of as-yet-unknown food lovers, including Craig Claiborne, James Beard, and Julia Child, whose adventures redefine American food. Through it all, Jacques proves himself to be a master of the American art of reinvention: earning a graduate degree from Columbia University, turning down a job as John F. Kennedy's chef to work at Howard Johnson's, and, after a near-fatal car accident, switching careers once again to become a charismatic leader in the revolution that changed the way Americans approached food. Included as well are approximately forty all-time favorite recipes created during the course of a career spanning nearly half a century, from his mother's utterly simple cheese soufflé to his wife's pork ribs and redbeans.

The Apprentice is the poignant and sometimes funny tale of a boy's coming of age. Beyond that, it is the story of America's culinary awakening and the transformation of food from an afterthought to a national preoccupation. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 18, 1935
• Where—Bourg-en Bresse, France (near Lyon)
• Education—B.A. (1970), M.A. (1972), Columbia University
• Awards—Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des lettres;
Chevalier de L'Ordre du Merite Agricole; Legion d'honneur;
Emmy Award
• Currently—lives in Madison, Connecticut, USA

Jacques Pepin is the author of twenty-one cookbooks, including the best-selling The Apprentice and the award-winning Jacques Pepin Celebrates and Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home (with Julia Child).

He has appeared regularly on PBS programs for more than a decade, hosting over three hundred cooking shows. A contributing editor for Food & Wine, he is the dean of special programs at the French Culinary Institute in New York City. Before coming to the United States, he served as personal chef to three French heads of state. (From the publisher.)

More
Pepin was born in Bourg-en-Bresse near Lyon, and began cooking in his parents' restaurant, Le Pelican, at the age of 12. He went on to work in Paris, training under Lucien Diat at the Plaza Athénée. He eventually served as a personal chef for Charles de Gaulle and two other French premiers. Upon immigration to the United States in 1959, Pepin turned down a job offer at the Kennedy White House, and instead accepted a position as the director of research and new development for the Howard Johnson's chain of hotels. He stayed at Howard Johnson's for ten years.

Demonstrating interests beyond cooking, Pepin earned a bachelor's degree from the Columbia University School of General Studies in 1970, followed by a Master of Arts in 18th Century French poetry from Columbia in 1972.

Pepin has been featured in several highly acclaimed television shows and written eighteen books.

His celebrated La Technique is used to this day as a textbook for teaching the fundamentals of French cuisine. The success of La Technique prompted him to launch a televised version of the book, resulting in an acclaimed 1997 PBS series, The Complete Pepin. Recently relaunched on PBS ten years after its initial run, the series included a new introduction by Pepin where he stressed that now more than ever the secret to being a successful chef and not a mere line cook lies in knowing and using the proper technique.

Pepin also co-starred in award-winning 1999 PBS series Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home with Julia Child. Their work together was honored with a Daytime Emmy in 2001.

A third series had Pepin cooking with his daughter, Claudine, wife of chef Rolland Wesen.

His show Jacques Pepin: Fast Food My Way (based on his 2004 book of the same name) ran on PBS, as did a follow-up show, Jacques Pepin: More Fast Food My Way. All of his programs have been produced by KQED-TV in San Francisco.

A time line of his life, based on his 2003 autobiography The Apprentice, is available on the KQED website.

Pepin was a guest judge on the Bravo television show Top Chef on season five, airing in 2008. He stated that his ideal "final meal" would be roast squab and fresh peas.

Pepin serves as Dean of Special Programs at the French Culinary Institute, part of the new International Culinary Center, in New York City. He is also an active contributor to the Gastronomy department at Boston University, where he teaches an online class on the cuisine and culture of France along with professor Kyri Claflin of Boston University's history department. Pepin also writes a quarterly column for Food & Wine and offers an amateur class each semester based on varied culinary topics.

Pepin currently resides with his wife, Gloria, in Madison, Connecticut. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Pepin made his way late to the written word, having been a chef before he was a scholar, and a teacher and a restaurateur before he published. But first—the good luck is ours—he was a hungry child, in a country in which food was religion, and in which history imprinted itself culinarily.
Stacy Shiff - New York Times

Lest any reader think this is another saga of sex and drugs in the kitchen, it definitely is not. Instead, it's the story of just what it takes to turn a talented young Frenchman into one of the most admired figures in the culinary world. And anyone who thinks that all you need to do to be called "chef" is to survive a few months—or even a few years—in culinary school would do well to read it.
Judith Weinraub - Washington Post

In this beguiling memoir, the celebrated French chef and cooking-show host recounts his start as a scrappy thirteen-year-old country boy who arrived at his first restaurant apprenticeship still wearing short pants. An incorrigible prankster (he once coated a colleague's eyeglasses in aspic), Pépin never fully submitted to the strict regimen of the French kitchen, and, after a stint as a cook for Charles de Gaulle, he headed for New York, where he ended up working for the chain-restaurant entrepreneur Howard Johnson. Making clam chowder by the gallon was a quirky turn for a classically trained chef, but it enabled Pépin to revolutionize mass-produced food. With appealing modesty, he sees himself as essentially a blue-collar worker, whose "vantage point to history-in-the-making was the crack between two swinging kitchen doors."
The New Yorker

In this fast-moving and often touching memoir, Pepin recounts his journey from the kitchen of his mother's humble restaurant in rural France after World War II to his current position as author of 21 cookbooks, star of 13 PBS cooking shows and dean of special programs at the French Culinary Institute in New York City. Along the way he describes everything from the tough French apprenticeship system that saw him dropping out of school at 13 to work in Lyon to the beginnings of the Howard Johnson's chain. Pepin accepted a job in the Howard Johnson's test kitchen over a stint at the White House cooking for John F. Kennedy, but shows no signs of regret. In fact, if there's a flaw here, it's that Pepin's eternally upbeat attitude is sometimes a little hard to buy—although he does seem to have been born under a lucky star. Pepin came to the U.S. just when a culinary culture was building and fell into friendships with Craig Claiborne, then food editor of the New York Times, and Julia Child. Even a bad car accident when he was 39 turned out to be a godsend, as it got him out of the restaurant kitchen and into the teaching profession. Pepin mines a lot of humor from the differences between French and American attitudes toward food, as when he recounts how he and a French friend once stopped by a farm somewhere in the U.S. with a sign reading "Ducks for Sale" and wrung the neck of the duck they'd just bought in front of the horrified proprietress. Each chapter concludes with one or two recipes, many of them surprisingly earthy, such as Oatmeal Breakfast Soup with leeks and bacon.... This charming memoir will not disappoint.
Publishers Weekly

How does one become a chef? Aside from having a love for food, modern cooks are born from—diverse experiences, talents, and training. Pepin, who has given us numerous cookbooks and memorable television programs, now shares his story. Throughout his early years in the kitchens of family restaurants and highly structured apprenticeships throughout France to his move to the United States, years as a product development chef for Howard Johnson, and friendships with such famous foodies as Craig Claiborne, Pepin relates how his interest in food and culinary techniques developed into passions for cooking and teaching. He does this deftly, neatly capturing personalities and events with clear, concise writing. As a tantalizing bonus, each chapter concludes with a favorite recipe. Pepin's book is an essential counterpoint to Anthony Bourdain's cynical Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.
Library Journal

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, The Apprentice is an earthy, honest, well-written autobiography by one of the century's best-known chefs. During WW II, Jacques' mother worked as a waitress to feed her three young sons. In 1947 Jacques' mother opened a restaurant, Chez Pepin, in a working class neighborhood in Lyon. Bigger restaurants followed and Jacques quit school at 13, determined to become a chef. In 1949 he began a three-year apprenticeship, learning to cook on a temperamental wood stove. Afterward he worked in a succession of hotels and then served in the navy during the Algerian War. He even served as chef to France's prime minister, a job that ended when the government collapsed in 1958. Soon, however, he was cooking for Charles de Gaulle. In 1959 Pepin came to the US and landed a job at the prestigious Le Pavillon in New York City. Eight months later this job ended and Pepin went to work for Howard Deering Johnson, improving the food served by his restaurant chain. Pepin also received a tempting offer—to become the White House chef, should John Kennedy be elected. But he had found a second father in Mr. Johnson, with whom he remained during the 1960s. He married, bought a house in the Catskills, fathered Claudine, and opened a soup restaurant in 1970. La Potagerie was a great success, but tragedy struck when Pepin was seriously injured in an auto accident in 1974. After this he became a teacher and TV personality. Pepin's charming memoir is enlivened with anecdotes, photos and 24 easy-to-follow recipes.
Janet Julian - KLIATT

From chef, author, and cooking-show veteran Pepin, an easygoing but proud memoir of his journey through the stations of the kitchen and the food world. Pépin doesn't gloss over the difficulties involved in scaling the French culinary ladder, but there is never any question that it was exactly what he wanted to be doing. His mother ran a series of comfortable, small-scale, well-received restaurants outside Lyon, and young Jacques took to "the hurly-burly noise of the kitchen. The heat. The sweat. The bumping of bodies. The raised voices. The constant rush of adrenaline." His apprenticeship, feudal in duration and circumstances, wasn't easy, but he reveled in the learning process of observation and imitation, a "visual osmosis" that he conveys in warm, willowy prose. Cooking in a restaurant, we realize, is a calling, not a job. Gradually introduced to a variety of French regional foods, Pépin learned thoroughly and from the ground up the responsibilities and techniques of each kitchen position. He landed a succession of jobs at great restaurants in Paris and as a private chef before moving to New York and immersing himself in the revolution overtaking American cooking. Hungry for work, he was also gratifyingly unpretentious; he took a job at Howard Johnson’s rather than the Kennedy White House because he liked his life in New York. At Ho Jo’s, he worked with chefs (many of them blacks from the American South) who lacked formal training but had "natural grace and gut-felt understanding." After a horrific car accident shattered too many bones to count and forced him to leave the kitchen, he turned to writing, teaching, and fostering the growing American awareness of good food. Pépin offers a worm's-eye view of culinary personalities and approaches, and there’s no doubt he has earned every ounce of bounty he has received from the kitchen. Prose as joyful and rich as the author’s food
Kirkus Reviews

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

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

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Apprentice:

1. What personal and professional qualities does it take to become a top chef? How difficult is the road to earn the title "chef"? What would you say has made Jacques Pepin so successful?

2. Why does Pepin turn down a job as White House chef to stay with Howard Johnson? What does it say about the kind of person Pepin is? And what does the experience working at HoJo's gain him—what does he learn?

3. Why does Pepin turn to teaching and writing? What does he hope to achieve in the classroom or through books?

4. What has The Apprentice taught you about the different approaches to cooking? Have you learned any new culinary techniques that could be useful in your own kitchen?

5. Pepin shares part of the insider's world of cooking personalities. Talk about some of those culinary figures and some of the anecdotes.

6. For book clubs, have members cook and serve some of the recipes found in the book. Talk about which ones you like best.

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

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The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War
A.J. Baime, 2014
Houghton Mifflin
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780547719283

Summary
A dramatic, intimate narrative of how Ford Motor Company went from making automobiles to producing the airplanes that would mean the difference between winning and losing World War II.

In 1941, as Hitler’s threat loomed ever larger, President Roosevelt realized he needed weaponry to fight the Nazis—most important, airplanes—and he needed them fast. So he turned to Detroit and the auto industry for help.

The Arsenal of Democracy tells the incredible story of how Detroit answered the call, centering on Henry Ford and his tortured son Edsel, who, when asked if they could deliver 50,000 airplanes, made an outrageous claim: Ford Motor Company would erect a plant that could yield a "bomber an hour." Critics scoffed: Ford didn’t make planes; they made simple, affordable cars.

But bucking his father’s resistance, Edsel charged ahead. Ford would apply assembly-line production to the American military’s largest, fastest, most destructive bomber; they would build a plant vast in size and ambition on a plot of farmland and call it Willow Run; they would bring in tens of thousands of workers from across the country, transforming Detroit, almost overnight, from Motor City to the "great arsenal of democracy." And eventually they would help the Allies win the war.

Drawing on exhaustive research from the Ford Archives, the National Archives, and the FDR Library, A. J. Baime has crafted an enthralling, character-driven narrative of American innovation that has never been fully told, leaving readers with a vivid new portrait of America—and Detroit—during the war. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Raised—Caldwell, New Jersey
• Education—University of New Hampshire; M.A., New York University
• Currently—Chicago, Illinois

A.J. Baime is the author of Big Shots: The Men Behind the Booze (2003); Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans (2010) and The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War (2014). A magazine editor, Baime has written for numerous publications, including New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Popular Science, and Maxim. (Adapated from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
In A. J. Baime’s fast-paced book, The Arsenal of Democracy, the Ford Motor Company and its production of the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber take center stage. To be sure, this was one of many planes produced for the war, and Ford was neither the only car company to manufacture planes nor the largest military contractor. But as Baime points out, “Americans believed that no single Detroit industrialist was contributing more to the war effort than Henry Ford.... The book’s intent is not to be useful to contemporary policy debates but to tell a good story. However, ignoring some of the more challenging complexities of its subject makes The Arsenal of Democracy less rewarding than it might have been.
Charles N. Edel = New York Times Book Review

If anyone remembers Edsel Ford today, it is because of the Ford Edsel, the car created in 1957, 14 years after its namesake's death. It was one of the biggest flops in car-industry history. The only son of automotive wizard Henry Ford has deserved a better legacy, and A.J. Baime has given it to him. Although billed as a history of how the Detroit auto industry geared up to arm the United States, The Arsenal of Democracy is a touching and absorbing portrait of one the forgotten heroes of World War II.
Arthur Herman - Wall Street Journal

This accessible, surprising history is a welcome addition to the inexhaustible list of WWII studies, as Baime (Go Like Hell) claims that perhaps the most important battle was fought far from the battlefield—in the monolithic warehouses of Ford Motor Company in Detroit.... [A] forthright and absorbing look at "the biggest job in all history."
Publishers Weekly

At the core [is] an epic battle between father and son, the cantankerous industrialist Henry Ford, who despised war, and his sensitive son, Edsel, who could never emerge from his father’s shadow.... Baime details [the massive war effort] with great care and empathy for his principal subjects. —David Siegfried
Booklist

The Ford Motor Company goes to war...[is the] latest examination of the transition of American industry to wartime production.... Written in a hyperbolic tabloid style...the book falls well short of the standards set by similar recent works. See Arthur Herman's Freedom's Forge instead. A complex and worthy story reduced to a beach read.
Kirkus Reviews

The Art of Memoir
Mary Karr, 2015
HarperCollins
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062223067

Summary
Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well.

For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse. (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.)

In The Art of Memoir, she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and black belt sinner, providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre.

Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers’ experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr’s own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told—and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.) As she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, she breaks open our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminates the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate.

Joining such classics as Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, The Art of Memoir is an elegant and accessible exploration of one of today’s most popular literary forms—a tour de force from an accomplished master pulling back the curtain on her craft. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 16, 1955
• Where—Groves, Texas, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Goddard College
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—teaches English at Syracuse University.

Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist, and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University and, in 2015, was chosen to deliver the commencement speech at the university.

Memoirs
Her memoir The Liars' Club, published in 1995, was a New York Times bestseller for over a year and was named one of the year's best books. It delves vividly and often humorously into her deeply troubled childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty industrial section of Southeast Texas in the 1960s. She was encouraged to write her personal history by her friend Tobias Wolff, but has said she only took up the project when her marriage fell apart.

She followed the book with another memoir, Cherry (2000), about her late adolescence and early womanhood.

A third memoir Lit details her "journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic," came out in 2009. She writes about her time as an alcoholic and the salvation she found in her conversion to Catholicism. She does, however, describe herself as a cafeteria Catholic.

In 2015 Karr published The Art of Memoir. Based on her writing class syllabus at Syracuse, the book is aimed at novice writers yet may also appeal to the general public for its humor and for its insights into the writing process. The book includes an extensive list of Karr's recommended memoirs in the appendix.

Poetry and essays on poetry
Karr won a 1989 Whiting Award for her poetry. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry in 2005 and has won Pushcart prizes for both her poetry and her essays. Karr has published four volumes of poetry: Abacus (1987), The Devil's Tour (1993), Viper Rum (1998), and Sinners Welcome (2006). Her poems have appeared in major literary magazines such as Poetry, New Yorker, and Atlantic Monthly.

Karr's Pushcart Award winning essay, "Against Decoration." was published in the quarterly review Parnassus (1991). The essay argues for content over poetic style—insisting that emotions need to be expressed directly and with clarity. She criticized the use of obscure characters, imprecise or "foggy" descriptions of the physical world, and "showy, over-used references. She also holds that abstruse language—polysyllables, archaic words, intricate syntax, "yards of adjectives"—serve only as an obstacle to readers' understanding.

Karr directly criticized well-known, well-connected, and award-winning poets such as James Merrill, Amy Clampitt, Vijay Seshadri, and Rosanna Warren (daughter of Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren). Karr favors controlled elegance to create transcendent poetic meaning out of not-quite-ordinary moments, presenting James Merrill's "Charles on Fire" as a successful example.

Another essay, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer," was published in Poetry (2005). Karr tells of her move from agnostic alcoholic to baptized Catholic of the decidedly "cafeteria" kind, yet one who prays twice daily with loud fervor from her "foxhole." In the essay Karr argues that poetry and prayer arise from the same sources within us.

Personal life
In the 90s, Karr dated David Foster Wallace, who once tried to push her out of a moving car.

Awards and honors
1989 - Whiting Award
1995 - PEN/Martha Albrand Award for The Liars' Club
2005 - Guggenheim Fellowship. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/30/2015.)

Book Reviews
There’s a textbook lurking at the heart of Mary Karr’s new book about how memoirs have and should be written. But it’s a chaotic one: Ms. Karr is, by her own admission, a passionate, messy teacher..... Ms. Karr acknowledges that this book began with the teaching syllabus she uses at Syracuse University.... She has fleshed it out with analyses of some of her favorite memoirists’ work, but she can’t help being more interesting than her lesson plans. The best parts of this book are those that veer off course and find her writing about herself again,
Janet Maslin - New York Times

The Art of Memoir is a hodgepodge of a book...[that] will appeal most to those hoping to write their own memoirs.... Though Karr’s own Texan voice strains a bit in the opening pages to achieve the swagger and folksy charm she is known for, her emphasis on finding an authentic, unpretentious voice will be useful to any novice writer.... Her close readings are full of smart insights about the problems writers overcome.... The Art of Memoir is full of Karr’s usual wit, compassion and, perhaps most reassuringly, self-doubt. Her fans should be delighted—and they can’t go wrong reading the books she discusses, including her own.
Janet Spear - Washington Post

Should be required reading for anyone attempting to write a memoir, but anyone who loves literature will enjoy it too.
Wall Street Journal;

A master class on memoir, from a memoirist who pulls no punches.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

Could have been called The Art of Living.
San Francisco Chronicle

A veritable blueprint for the genre…. Lovers of the form and aspiring scribblers alike will relish this comprehensive appreciation of and guide to writing the real self.
Oprah Magazine

(Starred review.) Karr write[s] exquisitely...(and without pretense, often with raw authenticity.... The text is a must-read for memoirists, but will also appeal to memoir lovers and all who are curious about how books evolve.... Karr wisely (and quite often humorously) guid[es] readers in their understanding and experience of the art.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) [A]n enlightening review of the memoir as a medium for communicating carnal, lived experiences. Fresh and heartfelt, Karr's analysis of the form illustrates its variety and depth, the significance of voice, and the perception of truth. [A]n excellent challenge for readers and writers alike. —Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib.
Library Journal

[A] spirited commentary about memoir, the literary form that has become synonymous with her name.... Karr's sassy Texas wit and her down-to-earth observations ...make for lively and inspiring reading. A generous and singularly insightful examination of memoir.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. For years Mary Karr resisted writing autobiographical nonfiction and instead wrote poetry and fiction. Why was this? How is each of these genres different? What are the strengths and limitations of each?

2. What particular abilities and talents make a great memoirist?

3. Examine Karr’s emphasis on the importance of carnality in memoir writing. Why is unique, sensory detail so important? How does it have "psychological effects" on a reader?

4. Both memoir writing and psychotherapy require the act of revisiting and articulating past experience, telling the stories. In what other ways are these two complex pursuits similar or different?

5. How does revisiting and engaging with past trauma or difficulty potentially transform its effects?

6. How does the unreliability of human memory influence a person’s attempt to understand herself? In what ways might a writer bridge gaps of information on the page?

7. How much of a person’s identity is the result of arbitrary early experience? To what extent can she forge a new identity? How might this influence the writing of memoir?

8. Given that "from the second you choose one event over another, you’re shaping the past’s meaning," how should a memoir writer best think about and negotiate the truth of her experience? What is a necessary and appropriate balance of honesty and creativity in nonfiction writing?

9. Karr believes that lying is not just unethical for a writer but usually "carve[s] a lonely gap between your disguise and who you really are." What are the effects of such a personal disassociation? Karr adamantly claims "each great memoir lives or dies...on voice." What is voice? How does a writer develop it? How does "finding...inner truth about psychological conflicts" help?

10. What is the nature and importance of the "inner enemy" in a memoir? Why might a "blazing psychic struggle" be essential for the writer and the reader?

11. Karr admits that she "hid from readers on pages that sugarcoated any emotional truths," and finds many of her talented students doing the same. Why is this resistance so common even after one has decided to write memoir?

12. Karr believes that memoirs often fail because the narrator fails to change over time. Why is experiencing and articulating personal change or transformation so essential?

13. Karr says, every writer needs two selves—the generative self and the editor self. How are these essentially different? What’s the best way to balance them?

14. Considering writers like Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston and Michael Herr, in what ways can or should a memoir be a social or political act?

15. Considering G. H. Hardy’s self-evaluation in A Mathematician’s Apology, how might an earnest writer evaluate the value of her experience short of public recognition or financial success?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story
Lily Koppel, 2013
Grand Central Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455503247

Summary
As America's Mercury Seven astronauts were launched on death-defying missions, television cameras focused on the brave smiles of their young wives. Overnight, these women were transformed from military spouses into American royalty. They had tea with Jackie Kennedy, appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and quickly grew into fashion icons.

Annie Glenn, with her picture-perfect marriage, was the envy of the other wives; platinum-blonde Rene Carpenter was proclaimed JFK's favorite; and licensed pilot Trudy Cooper arrived on base with a secret. Together with the other wives they formed the Astronaut Wives Club, meeting regularly to provide support and friendship. Many became next-door neighbors and helped to raise each other's children by day, while going to glam parties at night as the country raced to land a man on the Moon.

As their celebrity rose—and as divorce and tragic death began to touch their lives—they continued to rally together, and the wives have now been friends for more than fifty years. The Astronaut Wives Club tells the real story of the women who stood beside some of the biggest heroes in American history. (From the publisher.)

Watch a video of the astronaut wives.

Author Bio
• Birth—1981
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College
• Currently—lives in New York, New York

Lily Koppel is a writer living in New York. She is known for her books, The Astronaut Wives Club (2013) and The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal (2008). Astronaut Wives traces the lives and marriages of the wives of the nation's astronauts from 1969-1971. Red Leather Diary is about her discovery of a young woman’s diary, kept in New York in the 1930s, and its return to Florence Wolfson Howitt, its owner, at age 90. The diary was recovered from a steamer trunk found in a dumpster outside of Koppel's apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The non-fiction book is based on Koppel's New York Times City section cover story.

Koppel writes for the New York Times and other publications. She graduated from Barnard College in 2003 with a degree in English Literature and creative writing. Koppel began contributing reporting to the New York Times "Boldface Names" celebrity column in 2003.

She has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America and National Public Radio. (From .)

Book Reviews
A fair and accomplished reporter...Lily Koppel offers a grounded, irresistible and sociable social history.... Koppel's book deftly delivers The Wife Stuff.../ Koppel does an excellent job of capturing a group portrait with enough highlights, low points, sunny spots and shadows for individual features to emerge.... The Astronaut Wives Club is wholly and consistently in Koppel's voice: smart, evocative, informed and warm-an electric fireside chat with the women who put men on the moon.
Chicago Tribune

The men catapulted into space in the 20th century were interesting, sort of. The women they left back on earth were fascinating.... A lively account of how the wives coped with fame, fear, [and] loneliness.
People

This is one of those light, tasty summer reads you'll guzzle down like a milk shake.
Entertainment Weekly

[A] true (juicy) story. Gotta love non-fiction that feels like a beach read: Lily Koppel's The Astronaut Wives Club chronicles the wives of 1960s astronauts.... Put down that mystery and pick up some history!
Redbook

In this entertaining and quirky throwback, journalist Koppel revisits the ladies who cheered and bolstered their men to victory in the U.S. space program..., revealing public triumph and rarely private agony. Koppel looks at the history of the race to space...focusing on the wives...[who] had to be gracious to the Life magazine reporters who invaded their homes, concealing unpleasant domestic details..., and unseemly competition with other wives.... This is truly a great snapshot of the times.
Publishers Weekly

The author's aim was to uncover the real lives behind the "perfect" astronaut wives, and she hits the mark, crafting an exceptional story that seriously examines the imperfection and humanity of America's heroic astronauts, their wives, and their families. —Crystal Goldman, San Jose State Univ. Lib., CA
Library Journal

Mad Men fans and history buffs alike won't want to miss a new book about...the lives of the astronauts' wives.... We meet the Mercury Seven women in the first chapter of The Astronaut Wives Club, and author Lily Koppel does a nice job of staying close to their stories. By the time you see the women's faces in the pictures, you'll feel like you're a member of the gang.... It's hard to believe no one has already written their story, and this reader is glad Koppel finally did.
BookPage

Koppel explores the cohesiveness of a group of wives who formed an unofficial support group and their individual development during the early years of the Cold War. With the announcement on April 9, 1959, of the "nation's first astronauts," the women's lives changed, as they became instant celebrities along with their husbands.... Koppel describes their appearance on the pages of Life magazine, looking like "scoops of ice cream" in their "pressed pastel shirtwaists."... Insightful social history with a light touch.
Kirkus Reviews

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

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

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Astronaut Wives Club:

1. Talk about the lives of the different women covered in the book. Whom did you most sympathize with, admire, or dislike?

2. What did you find most impressive regarding the level of support the women provided one another? Is there anything in your own life that resembles the bond that developed among the astronaut wives?

3. Discuss the various stresses the women were under: the invasion of privacy, the absense of husbands, the not infrequent infidelity, and the anxiety for their husbands' lives. What was most difficult? What would you have found most difficult. Do you find any aspect of their lives enviable? Were the lives of the astronaut spouses any more difficult than other spouses whose husbands or wives go off to war?

