Non-Fiction - Results from #450

Not My Father's Son: A Memoir
Alan Cumming, 2014
HarperCollins
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062225061

Summary
In his unique and engaging voice, the acclaimed actor of stage and screen shares the emotional story of his complicated relationship with his father and the deeply buried family secrets that shaped his life and career.

A beloved star of stage, television, and film—“one of the most fun people in show business” (Time magazine)—Alan Cumming is a successful artist whose diversity and fearlessness is unparalleled. His success masks a painful childhood growing up under the heavy rule of an emotionally and physically abusive father—a relationship that tormented him long into adulthood.

When television producers in the UK approached him to appear on a popular celebrity genealogy show in 2010, Alan enthusiastically agreed. He hoped the show would solve a family mystery involving his maternal grandfather, a celebrated WWII hero who disappeared in the Far East. But as the truth of his family ancestors revealed itself, Alan learned far more than he bargained for about himself, his past, and his own father.

With ribald humor, wit, and incredible insight, Alan seamlessly moves back and forth in time, integrating stories from his childhood in Scotland and his experiences today as a film, television, and theater star. At times suspenseful, deeply moving, and wickedly funny, Not My Father’s Son will make readers laugh even as it breaks their hearts. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January, 27 1965
• Where—Aberfeldy, Perthshire, Scotland, UK
• Education—Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama
• Awards—numerous for stage acting
• Currently—lives in Manhanttan

Alan Cumming is a Scottish-born American actor who has appeared in numerous films, television shows and plays.

His London stage appearances include Hamlet, the Maniac in Accidental Death of an Anarchist (for which he received an Olivier Award), the lead in Bent, and the National Theatre of Scotland's The Bacchae.

On Broadway he has appeared in The Threepenny Opera, as the master of ceremonies in Cabaret (for which he won a Tony Award), and Design for Living. His best-known film roles include his performances in GoldenEye, Spy Kids, and X2. Cumming also introduces Masterpiece Mystery! for PBS and appears on The Good Wife, for which he has been nominated for two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Satellite Award.

He has also written a novel, Tommy's Tale and a memoir, Not My Father's Child, hosted a cable talk show called Eavesdropping with Alan Cumming, and produced a line of perfumed products labelled "Cumming". He has contributed opinion pieces to many publications and performed a cabaret show, I Bought A Blue Car Today. In 2008, still retaining his British citizenship, Cumming became a naturalised U.S. citizen.

Early life
Cumming was born in Aberfeldy, Perthshire, Scotland, the son of Mary (nee Darling), an insurance company secretary, and Alex Cumming, a forester. He has stated that his father was physically and emotionally abusive, a topic he explores in his 2014 memoir, Not My Father's Son.

After his graduation from high school, he spent a year and a half as an editor and columnist for the pop and TV magazine TOPS before entering the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. On graduation he married fellow student Hilary Lyon; they divorced eight years later and had no children.

Personal life
Cumming lives in Manhattan with his husband, graphic artist Grant Shaffer, and their dogs, Honey and Leon.[18] The couple dated for two years before entering into a civil partnership at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, London in 2007; they remarried in New York in 2012, the fifth anniversary of their London union.

Once described as "a frolicky pansexual sex symbol for the new millennium," Cumming said he considers himself bisexual, "although the pendulum has obviously swung." Previous relationships include an eight-year marriage to actress Hilary Lyon, a two-year relationship with actress Saffron Burrows, and a six-year relationship with theater director Nick Philippou. After his civil partnership with Shaffer, when asked if he was monogamous, he stated "I don't believe that monogamy is feasible." In 2006, Cumming stated that he "would dearly like to adopt a child," but that his life was "too hectic" for children.

Cumming used to be a member of the Church of Scotland, until his mother received a letter from them saying they had "read something about me being an atheist and would I like to leave." He said he had attended out of tradition, but realised being a part of it was "only condoning and validating lots of things I disapprove of: oppression, guilt, shame, etc." Adapted from a much longer version on Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/15/2014.)

Book Reviews
Scottish actor Cumming struggles to reconcile with his troubled past in this moving, if oddly structured, memoir. Alternating between three time periods—"Then," "Now," and a span of several months in 2010—Cumming recounts his life...under the brutal reign of his abusive father.... [This is] a case where the journey is more important than the destination.
Publishers Weekly

[A]n insightful, relentless examination of Cumming's hardships, alongside keen observations about the continuing effect of abuse on his life. A moving read that fans of the man and of memoirs won't want to put down. —Ashleigh Williams, School Library Journal
Library Journal

Instead of writing a showbiz memoir with stories of his eclectic career, Cumming...anchors his book with his discovery of the truth about his grandfather's premature death (at age 35) and a recognition of the "dual family narrative" of shame and secrecy..... A raw, revealing memoir from a courageous actor and writer.
Kirkus Reviews

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Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
Lena Dunham, 2014
Random House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812994995

Summary
This hilarious, poignant, and extremely frank collection of personal essays confirms Lena Dunham—the acclaimed creator, producer, and star of HBO’s Girls—as one of the brightest and most original writers working today.

In Not That Kind of Girl, Dunham illuminates the experiences that are part of making one’s way in the world: falling in love, feeling alone, being ten pounds overweight despite eating only health food, having to prove yourself in a room full of men twice your age, finding true love, and most of all, having the guts to believe that your story is one that deserves to be told.

“Take My Virginity (No Really, Take It)” is the account of Dunham’s first time, and how her expectations of sex didn’t quite live up to the actual event (“No floodgate had been opened, no vault of true womanhood unlocked”); “Girls & Jerks” explores her former attraction to less-than-nice guys—guys who had perfected the “dynamic of disrespect” she found so intriguing; “Is This Even Real?” is a meditation on her lifelong obsession with death and dying—what she calls her “genetically predestined morbidity.” And in “I Didn’t F*** Them, but They Yelled at Me,” she imagines the tell-all she will write when she is eighty and past caring, able to reflect honestly on the sexism and condescension she has encountered in Hollywood, where women are “treated like the paper thingies that protect glasses in hotel bathrooms—necessary but infinitely disposable.”

Exuberant, moving, and keenly observed, Not That Kind of Girl is a series of dispatches from the frontlines of the struggle that is growing up. “I’m already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you,” Dunham writes. “But if I can take what I’ve learned and make one menial job easier for you, or prevent you from having the kind of sex where you feel you must keep your sneakers on in case you want to run away during the act, then every misstep of mine will have been worthwhile.”(From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 13, 1986
• Where—New York City (Brooklyn), New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College
• Awards—Golden Globe Awards (twice); Directors Guild Award
• Currently—New York City (Brooklyn), New York

Lena Dunham is an American actress, screenwriter, producer, and director. She wrote and directed the independent film Tiny Furniture (2010), and is the creator, writer and star of the HBO series Girls. She has received eight nominations for Emmy Awards as a writer, director, actress and producer and won two Golden Globe Awards for Girls. Dunham is also the first woman to win a Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Director in a Comedy Series.

Background
Dunham was born in New York City, New York. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter, and her mother, Laurie Simmons, is an artist and photographer, and a member of the Pictures group. Laurie is known for her use of dolls and doll-house furniture in her photographs of setup interior scenes. Dunham has described herself as feeling "very culturally Jewish, although that’s the biggest cliche for a Jewish woman to say”; her father is Protestant, and her mother is Jewish.

She has a younger sister, Grace, a 2014 graduate of Brown University, who appeared in Dunham's first film, Creative Nonfiction, and starred in her second film, Tiny Furniture.

Dunham was raised in Brooklyn and spent her summers in a house in Salisbury, Connecticut, though her parents later purchased a weekend family home in Cornwall, Connecticut.

Dunham attended Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, where she met Tiny Furniture actress and Girls co-star Jemima Kirke. She graduated in 2008 from Oberlin College, where she studied creative writing. During her college years, Dunham worked part-time at the West Village boutique Geminola.

Career
Dunham's 2010 feature film Tiny Furniture won Best Narrative Feature at South by Southwest Music and Media Conference, and subsequently screened at such festivals as Maryland Film Festival. Dunham herself plays the lead role of Aura. Her real life mother plays Aura's mother, while her real sister, Grace, plays Aura's on-screen sibling.

In early 2012, HBO gave the go-ahead to Dunham's television series Girls. The first season premiered in April, 2012, and has garnered Dunham four Emmy nominations for her roles in acting, writing, and directing the series and two Golden Globe wins for Best Comedy Series for Girls and for herself in Best Lead Actress in a Comedy or Musical Series. In February 2013, Dunham became the first woman to win a Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Director in a Comedy Series for her work on Girls.

Dunham appeared in a video advertisement promoting President Barack Obama's re-election, delivering a monologue, which, according to a blog quoted in The Atlantic, tried to "get the youth vote by comparing voting for the first time to having sex for the first time". Fox News reported "intense criticism" from multiple media sources, who labeled the advertisement as "tasteless and inappropriate," but added that "not everyone was so offended". In 2014, she was named the Recipient of Horizon Award 2014 by Point Foundation for her support to the gay community.

In 2014 Dunham published a collection of personal essays, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned." She dedicated the book to Nora Ephron, a friend.

Personal life
In 2012, Dunham began dating Jack Antonoff, lead guitarist of the band Fun. She has stated that she will not get married until same-sex marriage is legalized.

Dunham was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder as a child, and continues to take a low dose of an antidepressant to relieve her anxiety. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/4/2014.)

Book Reviews
[S]mart, funny…creator of the critically acclaimed HBO series Girls…Ms. Dunham brings a similar candor to the story of her own life, getting as naked in print as her alter ego Hannah often does in the flesh…while Hannah, an aspiring author, is constantly putting her foot in her mouth and prattling on about herself, the gifted Ms. Dunham not only writes with observant precision, but also brings a measure of perspective, nostalgia and an older person's sort of wisdom to her portrait of her (not all that much) younger self and her world…Ms. Dunham doesn't presume to be "the voice of my generation" or even "a voice of a generation," as Hannah does in the show. Instead, by simply telling her own story in all its specificity and sometimes embarrassing detail, she has written a book that's as acute and heartfelt as it is
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Not That Kind of Girl is familiar fare. Dunham chronicles her attempts to lose her virginity and lose weight. She tells gut-wrenching stories of sex. She gets a job, goes to camp, grapples with a medical diagnosis and experiments with early iterations of technology. When her sister is born, she wails “Intruder! Return Her!” As Nora Ephron said, “everything is copy,” and though such topics are well trodden, Dunham makes them shine.
Michelle Goldberg - New York Times Book Review

[W]itty and wise and rife with the kind of pacing and comedic flourishes that characterize early Woody Allen books.... Dunham is an extraordinary talent, and her vision...is stunningly original
Meghan Daum - New York Times Magazine

There’s a lot of power in retelling your mistakes so people can see what’s funny about them—and so that you are in control. Dunham knows about this power, and she has harnessed it.
Washington Post

A lovely, touching, surprisingly sentimental portrait of a woman who, despite repeatedly baring her body and soul to audiences, remains a bit of an enigma: a young woman who sets the agenda, defies classification and seems utterly at home in her own skin.
Chicago Tribune

Reading this book is a pleasure.... [These essays] exude brilliance and insight well beyond Dunham’s twenty-eight years.
Philadelphia Inquirer

Dunham has crafted warm, intelligent writing that is both deeply personal and engaging. . . . [Hers] is not only a voice who deserves to be heard but also one who will inspire other important voices to tell their stories too.
Roxane Gay - Time

Witty, illuminating, maddening, bracingly bleak . . . That great feminist icon Norman Mailer was very careful, through a lifetime’s work, not to unbury his ‘crystals,’ his prismatic lodes of psychic material: it’s the reason (he claimed) he never wrote an autobiography. Dunham’s crystals are on perpetual display, sending light shafts everywhere. . . . [She’s] a genuine artist, and a disturber of the order.
Atlantic

A lot of us fear we don’t measure up beautywise and that we endure too much crummy treatment from men. On these topics, Dunham is funny, wise, and, yes, brave.... Among Dunham’s gifts to womankind is her frontline example that some asshole may call you undesirable or worse, and it won’t kill you. Your version matters more.
Elle

(Starred review.) Touching, at times profound, and deeply funny . . . Dunham is expert at combining despair and humor.
Publishers Weekly

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Library Journal

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Kirkus Reviews

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Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
Barbara Demick, 2009
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385523912

Summary
A remarkable view into North Korea, as seen through the lives of six ordinary citizens

Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the unchallenged rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population.

Taking us into a landscape most of us have never before seen, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive totalitarian regime today—an Orwellian world that is by choice not connected to the Internet, in which radio and television dials are welded to the one government station, and where displays of affection are punished; a police state where informants are rewarded and where an offhand remark can send a person to the gulag for life.

Demick takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors. Through meticulous and sensitive reporting, we see her six subjects—average North Korean citizens—fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival. One by one, we experience the moments when they realize that their government has betrayed them.

Nothing to Envy is a groundbreaking addition to the literature of totalitarianism and an eye-opening look at a closed world that is of increasing global importance. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; Fellowship in Journalism,
Columbia University
• Awards—numerous journalism awards (see below)
• Currently—lives in Beijing, China

Barbara Demick is an American journalist. She is currently Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood (1996) and Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009).

Demick was correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer in Eastern Europe from 1993 to 1997. Along with photographer John Costello, she produced a series of articles that ran 1994-1996 following life on one Sarajevo street over the course of the war in Bosnia. The series won the George Polk Award for international reporting, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for international reporting and was a finalist for the Pulitzer in the features category. She was stationed in the Middle East for the newspaper between 1997 and 2001.

In 2001, Demick moved to the Los Angeles Times and became the newspaper's first bureau chief in Korea. She reported extensively on human rights in North Korea, interviewing large numbers of refugees in China and South Korea. She focused on economic and social changes inside North Korea and on the situation of North Korean women sold into marriages in China. She wrote an extensive series of articles about life inside the North Korean city of Chongjin.

In 2005, Demick was a co-winner of the American Academy of Diplomacy's Arthur Ross Award for Distinguished Reporting & Analysis on Foreign Affairs. In 2006, her reports about North Korea won the Overseas Press Club's Joe and Laurie Dine Award for Human Rights Reporting and the Asia Society's Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Asian Journalism. That same year, Demick was also named print journalist of the year by the Los Angeles Press Club.

Demick was a visiting professor at Princeton University in 2006-2007 teaching Coverage of Repressive Regimes through the Ferris Fellowship at the Council of the Humanities. She moved to Beijing for the Los Angeles Times in 2007 and became Beijing bureau chief in early 2009. Demick was one of the subjects of a 2005 documentary Press Pass to the World by McCourry Films. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Ms. Demick's book is a lovely work of narrative nonfiction, one that follows the lives of six ordinary North Koreans, including a female doctor, a pair of star-crossed lovers, a factory worker and an orphan. It's a book that offers extensive evidence of the author's deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.
Dwight Garner - New York Times

As a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, Demick discovered that the country isn't illuminated any further by traveling there. So she decided to penetrate North Korea's closed society by interviewing the people who had gotten out, the defectors, with splendid results.... Nothing to Envy conveys the emotional riptides and overall disintegration of stopped factories, unpaid salaries and piled-up corpses.
Stephen Kotkin - Washington Post

Excellent new book is one of only a few that have made full use of the testimony of North Korean refugees and defectors. A delightful, easy-to-read work of literary nonfiction, it humanizes a downtrodden, long-suffering people whose individual lives, hopes and dreams are so little known abroad that North Koreans are often compared to robots.... The tale of the star-crossed lovers, Jun-sang and Mi-ran, is so charming as to have inspired reports that Hollywood might be interested.
San Francisco Chronicle

There’s a simple way to determine how well a journalist has reported a story, internalized the details, seized control of the narrative and produced good work. When you read the result, you forget the journalist is there. Barbara Demick, the Los Angeles Times’ Beijing bureau chief, has aced that test in Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, a clear-eyed and deeply reported look at one of the world’s most dismal places.
Cleveland Plain Dealer

A fascinating and deeply personal look at the lives of six defectors from the repressive totalitarian regime of the Republic of North Korea, in which Demick, an L.A. Times staffer and former Seoul bureau chief, draws out details of daily life that would not otherwise be known to Western eyes because of the near-complete media censorship north of the arbitrary border drawn after Japan's surrender ending WWII. As she reveals, “ordinary” life in North Korea by the 1990s became a parade of horrors, where famine killed millions, manufacturing and trade virtually ceased, salaries went unpaid, medical care failed, and people became accustomed to stepping over dead bodies lying in the streets. Her terrifying depiction of North Korea from the night sky, where the entire area is blacked out from failure of the electrical grid, contrasts vividly with the propaganda on the ground below urging the country's worker-citizens to believe that they are the envy of the world. Thorough interviews recall the tremendous difficulty of daily life under the regime, as these six characters reveal the emotional and cultural turmoil that finally caused each to make the dangerous choice to leave. As Demick weaves their stories together with the hidden history of the country's descent into chaos, she skillfully re-creates these captivating and moving personal journeys.
Publishers Weekly

For most Americans, North Korea, one of the last Communist dictatorships, is a totalitarian menace but socially a great blank space. Demick, a Los Angeles Times reporter based first in Seoul and now in Beijing, fills this void with well-rounded life stories based on seven years of interviews with individuals who escaped to South Korea or China. Mi-ran, for instance, as the daughter of a political outcast, could meet with her young man only after dark, when they would take advantage of the complete absence of electric lights to walk for miles and miles unobserved—without, however, going even so far as to hold hands. She could not let him know of her plans to leave for fear that the authorities would hold him responsible or that he would need to inform on her to protect his family. This and other life stories form a welcome portrait of "ordinary" lives in an extraordinary society. VERDICT Recommended for readers interested in North Korea who want to supplement their political studies or simply enjoy the personal approach. —Charles W. Hayford, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL
Library Journal

Strongly written and gracefully structured, Demick’s potent blend of personal narratives and piercing journalism vividly and evocatively portrays courageous individuals and a tyrannized state within a saga of unfathomable suffering punctuated by faint glimmers of hope. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

A detailed, grim portrait of daily life under the repressive North Korean dictatorship, where schoolchildren are taught to sing anthems in praise of their leader asserting that they "have nothing to envy in this world." Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent Demick bases her account on seven years of interviews with North Koreans who escaped to South Korea. She focuses on individuals whose stories began in the 1990s and continue to the present, including Mi-ran, a lower-class girl who became a teacher; Jun-sang, a university student who eventually got a glimpse of outside life through books, radio and television; Mrs. Song, a middle-aged true believer, and her defiant daughter Oak-hee; Dr. Kim, an idealistic female physician; and Kim Hyuck, an orphan boy surviving alone on the streets. Along with their personal stories, Demick includes background information on the Korean War and the dictatorships of Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il. The author also examines the great famine that killed millions of North Koreans in the 1990s. She paints a stark, vivid picture of reality in an industrial city with no electricity and almost no industry, where workers no longer get paid, men are conscripted into military service for ten years, grass, bark and corn husks are considered food, and death by starvation is all too common. In one unforgettable scene, Dr. Kim, having crossed a river into China, sees that dogs in China eat better than human beings in North Korea. In addition to the physical hardships is the psychological stress of living under a rigid totalitarian government where a chance wrong word overheard and reported by a neighbor can mean imprisonment or death. Demick shows the state of mind of each of her subjects, what their daily life was like, how they coped and eventually how each escaped. She also reveals her subjects struggling, sometimes unsuccessfully, to adapt to life in South Korea. Meticulous reporting reveals life in a country that tries hard to keep its citizens walled in and the rest of the world out.
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 Nothing to Envy:

1. Demick follows the lives of six North Koreans. Whose story do you find most compelling, disturbing, horrific—or inspiring?

2. Talk about what happens to those who manage to defect. How do they manage life outside North Korea? What are the difficulties— both practical and psychological—they confront in their new lives?

3. Demick describes North Korea, not as an undeveloped country, but as "a country that has fallen out of the developed world." What does she mean? What would it be like for any of us to live under the conditions in North Korea? What would be most difficult for you? What shocked or angered you most about the book's descriptions of life in the DPRK?

4. Discuss the history of North Korea and its descent into deprivation. How did a formerly wealthy, industrialized country—which attracted Chinese from across the border—deteriorate into its present state?

5. What does it take to survive in North Korea? How do some get around the restrictive laws?

6. Do Koreans love their "dear leader" as much as they claim?

7. How does one explain the disparity between North and South Korea?

8. Talk about your experience reading this book? Was it hard to get through...or did you find yourself unable to put the book down? Were you depressed, angered, outraged, thankful for your own life...or all of the above?

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

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Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror
Nonie Darwish, 2006
Penguin Group USA
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781595230447

Summary
When Nonie Darwish was a girl of eight, her father died while leading covert attacks on Israel. A high-ranking Egyptian military officer stationed with his family in Gaza, he was considered a "shahid," a martyr for jihad.

Yet at an early age, Darwish developed a skeptical eye about her own Muslim culture and upbringing. Why the love of violence and hatred of Jews and Christians? Why the tolerance of glaring social injustices? Why blame America and Israel for everything?

Today Darwish thrives as an American citizen, a Christian, a conservative Republican, and an advocate for Israel. To many, she is now an infidel. But she is risking her comfort and her safety to reveal the many politically incorrect truths about Muslim culture that she knows firsthand. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1949
• Where—Cairo, Egypt
• Education—B. A., American University, Cairo
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California, USA

Nonie Darwish is an Egyptian-American human rights activist, the founder of Arabs For Israel, and Director of Former Muslims United. She is the author of two books: Now They Call Me Infidel; Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror and Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law. Darwish's speech topics cover human rights, with emphasis on women's rights and minority rights in the Middle East.

Early years
Born in Egypt, in 1949, Darwish's family moved to Gaza in the 1950s when her father, Colonel Mustafa Hafez, was sent by Egypt's then-president Nasser to serve as commander of the Egyptian Army Intelligence in Gaza, which was under supervision of Egypt. In July 1956 when Nonie was eight years old, her father was killed by a mail bomb in an operation by the Israeli Defense Forces. The assassination was a response to Fedayeen's attacks, making Darwish's father a shahid.

During his speech announcing the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Nasser vowed that all of Egypt would take revenge for Hafez's death. Darwish claims that Nasser asked her and her siblings, "Which one of you will avenge your father's death by killing Jews?"

Darwish explains:

I always blamed Israel for my father's death, because that's what I was taught. I never looked at why Israel killed my father. They killed my father because the fedayeen were killing Israelis. They killed my father because when I was growing up, we had to recite poetry pledging jihad against Israel. We would have tears in our eyes, pledging that we wanted to die. I speak to people who think there was no terrorism against Israel before the '67 war. How can they deny it? My father died in it.

After the death of her father, her family moved back to Cairo, where she attended Catholic high school and then the American University in Cairo, earning a BA in Sociology/Anthropology. She then worked as an editor and translator for the Middle East News Agency, until emigrating to the United States in 1978 with her husband, ultimately receiving United States citizenship.

After arriving in the US, she became a Christian and began attending a non-denominational evangelical church. About a year after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Darwish began writing columns critical of Islamic extremism and the silence of moderate Muslims.

Asked what can be done to encourage more moderate Muslims to speak out, Darwish answers:

After 9/11 very few Americans of Arab and Muslim origin spoke out... Muslim groups in the U.S. try to silence us and intimidate American campuses who invite us to speak. I often tell Muslim students that Arab Americans who are speaking out against terrorism are not the problem, it’s the terrorists who are giving Islam a bad name. And what the West must do is ask the politically incorrect questions and we Americans of Arab and Muslim origin owe them honest answers.

Darwish is the current Director of Former Muslims United. In a letter sent from that organization to Muslim leaders, Darwish said:

We send this letter to you to be received by September 25, 2009. On that date 220 years ago in 1789, the U.S. Congress passed the Bill of Rights. This is a fitting date to put our pledge to the world...As founders of Former Muslims United, we now pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to achieve for former Muslims their unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We claim these rights as the foundation for our right to freedom from Shariah. We urge you to join us.

She often says, "Just because I am pro-Israel does not mean I am anti-Arab, its just that my culture is in desperate need for reformation which must come from within”.

She has spoken on numerous college campuses including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Tufts, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Oxford, Cornell, UCLA, NYU, Virginia Tech, UC Berkeley and several others. She has also spoken in the United States Congress, the House of Lords and the European Parliament.

Views on Islam
Darwish believes Islam is an authoritarian ideology that is attempting to impose on the world the norms of seventh-century culture of the Arabian Peninsula. She writes that Islam is a "sinister force" that must be resisted and contained. She remarks that it is hard to "comprehend that an entire religion and its culture believes God orders the killing of unbelievers." She claims that Islam and Sharia of forming a retrograde ideology that adds greatly to the world's stock of misery.