4. Talk about Betty Grissom, Pat White and Martha Chaffee—the widows of the three men who were burned alive during a pre-launch test of their Apollo 1 mission. How did each woman handle the horrific tragedy? Pat White was considered "the final victim of the Apollo 1 fire," writes Lily Koppel. Is there any way in which Pat White's life might have had a better ending?

5. Talk about the marital relationships within the couples. Which marriages did you find solid and which were troubling...and why? Were you surprised at the number of marriages that ultimately failed?

6. To what degree, if any, might the lives of these women be different today given the change in society's attitudes toward women? Consider, for instance, their reactions to the Life magazine article:

The wives were completely shocked, worrying about how America would judge them. They would never wear such a bold colored lipstick. They were mothers, not vixens.

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

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Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2017
W.W. Norton & Co.
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393609394

Summary
The essential universe, from our most celebrated and beloved astrophysicist.

♦ What is the nature of space and time?
♦ How do we fit within the universe?
♦ How does the universe fit within us?

There’s no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil deGrasse Tyson.

But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in tasty chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.

While you wait for your morning coffee to brew, for the bus, the train, or a plane to arrive, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry will reveal just what you need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 5, 1958
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.S., Harvard University; M.S., University of Texas; M.S., Ph.D., Columbia University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Since 1996, he has been the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. The center is part of the American Museum of Natural History, where Tyson founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate in the department since 2003.

Born and raised in New York City, Tyson became interested in astronomy at the age of nine after a visit to the Hayden Planetarium. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, where he was editor-in-chief of the Physical Science Journal, he completed a bachelor's degree in physics at Harvard University in 1980.

After receiving a master's degree in astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin in 1983, he earned his master's (1989) and doctorate (1991) in astrophysics at Columbia University. For the next three years, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. In 1994, he joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist and the Princeton faculty as a visiting research scientist and lecturer. In 1996, he became director of the planetarium and oversaw its $210-million reconstruction project, which was completed in 2000.

From 1995 to 2005, Tyson wrote monthly essays in the "Universe" column for Natural History magazine, some of which were published in his books Death by Black Hole (2007) and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017). During the same period, he wrote a monthly column in Star Date magazine, answering questions about the universe under the pen name "Merlin." Material from the column appeared in his books Merlin's Tour of the Universe (1998) and Just Visiting This Planet (1998).

Tyson served on a 2001 government commission on the future of the U.S. aerospace industry, and on the 2004 Moon, Mars and Beyond commission. He was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal in the same year. From 2006 to 2011, he hosted the television show NOVA ScienceNow on PBS. Since 2009, Tyson hosted the weekly podcast StarTalk. A spin-off, also called StarTalk, began airing on National Geographic in 2015.

In 2014, he hosted the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a successor to Carl Sagan's 1980 series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences awarded Tyson the Public Welfare Medal in 2015 for his "extraordinary role in exciting the public about the wonders of science." (Excerpted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/72/2017.)

Book Reviews
Neil deGrasse Tyson is a rock star, and his newest book shows why: as small as it is — it practically fits in your pocket — its subject is nothing less than the universe itself. More remarkable, it’s a bestseller. Think about that: a book on astrophysics at the top of the charts. What’s the world coming to?… Astrophysics for People in a Hurry is written for…the layperson, for folks who don’t spend time in labs or at the chalkboard solving equations with Greek letters. Make no mistake, though: Tyson's lucid, accessible prose takes on complicated subjects without dumbing them down. His tone is light, even funny…. READ MORE…
P.J. Adler - LitLovers

Tyson is a master of streamlining and simplification …taking mind-bogglingly complex ideas, stripping them down to their nuts and bolts, padding them with colorful allegories and dorky jokes, and making them accessible to the layperson.
Salon

This book will keep you fascinated with succinct and dynamic explanations of a wide variety of astronomical topics. A winner that every astronomy enthusiast should have on the bookshelf!
David J. Eicher - Astronomy

With wry humor, keen vision, and abundant humanity, Neil deGrasse Tyson distills the big questions of space, time, and reality into short, insightful chapters you can enjoy with your morning coffee.
Discover

This may have been written for people in a hurry, but I urge you to take your time. It will all be over far too soon.
BBC's Sky at Night (UK)

Tyson manifests science brilliantly …[his] insights are valuable for any leader, teacher, scientist or educator.
Forbes

Tyson…has revisited, modified, consolidated, and… updated a number of essays from his Universe column from Natural History magazine.… Tyson fans and newcomers alike — will enjoy this caper through the cosmos. —Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono
Library Journal

Even readers normally adverse to anything to do with physics or chemistry will find Tyson’s wittily delivered explanations compelling and disarmingly entertaining.
Booklist

[Q]uick and thoroughly enjoyable.… [The book] may fundamentally shift your perspective of our place in the universe — and convince you to pursue some of the many fine longer-form books on the subject. A sublime introduction to some of the most exciting ideas in astrophysics that will leave readers wanting more.
Kirkus Reviews

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

1. What is your level of scientific education: have you ever had a physics class, for instance? How much do you know, as a non-scientist, of the cosmos — it's history, its present state, and it's possible future, as well as how it works? What have you learned from reading Neil deGrasse Tyson's book?

2. How accessible is Tyson's book to a non-scientist? How much of the information are you able to grasp? Consider the slenderness of the book — and the fact that there are only about 200 words on each page. Does the physical slightness of book detract from or enhance your reading experience? Is the book dumbed down?

3. Do you find Astrophysics for People in a Hurry interesting? Has it inspired you to want to learn more about the subject? Or does this book satisfy your level of curiosity?

4. Is there a particular chapter or topic that you find more interesting than others? Or perhaps find easier — or maybe more difficult — to grasp than others? Consider dark matter or Einstein's General Theory of Relativity? What about the chapter on exoplanets?

5. What does Tyson mean by "cosmic perspective"? Does his view resonate with you or not? Do you have a different sense of the universe than Tyson?

6. Tyson has a gift for picturesque facts and analogies like the fact that two cubic feet of iridium has the same weight as a Buick … or the fact that a pulsar has about as much density as 100 elephants crammed into a Chap Stick case. Are there others that struck you as particularly helpful or clever?

7. Talk about some of the areas of astrophysics for which we've amassed a fair amount of knowledge …as well as the many mysteries that we still don't have answers for.

8. How familiar were you with Neil deGrasse Tyson before reading this latest book of his. Have you read any of his other books or articles? Have you watched any of his television shows, his 2014 sequel to Carl Sagan's Cosmos, for instance. Or perhaps you've seen his Great Courses lectures or listened to StarTalk, his podcast?

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

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At Home
Bill Bryson, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780767919388

Summary
Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.

Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to “write a history of the world without leaving home.” The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom, sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen, nutrition and the spice trade; and so on, as Bryson shows how each has figured in the evolution of private life. Whatever happens in the world, he demonstrates, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture.

Bill Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and he is a master at turning the seemingly isolated or mundane fact into an occasion for the most diverting exposition imaginable. His wit and sheer prose fluency make At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 8 1951
• Where—Des Moines, Iowa, USA
• Education—B.A., Drake University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Norfolk, England, UK

William McGuire "Bill" Bryson is a best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and on science. Born an American, he was a resident of North Yorkshire, UK, for most of his professional life before moving back to the US in 1995. In 2003 Bryson moved back to the UK, living in Norfolk, and was appointed Chancellor of Durham University.

Early years
Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, the son of William and Mary Bryson. He has an older brother, Michael, and a sister, Mary Jane Elizabeth.

He was educated at Drake University but dropped out in 1972, deciding to instead backpack around Europe for four months. He returned to Europe the following year with a high school friend, the pseudonymous Stephen Katz (who later appears in Bryson's A Walk in the Woods). Some of Bryson's experiences from this European trip are included as flashbacks in a book about a similar excursion written 20 years later, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe.

Staying in the UK, Bryson landed a job working in a psychiatric hospital—the now defunct Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water in Surrey. There he met his wife Cynthia, a nurse. After marring, the couple moved to the US, in 1975, so Bryson could complete his college degree. In 1977 they moved back to the UK where they remained until 1995.

Living in North Yorkshire and working primarily as a journalist, Bryson eventually became chief copy editor of the business section of The Times, and then deputy national news editor of the business section of The Independent.

He left journalism in 1987, three years after the birth of his third child. Still living in Kirkby Malham, North Yorkshire, Bryson started writing independently, and in 1990 their fourth and final child, Sam, was born.

Books
Bryson came to prominence in the UK with his 1995 publication of Notes from a Small Island, an exploration of Britain. Eight years later, as part of the 2003 World Book Day, Notes was voted by UK readers as the best summing up of British identity and the state of the nation. (The same year, 2003, saw Bryson appointed a Commissioner for English Heritage.)

In 1995, Bryson and his family returned to the US, living in Hanover, New Hampshire for the next eight years. His time there is recounted in the 1999 story collection, I'm A Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to American After 20 Years Away (known as Notes from a Big Country in the UK, Canada and Australia).

It was during this time that Bryson decided to walk the Appalachian Trail with his friend Stephen Katz. The resulting book is the 1998 A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. The book became one of Bryson's all-time bestsellers and was adapted to film in 2015, starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte.

In 2003, the Brysons and their four children returned to the UK. They now live in Norfolk.

That same year, Bryson published A Short History of Nearly Everything, a 500-page exploration, in nonscientific terms, of the history of some of our scientific knowledge. The book reveals the often humble, even humorous, beginnings of some of the discoveries which we now take for granted.

The book won Bryson the prestigious 2004 Aventis Prize for best general science book and the 2005 EU Descartes Prize for science communication. Although one scientist is alleged to have jokingly described A Brief History as "annoyingly free of mistakes," Bryson himself makes no such claim, and a list of nine reported errors in the book is available online.

Bryson has also written two popular works on the history of the English language—Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way (1990) and Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States (1994). He also updated of his 1983 guide to usage, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. These books were popularly acclaimed and well-reviewed, despite occasional criticism of factual errors, urban myths, and folk etymologies.

In 2016, Bryson published The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in England, a sequel to his Notes from a Small Island.

Honors
In 2005, Bryson was appointed Chancellor of Durham University, succeeding the late Sir Peter Ustinov, and has been particularly active with student activities, even appearing in a Durham student film (the sequel to The Assassinator) and promoting litter picks in the city. He had praised Durham as "a perfect little city" in Notes from a Small Island. He has also been awarded honorary degrees by numerous universities, including Bournemouth University and in April 2002 the Open University.

In 2006, Frank Cownie, the mayor of Des Moines, awarded Bryson the key to the city and announced that 21 October 2006 would be known as "Bill Bryson, The Thunderbolt Kid, Day."

In November 2006, Bryson interviewed the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair on the state of science and education.

On 13 December 2006, Bryson was awarded an honorary OBE for his contribution to literature. The following year, he was awarded the James Joyce Award of the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin.

In January 2007, Bryson was the Schwartz Visiting Fellow of the Pomfret School in Connecticut.

In May 2007, he became the President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. His first area focus in this role was the establishment of an anti-littering campaign across England. He discussed the future of the countryside with Richard Mabey, Sue Clifford, Nicholas Crane and Richard Girling at CPRE's Volunteer Conference in November 2007. (From Wikipedia. Adapted 2/1/2016.)

Book Reviews
Bryson (A Short History of Everything) takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, and finds it crammed with 10,000 years of fascinating historical bric-a-brac. Each room becomes a starting point for a free-ranging discussion of rarely noticed but foundational aspects of social life. A visit to the kitchen prompts disquisitions on food adulteration and gluttony; a peek into the bedroom reveals nutty sex nostrums and the horrors of premodern surgery; in the study we find rats and locusts; a stop in the scullery illuminates the put-upon lives of servants. Bryson follows his inquisitiveness wherever it goes, from Darwinian evolution to the invention of the lawnmower, while savoring eccentric characters and untoward events (like Queen Elizabeth I's pilfering of a subject's silverware). There are many guilty pleasures, from Bryson's droll prose—"What really turned the Victorians to bathing, however, was the realization that it could be gloriously punishing"—to the many tantalizing glimpses behind closed doors at aristocratic English country houses. In demonstrating how everything we take for granted, from comfortable furniture to smoke-free air, went from unimaginable luxury to humdrum routine, Bryson shows us how odd and improbable our own lives really are.
Publishers Weekly

Popular nonfiction writer Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything), an American-born UK resident, uses his home—a former Victorian parsonage—to explore how the contents of the rooms—in both his and others' dwellings—are reflections of our history. Changes in how we cope with hygiene, sex, death, sleep, amusement, nutrition, and various manufacturing and service trades all leave legacies on the domestic front. Looking at so many aspects of quotidian culture, Bryson understandably risks leaving out some parts, unlike microstudies such as Mark Kurlansky's Salt. Concentrating on the last 150 years of industrial society, thus including those advances showcased at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (the year his house was built), he often wanders back several centuries. The digressions can be overwhelming, especially as the chapters do not provide clear organization. A dedicated wordsmith writing in a colloquial style, Bryson evidently enjoys his musings and trusts that his public will do the same. Verdict: Readers might best use this anecdotally constructed book by dipping into, rather than methodically reading, it. Its eclectic, ambulatory arrangement will delight many but baffle others. Bryson fans will want to read it. With a bibliography listing print sources but no websites and no endnotes. —Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress
Library Journal

(Starred review.) [A] delightful stroll through the history of domestic life. Now living in a 19th-century church rectory in Norfolk, England, the author decided to learn about the ordinary things of life by exploring each room in his house.... In a sense, Bryson’s book is a history of “getting comfortable slowly".... Informative, readable and great fun.
Kirkus Reviews

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for At Home:

1. This book is a series of loosely-connected essays about ... well, what has made life comfortable, indeed, habitable for all of us. What was your experience reading At Home—did you find the loose structure of the work enjoyable, or did find it disjointed and overly digressive? How did you read the book—sequentially, chapter by chapter...or did you "skip and dip," reading ones you felt might be interesting while skipping others?

2. What do you find most interesting in Bryson's historical accounts? What surprises you the most...or impresses you the most? Horrify you? Anything make you laugh?

3. Sometimes it seems as if historical events are inevitable, but Bryson seems to suggest otherwise. Talk about the ways in which coincidence has influcenced history.

4. Progress happens inspite of oursleves. Find examples in Bryson's book of those who resisted new ideas—and insisted that their traditional notions of how the world worked was the only correct way. (Hint: approaches to hygiene...)

5. Some have pointed out the lack of documentation for many of Bryson's claims. Does that bother you...or are footnotes unnecessary in a non-academic work like At Home?

6. Overall, what have you taken away from Bryson's book? Have you read other Bryson works...if so, how does this stack up?

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

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The Audacity of Self: Dare to Put You First
Raquel A. Stuart, Ph.D., 2016
Balboa Press
112 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781504349048

Summary
The Audacity of Self: Dare to Put You First is a delightful must-read. This book pens a powerful account of emotional pain from not being genuine with self and others.

It takes you on a journey from insecurity and having a victim mentality to strength, love of self, and moving from victim to victor. This journey is not an easy one; then again, nothing worth having ever is.

This book is interactive in the sense that it will challenge you from beginning to end. It is a reminder to give yourself permission to live authentically through your words and actions.

The author encourages you to believe in yourself and declare that you are worthy to live an awesome and amazing life. It is up to you to create the space and dare to put you first.

Author Bio
• Birth—October 27, 1972
• Where—St. Michael, Barbados
• Education—Ph.D., Capella University
• Currently—lives in the state of New Jersey, USA

First...in her own words:
I was born on a small island in the West Indies where I lived with my mom for the first six years of my life. I vaguely remember my dad being around, but as far as I can remember, he didn’t live with us. He lived with his mother and brother and I visited them. I did not know it then, but my mom had been a victim of domestic violence; she had suffered at the hands of my father. They were teenagers when they had me, my mom, 18, and my dad, 19.

At the age of six, I immigrated with my mom to America, where we came to live with my grandmother and uncle in Brownsville, a community in Brooklyn, New York City. I lived in NYC for the majority of my life and attended school and college in NYC.

Dr. Raquel A. Stuart is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with a Ph.D. in Human Services with a specialization in Counseling. She has subject matter expertise in high engagement presentations and workshops dealing with sexuality, body image, relationships, and self-esteem. She has served as a Psychology Professor for numerous years at various universities.

Dr. Stuart is the host of a weekly talk show, Bare It All. She is the Founder and CEO of Sistas Speak, LLC, a transformational movement which teaches women and girls to live beyond their reasons and justifications and to understand that if they want something different they have to do something different. (From the author.)

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

Book Reviews
The Audacity of Self: Dare to Put You First is a delightful must read. This book is raw, and Dr. Stuart pens a powerful account of her struggles that inspires her readers to push forward in the face of adversity. She displays pure strength and authenticity in this awe inspiring chronicle despite hurt, pain, and shame to shed her victim mentality in a fight to transform and reclaim her life.
Dr. Leslie E. Brown, Author of The Thorns Within

Raquel writes authentically from the heart. She is real and shares her journey of what she has gone through to where she is now in her life, which is living her life with purpose, power, courage, freedom from the past, with a sprinkle of fun and humor. I feel this book is a MUST read for everyone. We only have 1 life and it's now to live it, why not let Raquel share her journey in supporting our journey in living life Audaciously.
Regina Rossi Lamothe, LCSW

Discussion Questions
1. When we walk around with a negative attitude, where does that attitude get us?

2. How do you know you are walking in your purpose?

3. When you are having a conversation with yourself, what does it sound like?

4. How do you know if the relationships you have are stretching you beyond your comfort zone?

5. What are you seeking from your life?

6. What does self-love look like for you?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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Audition
Barbara Walters, 2008
Knopf Doubleday
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307269546

Summary
Young people starting out in television sometimes say to me: “I want to be you.” My stock reply is always: “Then you have to take the whole package.”

And now, at last, the most important woman in the history of television journalism gives us that “whole package,” in her inspiring and riveting memoir. After more than forty years of interviewing heads of state, world leaders, movie stars, criminals, murderers, inspirational figures, and celebrities of all kinds, Barbara Walters has turned her gift for examination onto herself to reveal the forces that shaped her extraordinary life.

Barbara Walters’s perception of the world was formed at a very early age. Her father, Lou Walters, was the owner and creative mind behind the legendary Latin Quarter nightclub, and it was his risk-taking lifestyle that made Barbara aware of the ups and downs that can occur when someone is willing to take great risks.

The financial responsibility for her family, the fear, the love all played a large part in the choices she made as she grew up: the friendships she developed, the relationships she had, the marriages she tried to make work. Ultimately, thanks to her drive, combined with a decent amount of luck, she began a career in television. And what a career it has been! Against great odds, Barbara has made it to the top of a male-dominated industry.

She has spent a lifetime auditioning, and this book, in some ways, is her final audition, as she fully opens up both her private and public lives. In doing so, she has given us a story that is heartbreaking and honest, surprising and fun, sometimes startling, and always fascinatings. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 25, 1929
• Where—Brookline, Massachesetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Sarah Lawrence College
• Currently—lives in New York City

Barbara Jill Walters is an American journalist, writer, and media personality who was first known as a popular TV morning news anchor for over 10 years on NBC's Today, where she worked with Hugh Downs and later hosts Frank McGee and Jim Hartz. Walters later spent 25 years as co-host of ABC's newsmagazine 20/20. She was the first female co-anchor of network evening news, working with Harry Reasoner on the ABC Evening News and was later a correspondent for ABC World News Tonight (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
A woman with an impeccable sense of timing…There will never be another television news career like this one.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

Breaking news: Barbara Walters wears fake eyelashes, is afraid to drive, gave up her black married lover to save her career (while his went down the tubes). These and other true confessions provide the tabloid interest through 600 pages of the network diva's new memoir, Audition. But it's her heartfelt candor that lifts this book above mere titillation. Finally we learn why Walters is so relentless. It's a question I've often pondered watching her on television after beginning my own TV news career 30 years ago. In this engaging and chatty look back at a life largely lived in public view, Walters provides the answer.
Kathleen Matthews - Washington Post

An unusually ambitious and successful book.... suffused with an emotional intensity…it belongs to a part of American culture that Walters helped invent.
The New Yorker

Audition is brutally honest, both about Walters and those she's worked with. Readers won't be left wondering what she thinks of anything, or anyone, for that matter.... It's a fascinating look at a woman who has lived a fascinating life.
Laura L. Hutchinson - Free Lance-Star

Although Walters writes, "It was not in my nature to be courageous, to be the first," her compulsively readable memoir proves otherwise. No one lasts on TV for more than 45 years without the ability to make viewers feel comfortable, and Walters's amiable persona perfectly translates to the page. She gives us an entertaining panorama of a full life lived and recounted with humor and bracing honesty. Walters is surprisingly candid: about her older sister's retardation, her father's suicide attempt, her midlife affairs (including ones with John Warner—before and after his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor—and a very married Edward Brooke, the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction), her daughter's troubled teen years and her acrimonious relationships with coanchors Frank McGee and Harry Reasoner. She vividly recounts her decision to leave NBC's Today Show after 14 years to become the first female nightly news coanchor, and tells of the firestorm of criticism she endured for accepting that pioneering position and its million-dollar salary. Alternating between tales of her personal struggles, professional achievements and insider anecdotes about the celebrities and world leaders she's interviewed, this mammoth memoir's energy never flags.
Publishers Weekly

(Audio version.) Listeners have two recordings of Walters's 580-page tell-all from which to choose. The abridged version is read by the media personality herself, and other than affording listeners her authentic voice, complete with her trademark lisp, this version is not worthwhile—lasting just six hours, it omits massive amounts of information; notably, Walters's affair with former senator Edward Brooke.In the unabridged version, Bernadette Dunne does a fine job as a surrogate for Walters. The quality of both versions is excellent, and both are appropriate for audio and biography collections in all types of libraries.
Library Journal

and regret are as much the subjects here as religious controversy. Ruefully humorous and tenderly understanding.
Kirkus Reviews

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

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

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to get your discussion started for Audition:

1. Talk about Walters' youth, especially her father's career in show business and its effect on Barbara's own career—her unflagging drive and energy.

2. Walters openly shares the knocks and insults that came her way, both while building her career and even when she reached the top: from Newsweek's "dumdum bullets swaddled in angora" to Saturday Night Live and Gilda Radner's "Baba Wawa." Why such relentless mockery? How well does she seem to handle it?

3. Even as she attained fame, Walter's career continued to stumble—when paired with NBC's Frank McGee or during her stint as co-host with Harry Reasoner on ABC. To what do you attribute this—to Walter's overreaching, to others' professional envy, to the fact that she was a pioneering woman in a male profession...or to something else?

4. Did reading her memoir, change your attitudes about Walters? How did you view her before you read Auditions ... and after? Overall, how does Barbara Walters come across, what kind of an individual is she, what kind of personal character traits does she possess? Do you admire her more...or like her less?

5. Do you feel Walter's self-assessment is frank and on-the-mark? Do you find it honest...or self-serving...or... defensive...or refreshing...or what?

6. Discuss the way Walters deals with her failed marriages and the difficulties she shares with readers in raising her daughter Jackie. How does she treat these painful episodes in her life? Does she accept responsibility for her failures and difficulties, or accept that they are part of the life she has chosen?

7. Which celebrity episode did you enjoy reading about most and why? Which interviewee did you like the most? Admire the most? Dislike the most?

8. When aspiring young newscasters tell Walters they want a career just like hers, what does she mean when she says, "Then you have to take the whole package"?

9. Walters rejects the notion that women can't have it all—"a great marriage, successful career, and well-adjusted children, at least not at the same time." What are your thoughts?

10. In your opinion, to what extent are female TV news personalities, such as Katie Couric and Christiane Amanpour, responsible to Walters for their careers?

11. A fascinating corollary to Walters' book is the question of whether or not women are selected as TV news personalities based on their looks or their talent. Which is more important? When women age, what happens to their careers? Are older women ever allowed to attain the status of a great "grey eminence," like Walter Cronkite or Harry Reasoner or Bob Schieffer? Are they allowed to gain weight like Bill O'Reilly—or even be homely like Dan Rather (well, unless you consider him good-looking.)

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

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The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X and Alex Haley, 1965
Random House
527 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345376718

Summary
With its first great victory in the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights movement gained the powerful momentum it needed to sweep forward into its crucial decade, the 1960s. As voices of protest and change rose above the din of history and false promises, one sounded more urgently, more passionately than the rest.

Malcolm X—once called the most dangerous man in America—challenged the world to listen and learn the truth as he experienced it. And his enduring message is as relevant today as when he first delivered it.

In his autobiography's searing pages, Malcolm X the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement to veteran writer and journalist Alex Haley. In a unique collaboration, Alex Haley worked with Malcolm X for nearly two years, interviewing, listening to, and understanding the most controversial leader of his time.

Raised in Lansing, Michigan, Malcolm Little's road to world fame was as astonishing as it was unpredictable. After drifting from childhood poverty to petty crime, Malcolm found himself in jail. It was there that he came into contact with the teachings of a little-known Black Muslim leader named Elijah Muhammed. The newly renamed Malcolm X devoted himself body and soul to the teachings of Elijah Muhammed and the world of Islam, and became the Nation's foremost spokesman.

When his own conscience forced him to break with Elijah Muhammed, Malcolm founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity, to reach African Americans across the country with an inspiring message of pride, power, and self-determination. The Autobiography of Malcolm X defines American culture and the African-American struggle for social and economic equality that has now become a battle for survival. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 19, 1925
• Where—Omaha, Nebraska, USA
• Death—February 21, 1965
• Where—New York, New York

Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, was an African-American Muslim minister and a human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of blacks, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans.

To his detractors he was a threat to social order, preaching racism and violence. Nonetheless, despite the criticism, he has been called one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history.

Early years
Malcolm X was effectively orphaned early in life. His father was killed when he was six and his mother was placed in a mental hospital when he was thirteen, after which he lived in a series of foster homes.

In 1946, at age 20, he went to prison for larceny and breaking and entering. While in prison he became a member of the Nation of Islam, and after his parole in 1952 quickly rose to become one of its leaders.

Nation of Islam
For a dozen years he was the public face of the controversial group; in keeping with the Nation's teachings he espoused black supremacy, advocated the separation of black and white Americans and scoffed at the civil rights movement's emphasis on integration.

By March 1964, Malcolm X had grown disillusioned with the Nation of Islam and its leader Elijah Muhammad. He ultimately repudiated the Nation and its teachings and embraced Sunni Islam. After a period of travel in Africa and the Middle East, he returned to the United States to found Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

While continuing to emphasize Pan-Africanism, black self-determination, and black self-defense, he disavowed racism, saying, "I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie then... pointed in a certain direction and told to march."]

Death
In February 1965, shortly after repudiating the Nation of Islam, he was assassinated by three of its members. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published shortly after his death, is considered one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/9/2012.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 11, 1921
• Raised—Ithaca, New York, USA
• Death—February 10, 1992
• Where—Seattle, Washington
• Awards—Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Pulitzer Prize

Alex Haley was an American writer. He is best known as the author of the 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. It was adapted by ABC as a TV mini-series of the same name and aired in 1977 to a record-breaking 130 million viewers. It had great influence on awareness in the United States of African-American history and inspired a broad interest in genealogy and family history.

Haley had previously written The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), a collaboration through numerous lengthy interviews with the subject, a major African-American leader.

He was working on a second family history novel at his death. Haley had requested that David Stevens, a screenwriter, complete it; the book was published as Alex Haley's Queen. It was adapted as a film of the same name released in 1993.

Early life
Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, on August 11, 1921, and was the oldest of three brothers and a sister. Haley lived with his family in Henning, Tennessee, before returning to Ithaca with his family when he was five years old. Haley's father was Simon Haley, a professor of agriculture at Alabama A&M University, and his mother was Bertha George Haley (nee Palmer) who was from Henning. The younger Haley always spoke proudly of his father and the obstacles of racism he had overcome.

Like his father, Alex Haley was enrolled at age 15 in Alcorn State University, a historically black college, and, a year later, enrolled at Elizabeth City State College, also historically black, in North Carolina. The following year he returned to his father and stepmother to tell them he had withdrawn from college.

His father felt that Alex needed discipline and growth, and convinced him to enlist in the military when he turned 18. On May 24, 1939, Haley began what became a 20-year career with the United States Coast Guard.

US Coast Guard
Haley enlisted as a mess attendant. Later he was promoted to the rate of petty officer third-class in the rating of steward, one of the few ratings open to African Americans at that time. It was during his service in the Pacific theater of operations that Haley taught himself the craft of writing stories. During his enlistment he was often paid by other sailors to write love letters to their girlfriends. He said that the greatest enemy he and his crew faced during their long voyages was not the Japanese forces but rather boredom.

After World War II, Haley petitioned the U.S. Coast Guard to allow him to transfer into the field of journalism. By 1949 he had become a petty officer first class in the rating of journalist. He later advanced to chief petty officer and held this grade until his retirement from the Coast Guard in 1959. He was the first Chief Journalist in the Coast Guard, the rating having been expressly created for him in recognition of his literary ability.

Haley's awards and decorations from the Coast Guard include the Coast Guard Good Conduct Medal (with 1 silver and 1 bronze service star), American Defense Service Medal (with "Sea" clasp), American Campaign Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, World War II Victory Medal, Korean Service Medal, National Defense Service Medal, United Nations Service Medal, and the Coast Guard Expert Marksmanship Medal.[7] Additionally, he was awarded the War Service Medal by the Republic of Korea ten years after his death.

Literary career
After retiring from the U.S. Coast Guard, Haley began another phase of his journalism career. He eventually became a senior editor for Reader's Digest magazine.

Playboy magazine
Haley conducted the first interview for Playboy magazine. His interview with jazz musician Miles Davis appeared in the September 1962 issue. Haley elicited candid comments from Davis about his thoughts and feelings on racism. That interview set the tone for what became a significant feature of the magazine. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Playboy Interview with Haley was the longest he ever granted to any publication.

Throughout the 1960s, Haley was responsible for some of the magazine's most notable interviews, including one with George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party. He agreed to meet with Haley only after gaining assurance from the writer that he was not Jewish. Haley remained professional during the interview, although Rockwell kept a handgun on the table throughout it. (The interview was recreated in Roots: The Next Generations, with James Earl Jones as Haley and Marlon Brando as Rockwell.)

Haley also interviewed Muhammad Ali, who spoke about changing his name from Cassius Clay. Other interviews include Jack Ruby's defense attorney Melvin Belli, entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., football player Jim Brown, TV host Johnny Carson, and music producer Quincy Jones.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Published in 1965, The Autobiography of Malcolm Xwas Haley's first book. It describes the trajectory of Malcolm X's life from street criminal to national spokesman for the Nation of Islam to his conversion to Sunni Islam. It also outlines Malcolm X's philosophy of black pride, black nationalism, and pan-Africanism. Haley wrote an epilogue to the book summarizing the end of Malcolm X's life, including his assassination in New York's Audubon Ballroom.

Haley ghostwrote the autobiography based on more than 50 in-depth interviews he conducted with Malcolm X between 1963 and the February 1965 assassination. The two men had first met in 1960 when Haley wrote an article about the Nation of Islam for Reader's Digest. They met again when Haley interviewed Malcolm X for Playboy.

The first interviews for the autobiography frustrated Haley. Rather than discussing his own life, Malcolm X spoke about Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam; he became angry about Haley's reminders that the book was supposed to be about Malcolm X. After several meetings, Haley asked Malcolm X to tell him something about his mother. That question drew Malcolm X into recounting his life story.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X has been a consistent best-seller since its 1965 publication. The New York Times reported that six million copies of the book had sold by 1977. In 1998, Time magazine ranked the book as one of the 10 most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.

In 1966, Haley received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Roots
In 1976, Haley published Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a novel based on his family's history, going back to slavery days. It started with the story of Kunta Kinte, who was kidnapped in the Gambia in 1767 and transported to the Province of Maryland to be sold as a slave.

Haley claimed to be a seventh-generation descendant of Kunta Kinte, and his work on the novel involved ten years of research, intercontinental travel and writing. He went to the village of Juffure, where Kunta Kinte grew up and which had continued, and listened to a tribal historian (griot) tell the story of Kinte's capture. Haley also traced the records of the ship, The Lord Ligonier, which he said carried his ancestor to the Americas.

Haley has stated that the most emotional moment of his life occurred in 1967 when he stood at the site in Annapolis, Maryland, where his ancestor had arrived from Africa in chains exactly 200 years before. A memorial depicting Haley reading a story to young children gathered at his feet has since been erected in the center of Annapolis.

Roots was eventually published in 37 languages. Haley won a special Pulitzer Prize for the work in 1977. The same year, Roots was adapted as a popular television miniseries of the same name by ABC. The serial reached a record-breaking 130 million viewers. Roots emphasized that African Americans have a long history and that not all of that history is necessarily lost, as many believed. Its popularity also sparked a greatly increased public interest in genealogy.

In 1979, ABC aired the sequel miniseries, Roots: The Next Generations, which continued the story of Kunta Kinte's descendants. It concluded with Haley's travel to Juffure. Haley was portrayed at different ages by Kristoff St. John, The Jeffersons actor Damon Evans, and Tony Award winner James Earl Jones.

Haley was briefly a "writer in residence" at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he began work on Roots. He enjoyed spending time at The Savoy, a local bistro in nearby Rome, where he would sometimes pass the time listening to the piano player. Today, there is a special table in honor of Haley, with a painting of Haley writing Roots on a yellow legal tablet

Later life and death
In the late 1970s, Haley began working on a second historical novel based on another branch of his family, traced through his grandmother Queen, the daughter of a black slave woman and her white master. Unable to finish the novel before his death, he had requested that David Stevens complete it. Published as Alex Haley's Queen, it was subsequently adapted as a movie of the same name in 1993.

Late in his life, Haley had acquired a small farm in Norris, Tennessee, adjacent to the Museum of Appalachia, intending to live there. After his death, the property was sold to the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) and is now known as The Alex Haley Farm. The CDF uses the property as a national training center and retreat site. An abandoned barn on the property was redesigned as a traditional cantilevered barn by architect Maya Lin and serves as a library for the CDF.

Haley died of a heart attack on February 10, 1992, in Seattle, Washington. He was 70 years old and is buried beside his childhood home in Henning, Tennessee. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/9/2012.)

Book Reviews
As this extraordinary autobiography shows, the source of Malcolm X's power was not alone in his intelligence, energy, electric personality or ability to grow and change, remarkable as these were. Its source was that he understood, perhaps more profoundly than any other Negro leader, the full, shocking extent of America's psychological destruction of its Negroes. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a brilliant, painful, important book.... The book raises many difficult questions.... But as a document for our time, its insights may be crucial; its relevance cannot be doubted.
Eliot Fremont-Smith - New York Times (November 5, 1965)

The prime document that has kept Malcolm’s story alive over the decades since his assassination in 1965 is The Autobiography of Malcolm X. That book has changed countless lives and made Malcolm a central influence on generations of black men who admire his force, his courage, his brilliance, and his way of merging the protean trickster and the bold intellectual activist and the inspiring preacher. But all autobiographies are, in part, lies. They rely on memory, which is notoriously fallible, and are shaped by self-image. They don’t really tell us who you are but whom you want the world to see you as. Did Malcolm X consciously lie in his autobiography? In some cases, yes — he wanted us to believe he was a bigger criminal than he actually was, so that his growth into a Nation of Islam figure would seem a much more dramatic change.
Toure - New York Times Book Review (June 17, 2011)

What makes this book extraordinary is the honesty with which Malcolm presents his life: Even as he regrets the mistakes he made as a young man, he brings his zoot-suited, swing-dancing, conk- haired Harlem youth to vivid life; even though he later turns away from the Nation of Islam, the strong faith he at one time in that sect's beliefs, a faith that redeemed him from prison and a life of crime, comes through. What made the man so extraordinary was his courageous insistence on finding the true path to his personal salvation and to the salvation of the people he loved, even when to stay on that path meant danger, alienation, and death
Sacred Fire

While critics still debate the role Alex Haley played in the writing of this 1965 book, its importance is irrefutable. With Haley’s assistance, Malcolm X described a world of broken promises, injustice, and hatred from which he wanted his race to escape. Many social reformers and militants have been inspired by this dramatic story.
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. Having read his autobiography, how do you personally feel about Malcolm X and his philosophies about the plight of African Americans. Be sensitive to the fact that there may be a number of members in your group who disagree with his approaches. Keep in mind, too, that many African Americans were opposed to Malcolm X's philosophy.

2. Discuss the role that Ella played in Malcolm's life. Describe her as a person. How was she a positive influence?

3. How did Malcolm get "off track" as a young person? How could he have handled his early years differently?

4. Discuss the role of the welfare workers in the Little family after the death of the father. Were they effective? What would have been some other alternatives that might have been more appropriate for the family?

5. How is hair an expression of one's self? Ask each student to write an essay that expresses why he or she has chosen to wear his or her hair in its current fashion.

6. Many of the people Malcolm X preached to about the Nation of Islam were turned off by the strict code of discipline. How is strict discipline an advantage in developing moral character and fortitude? How is strict discipline a disadvantage?

7. Explain how travel helps a person become more well rounded.

8. Why are many young people drawn into criminal lifestyles?

9. Compare and contrast Civil Rights as a movement in the 1960s and 1990s. Identify specific situations and events that have shaped civil rights in both time periods.

10. What are the characteristics of a leader? How would you rate Malcolm X as a leader and why?

11. Malcolm X was disappointed by the actions of Elijah Muhammad that were inconsistent with their Muslim principles. How would you have handled your disappointment with this situation?

12. Malcolm X, the father and husband, presented a number of challenges. What were they? What are the risks associated with being the spouse of a public figure? Is the risk the same or different when the public figure is a woman and the spouse is a man?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Ava's Man
Rick Bragg, 2001
Knopf Doubleday
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375724442

Summary
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All Over but the Shoutin’ continues his personal history of the Deep South with an evocation of his mother’s childhood in the Appalachian foothills during the Great Depression, and the magnificent story of the man who raised her.

Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, a carpenter, a whiskey-maker, a fisherman who knew every inch of the Coosa River, made boats out of car hoods and knew how to pack a wound with brown sugar to stop the blood. He could not read, but he asked his wife, Ava, to read him the paper every day so he would not be ignorant. He was a man who took giant steps in rundown boots, a true hero whom history would otherwise have overlooked.

In the decade of the Great Depression, Charlie moved his family twenty-one times, keeping seven children one step ahead of the poverty and starvation that threatened them from every side. He worked at the steel mill when the steel was rolling, or for a side of bacon or a bushel of peaches when it wasn’t. He paid the doctor who delivered his fourth daughter, Margaret—Bragg’s mother—with a jar of whiskey. He understood the finer points of the law as it applied to poor people and drinking men; he was a banjo player and a buck dancer who worked off fines when life got a little sideways, and he sang when he was drunk, where other men fought or cussed. He had a talent for living.

His children revered him. When he died, cars lined the blacktop for more than a mile.

Rick Bragg has built a soaring monument to the grandfather he never knew—a father who stood by his family in hard times and left a backwoods legend behind—ina book that blazes with his love for his family, and for a particular stretch of dirt road along the Alabama-Georgia border. A powerfully intimate piece of American history as it was experienced by the working people of the Deep South, a glorious record of a life of character, tenacity and indomitable joy and an unforgettable tribute to a vanishing culture, Ava’s Man is Rick Bragg at his stunning best. (From the publisher.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Reviews
In less capable hands, this biography could have been mawkish and mundane. Instead, Bragg's telling of his maternal grandfather's life is eloquent and touching, and his spare prose is alive with fresh metaphors and memorable sentences. Bragg never knew Charlie Bundrum, who died prematurely at age 51 in 1958; the story of this proud, flawed, loving and much-loved hero of Depression-era Appalachia is derived from family and community oral history. Interestingly, this book emerged because readers of Bragg's bestselling book about his mother, Ava (All Over but the Shoutin'), wanted to understand the force that drove her to be such a strong figure. Few actors could have read this work as well as the author has. Bragg's Appalachian accent, slightly polished by Northern living, adds authenticity to the fine, funny and painful anecdotes that made up his grandfather's life and to the feelings each story encompasses. His smooth reading enhances the rhythms and sounds of his prose, rendering with genuine sincerity his deep admiration for his people and for the vanishing culture they represent.
Publishers Weekly

After the publication of Bragg's best-selling memoir All Over but the Shoutin', readers accused the author of "leaving out the good part." They wanted to know where he believed his mother's "heart and backbone came from, and where she inherited the strength and character to raise three boys alone." They also felt he had "short-shrifted" Charlie and Ava Bundrum, his mother's parents. Bragg's grandfather died before he was born, and his extended family, filled with fine storytellers, were conspicuously silent about his life. Upon questioning, he discovered that talking about his grandfather's life led to talking about his death and the grief all of his children still felt 42 years after he "was preached into the sky." On the day of Charlie's funeral, cars lined the blacktop for more than a mile. Deciding "a man like that deserved a book," Bragg interviewed family members and neighbors to tell his grandfather's story. As with his previous book, Bragg writes about poor people of the South with dignity and without condescension. The author reads with humor, affection, and pride; this is a splendid listening experience. —Pam Kingsbury, Alabama Humanities Fdn., Florence, AL.
Library Journal

The story of a man who could charm a bird off a wire, beat the tar out of a threat, dandle a baby, tend a still, and smile—no, live—right through the meanest poverty the South could throw at him, from New York Times reporter and Pulitzer-winner Bragg (All Over But the Shoutin'). Bragg's grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, died a year before Bragg was born, so the author "built him up from dirt level, using half-forgotten sayings, half-remembered stories, and a few yellowed, brittle, black-and-white photographs." Speaking in a lovely southern voice out of northern Georgia and Alabama, with a juke in its bones and metaphors to die for, Bragg brings not just Charlie but an entire time and place to life. Charlie was the son of another piece of work, a man who "largely disregarded any laws or influence outside his own will, and some people did not like to look him dead in the eye because it made them feel weak." No stranger to a dust-up himself, Charlie would take the law down a notch if it was too mettlesome, but he had a softer side—one that would play a white-hot banjo, buck-dance under the stars (and under the influence of his own good white whisky, which made him sing rather than cuss), and offer a helping hand whenever the need arose. Most important of Charlie's virtues, from the author's point of view, was the fact that "if he ever was good at one thing on this earth, it was being a daddy." Searching for work (sometimes, just for food), he'd move his family about the wild and dangerous South, a landscape of ridges and hollows and deep woods, ramshackle houses, muddy rivers, water moccasins, primeval catfish (which he caught from a boat made of two car hoods weldedtogether)—but he knew how to make his family feel secure and loved. A book that flashes with affection and respect for Charlie and the vanishing culture he represents, one we will be immensely the poorer for losing.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In the prologue, Rick Bragg wonders about his grandfather, “What kind of man was this...who is so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make [his family] cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky?” [p. 9] How does the book answer this question? What kind of man is Charlie Bundrum? Why does his memory evoke such powerful emotions in those who knew him?

2. Bragg says that he wrote this story “for a lot of reasons, ” one of which was “to give one more glimpse into a vanishing culture” [p. 13]. How does he create a vivid picture of that culture? What does he admire about it? How is it different from “the new South”? What other reasons compelled Bragg to write about a grandfather he never knew?

3. Bragg says that Charlie Bundrum was “blessed with that beautiful, selective morality that we Southerners are famous for. Even as a boy, he thought people who steal were trash, real trash. . . . Yet he saw absolutely nothing wrong with downing a full pint of likker . . . before engaging in a fistfight that sometimes required hospitalization” [p. 53]. What kind of moral code does Charlie live by? Are his frequent acts of violence justifiable? In what sense can Charlie be called a hero?

4. Charlie is a man of great physical strength and courage, but what instances of kindness, generosity, and caring balance the violence and recklessness in his life? How does the inclusion of this kind of behavior in Bragg’s description create a richer and fuller portrait of the man?

5. In speaking of his grandfather’s legacy, Bragg says, “A man like Charlie Bundrumdoesn’t leave much else, not title or property, not even letters in the attic. There’s just stories, all told second and thirdhand, as long as somebody remembers” [p. 18]. What is the value of preserving the kind of stories that Bragg gathers in Ava’s Man?

6. Ava’s Man is filled with dramatic confrontations and vivid scenes. What episodes stand out the most? What do these episodes reveal about the character of the Bundrum family?

7. In considering his grandfather’s drinking, Bragg writes, “I am not trying to excuse it. He did things that he shouldn’t have. I guess it takes someone who has outlived a mean drunk to appreciate a kind one” [p. 133]. What does this passage suggest about Bragg’s personal stake in reconnecting with his grandfather? What kind of portrait does he paint of his own father in Ava’s Man?

8. Charlie Bundrum “was a man who did the things more civilized men dream they could, who beat one man half to death for throwing a live snake at his son, who shot a large woman with a .410 shotgun when she tried to cut him with a butcher knife, who beat the hell out of two worrisome Georgia highway patrolmen and threw them headfirst out the front door of a beer joint called the Maple on the Hill” [p. 8]. In what ways is Charlie free from the constraints of society? What is the cost of this freedom? Is Bragg right in thinking that Charlie’s way of living is something that more civilized men envy?

9. Bragg writes that Ava could have had her sister Grace’s life, a life of relative wealth and comfort, of fine clothes, good food, and travel, instead of a life of rented houses, poverty, and hard labor in the cotton fields. “She could have hated her life, ” Bragg admits [p. 153]. Why doesn’t she? What does Charlie give her that other men cannot? What kind of woman is she?

10. Why does Charlie take in Hootie? What does this reveal about his character? What does Hootie bring out in Charlie?

11. Bragg writes that Charlie “could charm a bird off a wire” [p. 45]. What are the charms of Bragg’s own storytelling style? Where else does he use colorful similes? In what ways is his narrative voice perfectly suited to his subject matter?

12. What does Ava’s Man reveal about how the Great Depression affected people in the Deep South, especially those who lived in the foothills? How did it affect the Bundrums specifically? How are they treated by landlords, sheriffs, and others in positions of power?

13. For centuries, recorded history has largely been the account of those who have had the greatest impact on world events. Why is the history of a man like Charlie Bundrum important? In what ways does it offer a door into American history and culture that more conventional histories cannot provide?

14. In the epilogue, Bragg argues that when compared with the new South, Charlie Bundrum seems larger than life, because of “his complete lack of shame. He was not ashamed of his clothes, his speech, his life. He not only thrived, he gloried in it” [p. 248]. What accounts for Charlie’s pride? Why is Bragg so proud of him? What does Ava’s Man suggest about the way in which inner character is more important than external circumstances?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Bad Blood: Secets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou, 2020
Knopf Doubleday
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525431992

Summary
In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the next Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with its breakthrough device, which performed the whole range of laboratory tests from a single drop of blood.

Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.5 billion.

There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.

Erroneous results put patients in danger, leading to misdiagnoses and unnecessary treatments. All the while, Holmes and her partner, Sunny Balwani, worked to silence anyone who voiced misgivings—from journalists to their own employees.

Rigorously reported and fearlessly written, Bad Blood is a gripping story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron—a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
John Carreyrou is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal. For his extensive coverage of Theranos, Inc., Carreyrou was awarded the George Polk Award for Financial Reporting, the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism and the Barlett & Steele Award for Investigative Journalism in 2016. Carreyrou lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
John Carreyrou tells [the story] virtually to perfection in Bad Blood, which really amounts to two books. The first is a chilling, third-person narrative of how Holmes came up with a fantastic idea that made her, for a while, the most successful woman entrepreneur in Silicon Valley…. The author's description of Holmes as a manic leader who turned coolly hostile when challenged is ripe material for a psychologist; Carreyrou wisely lets the evidence speak for itself…. In the second part of the book the author compellingly relates how he got involved, following a tip from a suspicious reader. His recounting of his efforts to track down sources… reads like a West Coast version of All the President's Men.
Roger Lowenstein - New York Times Book Review -

A great and at times almost unbelievable story…. Theranos may be the biggest case of corporate fraud since Enron.
New York Magazine

Gripping.… Riveting.… [Told] with a momentum worthy of a crime novel.
Los Angeles Review of Books

Riveting.… For all its boomtime feel, there are timeless aspects to Theranos’ story. Venality is age-old, but so is courage, and that of the ex-employees who blew the whistle on its deceptions is restorative.… And more than an honorable mention should go to Carreyrou, a dogged old-school reporter uncowed by Theranos’ legal hardball.
San Francisco Chronicle

A veritable page-turning..… Gripping..… Presents comprehensive evidence of the fraud perpetrated by Theranos chief executive Elizabeth Holmes.… Unveils many dark secrets of Theranos that have not previously been laid bare.
Nature

Riveting..… Compelling.… [Carreyrou’s] unmasking of Theranos is a tale of David and Goliath.
Financial Times

A fascinating true story that reads like a suspense novel. . . . A telling parable of Silicon Valley magical thinking.
Vogue

In Bad Blood, Carreyrou tells the full, gripping tale of how he slayed the ‘unicorn’ in a fascinating look at how buzz and billions can blind people to facts.
Marie Claire

A parable about Silicon Valley delusion. . . . Gossipy fun comes from seeing which high-profile man (James Mattis, Joe Biden) gets drawn into Holmes’ scammy web next.
Elle

A thorough and devastating piece of reporting that deserves a place alongside the masterworks of the inside-the-boardroom business genre. . . . He quietly compiles detail after damning detail into a fascinating narrative.
Weekly Standard (UK)

(Starred review) An apparent scientific breakthrough rests on a quicksand of deception in this riveting account of the rise and downfall of notorious biotech firm Theranos…. The result is a bracing cautionary tale about visionary entrepreneurship gone very wrong.
Publishers Weekly

[C]learly written and accessible…. [T]he company believed it could "fake-it-until-you-make-it," a Silicon Valley flaw, per Carreyrou. Using aggressive tactics and pit bull attorneys, Theranos squelched dissent and threatened the author. Highly recommended —Harry Charles, St. Louis
Library Journal

(Starred review) Crime thriller authors have nothing on Carreyrou's exquisite sense of suspenseful pacing and multifaceted character development in this riveting, read-in-one-sitting tour de force.... Carreyrou's commitment to unraveling Holmes' crimes was literally of life-saving value.
Booklist

A deep investigative report…. The author brilliantly captures the interpersonal melodrama, hidden agendas, gross misrepresentations, nepotism, and a host of delusions and lies…. [A] vivid, cinematic portrayal of serpentine Silicon Valley. [Future film planned.]
Kirkus Reviews

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

1. Really, the primary question is simple: what in Carreyrou's book angered you most?

2. The second question, of course, is … how in God's name did Theranos get away with its scam for as long as it did? CEO Elizabeth Holmes even had a visit from the vice president of the United States, who, along with others, was completely taken in. Such icons of wisdom and gravitas, such as Henry Kissenger and George Schultz, sat on the board of directors. What took so long for anyone to catch on?

3. How would you describe Elizabeth Holmes—what drove her? And what enabled her to pull the wool over the eyes of so many, even including some of her own employees? What kind of personality, or personality disorder, does she exhibit?

4. Consider Walgreens' actions: the company was warned by a consultant not to go ahead with instore clinics. Why did it refuse to listen to the advice?

5. How does David Boies, the well-known (some might say infamous) lawyer come across in this telling?

6. Does anyone in Bad Blood (other than the author) emerge as a hero of sorts? What about Rupert Murdock? Does it take someone with his wealth and power to stand up to a person like Holmes? He was a stockholder, after all.

7. Talk about the author's dogged approach to uncovering this story.

8. Ultimately, does Bad Blood encompase a broader issue than the story of a single company gone bad?

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

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Bad Feminist: Essays
Roxane Gay, 2014
HarperCollins
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062282712

Summary
A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay.

“Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink—all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I’m not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.”

In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.

Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1974-75
• Where—Omaha, Nebraska, USA
• Education—M.A., University of Nebraska; Ph.D., Michigan Technological University
• Currently—lives in Layfayette, Indiana, and Los Angeles, California

Roxane Gay is a writer, academician, editor, blogger, and commentator. She is an assistant professor of English at Purdue University, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, contributing editor for Bluestem Magazine, essays editor for The Rumpus, and co-editor of PANK, a nonprofit literary arts collective.

She is the author of the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), and the essay collection Bad Feminist (2014). She also edited the book Girl Crush: Women's Erotic Fantasies. In addition to her regular contributions to Salon and HTMLGIANT, her writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012 and The New York Times Book Review.

Gay was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to Haitian parents. She attended Philips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, received her Master's degree from University of Nebraska and her doctorate (in rhetoric and technical communication) from Michigan Technological University. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/20/2014.)