She claims the Qur'an is a text that is "violent, incendiary, and disrespectful" and says that barbarities such as brutalization of women, the persecution of homosexuals, honor killings, the beheading of apostates and the stoning of adulterers come directly out of the Qur'an.

Darwish is also a strong supporter of Israel, and has founded the group "Arabs for Israel", composed of ethnic Arabs and Muslims who respect and support the State of Israel, welcome a peaceful and diverse Middle East, reject suicide terrorism as a form of Jihad, and promote constructive self-criticism and reform in the Arab/Muslim world. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
(There are few mainstream press reviews online for this work. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

Now They Call Me Infidel is a book of great humanity, intelligence, and courage. If ever there is to be peace between Arabs and Israelis, it will have to be along the lines depicted by Nonie Darwish.
David Pryce-Jones - National Review

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 Now They Call Me Infidel:

1. How was Nonie's childhood and adolescence different from that of other Muslim children? How did her privileged upbringing, as the daughter of a "shahid," shape her future views on Islamic culture and faith?

2. In what way did her father's death cause Nonie to question Islamic society, rather than accept the way things were? You would have expected her to insist on revenge for his death; why didn't she?

3. What was Nonie taught about Israel and the Jews when growing up?

4. Discuss the build-up of Jihad through the 1960s and 70s? To what does Darwish attribute the growth and spread of Islamic radicalism.

5. How was Egypt different from other countries in the Middle East? Why was it different?

6. Discuss Darwish's views of Islam and the Qur'an. How does Darwish describe the practices of Islam, especially Sharia? What is her response to young American-born Muslim women who whom she sees wearing the hajib and calling for Sharia?

7. Why, according to Darwish, do many of the Muslim-American families not attend their local mosques?

8. Why does Darwish see the moderate image of Islam as a tolerant faith—a position proffered by academic institutions like Columbia University—as misguided, even dangerous? Do you agree with her? Does the Western world need a more realistic view of Islam? Should it take a harsher stance against Islam's more radical elements, both within the US and outside its borders?

9. When the planes flew into the World Trade Center on 9/11, Darwish called her family and friends back in Egypt. Talk about their response to the attacks.

10. What roll does the dependence on petroleum play, according to Darwish, in America's ostrich-like attitude toward Saudi Arabia? Do you agree with her?

11. Have your views of Islam been altered by reading Now They Call Me Infidel? What have you learned? What in the book struck or even suprised you most? Do you agree with Darwish in her assessment of the dangers of Jihad? Or does she overstate her case?

12. Have you read other works about Islam that seem to support or perhaps contradict Darwish's book?

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

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Nuture Shock: New Thinking About Children
Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman, 2009
Twelve Books
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446504133

Summary
In a world of modern, involved, caring parents, why are so many kids aggressive and cruel? Where is intelligence hidden in the brain, and why does that matter? Why do cross-racial friendships decrease in schools that are more integrated? If 98% of kids think lying is morally wrong, then why do 98% of kids lie? What's the single most important thing that helps infants learn language?

NurtureShock is a groundbreaking collaboration between award-winning science journalists Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. They argue that when it comes to children, we've mistaken good intentions for good ideas. With impeccable storytelling and razor-sharp analysis, they demonstrate that many of modern society's strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring—because key twists in the science have been overlooked.

Nothing like a parenting manual, the authors' work is an insightful exploration of themes and issues that transcend children's (and adults) lives. (From the publisher.)

Author Bios
• Name—Po Bronson
• Birth—March 14, 1964
• Where—Seattle, Washington, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., San Francisco
State University
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California

Po Bronson is the rare writer that makes no claims to having an extraordinary or controversial history. On his web site, he states, "I'm a regular guy. I don't have much of a particularly unusual story." While some may assume such a description might not be the makings of a person with any stories worth telling, it actually provides the perfect background for a writer such as Bronson. He has made it his mission to relate the stories of his fellow everyday people, and with books such as What Should I Do With My Life? and Why Do I Love These People?, he has proved that ordinary people can lead extraordinary lives.

A prolific writer with a talent well-suited for a variety of genres, Bronson started out dabbling in screenplays, op-eds, TV and radio scripts, performance monologues, and literary reviews, and his first two books were satirical novels. Bombardiers (1995) was a sort of Catch 22 set in the bond-trading business; The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest: A Silicon Valley Novel, Vol. 4 (1997) a tale about the West Coast tech boom of the late 1990's. With his third book, The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other Tales of Silicon Valley, he turned his focus away from fiction and toward the true stories of the tech-heads he encountered while working as a writer in Silicon Valley. Hailed by the Village Voice Literary Supplement upon its publication as "the most complete and empathetic portrait of the Valley so far," the breakout bestseller established Bronson as the first author to truly capture the spirit of the high-tech heyday

In writing What Should I Do With My Life? (2003), Bronson posed that very question to a variety of regular folks all around the globe. The result: a rich and fascinating compendium of inspirational, witty, and insightful personal stories about finding one's direction, vocational and otherwise. The book was a tremendous success, and Bronson had clearly found his niche. Why Do I Love These People? followed in late 2005. This time around, Bronson questioned a multitude of people about illness, resolving familial conflicts, infidelity, prejudice, money problems, abuse, death, and other provocative issues, once again illustrating that one need not be a celebrity to lead a life worth reading about. Among others, Bronson encounters a Southern Baptist in the Ozarks who tracks down the teenage son he had abandoned at birth, a woman who fought for her life and the life of her children while trapped underwater in a Texas river, and a Turkish Muslim who wed a U.S. naval officer—a union resulting in death threats from her own father.

Bronson characterizes his recent books as "social documentaries," but he doesn't rule out returning to the other genres he's loved. He does, however, credit his recent work with one important feature: "I used to write novels, and maybe I will again one day," he told BN.com in an audio interview, "but I have found that writing these social documentaries is good for me as a person." (From Barnes & Noble.)

___________________

• Name—Ashley Merryman
• Education—B.F.A., University of Southern California; J.D., Georgetown University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California

Ashley Merryman is a writer and attorney living in Los Angeles. She previously served in the Clinton Administration in various positions, including as a speechwriter / researcher to then Vice-President Al Gore.

Her play, Metanoia, has had staged readings in Los Angeles and Chicago, while her other writings have appeared in the Washington Post and the National Catholic Reporter. She has a JD from Georgetown, a BFA from the University of Southern California, and a Certificate in Irish Studies from Queen’s University, Northern Ireland. In addition to NurtureShock, Ashley has been working with Bronson Po on pieces for Time magazine and the Guardian. (From the author's blog.)

Book Reviews
The authors throw open the doors on this research to create a book that is not only groundbreaking but compelling as well. Even if you don't have children, or your kids are grown, you should find the revelations about how the brain works and the rigors and frustrations of the scientific process captivating.... We see [Bronson and Merryman] doggedly digging for answers to confounding questions.... Bronson, with his gentle, conversational style, lays out every conundrum clearly, and shows all the steps the researchers took to ensure accurate results, including tweaking their testing methods when results were inconclusive or seemed flawed. In a sense, it's "Science for Dummies" —explaining cutting-edge research to a lay readership.... Riveting.
San Francisco Chronicle

Engaging.... It's not didactic—more of a revelatory journey.... Bronson relays some startling scientific findings.... Nobody's ever done this before in a systematic way.... Using the simple technique of speaking to researchers and observing them at work, Bronson and Merryman avoid the smugness common to the parenting oeuvre, which is often rather self-satisfied and/or guilt-inducing. This book's great value is to show that much of what we take to be the norms of parenting—i.e. what's good for children—is actually non-scientific and based on our own adult social anxieties.... This is a funny, clever, sensible book. Every parent should read it.
Financial Times

The central premise of this book by Bronson (What Should I Do with My Life?) and Merryman, a Washington Post journalist, is that many of modern society's most popular strategies for raising children are in fact backfiring because key points in the science of child development and behavior have been overlooked. Two errant assumptions are responsible for current distorted child-rearing habits, dysfunctional school programs and wrongheaded social policies: first, things work in children the same way they work in adults and, second, positive traits necessarily oppose and ward off negative behavior. These myths, and others, are addressed in 10 provocative chapters that cover such issues as the inverse power of praise (effort counts more than results); why insufficient sleep adversely affects kids' capacity to learn; why white parents don't talk about race; why kids lie; that evaluation methods for “giftedness” and accompanying programs don't work; why siblings really fight (to get closer). Grownups who trust in “old-fashioned” common-sense child-rearing—the definitely un-PC variety, with no negotiation or parent-child equality—will have less patience for this book than those who fear they lack innate parenting instincts. The chatty reportage and plentiful anecdotes belie the thorough research backing up numerous cited case studies, experts' findings and examination of successful progressive programs at work in schools.
Publishers Weekly

Why are kids today so fat? Too much TV and Internet surfing, right? Nope. What’s better for kids—watching Power Rangers or Clifford the Big Red Dog? (It’s not what you think.) Prepare to be slack-jawed as Bronson (What Should I Do With My Life?) and Merryman excavate astonishing research that reveals why our parenting strategies have backfired: why smart kids are underperforming, why Baby Einstein watchers speak fewer words than their peers, and why kindergarteners in the gifted program are no smarter than others. Chapters address sibling relations, self-control, sleep effects, and other relevant topics. The book presents a panoramic view of the latest research and is further distinguished by pragmatic prose that avoids alarmism and sanctimony. Verdict: This tour de force is one of the best parenting psychology books in years and will likely be seismic in influence. —Julianne J. Smith, Ypsilanti Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal

A provocative collection of essays popularizing recent research that challenges conventional wisdom about raising children. An award-winning article, "How Not to Talk to Your Kids," which advised parents that telling children they are smart is counterproductive, prompted journalists Bronson (Why Do I Love These People?: Honest and Amazing Stories of Real Families, 2005, etc.) and Merryman to dig further into the science of child development. Here they ably explore a range of subjects of interest to parents: adolescents' sleep needs and the effects of sleep deprivation, children's attitudes toward skin color and race, why children lie, the dangers of using a single intelligence test at an early age to determine giftedness, how interactions with other children affect relationships with siblings, the positive effects of marital conflict, how self-control can be taught, the effects of different types of TV programs on children's behavior and the development of language in young children. Their findings are often surprising. For example, in schools with greater racial diversity, the odds that a child will have a friend of a different race decrease; listening to "baby DVDs" does not increase an infant's rate of word acquisition; children with inconsistent and permissive fathers are nearly as aggressive in school as children of distant and disengaged fathers. Bronson and Merryman call attention to what they see as two basic errors in thinking about children. The first is the fallacy of similar effect—the assumption that what is true for adults is also true for children. The second—the fallacy of the good/bad dichotomy—is the assumption that a trait or factor is either good or bad, when in factit may be both (e.g., skill at lying may be a sign of intelligence, and empathy may become a tool of aggression.) The authors also provide helpful notes for each chapter and an extensive bibliography. A skilled, accessible presentation of scientific research in layman's language.
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 NutureShock:

1. What is the overall premise of Bronson and Merryman's book? What do you think sets NurtureShock apart from other parenting advice books on the market?

2. In his introduction, how does Bronson compare the 1950's paint-by-number hobby with parenting-by-the-book?

3. How does Bronson define the innate maternal instinct? Does he suggest instinct is a dependable guide for child rearing, or not?

4. Given your discussion of Question #3, does Bronson contradict himself at the end of his introduction when he says that, given all the scientific findings, "the new thinking about children felt self-evident and logical, even obvious.... It felt entirely natural, a restoration of common sense"?

5. Chapter 1 discusses the value and consequences of praising your child. How do Bronson and Merryman suggest praising can backfire?

6. Chapter 2 talks about the prevelance of sleep deprivation in the current generation of children and adolescents. What do the authors suggest are the consequences of lack of sleep?

7. Chapter 3 offers some startling insights into racial issues regarding children. What are the authors' findings about how to talk about race with children...and about diversity in our schools?

8. Chapter 4 addresses truth and lying. What does the research indicate about encouraging children to be truthful?

9. Chapter 5 undermines the validity of testing results for giftedness and intelligence. What surprised you the most about this chapter?

10. Chapter 6 challenges the ideas that siblings provide one another a path to healthy socialization. What does scientific evidence indicate about sibling rivalry and only children?

11. Chapter 7 focuses on teen rebellion. How do the authors view teenage arguing?

12. Chapter 8 talks about teaching children self-control. What do studies suggest about this area?

13. Chapter 9 is centered on antisocial behavior? What was surprising—or not—in their findings. Who, does it turn out, does the bullying, and who does not? What happens when parents try to intervene and teach their children not to bully? What are the options for children—to have friends or to be picked on? Is there another option?

14. Chapter 10 revolved around language acquisition. What points do the authors make about jump-starting your child to speak early?

15. Which findings in the book most surprised you? Which seemed most counter-intuitive or challenged the ways in which you have always thought about child-rearing?

16. Were there findings in the book that confirmed some of you prior understandings about children?

17. Some criticism of this book has centered on the fact that it points out problems but offers little guidance? Do you agree...and if so, in which areas would you have appreciated more advice. If you disagree with that statement...why?

18. Given the plethora of child-rearing advice books, should this particular book be taken seriously by parents and educators? Why or why not?

19. If you do consider NurtureShock a serious book, what would need to change in your approach to child-rearing and/or education? How can you best maximize attempts to achieve effective learning, better socialization, and more confident children?

20. On the other hand, what do you feel you are doing correctly?

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

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The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan, 2006
Penguin Group USA
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143038580

In Brief
A New York Times bestseller that has changed the way readers view the ecology of eating, this revolutionary book by award winner Michael Pollan asks the seemingly simple question: What should we have for dinner?

Tracing from source to table each of the food chains that sustain us — whether industrial or organic, alternative or processed — he develops a portrait of the American way of eating. The result is a sweeping, surprising exploration of the hungers that have shaped our evolution, and of the profound implications our food choices have for the health of our species and the future of our planet. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 6, 1955
• Where—Raised in Long Island, New York, USA
• Education—N/A
• Awards—California Book Award; James Beard Award, 2000
and 2006; Reuters-IUCN Global Award-Environmental
Journalism.
• Currently—lives in Berkeley, California

Few writers have done more to revitalize our national conversation about food and eating than Michael Pollan, an award-winning journalist and bestselling author whose witty, offbeat nonfiction shines an illuminating spotlight on various aspects of agriculture, the food chain, and man's place in the natural world

Pollan's first book, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education (1991), was selected by the American Horticultural Society as one of the 75 best books ever written about gardening. But it was Botany of Desire, published a full decade later, that put him on the map. A fascinating look at the interconnected evolution of plants and people, Botany... was one of the surprise bestsellers of 2001. Five years later, Pollan produced The Omnivore's Dilemma, a delightful, compulsively readable "ecology of eating" that was named one the ten best books of the year by the New York Times and Washington Post. And in 2008, came In Defense of Food.

A professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, Pollan is a former executive editor for Harper's and a contributing writer for the New York Times, where he continues to examine the fascinating intersections between science and culture. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Every time you go into a grocery store you are voting with your dollars, and what goes into your cart has real repercussions on the future of the earth. But although we have choices, few of us are aware of exactly what they are. Michael Pollan's beautifully written book could change that. He tears down the walls that separate us from what we eat, and forces us to be more responsible eaters. Reading this book is a wonderful, life-changing experience.
Ruth Reichl - Gourmet Magazine

Thoughtful, engrossing ... You're not likely to get a better explanation of exactly where your food comes from.
New York Times

His book is an eater's manifesto, and he touches on a vast array of subjects, from food fads and taboos to our avoidance of not only our food's animality, but also our own. Along the way, he is alert to his own emotions and thoughts, to see how they affect what he does and what he eats, to learn more and to explain what he knows. His approach is steeped in honesty and self-awareness. His cause is just, his thinking is clear, and his writing is compelling.
Bunny Crumpacker - Washington Post

Michael Pollan has perfected a tone—one of gleeful irony and barely suppressed outrage—and a way of inserting himself into a narrative so that a subject comes alive through what he's feeling and thinking. He is a master at drawing back to reveal the greater issues.
Los Angeles Times

Pollan examines what he calls "our national eating disorder" (the Atkins craze, the precipitous rise in obesity) in this remarkably clearheaded book. It's a fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. You'll certainly never look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again. Pollan approaches his mission not as an activist but as a naturalist: "The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world." All food, he points out, originates with plants, animals and fungi. "[E]ven the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of... well, precisely what I don't know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living creature, i.e., a species. We haven't yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly." Pollan's narrative strategy is simple: he traces four meals back to their ur-species. He starts with a McDonald's lunch, which he and his family gobble up in their car. Surprise: the origin of this meal is a cornfield in Iowa. Corn feeds the steer that turns into the burgers, becomes the oil that cooks the fries and the syrup that sweetens the shakes and the sodas, and makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients (yikes) in the Chicken McNuggets. Indeed, one of the many eye-openers in the book is the prevalence of corn in the American diet; of the 45,000 items in a supermarket, more than a quarter contain corn. Pollan meditates on the freakishly protean nature of the corn plant and looks at how the food industry has exploited it, to the detriment of everyone from farmers to fat-and-getting-fatter Americans. Besides Stephen King, few other writers have made a corn field seem so sinister. Later, Pollan prepares a dinner with items from Whole Foods, investigating the flaws in the world of "big organic"; cooks a meal with ingredients from a small, utopian Virginia farm; and assembles a feast from things he's foraged and hunted. This may sound earnest, but Pollan isn't preachy: he's too thoughtful a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take over. He's also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a pasture from a cow's-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into the making of his meals. I'm not convinced I'd want to go hunting with Pollan, but I'm sure I'd enjoy having dinner with him. Just as long as we could eat at a table, not in a Toyota.
Publishers Weekly

Pollan defines the Omnivore's Dilemma as the confusing maze of choices facing Americans trying to eat healthfully in a society that he calls "notably unhealthy." He seeks answers to this dilemma by taking readers through the industrial, organic, and hunter-gatherer stages of the food chain. Focusing on corn as the keystone plant in the industrial stage, Pollan describes its role in feeding cattle and in food processing as well as its ultimate destination in the products we consume at fast-food restaurants. The organic, or pastoral, stage offers a pure and chemical-free eating environment for animals and humans. In the hunter-gatherer stage, omnivores hunt animals and gather the plant foods that comprise all or part of their diets. Pollan explains how a framework of environmental, biological, and cultural factors determines what and how we eat. Although a bit long and sometimes redundant, this folksy narrative provides a wealth of information about agriculture, the natural world, and human desires. Recommended for all omnivores. —Irwin Weintraub, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., New York
Library Journal

The dilemma—what to have for dinner when you are a creature with an open-ended appetite—leads Pollan (The Botany of Desire, 2001, etc.) to a fascinating examination of the myriad connections along the principal food chains that lead from earth to dinner table. The author identifies three: the one controlled by agribusiness; the pastoral, organic industry that has sprung up as an alternative to it; and the very short food chain Pollan calls "neo-Paleolithic," in which he assumes the role of modern-day hunter-gatherer. He demonstrates the dependence of the agribusiness system on a single grain, corn, as it passes from farm to feedlot and processing plant. The meal that concludes this section is takeout from McDonald's and includes among other foods a serving of Chicken McNuggets. Of the 38 ingredients that make up McNuggets, 13, he notes, are derived from corn. This fact bolsters an earlier, startling statistic: Each of us is personally responsible for consuming a ton of corn each year. Pollan's exploration of the pastoral food chain takes two roads. Investigating "industrial organic," he assembles a meal composed entirely of ingredients from a Whole Foods supermarket. But he also visits a single, relatively small farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, where grass, not corn, is the basis of production, and cattle, chickens and pigs are raised through management of the natural ecosystem. Pollan joins in the farm work and is clearly impressed by what he learns, observes and eats here. In the final section, he learns how to shoot a wild pig and how to scavenge for forest mushrooms. The author's extraordinarily labor-intensive final meal provides a perfect contrast to the fast-food takeout of Part I. Pollan combines ecology, biology, history and anthropology with personal experience to present fascinating multiple perspectives. Revelations about how the way we eat affects the world we live in, presented with wit and elegance.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Michael Pollan approaches eating as an activity filled with ethical issues. Do you agree that the act of eating is as morally weighty as he says it is? What questions concern you most about the way you eat or the way your food is created?

2. Some readers might argue that Pollan’s ethics do not go far enough, perhaps because he does not urge us all to become vegetarians or possibly because of the zeal with which he pursues the feral pig that he kills toward the end of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Did you find yourself quarreling with any of Pollan’s ethical positions, and why?

3. Pollan argues that capitalism is a poor economic model to apply to the problems of food production and consumption. Do you agree or disagree, and why?

4. Pollan also shows a number of instances in which government policies have apparently worsened the crisis in our food culture. What do you think should be the proper role of government in deciding how we grow, process, and eat our food?

5. How has Michael Pollan changed the way you think about food?

6. At the end of In Defense of Food, Pollan offers a series of recommendations for improved eating. Which, if any, do you intend to adopt in your own life?

7. Which of Pollan’s recommendations would you be least likely to accept, and why?

8. Do you think that the way Americans eat reveals anything about our national character and broader shared values? How is Pollan’s writing a statement not only about American eating, but about American culture and life?

9. In both The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, Pollan quotes the words of Wendell Berry: “Eating is an agricultural act.” What does Berry mean by this, and why is his message so important to Pollan’s writing?

10. In each part of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan has a particular friend to help him understand the food chain he is investigating: George Naylor in Iowa, Joel Salatin at Polyface, and Angelo Garro in northern California. Which of these men would you most like to know personally, and why?

11. What, in the course of his writing, does Michael Pollan reveal about his own personality? What do you like about him? What, if anything, rubs you the wrong way?

12. If Michael Pollan were coming to your place for dinner, what would you serve him and why? [Or would you finally come to your senses...and cancel? —ed., LitLovers]
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family
Lisa See, 1995
Knopf Doubleday
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679768524

Summary
When she was a girl, Lisa See spent summers in the cool, dark recesses of her family's antiques store in Los Angeles Chinatown. There, her grandmother and great-aunt told her intriguing, colorful stories about their family's past stories of missionaries, concubines, tong wars, glamorous nightclubs, and the determined struggle to triumph over racist laws and discrimination.

They spoke of how Lisa's great-great-grandfather emigrated from his Chinese village to the United States to work on the building of the transcontinental railroad as an herbalist; how his son followed him, married a Caucasian woman, and despite great odds, went on to become one of the most prominent Chinese on "Gold Mountain" (the Chinese name for the United States).

As an adult, See spent five years collecting the details of her family's remarkable history. She interviewed nearly one hundred relatives—both Chinese and Caucasian, rich and poor—and pored over documents at the National Archives and several historical societies, and searched in countless attics, basements, and closets for the intimate nuances of her ancestors' lives.

The result is a vivid, sweeping family portrait in the tradition of Alex Haley's Roots that is at once particular and universal, telling the story not only of one family, but of the Chinese people in America itself, a country that both welcomes and reviles immigrants like no other culture in the world.

On Gold Mountain was a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book. It was the inspiration for an exhibition at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in 2000. Lisa also wrote a libretto based on the book for a 2000 production by the Los Angeles Opera. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 18, 1955
• Where—Paris, France
• Education—B.A., Loyola Marymount University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California

Lisa See is an American writer and novelist. Her Chinese-American family (See has one Chinese great-grandparent) has had a great impact on her life and work. Her books include On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1995) and the novels Flower Net (1997), The Interior (1999), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), Shanghai Girls (2009), which made it to the 2010 New York Times bestseller list, and China Dolls (2014).

Flower Net, The Interior, and Dragon Bones make up the Red Princess mystery series. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love focus on the lives of Chinese women in the 19th and 17th centuries respectively. Shanghai Girls chronicles the lives of two sisters who come to Los Angeles in arranged marriages and face, among other things, the pressures put on Chinese-Americans during the anti-Communist mania of the 1950s. See published a sequel titled Dreams of Joy.

Writing under the pen name Monica Highland, See, her mother Carolyn See, and John Espey, published three novels: Lotus Land (1983), 110 Shanghai Road (1986), and Greetings from Southern California (1988).

Biography
Lisa See was born in Paris but has spent many years in Los Angeles, especially Los Angeles Chinatown. Her mother, Carolyn See, is also a writer and novelist. Her autobiography provides insight into her daughter's life. Lisa See graduated with a B.A. from Loyola Marymount University in 1979.

See was West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly (1983–1996); has written articles for Vogue, Self, and More; has written the libretto for the opera based on On Gold Mountain, and has helped develop the Family Discovery Gallery for the Autry Museum, which depicts 1930s Los Angeles from the perspective of her father as a seven-year-old boy. Her exhibition On Gold Mountain: A Chinese American Experience was featured in the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, and the Smithsonian. See is also a public speaker.

She has written for and led in many cultural events emphasizing the importance of Los Angeles and Chinatown. Among her awards and recognitions are the Organization of Chinese Americans Women's 2001 award as National Woman of the Year and the 2003 History Makers Award presented by the Chinese American Museum. See has served as a Los Angeles City Commissioner. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/21/2014.)

Book Reviews
"[See] proves to be a clever, conscientious, fair-minded biographer… [She] has done a gallant job of fashioning anecdote, fable and fact into an engaging read. Terrific stuff… The See family's adventures would be incredible if On Gold Mountain were fiction.
New York Times Book Review

Astonishing.... A comprehensive and exhaustively researched account of a Chinese-American family...that juggles such explosive elements as race, class, tradition, prejudice, poverty, and great wealth in new and relatively unexpected combinations.
Los Angeles Times

(Starred reveiw.) A matchless portrait not only of a remarkable family but of a century's changing attitudes.... The ambitions, fears, loves, and sorrows of See's huge cast are set forth with the storytelling skills of a novelist. Immediate and gripping.
Publishers Weekly

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for On Gold Mountain:

1. Discuss the obstacles that Fong See, Lisa's great grandfather, and Letticie Pruett, her caucasan great grandmother, were forced to overcome in order to marry. Also consider the hardships—the indignities and abuses—that each of them encountered in America, the land of equality and opportunity.

2. Lisa herself is only 1/8th Chinese. Do you feel she is qualified to tell the story of Chinese immigrants to this country?

3. How well does See deal with her mother Carolyn, who careened from one marriage to another? Carolyn, by the way, has also written a book; she and Lisa have worked together assisting one another on their separate family projects.

4. Discuss the roles that the women in Lisa's family play. How would you describe those women? What qualities do they exhibit?

5. How does the family's life in China, prior to emmigration, compare with their life in America? Better off? Worse off?

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

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On Immunity: An Inoculation
Eula Bliss, 2014
Graywolf Press
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781555977207

Summary
In this bold, fascinating book, Eula Biss addresses our fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what may be in our children's air, food, mattresses, medicines, and vaccines.

Reflecting on her own experience as a new mother, she suggests that we cannot immunize our children, or ourselves, against the world.

As she explores the metaphors surrounding immunity, Biss extends her conversations with other mothers to meditations on the myth of Achilles, Voltaire's Candide, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Susan Sontag's AIDS and Its Metaphors, and beyond.

On Immunity is an inoculation against our fear and a moving account of how we are all interconnected-our bodies and our fates. (From publishers.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1977-78
• Raised—upstate New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Hampshire College; M.F.A., University of Iowa
• Awards—National Book Critics Circle Award; Pushcart Prize; Carl Sandberg Award
• Currently—lives in Evanston, Illinois

Eula Biss is an American non-fiction writer and the founder of Essay Press where she is also an editor. She teaches, as an artist in residence, at Northwestern University.

Personal
Rasied in upstate New York, Biss earned a bachelor's degree in non-fiction writing from Hampshire College in western Massachusetts. After graduation, she moved to New York City, teaching in public schools—an experience that profoundly influenced her writing. In 2003, she moved to Iowa City to complete her MFA in the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. She teaches at Northwestern University.

She and her husband John Bresland live with their son in Evanston, Illinois. She and Bresland are also in a band called STET Everything.

Writing
Biss published her first book Balloonist, a collection of prose poems, in 2002. Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays, her second book, came out in 2009, winning the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. She published her third book On Immunity: An Inoculation in 2014. It was named one of the New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2014" and was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Biss won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/20/2015.)

Book Reviews
On Immunity casts a spell.... There's drama in watching this smart writer feel her way through this material. She's a poet, an essayist and a class spy. She digs honestly into her own psyche and into those of "people like me," and she reveals herself as believer and apostate, moth and flame.
Dwight Garner - New York Times

Subtle, spellbinding.... Sontag said she wrote Illness as Metaphor to "calm the imagination, not to incite it," and On Immunity also seeks to cool and console...[Biss] advances from all sides, like a chess player, drawing on science, myth, literature to herd us to the only logical end, to vaccinate
Parul Sehgal - New York Times Book Review

A welcome antidote--or "inoculation," as the subtitle suggests--against the toxic shouting match occurring between 'anti-vaxxers' and their opponents.... Biss leaps nimbly through a vertiginous range of subjects.... Brilliant and entertaining.
Boston Globe

A philosophical look at the history and practice of vaccination that reads like Joan Didion at her best. If you are yourself a nonfiction author, your initial response to this book might be to decide immediately on another line of work; Biss is that intimidatingly talented.... This is cultural commentary at its highest level, a searching examination of the most profound issues of health, identity and the tensions between individual parenting decisions and society.
Washington Post

By exploring the anxieties about what's lurking inside our flu shots, the air, and ourselves, [Biss] drives home the message that we are all responsible for one another. On Immunity will make you consider that idea on a fairly profound level.
Entertainment Weekly

On Immunity...weaves metaphor and myth, science and sociology, philosophy and politics into a tapestry rich with insight and intelligence.
Jerome Groopman - New York Review of Books

[An] elegant, intelligent and very beautiful book, which occupies a space between research and reflection, investigating our attitudes toward immunity and inoculation through a personal and cultural lens.
Los Angeles Times

Biss's gracious rhetoric and her insistence that she feels "uncomfortable with both sides" of the rancorous fight may frustrate readers looking for a pro-vaccine polemic. Yet her approach might actually be more likely to sway fearful parents, offering them an alternative set of images and associations to use in thinking about immunization.... Compelling.... This is writing designed to conquer anxiety.
The New Yorker

Biss advocates eloquently for childhood immunization...and understanding the consequences. Her exploration is both historical and emotional.... Biss frankly and optimistically looks at our "unkempt" world and our shared mission to protect one another.
Publishers Weekly

[A] far-reaching and unusual investigation into immunity.... Artfully mixing motherhood, myth, maladies, and metaphors into her presentation, Biss transcends medical science and trepidation
Booklist

National Book Critics Circle Award winner Biss investigates the nature of vaccinations, from immunity as myth to the intricate web of the immune system.... Brightly informative, giving readers a sturdy platform from which to conduct their own research and take personal responsibility.
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 start a discussion for On Immunity:

1. One of the big questions dealt with in Biss's On Immunity is why vaccinations trigger fear and dread in many. To what does the author attribute this anxiety?

2. The author writes, "My son’s birth brought with it an exaggerated sense of both my own power and my own powerlessness. The world became suddenly forbidding." What specifically does Biss fear? Do you relate to those concerns--or do you feel they're an over-exaggeration?

3. What are your personal views on childhood vaccinations? Does Biss make a convincing case—logically, morally, and/or scientifically—in support of vaccinating infants and children? If so, what did you find most convincing?

—> On the other hand, if you remain unconvinced about the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines, in what way did Biss fail to convince you? Where do you disagree with her? Better yet, where does her evidence fall short?

4. Much has been made of Biss's conciliatory language and the overall tone she uses throughout the book. Reviewers speak of her kindness, calmness, even her complicity as a mother. Point to some of the words and phrases she uses to de-escalate the potential for anger.

5. Bliss writes that "a privileged 1 percent are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99 percent." What does she mean by that?

6. Biss believes that "from birth onward, our bodies are a shared space." Do you agree...or not? Either way, where do our responsibilities lie—for ourselves, as well as for others?

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

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On the Move: A Life
Oliver Sacks, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385352543

Summary
When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.”

It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks writes about the passions that have driven his life—from motorcycles and weight lifting to neurology and poetry.

He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists—W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick—who have influenced his work.

On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer, a man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 9, 1933
• Where—Willesden, London, England, UK
• Death—August 30, 2015
• Where—New York City, New York
• Education—B.A., M.D., Oxford University
• Awards—(see below)

Oliver Wolf Sacks was a British neurologist, naturalist, and author who spent his professional life in the United States. For Sacks, the brain was the "most incredible thing in the universe" and therefore a valuable field of study. He became widely known for writing best-selling case histories about his patients' disorders, with some of his books adapted for film and stage.

Early life
Sacks was born in Willesden, London, England, the youngest of four children born to Jewish parents: Samuel Sacks, a Lithuanian Jewish physician, and Muriel Elsie Landau, one of the first female surgeons in England. Sacks had a large extended family, including the director and writer Jonathan Lynn and first cousins, the Israeli statesman Abba Eban, and the Nobel Laureate Robert Aumann.

When Sacks was six years old, he and his brother Michael were evacuated from London to escape the Blitz, retreating to a boarding school in the Midlands where he remained until 1943. Unknown to his family, at the school, he and his brother Michael "subsisted on meager rations of turnips and beetroot and suffered cruel punishments at the hands of a sadistic headmaster."

He later attended St Paul's School in London. During his youth he was a keen amateur chemist, as recalled in his 2001 memoir Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. He also came to share his parents' enthusiasm for medicine, entering Queen's College, Oxford, in 1951. There he earned a BA degree in physiology and biology in 1956.

Although not required, Sacks chose to stay on for an additional year to undertake research, having been inspired by a course taught by Hugh Macdonald Sinclair. Sacks recalls,

I had been seduced by a series of vivid lectures on the history of medicine.... And now, in Sinclair's lectures, it was the history of physiology, the ideas and personalities of physiologists, which came to life.

Sacks then became involved with the school's Laboratory of Human Nutrition under Sinclair, focusing his research on the toxic and commonly abused drug Jamaica ginger, known to cause irreversible nerve damage. After devoting months to research, he was disappointed by the lack of help and guidance he received from Sinclair, so he wrote uphis research findings but stopped working on the subject.

As a result of his disappointment, he fell into depression, at which point his tutor at Queen's College and his parents suggested he take time away from his studies. In the summer of 1955, his parents offered to send him to an Israeli kibbutz where, they felt, the physical labor would do him good.

Sacks later described his experience on the kibbutz as an "anodyne to the lonely, torturing months in Sinclair's lab." He lost 60 pounds (27 kg), traveled around the country, scuba dived in the Red Sea, and began to reconsider his future. "I was 'cured' now; it was time to return to medicine, to start clinical work, seeing patients in London."

Medical training
Sacks began medical school in 1956 and for the next two and half years took courses in medicine, surgery, orthopedics, pediatrics, neurology, psychiatry, dermatology, infectious diseases, obstetrics and various other specialties. He followed up his formal training with a year-long internship at Middlesex Hospital, split between its medical and neurological units. However, after completing the internships in 1960, Sacks was uncertain about his future.

He left England and flew into Montreal, Canada, on his 27th birthday. He visited the Montreal Neurological Institute and the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), telling them that he wanted to be a pilot. After some interviews and checking his background, RCAF told him he would be best in medical research. It was suggested that he take time to reconsider. He used the next three months to travel across Canada, deep into the Canadian Rockies, which he described in his personal journal, later published as Canada: Pause, 1960.

He next made his way from there to the United States where he completed a residency in Neurology at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, as well as fellowships in Neurology and Psychiatry at UCLA. It was during his time at UCLA that he experimented with various recreational drugs, describing his experiences in his 2012 book Hallucinations.

Medicine
After completing his residency in neurology in 1965, Sacks relocated to New York to became professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine, remaining with that institution for most of his career.

In 1966 he began consulting at chronic care facility Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. He worked there with a group of survivors of the 1920s outbreak of encephalitis lethargica—sleeping sickness—who had been unable to move on their own for decades. The story of their treatment became the basis of Sacks's most well-known book, his 1973 Awakenings.

Sacks's work at Beth Abraham helped lay the foundation for the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, and Sacks served as honorary medical adviser. The Institute honored Sacks with its first Music Has Power Award in 2000 and again in 2006. The latter commemorated "his 40 years at Beth Abraham and honor his outstanding contributions in support of music therapy and the effect of music on the human brain and mind."

From 1966 to 2007, Sacks served as an instructor and later as clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He also held an appointment at the New York University School of Medicine from 1992 to 2007.

In July 2007, he joined the faculty of Columbia University Medical Center as a professor of neurology and psychiatry. At the same time, he was appointed Columbia University's first "Columbia University Artist" in recognition of his work in bridging the arts and sciences.

Sacks returned to New York University School of Medicine in 2012, serving as a professor of neurology and consulting neurologist in the center's epilepsy center.

In addition to his academic work, Sacks maintained a practice in New York City. He also served on the boards of The Neurosciences Institute and the New York Botanical Garden.

Writing
Beginning in 1970, Sacks wrote of his experience with neurological patients. His books have been translated into more than 25 languages. In addition, he was a regular contributor to The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and various medical, scientific and general publications. He was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science in 2001.

Sacks's work was featured in a "broader range of media than those of any other contemporary medical author." In 1990 the New York Times referred to him as "a kind of poet laureate of contemporary medicine." His books use a wealth of narrative detail to focus on the experiences of patients who are often able to adapt despite neurological conditions usually considered incurable.

Awakenings, his most famous book (and the basis for the 1990 feature film), describes his use of the then new drug levodopa on post-encephalitic patients at Beth Abraham. The 1973 book was also the subject of the first documentary made for the British television series Discovery.

In other books, he describes cases of Tourette's syndrome and the various effects of Parkinson's disease. The title essay in his 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat centers on a man with visual agnosia—the inability of the brain to interpret visual information—and was the subject of a 1986 opera by Michael Nyman.

His article "An Anthropologist on Mars," which won a Polk Award for magazine reporting, is about Temple Grandin, the autistic professor who instituted more human treatment methods in the beef cattle industry. Seeing Voices, Sacks's 1989 book, covers a variety of topics in Deaf studies.

In his book The Island of the Colorblind, Sacks wrote about an island whose residents have a high incidence of achromatopsia—total color blindness, low visual acuity, and high photophobia. He also describes the Chamorro people of Guam, many of whom suffer from a neurodegenerative disease known as Lytico-Bodig disease—a devastating combination of ALS, dementia and parkinsonism. Along with Paul Alan Cox, Sacks published papers suggesting a possible cause for the cluster—a toxin from the cycad nut transmitted by the flying fox bat.

In November 2012, Sacks released his book Hallucinations which examines why ordinary people sometimes experience hallucinations. "Hallucinations don't belong wholly to the insane, " he explains. "Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness or injury."

Sacks also wrote about the little known phenomenon called Charles Bonnet syndrome, which has been found to occur in elderly people who have lost their eyesight.

Sacks was the author of The Mind's Eye, The Oxcaca Journal, On The Move: A Life, and numerous articles in The New Yorker.

Criticism
Sacks sometimes faced criticism from the medical and disability studies communities.

Arthur K. Shapiro, an expert on Tourette syndrome, called Sacks's work "idiosyncratic," relying too heavily on anecdotal evidence.
Researcher Makoto Yamaguchi thought Sacks's mathematical explanations in his study of the numerically gifted savant twins (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), were irrelevant.
British academic and disability rights activist Tom Shakespeare called Sacks "the man who mistook his patients for a literary career," while another critic called his work "a high-brow freak show."

Sacks responded, "I would hope that a reading of what I write shows respect and appreciation, not any wish to expose or exhibit for the thrill...but it's a delicate business."

Personal
Sacks declined to share details from his personal life until later in life. In a 2001 interview he discussed his severe shyness—describing it as "a disease" and a lifelong impediment to his personal interactions. Much later, in a 2015 Vanity Fair article, he talked about his earlier years in California when he indulged in

...staggering bouts of pharmacological experimentation, underwent a fierce regimen of bodybuilding at Muscle Beach (for a time he held a California record, after he performed a full squat with 600 pounds across his shoulders), and racked up more than 100,000 leather-clad miles on his motorcycle. And then one day he gave it all up—the drugs, the sex, the motorcycles, the bodybuilding.

He waged a lifelong battle with prosopagnosia—face blindness—which he discussed in a 2010 New Yorker piece. He also wrote about a near-fatal accident at 41, a year after the publication of Awakenings, when he fell and broke his leg while mountaineering alone.

Sacks lived alone, never marrying. In 2008, after nearly 35 years of celibacy, he entered into a relationship with writer and New York Times contributor Bill Hayes. In his 2015 autobiography On the Move: A Life, he addressed his homosexuality for the first time.

Illness and death
In 2006 Sacks underwent radiation therapy for a uveal melanoma in his right eye. He discussed his loss of stereoscopic vision caused by the treatment in a 2010 article, and expanded on it later that year in his book The Mind's Eye.

In January, 2015, metastases from the ocular tumor were discovered in his liver and brain. Sacks announced this development in a February New York Times op-ed piece and estimated his remaining time in "months." He expressed his intent to "live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can," adding...

I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

Sacks died from the disease on August 30, 2015, at his home in Manhattan. He was 82.

Honors
???? - Fellow—Royal College of Physicians (FRCP)
1990 - Honorary Doctorate: Georgetown University
1991 - Honorary Doctorate: (3) Tufts University, New York Medical College, and College of Staten Island
1992 - Honorary Doctorate: (2) Medical College of Pennsylvania and Bard College
1996 - Member: American Academy of Arts and Letters (Literature)
1999 - Fellow: New York Academy of Sciences; Honorary Fellow—The Queen's College, Oxford.
2002 - Fellow: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Humanities and Arts / Literature)
2001 - Honorary Doctorate: Queen's University (Ontario); Lewis Thomas Prize—Rockefeller University
2005 - Honorary Doctorate: 2) Oxford University and Gallaudet University
2006 - Honorary Doctorate: Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru
2008 - Honorary Doctorate: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
2008 - Commander of the order of the British Empire (CBE)

Sacks was named to the position "Columbia Artist" from Columbia University in 2007, a post that was created specifically for him. The title granted Sacks unfettered access to the University, regardless of department or discipline.

The minor planet 84928 Oliversacks, discovered in 2003, was named in his honor.

In February 2010 Sacks was named as one of the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers. He described himself as "an old Jewish atheist." (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/18/2015.)

Book Reviews
[D]eeply moving…. Dr. Sacks trains his descriptive and analytic powers on his own life, providing a revealing look at his childhood and coming of age, his discovery and embrace of his vocation, and his development as a writer. He gives us touching portraits, brimming with life and affection, of friends and family members…. This is a more intimate book than Dr. Sacks's earlier ventures into autobiographical territory…and the more he tells us about himself, the more we come to see how rooted his own gifts as an artist and a doctor are in his early family experiences in England and what he once thought of as emotional liabilities…[Sacks's] writing, which [he] says gives him a pleasure "unlike any other," has also been a gift to his readers—of erudition, sympathy and an abiding understanding of the joys, trials and consolations of the human condition.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

With On the Move, [Sacks] has finally presented himself as he has presented others: as both fully vulnerable and an object of curiosity…. The primary mark of a good memoir is that it makes you nostalgic for experiences you never had, and Sacks captures the electrifying discoveries he made, especially those in his early career, with vivid, hard-edge prose…. Sacks's ability to enact and celebrate intuition in medicine and precision in art is singular.
Andrew Solomon - New York Times Book Review

Marvelous.... He studies himself as he has studied others: compassionately, unblinkingly, intelligently, acceptingly and honestly.
Wall Street Journal

Intriguing.... When describing his patients and their problems, he is attentive and precise, straightforward and sympathetic, and he brings these worthy qualities to his descriptions of his younger self.
Washington Post

Remarkably candid and deeply affecting.... Sacks’s empathy and intellectual curiosity, his delight in, as he calls it, "joining particulars with generalities" and, especially, "narratives with neuroscience"—have never been more evident than in his beautifully conceived new book.
Boston Globe

[A] wonderful memoir, which richly demonstrates what an extraordinary life it has been.... A fascinating account—a sort of extended case study, really—of Sacks’s remarkably active, iconoclastic adulthood.
Los Angeles Times

[Sacks is] a wonderful storyteller.... It’s his keen attentiveness as a listener and observer, and his insatiable curiosity, that makes his work so powerful.
San Francisco Chronicle

(Starred review.) Sacks's writing is lucid, earnest, and straightforward, yet always raptly attuned to subtleties of character and feeling in himself and others; the result, closely following his announcement that he has terminal cancer, is a fitting retrospective of his lifelong project of making science a deeply humanistic pursuit.
Publishers Weekly

Sacks, now 81, writes of early school memories, first loves, and his desire to travel. He even utilizes entries from a journal he kept while traveling coast to coast on a motorcycle in the United States.... Frank and candid, Sacks sounds as though he's talking to the reader from across the dinner table. His story is a reminder that we create our own journeys. —Caitlin Kenney, Niagara Falls P.L, NY
Library Journal

The prolific physician's adventure-filled life.... Describing himself as quiet, shy, and solitary, [Sacks] nevertheless has become a man of many passions: science, medicine, motorbikes, and, for years, assorted drugs.... Despite impressionistic chronology, which occasionally causes confusion and repetition, this is an engaging memoir by a consummate storyteller.
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 using these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for On the Move:

1. After reading his autobiography, what do you think of Oliver Sacks? How would you describe him—both as a man and as a physician? How familiar were you with Sacks and his work before reading On the Move? Have you read any other books by Oliver Sacks? if so, how does this one compare?

2. During the London Blitz, Oliver and his brother Michael were sent to a boarding school where he was bullied and beaten. What effect, both good and bad, did this treatment have on his life? In what way does Sacks see those experiences as aiding him in his work with patients?

3. Talk about the various influences in Oliver's young life, including this brother's schizophrenia, that prompted him to enter medicine.

4. Sacks is open about his shyness. Elsewhere, he has likened it to a disease, although most of us would consider it simply a personality trait. What do you think? How did Sacks's shy personality shape his life?

5. Follow-up to Question 4: Given Sack's excessive shyness, how does one explain his years in California, during the 60s—his biker days, drug addiction, and obsessive body building? This immoderate risk-taking would seem at odds with a painfully shy individual. Or would it?

6. How would you describe Sacks's gifts as a physician?

7. What do you think of his mother's reaction to Sack's homosexuality? What part might her anger have played in Sacks's adult life? Although Sacks himself doesn't speculate, do you want to give it a try?

8. What do you make of Sacks's 35-year celibacy?

9. Sacks has been accused of exploiting his patients for gain and fame and for substituting empirical evidence with anecdotal evidence. If medicine is based on a strict adherence to hard data, what room is there for the "soft" patient narratives of Oliver Sacks?

10. Talk about what you found most surprising in this book—or inspiring, humorous, offensive, or anything especially memorable about Oliver Sacks and his life.

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

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On Toby's Terms
Charmaine Hammond, 2010
Bettie Youngs Books
264 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780984308149

Summary
#1 Non Fiction Book in Calgary, Canada
Winner, 2012 Gold for Readers' Favorite

On Toby's Terms is a adult memoir.When Charmaine and her husband adopted Toby, a five-year-old Chesapeake Bay retriever, they figured he might need some adjusting time, but they certainly didn't count on what he'd do in the meantime. Soon after he entered their lives and home, Toby proved to be a holy terror who routinely opened and emptied the hall closet, turned on water taps, pulled and ate things from the bookshelves, sat for hours on end in the sink, and spent his days rampaging through the house.

Oddest of all was his penchant for locking himself in the bathroom, and then pushing the lid of the toilet off the tank, smashing it to pieces. After a particularly disastrous encounter with the knife-block in the kitchen—and when the couple discovered Toby's bloody paw prints on the phone—they decided Toby needed professional help.

Little did they know what they would discover about this dog. On Toby's Terms is an endearing story of a beguiling creature who teaches his owners that, despite their trying to teach him how to be the dog they want, he is the one to lay out the terms of being the dog he needs to be. This insight would change their lives forever. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Charmaine Hammond, is the best selling and award winning author of the memoir On Toby's Terms (2010), about her family dog. The book is in development to be a motion picture with Impact Motion Pictures. She also co-authored GPS Your Best Life (2012)—charting your destination and getting there in style. In addition to her adult novels, Charmain has also published a series of children's books—Toby The Pet Therapy Dog & His Hospital Friends (2011), and Be a Buddy Not a Bully (2012).

Toby, the dog, has given Charmaine much to write about. From learning to put on his own seat belt, making a difference in the lives of many through his visitation at local hospitals as a therapy dog, and dressing up in a jail uniform to raise money from charity, Toby has given people much to smile about. Toby has presented in front of more than 10,000 students and some 1500 adults.

As a professional speaker in her other life, Charmaine has spoken to audiences internationally and is a sought after speaker at corporate events, conferences and author conventions. She also hosts three wildly popular radio shows.