Book Reviews
Blunt and funny.... Gay floats the proposition that “feminism has, historically, been far more invested in improving the lives of heterosexual white women to the detriment of all others.” It might have been interesting to pair further discussion on this theme with Gay’s defense of Sheryl Sandberg and Nell Scovell’s self-help book Lean In, in which [Gay] argues that “Assuming Sandberg’s advice is completely useless for working-class women is just as shortsighted as claiming her advice needs to be completely applicable to all women.” But if I occasionally wish that Gay were a bit more formal in developing her arguments, her writing can also make a virtue of jarring compositions, of ideas that do not quite fit together.
Alyssa Rosenberg - Washington Post

Fascinating.... An important and pioneering contemporary writer.... Readers will immediately understand the appeal of Gay’s intimate and down-to-earth voice.... An important contribution to the complicated terrain of gender politics.
Boston Globe

A prolific and exceptionally insightful writer.... Bad Feminist doesn’t show us how Gay should be, but something much better: how Roxane Gay actually is.... Gay unquestionably succeeds at leading us in her way.
Globe and Mail (Toronto)

A thoughtful and often hilarious new collection of essays.
Chicago Tribune

What makes Bad Feminist such a good read isn’t only Gay’s ability to deftly weave razor-sharp pop cultural analysis and criticism with a voice that is both intimate and relatable. It’s that she’s incapable of blindly accepting any kind of orthodoxy.
San Francisco Chronicle

Roxane Gay is the gift that keeps on giving.... An entertaining and thought-provoking essay collection.
Time

One of our sharpest new culture critics plants her flag in topics ranging from trigger warnings to Orange is the New Black in this timely collection of essays.
Oprah Magazine

An assortment of comical, yet astute essays that touch on Gay’s personal evolution as a woman, popular culture throughout the recent past, and the state of feminism today.
Harper's Bazaar

Bad Feminist collects the very good essays of ‘It girl’ culture critic Roxane Gay.
Vanity Fair

Roxane Gay is the brilliant girl-next-door: your best friend and your sharpest critic.... She is by turns provocative, chilling, hilarious; she is also required reading.
People

Roxane Gay applies her discerning eye to everything from Paula Deen to The Bachelor.
Marie Claire

Roxane Gay delivers sermons that read like easy conversations. Bad Feminist is an important collection of prose—prose that matters to those still trying to find their voice.
Ebony

Toss Roxane Gay’s collection of witty, thoughtful essays, Bad Feminist into your tote bag. With musings on everything from Sweet Valley High to the color pink, Gay explores the idea of being a feminist, even when you’re full of contradictions.
Self

Alternately friendly and provocative, wry and serious, her takes on everything from Girls to Fifty Shades of Grey help to recontextualize what feminism is--and what it can be.
Time Out New York

Arresting and sensitive.... An author who filters every observation through her deep sense of the world as fractured, beautiful, and complex.
Slate

Gay’s essays expertly weld her personal experiences with broader gender trends occurring politically and in popular culture.
Huffington Post

[Gay’s] energetic and thought-provoking first essay collection will become as widely read as other generation-defining works, like Nora Ephron’s Crazy Salad and Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost.
Essence

(Starred review.) This trenchant collection assembles previously published essays and new work by cultural critic and novelist Gay.... Although Gay is aware of her privilege as a middle-class Haitian-American, she doesn’t refrain from advising inner-city students to have higher expectations. Whatever her topic, Gay’s provocative essays stand out for their bravery, wit, and emotional honesty.
Publishers Weekly

Essayist, novelist and pop-culture guru Gay sounds off on the frustrating complexities of gender and race in pop culture and society as a whole. In this diverse collection of short essays, the author launches her critical salvos at seemingly countless waves of pop-cultural cannon fodder.... An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.
Kirkus Reviews

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Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
William Finnegan, 2015
Penguin
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594203473

Summary
Winner, 2016 Pulitizer Prize - Biography

A deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer by the acclaimed New Yorker writer.

Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.

Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter.

Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves.

Finnegan shares stories of life in a whitesonly gang in a tough school in Honolulu even while his closest friend was a Hawaiian surfer. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor.

He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the world’s greatest waves. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he becomes an improbable anthropologist: unpicking the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissecting the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, navigating the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria.

Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.

Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little understood art. Today, Finnegan’s surfing life is undiminished. Frantically juggling work and family, he chases his enchantment Long Island ice storms and obscure corners of Madagascar. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1952
• Raised—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California-Santa Cruz; M.F.A. University of Montana
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York

William Finnegan is a staff writer at The New Yorker and well-known author of works of international journalism. He has specially addressed issues of racism and conflict in Southern Africa and politics in Mexico and South America, as well as poverty among youth in the United States, and is well known for his writing on surfing.

Finnegan currently resides in New York.

Early years
Finnegan was born in New York City in 1952. He was raised in Los Angeles and Hawaii. He graduated from William Howard Taft High School in Woodland Hills, California and received his B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1974 with a degree in Literature.

During his youth he took up surfing, which became a lifelong passion he still practices off Long Island when at home. Finnegan spent the next four years taking seasonal jobs and working on an MFA in creative writing at the University of Montana.

Finnegan then spent four years abroad, traveling in Asia, Australia, and Africa. He supported himself with freelance travel writing and other odd jobs, but upon reaching Cape Town, South Africa, Finnegan was in need of a job. He found a position as an English teacher at Grassy Park High School, a school for "coloured" students.

Finnegan’s teaching experience coincided with a nationwide school boycott, giving him fodder for his first book, Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid, which was published in 1986 and was selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best nonfiction books of the year.

Journalism career
Finnegan’s experience in South Africa transformed him from a novelist to a political journalist. His first short piece, about his experience living in Sri Lanka, was published in Mother Jones in 1979. Finnegan began contributing to The New Yorker in 1984 and has been a staff writer there since 1987. He has also contributed to Harper's and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.

Finnegan contributed a two-part series for The New Yorker in 1992 entitled "Playing Doc's Games." A surfer himself, Finnegan writes about the local surf scene in San Francisco revolving around Ocean Beach and Dr. Mark Renneker ("Doc") as well as Finnegan's own personal experiences. A remarkable piece of writing, it is widely considered to be one of the best pieces of journalism on surfing.

Finnegan’s next two books grew out of assignments for The New Yorker. In 1986, he was sent to Johannesburg, where he followed black reporters who gathered information for white reporters during Apartheid. This led to the 1988 publication of Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South African Reporters.

A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique, published in 1992, grew out of a series of correspondences about the war-torn nation for the magazine, and Finnegan's own travels throughout that war-torn nation. 1998 saw the publication of Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country, which deals with the bleak lives of American teenagers in spite of the United States’ economic affluence. It was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism in 1999.

In the July 20th, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, Finnegan profiled Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona and his role in the conflict over immigration in that border state. In the May 31st, 2010 issue, he reported from Michoacan state in Mexico on the rise of the "La Familia" drug gang and the increasing social and political instability in Mexico. His "Talk of the Town" comment on "Borderlines," which addresses the U.S. political stalemate over immigration reform, appeared in the magazine's issue for July 26, 2010.

Awards
Finnegan has twice received the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, given by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, in 1994 and 1996. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist, in 1990 and 1995. In 1994, his article “Deep East Texas” won the Edward M. Brecher Award for Achievement in the Field of Journalism from the Drug Policy Foundation.

His article “The Unwanted” won the Sidney Hillman Award for Magazine Reporting in 1998. His report from Sudan, “The Invisible War,” won a Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club in 2000. In 2002, Hunter College, City University of New York, honored him with the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for his article "Leasing the Rain" on the fight to control fresh water. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/23/2015.)

Book Reviews
No pretension or flab here. Just sturdy verbs, a casual flowing power, tantric masculine reticence, a melancholy sense of a sidewise-drifting life….The star is the surfing, and the waves, which the author studies all over the world, from a hundred different angles…one takes away from Barbarian Days a sense of a big, wind-chapped, well-lived life. Mr. Finnegan has moved about the earth like a man in a ballad, testing himself at every opportunity, always willing to obey "dog-whistle orders from the collective surf unconscious."
Dwight Garner - New York Times

[An] extraordinary book…. It is in many ways, and for the first time, a surfer in full. And it is cause for throwing your wet-suit hoods in the air…if the book has a flaw, it lies in the envy helplessly induced in the armchair surf-traveler by so many lusty affairs with waves that are the supermodels of the surf world. Still, Finnegan considerately shows himself paying the price of admission in a few near drownings, and these are among the most electrifying moments in the book.
Thad Ziolkowski - New York Times Book Review

Terrific… Elegantly written and structured, it’s a riveting adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, and a restless, searching meditation on love, friendship and family…. A writer of rare subtlety and observational gifts, Finnegan explores every aspect of the sport—its mechanics and intoxicating thrills, its culture and arcane tribal codes—in a way that should resonate with surfers and non-surfers alike. His descriptions of some of the world’s most powerful and unforgiving waves are hauntingly beautiful…Finnegan displays an honesty that is evident throughout the book, parts of which have a searing, unvarnished intensity that reminded me of Stop Time, the classic coming-of-age memoir by Frank Conroy.
Washington Post

Gorgeously written and intensely felt…With Mr. Finnegan’s bravura memoir, the surfing bookshelf is dramatically enriched. It’s not only a volume for followers of the sport. Non-surfers, too, will be treated to a travelogue head-scratchingly rich in obscure, sharply observed destinations…. Dare I say that we all need Mr. Finnegan…as a role model for a life fully, thrillingly, lived.
Wall Street Journal

Finnegan writes so engagingly that you paddle alongside, eager for him to take you to the next wave…It is a wet and wild run. He makes surfing seem as foreign and simultaneously as intimate a sport as possible…Surfing is the backbone of the book, but Finnegan’s relationships to people, not waves, form its flesh…[A] deep blue story of one man’s lifelong enchantment.
Boston Globe

A demonstration of gratitude and mastery. [Finnegan] uses these words to describe the wave, but they might as well apply to the book. In a sense, Barbarian Days functions as a 450-page thank you letter, masterfully crafted, to his parents, friends, wife, enemies, ex-girlfriends, townsfolk, daughter—everyone who tolerated and even encouraged his lifelong obsession. It’s a way to help them—and us—understand what drives him to keep paddling out half a century after first picking up a board.
NPR.org

An evocative, profound and deeply moving memoir…The proof is in the sentences. Were I given unlimited space to review this book, I would simply reproduce it here, with a quotation mark at the beginning and another at the end. While surfers have a reputation for being inarticulate, there is actually a fair amount of overlap between what makes a good surfer and a good writer. A smooth style, an ability to stay close to the source of the energy, humility before the task, and, once you’re done, not claiming your ride. In other words, making something exceedingly difficult look easy. The gift for writing a clean line is rare, and the gift for riding one even rarer. Finnegan possesses both.
San Francisco Chronicle

[A] sweeping, glorious memoir…Oh, the rides, they are incandescent…I’d sooner press this book upon on a nonsurfer, in part because nothing I’ve read so accurately describes the feeling of being stoked or the despair of being held under. But also because while it is a book about ‘A Surfing Life’…it’s also about a writer’s life and, even more generally, a quester’s life, more carefully observed and precisely rendered than any I’ve read in a long time.
Los Angeles Times

Vivid and propulsive…. Finnegan…has seen things from the tops of ocean peaks that would disturb most surfers’ dreams for weeks. (I happily include myself among that number.)…. A lyrical and enormously rewarding read…Finnegan’s enchantment takes us to some luminous and unsettling places—on both the edge of the ocean, and the frontiers of the surfing life.
San Diego Union-Tribune

Finnegan’s epic adventure, beautifully told, is much more than the story of a boy and his wave, even if surfing serves as the thumping heartbeat of his life.
Dallas Morning News

Fans of [Finnegan’s] writing have been waiting eagerly for his surfing memoir…Well, Barbarian Days is here. And it’s even better than one could have imagined…This is Finnegan’s gift. He’s observant and expressive but shows careful restraint in his zeal. He says only what needs to be said, enough to create a vivid picture for the reader while masterfully giving that picture a kind of movement.
Honolulu Star-Advertiser

That surfing life is [Finnegan’s], and it’s a remarkably adventurous one sure to induce wanderlust in anyone who follows along, surfer or not…. Lyrical but not overbaked, exciting but always self-effacing. It captures the moments of joy and terror Finnegan’s lifelong passion has brought him, as well as his occasional ambivalence about the tenacious hold it has on him. It’s easily the best book ever written about surfing. It’s not even close.b
Florida Times-Union

The kind of book that makes you squirm in your seat on the subway, gaze out the window at work, and Google Map the quickest route to the beach. In other words, it is, like Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, a semi-dangerous book, one that persuades young men…to trade in their office jobs in order to roam the world, to feel the ocean’s power, and chase the waves.
Paris Review Daily

An engrossing read, part treatise on wave physics, part thrill ride, part cultural study, with a soupçon of near-death events. Even for those who’ve never paddled out, Finnegan’s imagery is as vividly rendered as a film, his explanation of wave mastery a triumph of language. For surfers, the book is The Endless Summer writ smarter and larger, touching down at every iconic break.
Los Angeles Magazine

Barbarian Days gleams with precise, often lyrical recollections of the most memorable waves [Finnegan has] encountered…He carefully mines his surfing exploits for broader, hard-won insights on his childhood, his most intense friendships and romances, his political education, his career. He’s always attuned to his surroundings, and his reflections are often tinged with self-effacing wit.
Chicago Reader

Which is precisely what makes the propulsive precision of Finnegan’s writing so surprising and revelatory… Finnegan’s treatment of surfing never feels like performance. Through the sheer intensity of his descriptive powers and the undeniable ways in which surfing has shaped his life, Barbarian Days is an utterly convincing study in the joy of treating seriously an unserious thing…As Finnegan demonstrates, surfing, like good writing, is an act of vigilant noticing.
New York Review of Books

Finnegan is an excellent surfer; at some point he became an even better writer. That pairing makes Barbarian Days exceptional in the notoriously foamy genre of surf lit: a hefty, heavyweight tour de force, overbrimming with sublime lyrical passages that Finnegan drops as effortlessly as he executed his signature ‘drop-knee cutback’ in the breaks off Waikiki…Reading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting; William Burroughs on controlled substances; Updike on adultery…Finnegan is a virtuoso wordsmith, but the juice propelling this memoir is wrung from the quest that shaped him…A piscine, picaresque coming-of-age story, seen through the gloss resin coat of a surfboard.
Sports Illustrated

Overflowing with vivid descriptions of waves caught and waves missed, of disappointments and ecstasies and gargantuan curling tubes that encircle riders like cathedrals of pure stained glass…These paragraphs, with their mix of personal remembrance and subcultural taxonomies, tend to be as elegant and pellucid as the breakers they immortalize…This memoir is one you can ride all the way to shore.
Entertainment Weekly

That’s always Finnegan’s M.O.: examining the ways in which surfing intertwines with anthropology, economics, politics, and, of course, writing. Finnegan is a sober, straightforward author, but the level of detail, emotion, and insight he achieves is unparalleled…. A must-read for all surfers—not just because of its unblinking prose and subtle wit, but because it’s the only book that properly details what it’s like to cultivate both an award-winning career and a dedicated surfing life.
Eastern Surf Magazine

Finnegan describes, with shimmering detail, his adventures riding waves on five continents. Surfing has taken him places he'd never otherwise have thought to go, but it also buoyed him through a career reporting on the politics of intense scarcity, limitless cruelty, and unimaginable suffering. It's a book about travel and growing up, and the power of a pastime when it becomes an obsession.
Men's Journal

(Starred review.) [P]anoramic and fascinating memoir.... [Finnegan] set out in pursuit of a perfect wave, and spent five years circumnavigating the globe with long stops in Polynesia, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, and South Africa.... [H]e has written a revealing and magisterial account of a beautiful addiction.
Publishers Weekly

[A]n up-close and personal homage to the surfing lifestyle through the author's journey as a lifelong surfer. Finnegan's writing is polished and bold, but the lengthy descriptions of individual waves and their personalities may be daunting to the average reader.... [H]igh-caliber memoir.... —Stacy Shaw, Orange, CA
Library Journal

As brilliant and lucid as some of [Finnegan's] descriptions are, they sometimes overwhelm the rest of the narrative.... [N]evertheless...a fascinating look inside the mind of a man terminally in love with a magnificent obsession. A lyrical and intense memoir.
Kirkus Reviews

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Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
Amy Chua
Penguin Group USA
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594202841

Summary
An awe-inspiring, often hilarious, and unerringly honest story of one mother's exercise in extreme parenting, revealing the rewards-and the costs-of raising her children the Chinese way.

All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. What Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother reveals is that the Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that. Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions and providing a nurturing environment. The Chinese believe that the best way to protect your children is by preparing them for the future and arming them with skills, strong work habits, and inner confidence. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother chronicles Chua's iron-willed decision to raise her daughters, Sophia and Lulu, her way—the Chinese way—and the remarkable results her choice inspires.

Here are some things Amy Chua would never allow her daughters to do:

• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• not be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin

The truth is Lulu and Sophia would never have had time for a playdate. They were too busy practicing their instruments (two to three hours a day and double sessions on the weekend) and perfecting their Mandarin.

Of course no one is perfect, including Chua herself. Witness this scene—"According to Sophia, here are three things I actually said to her at the piano as I supervised her practicing:

Oh my God, you're just getting worse and worse.
I'm going to count to three, then I want musicality.
If the next time's not PERFECT, I'm going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them!"

But Chua demands as much of herself as she does of her daughters. And in her sacrifices-the exacting attention spent studying her daughters' performances, the office hours lost shuttling the girls to lessons-the depth of her love for her children becomes clear.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is an eye-opening exploration of the differences in Eastern and Western parenting- and the lessons parents and children everywhere teach one another. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Champaign, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., J.D., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in New Haven, Connecticut

Amy L. Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She joined the Yale faculty in 2001 after teaching at Duke Law School. Prior to starting her teaching career, she was a corporate law associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. She specializes in the study of international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization and the law. She is widely known for her parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), and The Triple Package (2014), co-authored with her husband Jed Rubenfeld.

Background
Chua was born in Champaign, Illinois. Her parents were ethnic Chinese from the Philippines who emigrated to the United States. Amy's father, Leon O. Chua, is an Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences professor at the University of California, Berkeley and is known as the father of nonlinear circuit theory, cellular neural networks, and discovered the memristor. She was raised as a Roman Catholic and lived in West Lafayette, Indiana.

When she was eight years old, her family moved to Berkeley, California. Chua went to El Cerrito High School and graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in Economics from Harvard College in 1984. She obtained her J.D. cum laude in 1987 from Harvard Law School, where she was an Executive Editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Books
Chua has written four books: two studies of international affairs, a memoir and her latest on Ethnic-American culture.

• World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003), explores the ethnic conflict caused in many societies by disproportionate economic and political influence of "market dominant minorities" and the resulting resentment in the less affluent majority. The book—a New York Times Bestseller, was selected by The Economist as one of the Best Books of 2003 and was named in The Guardian as one of the "Top Political Reads of 2003"—examines how globalization and democratization since 1989 have affected the relationship between market dominant minorities and the wider population.

• Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall (2007), examines seven major empires and posits that their success depended on their tolerance of minorities.

• Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), is a memoir that ignited a global parenting debate with its story of one mother’s journey in strict parenting techniques.

• The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America (2014) outlines three personal traits that make for individual success. It is co-authored with Jed Rubenfeld, her husband.

Personal
Chua lives in New Haven, Connecticut and is married to Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld. She has two daughters, Sophia and Louisa ("Lulu"). She is the eldest of four sisters: Michelle, Katrin, and Cynthia. Katrin is a physician and a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. Cynthia, who has Down Syndrome, holds two International Special Olympics gold medals in swimming. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/18/2014.)

Book Reviews
So many parenting memoirs capture the various ways the authors' children have taken them to hell and back. Refreshingly, and perhaps uniquely, Chua instead catalogs the various ways she tortured her two young daughters, all in the name of Chinese tradition and the goal of reaching Carnegie Hall…Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is entertaining, bracingly honest and, yes, thought-provoking.
Susan Dominus - New York Times Book Review

Readers will alternately gasp at and empathize with Chua's struggles and aspirations, all the while enjoying her writing, which, like her kid-rearing philosophy, is brisk, lively and no-holds-barred. This memoir raises intriguing, sometimes uncomfortable questions about love, pride, ambition, achievement and self-worth that will resonate among success-obsessed parents.
Elizabeth Chang - Washington Post

This is one outrageous book, partly thanks to Amy Chua's writing style - Chua is pugnacious and blunt, with an unerring nose for the absurd ...The cultural divide Chua so brilliantly captures is one we stand to witness more and more in our globalized age, after all; and what with Asia and Asian achievement looming ever larger in the American imagination, the issues inherent in Battle Hymn are as important as they are entertaining... I was riveted by this book.
Gish Jen - Boston Globe

Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother did more than speak to me. It screamed, shouted and lectured me. It made me simultaneously laugh with empathy and cringe with embarrassment and exasperation... Charming... Self-effacing... Guffaw-inducing.
Terry Hong - San Francisco Chronicle

Chua (Day of Empire) imparts the secret behind the stereotypical Asian child's phenomenal success: the Chinese mother. Chua promotes what has traditionally worked very well in raising children: strict, Old World, uncompromising values--and the parents don't have to be Chinese. What they are, however, are different from what she sees as indulgent and permissive Western parents: stressing academic performance above all, never accepting a mediocre grade, insisting on drilling and practice, and instilling respect for authority. Chua and her Jewish husband (both are professors at Yale Law) raised two girls, and her account of their formative years achieving amazing success in school and music performance proves both a model and a cautionary tale. Sophia, the eldest, was dutiful and diligent, leapfrogging over her peers in academics and as a Suzuki piano student; Lulu was also gifted, but defiant, who excelled at the violin but eventually balked at her mother's pushing. Chua's efforts "not to raise a soft, entitled child" will strike American readers as a little scary—removing her children from school for extra practice, public shaming and insults, equating Western parenting with failure—but the results, she claims somewhat glibly in this frank, unapologetic report card, "were hard to quarrel with.
Publishers Weekly

Most critics agreed that Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is an entertaining read—lively and humorous, written with the intent to shock. More controversial is Chua’s stereotyping of Chinese and Western cultures, not to mention her authoritarian parenting methods..
Bookmarks Magazine

She insists that Western children are no happier than Chinese ones, and that her daughters are the envy of neighbors and friends, because of their poise and musical, athletic, and academic accomplishments. Ironically, this may be read as a cautionary tale that asks just what price should be paid for achievement. —Colleen Mondor
Booklist

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother:

1. What is your overall reaction to Battle Hymn of the Mother Tiger? Are you appalled or impressed, in agreement, disagreement...or something else?

2. What kind of mother is Amy Chua? Do you wish you'd had a mother like Chua? Or that you were a mother like Chua?

3. Is this a parenting manual? Are Western parents too soft on, or too permissive toward, their children? Does Amy Chua offer an alternative parenting model?

4. What is the most extreme example of Amy Chua's mothering? Which incidents stuck with you more than others—the piano practice threats? The birthday card rejection?

5. Success for Chua is important: how does she define success...and how do you define it? How important is success to you?

6. Consider whether Chua's children are such extraordinarily high achievers (musically and academically) because of their strict upbringing...or because of their innate abilities, i.e., genetics? (See her father's background in the Author Bio above.)

7. According to Chua, her parenting method is typical of Chinese families. Is their method—with its strict demands for high achievement—superior to that of Western parents? How would you describe the differences between parenting in the two cultures?

8. Chua wishes to reverse what she sees as "a remarkably common pattern" of decline in the Chinese immigrant family. According to Chua, first generation immigrants exercise strict discipline. Their children, the second generation, will "typically be high-achieving" but less strict with their children. And the third generation, "will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution"—an attitude that ultimately leads to to disobedience and generational decline. Is the decline Chua describes real? Have other immigrant populations experienced the same pattern?

9. Do you agree or disagree with Chua's criticisms of various aspects of Western culture—Facebook and junk food being two examples?

10. What does Chua think of the Western emphasis on self-esteem? Do you agree...or disagree with her assessment?

11. Chua dismisses the happy endings of Disney family movies by saying that that's "just Disney's way of appealing to all the people who never win prizes." What do you think—are the movies' soft-focus on parenting values pandering to low-achievers, to those who will never rise above average?

12. Part of Chua's rationale is that she understands what all Chinese parents understand: "that nothing is fun until you're good at it." Do you agree? Is playing the piano well as an adult, for instance, worth those toothmarks bitten into the piano as a child?

13. Chua says of herself, "the truth is I'm good at enjoying life." What do you make of her admission? Has she risked teaching her daughters the same attitude toward life?

14. What role does Chua's husband, Jed, play in all this? What should his role have been? What do you make of the fact that Chua is not unlike his own mother?

15. How did her sister's illness change Chua's views on life?

16. When Lulu had her outburst in Russia, did you root for her, or shrink back in horror?

17. How, eventually, is Chua "humbled" by her daughters—in what way do they prove wiser than their mother? Is, in fact, Chua truly humbled by Lulu? Does she have a genuine awakening?

18. What area some of the books humorous moments. Many reviewers talked about laughing out loud. What sections do you find especially funny, even hilarious?

19. Is success worth the time and effort it takes to maintain oversight and discipline...and, most especiallly, is it worth a child's unhappiness? Is that unhappiness only momentary in the larger scheme of life? In the end, is the payoff—a lifetime of accomplishment—worth the cost?

20. What do you predict for Chua's daughters? Do you think they will raise their children with the same strict standards their mother applied to them?

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

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Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addition
David Sheff, 2008
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780547203881

Summary
What had happened to my beautiful boy? To our family? What did I do wrong? Those are the wrenching questions that haunted every moment of David Sheff ’s journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery. Before Nic Sheff became addicted to crystal meth, he was a charming boy, joyous and funny, a varsity athlete and honor student adored by his two younger siblings.

After meth, he was a trembling wraith who lied, stole, and lived on the streets. David Sheff traces the first subtle warning signs: the denial, the 3 A.M. phone calls (is it Nic? the police? the hospital?), the rehabs. His preoccupation with Nic became an addiction in itself, and the obsessive worry and stress took a tremendous toll. But as a journalist, he instinctively researched every avenue of treatment that might save his son and refused to give up on Nic.