Charmain is the winner of the 2012 Business Matchmaker of the Year award, an international award (eWomenNetwork) and has been nominated for the 2012 RBC Woman Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
She has been featured in the Metro USA, Metro Canada, Edmonton Journal, Edmonton and Spruce Grove Examiner, Calgary and Edmonton Sun, Del Mar Times, National Post, Global TV, CTSTV, Alberta Prime Time (CTV) and on many radio stations in the US and Canada. (From the author.)

Charmain hopes you'll visit Toby on your terms...on his very own website — www.ontobysterms.com.

Book Reviews
Authentically moving. You will be different after reading this book. Charmaine provides exquisite life lessons, shows you humility on steroids, and offers new perceptions on the illusion of contro—all through the experience of a beloved dog. A pure joy to read.
Shawne Duperon - CEO ShawneTV, Six-time EMMY award winner

A touching portrait of a remarkable dog. If you’re looking for a feel-good story, this is it.
Jamie Hall - Edmonton Journal

Simply a beautiful book about life, love and purpose.
Jack Canfield, Co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul

Charmaine Hammond is a Saint! You'll see why when you read this book and the incredible duress she and her husband Chris had to endure through their dog Toby. The way they persevered is both incredible and heart-warming, and the Life Lessons they learned in the process are ones everyone should know and cherish to reach their Full Life Potential. This is not just a story about a dog...it's a tail (I mean "tale"...sorry I couldn't resist ;) of LOVE, Compassion, Heartbreak, Joy, Renewal, and Purpose. Whether you're a pet-lover or not, you'll be moved by the author's mastery of story-telling and you'll come to love Toby just as much as Charmaine and Chris did. I don't even own a dog, and I couldn't put this book down. Get a copy for yourself and any one you love. If you like the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series, this is Chicken Soup on steroids.
Dave Albano - Full Life Potential

Discussion Questions
1. What were the most poignant lessons that Toby taught his owners, Charmaine and Christopher? What is the most profound lesson you learned from your own pet?

2. Clearly this dog is a handful—and on occasion, the couple come close to surrendering him to the local shelter. But they stick it out and then fall in love with him. How did this couple grow, both individually and in their marriage, as a result of their life with Toby? In what way did this couple enhance Toby’s emotional and physical health? How would you have dealt with a dog like Toby?

3. Charmaine discusses her tendency toward being a perfectionist and all-or-nothing thinking—a trait that is also shared to some degree by her husband, Chris. How did this trait affect their relationship and marriage? How did it impact their relationship with Toby? Do you think that you are a perfectionist? Why or why not?

4. The author and her husband survive a life-threatening experience. How did this incident impact them, and in what ways did it change their lives? In what way did bringing Toby into their lives allow them relive the lessons learned that day? Do you think you would have responded the same way or differently?

5. The couple are told by a behaviorist that Toby “lacks purpose” and clarity on his role in the family. In what ways did helping Toby discover his purpose modify his behavior. How would you define your “purpose” and in what way do you deem it necessary to living with passion?

6. “Letting go” is a theme throughout the story. What is the relevance of “letting go” and in what way does doing so change the author’s life? Have you ever had to “let go” of something? How did that affect you?

7. In what way is Toby an inspiration? In this story, who inspired you the most and for what reason? Who or what inspires you?

8. Charmaine alludes to the axiom, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” Who was the teacher—the author or Toby? Of the lessons each learned, what was the most significant? Are you a teacher, student, or both? Explain.

9. When Toby tips over the keepsake box, what hidden treasures surprise Charmaine? How do these discoveries impact Chris and Charmaine’s future with Toby? Do you have a box of “hidden treasures”? What memories do they evoke?

10. What kept Christopher from all but giving up on Toby? How did this decision affect the couple’s marriage and their plans for their future? Facing the same sort of situation, would you have given up or stuck with it? Why?

11. Charmaine comes off as an optimist, seeing the good in situations. How does this mindset both help and hinder her? Do you consider yourself optimistic or pessimistic? How does this view affect your life? Do you think you should change?

12. As Charmaine and Chris became the “pack leaders” in Toby’s life, his behavior improved. Had they accepted this sooner, would the outcome have been different? What qualities do pack leaders emulate? When have you been a pack leader in your life? How did being a pack leader change a situation for you?
(Questions kindly provided by the author.)

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One Summer: America, 1927
Bill Bryson, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
524 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780767919401

Summary
In One Summer Bill Bryson, one of our greatest and most beloved nonfiction writers, transports readers on a journey back to one amazing season in American life.

   • The summer of 1927 began with one of the signature events of the twentieth century: on May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to cross the Atlantic by plane nonstop, and when he landed in Le Bourget airfield near Paris, he ignited an explosion of worldwide rapture and instantly became the most famous person on the planet.

   • Meanwhile, the titanically talented Babe Ruth was beginning his assault on the home run record, which would culminate on September 30 with his sixtieth blast, one of the most resonant and durable records in sports history.

   • In between those dates a Queens housewife named Ruth Snyder and her corset-salesman lover garroted her husband, leading to a murder trial that became a huge tabloid sensation.

   • Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat atop a flagpole in Newark, New Jersey, for twelve days—a new record.

   • The American South was clobbered by unprecedented rain and by flooding of the Mississippi basin, a great human disaster, the relief efforts for which were guided by the uncannily able and insufferably pompous Herbert Hoover. Calvin Coolidge interrupted an already leisurely presidency for an even more relaxing three-month vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

   • The gangster Al Capone tightened his grip on the illegal booze business through a gaudy and murderous reign of terror and municipal corruption.

   • The first true “talking picture,” Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, was filmed and forever changed the motion picture industry.

   • The four most powerful central bankers on earth met in secret session on a Long Island estate and made a fateful decision that virtually guaranteed a future crash and depression.

All this and much, much more transpired in that epochal summer of 1927, and Bill Bryson captures its outsized personalities, exciting events, and occasional just plain weirdness with his trademark vividness, eye for telling detail, and delicious humor. In that year America stepped out onto the world stage as the main event, and One Summer transforms it all into narrative nonfiction of the highest order

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 will set you right in this canter through one summer of one year that—once you’ve turned the final page—will seem more critical to American history than you might have reckoned before… [He] is a master of the sidelong, a man who can turn obscurity into hilarity with seemingly effortless charm—and One Summer is an entertaining addition to a body of work that is at its best when it celebrates the unexpected and the obscure… This is a jolly jalopy ride of a book; Bryson runs down the byways of American history and finds diversion in every roadside stop.
Financial Times

Bryson is a marvelous historian, not only exhaustively accurate, but highly entertaining. If you avoid textbook histories because they seem too dry, pick up One Summer, or any other of Mr. Bryson's books. They are intelligent delights.
Liz Smith - Huffington Post

Bryson covers [1027 historical events] in characteristically sparkling prose. These notable happenings are worth relating and recalling, but others have done so, and more authoritatively and fully. Here, there’s not much connection between them; a string of coincidents (and there are many of those each day) hardly justify a book. So this isn’t history, nor is it really a story with a start, finish, and thematic spine. No analysis, only narrative—it’s diverting but slight.
Publishers Weekly

The summer of 1927 offers the prolific Bryson a prepared canvas on which to paint a narrative of well-known, unknown, and little-known events and personalities of the Twenties.... The book's strength is in showing the overlap of significant events and the interaction of personalities. But the author's approach keeps the reader from gaining a real sense of the landscape; this is more a spatter painting. —Charles K. Piehl, Minnesota State Univ., Mankato
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Bryson’s inimitable wit and exuberance are on full display in this wide-ranging look at the major events in an exciting summer in America. Bryson makes fascinating interconnections...[and] offers delicious detail and breathtaking suspense about events whose outcomes are already known. A glorious look at one summer in America. —Vanessa Bush
Booklist

A popular chronicler of life and lore vividly charts a particularly pivotal season in American history. Bryson reanimates the events and principal players across five key months in 1927.... While he may be an expatriate residing in England, Bryson's American pride saturates this rewarding book. A distinctively drawn time capsule from a definitive epoch.
Kirkus Reviews

1. Of all the stories that Bryson tells in One Summer, which one do you find most interesting—which engaged you more than others? Which story most surprised you (e.g., President Coldidge's four-hour work day)?

2. Of all the heroes covered in the book, whom do you have the most sympathy for? Maybe Philo Farnsworth? Which hero do you most admire? Most despise?

3. How did Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray bungle the coverup of their murder?

4. What about Robert Elliott, America's top executioner—how would you describe him? What in his background shaped him to do his job? Would you want him as a father...or husband?

5. Bryson's trademark humor is on display in One Summer. What parts, in particular, did you find funny?

6. How much, if anything, have your learned from One Summer? If you've read Bryson's previous A Brief History of Nearly Everything, how does this book compare?

7. Is there anything about the episodes in this book that mark them as distinctly American? Is there something that links them together in a way that defines the culture of this country?

8. The book has been criticized as "light"—lacking any deeper analysis—that it's merely a collection of disparate historical anecdotes whose purpose is to amuse. Hmmm... Do you agree...or disagree?

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

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Ooh La La: French Women's Secrets to Feeling Beautiful Every Day
Jamie Cat Callan, 2013
Kensington Books
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780806535579

Summary
French women seem to have a special knack for life's most important things—food, love, raising children. And in matters of beauty and style, they appear to be at an unfair advantage.

But the good news is that everything French women know can be learned.

French women are not born more attractive than anyone else. They simply learn at a very young age how to feel beautiful, confident, and sexy, inside and out. It's an allure that outlasts youth—in fact, some of France's most celebrated women are femmes d'un certain âge. Experience only makes them more irresistible.

Growing up, Jamie Cat Callan had a French grand-mere to instruct her on style, grooming, and genuinely liking her reflection in the mirror. Now she shares that wisdom along with advice from other French women on fragrance, image consulting, makeup, and more, and shows you how to:

♦ Discover the power of perfume
♦ Find mentors who will help hone your personal style
♦ Begin at the ends—hands, feet, and hair
♦ Choose lingerie that makes you feel magnifique
♦ Get an internal makeover and nourish your soul
♦ Embrace your age gracefully and gorgeously

Bid au revoir to Botox, fad diets, and agonizing over every imperfection, and say hello to the truly timeless beauty that comes with making the most of your own unique je-ne-sais-quoi. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1954-55
• Raised—Stamford, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., Bard College; M.F.A., University of California-Los Angeles
• Currently—lives in Cap Cod, Massachusetts

Although raised in the U.S.A., Jamie Cat Callan grew up under the tutelage of her French grandmother. She has traveled to France many times, lived in France, and fallen in love with all things French. That fascination led Callan, eventually, to publish three books about French women and "their secrets to joie de vivre, timeless beauty, love, romance...and lingerie." In the space of four years, from 2009-2013, Callan published French Women Don't Sleep Alone; Bonjour, Happiness; and Ooh La La.

Callan earned her B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. in Screenwriting from the University of California-Los Angeles. Her writing career took off at 26 when she published her first book under a New York State grant from the Council of the Arts Program. That book, Over the Hill at Fourteen sold nearly half-a million copies and became a Scholastic Book Club selection.

Over the next five years, Callan published two more young adult books including The Young and the Soapy (1984) and Just Too Cool (1987).

Since then her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Modern Love column, Missouri Review, American Letters & Commentary, and Best American Erotica.

Her book Hooking Up or Holding Out was issued in 2006, followed by her three advice books on the style and love lives of French women.

Callan has taught writing at Wesleyan University's Graduate Liberal Studies Program and conducted writing workshops at Grub Street in Boston and through New York University. She lives with her husband on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. (Adapted from the publisher and Cervena Barva Press.)

Book Reviews
[A]n important look at American women, how we may be selling ourselves short, and how the women in that strange land called France may have much to teach us. It may change you.... Ooh La La is a reminder that you get to choose so many things about who you are and how you want to be seen.... This book will help you do just that. Take possession of your future. Buy it. Read it. Gift it. Hurry. Read more . . .
Christine Merser - LitLovers

In this combination lifestyle guide and travelogue, Callan interviews French women...on topics like beauty, fashion, and feminine hygiene in an effort to divine the wellspring of a French woman’s je ne sais quoi.... This charming foray into French femininity will make a perfect cadeau for any Francophile lady.
Publishers Weekly

The good news for women around the globe is that they don't have to be French to develop a chic sense of style.... [This] delightful romp through France...provides universal lessons on looking and feeling fabulous and will appeal to Francophiles. —Ajoke Kokodoko, Oakland P.L.
Library Journal

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

1. What are the differences Callan sees between French women and American women? Do you agree, or not? Has she overstated her case...or hit the nail on the head?

2. How do French women handle aging? Do they "age gracefully" and if so, how? In fact, what does it mean to "age gracefully"? Based on Callan's observations, does France seem to be as caught up in the idea of youthful beauty as America? Or do the French see aging as an advantage rather than a loss?

3. If you have traveled in France, what did you take away from your time there—in terms of lifestyle, attitudes between the sexes, work, consumerism, sexuality, beauty, or fashion? Are French values different from American values?

4. How do you feel about lingerie after reading Ooh La La?

5. Callan begins each of her chapters with an epigraph. How do they relate to what follows? Do any strike you as particularly inspirational, astute, helpful, funny?

6. Overall, what do you think of Ooh La La? Does it offer sound advice, something you can take to heart, and use to make changes in your life? Is the book insightful, or do you find it shallow?

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

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Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assurd an Allied Victory
Ben Macintyre, 2010
Crown Publishing
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307453280

Summary
In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated— Operation Mincemeat. The purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed, and the Allies ultimately chose.

Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu could not have been more different. Cholmondeley was a dreamer seeking adventure. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister. But together they were the perfect team and created an ingenious plan: Get a corpse, equip it with secret (but false and misleading) papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would, they hoped, take the bait. The idea was approved by British intelligence officials, including Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond). Winston Churchill believed it might ring true to the Axis and help bring victory to the Allies.

Filled with spies, double agents, rogues, fearless heroes, and one very important corpse, the story of Operation Mincemeat reads like an international thriller.

Unveiling never-before-released material, Ben Macintyre brings the reader right into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles and spies, and the German Abwehr agents who suffered the “twin frailties of wishfulness and yesmanship.” He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley and Montagu and their near-impossible feats into a riveting adventure that not only saved thousands of lives but paved the way for a pivotal battle in Sicily and, ultimately, Allied success in the war. (From the publisher.)

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

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

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

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

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

Book Reviews
Operation Mincemeat is utterly, to employ a dead word, thrilling. But to call it thus is to miss the point slightly, in terms of admiring it properly.... What makes Operation Mincemeat so winning, in addition to Mr. Macintyre's meticulous research and the layers of his historical understanding, is his elegant, jaunty and very British high style. The major players in this spy story seem to have emerged from an Evelyn Waugh novel that's been tweaked by P. G. Wodehouse. This isn't to say that Mr. Macintyre has embellished his teeming cast of eccentrics. It's to say that he fully appreciates them, and his fondness for them is contagious.
Dwight Garner - New York Times

Ben Macintyre...is a first-rate journalist who seems to have talked to everyone connected with the operation (or their descendants) and worked his way through recently declassified documents in the National Archives. But—true to the spirit of the operation—his most important source turned out to be the deceased Montagu himself, or more specifically, a dusty trunk he left behind with bundles of files from MI5, MI6 and Naval Intelligence; letters, memos, photographs; original, uncensored drafts; and so on, an intelligence bonanza more genuine than the one foisted on the Germans. Macintyre has made the most of it. Here, finally, is the complete story with its full cast of characters (not a dull one among them), pure catnip to fans of World War II thrillers and a lot of fun for everyone else.
Joseph Kanon - Washington Post

A nearly flawless true-life picaresque …zeroes in on one of the few times in war history when excessive literary imagination, instead of hobbling a clandestine enterprise, worked beyond its authors’ wildest dream….Almost inedibly rich with literary truffles—doppelgangers, obsession, transgression, self-fashioning.... It is hard to oversate how cinematic this story really was.
New Republic

London Times writer-at-large Macintyre (Agent Zigzag) offers a solid and entertaining updating of WWII's best-known human intelligence operation. In 1943, British intelligence conceived a spectacular con trick to draw German attention away from the Allies' obvious next objective, Sicily. The bait was a briefcase full of carefully forged documents attached to the wrist of Major William Martin, Royal Marines—a fictitious identity given to a body floated ashore in neutral Spain. Making the deception plausible was the task given to two highly unconventional officers: Lt. Comdr. Ewen Montagu and Squadron Leader Charles Cholmondeley. Macintyre recounts their adventures and misadventures with panache. The body was that of a derelict. Its costuming included the underwear of a deceased Oxford don. An attractive secretary provided the photo of an imaginary fiancée. The carefully constructed documents setting up the bogus operation against Greece and Sardinia convinced even Hitler himself. The Sicily landings were achieved as almost a complete surprise. And the man who never was entered the history and folklore of WWII.
Publishers Weekly

Macintyre (assoc. editor, Times of London; Agent Zigzag) takes readers on an exciting World War II adventure as he details one of the most famous military intelligence operations of the 20th century. In July 1943 the semidecomposed body of a man who seemed to be a British soldier was discovered floating off of southwestern Spain. When the body was examined by Spanish officials (Spain was neutral but sympathetic to Germany), they identified him as Royal Marine officer William Martin and passed on the information discovered in his belongings. It was all a deception that included love letters from a fiancée, her photograph, stubs of London theater tickets, bank notices, and so on. More crucially, Major Martin was carrying sealed letters to senior military figures in North Africa. When these documents reached Berlin they induced a response from the German military that greatly enabled the Allied invasion of Sicily. Mcintyre turns this successful Allied endeavor into a rousing story, recounting also the life of the Welshman who died down on his luck and became the body of "William Martin." VERDICT This retelling of a well-known part of World War II espionage history will appeal to military history buffs, especially those new to this particular episode, and to readers of adventure fiction, who will find it hard to put down. —Sheri Beth Scovil, Bartow Cty. Lib. Syst., Cartersville, GA
Library Journal

The exciting story of the ingenious British ruse that distracted the Nazis from the Allied Sicilian invasion. Although the invasion finally took place July 10, 1943, allowing the Allied forces an initial foothold into the German "Fortress Europe," the trick that kept the Nazis from fortifying Sicily took place months before. The dead body of a British major, "William Martin," had been hauled in on April 30 by fishermen off the port of Huelva, Spain, a pro-German outpost, his briefcase full of top-secret letters by British officers detailing the invasions of Greece and Sardinia and sure to land in the eager hands of the Germans. In fact, the body was a plant, a suicide victim actually named Glyndwr Michael. He had been plucked from a morgue in London, kept on ice for a few months, dressed in a well-used British Navy uniform, stocked with identification, fake official letters and correspondence from his father and fiancee "Pam," and slipped into the Spanish waters by a British submarine. London Times writer at large Macintyre (Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal, 2007, etc.) skillfully unravels this crazy, brilliant plan by degrees. The "corkscrew minds" at British Navy Intelligence, headed by John Godfrey and his assistant, Ian Fleming (yes, of James Bond fame), put forth the germ of the idea, which was then developed to its fantastic implementation by RAF flight officer Charles Cholmondeley and Lt. Commander Ewen Montagu, first under the code name "Trojan Horse," then the more prosaic "Operation Mincemeat." The author's chronicle of how the last two intelligence officers lovingly created an entire personality for "Major Martin" makes for priceless reading. Astoundingly, as Winston Churchill noted exultantly, the Nazis swallowed the bait "rod, line and sinker."Macintyre spins a terrific yarn, full of details gleaned from painstaking detective work.
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 Operation Mincemeat:

1. What could explain the fact that German intelligence, hardly an un-intelligent group, fell for a feint like Operation Mincemeat...to the point where Hitler deployed troops to Greece rather than Sicily?

2. In an Amazon interview, Ben Macintyre says that what most fascinated him in researching the book was "the elaborate, many-layered deception...as if [the organizers of the operation] were writing a novel...." In what way was the creation of Mincemeat like a writing novel?

3. What do you think of Charles Cholmondeley? Would you consider him the unsung hero behind Operation Mincemeat? Or would you reserve the "hero" title for Ewan Montague? Or is there someone else?

4. Do you think Ewan (Bill) and Jean Leslie (Pam) actually had an actual affair? There are hints that, indeed, they might have, but only hints. What do you think?

5. The characters who worked on the the plot were a strange eccentric group of people, many with blistering egos. What do you think made them cohere as a group and pull off, successfully, this multi-faceted escapade?

6. Do you find it ironic that poor Glyndwr Michael, who led an insignificant life, became far more valuable as a dead men? What might this suggest about the pathos, even tragedy, of real life...or the old saw—"life is stranger than fiction"?

7. You might get a hold of the 1956 film, The Man Who Never Was, and play a few clips. The film is based on the events of Operation Mincemeat. Compare book and film.

8. Discuss the brilliant planning—and fine-tuning— that went into the success of the operation. What impressed you most...or surprised you most?

9. Talk about the ways in which luck also played a part in the operation's success.

10. Could someone create a story of your own (real) life and pass it on as credible to enemy intelligence? What would you want them to include in the bio—what kind of, say, "wallet litter"? Even better, divide up into groups and devise your own fictional character, someone who might be carrying information valuable to the enemy. How would you create such a life—and make it seem real? Is it sorta...kinda...like writing a novel?

11. What does Macintyre mean when he says that the overall scheme was a "double bluff"?

12. What does this book reveal about the spy-world during war—the role that "intelligence" played back then...and might still play today? How would you prioritize what is more important in determining the outcome of war? Would you say...intellligence, leadership, or fighting?

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

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Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy
Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, 2017
KnopfDoubleday
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524732684

Summary
A powerful, inspiring, and practical book about building resilience and moving forward after life’s inevitable setbacks.

After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. "I was in ‘the void," she writes, "a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe."

Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build.

Option B combines Sheryl’s personal insights with Adam’s eye-opening research on finding strength in the face of adversity. Beginning with the gut-wrenching moment when she finds her husband, Dave Goldberg, collapsed on a gym floor, Sheryl opens up her heart—and her journal—to describe the acute grief and isolation she felt in the wake of his death.

But Option B goes beyond Sheryl’s loss to explore how a broad range of people have overcome hardships including illness, job loss, sexual assault, natural disasters, and the violence of war. Their stories reveal the capacity of the human spirit to persevere …and to rediscover joy.

Resilience comes from deep within us and from support outside us. Even after the most devastating events, it is possible to grow by finding deeper meaning and gaining greater appreciation in our lives.

Option B illuminates how to help others in crisis, develop compassion for ourselves, raise strong children, and create resilient families, communities, and workplaces. Many of these lessons can be applied to everyday struggles, allowing us to brave whatever lies ahead.

Two weeks after losing her husband, Sheryl was preparing for a father-child activity. "I want Dave," she cried. Her friend replied, "Option A is not available," and then promised to help her make the most of Option B. We all live some form of Option B. This book will help us all make the most of it. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 28, 1969
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Raised—North Miami Beach, Florida
• Education—B.A., M.B.A., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Northern California

Sheryl Kara Sandberg is an American businesswoman and author, who has served as the chief operating officer of Facebook since 2008. In June 2012, she was also elected to the board of directors by the existing board members becoming the first woman to serve on its board.

She has written one book and co-authored a second: on her own, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013) and, with Adam Grant, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (2017). The latter was written after the death of her husband, David Goldberg. Both books became bestsellers.

Before Facebook, Sandberg was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google. She also was involved in launching Google's philanthropic arm Google.org. Before Google, Sandberg served as chief of staff for the United States Department of the Treasury. In 2012, she was named in "Time 100," an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world assembled by Time.

Background
Sandberg is the daughter of Adele and Joel Sandberg and the oldest of three siblings. Her father, Joel, is an optometrist, and her mother, Adele, has a Ph. D. and worked as a French teacher before concentrating on raising her children. Her family moved to North Miami Beach, Florida when she was two years old. She attended public school and taught aerobics in the 1980s while still in high school.

In 1987, Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College and graduated in 1991 summa cum laude with an A.B. in economics and was awarded the John H. Williams Prize for the top graduating student in economics. While at Harvard, Sandberg met then-professor Larry Summers, who became her mentor and thesis adviser. Summers recruited her to be his research assistant at the World Bank, where she worked on health projects in India dealing with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness.

In 1993, she enrolled at Harvard Business School and in 1995 she earned her M.B.A. with highest distinction. After business school, Sandberg worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company. From 1996 to 2001, Sandberg served as Chief of Staff to then United States Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers under President Bill Clinton where she helped lead the Treasury’s work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis.

She joined Google Inc. in 2001 and served as its Vice President of Global Online Sales & Operations, from November 2001 to March 2008. She was responsible for online sales of Google's advertising & publishing products and also for sales operations of Google's consumer products & Google Book Search.
Facebook

Facebook
In late 2007, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, met Sandberg at a Christmas party; at the time, she was considering becoming a senior executive for The Washington Post Company. Zuckerberg had no formal search for a COO but thought of Sandberg as "a perfect fit" for this role. They spent more time together in January 2008 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and in March 2008 Facebook announced hiring Sheryl Sandberg away from Google.

After joining the company, Sandberg quickly began trying to figure out how to make Facebook profitable. Before she joined, the company was "primarily interested in building a really cool site; profits, they assumed, would follow." By late spring, Facebook's leadership had agreed to rely on advertising, "with the ads discreetly presented"; by 2010, Facebook became profitable. According to Facebook, Sandberg oversees the firm's business operations including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy and communications.

Her executive compensation for FY 2011 was $300,000 base salary plus $30,491,613 in FB shares. According to her Form 3, she also owns 38,122,000 stock options and restricted stock units (worth approx. $1.45 billion as of mid-May 2012) that will be completely vested by May 2022, subject to her continued employment through the vesting date.

In 2012 she became the eighth member (and the first female member) of Facebook's board of directors.

Personal
In 2004, Sandberg married David Goldberg. The couple lived in Northern California with their two children. Tragically, David died from a head injury after falling from a treadmill while the couple was on vacaction in Mexico.

Sandberg's grief inspired her to pair with psychologist Adam Grant in order to write Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. The book, published in 2017, became a New York Times bestseller. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved, 2013; updated, 2017.)

Adam Grant is a psychologist and the New York Times best-selling author of Originals: How Nonconformists Move the World (2016) and Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (2013). His also co-authored, with Sheryl Sandberg, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (2017).

As Wharton’s top-rated professor for five straight years, Adam is a leading expert on how we can find motivation and meaning, and live more generous and creative lives. He has been recognized as one of the world’s 25 most influential management thinkers and received distinguished scholarly achievement awards from the American Psychological Association and the National Science Foundation.

Grant received his B.A. from Harvard University with Phi Beta Kappa honors and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He serves as a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times on work and psychology.

His keynote speaking and consulting clients include Facebook and Google, the NBA, Teach For America, and the U.S. Army and Navy. Adam is a former Junior Olympic springboard diver. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, their two daughters, and their son. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[A] remarkable achievement: generous, honest, almost unbearably poignant. It reveals an aspect of Sandberg's character that Lean In had suggested but…did not fully demonstrate: her impulse to be helpful. She has little to gain by sharing, in excruciating detail, the events of her life over the past two years. This is a book that will be quietly passed from hand to hand, and it will surely offer great comfort to its intended readers.… The intimacy of detail that fills the book is unsettling; there were times I felt that I had come across someone's secret knowledge, that I shouldn't have been in possession of something that seemed so deeply private. But the candor and simplicity with which she shares all of it…is a kind of gift.
Caitlin Flanagan - New York Times Book Review

Sandberg is wise and honest and funny and practical in ways that are likely to stay with the reader. Her deeply personal book is more than memoir; interspersed with devastating scenes are equally powerful strategies for coping when your world has gone tilt.
Tracy Grant - Washington Post

Being among the most powerful women in the world didn’t spare Sheryl Sandberg from the sudden death of her husband, not quite two years ago. Option B is at its best when pinpointing specific tips for coping with overwhelming grief. Sandberg writes how she created new rituals, such as taking a moment at dinner each evening to express gratitude for something positive that day, and declaring ‘small wins.’ Day by day, the book says, these small victories can become building blocks to a return to emotional equanimity.
Diane Cole - Wall Street Journal

Option B chronicles Sandberg’s devastating loss, her grief and how she emerged from it with a new perspective on life. The most affecting parts of the book recount not just Sandberg's grief, but that of her children.… "Tragedy does not have to be personal, pervasive or permanent, but resilience can be," she writes. "We can build it and carry it with us throughout our lives."
Associated Press

Intimate, personal.… Within Option B there are lessons for leaders who want to make organizations more resilient, help employees recover from a loss—or crisis—and create workplaces that are more prepared to deal with failure.
Jena McGregor - Los Angeles Times

Like her debut volume, Sandberg’s Option B is an optimistic book, even if one riven with sorrow. She argues that after adversity and loss, there is an opportunity for "post-traumatic growth." Thus the book is in part a moving memoir.
Rebecca Mead - New Yorker

Sandberg’s new book is tough, full of the raw, painful emotions.… Option B [has] advice for people who are grieving. But it’s also a book for nearly everyone — people who may not know what to say or do in the wake of a tragedy. It’s also a deeply optimistic book, framed around the question, what’s next?
Rebecca J. Rosen - Atlantic

Admirably honest, optimistic.… Sandberg shares a great deal of herself and what she has learned. At its core the book helps those who have been felled by despair: a guide both for those who have directly suffered loss and for those who are close to people who have.
Economist

[H]elpful and hopeful.… [A]uthors show how… strengthened relationships and a greater sense of gratitude, can be gleaned from awful situations. Those suffering [or] seeking to provide comfort should find both solace and wisdom in this book.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) While the authors concede that everyone's story is different, they explore…what others have gone through in order to find joy and strength after difficulty.… This captivating memoir offers genuine hope.
Library Journal

A memoir of the loss of a husband and finding a path forward beyond the grieving process.… A book that provides illuminating ways to make headway through the days when there doesn't seem to be a way forward.
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 Option B … then take off on your own:

1. What do you think of Sheryl Sandberg's Option B? Do you find it enlightening? Has it helped you cope with your own grief or offer guidance for helping others? What was your experience reading the book? Did you feel uncomfortable reading some of the rawer, more intimate sections? Or did the book's candor create a more sympathetic connection between you (the reader) and Sandberg (the author)?

2. Sandberg writes about starting rituals, such as taking a moment each evening to express gratitude for something positive that happened that day. What was, in your mind, the most important or helpful advice in Option B? What struck you most or resonated with your own personal experiences? Are there suggestions or observations in the book you disagree with?

3. If you read Lean In, does Sandberg come across the same in Option B … or does she seem different? If you haven't read Lean In, how you feel about Sheryl Sandberg: what kind of person is she?

4. Sandberg acknowledges that her wealth and status insulate her from the economic insecurity many feel after loss. As one of the top executives and most accomplished women in the country, is she capable of offering advice to us more mud-bound souls (an occasional criticism of Lean In)? When, on the first anniversary of their father's death, she takes her kids to a SpaceX launch, does someone like Sandberg have something of relevance to say to the rest of us? Does wealth cushion one from despair and grief? Or, ultimately, is money irrelevant?

5. Talk about the book's title and its derivation. What is "Option A" and why is it "not available"?

6. What are the "three P's" that, according to Martin Seligman, hinder recovery after trauma or loss? Talk about why they end up working against us when we most need comfort?

7. It can be fashionable to level scorn at our over-use of social media. But Sandberg points to Facebook as a venue to help people express their own grief or offer solace to others. What are your thoughts and experiences regarding Facebook?

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

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Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Woman's Prison
Piper Kerman, 2010
Randm House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385523394

Summary
With a career, a boyfriend, and a loving family, Piper Kerman barely resembles the reckless young woman who delivered a suitcase of drug money ten years before. But that past has caught up with her.

Convicted and sentenced to fifteen months at the infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, the well-heeled Smith College alumna is now inmate #11187–424—one of the millions of people who disappear “down the rabbit hole” of the American penal system. From her first strip search to her final release, Kerman learns to navigate this strange world with its strictly enforced codes of behavior and arbitrary rules.

She meets women from all walks of life, who surprise her with small tokens of generosity, hard words of wisdom, and simple acts of acceptance. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and at times enraging, Kerman’s story offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison—why it is we lock so many away and what happens to them when they’re there.

The film adaptation was produced by Netflix and released in 2013. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Smith College
• Currently—

Piper Kerman is an American memoirist whose experiences in prison provided the basis for the comedy-drama series Orange Is the New Black.

Kerman was born in 1970 in Boston into a family with many doctors, attorneys and educators and graduated from Smith College in 1992. A self-described WASP, in 1993 she entered into a romantic relationship with Nora Jansen, a woman who dealt heroin for a West African kingpin. Kerman laundered money for the drug operation.

In 1998, Kerman was indicted for money laundering and drug trafficking and subsequently pled guilty. Beginning in 2004, she served 13 months of a 15 month sentence at FCI Danbury, a minimum security prison located in Danbury, Connecticut.

At present, Kerman is vice president of a Washington, D.C.–based communications firm that works with foundations and nonprofits. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Kerman published her best-selling memoir about her experiences in prison, Orange Is the New Black, in 2010. An adaptation of the same name by Jenji Kohan, the Emmy award-winning creator of Weeds, debuted in July 2013 exclusively on Netflix. Kerman's analogue on the series ("Piper Chapman") is played by Taylor Schilling. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Kerman neither sentimentalizes nor lectures. She keeps the details of her despair to a minimum along with her discussion of the outrages of the penal system, concentrating instead on descriptions of her direct experiences, both harrowing and hilarious, and the personalities of the women who shared them with her.
Boston Globe

Kerman puts us inside, from the first strip search...to the prison-issue unwashed underwear to the cucumbers and raw cauliflower that count as salad.... This book is impossible to put down because she could be you. Or your best friend. Or your daughter.
Los Angeles Times

Orange transcends the memoir genre's usual self-centeredness to explore how human beings can always surprise you. You'd expect bad behavior in prison. But it's the moments of joy, friendship and kindness that the author experienced that make Orange so moving and lovely…You sense [Kerman] wrote Orange to make readers think not about her but her fellow inmates. And, boy, does she succeed.
USA Today

Ten years after a fleeting post-Smith College flirtation with drug trafficking, Piper Kerman was arrested–a P.O.W. in the war on drugs. In Orange Is the New Black, Kerman presents–devoid of self-pity, and with novelistic flair–life in the clink as less Caged Heat and more Steel Magnolias.
Vanity Fair

Relying on the kindness of strangers during her year's stint at the minimum security correctional facility in Danbury, Conn., Kerman...found that federal prison wasn't all that bad. In fact, she made good friends doing her time among the other women, many street-hardened drug users.... Kerman's ordeal indeed proved life altering.
Publishers Weekly

Kerman finds herself submerged in the unique and sometimes overwhelming culture of prison.... Kerman quickly learns the rules...and carves a niche for herself even as she witnesses the way the prison system fails those who are condemned to it, many of them nonviolent drug offenders. An absorbing, meditative look at life behind bars. —Kristine Huntley
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 start a discussion for Orange is the New Black:

1. Talk about Piper Kerman. What do you think of her? Does she deserve the sentence she received?

2. How would you describe the prison culture—its hierarchy and values. What must Piper learn in order to adapt to, or even survive, prison life? Discuss about how Piper's relationships changed—both inside the prison walls and outside prison.

3. Do you have favorites among the inmates? Least favorites? Are there any inmates you come to admire? if so, why? Are there inmates who don't deserve to be in prison?

4. Talk about the relationship of the inmates with the guards and prison authorities.

5. In many ways, this is a coming-of-age story. What are the ways in which prison changes Piper? What does she come to learn about who she is?

6. Has reading Orange Is the New Black altered your views of the criminal justice system? Or does the memoir basically confirm what you believed?

7. Why is being sent to prison frequently referred to as "disappearing down the rabbit hole"?

8. Does our criminal justice system work? Does prison work? If you could, what would you change about the legal and/or the prison system?

9. Watch the Netflix film adaptation—either selected clips or in its entirety. How does it compare with the book?

10. Talk about homosexuality, both in Piper's life and as it exists in prison.

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

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The Orchard: A Memoir
Theresa Weir, 2011
Grand Central Publishing
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446584692

Summary
The Orchard is the story of a street-smart city girl who must adapt to a new life on an apple farm after she falls in love with Adrian Curtis, the golden boy of a prominent local family whose lives and orchards seem to be cursed.

Married after only three months, young Theresa finds life with Adrian on the farm far more difficult and dangerous than she expected. Rejected by her husband's family as an outsider, she slowly learns for herself about the isolated world of farming, pesticides, environmental destruction, and death, even as she falls more deeply in love with her husband, a man she at first hardly knew and the land that has been in his family for generations.

Theresa becomes a reluctant player in their attempt to keep the codling moth from destroying the orchard. Yet she and Adrian eventually come to know that their efforts will not only fail but will ultimately take an irreparable toll. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Aka—Anne Frasier
• Birth—ca. 1950s
• Where—Burlington, Iowa, USA
• Education—Artesia High School, Artesia, New Mexico
• Awards—Romantic Times Best Romantic-Adventure
Writer Award; Romance Writers of America Award
(RITA); Daphne du Maurier Award; Romantic Times
Career Achievement Award.
• Currently—lives in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota

Theresa Weir is the real name of Anne Frasier, a USA Today bestselling author of nineteen novels that have spanned the genres of suspense, mystery, thriller, romantic suspense, paranormal, and memoir. Her books have been translated into twenty languages.

Weir’s debut title was the cult phenomenon Amazon Lily, initially published by Pocket Books and later reissued by Bantam Books. Writing as Theresa Weir, she won a RITA for romantic suspense (Cool Shade), and a year later the Daphne du Maurier for paranormal romance (Bad Karma).

In her more recent Anne Frasier career, her thriller and suspense titles hit the USA Today list (Hush, Sleep Tight, Play Dead) and were featured in Mystery Guild, Literary Guild, and Book of the Month Club. Hush was both a RITA and Daphne du Maurier finalist. Well-known and respected in the mystery community, she served as hardcover judge for the Thriller presented by International Thriller Writers, and was guest of honor at the Diversicon 16 mystery/science fiction conference held in Minneapolis in 2008. Frasier books have received high praise from print publications and online review sites. Her short stories and poetry can be found in Discount Noir, Once Upon a Crime, and The Lineup, Poems on Crime. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, and Crimespace.

Life
Theresa Weir was born in Burlington, Iowa, a river town settled by German, Irish, and Dutch immigrants. Her blue-collar parents divorced when she was six, and the next twelve years were spent in poverty, moving to and from Florida, Iowa, California, Illinois, and New Mexico. She graduated from Artesia High School, Artesia, New Mexico.

After high school she worked as a waitress, a factory worker at Albuquerque’s Levi Strauss (where she sewed the Levi’s logo on the back pocket of jeans), followed by a secretarial position at Wally's LP Gas in Santa Fe, New Mexico. At age nineteen, she joined her uncle at his bar in rural Illinois across the Mississippi River from her birthplace of Burlington, Iowa. While tending bar at the Pilot House, she met an apple farmer and the two married three months later.

Shortly after moving to the farm, in the mid-1980s, Weir began writing. Her first manuscript, Amazon Lily (under Theresa Weir) was rejected by multiple agents and publishers because they believed that her hero was unlikable. Four years later, in 1988, she was offered a contract with Pocket Books—and her ground breaking, multi-award winning Amazon Lily was published.

The novel finally sold and went on to win the Romantic Times Best Romantic Adventure Writer Award, but Frasier continued to encounter editors who disliked her characters. In Frasier's words, her characters are "imperfect people who had problems, who didn't always make the right choices, but in the end triumphed." The characters have real, interesting problems, including a hero with agoraphobia and a heroine with an eating disorder.

Her work has continued to be popular with readers and fellow romance writers, however, and in 1999 she was awarded a Romance Writers of America RITA Award for Best Romantic Suspense for her novel Cool Shade. She has also been awarded the Daphne du Maurier award for romantic suspense, and she has been awarded Romantic Times Career Achievement Award and been nominated for a Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award for Long Night Moon.

During her years of writing romance novels, Frasier's editors often asked her "to remove the blood and bodies" from her plots. She decided that instead it would be easier for her to remove the romance and focus more completely on the mystery of the story. After several years, she found a publisher willing to allow her to move her writing into this new direction. Although she has now stopped releasing new romance novels, her thrillers do contain elements of romance. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
[S]earing...the past is artfully juxtaposed with the present in this finely wrought work. Its haunting passages will linger long after the last page is turned.
Boston Globe

What do those perfectly round, shiny red apples really cost? This poignant memoir of love, labor, and dangerous pesticides reveals the terrible true price.
Karen Holt - O Magazine

Equal parts moving love story and environmental warning.
Entertainment Weekly

The use of heavy pesticides over decades on Midwestern farms forms the dark, moody leitmotiv of this affecting memoir set largely around a 1970s orchard by thriller writer Weir (aka Anne Frasier). As a 21-year-old from a divorced home who grew up in Miami and Albuquerque, with a talent for art but little prospects to educate herself, Weir gravitated toward the Midwest, where she worked as a waitress in her uncle’s bar in Henderson County, Ill., just off the Iowa border; farmers dropped in for beer and a secret stash of porn her uncle kept in the back, their arms dusted with the herbicide they used in the fields. Smitten with young, handsome Adrian Curtis, the scion of a large apple orchard that seemed to be under a curse of bad luck, Weir soon married the serious, reticent young farmer and lived with him in a small cabin on his parents’ farm, although she hadn’t a clue about being a farm wife; moreover, her in-laws despised her as an outsider (“white trash”) and nobody expected her to last long. Nonetheless, the marriage endured happily, two healthy children were born, and Weir improbably managed to start a career as a writer. But then both Adrian and his father were diagnosed with and died from cancer. Afraid of further contaminating themselves, Weir and her two children eventually moved out of the county. Weir, now living in Minneapolis, narrates a truly disquieting tale of familial dislocation and rupture.
Publishers Weekly

A foreboding memoir of the author's early marriage into an agricultural family, and her emotional navigation between rootlessness and heritage.... The strongest feature of the book is the determined loyalty that allows Weir to discover beauty amid strife, as well as the touching conclusion.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The author’s decision to move to Illinois and help her uncle with his bar was made on a whim. Have you ever made a decision that seemed small and insignificant at the time, but in the end redesigned your life?

2. How might the lack of adult guidance in the author’s childhood have laid the groundwork for her decision to get married so quickly?

3. Why did the author stay on the farm, especially in the beginning? Could her unconventional upbringing have led to an acceptance of a situation many women wouldn’t have tolerated? How did her mother’s rocky relationships play into Theresa’s unclear view of marriage?

4. Would you have stayed given similar circumstances?

5. The author is never quite sure why Adrian married her. Was it passive aggressive behavior on his part? Did he want to annoy his mother? Was he attracted to someone who represented the freedom he could never have? Or was it something else?

6. Did the author’s ambivalence toward her mother-in-law antagonize the situation? Should the author have tried harder to fit in?

7. A scion is a rogue branch that is unlike the rest of the tree. How were the author and her husband both scions? Was one more of a scion than the other?

8. Some cultures believe that no one can really own the land. Should farmers be monitored more closely and held accountable for farming practices? Do they have a responsibility that extends beyond themselves? Or should they be able to do whatever they want with the land they own?

9. The Orchard reads a little like a dark fairy tale. What are some similarities between The Orchard and a fairy tale?

10. In one scene, we’re given insight into what drives Ruth. In many ways she’s a product of her time, her generation, her childhood, and her environment. Her behavior would have been considered acceptable in certain circles, and her battle was not only for the farm, but for her newly found identity. Did you ever feel sympathy for her as the life she’d worked so hard to build collapsed?

11. We know that salesmen once drank the herbicide they were selling as a way of demonstrating the product’s “safety”, but do you think Lily really existed?

12. What scene impacted you the most?

I3. In the final scene, do the roses have significance beyond a simple gift of flowers?

14. Did you learn anything new about apples? If so, what? Will you ever look at an apple the same way again?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey
Rinker Buck, 2015
Simon & Schuster
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451659160

Summary
An epic account of traveling the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way—in a covered wagon with a team of mules, an audacious journey that hasn’t been attempted in a century—which also chronicles the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country.

Spanning two thousand miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific coast, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America. In the fifteen years before the Civil War, when 400,000 pioneers used the trail to emigrate West—scholars still regard this as the largest land migration in history—it united the coasts, doubled the size of the country, and laid the groundwork for the railroads. Today, amazingly, the trail is all but forgotten.

Rinker Buck is no stranger to grand adventures. His first travel narrative, Flight of Passage, was hailed by The New Yorker as “a funny, cocky gem of a book,” and with The Oregon Trail he brings the most important route in American history back to glorious and vibrant life.

Traveling from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Baker City, Oregon, over the course of four months, Buck is accompanied by three cantankerous mules, his boisterous brother, Nick, and an “incurably filthy” Jack Russell terrier named Olive Oyl. Along the way, they dodge thunderstorms in Nebraska, chase runaway mules across the Wyoming plains, scout more than five hundred miles of nearly vanished trail on foot, cross the Rockies, and make desperate fifty-mile forced marches for water.

The Buck brothers repair so many broken wheels and axels that they nearly reinvent the art of wagon travel itself. They also must reckon with the ghost of their father, an eccentric yet loveable dreamer whose memory inspired their journey across the plains and whose premature death, many years earlier, has haunted them both ever since.

But The Oregon Trail is much more than an epic adventure. It is also a lively and essential work of history that shatters the comforting myths about the trail years passed down by generations of Americans. Buck introduces readers to the largely forgotten roles played by trailblazing evangelists, friendly Indian tribes, female pioneers, bumbling U.S. Army cavalrymen, and the scam artists who flocked to the frontier to fleece the overland emigrants.

Generous portions of the book are devoted to the history of old and appealing things like the mule and the wagon. We also learn how the trail accelerated American economic development. Most arresting, perhaps, are the stories of the pioneers themselves—ordinary families whose extraordinary courage and sacrifice made this country what it became.

At once a majestic journey across the West, a significant work of history, and a moving personal saga, The Oregon Trail draws readers into the journey of a lifetime. It is a wildly ambitious work of nonfiction from a true American original. It is a book with a heart as big as the country it crosses. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 29, 1950
• Where—Morristown, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Bowdoin College
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in northwest Connecticut

Rinker Buck is an award-winning American author who first became known as the author of a 1997 memoir Flight of Passage. His second book, The Oregan Trail, based on his trip with is brother in a covered wagon along the famous trail, was released in 2015.

Early life
Rinker Buck was born and raised in Morristown, New Jersey, the fourth child of Mary Patricia Buck (nee Kernahan) and political activist and Look Magazine publisher Thomas Francis Buck. He has five brothers and five sisters.

Flight
In the winter of 1965/1966, Rinker, then only15, and his older brother Kernahan, 17, a licensed pilot, devised a plan to rebuild their father's 1948 Piper PA-11 and fly it from Somerset Hills Airport (N64) in Basking Ridge, NJ to Capistrano Airport (L38) in San Juan Capistrano, CA. Their journey took six days and was completed in July 1966. The flight is the subject of Buck's 1997 memoir Flight of Passage.

Journalism
Buck began his career in journalism shortly after graduating from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. His first job was writing for the Berkshire Eagle in 1973. He then served as reporter for New York, Life, Hartford Courant, Adweek and several other national publications.

Awards
Buck is the recipient of three awards: Eugene S. Pulliam Journalism Writing Award; Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award; and the Max Kurant Award for Excellence in Aviation Coverage (AOPA). (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/20/2015.)