Beautiful Boy is a fiercely candid memoir that brings immediacy to the emotional rollercoaster of loving a child who seems beyond help. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
• Education—University of California, Berkeley
• Currently—lives in Inverness, California

David Sheff’s books include Game Over, China Dawn, and All We Are Saying. His many articles and interviews have appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Wired, Fortune, and elsewhere. His piece for the New York Times Magazine, “My Addicted Son,” won an award from the American Psychological Association for “Outstanding Contribution to Advancing the Understanding of Addiction.” Sheff and his family live in Inverness, California (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
On the long, crowded shelf of addiction memoirs Beautiful Boy is more notable for sturdiness and sense than for new insight.... [Still, it] does illustrate how the most clichéd insights into addiction can also be the most accurate. Nothing here is more succinct than what Nic’s little brother says when he tries to explain addiction. “It’s like in cartoons when some character has a devil on one shoulder,” the boy says, “and an angel on the other.”
Janet Maslin - New York Times

David describes his family's ordeal with a lucidity that will undoubtedly help many addicts and their families, providing not only a wealth of factual data but also the steadying assurance that they are not alone in their grief. He eloquently describes the sense of isolation and horror that accompanied his realization of what was happening to Nic, and the help David found in support groups.
Juliet Wittman - Washington Post

Expanding on his New York Times Magazine article, Sheff chronicles his son's downward spiral into addiction and the impact on him and his family. A bright, capable teenager, Nic began trying mind- and mood-altering substances when he was 17. In months, use became abuse, then abuse became addiction. By the time Sheff knew of his son's condition, Nic was strung out on meth, the highly potent stimulant. While his son struggles to get clean, his second wife and two younger children are pulled helplessly into the drama. Sheff, as the parent of an addict, cycles through denial and acceptance and resistance. The author was already a journalist of considerable standing when this painful story began to unfold, and his impulse for detail serves him personally as well as professionally: there are hard, solid facts about meth and the kinds of havoc it wreaks on individuals, families and communities both urban and rural. His journey is long and harrowing, but Sheff does not spare himself or anyone else from keen professional scrutiny any more than he was himself spared the pains—and joys—of watching a loved one struggling with addiction and recovery. Real recovery creates—and can itself be—its own reward; this is an honest, hopeful book, coming at a propitious moment in the meth epidemic.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) The book originated in a much-lauded New York Times Magazine article, which Sheff here expands in scope, sharing his and Nic's wisdom, missteps, and successes, and the lessons they learned. A must-read for, at the least, anyone in similar straits. —Donna Chavez
Booklist

"I'll be fine. I've stopped using." That lie is told again and again in this memoir of a father's heartbreaking struggle with his son's addiction to methamphetamines. The clearly charming and talented Nic first tried marijuana in high school and subsequently went through a decade of using, rehabilitation and relapse. Expanding on a 2005 article in the New York Times Magazine, journalist Sheff takes readers along on the grim roller-coaster ride. While on drugs, Nic leads a life of self-destruction, deception and crime. He breaks into the family home to steal money; he lies about where he is and what he is doing; he asks for help but refuses the terms on which it is offered. The effect on Sheff's family is devastating; trying to save his son and also protect his wife (not Nic's mother) and their two young children, the author suffers a near-fatal brain hemorrhage. He applies his research skills to learn everything possible about methamphetamine, what it does to the brain and what treatments are available. The hard truth is that no one really knows what works best in dealing with meth addiction, or even what doesn't work. He didn't cause Nic's addiction, Sheff comes to understand; he can't control it and he can't cure it. Eventually shifting his focus from Nic's recovery to his own, the author goes into therapy to get past his obsession with his son's problems. Whether Nic will recover remains an open question at the book's end, which offers a glimmer of hope, but no promises and no easy answers. A clear picture of what meth addiction does to a user and those who love him that may help other families better cope with this growing problem.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In the New York Times Book Review, Janet Maslin wrote, “Addiction is a compulsion to do the same thing over and over, despite knowing that the outcome will almost certainly be the same. Addiction memoirs often illustrate this same definition of insanity…Yet the genre itself remains so addictive that readers keep hoping to discover something new.” Why are addiction memoirs so addictive? Why were you drawn to this one?

2. David Sheff writes that “drug stories are sinister” (p. 87). What does he mean by that? How are drug stories different than addiction memoirs, if at all?

3. In the introduction, Sheff writes, “I have felt and thought and done almost everything an addict’s parent can feel and think and do” (p. 13). Which of his experiences, thoughts, and actions were most affecting to you? Which could you relate to and which were totally foreign?

4. Sheff begins his story with the statement, “We are among the first generation of self-conscious parents. Before us, people had kids. We parent” (p. 20). What does it mean to parent, as opposed to just having kids? At the end, Sheff writes, “I wish I had gotten here quicker, but I couldn’t. If only parenting were easier” (p. 310). What does he learn about “parenting” over the course of the book?

5. Discuss Nic’s upbringing. What privileges did he have? What disadvantages? Did Sheff seem to you a “good parent”?

6. How does the integration of pop culture references—quotes from literature, song lyrics, movie dialogue—contribute to the book? Look particularly at what Sheff used as the epilogues to each section of the book: John Lennon, Kurt Cobain for Part I, Shakespeare for Part II, etc. Why might Sheff have chosen these particular passages? How do they help your understanding of events, and of Sheff’s mindset?

7. What is the extent of David Sheff’s own drug use? What is your philosophy of discussing drugs with kids? Would you be—or have you been—honest about your past with your own kids?

8. Discuss Nic’s descent. At what point do you think you would have noticed Nic had a serious problem and needed help? Were there times you disagreed with David Sheff’s course of action? What might you have done differently?

9. When David smoked pot with Nic, what was your reaction?

10. A friend of David’s expresses surprise at Nic’s addiction and says the Sheffs don’t seem like a dysfunctional family. Sheff responds, “We are dysfunctional.... I’m not sure I know any ‘functional’ families” (p. 14) How would you define a functional family? Which are the Sheffs? How you would describe your own family?

11. On page 195, Sheff explores the idea of what it means to have a “normal life,” concluding, “Now I live with the knowledge that, never mind the most modest definition of a normal or healthy life, my son may not make it to twenty-one.” How would you define a “normal life”? How do these socially-accepted definitions—a normal life, a functional family—contribute to, or hinder, Sheff’s ability to understand and accept his son’s situation? How have these definitions affected some of the decisions you’ve made about your own life?

12. In his suicide note, Kurt Cobain quoted Neil Young and wrote “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” When Sheff interview John Lennon, Lennon said, “I worship the people who survive. I’ll take the living and the healthy” (p. 118). Who do you agree with, Cobain or Lennon? Why does society glamorize those rock stars and other artists who burn out? Nic Sheff’s glamorization of alcoholics and drug-addicted artists ostensibly contributed to his own downfall. How should we counsel children and young adults on the dangers of idolizing such people?

13. As a journalist and someone with the means to do so, Sheff consults a wide variety of experts on the causes, effects, and treatment of addiction. What did you find most helpful? What else might be behind Sheff’s impulse to do more and more research?

14. Much of chapter 15 is devoted to the exploration of the disease of addiction. What is your understanding of addiction as a disease? Do you think of it as a behavioral or a brain disorder?

15. Many of the counselors and family members of addicts tell David and Karen, “Be allies. Remember, take care of yourselves. You’ll be good for no one—for each other, for your children—if you don’t” (p. 132). Do Karen and David take care of one another? Does David take care of himself?

16. A recovering addict tells Sheff, “You will believe in God before this over” (p. 133). Later, Sheff quotes John Lennon, “God is a concept by which we measure our pain” (p. 256). What does this last statement mean? How do David and Nic each come to believe in a higher power? Discuss their struggle with faith and their ultimate understanding of God.

17. After David Sheff suffers a cerebral hemorrhage, he can’t remember his own name, but he cannot forget Nic and his worry over his son. What is the extent of the damage of the hemorrhage? What good comes out of it?

18. What toll does Nic’s addiction take on Jasper and Daisy? How do David and Karen help them to understand their brother’s behavior?

19. At the end of his memoir, Sheff writes, “Now I am in my own program to recover from my addiction to [Nic’s addiction]” (p. 305). How is Sheff addicted to Nic’s addiction? How does David’s addiction affect his family, his job, and his life? What is his program for recovery?

20, Nic Sheff’s own memoir, Tweak, was published simultaneously with Beautiful Boy. Having only read the latter, would it surprise you to learn that Nic, during the height of his drug abuse, dealt drugs? That he prostituted himself for drug money? As a parent, do you think it would be worse knowing or not knowing such details? Think about what’s missing in David Sheff’s memoir and how that might have colored your interpretation of events.

21. When the book ends, Nic is once again in recovery. Are you left hopeful he will stay that way?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir
Michele Harper, 2020
Penguin Publishing
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525537380

Summary
An emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself.

Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white.

Brought up in Washington, D.C., in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn't move with her.

Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman.

In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken—physically, emotionally, psychically.

How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process.

The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper's journey toward self-healing. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery.

• How to let go of fear even when the future is murky.
• How to tell the truth when it's simpler to overlook it.
• How to understand that compassion isn't the same as justice.

As she shines a light on the systemic disenfranchisement of the patients she treats as they struggle to maintain their health and dignity, Harper comes to understand the importance of allowing ourselves to make peace with the past as we draw support from the present.

In this hopeful, moving, and beautiful book, she passes along the precious, necessary lessons that she has learned as a daughter, a woman, and a physician. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Michele Harper has worked as an emergency room physician for more than a decade at various institutions, including as chief resident at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and in the emergency department at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Philadelphia.

She is a graduate of Harvard University and the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. The Beauty in Breaking is her first book. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Riveting, heartbreaking, sometimes difficult, always inspiring.
New York Times Book Review

(Starred review) Taking on the painful topics of trauma, domestic abuse, and the "ubiquitous microaggressions faced by people of color," Harper… begins her own process of self-healing…. This powerful story will resonate with readers.
Publishers Weekly

Harper’s words inspire hope and understanding of the importance of peace and acceptance of the past. Poignant, helpful, and encouraging, [her] lessons… from life in… the emergency room ultimately teach readers how to trust the healing process. —Rich McIntyre Jr., UConn Health Sciences Lib., Farmington
Library Journal

An African American emergency room physician reflects on how "the chaos of emergency medicine" helped her… understand the true nature of healing.… [T]his eloquent book… chronicles a woman’s ever evolving spiritual journey. A profoundly humane memoir from a thoughtful doctor.
Kirkus Reviews

In this illuminating memoir, an African American emergency room doctor finds that her patients' stories lead her to make connections between her work and the larger world.
Shelf Awareness

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 of THE BEAUTY IN BREAKING … then take off on your own:

1. "If my brother’s body could be patched up, then certainly, in its own time, his spirit could mend, too." Talk about the ways in which this passage, young Michele Harper's musing about her brother's presence in the ER stands as the thematic concern of this work. How is it possible for physical healing lead to spiritual/emotional healing?

2. How did Harper's observations of her patients and their struggles teach her about human brokenness and resilience. Take her patients, one-by-one, and talk about their personal struggles and what Harper learned from them.

3. Harper is a Black woman in an overwhelmingly white profession. Talk about the roll that racism plays in Harper's own life and for the patients of color who enter the hospital's ER.

4. Harper realizes that "America bears… many layers of racial wounds, both chronic and acute." What specifically does she mean, and in what way does this realization inspire her?

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

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The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
Naomi Wolf, 1991
HarperCollins
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060512187

Summary
In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife.

It's the beauty myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society's impossible definition of "the flawless beauty." (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 12, 1962
• Where—San Francisco, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; Oxford University, England
(Rhode Scholar)
• Currently—lives in New York, NY

At a relatively young age, Naomi Wolf became literary star of what was later described as the "third-wave" of the feminist movement and she is also known for her advocacy of progressive politics.

She became famous because of her first book The Beauty Myth (1991), which became an international bestseller. In the book, she attacked what she characterized as the exploitation of women by the fashion and beauty industries. Wolf argued that women deserve "the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically." The book examines five areas in which Wolf believed women were under assault by the beauty myth: work, religion, sex, violence, and hunger.

Wolf's book became an overnight bestseller, garnering not only praise from feminists but from the public and mainstream media. Second-wave feminist Germaine Greer wrote that The Beauty Myth was "the most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch." British novelist Fay Weldon called the book "a vivid and impassioned polemic, essential reading for the New Woman."

Wolf was involved in Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election bid where she brainstormed with the Clinton-Gore team about ways to reach "soccer moms" and other female voters. During Al Gore's unsuccessful bid for the 2000 US presidency, Wolf was hired as a consultant to target female voters, reprising her role in the Clinton campaign. Wolf's ideas and participation in the Gore campaign generated considerable media coverage and criticism. According to a report by Michael Duffy in Time magazine, "Wolf [was] paid a salary of $15,000 a month…in exchange for advice on everything from how to win the women’s vote to shirt-and-tie combinations." This article was the original source of the widely reported claim that Wolf was responsible for Gore's "three-buttoned, earth-toned look." The Duffy article did not mention "earth tones."

The Time article and others also claimed that Wolf had developed the idea that Gore is "a beta male who needs to take on the alpha male in the Oval Office". In an interview with Melinda Henneberger in the New York Times, Wolf denied ever advising Gore on his wardrobe. Wolf herself claimed she mentioned the term "alpha male" only once in passing and that "it was just a truism, something the pundits had been saying for months, that the vice president is in a supportive role and the President is in an initiatory role...I used those terms as shorthand in talking about the difference in their job descriptions."

Departing from the anti-pornography emphasis of such second-wave feminist writers as Andrea Dworkin, Wolf suggested in 2003 that the ubiquity of Internet pornography tends to make males less libidinous toward typical real females. She later followed up on this theme with the assertion that Saturday-night parties with significant alcohol consumption tended toward an increase in one-night stands, which she refers to as "hooking up." (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Beauty is such a strange thing—it's a fantasy, a pastime and a profession...we bring a daunting range of emotions and associations to it...The Beauty Myth shows us yet again how much we need new ways of seeing.
Margo Jefferson - New York Times (Books of the Century, 5/19/91)

This valuable study, full of infuriating statistics and examples, documents societal pressure on women to conform to a standard form of beauty. Freelance journalist Wolf cites predominant images that negatively influence women—the wrinkle-free, unnaturally skinny fashion model in advertisements and the curvaceous female in pornography—and questions why women risk their health and endure pain through extreme dieting or plastic surgery to mirror these ideals. She points out that the quest for beauty is not unlike religious or cult behavior: every nuance in appearance is scrutinized by the godlike, watchful eyes of peers, temptation takes the form of food and salvation can be found in diet and beauty aids. Women are "trained to see themselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs" and must learn to recognize and combat these internalized images. Wolf's thoroughly researched and convincing theories encourage rejection of unrealistic goals in favor of a positive self-image.
Publishers Weekly

Journalist and poet Wolf presents a provocative and persuasive account of the pervasiveness of the beauty ideal in all facets of Western culture, including work, sex, and religion. In showing how this myth works against women and how women sabotage themselves by their complicity with this impossible standard, she discusses at length two unfortunate consequences: the growth in the number of bulimic and anorexic women and the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery. The facts are certainly stacked to prove her thesis but, for the most part, provide convincing evidence. In her final chapter, Wolf instructs women on how to crack the beauty myth. Recommended, especially for women's studies collections. —Anne Twitchell, National Research Council Lib., Washington, D.C.
Library Journal

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

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

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Becoming
Michelle Obama, 2018
Crown Publishing
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524763138

Summary
An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States

In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era.

As First Lady of the United States of America—the first African American to serve in that role—she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world.

She dramatically changed the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, while standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.

In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address.

With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it—in her own words and on her own terms.

Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 17, 1964
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton University; J.D., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois

Michelle Robinson Obama served as First Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Mrs. Obama started her career as an attorney at the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin, where she met her future husband, Barack Obama.

She later worked in the Chicago mayor’s office, at the University of Chicago, and at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Mrs. Obama also founded the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an organization that prepares young people for careers in public service.

The Obamas currently live in Washington, DC, and have two daughters, Malia and Sasha. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Becoming divulges some details that the Obamas haven't discussed publicly before.… But it's the moments when [Michelle] Obama tries to make sense of what she's seeing now, in the country, that are among the most moving—if only because she's so clearly struggling to reconcile the cleareyed realism of her upbringing, brought about by necessity, with the glamorous, previously unthinkable life she has today.… For all the attempts by conservatives a decade ago to paint her as a radical, Obama seems to be a measured, methodical centrist at heart. But hers isn't a wan faith in expanding the pie and crossing the aisle. Her pragmatism is tougher than that, even if it will come across as especially frustrating to those who believe that centrism and civility are no longer enough. As she writes in Becoming, she long ago learned to recognize the "universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go."
Jennifer Szalai - New York Times

Becoming serenely balances gravity and grace, uplift and anecdote, though its high-mindedness does permit a few low blows at Barack Obama’s villainous successor. A single sentence catches the blend of conscientious bass and giggly treble that makes Michelle simultaneously admirable and adorable.… Becoming is frequently funny, sometimes indignant or enraged, and when Michelle describes her father’s early death from multiple sclerosis it turns rawly emotional.
Guardian (UK)

More like a novel than a political memoir, the First Lady’s book reveals its author as utterly, viscerally human.… [It is] beautiful and extraordinary.
Vanity Fair

The former first lady looks back on an unlikely rise to the top while navigating issues of race and gender in this warmhearted memoir.… There are no dramatic revelations and not much overt politics here, but fans of the Obamas will find an interesting, inspiring saga of quiet social revolutions.
Publishers Weekly

From the former First Lady, here's a memoir starting with her childhood on Chicago's South Side and leading to her life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where she raised her children gracefully while representing the United States to the world.
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. Mrs. Obama begins her book with a story about making cheese toast on a quiet night at home, a few months after leaving the White House. Why do you think she chose this story to begin her memoir?

2. Mrs. Robinson is the opposite of a helicopter parent. She was tough and had very high expectations for her children, and she also expected them to figure some things out on their own and learn from their missteps and the process of making choices. She gave her children agency at a very young age. How did that shape Mrs. Obama? What is the balance between discipline and trust?

3. In Becoming, we get to know the constellation of Mrs. Obama’s extended family through her eyes. Her grandfather, Southside filled his house with music and makeshift speakers and merriment. Years later, Mrs. Obama would fill the White House with music and culture through live performances and several programs aimed at children. How do those kinds of early memories leave an imprint on us as we grow older? What were the sights and smells that you remember from visiting grandparents or other elders, and how have they left a mark on you?

4. In discussing her neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, Mrs. Obama writes, "Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear." How did this insight shape Mrs. Obama’s work and mission as First Lady? What can we all do—as individuals, parents, and community members—to help break this cycle?"

5. Mrs. Obama writes about the early influences of her mother, Marion Robinson, and her TV role model Mary Tyler Moore. One was a single, professional living on her own in the big city. One was a wise and supportive stay-at-home mother, who later went to work to help pay for her children’s education. Where do you see the influences of both of these women in Mrs. Obama’s life?

6. Early in her senior year at Whitney Young High School, Mrs. Obama went for an obligatory first appointment with the school college counselor. Mrs. Obama was treasurer of the senior class. She had earned a spot in the National Honor Society. She was on track to graduate in the top 10 percent of her class and she was interested in joining her older brother, Craig, at Princeton University. The guidance counselor said to her, "I’m not sure that you’re Princeton material." How did Mrs. Obama handle hearing that statement? How does one avoid having one’s dreams dislodged by someone else’s lower expectations?

7. In high school Mrs. Obama said she felt like she was representing her neighborhood. At Princeton, faced with questions of whether she was the product of Affirmative Action programs, she felt like she was representing her race. Was that more than a feeling? Was she actually representing her communities in those settings? Have you had moments in life where you feel as though you are representing one of your communities?

8. In her early life Mrs. Obama writes about being a "box checker," but as she gets older she learns how to "swerve" to adjust to life’s circumstances. What does it mean to swerve and how do we develop that skill in life?

9. In Becoming, Mrs. Obama describes a number of women who have served as mentors for her at different times in her life, including Czerny Brasuell, Valerie Jarrett, and Susan Sher. What do these women have in common? What lessons did Mrs. Obama learn from them about finding a fulfilling career as a parent? Who are your mentors and how do you cultivate those relationships?

10. In Chapter 15, Mrs. Obama explains why she chose to support her husband’s run for the presidency despite her misgivings about politics. What made her change her mind? Would you have made the same choice? How do you balance the competing worlds of family life and work in your life?

11. As Mrs. Obama notes, First Lady is a role without a job description. How did Mrs. Obama choose to approach the role? If you were in charge of writing the job description for the First Lady, what would you include and exclude?

12. In Becoming, Mrs. Obama writes candidly about detractors who tried to invalidate her standing or her work. "I was female, black, and strong, which to certain people, maintaining a certain mind-set, translated only to ‘angry.’ It was another damaging cliche, one that’s been forever used to sweep minority women to the perimeter of every room, an unconscious signal not to listen to what we’ve got to say." What is the root of that "angry black woman" cliche? How and why does it do damage?

13. Throughout her life, Michelle Obama has been a meticulous planner. It is evident in her approach to her studies in high school and at Princeton. It is evident in the way she transitioned through jobs as a professional. And it is evident in the way she approached her role as First Lady. Where did that come from? How did Fraser Robinson’s approach to life impact his daughter? Are you a planner or more spontaneous? How does it impact those around you and your life?

14. In the epilogue, Mrs. Obama writes, "I’ve never been a fan of politics, and my experience over the last ten years has done little to change that." Did you find her statement surprising? Do you think politics is an effective way to make social change?

15. Why do you think Michelle Obama chose to name her memoir "Becoming"? What does the idea of "becoming" mean to you?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Becoming Duchess Goldblatt
Anonymous, 2020
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780358216773

Summary
Part memoir and part joyful romp through the fields of imagination, the story behind a beloved pseudonymous Twitter account reveals how a writer deep in grief rebuilt a life worth living.

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt is two stories: that of the reclusive real-life writer who created a fictional character out of loneliness and thin air, and that of the magical Duchess Goldblatt herself, a bright light in the darkness of social media.

Fans around the world are drawn to Her Grace’s voice, her wit, her life-affirming love for all humanity, and the fun and friendship of the community that’s sprung up around her.

@DuchessGoldblat (81 year-old literary icon, author of An Axe to Grind) brought people together in her name: in bookstores, museums, concerts, and coffee shops, and along the way, brought real friends home—foremost among them, Lyle Lovett.

“The only way to be reliably sure that the hero gets the girl at the end of the story is to be both the hero and the girl yourself.” — Duchess Goldblatt (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Duchess Goldblatt, 81, is the inspirational author of An Axe to Grind"; Feasting on the Carcasses of My Enemies: A Love Story; and the heartwarming meditation on mothers and daughters Not If I Kill You First.

A cultural icon, trophy ex-wife, friend to all humanity, and sponsor of the prestigious Goldblatt Prize in Fiction, she lives in Crooked Path, NY. She’s fictional but her love is real.

Anonymous, the real-life person in whose mind Duchess Goldblatt lives and flourishes, has gathered all available truth and beauty for these pages. There’s nothing else to give. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Deeply satisfying, unexpectedly moving.… As lovable as the duchess herself…. Duchess and Anonymous subtly, slowly become one person. She no longer feels alone; neither do her subjects. People find solace in this fictional character—and Anonymous does, too.
Julie Klam - New York Times Book Review

There's no recipe for Duchess Goldblatt tweets, but they often amount to one part conventional wisdom and two parts surrealism, with some grandmotherly tenderness or saltiness sprinkled in for good measure.… Her feed is one of the few places on the internet devoted to spreading unadulterated joy.… Becoming Duchess Goldblatt recontextualizes the Twitter account as a therapeutic exercise.
Kate Dwyer - New York Times

Her proclamations sound like pithy lines from a standup special—that is, if the comedian was God and if God was an 81-year-old woman from the 17th century.… [H]er community.… [finds] her amusing, comforting, assuring.… It's loving the bizarre and cherishing the weird that Goldblatt does best. And it's why so many people trust her to tell them how to live, how to treat themselves with more compassion, how to treat each other better, too.
Boston Globe

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt is many things, all of them splendid…. The best sort of self-help, demonstrating that creativity, generosity and even Twitter… can offer salvation and lift all boats…. The book is enriched by two distinct voices: one frank and vulnerable, the other all-knowing.…This sort of anonymity, in a time of too much oversharing on too many platforms, is a respite. We need magic. The book's timing is inspired. It's a summer cocktail of a book.
Washington Post

A source of wry wisdom and off-kilter commentary...A testament to the powers of redemption, reinvention, and yes, country singer Lyle Lovett.
Christian Science

A life-affirming memoir packed with hilarity and candid observations about life and love.
Marie Claire

Surely you follow Duchess Goldblatt on Twitter? If not, do yourself a favor and hit that button to subscribe to her delightful musings. In Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, the Duchess' real-life anonymous creator writes about crafting one of Twitter's (if not the Internet's) best accounts and healing herself in the process.
Real Simple

The Duchess is a light shining in the darkness, a beacon for troubled souls…. Her presence has uplifted her human avatar, even as it heartens Her Grace's ever-growing audience of "loons" and "rascals." … [A]s the Duchess would say—her love is real.
BookPage

A surprising, joyful story of social media at its best.
Booklist

(Starred review) How does a fictional character write a real memoir? Very, very well.… [The author has] created a long-term fever dream of humor, compassion, wordplay, and dog photos. A fascinating memoir by a 21st-century original.
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 BECOMING DUCHESS GOLDBLATT … then take off on your own:

1. ''Do you follow the Duchess's tweets? If so, does her book incorporate the same (or similar) style and pithiness?

2. What passages in Becoming Duchess Goldblatt do you feel carry the most weight in terms humor, compassion, or advice for living life as a person you wish to be? In other words, what most resonates with you? Did you have any "Ah-ha!" moments?

3. Well, just how funny is Duchess Goldblatt? What made you laugh out loud, or at least elicit a deep chuckle (or dainty snort)?

4. What does Anonymous tell us about her own life and her own vulnerability?

5. Who do you think Anonymous is, who's the real person behind the curtain? Well, of course, not WHO she is, but what she's like. Have some fun and create an identity for her. Speculate!—is the Duchess even a woman, is she really an octogenarian? Maybe she's a literary historian …or a 17th-18th century literature professor? Where do you think she lives?

6. The Duchess at one point insists she doesn't have many friends, that if you "get too friendly …they [will] inevitably drop you." But later she admits to a desire to connect with people, that she's "trying to make a new life" for herself. Do you find those revelation genuine ...or a part of her made-up character? Does her wariness of friendship feel familiar to you …or completely foreign?

7. The Duchess says that her followers confide in her about "trying to get or stay sober, or their marriages are unhappy or they have a child who’s terribly sick." Why do you think people are willing to share such deeply personal issues with her?

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

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Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family
Amy Ellis Nutt, 2015
Random House
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812995411

Summary
The inspiring true story of a transgender girl, her identical twin brother, and an ordinary American family’s extraordinary journey to understand, nurture, and celebrate the uniqueness in us all.