Book Reviews
Absorbing.... The many layers in The Oregon Trail are linked by Mr. Buck’s voice, which is alert and unpretentious in a manner that put me in mind of Bill Bryson’s comic tone in A Walk in the Woods.... He’s good company on the page, and you root for him.... He’s particularly winning on how, as he puts it, "the vaudeville of American life was acted out on the trail." ... This shaggy pilgrimage describes a form of happiness sought, and happiness found.
Dwight Garner - New York Times

Enchanting.... Interspersed with the story of his westward journey, Mr. Buck entertains and enlightens with discourses on American history and culture.... He has delivered us a book filled with so much love—for mules, for his brother, for America itself.... Long before Oregon, Rinker Buck has convinced us that the best way to see America is from the seat of a covered wagon.
Gregory Crouch - Wall Street Journal

Awe-inspiring.... Charming, big-hearted, impassioned, and a lot of fun to read.... If Buck doesn’t quite make you want to hitch up your own wagon, his rapturous account will still leave you daydreaming and hungry to see this land.
Boston Globe

Interwoven in Buck’s adventure tale is a fascinating history of the development of the trail, its heyday, and the colorful characters that made the journey.... Whether their primary interest is American history, adventure travel or a captivating memoir, readers are sure to be delighted by this humorous and entertaining story that allows us to believe that Walter Mitty–like fantasies can indeed come true.
Associated Press

A quintessential American story.... The Oregon Trail attains its considerable narrative power by interweaving pioneer history with Rinker-and-Nick-and-mules interpersonal strife with poignant memories of the author’s father, who took his own family on a covered wagon journey through New Jersey and Pennsylvania in 1958.... This makes The Oregon Trail a rare and effective work of history—the trail stories of the Buck brothers bring humor and drama, and the pioneer biographies supply a context that makes every other aspect of the book snap into sharp relief.... The experience of The Oregon Trail stands squarely opposite much of what is modern—it’s slow travel with poor communication, it places struggle before comfort, and it represents a connection with history rather than a search for the newest of the new. In that sense, you’d think the book would be slow-paced and fusty, but it’s really something else: raw, visceral, and often laugh-out-loud funny. For anyone who has ever dreamed of seeing America slowly from the back of a wagon, The Oregon Trail is a vicarious thrill.
James Norton - Christian Science Monitor

A trip back in time.... Buck brings the land to life in a richly researched book that draws heavily from journals kept by the pioneers and their memoirs.... His exploration of America and himself is a joy to read. (4 out of 4 stars)
USA Today

What a way to spend a summer! Rinker Buck lived the dream of countless red-blooded Americans.... The Oregon Trail is must reading for anyone in love with the West.”
Jules Wagman - Cleveland Plain Dealer

This book is a keeper.... The straight-ahead title scarcely does justice to this rollicking good read, a book that’s as much fun as the Brothers Buck seem to be as they travel from Missouri to Oregon by covered wagon.... Observant, conversational, and often funny, The Oregon Trail makes for a satisfying trip.
Seattle Times

An incredible true story.... Weaving a tale somewhere between a travelogue and a history lesson, Buck traces the iconic path literally and figuratively as he re-creates the great migration with his brother and a Jack Russell terrier.
Entertainment Weekly

Laugh-out-loud masterpiece.... Alternately harrowing and exhilarating.... The book is an unremitting delight.
Willamette Week

An entertaining and enlightening account of one of America’s most legendary migrations. Even readers who don’t know a horse from a mule will find themselves swept up in this inspiring and masterful tale of perseverance and the pioneer spirit.
Publishers Weekly

Romantic.... Compelling.... The Oregon trip is fraught with mishaps, near-death experiences, and plain bad luck. But there were also angels along the way helping them get through.
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Astonishing.... By turns frankly hilarious, historically elucidating, emotionally touching, and deeply informative.... A crazy whim of a trip on a covered wagon turns into an inspired exploration of American identity.
Kirkus Reviews

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Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
Adam Grant, 2016
Penguin Publishing
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525429562

Summary
The national bestseller that examines how people can champion new ideas—and how leaders can fight groupthink

With Give and Take, Adam Grant not only introduced a landmark new paradigm for success but also established himself as one of his generation’s most compelling and provocative thought leaders.

In Originals he again addresses the challenge of improving the world, but now from the perspective of becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions. How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all?

Using surprising studies and stories spanning business, politics, sports, and entertainment, Grant explores how to recognize a good idea, speak up without getting silenced, build a coalition of allies, choose the right time to act, and manage fear and doubt; how parents and teachers can nurture originality in children; and how leaders can build cultures that welcome dissent.

Learn from an entrepreneur who pitches his start-ups by highlighting the reasons not to invest, a woman at Apple who challenged Steve Jobs from three levels below, an analyst who overturned the rule of secrecy at the CIA, a billionaire financial wizard who fires employees for failing to criticize him, and a TV executive who didn’t even work in comedy but saved Seinfeld from the cutting-room floor.

The payoff is a set of groundbreaking insights about rejecting conformity and improving the status quo. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 13, 1981
• Where—West Bloomfield, Michigan, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; Ph.D., University of Michigan
• Currently—lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Adam M. Grant is an author and a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is considered both the youngest-tenured and the most highly-rated professor at the Wharton School. He is a former junior Olympic springboard diver and a professional magician.

Academic career
Grant is a researcher on success, work motivation, and generosity. He received his B.A. from Harvard University, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan, completing it in less than three years. He worked as an adjunct professor at Michigan, then as an assistance professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. At the age of 29 he was became a tenured professor at Wharton.

Books
His first book, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success (2013), was a New York Times bestseller, translated into twenty-seven languages, and named one of the best books of 2013 by Amazon, Apple, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal—as well as one of Oprah's riveting reads, Fortune's must-read business books, Harvard Business Review's ideas that shaped management, and the Washington Post's books every leader should read.

His second book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (2016) has also been a bestseller and was published to solid reviews.

Other
Grant has presented for leaders at organizations such as Google, the NFL, Merck, Pixar, Goldman Sachs, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, The United Nations, The World Economic Forum, and the US Army, the US Navy, and the US Air Force. He writes regularly about work and psychology as a LinkedIn Influencer.

Grant's research has been featured in bestselling books, including Quiet by Susan Cain, Drive and To Sell Is Human by Daniel Pink, and The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor, as well as hundreds of media outlets, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, USA Today, Financial Times, Oprah Magazine, and Freakonomics blog.

His call-center study has been credited with changing perspectives on workplace motivation. In 2011, Fortune Magazine named him one of the Top 40 Business Professors Under 40. BusinessWeek then named Grant one of their favorite professors in 2012, and Susan Cain cited Grant's research on introverts as one of the 23 biggest ideas of the year. (FromWikipedia. Retrieved 2/21/2016.)

Book Reviews
Wharton professor [Grant's]...approach is mainly descriptive, but does include some concrete steps for would-be innovators to develop their ideas, and for business leaders to support them. With a foreword by Sheryl Sandberg.
Publishers Weekly

Originals are people with creative ideas that defy the traditional, but when their visions are made reality the world is improved.... Grant includes many examples, ideas, and encouragements for those who wish to try. He concludes the book with 30 practical actions to unleash originality.... [E]joyable and full of useful information. —Bonnie A. Tollefson, Rogue Valley Manor Lib., Medford, OR
Library Journal

A blend of old and new—and sometimes original—informs this pop-science piece on creativity and its discontents... Grant sometimes gets tangled in jargon, but he turns up some fascinating tidbits.... A mixed bag but of interest to readers looking to jump-start their creative powers and raise quick-witted children.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if and when they're made available. In the meantime use these LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for Originality...then take off on your own:

1. Adam Grant proposes that all of us have creatuve, even original, ideas even if we don't consider ourselves as nonconformists. Where would you place yourself on the spectrum of non-creative→creative? Think of some creative ideas you've had about improvements in the way you approach things, perhaps changes to routine tasks you perform day to day—or anything, really.

2. Follow-up to Question 1: What, according to Grant, is the difference between creativity and originality? Where would you place yourself on that spectrum: creative→original?

3. If Grant is right, that many originals never act on their ideas, what holds them back? Any personal experience in that area?

4. Grant asserts that sexism can subvert originality: women, say at work, are often dismissed, even penalized, for originality while men are often rewarded for it. Have you ever seen or had first-hand experience with this bias in action? Is there a way out of it?

5. What kind of organization or institutional structures promote originality according to Grant?

6. Talk about Grant's view of middle managers. Why does he see those individuals as less creative than others on the upper or lower rungs of management?

7. How can we spur creativity or originality in our children? How might say, approval, from teachers or parents hinder its development?

8. What internet browser do you use, and what does it say about you?

9. Grant provides various examples of original individuals. Whose story do you find most interesting or most impressive?

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

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The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates
Wes Moore, 2010
Random House
250 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385528207

Summary
Two kids with the same name were born blocks apart in the same decaying city within a year of each other. One grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar, army officer, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. Here is the story of two boys and the journey of a generation.

In December of 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship.

The same paper ran a huge story about four young men who had killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One of their names was Wes Moore

Wes Moore, the Rhodes Scholar, became obsessed with the story of this man he’d never met but who shared much more than space in the same newspaper. Both had grown up in similar neighborhoods and had had difficult childhoods.

After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he finally he wrote a letter to the other Wes, now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting Wes: Who are you? Where did it go wrong for you? How did this happen?

That letter led to a correspondence and deepening relationship that has lasted for several years. Over dozens of letters and prison visits, Wes discovered that the other Wes had had a life not unlike his own: they were both fatherless, were both in and out of school; they’d hung out onsimilar corners with similar crews, and had run into trouble with the police.

And they had both felt a desire for something better for themselves and their families—and the sense that something better was always just out of reach. At each stage of their young lives, they came across similar moments of decision that would alter their fates

Told in alternating dramatic narratives that take readers from heartwrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1978
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Reared—Bronx, New York, New York
• Education—B.A., Johns Hopkins University; M. Litt, Oxford
University
• Awards—Rhodes Scholar
• Currently—lives in New Jersey

Wes Moore is a Rhodes Scholar and a combat veteran of Afghanistan. As a White House Fellow, he worked as a special assistant to Secretary Condoleezza Rice at the State Department. He was a featured speaker at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, was named one of Ebony magazine’s Top 30 Leaders Under 30 (2007), and, most recently, was dubbed one of the top young business leaders in New York by Crain’s New York Business. He works in New York City. (From the publisher.)

More
Wes Moore is a youth advocate, Army combat veteran, promising business leader and author.

Wes graduated Phi Theta Kappa as a commissioned officer from Valley Forge Military College in 1998 and Phi Beta Kappa from Johns Hopkins University in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in International Relations. At Johns Hopkins he was honored by the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame. He completed an M Litt in International Relations from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar in 2004. Wes was a para-trooper and Captain in the United States Army, serving a combat tour of duty in Afghanistan with the elite 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division in 2005–2006.

Wes spearheaded the American strategic support plan for the Afghan Reconciliation Program that unites former insurgents with the new Afghan Government. He is recognized as an authority on the rise and ramifica-tions of radical Islamism in the Western Hemisphere. A White House Fellow from 2006–2007, Wes served as a Special Assistant to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Following his time at the White House, Wes became an investment professional in New York at Citigroup, focusing on global technology and alternative investments. In 2009 he was selected as an Asia Society Fellow. Moore was named one of Ebony magazine’s “Top 30 Leaders Under 30” for 2007 and Crain’s New York Business “40 Under 40 Rising Stars” in 2009.

Wes is passionate about supporting U.S. veterans and examining the roles education, mentoring and public service play in the lives of American youth. He serves on the board of the Iraq Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) and founded an organization called STAND! through Johns Hopkins that works with Baltimore youth involved in the criminal justice system. Wes was a featured speaker at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver and addressed the crowd from Invesco Field. He has also spoken at the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) Business Plan Competition, Southern Regional Conference of the National Society of Educators, the education reform session of the third annual Race & Reconciliation in America conference, and the first 9/11 National Day of Service and Remembrance.

He has been featured by such media outlets as People magazine, the New York Times, Washington Post, CSPAN, and MSNBC, amongst others. Wes’ first book, The Other Wes Moore, was published by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, in 2010.

Wes Moore was born in 1978 and was three years old when his father, a respected radio and television host, died in front of him. His mother, hoping for a better future for her family, made great sacrifices to send Wes and his sisters to private school. Caught between two worlds—the affluence of his classmates and the struggles of his neighbors—Wes began to act out, succumbing to bad grades, suspensions, and delinquencies. Desperate to reverse his behavior, his mother sent him to military school in Pennsylvania. After trying to escape five times, Wes finally decided to stop railing against the system and become accountable for his actions. By graduation six years later, Moore was company commander overseeing 125 cadets.

On December 11, 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran an article about how Wes, despite his troubled childhood, had just received The Rhodes Scholarship. At the same time, The Sun was running stories—eventually more than 100 in all—about four African-American men who were arrested for the murder of an off-duty Baltimore police officer during an armed robbery. One of the men convicted was just two years older than Wes, lived in the same neighborhood, and in an uncanny turn, was also named Wes Moore.

Wes wondered how two young men from the same city, who were around the same age, and even shared a name, could arrive at two completely different destinies. The juxtaposition between their lives, and the questions it raised about accountability, chance, fate and family, had a profound impact on Wes. He decided to write to the other Wes Moore, and much to his surprise, a month later he received a letter back. He visited the other Wes in prison over a dozen times, spoke with his family and friends, and discovered startling parallels between their lives: both had difficult childhoods, they were both fatherless, were having trouble in the classroom; they’d hung out on similar corners with similar crews, and had run into trouble with the police. Yet at each stage of their lives, at similar moments of decision, they would head down different paths towards astonishingly divergent destinies. Wes realized in their two stories was a much larger tale about the conse-quences of personal responsibility and the imperativeness of education and community for a generation of boys searching for their way.

Seeking to help other young people to redirect their lives, Wes is committed to being a positive influence and helping kids find the support they need to enact change. Pointing out that a high school student drops out every nine seconds, Wes says that public servants—the teachers, mentors and volunteers who work with our youth—are as imperative to our national standing and survival as are our armed forces. “Public service does not have to be an occupation,” he says, “but it must be a way of life.”

Moore lives with his wife Dawn in New Jersey. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
The author emphasizes that the point of his book is not to depict a "good" Wes Moore and a "bad" Wes Moore. He says he wanted to illustrate not the differences between their lives but the similarities, particularly what it's like to grow up without a father in the house — an experience he shares with an estimated one out of three children, according to 2009 U.S. Census Bureau data. Moore's hope is that his story will encourage Americans to step in at crucial moments to help other troubled 12-year-olds. "It's not a race issue," he says. "It's a national issue which threatens the future of the United States. We're spending billions on prisons. Mathematically, it's unsustainable."
Deirdre Donahue - USA Today

(Starred review.) Two hauntingly similar boys take starkly different paths in this searing tale of the ghetto. Moore, an investment banker, Rhodes scholar, and former aide to Condoleezza Rice, was intrigued when he learned that another Wes Moore, his age and from the same area of Greater Baltimore, was wanted for killing a cop. Meeting his double and delving into his life reveals deeper likenesses: raised in fatherless families and poor black neighborhoods, both felt the lure of the money and status to be gained from dealing drugs. That the author resisted the criminal underworld while the other Wes drifted into it is chalked up less to character than to the influence of relatives, mentors, and expectations that pushed against his own delinquent impulses, to the point of exiling him to military school. Moore writes with subtlety and insight about the plight of ghetto youth, viewing it from inside and out; he probes beneath the pathologies to reveal the pressures—poverty, a lack of prospects, the need to respond to violence with greater violence—that propelled the other Wes to his doom. The result is a moving exploration of roads not taken.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) The author examines eight years in the lives of both Wes Moores to explore the factors and choices that led one to a Rhodes scholarship, military service, and a White House fellowship, and the other to drug dealing [and] prison.... Moore ends this haunting look at two lives with a call to action and a detailed resource guide. —Vanessa Bush
Booklist

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Other Wes Moore:

1. How well does Moore describe the culture of the streets, where young boys grow up believing that violence transforms them into men? Talk about the street culture—its violence, drug dealing, disdain for education. What creates that ethos and why do so many young men find it attractive?

2. In writing about the Wes Moore who is in prison, Wes Moore the author says, "The chilling truth is that his life could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his." What do you make of that statement? Do you think Moore is correct?

3. Oprah Winfrey has said that "when you hear this story, it's going to turn the way you think about free will and fate upside down." So, which is it...freedom or determinism? If determinism, what kind of determinism—God, cosmic fate, environment, biology, psychology? Or if freedom, to what degree are we free to choose and create our own destiny?

4. The overriding question of this book is what critical factors in the lives of these two men, who were similar in many ways, created such a vast difference in their destinies?

5. Talk about the role of family—and especially the present or absence of fathers—in the lives of children. Consider the role of the two mothers, Joy and Mary, as well as the care of the author's grandparents in this book.

6. Why did young Wes, who ran away from military school five times, finally decide to stay put?

7. Why was the author haunted by the story of his namesake? What was the reason he insisted on meeting him in prison? Talk about the awkwardness of the two Weses' first meeting and their gradual openness and sharing with one another.

8. From prison, the other Wes responded to the author's initial letter with his own letter, in which he said, "When you're in here, you think people don't even know you're alive anymore." Talk about the power of hope versus hopelessness for those imprisoned. What difference can it make to a prisoner to know that he or she is remembered?

8. The author Wes asked the prisoner Wes, "when did you first know you were a man?" Talk about the significance of that question...and how each man responded.

9. Has this book left you with any ideas for ameliorating the conditions that led to the imprisonment of the other Wes Moore? What can be done to ensure a more productive life for the many young men who grow up on the streets?

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

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Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class
Lawrence Otis Graham, 1999
HarperCollins
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060984380

Summary
In 1995, Lawrence Otis Graham wrote a first-person account of his observations of institutional racism perpetuated at an elite country club—Member of the Club

In Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class, Graham focuses his sights on the black upper class, looking at the people, places, and objects it comprises. His examination of the history of this elite — who refer to themselves as "our crowd" — serves as a first-person look at a small, tightly knit group that has wielded an increasingly large amount of power and prestige.

Debutante cotillions. Million-dollar homes. Summers in Martha's Vineyard and Sag Harbor. Membership in the Links, Jack & Jill, Deltas, Boule, and AKAs. An obsession with the right schools, families, social clubs, and skin complexion. This is the world of the black upper class and the focus of the first book written about the black elite by a member of this hard-to-penetrate group.

Author and TV commentator Graham, one of the nation's most prominent spokesmen on race and class, spent six years interviewing the wealthiest black families in America. He includes historical photos of a people that made their first millions in the 1870s. Graham tells who's in and who's not in the group today with separate chapters on the elite in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Nashville, and New Orleans. A new Introduction explains the controversy that the book elicited from both the black and white communities. (From the publisher.)

About the Author
• Birth—1962
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Raised—Westchester County, NY
• Education—B.A., Princeton Univesity; J.D., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Westchester County, New York

Lawrence Otis Graham is an attorney and commentator on race, politics, and class in America. He is one of the nation’s leading authors and experts on race, politics and class in America. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, he is the author of 14 books and numerous articles in such publications as the New York Times, Essence, Reader’s Digest, Glamour and U.S. News & World Report. His book, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class was a New York Times, L.A. Times and Blackboard bestseller.

Graham’s newest book, The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty is an important biography of U.S. Senator Blanche Bruce, the first black to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate. Graham is also the author of such books as The Best Companies for Minorities, Proversity—two Important guides on diversity in the workplace—as well as the very popular Member of the Club, which focused on his now-famous experience of leaving his New York law firm and going undercover as a busboy to expose racism, sexism and antisemitism at an all-white country club in Greenwich, Connecticut. That was originally a cover story on New York magazine.

Graham has appeared on more than one hundred TV shows including Oprah, Today Show, The View, Good Morning America, and has been profiled in USA Today, Time, Ebony, People Magazine and many other publications. He is a popular speaker at colleges, corporations and other institutions where he has addressed the issues of diversity and culture. His audiences have included Duke, UCLA, Howard, Yale, Kraft Foods, Corning, Xerox, Disney, American Library Association and many other organizations around the U.S. and Japan. His research and advice have appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

He is leading a campaign to get the U.S. Post Office to honor Senator Blanche Bruce on a stamp since the nation has never placed a black elected official on a stamp. Graham is married to the corporate executive, Pamela Thomas-Graham, who is the author of novels including Blue Blood and Orange Crushed. They live in Manhattan and Westchester County, New York. (From Wikipedia.)/p>

Book Reviews
A fascinating if unwieldy amalgam of popular history, sociological treatise and memoir....Graham clearly loves and admires the people he is writing about, and this is both the charm of the book and its great failing....Still...[Graham] has made a major contribution both to African-American studies and to the larger American picture.
Andrea Lee - The New York Times Book Review

Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class is the literary equivalent of the nose job Graham obtained so that he could "further buy into the aesthetic biases that many among the black elite hold so dear." Instead of reporting on the foibles of the black upper crust, Graham sucks up to it, providing little more than a breathless list of neighborhoods, vacation spots and social clubs dominated by folks who can pass the 'brown paper bag' test.
Jack White - Time

In this work, Graham, who exposed bias against African Americans in his sharp-tongued account of working at an elite country club (Member of the Club), here focuses on "America's black upper class": a conservative, well-to-do group that dates back to the first black millionaires in the 1870s and whose members are associated with institutions like the Links and the Oak Bluffs area of Martha's Vineyard.
Library Journal

[Graham's] insights into the story of blacks in vacation spots...are fascinating. Nevertheless, the ongoing claustrophobia of privilege can weary a reader. One walks away with the impression that Graham's effort could have been cut in half—and all one would have missed is an extra afternoon of interminable croquet, followed by cucumber sandwiches down by the gazebo.
Kirkus Reviews

Book Club Discussion Questions

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Our Kind of People:

1. Does Graham's book offer a critique or a glorification of the tightly-knit world of upper-class African-Americans?

2. What does it take to become part of this elite group? Can the self-made man or woman join?

3. Trace the historical background, the development, of this elite group of African-Americans and its separate-but-just-as-equal (or more-than-equal) world.

4. What do you think of the insuated resorts for the wealthy (black or white) on Martha's Vineyard, Sag Harbor? Do you find them alluring, claustrophobic, unfairly exclusive, enviable?

5. To what degree does Graham's place in his social milieu enable him to view it objectively. Do you think his familiarity helps him or hinders him in his assessment?

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

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Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell, 2008
Little, Brown & Company
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316017923

Summary
Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"—the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful.

He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.

Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 3, 1963
• Where—Fareham, Hampshire, England, U.K.
• Raised—Elmira, Ontario, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Toronto
• Currently—New York, New York, USA

Malcolm T. Gladwell is an English-Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has written five books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009), and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013). The first four books were on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Gladwell's books and articles often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences and make frequent and extended use of academic work, particularly in the areas of sociology, psychology, and social psychology. Gladwell was appointed to the Order of Canada 1n 2011.

Early life
Gladwell was born in Fareham, Hampshire, England. His mother is Joyce (Nation) Gladwell, a Jamaican-born psychotherapist. His father, Graham Gladwell, is a British mathematics professor. Gladwell has said that his mother is his role model as a writer. When he was six, his family moved to Elmira, Ontario, Canada.

Gladwell's father noted that Malcolm was an unusually single-minded and ambitious boy. When Malcolm was 11, his father allowed him to wander around the offices at his university, which stoked the boy's interest in reading and libraries. During his high school years, Gladwell was an outstanding middle-distance runner and won the 1,500 meter title at the 1978 Ontario High School 14-year-old championships in Kingston, Ontario. In the spring of 1982, Gladwell interned with the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C. He graduated with a degree in history from the University of Toronto's Trinity College in 1984.

Career
Gladwell's grades were not good enough for graduate school (as Gladwell puts it, "college was not an... intellectually fruitful time for me"), so he decided to go into advertising. After being rejected by every advertising agency he applied to, he accepted a journalism position at The American Spectator and moved to Indiana. He subsequently wrote for Insight on the News, a conservative magazine owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.

In 1987, Gladwell began covering business and science for the Washington Post, where he worked until 1996. In a personal elucidation of the 10,000 hour rule he popularized in Outliers, Gladwell notes, "I was a basket case at the beginning, and I felt like an expert at the end. It took 10 years—exactly that long."

When Gladwell started at The New Yorker in 1996 he wanted to "mine current academic research for insights, theories, direction, or inspiration." His first assignment was to write a piece about fashion. Instead of writing about high-class fashion, Gladwell opted to write a piece about a man who manufactured T-shirts, saying

...it was much more interesting to write a piece about someone who made a T-shirt for $8 than it was to write about a dress that costs $100,000. I mean, you or I could make a dress for $100,000, but to make a T-shirt for $8 – that's much tougher.

Gladwell gained popularity with two New Yorker articles, both written in 1996: "The Tipping Point" and "The Coolhunt." These two pieces would become the basis for Gladwell's first book, The Tipping Point, for which he received a $1 million advance. He continues to write for The New Yorker and also serves as a contributing editor for Grantland, a sports journalism website founded by ESPN's Bill Simmons.

Works
When asked for the process behind his writing, Gladwell has said...

I have two parallel things I'm interested in. One is I'm interested in collecting interesting stories, and the other is I'm interested in collecting interesting research. What I'm looking for is cases where they overlap.

The title for his first book, The Tipping Point (2000), came from the phrase "tipping point"—the moment in an disease epidemic when the virus reaches critical mass and begins to spread at a much higher rate.

Gladwell published Blink (2005), a book explaining how the human subconscious interprets events or cues and how past experiences can lead people to make informed decisions very rapidly.

Gladwell's third book, Outliers (2008) examines the way a person's environment, in conjunction with personal drive and motivation, affects his or her possibility and opportunity for success.

What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009) bundles together Gladwell's favorite articles from The New Yorker since he joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1996. The stories share a common idea, namely, the world as seen through the eyes of others, even if that other happens to be a dog.

David and Goliath (2013) explores the struggle of underdogs versus favorites. The book is partially inspired by a 2009 article Gladwell wrote for The New Yorker, "How David Beats Goliath."

Reception
The Tipping Point and Blink became international bestsellers, each selling over two million copies in the US.

David Leonhardt wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "In the vast world of nonfiction writing, Malcolm Gladwell is as close to a singular talent as exists today" and that Outliers "leaves you mulling over its inventive theories for days afterward." Ian Sample of The Guardian (UK) also wrote of Outliers that when brought together, "the pieces form a dazzling record of Gladwell's art. There is depth to his research and clarity in his arguments, but it is the breadth of subjects he applies himself to that is truly impressive."

Criticism of Gladwell tends to focus on the fact that he is a journalist and not a scientist, and as a result his work is prone to oversimplification. The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, "impervious to all forms of critical thinking" and said that Gladwell believes "a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule."

Gladwell has also been criticized for his emphasis on anecdotal evidence over research to support his conclusions. Steven Pinker, even while praising Gladwell's attractive writing style and content, sums up Gladwell as "a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning." Pinker accuses him of using "cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies" in Outliers.

Despite these criticisms Gladwell commands hefty speaking fees: $80,000 for one speech, according to a 2008 New York magazine article although some speeches he makes for free. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/02/2013.)

Book Reviews
In Outliers, Gladwell (The Tipping Point) once again proves masterful in a genre he essentially pioneered—the book that illuminates secret patterns behind everyday phenomena. His gift for spotting an intriguing mystery, luring the reader in, then gradually revealing his lessons in lucid prose, is on vivid display. Outliers begins with a provocative look at why certain five-year-old boys enjoy an advantage in ice hockey, and how these advantages accumulate over time. We learn what Bill Gates, the Beatles and Mozart had in common: along with talent and ambition, each enjoyed an unusual opportunity to intensively cultivate a skill that allowed them to rise above their peers. A detailed investigation of the unique culture and skills of Eastern European Jewish immigrants persuasively explains their rise in 20th-century New York, first in the garment trade and then in the legal profession. Through case studies ranging from Canadian junior hockey champions to the robber barons of the Gilded Age, from Asian math whizzes to software entrepreneurs to the rise of his own family in Jamaica, Gladwell tears down the myth of individual merit to explore how culture, circumstance, timing, birth and luck account for success—and how historical legacies can hold others back despite ample individual gifts. Even as we know how many of these stories end, Gladwell restores the suspense and serendipity to these narratives that make them fresh and surprising.

One hazard of this genre is glibness. In seeking to understand why Asian children score higher on math tests, Gladwell explores the persistence andpainstaking labor required to cultivate rice as it has been done in East Asia for thousands of years; though fascinating in its details, the study does not prove that a rice-growing heritage explains math prowess, as Gladwell asserts. Another pitfall is the urge to state the obvious: "No one," Gladwell concludes in a chapter comparing a high-IQ failure named Chris Langan with the brilliantly successful J. Robert Oppenheimer, "not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone." But who in this day and age believes that a high intelligence quotient in itself promises success? In structuring his book against that assumption, Gladwell has set up a decidedly flimsy straw man.

In the end it is the seemingly airtight nature of Gladwell's arguments that works against him. His conclusions are built almost exclusively on the findings of others—sociologists, psychologists, economists, historians—yet he rarely delves into the methodology behind those studies. And he is free to cherry-pick those cases that best illustrate his points; one is always left wondering about the data he evaluated and rejected because it did not support his argument, or perhaps contradicted it altogether. Real life is seldom as neat as it appears in a Malcolm Gladwell book. —Leslie T. Chang
Publishers Weekly

Let's cut to the chase and say that all libraries should buy this book, if only because people will be asking for it. Gladwell, New Yorker staff writer, TEDTalks (Technology, Entertainment, Design) personality, and author of the best sellers The Tipping Point and Blink, has, well, reached a tipping point in the consciousness of observers of popular culture. Following a format similar to his previous books, Gladwell gloms onto an apparent phenomenon—in this case people who seem significantly different from other people, whether for good or for ill—and offers what we're all apparently supposed to believe are startlingly logical explanations for why they stand out. Gladwell's reasons have largely to do with things like where they come from and what month they were born in. It's all very readable, but not particularly surprising. No matter, libraries will need to acquire it.
Library Journal

There is a logic behind why some people become successful, and it has more to do with legacy and opportunity than high IQ. In his latest book, New Yorker contributor Gladwell (Blink, 2005, etc.) casts his inquisitive eye on those who have risen meteorically to the top of their fields, analyzing developmental patterns and searching for a common thread. The author asserts that there is no such thing as a self-made man, that "the true origins of high achievement" lie instead in the circumstances and influences of one's upbringing, combined with excellent timing. The Beatles had Hamburg in 1960-62; Bill Gates had access to an ASR-33 Teletype in 1968. Both put in thousands of hours—Gladwell posits that 10,000 is the magic number—on their craft at a young age, resulting in an above-average head start. The author makes sure to note that to begin with, these individuals possessed once-in-a-generation talent in their fields. He simply makes the point that both encountered the kind of "right place at the right time" opportunity that allowed them to capitalize on their talent, a delineation that often separates moderate from extraordinary success. This is also why Asians excel at mathematics—their culture demands it. If other countries schooled their children as rigorously, the author argues, scores would even out. Gladwell also looks at "demographic luck," the effect of one's birth date. He demonstrates how being born in the decades of the 1830s or 1930s proved an enormous advantage for any future entrepreneur, as both saw economic booms and demographic troughs, meaning that class sizes were small, teachers were over-qualified, universities were looking to enroll and companies were looking for employees. In short, possibility comes "from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with." This theme appears throughout the varied anecdotes, but is it groundbreaking information? At times it seems an exercise in repackaged carpe diem, especially from a mind as attuned as Gladwell's. Nonetheless, the author's lively storytelling and infectious enthusiasm make it an engaging, perhaps even inspiring, read. Sure to be a crowd-pleaser.
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 Outliers:

1. Malcolm Gladwell is interested in what makes some people more successful than others. Overall, how would you describe his thesis, or central premise? Do you agree or disagree with his ideas?

2. What does Gladwell mean by the term "outlier"?

3. Why does Gladwell insist that IQ is not the determining factor in one's ability to achieve success? What does he mean when he suggests that IQ reaches a point of diminishing returns after reaching 130?

4. Gladwell draws upon Robert Sternberg's idea of "practical intelligence." What is practical intelligence, and how does it differ from IQ?

5. According to Gladwell, what is the reason that Asians excell at mathematics? Discuss the cultural and educational differences that he points to as explanation.

6. Why does Gladwell feel there is no such thing as a self-made person. Do you agree? Can you name people who overcame great odds—circumstances not in their favor—to attain success? What about those people that Gladwell offers in support of his argument (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or the Beatles, among others)? Do you agree with his assessment that much depends on timing?

7. Do Gladwell's many anecdotes prove his hypothesis? Or do his stories exemplify his ideas? Is there a difference...if so, what? Some critics suggest that Gladwell cherry-picks his facts in order to support his premise. Is that a valid observation or not?

8. Is Gladwell suggesting that success is a matter of luck, the roll of the die? If so—if success depends on timing, birth, and opportunities—then do innate qualities (ambition or raw talent) have any role to play?

9. What personal experiences—people and incidents in your own life—can you think of that support or challenge Gladwell's ideas?

10. What did you find most surprising, humorous or thought-provoking in Gladwell's book? Any "ah-ha!" moments? Any-thing strike you as dubious? Have you come away thinking differently than before? What, if anything, do you feel you've learned?

11. Gladwell gives differing definitions of intelligence. Yet his definition of success is singular—"worldy" success in terms of of wealth, power, and fame. Are there also differing definitions of success that Gladwell doesn't consider? If so, what are they, and what does it take to achieve those versions of success?

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

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Over the Edge of the Edge: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
Laurence Bergreen, 2004
HarperCollins
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060936389

Summary
Ferdinand Magellan's daring circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century was a three-year odyssey filled with sex, violence, and amazing adventure. Now in Over the Edge of the World, acclaimed author Laurence Bergreen, interweaving a variety of candid, first-person accounts, some previously unavailable in English, brings to life this groundbreaking and majestic tale of discovery that changed many long-held views about the world and the way explorers would henceforth navigate its oceans.

In 1519 Magellan and his fleet set sail from Seville, Spain, to find a water route to the Spice Islands in Indonesia, where the most sought-after commodities—cloves, pepper, and nutmeg—flourished. Most important, they were looking for a passageway, a strait, through the great landmass of the Americas that would lead them to these fabled islands. Laurence Bergreen takes readers on board with Magellan and his crew as they explore, navigate, mutiny, suffer, and die across the seas. He also recounts the many unusual sexual practices the crew experienced, from orgies in Brazil to bizarre customs in the South Pacific. With a fleet of five ships and more than two hundred men, they had set out in search of the Spice Islands. Three years later they returned with an abundance of spices from their intended destination, but with just one ship carrying eighteen emaciated men. They suffered starvation, disease, and torture, and many died, including Magellan, who was killed in a fierce battle.

A man of great tenacity, cunning, and courage, Magellan was full of contradictions. He was both heroic and foolish, insightful yet blind, a visionary whose instincts outran his ideals. Ambitious to a fault and not above using torture and murder to maintain control of his ships and sailors, he survived innumerable natural hazards in addition to several violent mutinies aboard his own fleet—and it took no less than the massed forces of fifteen hundred men to kill him.

This is the first time in nearly half a century that anyone has attempted to narrate the complete story of Magellan's unprecedented circumnavigation of the globe—to tell this truly gripping and profoundly important story of heroism, discovery, and disaster. A voyage into history, a tour of the world emerging from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, an anthropological account of tribes, languages, and customs unknown to Europeans, and a chronicle of a desperate grab for commercial and political power, Over the Edge of the World is a captivating tale that rivals the most exciting thriller fiction. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 4, 1950
• Where—N/A
• Education—Harvard University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York

Laurence Bergreen is a historian and biographer who lives in New York City.

A Harvard graduate, he worked in journalism, academia and broadcasting before publishing his first biography, James Agee: A Life. He has also written biographies of Irving Berlin, Al Capone, and Louis Armstrong.

Bergreen has also written on historical subjects, including Voyage to Mars: NASA's Search for Life Beyond Earth, a narrative of NASA's exploration of Mars; Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe; Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu; and Columbus: The Four Voyages.

Bergreen has also written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek and Esquire. He taught at The New School in New York, and served as Assistant to the President of The Paley Center for Media. Bergreen frequently lectures at major universities and symposia, and is a Featured Historian for The History Channel.

In 2007, Bergreen was asked by NASA to name some geological features surrounding the Victoria crater on Mars, based on places Ferdinand Magellan visited. In 2008, Bergreen was a keynote speaker at NASA's 50th anniversary event in Washington, D.C. (From Widipedia.)

Book Reviews
Prodigious research, sure-footed prose and vivid depictions make for a thoroughly satisfying account of the age in which Iberian seafarers groped their way around the world. Binding it all together is the psychology of Magellan's flawed leadership, the source of constant tension in his fleet. Driven by a fanatical dream to find the Spice Islands, Magellan was a frustrated Portuguese nobleman sailing for the king of Spain and a complicated man with absolute power of life and death over his crew. Almost five centuries after embarking on his world-changing voyage, he emerges here in the hands of a capable biographer who is simultaneously attracted and repelled by his excesses.
W. Jeffrey Bolster - Wall Street Journal

In Bergreen's hands, however, [Over the Edge of the World is] a great adventure story, complete with enough plot elements—political intrigue, sexual adventurism, travelogue—to keep anyone happy, even those of us with no interest in navigation.
Alan Greenblatt - National Public Radio

Journalist Bergreen, who has penned biographies of James Agee, Louis Armstrong, Irving Berlin and Al Capone, superbly recreates Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan's obsessive 16th-century quest, an ill-fated journey that altered Europe's perception of the planet: "It was a dream as old as the imagination: a voyage to the ends of the earth.... Mariners feared they could literally sail over the edge of the world." In 2001, Bergreen traveled the South American strait that bears Magellan's name, and he adds to that firsthand knowledge satellite images of Magellan's route plus international archival research. His day-by-day account incorporates the testimony of sailors, Francisco Albo's pilot's log and the eyewitness accounts of Venetian scholar Antonio Pigafetta, who was on the journey. Magellan's mission for Spain was to find a water route to the fabled Spice Islands, and in 1519, the Armada de Molucca (five ships and some 260 sailors) sailed into the pages of history. Many misfortunes befell the expedition, including the brutal killing of Magellan in the Philippines. Three years later, one weather-beaten ship, "a vessel of desolation and anguish," returned to Spain with a skeleton crew of 18, yet "what a story those few survivors had to tell—a tale of mutiny, of orgies on distant shores, and of the exploration of the entire globe," providing proof that the world was round. Illuminating the Age of Discovery, Bergreen writes this powerful tale of adventure with a strong presence and rich detail. Maps, 16-page color photo insert.
Publishers Weekly

Bergreen (Voyage to Mars; Louis Armstrong) applies his successful writing skills to this inside story of what really happened during Magellan's epic, three-year circumnavigation of the globe. On September 6, 1522, of the five vessels that began the historic voyage, only one (the Victoria) sailed into the Spanish port of Sanlucar de Barrameda, holding a mere 18 survivors from the original crew of 260. Bergreen provides a gripping, first-rate story of the harrowing journey, the death of Magellan and nearly his entire crew, and the loss of three of the ships (one had already returned to Spain). Bergreen bases the text on exhaustive research into over 500-year-old original and secondary source documents from five languages, including the extensive eyewitness account by Antonio Pigafetta, the official chronicler of the voyage. Readers will be thrilled by Bergreen's superb, lively writing. The work nicely updates Tim Joyner's ten-year-old Magellan and provides a readily accessible, general history of this important event in world history that will also attract interest in academia. Highly recommended for all libraries. —Dale Farris, Groves, TX
Library Journal

Ferdinand Magellan's ship was the first to circumnavigate the globe. While the accomplishment is recognized as a historic milestone, less known are the details of that voyage around the world.... Fascinating reading for history buffs, and a great story that rivals any seagoing adventure. —Gavin Quinn
Booklist

A vivid account of Magellan's star-crossed voyage around the world nearly five centuries ago. Fond of epic adventures and odd ducks alike, Bergreen (Voyage to Mars, 2000, etc.) finds a nice blend of the two in Ferdinand Magellan's life and career. Considered a tyrant by some, a traitor by others, and often in trouble with one legal authority or another, Magellan seemed driven by a need both to serve the powerful and to make himself rich and/or famous in the bargain; he also had a habit of tripping himself up and making powerful enemies, racking up charges of selling provisions to the Arab enemy in one war and earning mistrust for abandoning his native Portugal for the chance to command an expedition for archrival Spain. Magellan's skills as a soldier and apparent lack of fear in promoting his aims—if matched by a deeply provisional knowledge of the world beyond Iberia—eventually won him the exclusive contract to find the fabled Spice Islands and claim the lands he found for Christianity and Spain. Thanks to bad luck, poor skills on the human-relations front, and some unfortunate missteps at sea, Magellan found himself confronting near-constant mutinies great and small; he survived them only to die, in 1521, in the Philippines after picking a fight with the natives in a misguided attempt to prove his omnipotence. Bergreen, citing Magellan's shipmate and chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, suggests that the Captain General's ever-quarrelsome crew deliberately failed to come to his aid—"or their officers ordered them to stay put," effecting an easily disguised mutiny by another name. Only one of the Magellan armada's ships made it back to Spain, and 200 sailors died on the voyage. Still, Bergreen writes, the expedition had an important effect not only in pointing the way to the Spice Island trade, but also in dispelling reigning myths about "mermaids, boiling water at the equator, and a magnetic island capable of pulling the nails from passing ships." Very nicely written through and through, and a pleasure for students of world exploration.
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 Over the Edge of the World:

1. How does Laurence Bergreen present Ferdinand Magellan to readers? What kind of man is Magellan? How would you describe him? Was he "the man for the job"? In other words, did Magellan's character traits and personality make him suitable for leading this voyage of discovery?

2. What were the political and economic justifications for the expedition? Why was even a small sack of spices valuable to a sailor?

3. Talk about the role of nationalism—between the Spaniards and Portuguese—and how it undermined the voyage? What about King Manuel of Portugal? Why was he so intent on interfering with Magellan?

4. Did you find helpful Bergreen's discussion of the Pope's demarcation of Spanish and Portuguese spheres of control? Were you able to follow the author's explanation?

5. Did Bergreen's use of primary sources enhance or detract from your reading experience? What do they bring, if anything, to the narrative? Did you at times wish for more maps to trace the route? Was the NASA photograph of the Magellan Strait helpful?

6. Bergreen's descriptive passages detail both the beauty and brutality of the natural world. What were some of the descriptions that most struck you? Perhaps the glaciers in the Strait of Magellan? What else?

7. Talk about the ordeal of living on a ship in the 16th century: everything from the lack of fresh water to violent weather and bedbugs? What would you have found most difficult?

8. Magellan's armada suffered multiple mutinies. What were the reasons for the rebellions? Do you find yourself in sympathy with the crew or with Magellan?

9. What role does religion play in the expedition. How was the crew, for instance, affected by the Inquisition? What about religion's role in the Philippines?

10. What happened on the Philippines that led to Magellan's death? For a man as prudent and disciplined as Magellan, how did he find himself embroiled in a contest between two tribes?

11. Many of his crew watched Magellan from their ships as he was slaughtered in the surf in the Philippines. Antonio Pigafetta, the voyage's chief chronicler, implies that more might have been done to save Magellan's life. Why didn't the crew come to his rescue?

12. What affect did the expedition have on Europeans' perception of the world? How they view the world prior to the sail of the Molucca Armada...and after its return?

13. Despite the destruction of all but one ship, was the voyage "successful"? What impact did it have on Spain's economy? (Was it worth the heavy cost, in human terms, to bring a supply of spices to Europe? What, for instance, were cloves used for?)

14. You might say we, too, are in an "age of discovery"—voyaging into the unknown in spaceships rather than sea ships. In what way, if any, can the courage of astronauts be compared to that of 16th-century sea explorers? Are the two comparable?

15. Laurence Bergreen writes in the prologue, "They had survived an expedition to the ends of the earth, but more than that, they had endured a voyage into the darkest recesses of the human soul." What does Bergreen mean by that remark?

16. Follow-up to Question #15: Joseph Conrad wrote about that very theme 300 years later in The Heart of Darkness. Is it a universal human trait—that, once lost, alone, and "unanchored" from society, humans descend into the soul's dark recesses? Hypothetical question: would our behavior today be different from—or similar to—that of 16th-century explorers if we encountered beings on another planet?

17. What did you enjoy most about this historical biography? Did Bergreen's prose readily engage you? Did the author make the era come alive? Did you find the digressions and asides interesting? Of did you find the work bogged down by too much detail?

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Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
Mary Roach, 2010
W.W. Norton & Company
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393339918

Summary
Space is a world devoid of the things we need to live and thrive: air, gravity, hot showers, fresh produce, privacy, beer. Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human.

How much can a person give up? How much weirdness can they take? What happens to you when you can’t walk for a year? have sex? smell flowers? What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a space walk? Is it possible for the human body to survive a bailout at 17,000 miles per hour? To answer these questions, space agencies set up all manner of quizzical and startlingly bizarre space simulations.

As Mary Roach discovers, it’s possible to preview space without ever leaving Earth. From the space shuttle training toilet to a crash test of NASA’s new space capsule (cadaver filling in for astronaut), Roach takes us on a surreally entertaining trip into the science of life in space and space on Earth. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 20, 1959
• Rasied—Etna, New Hampshire, USA
• Education—B.A., Weslyan University
• Awards—see below
• Currently—lives in Oakland, California

Mary Roach is an American author, specializing in popular science. To date, she has published five books: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005) (published in some markets as Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife), Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2010), and Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (2013).

Roach was raised in Etna, New Hampshire. She received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Wesleyan University in 1981. After college, Roach moved to San Francisco, California and spent a few years working as a freelance copy editor. She worked as a columnist and also worked in public relations for a brief time. Her writing career began while working part-time at the San Francisco Zoological Society, producing press releases on topics such as elephant wart surgery. On her days off from the SFZS, she wrote freelance articles for the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday Magazine.

From 1996 to 2005 Roach was part of The Grotto, a San Francisco-based project and community of working writers and filmmakers. It was in this community that Roach would get the push she needed to break into book writing. While being interviewed by Alex C. Telander of BookBanter, Roach answers the question of how she got started on her first book:

A few of us every year [from The Grotto] would make predictions for other people, where they'll be in a year. So someone made the prediction that, "Mary will have a book contract." I forgot about it and when October came around I thought, I have three months to pull together a book proposal and have a book contract. This is what literally lit the fire under my butt.

Early career
In 1986, she sold a humor piece about the IRS to the San Francisco Chronicle. That piece led to a number of humorous, first-person essays and feature articles for such publications as Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Discover Magazine, National Geographic, Outside Magazine, and Wired. She has also written articles for Salon.com and tech-gadget reviews for Inc.com. An article by Roach, entitled "The C word: Dead man driving," was published in the Journal of Clinical Anatomy. Roach has had monthly columns in Reader's Digest (“My Planet”) and Sports Illustrated for Women (“The Slightly Wider World of Sports”).

Besides being a best selling author, Roach is involved in many other projects on the side. Roach reviews books for The New York Times and was the guest editor of the Best American Science and Nature Writing's 2011 edition. She also serves as a member of the Mars Institute's Advisory Board and was recently asked to join the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

Personal life
Roach has an office in downtown Oakland and lives in the Glenview neighborhood of Oakland with her husband Ed Rachles, an illustrator and graphic designer. She also has two step-daughters.

While Roach has often been quoted saying that she does not have much free time between writing books, she is very fond of backpacking and travel. The latter she has been able to do a great deal of while doing research for her articles and books. Roach has visited all seven continents twice. She has been to Antarctica a few times as part of the National Science Foundation's Polar Program. In 1997, she visited Antarctica to write an article for Discover Magazine on meteorite hunting with meteorite hunter Ralph Harvey.

Recognition
In 1995, Roach's article "How to Win at Germ Warfare" was a National Magazine Award Finalist. In the article, Roach conducts an interview with microbiologist Chuck Gerba of the University of Arizona who describes a scientific study where bacteria and virus particles become aerosolized upon flushing a toilet: "Upon flushing, as many as 28,000 virus particles and 660,000 bacteria [are] jettisoned from the bowl."

In 1996, her article on earthquake-proof, bamboo houses, "The Bamboo Solution", took the American Engineering Societies' Engineering Journalism Award in the general interest magazine category. In this article the reader learns from Jules Janssen, a civil engineer, that bamboo is "stronger than wood, brick, and concrete...A short, straight column of bamboo with a top surface area of 10 square centimeters could support an 11,000-pound elephant."

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers was a New York Times Bestseller, a 2003 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and one of Entertainment Weekly's Best Books of 2003. Stiff also won the Amazon.com Editor's Choice award in 2003, was voted as a Borders Original Voices book, and was the winner of the Elle Reader's Prize. The book has been translated into 17 languages, including Hungarian (Hullamerev) and Lithuanian (Negyveilai).[6] Stiff was also selected for Washington State University's Common Reading Program in 2008-09.

Roach's column "My Planet" (Reader's Digest) was runner-up in the humor category of the 2005 National Press Club awards. Roach's second book, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, was the recipient of the Elle Reader's Prize in October 2005. Spook was also listed as a New York Times Notable Books pick in 2005, as well as a New York Times Bestseller. In 2008, Roach's book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, was chosen as the New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, it was in The Boston Globe's Top 5 Science Books, and it was listed as a bestseller in several other publications.

In 2011, Roach's book, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, was chosen as the book of the year for the 7th annual One City One Book: San Francisco Reads literary event program. Packing for Mars was also 6th on the New York Times Best Seller list.[22]

In 2012, Roach was the recipient of the Harvard Secular Society's Rushdie Award for her outstanding lifetime achievement in cultural humanism. The same year, she received a Special Citation in Scientific inquiry from Maximum Fun.

Style
The common theme throughout all of Roach's books is a literary treatment of the human body. Roach says of her publication history,

My books are all [about the human body], Spook is a little bit of departure because it's more about the soul rather than the flesh and blood body, but most of my books are about human bodies in unusual circumstances.

When asked by Peter Sagal, of NPR, specifically how she picks her topics, she replied, "Well, its got to have a little science, it's got to have a little history, a little humor—and something gross."

While Roach does not possess a science degree, she attempts to take complex ideas and turn them into something that the average reader can understand. She takes the reader with her through the steps of her research, from learning about the material to getting to know the people who study it, as she described in a public dialog with Adam Savage:

Make no mistake, good science writing is medicine. It is a cure for ignorance and fallacy. Good science writing peels away the blindness, generates wonder, and brings the open palm to the forehead: "Oh! Now I get it!"