When Wayne and Kelly Maines adopted identical twin boys, they thought their lives were complete. But it wasn’t long before they noticed a marked difference between Jonas and his brother, Wyatt.

Jonas preferred sports and trucks and many of the things little boys were “supposed” to like; but Wyatt liked princess dolls and dress-up and playing Little Mermaid. By the time the twins were toddlers, confusion over Wyatt’s insistence that he was female began to tear the family apart.

In the years that followed, the Maineses came to question their long-held views on gender and identity, to accept and embrace Wyatt’s transition to Nicole, and to undergo an emotionally wrenching transformation of their own that would change all their lives forever.

Becoming Nicole chronicles a journey that could have destroyed a family but instead brought it closer together. It’s the story of...

a mother whose instincts told her that her child needed love and acceptance, not ostracism and disapproval,
a Republican, Air Force veteran father who overcame his deepest fears to become a vocal advocate for trans rights,
a loving brother who bravely stuck up for his twin sister,
a town forced to confront its prejudices, a school compelled to rewrite its rules, and...
a courageous community of transgender activists determined to make their voices heard.

Ultimately, Becoming Nicole is the story of an extraordinary girl who fought for the right to be herself.

Granted wide-ranging access to personal diaries, home videos, clinical journals, legal documents, medical records, and the Maineses themselves, Amy Ellis Nutt spent almost four years reporting this immersive account of an American family confronting an issue that is at the center of today’s cultural debate.

Becoming Nicole will resonate with anyone who’s ever raised a child, felt at odds with society’s conventions and norms, or had to embrace life when it plays out unexpectedly. It’s a story of standing up for your beliefs and yourself—and it will inspire all of us to do the same. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1956-57
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., Smith College; M.A., M.I.T. and Columbia University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—lives in Washington, DC

Amy Ellis Nutt won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for her Newark Star Ledger feature series “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” about the 2009 sinking of a fishing boat off the New Jersey coast. Currently, she is a health and science writer at the Washington Post.

She is also the author of three books: Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (2015), Shadows Bright as Glass: The Remarkable Story of One Man's Journey from Brain Trauma to Artistic Triumph (2011), and the co-author with Frances E. Jensen, M.D. of the New York Times bestseller The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults (2015).

Nutt was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University, a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton, and an instructor of journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Washington, D.C. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Reading strictly for plot, Becoming Nicole is about a transgender girl who triumphed in a landmark discrimination case in 2014, successfully suing the Orono school district in Maine for barring her from using the girls' bathroom. But the real movement in this book happens internally, in the back caverns of each family member's heart and mind. Four ordinary and imperfect human beings had to reckon with an exceptional situation, and in so doing also became, in their own modest ways, exceptional…Ms. Nutt…skillfully recreates a story that started years before she arrived at the family's doorstep. (They seem to have given her full-saturation access.) She gets the structure and pacing just right…if you aren't moved by Becoming Nicole, I'd suggest there's a lump of dark matter where your heart should be.
Jennifer Senior - New York Times

[The author] generously traces the parameters of parental love…Children are never what one expects, and the trick is not to be disappointed—in fact, to be pleased—with who they are. This process of constantly recalibrating one's expectations is the central job of parenthood: a high-wire act in which one's own memories of childhood and the priorities and habits developed there come into direct conflict with who one's child actually is…Becoming Nicole iterates this idea, delving deep into the case of a single family with a transgender child and discovering in its particulars certain universal truths about the ways children arrive in one's life already themselves.
Lisa Miller - New York Times Book Review

A transgender girl’s coming-of-age saga, an exploration of the budding science of gender identity, a civil rights time capsule, a tear-jerking legal drama and, perhaps most of all, an education about what can happen when a child doesn’t turn out as his or her parents expected—and they’re forced to either shut their eyes and hearts or see everything differently.
Time

Nutt reports on medical opinion that gender is established physiologically within the brain and is a matter of heredity.... What is clear in this gripping account is the strength of the emotional bond within the family.... A timely, significant examination of the distinction between sexual affinity and sexual identity.
Kirkus Reviews

If there is an inner distress...it arises from knowing exactly who they are, but at the same time being locked into the wrong body.... The dysfunction arises not from their own confusion, but from being made to feel like freaks or gender misfits.

What is your reaction to transgendered individuals? Has this book altered the way in which you understand their situation? Are you more, or less, sympathetic? Why?

5. What, if any, legitimate protections and/or rights should transgendered individuals expect from society?

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

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Before the Last All Clear
Ray Evans, 2005
Morgan James Publishing
263 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781600373787

Summary
During World War II around three and a half million British people were evacuated away from possible air raids in the big cities in one of the largest social upheavals Great Britain has ever seen.

The Government called this ‘Operation Pied Piper’ and many of the evacuees were children. Journeys from the cities were long and tiring and the evacuees did not know where they were going. They were often dropped off in groups and gathered in a local village hall or school to be 'chosen' by the prospective foster parents. One of those children was Ray Evans whose family was transported from Liverpool to the Welsh Town of Llanelli.

In Before the Last All Clear, Evans tells a harrowing tale of leaving his mother and being forced to live with families who at best regarded him as a nuisance and, at worst, exploited and brutalised him. Evans account takes a happy turn when he is billeted to a family who make him so welcome that he is reluctant to leave them at the end of the war.

Written in a simple, direct style Before the Last All Clear depicts a world far removed from the glamour and sophistication of the twenty-first century. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 29, 1933
• Where—Liverpool, England, UK
• Education—Secondary School
• Awards—Welsh Book Council Wales Reads
• Currently—lives in Virginia, USA

Born in Liverpool in 1933, Ray Evans was evacuated to the South Wales town of Llanelli at the outbreak of World War Two in 1939. He remained there until the cessation of hostilities in 1945. When he left school he served two years National Service in Egypt as a member of the British Royal Army Medical Corps, before marrying Lilian in 1956. Ray started a wholesale clothing business in 1964 and ran this enterprise very successfully along with Lilian until they retired and moved to the USA to be closer to their daughter. They lived first in New Hampshire, but now reside in the warmer climes of south east Virginia. Ray has been happily married to Lilian for 54 years: they have two children and six grandchildren. Ray now spends his time writing, blogging and golfing unless his lifetime favorite football (soccer) team Liverpool FC are playing, in which case he will be ‘glued’ to the television!

His own words:
During the writing of the book I learned a lot that I had either forgotten or was never aware of because I was so young when the events took place. It was in the course of my researching certain war time events for accuracy and inclusion in the book that I discovered just how much interest there really must be because of the myriad of websites and organizations that exist.

Before the Last All Clear began as a way to ensure the stories that had fascinated my children and now my grandchildren, would continue to be shared within our own family. Although I was reluctant at first [I felt I didn’t had the education to write a book and am well aware, I am no Shakespeare] however it became a labor of love and grew into so much more than I ever expected it to. Many people tell me the stories are funny, sad and some say beautiful and even inspiring. I can only say they have meant much to me and had a very deep and lasting effect on the person I became in later life.

The greatest pleasure I’ve had since the book was published has been meeting people at book clubs, events and schools. I am constantly amazed at how strongly people relate to the stories and experiences that I now realize have shaped my entire life. It is very humbling to realize that through this book, they may now also affect others – hopefully in a positive way. If there is anything I learned from those early experiences, it is that you have to always look for the light at the end of the tunnel and then just put your head down and work towards it! (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Some recall it as the greatest adventure of their lives. For others, being a wartime evacuee was a nightmare. These are the witty yet deeply poignant memories of a man still haunted by the cruelties he endured. During World War II, around three and a half million British children were evacuated away from possible air raids in the big cities in one of the largest social upheavals Great Britain has ever seen. One of those children was Ray Evans. This is the story of a young evacuee from Liverpool sent to live in the Welsh town of Llanelli. Separated from his mother, brothers and sisters, six-year old Ray was dispatched to a series of families who ignored, exploited and brutalised him. Pushed from pillar to post, he finally finds happiness with a family who make him so welcome that he is reluctant to leave when war ends. Set in a world of ration books, air-raid sirens and ever-present danger, this is a candid and direct account of wartime Britain as seen through the eyes of a child..
Daily Mail (UK)

A superb portrait of wartime Britain seen from a child’s perspective, and recalled in astounding and excruciating detail by a man who lived through it and tells all. Before the Last All Clear is a superb memoir, but more importantly, it is a vivid and uniquely personal morsel of history that any reader will find difficult to forget.
Book Review.com (www.bookreview.com)

At the age of six, Evans, along with thousands of other British children, was separated from his family, home and school and sent to the safety of the English countryside during WWII. In his memoir, the author recalls the emotions of a small child who misses his mother and family. While it may be easy for readers to become emotional when it comes to this kind of story, Evan’s touching account is indeed a tearjerker; he aptly recaptures his fear and the feeling of being lost as he made his way to his temporary home. He presents a tale of horror as he relives the memories of two homes where he stayed during the evacuation period. As a castoff evacuee, Evans was often mistreated by the families with whom he stayed, enduring what Western society today would consider child abuse. By the time the author reaches his third and final home, he loves it so much that he almost doesn’t want to leave. Evans’ illustrative writing capably paints each scene, making it easy to imagine the conditions in which he lived. In fact, it would be realistic to picture this cute young boy’s life portrayed on screen. Before the Last All Clear is a well-written account of a lovable protagonist who yearns for a sense of normalcy—all while remaining optimistic that the war will soon end and better days are ahead. A beautiful memoir of WWII as seen through the eyes of a child.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the differences between life in 1939 and how we live today. How are things easier for us today than they were back then?

2. How do you think you would feel or react to being told that your hometown was a major bombing target? Was evacuation voluntary or compulsory?

3. Imagine you are a parent – intellectually you know and understand you must allow your children to be evacuated, yet you have no idea of their destination, who they will be housed with or when they will be allowed to return. What do you think might go through your mind as you watch your children leave?

4. Describe Ray’s reaction to the selection process he goes through at the “evacuee Distribution Center” on arrival in Wales

5. Discuss the relationship between Ray and his various ‘foster parents’ at the different billets.

6. How do you think children in that time differ from children today? They certainly seem more naïve, but then so do the adults. Are we better off now or has society in general lost more than it’s gained?

7. Describe how Ray is made to feel when he has to ask for another billet, food or clothing.

8. What would you have the most trouble or difficulty with in Ray’s situation - living with strangers, going hungry or the separation from family and friends?

9. Was Ray’s a typical evacuation experience or more likely the exception? How many children were evacuated under Operation Pied Piper? Where did they get sent to?

10. How did Mrs. Williams and her family make Ray’s final years of evacuation a positive experience in the end?

11. How do you think Ray’s experiences as an evacuee shaped his personality in later life? Do you feel they helped or hurt him and if so, how?

12. What did you learn about wartime life in England and about yourself from reading this book

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Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Katherine Boo, 2012
Random House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812979329

Summary
In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”

But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.

With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 12, 1964
• Where—Washington, DC, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize for Public Service; MacArthur Fellowship;
The Hillman Prize; National Magazine Award for Feature Writing
• Currently—divides her time between the U.S. and India

Katherine (Kate) J. Boo is an award-winning journalist and author known primarily for writing about America's poor and disadvantaged.

A native of Washington, D.C., Boo attended the College of William and Mary and graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College and began her career in journalism with editorial positions at Washington's City Paper and then the Washington Monthly. From there she went to the Washington Post, from 1993 to 2003.

In 2000, her series for the Post about group homes for the mentally impaired won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The Pulitzer judges noted that her work "disclosed wretched neglect and abuse in the city’s group homes for the mentally retarded, which forced officials to acknowledge the conditions and begin reforms."

In 2003, she joined the staff of The New Yorker, to which she had been contributing since 2001. One of her subsequent New Yorker articles, "The Marriage Cure," won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2004. The article chronicled state-sponsored efforts to teach poor people in an Oklahoma community about marriage in hopes that the classes would help people avoid or escape poverty. Another of Boo's New Yorker articles, "After Welfare," won the 2002 Sidney Hillman Award, which honors articles that advance the cause of social justice.

She was a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, from 2002 through 2006. In 2002, she won a MacArthur Fellowship.[7]

In 2012, Boo published her first book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity , a non-fiction account of life in the Annawadi slums of Mumbai, India. (Author bio from Wikipedia .)

Book Reviews
[An] exquisitely accomplished first book. Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and beautifully, but Ms. Boo is not a novelist. She is one of those rare, deep-digging journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian with a superb sense of human drama. She makes it very easy to forget that this book is the work of a reporter.... Comparison to Dickens is not unwarranted.”
Janet Maslin - New York Times

A jaw-dropping achievement, an instant classic of narrative nonfiction.... With a cinematic intensity...Boo transcends and subverts every cliché, cynical or earnest, that we harbor about Indian destitution and gazes directly into the hearts, hopes, and human promise of vibrant people whom you’ll not soon forget.
Elle

Riveting, fearlessly reported.... [Beautiful Forevers] plays out like a swift, richly plotted novel. That's partly because Boo writes so damn well. But it's also because over the course of three years in India she got extraordinary access to the lives and minds of the Annawadi slum, a settlement nestled jarringly close to a shiny international airport and a row of luxury hotels. Grade: A.
Entertainment Weekly

A tough-minded, inspiring, and irresistible book.... Boo's extraordinary achievement is twofold. She shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as importantly, she makes us care. (Four stars.)
People

A shocking—and riveting—portrait of life in modern India.... This is one stunning piece of narrative nonfiction.... Boo’s prose is electric.
O, The Oprah Magazine

You'll know Boo from her work at the Washington Post and now as staff writer for The New Yorker, which has brought her any number of honors, including the MacArthur "genius" award. Her writing is marked by a persuasive sense of humanity, never more than in this study of the hopeful and go-getting inhabitants of the slums surrounding the luxury hotels at the Mumbai airport. Teenaged Abdul aims to better his family with finds from the trash rich tourists have discarded, for instance, while Asha works to make her promising daughter the slum's first female college graduate. Of course, abuse, envy, and political and religious tensions turn up as well. Comparisons to Slumdog Millionaire are inevitable, but this would also match up nicely with fiction from Aravind Adiga (e.g., The White Tiger). For all informed readers
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. Barbara Ehrenreich calls Behind the Beautiful Forevers “one of the most powerful indictments of economic inequality I’ve ever read.” Yet the book shows the world of the Indian rich—lavish Bollywood parties, an increasingly glamorous new airport—almost exclusively through the eyes of the Annawadians. Are they resentful? Are they envious? How does the wealth that surrounds the slumdwellers shape their own expectations and hopes?

2. As Abdul works day and night with garbage, keeping his head down, trying to support his large family, some other citydwellers think of him as garbage, too. How does Abdul react to how other people view him? How would you react? How do Abdul and his sort-of friend, Sunil, try to protect themselves and sustain self-esteem in the face of other people’s contempt?

3. The lives of ordinary women—their working lives, domestic lives, and inner lives—are an important part of Behind the Beautiful Forevers. The author has noted elsewhere that she’d felt a shortage of such accounts in nonfiction about urban India. Do women like Zehrunisa and Asha have more freedom in an urban slum than they would have had in the villages where they were born? What is Meena, a Dalit, spared by living in the city? What freedoms do Meena, Asha, and Zehrunisa still lack, in your view?

4. Asha grew up in rural poverty, and the teenaged marriage arranged by her family was to a man who drank more than he worked. In Annawadi, she takes a series of calculated risks to give her daughter Manju a life far more hopeful than that of other young women such as Meena. What does Asha lose by her efforts to improve her daughter’s life chances? What does she gain? Were Asha’s choices understandable to you, in the end?

5. The author has said elsewhere that while the book brings to light serious injustices, she believes there is also hope on almost every single page: in the imaginations, intelligence and courage of the people she writes about. What are the qualities of a child like Sunil that might flourish in a society that did a better job of recognizing his capacities?

6. When we think of corruption, the examples tend to be drawn from big business or top levels of government. The kind of corruption Behind the Beautiful Forevers show us is often described as “petty”. Do you agree with that characterization of the corruption Annawadians encounter in their daily lives? Why might such corrruption be on the increase as India grows wealthier as a nation?

7. Does Asha have a point when she argues that something isn’t wrong if the powerful people say that it’s right? How does constant exposure to corruption change a person’s internal understanding of right and wrong?

8. Shortly before Abdul is sent to juvenile jail, a major newspaper runs a story about the facility headlined: “Dongri Home is a Living Hell.” Abdul’s experience of Dongri is more complex, though. How does being wrenched away from his work responsibilities at Annawadi change his understandings of the hardships of other people? Are terms like liberty and freedom understood differently by people who live in different conditions?

9. Fatima’s neighbors view her whorling rages, like her bright lipsticks, as free comic entertainments. How has her personality been shaped by the fact that she has been defined since birth by her disability—very literally named by it? Zehrunusa waivers between sympathy for and disapproval of her difficult neighbor. In the end, did you?

10. Zehrunisa remembers a time when every slumdweller was roughly equal in his or her misery, and competition between neighbors didn’t get so out of hand. Abdul doesn’t know whether or not to believe her account of a gentler past. Do you believe it? Might increased hopes for a better life have a dark as well as a bright side?

11. Many Annawadians—Hindu, Muslim, and Christian—spend less time in religious observance than they did when they were younger, and a pink temple on the edge of the sewage lake goes largely unused. In a time of relative hope and constant improvisation for the slumdwellers, why might religious practice be diminishing? What role does religious faith still play in the slumdwellers’ lives?

12. Who do you think had the best life in the book, and why?

13. In the Author’s Note Katherine Boo emphasizes the volatility of an age in which capital moves quickly around the planet, government supports decline, and temporary work proliferates. Had the author followed the families of Annawadi for only a few weeks or months, would you have come away with a different understanding of the effects of that volatility? Does uncertainty about their homes and incomes change how Annawadians view their neighbors? Does economic uncertainty affect relationships where you live?

14. At one point in the book, Abdul takes to heart the moral of a Hindu myth related by The Master: Allow your flesh to be eaten by the eagles of the world. Suffer nobly, and you’ll be rewarded in the end. What is the connection between suffering and redemption in this book? What connections between suffering and redemption do you see in your own life? Are the sufferers ennobled? Are the good rewarded in the end?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Behind the Burly Q: The Story of Burlesque in America
Leslie Zemeckis, 2013
Skyhorse
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781620876916

Summary
The art of burlesque is continuing its resurgence. There are thousands of performers packing venues all over the world. Yet many of the genre’s fans, and even those involved in the trade, are still in the dark when it comes to the history of the craft.

Leslie Zemeckis has decided to do something about preserving the legacy of the pioneers of burlesque with a critically acclaimed documentary Behind the Burly Q (2012). But it was just the beginning. In possession of hundreds of hours of taped interviews and rare, never-before-seen photos, Leslie knew there was more to be done. So she has documented the definitive oral history of burlesque as told by the original stars themselves in her first book.

With a foreword by burlesque’s equivalent of Lady Gaga—Blaze Starr—Behind the Burly Q: The Story of Burlesque in America (Skyhorse Publishing, June 2013) is a fascinating exploration of America’s “seediest” art form.

Given unprecedented access to the performers’ diaries, letters, albums, and memorabilia, Leslie’s book gathers their stories and personal photos here for the first time. In their own words, the performers confide their stories of being courted by King Saud of Saudi Arabia, and their encounters with famous fans, including Abbott and Costello, Jack Ruby, and JFK himself.

The history and the lore come alive with the accounts of “Stage Door Johnnies” who followed the performers from town to town; the infamous “flash” that made New York Mayor LaGuardia shut down the city’s burlesque clubs; and lighting their tassels on fire in a never-ending quest to “out-gimmick” other dancers.

Full of gossip and firsthand accounts of backstage treachery, rivalries, lawsuits, and debauchery, Behind the Burly Q is also a heartwarming and inspiring book about the women (and men) whose stories of “stripping” have never been told. (From the publisher.)

Read the article in Huff Post.

Author Bio
Leslie Zemeckis is an author, actress, and award-winning documentarian. Zemeckis wrote, directed, and produced the award-winning Bound by Flesh about Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton as well as the critically acclaimed Behind the Burly Q, a definitive history of burlesque.

Book Reviews
Charming....often entertaining.... The present-day interviews with these women are a delight and also poignant, partly because of the contrast between their older and younger selves, though mostly because of the lives they lived.... It’s great that she immortalized these women.
Manohla Dargis - New York Times

[M]any creatively named burlesque stars—Tempest Storm, Candy Cotton, Blaze Starr, Candy Barr, Val Valentine, Tee Tee Red, the list goes on — interviewed at poignant, amusing and enlightening length in a new book, Behind the Burly Q: The Story of Burlesque in America.
Rick Kogan - Chicago Tribune

Leslie Zemeckis relates the tragic and uplifting tales of the forgotten stars of burlesque's golden age.
Los Angeles Times

Utterly entertaining Behind the Burly Q is a painstakingly researched love letter to the women and men who once made up the community of burlesque performers…its treasure trove of vintage photographs and performance footage is enough to make historians and fans of classic erotica swoon…insightful, fascinating.
Ernest Hardy - Village Voice

A privileged front-row seat to the history of burlesque! Glorious ladies in their heyday....their long-ago stripteases still pack a sensual, sassy, what-the-hell punch, while juicy anecdotes run from raunchy to touching to funny to flat-out incredible.
Ronnie Scheib - Variety

Entertaining, and often poignant book.
Liz Smith

[A]comprehensive history of the golden age of burlesque. Drawing from extensive interviews conducted for [her] film, Zemeckis profiles a host of colorful dancers.... Rounding out Zemeckis’s oral history are profiles of those connected to the burlesque circuit—like comedians Abbott and Costello—and examinations of the legal and social furors and fevers kicked off by the “Burly Q.” This rich history, rife with vibrant quotes and first-hand insights from burlesque’s biggest dancers, is indispensable for fans of the ribald pastime.
Publishers Weekly

Filmmaker Zemeckis...introduces readers to a wild and varied cast of characters, many of whom she interviewed herself, such as Lili St. Cyr, Zorita, and the legendary Gypsy Rose Lee, who was immortalized in the Broadway musical Gypsy. However, the author also reveals a more vulnerable side to these larger-than-life figures, discussing unstable childhoods and marital woes.... Zemeckis offers a rich, colorful narrative that provides a vivid sense of the era. —Mahnaz Dar
Library Journal

Salty reminiscences.... Zemeckis assembled an impressive number of surviving performers from roughly the 1930s through the late ’50s to recount their experiences toiling in this often misunderstood cul-de-sac in American performing arts. An evolution of vaudeville, burlesque added striptease to the program in an effort to lure audiences back from the movies.... There is much colorful ground-level showbiz detail... and the anecdotes are never less than good fun. An affectionate and historically valuable document of an intriguing, little-served corner of American entertainment.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Why has burlesque been left out of the history books? Where the performers themselves reluctant to talk about performing in burlesque or is it because of our perceptions today that burlesque was no more than a strip show with second rate comedians?

2. When does the author consider the years to be the “golden age of burlesque” and why?

3. Did most of the women revere their time in burlesque or were they ashamed of it? Did their families know?

4. How often did the performers work? Could say a hand-balancer actually make a living in burlesque?

5. Why is is considered to be the premier form of entertainment in America?

6. Why did burlesque die out? And what do we owe its growing resurgence to today?

7. Where can you see burlesque today? Which performers and television shows are burlesque?

8. What happened to the men and women when burlesque died out? Could they cross over into “legitimate” show business?

9. So many of the women talked about growing up poor and coming from abusive families did this have anything to do with their choices to go into burlesque? Did it give them opportunities they might not otherwise have had?

10. Alan Alda’s father was in burlesque, who else was in burlesque that surprised you?
(Questions provided courtesy of the author.)

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Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Atul Gawande, 2014
Henry Holt & Co.
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250081247

Summary
Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending.

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit.

Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.

Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession’s ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.

Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 5, 1965
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Rasied—Athens, Ohio
• Education—B.S., Stanford University ; M.A. Oxford Universty; M.D., M.P.H., Harvard University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Newton, Massachusetts

Atul Gawande is an American surgeon, author, and public health researcher. He is a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, professor in both the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In his work in public health, he is Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation and also chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit reducing deaths in surgery globally.

Early years
Gawande was born in Brooklyn, New York to Indian Maharashtrian immigrants to the United States, both doctors. The family soon moved to Athens, Ohio, where he and his sister grew up. He obtained an undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1987. He was a Rhodes scholar, earning a degree in Philosophy, Politics & Economics from Balliol College, Oxford in 1989. Gawande graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1995. He also has a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health, earned in 1999.

Political career and medical school
As a student, Gawande was a volunteer for Gary Hart's campaign. As a Rhodes Scholar, he spent one year at Oxford University. After graduation, he joined Al Gore's 1988 presidential campaign. He worked as a health-care researcher for Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN), who was author of a "managed competition" health care proposal for the Conservative Democratic Forum. After two years he left medical school to become Bill Clinton's health care lieutenant during the 1992 campaign and became a senior adviser in the Department of Health and Human Services after Clinton's inauguration. He directed one of the three committees of the Clinton Health Care Task Force, supervising 75 people and defined the benefits packages for Americans and subsidies and requirements for employers.

He returned to medical school in 1993 and earned a medical degree in 1994.

Journalism
Soon after he began his residency, his friend Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate, asked him to contribute to the online magazine. His pieces on the life of a surgical resident caught the eye of The New Yorker which published several pieces by him before making him a staff writer in 1998.

A June 2009 New Yorker essay by Gawande compared the health care of two towns in Texas to show why health care was more expensive in one town compared to the other. Using the town of McAllen, Texas, as an example, it argued that a revenue-maximizing businessman-like culture (which can provide substantial amounts of unnecessary care) was an important factor in driving up costs, unlike a culture of low-cost high-quality care as provided by the Mayo Clinic and other efficient health systems.

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post called it "the best article you'll see this year on American health care—why it's so expensive, why it's so poor, [and] what can be done." The article was cited by President Barack Obama during Obama's attempt to get health care reform legislation passed by the United States Congress. The article, according to Senator Ron Wyden, "affected [Obama's] thinking dramatically" and who later said to a group of Senators, "This is what we’ve got to fix." After reading the New Yorker article, Warren Buffett's long-time business partner Charlie Munger mailed a check to Gawande in the amount of $20,000 as a thank you to Dr. Gawande for providing something so socially useful. Gawande donated the money to the Brigham and Women's Hospital Center for Surgery and Public Health.

In addition to his popular writing, Gawande has published studies on topics including military surgery techniques and error in medicine, included in the New England Journal of Medicine. He is also the director of the World Health Organization's Global Patient Safety Challenge. His essays have appeared in The Best American Essays 2003, The Best American Science Writing 2002, and The Best American Science Writing 2009.

Books
In 2002 Gawande published his first book, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science. It was a National Book Award finalist and has been published in over one hundred countries.

His second book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, was released in 2007. It discusses three virtues that Gawande considers to be most important for success in medicine: diligence, doing right, and ingenuity. Gawande offers examples in the book of people who have embodied these virtues. The book strives to present multiple sides of contentious medical issues, such as malpractice law in the US, physicians' role in capital punishment, and treatment variation between hospitals.

Gawande's third book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, came out in 2009. It discusses the importance of organization and pre-planning (such as thorough checklists) in both medicine and the larger world. The Checklist Manifesto reached the New York Times Hardcover nonfiction bestseller list in 2010.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End was in October 2014.

Awards and recognition
In 2006, Gawande was named a MacArthur Fellow for his work investigating and articulating modern surgical practices and medical ethics. In 2007, he became director of the World Health Organization's effort to reduce surgical deaths, and in 2009 he was elected a Hastings Center Fellow.

In 2004, he was named one of the 20 Most Influential South Asians by Newsweek. In the 2010 Time 100, he was included (fifth place) in Thinkers Category. Also in 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.

Personal life
Gawande lives in Newton, Massachusetts with his wife, Kathleen Hobson, who is a Stanford graduate, and their three children: Walker, Hattie, and Hunter. He enjoys reading. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/12/2014.)

Book Reviews
"I never expected that among the most meaningful experiences I'd have as a doctor—and, really, as a human being—would come from helping others deal with what medicine cannot do as well as what it can," [Gawande] writes. Being Mortal uses a clear, illuminating style to describe the medical facts and cases that have brought him to that understanding.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

Gawande writes that members of the medical profession, himself included, have been wrong about what their job is. Rather than ensuring health and survival, it is "to enable well-being." If that sounds vague, Gawande has plenty of engaging and nuanced stories to leave the reader with a good sense of what he means…Being Mortal is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on aging, death and dying. It contains unsparing descriptions of bodily aging and the way it often takes us by surprise. Gawande is a gifted storyteller, and there are some stirring, even tear-inducing passages here. The writing can be evocative…. The stories give a dignified voice to older people in the process of losing their independence. We see the world from their perspective, not just those of their physicians and worried family members.
Sheri Fink - New York Time Book Review

Dr. Gawande’s book is not of the kind that some doctors write, reminding us how grim the fact of death can be. Rather, he shows how patients in the terminal phase of their illness can maintain important qualities of life (Best Books of 2014).
Wall Street Journal

Atul Gawande’s wise and courageous book raises the questions that none of us wants to think about.... Remarkable.
John Carey - Sunday Times (UK)

Gawande’s book is so impressive that one can believe that it may well [change the medical profession].... May it be widely read and inwardly　digested.
Diana Athill - Financial Times (UK)

Being Mortal, Atul Gawande’s masterful exploration of aging, death, and the medical profession’s mishandling of both, is his best and most personal book yet.
Boston Globe

Masterful.... Essential.... For more than a decade, Atul Gawande has explored the fault lines of medicine...combining his years of experience as a surgeon with his gift for fluid, seemingly effortless storytelling.... In Being Mortal, he turns his attention to his most important subject yet.
Chicago Tribune

A needed call to action, a cautionary tale of what can go wrong, and often does, when a society fails to engage in a sustained discussion about aging and dying.
San Francisco Chronicle

Beautifully crafted.... Being Mortal　is a clear-eyed, informative exploration of what growing old means in the 21st　century...a book I cannot recommend highly enough. This should be mandatory reading for every American.... [I]t provides a useful roadmap of what we can and should be doing to make the last years of life meaningful.
Time.com

Beautifully written.... In his newest and best book, Gawande...has provided us with a moving and clear-eyed look at aging and death in our society, and at the harms we do in turning it into a medical problem, rather than a human one.
New York Review of Books

Being Mortal left me tearful, angry, and unable to stop talking about it for a week.... A surgeon himself, Gawande is eloquent about the inadequacy of medical school in preparing doctors to confront the subject of death with their patients.... it is rare to read a book that sparks with so much hard thinking.
Nature

　
Eloquent, moving (Best Books of 2014).
Economist

A great read that leaves you better equipped to face the future, and without making you feel like you just took your medicine (Best Books of 2014).
Mother Jones

Leading surgeon, Harvard medical professor, and best-selling author, Gawande is also a staff writer at The New Yorker, which published the National Magazine Award-winning article that serves as the basis for this study of how contemporary medicine can do a better, more humane job of managing death and dying.
Library Journal

Gawande displays the precision of his surgical craft and the compassion of a humanist...in a narrative that often attains the force and beauty of a novel.... Only a precious few books have the power to open our eyes while they move us to tears. Atul Gawande has produced such a work. One hopes it is the spark that ignites some revolutionary changes in a field of medicine that ultimately touches each of us (Best Books of 2014).
Shelf Awareness

[A] cleareyed look at aging and death in 21st-century America.... Gawande offers a timely account of how modern Americans cope with decline and mortality. He points out that dying in America is a lonely, complex business.... A sensitive, intelligent and heartfelt examination of the processes of aging and dying.
Kirkus Reviews

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The Best of Friends: Martha and Me
Mariana Pasternak, 2010
HarperCollins
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061661280

Summary
For more than two decades, Mariana Pasternak and Martha Stewart were nearly inseparable. They first met over a garden gate in Westport, Connecticut—two suburban wives wedded to successful men but with grand aspirations of their own.

Their friendship only deepened after their marriages ended in divorce. Drawn into a seductive world of privilege and adventure, Pasternak, who struggled as a working single mother, watched with admiration as Martha built an empire that would make her one of the richest women in America. The two women enjoyed amazing experiences, traveled the world together, and talked on a daily basis, sharing thoughts and feelings, plans and dreams. But as time passed, money, men, and the arrogance of wealth frayed the bonds of their friendship—until the final break came when Pasternak was called as a witness in the high-profile trial that ultimately brought about Stewart's conviction and prison sentence.

The Best of Friends: Martha and Me tells the story of an extraordinary friendship and its devastating aftermath with breathtaking candor. Every woman who has had a best female friend will see herself in this deeply personal memoir. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Mariana Pasternak grew up in Romania and immigrated to the United States as a political refugee. The mother of two daughters, she has been a biomedical engineer and has held other positions involving computer-based research and development. For the past twenty years, she has been working as a realtor in Connecticut, where she lives. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Ms. Pasternak winds up expressing even more affection for a special red Hermes handbag ("How I loved that bag!") than she does for the woman whose coattails she rode for more than 20 years.
New York Times

[A] spiky, entertaining memoir by Stewart’s former pal Mariana Pasternak.... This is an observant, dishy look at a world of luxury and privilege from the perspective of a woman who’s trying to justify—if only to herself—her years as a hanger-on.
Laurie Muchnick - Bloomberg

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 Best of Friends:

1. How does Martha Stewart come off in Pasternak's book? Has it changed you opinion of her? Have you come away with greater admiration of Stewart...or less?

2. What do you think of Mariana Pasternak?

3. What was Pasternak's motivation for penning the book? Is her view of Stewart an unbiased one? Is the book merely a kiss & tell book—gossipy and self-serving? Or does her memoir provide us with fascinating insights into one of the most powerful and remarkable women of our time?

4. How would you describe Pasternak and Stewart's friendship? What was the friendship built on—was it a genuine friendship? What did either woman gain from the relationship? What began to eat away at the bond between the two women—when did the first cracks begin to appear? How might you have fared in such a friendship, one in which the other half has a huge financial advantage?

5. What kind of mother, according to Pasternak, was Martha Stewart? Why did Pasternak never say anything to Stewart about her concerns? Why did she allow her own daughter to continue visiting the Stewart household unsupervised?

6. Talk about the 2004 Stewart trial and Pasternak's damaging testimony. On cross examination by Stewart's lawyer, Pasternak wavered, admitting, "I do not know if Martha said that or it's me who thought those words." Do you find it contradictory that six years later, Pasternak's memory has improved, if not regarding the trial, then on so many other points covered in her memoir? Or can this be explained by the fact that a writer's recall would vastly improve as a result of focusing on the act of writing?

7. Did you feel any envy, even just a twinge, reading about the high-end lifestyle lived by Martha Stewart? Any parts in particular—e.g., fame, food, travel, houses and furnishings? In other words, would it be fun to be Martha...or is it just the goodies that would be nice?

8. How does Pasternak describe Stewart's relationship with men and her proclivity toward sex? How is that the two women find themselves alone, for instance, on New Year's Eve in one of Martha's houses?

9. What was Pasternak's fascination with Andy Stewart? Why do Andy and Martha divorce? What happened to Pasternak's marriage and why?

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

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Bettyville: A Memoir
George Hodgman, 2015
Penguin Books
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525427209

Summary
A witty, tender memoir of a son’s journey home to care for his irascible mother—a tale of secrets, silences, and enduring love.

When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself—an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook—in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living?

When hell freezes over. He can’t bring himself to force her from the home both treasure—the place where his father’s voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict: Betty, who speaks her mind but cannot quite reveal her heart, has never really accepted the fact that her son is gay.

As these two unforgettable characters try to bring their different worlds together, Hodgman reveals the challenges of Betty’s life and his own struggle for self-respect, moving readers from their small town—crumbling but still colorful—to the star-studded corridors of Vanity Fair. Evocative of The End of Your Life Book Club and The Tender Bar, Hodgman’s debut is both an indelible portrait of a family and an exquisitely told tale of a prodigal son’s return. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1959-60
• Where—Paris, Missouri, USA
• Education—B.A., Missouri School of Journalism; M.A., Boston College
• Currently—lives in New York City and Paris, Missouri

George Hodgman is a veteran magazine and book editor who has worked at Simon & Schuster, Vanity Fair, and Talk magazine. His writing has appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Interview, W, and Harper’s Bazaar, among other publications. He lives in New York City and Paris, Missouri. (From .)

Book Reviews
A remarkable, laugh-out-loud book.... Rarely has the subject of elder care produced such droll human comedy, or a heroine quite on the mettlesome order of Betty Baker Hodgman. For as much as the book works on several levels (as a meditation on belonging, as a story of growing up gay and the psychic cost of silence, as metaphor for recovery), it is the strong-willed Betty who shines through.
New York Times

An intimate, heartfelt portrait of a mother and son, each at the crossroads of life.... Hodgman’s sharp wit carries the book ever forward.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune

A superb memoir.... Hodgman is by turns wry, laugh-out-loud funny, self-deprecating, insecure to the point of near suicide, and an attentive caregiver despite occasional, understandable resentments.... I have read several hundred American memoirs; I would place Bettyville in the top five.
Steve Weinberg - Kansas City Star

In his tender, sardonic, and fearless account of life with Betty—who has never acknowledged that her son is gay—Hodgman delivers an epic unfolding of his lifelong search for acceptance and love.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A humorous, bittersweet account of Hodgman’s caring for his aging, irascible mother.
Vanity Fair

The author's continuous low-key humor infuses the memoir with refreshing levity, without diminishing the emotional toll of being the sole health-care provider to an elderly parent. This is an emotionally honest portrayal of a son's secrets and his unending devotion to his mother.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) This is a superior memoir, written in a witty and episodic style, yet at times it’s heartbreaking...filled with a lifetime’s worth of reflection and story after fascinating story.
Library Journal

The book is instantly engaging, as Hodgman has a wry sense of humor, one he uses to keep others at a distance. Yet the book is also devastatingly touching. Betty is one tough cookie, and...[t]here’s a lot for Hodgman to handle.... A tender, resolute look at a place, literal and figurative, baby boomers might find themselves.
Booklist

Hodgman writes with wit and empathy about all the loss he’s confronted with.... That doesn’t mean Bettyville is without humor—far from it.... This is a portrait of a woman in decline, but still very much alive and committed to getting the lion’s share of mini-Snickers at every opportunity. When things are left unsaid between parents and children, it leaves a hurt that can never be completely repaired, but love and dedication can make those scarred places into works of art. Bettyville is one such masterpiece.
BookPage

A gay magazine editor and writer's account of how he returned home to the Midwest from New York to care for his aging mother.... But when he returned to Paris [Missouri], it was with a greater acceptance of who he was: not the son Betty might have wanted or expected, but the son who would see her through the "strange days" of her final years of life. Movingly honest, at times droll, and ultimately poignant.
Kirkus Reviews

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Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure that Took the Victorian World by Storm
Monte Reel, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385534222

Summary
The unbelievably riveting adventure of an unlikely young explorer who emerged from the jungles of Africa with evidence of a mysterious, still mythical beast—the gorilla—only to stumble straight into the center of the biggest debate of the day: Darwin's theory of evolution

In 1856 Paul Du Chaillu marched into the equatorial wilderness of West Africa determined to bag an animal that, according to legend, was nothing short of a monster. When he emerged three years later, the summation of his efforts only hinted at what he'd experienced in one of the most dangerous regions on earth.

Armed with an astonishing collection of zoological specimens, Du Chaillu leapt from the physical challenges of the jungle straight into the center of the biggest issues of the time—the evolution debate, racial discourse, the growth of Christian fundamentalism—and helped push each to unprecedented intensities. He experienced instant celebrity, but with that fame came whispers—about his past, his credibility, and his very identity—which would haunt the young man.

Grand in scope, immediate in detail, and propulsively readable, Between Man and Beast brilliantly combines Du Chaillu's personal journey with the epic tale of a world hovering on the sharp edge of transformation. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Monte Reel is a former South America correspondent for the Washington Post, and he also reported for the newspaper in Washington and Iraq. His first book, The Last of the Tribe (2010), chronicles the story of the last surviving member of an indigenous tribe in the Amazon rainforest. After spending seven years in Argentina, he recently moved to the Chicago area, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. He is originally from Mattoon, Illinois. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
(Required reading.) You’d half expect a Bela Lugosi mad scientist or a Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan to pop up in this Victorian-era drama, which travels from the London of Darwin and Dickens to unexplored Africa to Civil War-ravaged America.
New York Post

Entertaining and provocative story of the life and adventures of explorer Paul Du Chaillu.... [Reel] does a superb job of telling the engrossing story of Du Chaillu and tying it into the events and thoughts of the time, from the intense debate over racial differences in light of the theory of evolution to the habit of Abraham Lincoln’s political enemies of referring to him as a 'gorilla'...scrupulous in adhering to the facts... At the same time, it has the narrative flow and evocative language of a fine historical novel.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

An admirable book for those who like epic tales of exploration.... Fascinating.... highlights once again the big issues that seem endlessly interesting to new generations of Americans, 'the evolution debate, racial discourse, the growth of Christian fundamentalism' in careful historical context and with a fine hand for thoughtful exposition."
Buffalo News

Before there was Jane Goodall, or even Tarzan and King Kong, the gorilla was a creature of mystery....Reel retraces his life and work with the spirit of curiosity and adventure that drove du Chaillu in the first place. What results is a celebration of accomplishments too far-reaching to be understood in their time."
Daily Beast

Paul Du Chaillu was one of the Victorian era’s most famous explorers. He was the person who brought the gorilla to the attention of Europeans. In response to his fame, he was attacked mercilessly by competitors who claimed he was a fraud.... Reel (The Last of the Tribe) provides a robust intellectual history by embedding Du Chaillu’s story within the debate over evolution, the relationship among the human races, the rise of Christian fundamentalism.... In Reel’s hands, Du Chaillu’s adventures in Africa, including his discovery of Pygmies and his part in a smallpox epidemic, were no less harrowing than his interactions with many of the world’s leading scientists and explorers.
Publishers Weekly

In 1856, explorer and amateur naturalist Paul du Chaillu undertook a treacherous expedition through West Africa, after which he brought back to England the first known specimens of the African gorilla ever seen there. Reel...examines the colorful life and times of du Chaillu...how du Chaillu's hugely popular expedition chronicle...ignited a storm of interest and controversy in the scientific circles of Victorian England. While Reel clearly admires his subject, he is also willing to address and evaluate du Chaillu's errors and exaggerations.... Today's readers may find du Chaillu's penchant for killing gorillas repugnant, although he followed the standard scientific practice of the time. —Ingrid Levin, Salve Regina Univ. Lib., Newport, RI
Library Journal

Those unfamiliar with [Paul Du Chaillu] would do well to pick up a copy of Beatween Man and Beast, Monte Reel's new book about Du Chaillu's life and adventures in pursuit of this fierce creature... Although Du Chaillu's checkered life story is the bedrock of this book, Reel builds upon it fascinating sketches of England's leading intellectuals, explorers and freelance eccentrics of the day, detailing not only their personal achievements but their professional jealousies as well.
BookPage

Former Washington Post reporter Reel (The Last of the Tribe: The Epic Quest to Save a Lone Man in the Amazon, 2010) offers a fascinating sidelight on the perennial debate of man's origins. In the decade before the publication of Darwin's On the Origins of Species, evolution was already a hotly debated topic.... Reel weaves together the fierce contentions about the theory of evolution among leading Victorian scientists and the story of young African explorer Paul Du Chaillu.... In 1861, after writing a book about his exploits...his book was published and he became an overnight celebrity, for a time overshadowing Darwin in the popular imagination. Ultimately, Du Chaillu was accused of embellishing his account. A lively footnote to the debate between science and religion and the exploration of the African jungle in the Victorian era.
Kirkus Reviews

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Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015
Random House
166 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781925240702

Summary
Winner, 2015 National Book Award

This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis.

Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion.

What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder.

Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 30, 1975
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—Howard University (no degree)
• Awards—National Book Award, George Polk Award, Hillman Prize (Journalism)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York

Ta-Nehisi Coates (TAH-nə-HAH-see KOHTS) is an American writer, journalist, and educator. Coates is a National Correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about cultural, social and political issues, particularly as regards African-Americans. In 2015, he won the National Book Award for Between the World and Me.

Coates has worked for the Village Voice, Washington City Paper, and Time. He has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Washington Monthly, O, and other publications. In 2008 he published his memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. His second book, Between the World and Me, was published in 2015 to wide acclaim.

Early life
Coates was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to father, William Paul "Paul" Coates, a Vietnam War veteran, former Black Panther, publisher and librarian, and mother, Cheryl Waters-Hassan, who was a teacher. Coates' father founded and ran Black Classic Press, a publisher specializing in African-American titles, as a grassroots organization with a printing press in the basement of their home.

Coates grew up in the Mondawmin neighborhood of Baltimore during the crack epidemic. His father had seven children—five boys and two girls, by four women (his first wife had three children, Coates' mother had two boys, and the other two women each had one child). In Coates' family the important focus was on child-rearing. The children were raised together in a close-knit family; most lived with their mothers and often visited their father. Coates, however, said he lived with his father full-time. As a Black Panther, Coates' father adhered to the Black Panther doctrine of free love rather than monogamy.

As a child Coates, enjoyed comic books and Dungeons & Dragons. His interest in books was instilled at an early age when his mother punished bad behavior by making him write essays. Another big influence was his father's work with the Black Classic Press; Coates said he read many of the books his father published.

Coates attended a number of Baltimore-area schools, including William H. Lemmel Middle School (where some scenes for The Wire TV series were shot), Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, before graduating from Woodlawn High School. His father was hired as a librarian at Howard University, which enabled some of his children to attend with tuition remission.

After high school, he attended Howard University and left without a degree after five years to start a career in journalism. He is the only child in his family without a college degree. In summer 2014, Coates attended an intensive program in French at Middlebury College to prepare for a writing fellowship in Paris.

Journalism
Coates' first journalism job was as a reporter at the the Washington City Paper; his editor was David Carr, who later wrote for the New York Times.

From 2000 to 2007, Coates worked as a journalist at various publications, including Philadelphia Weekly, Village Voice and Time. His first article for The Atlantic, "This Is How We Lost to the White Man," about Bill Cosby and conservatism, started a new, more successful phase of his career. The article led to an appointment with a regular blog column for The Atlantic, a blog that was both popular, influential and had a high level of community engagement.

Coates became a senior editor at The Atlantic, for which he wrote feature articles as well as maintained a blog. Topics covered by the blog included politics, history, race, culture as well as sports, and music.

His writings on race, such as his September 2012 Atlantic cover piece "Fear of a Black President," and his June 2014 feature "The Case for Reparations," received special praise and won his blog a place on the Best Blogs of 2011 list by Time magazine, as well as the 2012 Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism. The blog's comment section has also received praise for its high level of engagement; Coates curates and moderates the comments heavily so that, "the jerks are invited to leave [and] the grown-ups to stay and chime in."

In discussing his Atlantic article on "The Case for Reparations," Coates said he had worked on the article for almost two years, reading Rutgers University professor Beryl Satter's book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America,. Satter's book is a history of redlining, which discussed the grassroots organization, the Contract Buyers League, of which Clyde Ross was one of the leaders. The focus of the article was more on the institutional racism of housing discrimination than on reparations for slavery.

Coates has worked as a guest columnist for the New York Times. He turned down an offer from them to become a regular columnist.

Books
In 2008, Coates published The Beautiful Struggle, a memoir about coming of age in West Baltimore and its effect on him. In the book, he discusses the influence of his father, a former Black Panther; the prevailing street crime of the era and its effects on his older brother; his own troubled experience attending Baltimore-area schools; and his eventual graduation and enrollment in Howard University.

Coates' second book, Between the World and Me, was published in July 2015. Coates said that one of the origins of the book came from the murder of a college friend Prince Carmen Jones Jr. who was killed by police in a case of mistaken identity. In an ongoing discussion about reparation, continuing the work of his June 2014 Atlantic article, Coates cited the bill sponsored by Representative John Conyers "H.R.40 - Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act" that has been introduced every year since 1989. One of the themes of the book was about what physically affected African-American lives, their bodies being enslaved, violence, that come from slavery and various forms of institutional racism.

Teaching
Coates was the 2012–14 MLK visiting professor for writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the City University of New York as its journalist-in-residence in the fall of 2014.

Personal life
Coates currently resides in Harlem with his wife, Kenyatta Matthews, and son, Samori Maceo-Paul Coates. His son is named after Samori Ture, a Mande chief who fought French colonialism, after black Cuban revolutionary Antonio Maceo Grajales, and after Coates' father. Coates met his wife when they were both students at Howard University. He is an atheist and a feminist.

Coates says that his first name, Ta-Nehisi, is an Egyptian name his father gave him that means Nubia, and in a loose translation is "land of the black." Nubia is a region along the Nile river located in current day northern Sudan and southern Egypt. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/27/2015.)

Book Reviews
Powerful and passionate...profoundly moving...a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Brilliant.... [Ta-Nehisi Coates] is firing on all cylinders, and it is something to behold: a mature writer entirely consumed by a momentous subject and working at the extreme of his considerable powers at the very moment national events most conform to his vision.
Washington Post

I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.
Toni Morrison

A work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty.... Between the World and Me is a love letter written in a moral emergency, one that Coates exposes with the precision of an autopsy and the force of an exorcism.... Coates is frequently lauded as one of America’s most important writers on the subject of race today, but this in fact undersells him: Coates is one of America’s most important writers on the subject of America today.... [He’s] a polymath whose breadth of knowledge on matters ranging from literature to pop culture to French philosophy to the Civil War bleeds through every page of his book, distilled into profound moments of discovery, immensely erudite but never showy.
Slate

(Starred review.) [A]n immense, multifaceted work. This is a poet's book, revealing the sensibility of a writer to whom words—exact words—matter.... [I]t speaks so forcefully to issues of grave interest today....[and] will be hailed as a classic of our time.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) [W]hat it means to be black in America, especially...a black male.... This powerful little book may well serve as a primer for black parents, particularly those with sons.... [A] candid perspective on the headlines and the history of being black in America. —Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Library Journal

(Starred review.) [Coates] came to understand that "race" does not fully explain "the breach between the world and me," yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered.... Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live "apart from fear—even apart from me." ... [A] moving, potent testament.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Between the World and Me has been called a book about race, but the author argues that race itself is a flawed, if not useless, concept—it is, if anything, nothing more than a pretext for racism. Early in the book he writes, "Race, is the child of racism, not the father." The idea of race has been so important in the history of America and in the self-identification of its people—and racial designations have literally marked the difference between life and death in some instances. How does discrediting the idea of race as an immutable, unchangeable fact change the way we look at our history? Ourselves?

2. Fear is palpably described in the book’s opening section and shapes much of Coates’s sense of himself and the world. "When I was your age," Coates writes to his son, "the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid." How did this far inform and distort Coates’s life and way of looking at the world? Is this kind of fear inevitable? Can you relate to his experience? Why or why not?

3. The book—in the tradition of classic texts like Ranier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time—is written in the form of a letter. Why do you think Coates chose this literary device? Did the intimacy of an address from a father to his son make you feel closer to the material or kept at a distance?

4. One can read Between the World and Me in many different ways. It may be seen as an exploration of the African American experience, the black American male experience, the experience of growing up in urban America; it can be read as a book about raising a child or being one. Which way of reading resonates most with you?

5. Coates repeatedly invokes the sanctity of the black "body" and describes the effects of racism in vivid, physical terms. He writes:

And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape.… There is no uplifting way to say this. I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructive—that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings.

Coates’s atheistic assertion that the soul and mind are not separate from the physical body is in conflict with the religious faith that has been so crucial to many African Americans. How does this belief affect his outlook on racial progress?

6. Coates is adamant that he is a writer, not an activist, but critics have argued that, given his expansive following and prominent position, he should be offering more solutions and trying harder to affect real change in American race relations. Do you think he holds any sort of responsibility to do so? Why or why not?

7. Some critics have argued that Between the World and Me lacks adequate representation of black women’s experiences. In her otherwise positive Los Angeles Times review, Rebecca Carroll writes: "What is less fine is the near-complete absence of black women throughout the book." Do you think that the experience of women is erased in this book? Do you think Coates had an obligation to include more stories of black women in the text?

8. While much of the book concerns fear and the haunting effects of violence, it also has moments where Coates explores moments of joy and his blossoming understanding of the meaning of love. What notions of hard-won joy and love does the book explore? How do these episodes function in counterpoint to the book’s darker passages?

9. Do you think Between the World and Me leaves us with hope for race relations in America? Why or why not? Do you think "hope" was what Coates was trying to convey to readers? If not, what are you left with at the end of the book? If so, hope in what?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
Mary Norris, 2015
W.W. Norton & Co.
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393352146

Summary
The most irreverent and helpful book on language since the #1 New York Times bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Mary Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker's copy department, maintaining its celebrated high standards. Now she brings her vast experience, good cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice.

Between You & Me features Norris's laugh-out-loud descriptions of some of the most common and vexing problems in spelling, punctuation, and usage—comma faults, danglers, "who" vs. "whom," "that" vs. "which," compound words, gender-neutral language—and her clear explanations of how to handle them.

Down-to-earth and always open-minded, she draws on examples from Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and the Lord's Prayer, as well as from The Honeymooners, The Simpsons, David Foster Wallace, and Gillian Flynn. She takes us to see a copy of Noah Webster's groundbreaking Blue-Back Speller, on a quest to find out who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick, on a pilgrimage to the world's only pencil-sharpener museum, and inside the hallowed halls of The New Yorker and her work with such celebrated writers as Pauline Kael, Philip Roth, and George Saunders.

Readers—and writers—will find in Norris neither a scold nor a softie but a wise and witty new friend in love with language and alive to the glories of its use in America, even in the age of autocorrect and spell-check. As Norris writes, "The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around." (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth— February 7, 1952
• Raised—Cleveland, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Rutgers University; M.A., University of Vermont
• Currently—lives in New York, New York

Mary Norris was raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She graduated from Rutgers University in 1974. She earned a Masters in English from the University of Vermont.

Norris joined the editorial staff at The New Yorker in 1978. She has been a query proofreader at the magazine since 1993, as well as a contributor to the magazine's "The Talk of the Town" column and newyorker.com.

Her first book, Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen was published in 2015. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/17/2015.)

Book Reviews
Ms. Norris, who has a dirty laugh that evokes late nights and Scotch, is…like the worldly aunt who pulls you aside at Thanksgiving and whispers that it is all right to occasionally flout the rules.
Sarah Lyall - New York Times

Copy editors are a peculiar species…But those at The New Yorker are something else entirely…A regular reader might be forgiven for wondering, "Are these people nuts?" In Mary Norris's Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, we have our answer: They most certainly are. And their obsessions, typographical and otherwise, make hilarious reading…Despite the extreme grammar, this book charmed my socks off…Norris is a master storyteller and serves up plenty of inside stuff.
Patricia T. O'Conner - New York Times Book Review

Brims with wit, personality—and commas.... Norris' enthusiasm is infectious. She's as passionate about sharp pencils as she is about sharp writing.... Delightful.
Heller McAlpin - NPR Books

[P]ure porn for word nerds.
Allan Fallow - Washington Post

“Destined to become an instant classic…. It’s hard to imagine the reader who would not enjoy spending time with Norris.
Christian Science Monitor

Mary Norris has an enthusiasm for the proper use of language that’s contagious. Her memoir is so engaging, in fact, that it’s easy to forget you’re learning things.
People

[A] delightful discourse on the most common grammar, punctuation, and usage challenges faced by writers of all stripes. Not surprisingly, Norris writes well—with wit, sass, and smarts—and the book is part memoir, part manual.... [A]fter reading this book, [readers will] think more about how and what they write.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Part memoir and part writing guide, Norris's thoughtful and humorous narrative provides an irreverent account of her days as a New Yorker comma queen as well as an insightful look into the history of the English language. —Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib.
Library Journal

[A] funny and entertaining new book about language and life… While Norris may have a job as a “comma queen,” readers of Between You & Me will find that “prose goddess” is perhaps a more apt description of this delightful writer.
BookPage

(Starred review.) Norris delivers a host of unforgettable anecdotes.... In countless laugh-out-loud passages, Norris displays her admirable flexibility in bending rules when necessary. She even makes her serious quest to uncover the reason for the hyphen in the title of the classic novel Moby-Dick downright hilarious. A funny book for any serious reader.
Kirkus Reviews

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Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape
Jenna Miscavige Hill (with Lisa Pulitzer), 2013
HarperCollins
404 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062248473

Summary
Jenna Miscavige Hill was raised to obey. As the niece of the Church of Scientology's leader David Miscavige, she grew up at the center of this highly controversial and powerful organization. But at twenty-one, Jenna made a daring break, risking everything she had ever known and loved to leave Scientology once and for all. Now she speaks out about her life, the Church, and her dramatic escape, going deep inside a religion that, for decades, has been the subject of fierce debate and speculation worldwide.

Piercing the veil of secrecy that has long shrouded the world of Scientology, this insider reveals unprecedented firsthand knowledge of the religion, its obscure rituals, and its mysterious leader—David Miscavige. From her prolonged separation from her parents as a small child to being indoctrinated to serve the greater good of the Church, from her lack of personal freedoms to the organization's emphasis on celebrity recruitment, Jenna goes behind the scenes of Scientology's oppressive and alienating culture, detailing an environment rooted in control in which the most devoted followers often face the harshest punishments when they fall out of line. Addressing some of the Church's most notorious practices in startling detail, she also describes a childhood of isolation and neglect—a childhood that, painful as it was, prepared her for a tough life in the Church's most devoted order, the Sea Org.

Despite this hardship, it is only when her family approaches dissolution and her world begins to unravel that she is finally able to see the patterns of stifling conformity and psychological control that have ruled her life. Faced with a heartbreaking choice, she mounts a courageous escape, but not before being put through the ultimate test of family, faith, and love. At once captivating and disturbing, Beyond Belief is an eye-opening exploration of the limits of religion and the lengths to which one woman went to break free. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Jenna Miscavige Hill (born 1984) is a former Scientologist who, after leaving the Church of Scientology in 2005, has become an outspoken critic of the organization. She is the daughter of Ron Miscavige, Jr. and the niece of current church leader David Miscavige.

Hill, with Kendra Wiseman and Astra Woodcraft (both also raised in Scientology), founded the website exscientologykids.com. She has been interviewed about her experiences within Scientology by a number of media outlets, including ABC's Nightline in April 2008, and on Piers Morgan Tonight in February 2013 discussing details of the church.

In 2000, when Hill was 16, her father and mother left Scientology. Hill states that due to the Scientology-ordered practice of disconnection with relatives and friends who don't support Scientology or are hostile to it, letters from her parents were intercepted and she was not allowed to answer a telephone for a year.

She described her experience from ages five to 12 as thus: "We were also required to write down all transgressions...similar to a sin in the Catholic religion. After writing them all down, we would receive a meter check on the electropsychometer to make sure we weren't hiding anything, and you would have to keep writing until you came up clean." (From Wikipedia.)

Lisa Pulitzer is a former correspondent for the New York Times and coauthor of more than a dozen nonfiction titles, including New York Times bestsellers Stolen Innocence, Imperfect Justice, and Mob Daughter. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
An ex-member of Scientology's inner elite bolts—understandably, [if one is to] trust this undistinguished but still valuable memoir. If Charles Dickens had been a sci-fi author, he might have dreamed up something like Scientology and its weird workhouses.... [M]y life was Scientology," [Hill] writes. That life included absolute obedience to dictates that seem crafted to strip away any autonomy from the individual, if any individuality at all.... Hill scarcely saw her mother unless on "special Scientology/Sea Org occasions.... Hill's emotional turmoil is wrenchingly authentic, but [it] does not save the book.... Despite the uneven prose, readers with an interest in the psychology of religion, among other subjects, will find this rare insider's account to be of value—less so than Lawrence Wright's Going Clear (2013), but of value all the same
Kirkus Reviews

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

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

We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, consider the following approaches:

1. What surprised you most about this book? Has the book altered, in any way, your prior understanding of Scientology...or has it confirmed your existing views?

2. Talk about the reasons Jenna's parents left Scientology—and the outfall from their decision.

3. How do you define Scientology? Is it a legitimate religion? Is it a movement? Is the desire to punish transgressions or to control thinking different to or similar from other religions?

4. Is Scientology dangerous?

(Talking points by LitLovers. Feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution. If you have more detailed questions please let us know. We'll add them...and give you credit. Thanks.)

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The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America
Timothy Egan, 2009
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
324 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780547394602

Summary
On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men—college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps—to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.

Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Born—November 8, 1954
• Where—Seattle, Washington, USA
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize, Journalism (2001); National Book
Award, Nonfiction; Washington State Book Award (twice)
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington

Timothy Egan is an American Pulitzer Prize winning author who resides in Seattle, Washington. He currently contributes opinion columns to the New York Times as the paper's Pacific Northwest correspondent. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his contribution to the series "How Race is Lived in America."

In addition to his work with the New York Times, he has written six books, including The Good Rain (Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, 1991), Breaking Blue, and Lasso the Wind.

The Worst Hard Time is his non-fiction account of those who lived through The Great Depression's Dust Bowl, for which he won the 2006 Washington State Book Award in history/biography and a 2006 National Book Award.

In 2009 he wrote The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, which details the Great Fire of 1910 that burned about three million acres (12,000 km²) and helped shape the United States Forest Service. The book also details some of the political issues of the time focusing on Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. Egan won a second Washington State Book Award in history/biography in 2010 for this work, and a second Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award.

In 2012 Egan published a biography of Western and Native American photographer, Edward Curtis: Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. (From Wikipedia.)

Also see the extensive interview with Egan and his publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Book Reviews
Egan weaves his account of the Big Burn with the creation story of the United States Forest Service. This might seem a dull, bureaucratic yarn, but Egan tells it as the stirring tale of a very odd couple: the irrepressible Teddy Roosevelt, who "burned 2,000 calories before noon and drank his coffee with seven lumps of sugar," and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, an ascetic loner who sometimes slept on a wooden pillow and for 20 years mystically clung to his deceased fiancee.
New York Times

In terms of sheer political courage, reforming the American health-care system is but a minor parliamentary maneuver compared to the chutzpah mustered by Teddy Roosevelt in 1907, when he established the national forest system. In one frenzied week, Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, outlined 16 million acres of Western woodland that they felt needed to be preserved.... Egan always writes insightfully about his native region; here he commands the full sweep of characters, from the president on down to the loneliest mining-town drunk. The only off note, in fact, is the book's subtitle, which sells it just a little too hard. Did the Big Burn really "save America"?
Bill Gifford - Washington Post

Muir called Pinchot "someone who could relish, not run from a rainstorm"—a phrase that also describes The Big Burn's narrator. For as long as Egan keeps chasing storms, whether of dust, fire, rain or snow, you'd be smart to ride shotgun.
Los Angeles Times

[Egan] has already proved himself to be a masterly collector of memorable stories. His new book, The Big Burn, continues in the same tradition.... What makes The Big Burn particularly impressive is Egan’s skill as an equal-opportunity storyteller. By this I mean that he recounts the stories of men and women completely unknown to most of us with the same fervor he uses to report the stories of historic figures.... Even as we mark the centennial of this great fire, wildfires in the West continue to burn. It makes this book—which is a masterwork in every sense—worthy of a very careful reading.
Christian Science Monitor

(Starred review.) Egan, National Book Award winner for The Worst Hard Time, spins a tremendous tale of Progressive-era America out of the 1910 blaze that burned across Montana, Idaho and Washington and put the fledgling U.S. Forest Service through a veritable trial by fire. Underfunded, understaffed, unsupported by Congress and President Taft and challenged by the robber barons that Taft's predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, had worked so hard to oppose, the Forest Service was caught unprepared for the immense challenge. Egan shuttles back and forth between the national stage of politics and the conflicting visions of the nation's future, and the personal stories of the men and women who fought and died in the fire: rangers, soldiers, immigrant miners imported from all over the country to help the firefighting effort, prostitutes, railroad engineers and dozens others whose stories are painstakingly recreated from scraps of letters, newspaper articles, firsthand testimony, and Forest Service records. Egan brings a touching humanity to this story of valor and cowardice in the face of a national catastrophe, paying respectful attention to Roosevelt's great dream of conservation and of an America for the little man.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Historians will enjoy Egan’s well-written book, featuring sparkling and dynamic descriptions of the land and people, as a review of Roosevelt’s conservation ideas, while general readers will find his suspenseful account of the fires mesmerizing.
Library Journal

Most reviewers thought that The Big Burn equaled or exceeded Egan's last book in both its prose and its historical synthesis. The majority were impressed by his ability to balance a riveting story with strong characters and an original analysis of the American conservation movement.... [A] fine piece of writing, a powerful history, and a great read.
Bookmarks Magazine

Discussion Questions
1. This gripping account begins with the fire’s destruction of Wallace, Idaho. What kinds of things make people late to the evacuating train? What would you bring with you if you were allowed only a case small enough to fit on your lap?

2. With so much animosity between Pinchot and Roosevelt’s young Forest Service and the “robber baron” businessmen, what ultimately brings people together to fight the Big Burn of 1910? How does Congress—still controlled by powerful business interests—fail the rangers and citizens of the West after the fire has finished raging?

3. Egan details the childhood and early careers of both Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot in order to give readers a fuller picture of why and how these men came to pioneer conservation as a national value in America. In what ways do Roosevelt’s experiences shape his politics? How do Pinchot’s experiences influence his work as “Big G.P.” of the Forest Service?

4. Roosevelt and Pinchot are very different types of men, and yet they share a passion for the great outdoors. What do Roosevelt and Pinchot have in common? How are they different from one another?

5. Throughout the book, Egan reveals that some powerful men whose hubris and greed would decide the fate of America’s still-untamed West spend time in that region, while others distance themselves both literally and figuratively. Discuss the relationship these men have to the land they all but rule over and the way Egan portrays them.

6. On page 112, Egan quotes Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe as wondering, “Why are you in such a hurry?” He’s referring to the rush of “manifest destiny,” with America’s population exploding from colonies of 2.9 million people to an ocean-to-ocean nation of 91 million. In the first decade of the twentieth century alone, the populations of Idaho and Washington doubled. Discuss the effect this rapid growth has on the young nation—why are they in such a hurry? What does it cost them—and us?

7. In many ways, the battle against the forest fires of 1910 is a war of the disenfranchised. Identify the players and discuss their roles in this epic disaster. Why do you think they answer the call for labor when those with the most at stake—such as the “idle men” of Wallace—do nothing?

8. Gifford Pinchot firmly believed that man could control forest fires, though he’d never seen anything like the Big Burn of 1910 when he published his A Primer of Forestry in 1900. What methods do the rangers and townsfolk use to try to control the fires? What methods do they use to survive?

9. The aftermath of the Big Burn seems like one colossal governmental failure, though some bright spots exist, such as the sea change in many Americans’ opinions about the black “buffalo soldiers” who became heroes in Wallace, Idaho. How does Egan’s portrayal of this seminal moment in American history make you feel? Did it change your mind about anything, or teach you anything new?

10. William H. Taft is portrayed as a complicated man in this book. He idolizes Roosevelt and yet fails to keep his promises to him; on page 246, Egan describes how he publicly attacks T.R. in an effort to save face, but retreats afterward to weep in private. Do you feel any sympathy for Taft? Why or why not?

11. Ten days after the fires die down, infuriated by Taft’s betrayal of his predecessor’s conservation efforts, Teddy Roosevelt takes to the bully pulpit once more to pioneer a “New Nationalism.” What does this term mean to him and to his supporters? Discuss how some of these principles may still be seen alive and well in today’s America and how others have not quite taken hold.

12. In the final chapter of the book, Egan describes the current landscape of what was once several national forests in Montana, Idaho, and Washington. He shares how the Forest Service still carries “the Pulaski” as their prized firefighting tool, and how the great “Milwaukee Road” is now gone, its tracks pulled up and sold for scrap. Towns like Avery, Taft, and Grand Forks are now gone or reduced to wilderness outposts. What effect does this chapter have on you, and what message do you think the author hoped you would come away with?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life
Kelsey Miller, 2016
Grand Central Publishing
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455532636

Summary
A hilarious and inspiring memoir about one young woman's journey to find a better path to both physical and mental health.

At twenty-nine, Kelsey Miller had done it all: crash diets, healthy diets, and nutritionist-prescribed "eating plans," which are diets that you pay more money for. She'd been fighting her un-thin body since early childhood, and after a lifetime of failure, finally hit bottom.

No diet could transform her body or her life. There was no shortcut to skinny salvation. She'd dug herself into this hole, and now it was time to climb out of it.

With the help of an Intuitive Eating coach and fitness professionals, she learned how to eat based on her body's instincts and exercise sustainably, without obsessing over calories burned and thighs gapped. But, with each thrilling step toward a healthy future, she had to contend with the painful truths of her past.

Big Girl chronicles Kelsey's journey into self-loathing and disordered eating—and out of it. This is a memoir for anyone who's dealt with a distorted body image, food issues, or a dysfunctional family. It's for the late-bloomers and the not-yet-bloomed.

It's a book for everyone who's tried and failed and felt like a big, fat loser. So, basically, everyone. (From the publiosher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1985
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.S., Boston University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York

Kelsey Miller graduated from Boston University with a BS in Film & Television. She began her career in the film production industry before transitioning to full-time writing. Soon after joining the staff of Refinery29, she created The Anti-Diet Project, one of the website's most popular franchises. She is currently a Senior Features Writer and lives in Brooklyn. (From the pubisher.)

Book Reviews
This chronicle of [Miller's] journey from childhood through hard-won revelations is hilarious and brutally honest, offering plenty of wisdom for anyone who's struggled with issues of her own.
People

Readers of all sizes, shapes and backgrounds can relate to Big Girl. It's a tour de force on growing up, learning how to be healthy in mind, body and spirit, and coming to terms with the fact that life is fast, but it is OK to stop for a moment to bring home, smell and eat the bacon."
New York Daily News

Miller has shed her self-destructive bingeing and dieting habits...and gained the ability to recognize and embrace who she is. Her honestly, hilariously told story will appeal to any readers who have ever felt dissatisfaction with their bodies and will move them to tears of sorrow, laughter, and joy.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) This is not a diet book, it's an antidiet book, as well as a memoir of one woman's lifelong struggle to lose weight and journey through mindful eating.... [C]ompelling and deeply felt.
Library Journal

Miller does take a look at some of the deeper reasons behind her compulsive eating, and it's in these passages that her vulnerability comes through and her story becomes truly compelling. Readers will cheer for Miller to succeed on her "anti-diet" diet of intuitive eating.
Kirkus Reviews

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The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock
Tanya Selvaratnam, 2014
Prometheus Books
370 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616148454

Summary
A candid assessment of the pros and cons of delayed motherhood.

Biology does not bend to feminist ideals and science does not work miracles. That is the message of this eye-opening discussion of the consequences of delayed motherhood. Part personal account, part manifesto, Selvaratnam recounts her emotional journey through multiple miscarriages after the age of 37. Her doctor told her she still "had time," but Selvaratnam found little reliable and often conflicting information about a mature woman's biological ability (or inability) to conceive.

Beyond her personal story, the author speaks to women in similar situations around the country, as well as fertility doctors, adoption counselors, reproductive health professionals, celebrities, feminists, journalists, and sociologists. Through in-depth reporting and her own experience, Selvaratnam urges more widespread education and open discussion about delayed motherhood in the hope that long-lasting solutions can take effect.

The result is a book full of valuable information that will enable women to make smarter choices about their reproductive futures and to strike a more realistic balance between science, society and personal goals. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Sri Lanka
• Raised—Long Beach, California, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., Harvard University
• Currently—Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York, New York

Born in Sri Lanka and raised in Long Beach, CA, Tanya Selvaratnam is a writer, producer, theater artist, and activist. As a producer, recent projects include Mickalene Thomas’s Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman (on HBO); the Rockefeller Foundation-funded MADE HERE; Catherine Gund’s What’s On Your Plate? (Discovery’s Planet Green), and Chiara Clemente’s Beginnings (Sundance Channel, Webby Award).

Since 2008, she has been the Communications and Special Projects Officer for the Rubell Family Collection. As an activist, she has worked with the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Third Wave Foundation, the NGO Forum on Women, and the World Health Organization. She received her graduate and undergraduate degrees in Chinese language and history from Harvard University. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.
Visit Tanya on Facebook.

Book Reviews
Producer and activist Selvaratnam, a self-defined casualty of the second-wave feminist idea that biology should not define destiny, responds with a provocative mix of solid information and palpable anger.… This wakeup call…is controversial, but few would argue with Selvaratnam’s suggestion that women get the facts before making family-planning decisions.
Publishers Weekly

Set aside the "mommy wars." This work is for the women who have been left out of the discussion until now.… Many will cheer on Selvaratnam’s ultimate points. Sure to invite discussion among feminists.
Library Journal

She’s intelligent (she’s a Harvard grad), passionate (she’s a feminist and activist), and artistic (she’s a documentary and theater producer). And she wants to share her hard-won wisdom so that young women in the future don’t make the same mistakes she did.
Booklist

In The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism and the Reality of the Biological Clock Tanya Selvaratnam presents her own story of “heartbreak and self-discovery” relative to her attempts to become a mother at the relatively advanced age of 40 after having experienced three miscarriages. She notes that women tend not to talk among themselves about failed pregnancies, and overall women are not “conditioned to feel the urgency of fertility.… The message repeated throughout this and later chapters is that women need to have much more information about their fertility and its limitations.… [Tanya] is to be applauded by her attempt to see the many dimensions of feminism and motherhood
New York Journal of Books

Discussion Questions
1. Given that infertility treatments are much cheaper outside of the United States, what do you think about the decision of many to pursue IVF and surrogacy in other countries?

2. What role should a doctor or gynecologist play with regard to informing patients about fertility over time? What questions should women ask their doctor?

3. What do you think about the conflict between parenthood and career becoming such a hot topic, as seen with the controversy around Anne-Marie Slaughter’s essay “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” and Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In?

4. Do you feel that feminism contributed to the current bind for women between succeeding at both developing careers and building families? Do you think that feminism can also provide a way forward, and if so, what does that way forward look like? How can we get there?

5. How can we normalize conversations among women about miscarriages, infertility, and reproductive challenges? Does the conversation begin on a macro level (media outlets, celebrities), a micro level (friends, peer groups), or a combination thereof?

6. How can the media have a discussion about the touchy topics of women who focus primarily on careers and those who prioritize family (and whether that dichotomy even exists) without alienating a large segment of its audience? Is there a middle ground of open, intelligent discourse about the subject, and if so, how should media figures work towards finding a balanced tone that supports women in general rather than creating subsets of women to face off against each other?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
Michael Lewis, 2010
W.W. Norton & Co.
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393353150

Summary
Truth really is stranger than fiction.

Who better than the author of the signature bestseller Liar's Poker to explain how the event we were told was impossible—the free fall of the American economy—finally occurred; how the things that we wanted, like ridiculously easy money and greatly expanded home ownership, were vehicles for that crash; and how shareholder demand for profit forced investment executives to eat the forbidden fruit of toxic derivatives.

Michael Lewis's splendid cast of characters includes villains, a few heroes, and a lot of people who look very, very foolish: high government officials, including the watchdogs; heads of major investment banks (some overlap here with previous category); perhaps even the face in your mirror.

In this trenchant, raucous, irresistible narrative, Lewis writes of the goats and of the few who saw what the emperor was wearing, and gives them, most memorably, what they deserve. He proves yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our times. (From the publisher.)

The 2015 film version of Lewis's book stars Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gossling, and Brad Pitt.

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
No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Mr. Lewis, the author of Liar's Poker, that now classic portrait of 1980s Wall Street. His entertaining new book does not attempt a macro view of the financial crisis, but instead proposes to open a small window on the calamities by recounting the stories of some savvy renegades who cashed in on their conviction that the system was rotten… Mr. Lewis does a nimble job of using his subjects' stories to explicate the greed, idiocies and hypocrisies of a system notably lacking in grown-up supervision, a system filled with firms that "disdained the need for government regulation in good times" but "insisted on being rescued by government in bad times.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Since his first book, the autobiographical Liar’s Poker, Lewis has tackled big, engaging stories…by finding and developing characters whose personal narratives reveal a larger truth. He's done it again. The story of the crash is, overwhelmingly, a tale of failure. But Lewis managed to find quirky investors who minted fortunes by making unpopular, calculated bets on a financial meltdown. Ditching the aloof irony of his earliest works, he constructs a story that is funny, incisive, profanity-laced and illuminating—full of difficult-to-like underdogs whose vindication and enrichment we end up cheering.
Daniel Gross - New York Times Book Review

If you read only one book about the causes of the recent financial crisis, let it be Michael Lewis's, The Big Short…What's so delightful about Lewis's writing is how deftly he explains and demystifies how things really work on Wall Street, even while creating a compelling narrative and introducing us to a cast of fascinating, all-too-human characters…The Big Short manages to give us the truest picture yet of what went wrong on Wall Street—and why. At times, it reads like a morality play, at other times like a modern-day farce. But as with any good play, its value lies in the way it reveals character and motive and explores the cultural context in which the plot unfolds.
Steven Pearlstein - Washington Post

[A] microcosmic lens on the personal histories of several Wall Street outsiders who were betting against the grain—to shed light on the macrocosmic tale of greed and fear.
Publishers Weekly

Lewis is a storyteller, and he weaves the personal stories of these renegades against the inner workings of Wall Street's mortgage-backed securities money machine.... Verdict: Readers from generalists through specialists will find this fast-paced, engaging account both illuminating and disturbing. Highly recommended. —Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA
Library Journal

[Combines] an incendiary, timely topic with the author's solid, insightful, and witty investigative reporting.... Lewis is a capable guide into the world of CDOs, subprime mortgages, head-in-the-sand investments, inflated egos—and the big short.
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 start a discussion for The Big Short.

1. After reading The Big Short, do you have a clearer understanding of the Wall Street collapse of 2008? Does Michael Lewis do a good job, or a poor one, of explaining the arcane financial devices and the ins and outs of the bond markets? Did you find it interesting? Or were you bored to tears?

2. Follow-up to Question 2: How much did you know about financial crisis before reading The Big Short? What have you learned since that confirmed, or deviated from, your prior understanding of the events of 2008?

3. Where, or on whom, does Michael Lewis place blame for the events leading up to the crash?

4. What role did the rating agencies play—Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch? Were they at fault, or was the system such that they were forced to become unwilling partners?

5. Talk about the mortgage initiators. What role did they play? Discuss the array of mortgages offered and how they destabilized the system.

6. Steve Eisman, Mike Burry, and the men who ran the "garage band hedge fund" made huge fortunes off the downfall of others. Do you see them as prophetic heroes, greedy opportunists...or something else? How does Lewis portray them?

7. Follow-up to Question 6: Why did a handful of outsiders foresee what would happen with the subprimes while neither the heads of the large financial firms nor government regulators saw what was coming? Do you think it was genuine ignorance (the derivatives were simply too obscure to understand) or willful ignorance (no one really wanted to turn off the money spigot)? What about the risk managers for the Wall Street firms—where were they in all of this?

8. Another way to approach this book is to think of it almost as a mystery: who know how much...and when did they know it?

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

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