Regarding her skepticism about the world around her, Roach states in her book Spook,

Flawed as it is, science remains the most solid god I've got. And so I've decided to turn to it, to see what it had to say on the topic of life after death. Because I know what religion says, and it perplexes me. It doesn't deliver a single, coherent, scientifically sensible or provable scenario… Science seemed the better bet. (Author bio from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Ms. Roach has already written zealously nosy books about corpses (Stiff), copulation (Bonk) and charlatans (Spook). Each time, what has interested her most is the fringe material: exotic footnotes, smart one-liners, bizarre quasi-scientific phenomena. Yet her fluffily lightweight style is at its most substantial—and most hilarious—in the zero-gravity realm that Packing for Mars explores. Here's why: The topic of astronauts' bodily functions provides as good an excuse to ask rude questions as you'll find on this planet or any other.... So Packing for Mars is as startling as it is funny, even if its strategic aim is to tell you more than you need to know.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

Anyone who thinks astronauts ply a glamorous trade would do well to read Mary Roach's Packing for Mars.The book is an often hilarious, sometimes queasy-making catalog of the strange stuff devised to permit people to survive in an environment for which their bodies are stupendously unsuited…With an unflinching eye for repellent details, she launches readers into the thick of spaceflight's grossest engineering challenges: disposing of human waste, controlling body odor without washing, and containing nausea.
M.G. Lord - New York Times Book Review

Roach is America's funniest science writer...in Packing for Mars, she has written a comic survey of space science, with emphasis on the absurd, the bizarre and the gross…Obviously, Roach is not afraid of the icky. In fact, her book is packed with the kind of delightfully disgusting details that brings joy to the hearts of 12-year-old boys—and to the 12-year-old boy that lurks inside the average adult male.
Peter Carlson - Washington Post

Roach deftly guides her readers.... They never completely lose sight of the accomplishments of space travel, even as they take delight in the absurdities that, in the end, make those successes all the more sublime.
Dallas Morning News

Roach (Stiff) once again proves herself the ideal guide to a parallel universe. Despite all the high-tech science that has resulted in space shuttles and moonwalks, the most crippling hurdles of cosmic travel are our most primordial human qualities: eating, going to the bathroom, having sex and bathing, and not dying in reentry. Readers learn that throwing up in a space helmet could be life-threatening, that Japanese astronaut candidates must fold a thousand origami paper cranes to test perseverance and attention to detail, and that cadavers are gaining popularity over crash dummies when studying landings. Roach's humor and determined curiosity keep the journey lively, and her profiles of former astronauts are especially telling. However, larger questions about the "worth" or potential benefits of space travel remain ostensibly unasked, effectively rendering these wild and well-researched facts to the status of trivia. Previously, Roach engaged in topics everyone could relate to. Unlike having sex or being dead, though, space travel pertains only to a few, leaving the rest of us unsure what it all amounts to. Still, the chance to float in zero gravity, even if only vicariously, can be surprising in what it reveals about us.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Roach is back with another irreverent romp, this time through "an entire mock universe of outer space."... Readers who enjoyed the author's previous books will be pleased to know that the cadavers of Stiff return ... and so does the sex research of Bonk.... While there are occasional somber passages, most of the descriptions of the many and varied annoyances of space travel are perversely entertaining. —Nancy R. Curtis
Library Journal

(Starred review.) An impish and adventurous writer with a gleefully inquisitive mind and a stand-up comic’s timing, Roach celebrates human ingenuity (the odder the better), and calls for us to marshal our resources, unchain our imaginations, and start packing for Mars. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

(Starred review.) Popular science writer Roach entertainingly addresses ... life in outer space. There is much good fun with—and a respectful amount of awe at—the often crazy ingenuity brought to the mundane matters of surviving in a place not meant for humans. .... A delightful, illuminating grab bag of spaceflight curiosities.
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 Packing for Mars:

1. Most reviewers have talked about the humor in Mary Roach's book, a number using the word "hilarious." What do you find particularly funny in Packing for Mars? Does her humor enhance her narrative...or, as one lonely reader thought, become tiresome and distracting?

2. Does this book's irreverent look at space travel deflate your balloon—reverence you may have felt for the men and women who don space suits and enter the zone of zero gravity? Does the book bring astronauts back down to earth a bit too precipitously for your taste? In other words, has Mary Roach made human space travel a noble endeavor...or an absurd one?

3. Talk about the toll that zero gravity has on humans—biologically and psychologically. What is the most difficult challenge for long-term manned (or womanned) space travel?

4. After having read this book, and knowing how space travel affects the human body and its bodily functions, would you, if given a chance, want to go into space? Of all the problems/issues Roach describes—biological, social, psychological—which would be the hardest for you?

5. After World War II, the first test flights using used rhesus monkeys. Was it necessary or ethical to use animals for this testing? Could there have been another way?

6. Did this book alter—or confirm—your view of NASA and the people who devote their lives to space travel? Do you feel differently about the entire space program—its long-range goals and its costs?

7. Should the U.S. continue its efforts to travel to Mars? With humans...or robots?

8. What were some of the things that most surprised you in reading Roach's book? Which chapters did you find most interesting...and why?

9. Of the former astronauts Roach interviewed, do any, in particular, stand out—some you admire more than others or found more engaging?

10. Do you think some of Roach's interview questions are too close to the bone—too personal or probing? Or do you think her inteview technique enables her to uncover valuable and heretofore unkown information?

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

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Pain Killer Addict: From Wreckage to Redemption
Cathryn Kemp, 2012
Little, Brown UK
300 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780749958060

Summary
Cathryn Kemp was a successful travel journalist who fell ill with a life-threatening illness. After four years of painful operations and misdiagnoses she was discharged from hospital with a repeat prescription for fentanyl, a painkiller one hundred times stronger than heroin.

Within two years she was taking more than ten times the NHS maximum dosage, all on prescription.

Painkiller Addict: From Wreckage To Redemption is a story of our times; each year more and more prescriptions are written for strong painkillers, sleeping tablets, anti-depressants and tranquillisers. In this extraordinary poignant, vivid and honest memoir, Cathryn describes her horrifying descent into addiction and her fight for freedom from the medication which saved her life—then almost destroyed it.

It is a love story, a horror story and one of the bravest survival stories you will ever read. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Where—Surrey, UK
• Education—B.A., European Fine Art; M.A., National Council for
   Training of Journalists
• Awards—The Big Red Read Non Fiction Award;
   Nominated, Samuel Johnson Prize; Peter
   Wilson Award for Journalism
• Currently—lives on the Suffolk coast, UK

Cathryn Kemp is an award-winning journalist and writer. Painkiller Addict: From Wreckage To Redemption recently won The Big Red Read Non Fiction Award 2013 and was nominated for the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize 2012.

Cathryn worked for The News of the World, The Mirror and The Sunday People before falling ill overnight in 2004. She has written and co-written several Lonely Planet guides including Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Romania and Moldova and Eastern Europe. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Seeringly honest and courageous, an absolutely brilliantly written book about the descent into painkiller addiction that can so easily occur when someone is dealing with unbearable physical and emotional pain. A brave, heartfelt and extraordinary book.
Corinne Sweet - Author, psychologist and broadcaster

Frankly written, Kemp's courageous memoir will help those dealing with an addict, or with addiction itself.
Big Issue (North)

A brilliantly written book.... It's not only an inspirational addiction recovery story but also a deeply moving book about recovering from loss on many levels—health, love, independence, career, dignity, trust, optimism.... Cathryn's story gripped me at gut level from page one.
Gael Lindenfield - Author and Self-Help Expert

Looking at the cover, you might think Painkiller Addict is a self-help book for recovering addicts (and I've no doubt that Cathryn Kemp's insights and inspirational story are a beacon of hope for many), but I don't think that's what it is. It's a brilliantly well written memoir. Reading the book is like reading any great story: it's not just an account, it's an experience. Surprisingly, it's not harrowing to read. The journalistic pace of Kemp's writing draws you into the story and keeps you reading - it's fascinating and impossible to put down. I read the sample and loved it. I'm so pleased I bought the whole book, it's a great read!
SL Bradbury

Brilliant book. I've only got about a quarter of the way through but I'm really enjoying it. It's well written and, so far, I can relate to everything she says.
Emma-Jane Robinson

Amazing story of bravery and determination. Couldn't put this book down. Honest and inspiring, well done to cathryn kemp! Amazing.
Michelle Haiming

A very open account of a successful young woman's decent into the physical, psychological and social torture which is addiction. Whether the drug of choice is alcohol, painkillers or any other number of substances or behaviours, the patterns are all strikingly similar. The thing that struck me hard in this book is the shame, guilt and deceit that encircles the addict and is fed by the spiral of need... A great account which left me close to tears at the end. Cathryn obviously realises the delicacy of life and lives each day accordingly. Thank you Cathryn, and good luck for your future.
Marc (UK)

Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the relationship between Cathryn and her GP—was he negligent in prescribing more and more of Cathryn's medication or should Cathryn be held as accountable?

2. Describe the dynamics of the family relationships around Cathryn and how the illness affects her mother Sue and father Albert.

3. Was Cathryn's boyfriend Adrian wrong to leave her during her illness and did his decision to go precipitate the spiral into addiction?

4. Describe the point at which Cathryn moved from pain relief dependency into addiction.

5. Was Cathryn wrong to lie about her growing need for the painkillers to her family and friends?

6. At what point should Cathryn's GP have stopped her medication, was he quick enough to act?

7. Discuss how society sees drug addicts.

8. What was Cathryn's rock bottom moment in her addiction?

9. Describe Cathryn's relationship to the fentanyl lozenges—were they more than pain relief?

10. Should Cathryn have received funding from the NHS for her rehab or is it right she had to fend for herself?

11. How important was Cathryn's family to her going into recovery?

12. How culpable was the hospital which prescribed the fentanyl lozenges for Cathryn in the first place?

13. Describe the conflict between Cathryn's willingness to get off the drugs and her desperation to stay on them.

14. What was the attraction by Cameron for Cathryn, why did he want to have a relationship with her in light of her illness and addiction?

15. Discuss how Cathryn's inability to have children affected her throughout the book.

16. How does the arrival of Cameron's son, Cathryn's stepson, affect Cathryn's recovery?

17. Can you relate to any of the addiction issues raised by the book?

18. Can you relate to the illness suffered by cathryn or pain issues raised by the book?

19. What are your feelings towards Cathryn and her journey by the end of the book?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity
Nicholas Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345805102

Summary
An essential, galvanizing narrative about making a difference here and abroad—a road map to becoming the most effective global citizens we can be.

In their number one New York Times bestseller Half the Sky, husband-and-wife team Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn brought to light struggles faced by women and girls around the globe, and showcased individuals and institutions working to address oppression and expand opportunity.

A Path Appears is even more ambitious in scale: nothing less than a sweeping tapestry of people who are making the world a better place and a guide to the ways that we can do the same—whether with a donation of $5 or $5 million, with our time, by capitalizing on our skills as individuals, or by using the resources of our businesses.

With scrupulous research and on-the-ground reporting, the authors assay the art and science of giving, identify successful local and global initiatives, and share astonishing stories from the front lines of social progress. We see the compelling, inspiring truth of how real people have changed the world, upending the idea that one person can’t make a difference.

We meet people like...

Dr. Gary Slutkin, who developed his landmark Cure Violence program to combat inner-city conflicts in the United States by applying principles of epidemiology
Lester Strong, who left a career as a high-powered television anchor to run an organization bringing in older Americans to tutor students in public schools across the country
Esther Duflo, an MIT development economist, whose pioneering studies of aid effectiveness have revealed new truths about, among other things, the power of hope
Jessica Posner and Kennedy Odede, who are transforming Kenya’s most notorious slum by expanding educational opportunities for girls.

A Path Appears offers practical, results-driven advice on how best each of us can give and reveals the lasting benefits we gain in return. Kristof and WuDunn know better than most how many urgent challenges communities around the world face today. Here they offer a timely beacon of hope for our collective future. (From the publisher.)

Author Bios
Nicholas Kristof
• Birth—April 27, 1959
• Raised—Yamhill, Oregon, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard; J.D., Oxford University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in suburban New York City

Nicholas Donabet Kristof is an American journalist, author, op-ed columnist, and a winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. He has written an op-ed column for the New York Times since 2001.

Life and career
Kristof was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up on a sheep and cherry farm in Yamhill, Oregon. He is the son of Jane Kristof (nee McWilliams) and Ladis "Kris" Kristof (born Wladyslaw Krzysztofowicz), both long-time professors at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.

Nicholas Kristof graduated from Yamhill Carlton High School, where he was student body president and school newspaper editor, and later became a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard College. At Harvard, he studied government and worked on The Harvard Crimson newspaper; "Alums recall Kristof as one of the brightest undergraduates on campus," according to a profile in the Crimson.

After Harvard, he studied law at Magdalen College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. He earned his law degree with first-class honors and won an academic prize. Afterward, he studied Arabic in Egypt for the 1983–84 academic year. He has a number of honorary degrees.

New York Times
Kristof joined the New York Times in 1984, initially covering economics and later serving as a Times correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. He also covered presidential politics and is the author of the chapter on President George W. Bush in the reference book The Presidents. He rose to be the associate managing editor, responsible for Sunday editions.

In 2001 Kristof became a Times op-ed writer. His twice-weekly columns often focus on global health, poverty, and gender issues in the developing world. In particular, since 2004 he has written dozens of columns about Darfur and visited the area 11 times.

According to his New York Times bio, Kristoff has traveled to more than 150 countries—and not without incident. During his travels, he contracted malaria, was threatened by mobs, and survived an airplane crash. Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and The New Yorker, a Harvard classmate, once said...

I’m not surprised to see him emerge as the moral conscience of our generation of journalists. I am surprised to see him as the Indiana Jones of our generation of journalists.

Kristoff also pioneered the use of multimedia for the Times: he was both the first blogger on the paper's website and the first to make a video for the website. He also tweets, has Facebook and Google Plus pages and a YouTube channel. According to Twitter lists, he has more followers (almost 1.5 million) than any other print journalist in the world.

Kristof resides outside New York City with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, and their three children. He enjoys running, backpacking, and having his Chinese and Japanese corrected by his children.

Impact
Because of his emphasis on human rights abuses and social injustices—namely, human trafficking and the Darfur conflict—the Washington Post said that Kristoff has "shaped the field of opinion journalism."

Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa has called Kristof an "honorary African" for shining a spotlight on neglected conflicts.

Bill Clinton said of Kristof in 2009:

There is no one in journalism, anywhere in the United States at least, who has done anything like the work he has done to figure out how poor people are actually living around the world, and what their potential is.... So every American citizen who cares about this should be profoundly grateful that someone in our press establishment cares enough about this to haul himself all around the world to figure out what's going on....I am personally in his debt, as are we all.

In 2013 Joyce Barnathan, president of the International Center for Journalists, called Kristof "the conscience of international journalism."

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation names Kristof as one of its inspirations. A January 1997 page-one article by Kristof, about child mortality in the developing world, helped forcus the couple's philanthropy on global health. A framed copy of that article hangs in the gallery of the Gates Foundation.

Books
Kristof has co-authored four books with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn:

China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (1994) and Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia (2000). The two books examine the cultural, social, and political situation of East Asia largely through interviews and personal experiences.
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (2009), a best-seller, the book was the basis of an award-winning PBS documentary, which featured WuDunn. The book was also made into a Facebook game with more than 1.1 million players.
A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity (2014) explores how altruism affects all of us and presents various ways that we can make a difference. It, too, became a widely watched PBS documentary in 2015, and featured Jennifer Garner, Eva Longoria, Alfre Woodard, Blake Lively, in early 2015.

Half the Sky
Perhaps the best known of Kristof and WuDunn's books is their 2009 Half the Sky, which hit the top of the bestseller charts. The idea for the book was sparked by the Tiananmen Square protests. After reporting on the 500 deaths from that event, the authors learned that some 39,000 girls died every year—far more than had died at Tiananmen—from being denied access to the same food and medical treatment offered to boys. Yet there was no mention or coverage of this stastic anywhere.

Stunned, Kristof and WuDunn decided to dig deeper into overall issues of gender, everywhere—sex trafficking, modern slavery, domestic violence, and rape as both weapon of war and form of "legal justice." The resulting book, Half the Sky, shines in a light onto the dark recesses of female oppression and abuse around the world. The book has since been called a classic, a call to arms, and even comparable in significance to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Carolyn Seen of the Washington Post called it one of the most important books she had ever reviewed, as did Counter Punch's Charles Larson.

Awards and recognition
1989 - George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting (on human rights and environmental issues).
1990 - Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting (with Sheryl WuDunn)
2006 - Media Web's Journalist of the Year
2007 - Fred Cuny Award for Prevention of Deaadly Conflict
2007 - U.S. News & World Report: one of "America's Best Leaders."
2008 - Anne Frank Award
2009 - Dayton Literary Peace Prize Lifetime Award (with WuDunn)
2009 - World of Children Lifetime Achievement Award (with WuDunn)
2011 - Harvard Kennedy School / Washington Post: one of seven "Top American Leaders."
2013 - Advancing Global Health Award from Seattle Biomed
2013 - Goldsmith Award for Career Excellence in Journalism by Harvard University
2013 - International Freedom Conductor by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. (The prevous "Conductor" was the Dalai Lama.)
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/17/2016.)

Sheryl WuDunn
• Birth—November 16, 1959
• Raised—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Cornell University; M.B.A., Harvard University; M.P.A., Princeton Univeristy
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in suburban New York City

Sheryl WuDunn is a business executive, best-selling author, journalist, and international women’s rights advocate.

A third generation Chinese American, Sheryl WuDunn grew up in New York City on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In 1981 she graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in European History. In 1987, she earned her M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and, in 1994, an M.P.A. from Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs. She married reporter Nicholas Kristof in 1988.

In 1989 she joined the New York Times, becoming the first Asian-American hired by the paper. She served as a foreign correspondent in the Beijing and Tokyo bureaus where she and Kristof covered the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. They received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting—a first for Pulitzer: the first married couple to win for journalism, and the first Asian-American to win a Pulitzer, ever. In addition to her reporting on Tiananmen, WuDunn covered international business, including global energy, global markets, foreign industry and technology.

WuDunn was also one of the few people to move between the editorial and the business sides of the New York Times. In 2000 she was appointed executive director of the Times Circulation NexGen project. She held several other business positions before leaving for the investment bank Goldman Sachs where she became a vice president of asset management.

Since 2009, she has been managing director at the boutique investment firm Mid-Market Solutions.

WuDunn continues her work in media as a commentator on television and radio regarding China and global affairs. She has appeared on Bloomberg TV, NPR, The Colbert Report, and Charlie Rose. She has also lectured at the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Council on Foreign Relations.

WuDunn resides outside New York City with her husband, Nicholas Kristof, and their three children.

Books
WuDunn has co-authored four books with her husband, Nicholas Kristof:

China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (1994) and Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia (2000). The two book examine the cultural, social, and political situation of East Asia largely through interviews and personal experiences.
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (2009), a best-seller, the book was the basis of an award-winning PBS documentary, which featured WuDunn. The book was also made into a Facebook game with more than 1.1 million players.
A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity (2014) explores how altruism affects all of us and presents various ways that we can make a difference. It, too, became a widely watched PBS documentary in 2015, and featured Jennifer Garner, Eva Longoria, Alfre Woodard, Blake Lively, in early 2015.

Awards and recognition
1990 - Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting (with Kristof).
1990 - George Polk Award and an Overseas Press Club award for reporting in China.
2009 - Dayton Literary Peace Prize Lifetime Achievement Award (with Kristof).
2009 - World of Children Lifetime Achievement Award (with Kristof).
2011 - Newsweek: listed as one of "150 Women who Shake the World."
2012 - Fast Company magazine: listed in its "League of Extraordinary Women."
2013 - PBS The Makers documentary: listed as one of the "Women Who Make America."
2013 - Harvard Business School film: featured as one its most prominent female alumni.
2015 - Business Insider: listed as one of the 31 most prominent alumni of the Harvard Business School.

Boards
WuDunn served for more than a decade on the Cornell University board of trustees, including as a member of the board's finance committee and investment committee. Initially appointed to the Cornell board by the university president, she was later reappointed by the New York governor and served under two governors.

She also served for many years on the advisory council of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and in 2013 was elected by alumni to the Princeton University board of trustees. She currently serves on the board of advisers for Fuel Freedom Foundation. WuDunn is also on the advisory boards of a number of start-up companies in a variety of fields, including healthcare and mobile security. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/17/2016)

Book Reviews
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn show you, through many amazing vignettes matched with serious evidence, that you can make a difference….Read this book. Seize one of the many opportunities it lists, and change lives for the better, including your own.
Paul Collier - New York Times Book Review

[An] exhaustive though not exhausting profile of giving, with surprising guidance—indeed, coaching—on how to be an effective giver…. Upon finishing the book, readers are likely to…find themselves willing to do something in the world, unconcerned by questions of scale, but instead, to simply become more engaged, and in that, alive.
Boston Globe

[O]pens an important conversation for anyone interested in how to contribute to catalyzing positive change…[it] sheds light on the exploitation and inequity that exist in our own backyard, while also spotlighting the individuals overcoming it.
Christian Science Monitor

Readers will be inspired by the stories [Kristof and WuDunn] tell…. There are so many problems in the world, and so many organizations wanting charitable donations, that we can sometimes feel overwhelmed. [The authors] help us weed through those issues and find that path so we can make a difference.
National Geographic.com

Nobody clarifies the social challenges of our time, or the moral imperative to help meet them, better than Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Their latest book, A Path Appears, offers an inspiring roundup of the many simple and effective ways in which we can lend our hearts and talents to grow hope and opportunity both at home and around the globe—and an important reminder that just because we can’t do everything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do something.
Former President Bill Clinton, founder of the Clinton Foundation

Helping suffering people around the world to transform their own lives is a rewarding challenge we all share as citizens of a global community. A Path Appears is a helpful and inspiring guide for anyone who wonders what difference a single person can make in building a more hopeful world.”
Former President Jimmy Carter, founder of the not-for-profit Carter Center

Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have done us all a great service by shining a light on the problems faced by the poor. These stories of real people struggling for survival and opportunity serve as a powerful reminder that poverty is complex and painful, but the call to action doesn’t need to be. With insight, compassion and optimism, Kristof and WuDunn show us that we can all play a role in making the world a better place. A Path Appears is a compelling read that can’t help but to educate and energize.”
Bill and Melinda Gates, co-chairs of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Broadly inclusive and multifaceted account of possible solutions to today’s "overwhelming and unrelenting" social problems. Heartening anecdotal sketches of both givers and receivers in the "charity industry" are engaging and informative, and Kristof and WuDunn hope to provoke serious thought about the role of charity in today’s world.
Publishers Weekly

[K]nown for their crusading work on human rights...[the authors] examine individuals who are making a difference, aiming not simply to get us to contribute time, skills, and/or money to their efforts but to parse which approaches and initiatives really work. The forthcoming four-part PBS documentary amplifies the message.
Library Journal

A primer on "finding innovative and effective ways to give back."... [T]he husband-and-wife team addresses how ordinary people can participate in "a revolution in tackling social problems, employing new savvy, discipline and experience to chip away at poverty and injustice."... The authors deliver a profound message that packs a wallop.
Kirkus Reviews

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Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth
Hilary Spurling, 2010
Simon & Schuster
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416540434

Summary
She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in The Good Earth, an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she foresaw China’s future as a superpower, and she recognized the crucial importance for both countries of China’s building a relationship with the United States. As a teenager she had witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution, and as a young woman she narrowly escaped being killed in the deadly struggle between Chinese Nationalists and the newly formed Communist Party.

Pearl grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of years. She was the child of American missionaries, but she spoke Chinese before she learned English, and her friends were the children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted that she was Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the terrorist uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion forced her family to flee for their lives. It was the first of many desperate flights. Flood, famine, drought, bandits, and war formed the background of Pearl’s life in China. "Asia was the real, the actual world," she said, "and my own country became the dreamworld."

Pearl wrote about the realities of the only world she knew in The Good Earth. It was one of the last things she did before being finally forced out of China to settle for the first time in the United States. She was unknown and penniless with a failed marriage behind her, a disabled child to support, no prospects, and no way of telling that The Good Earth would sell tens of millions of copies. It transfixed a whole generation of readers just as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans would do more than half a century later. No Westerner had ever written anything like this before, and no Chinese had either.

Buck was the forerunner of a wave of Chinese Americans from Maxine Hong Kingston to Amy Tan. Until their books began coming out in the last few decades, her novels were unique in that they spoke for ordinary Asian people— "translating my parents to me," said Hong Kingston, "and giving me our ancestry and our habitation." As a phenomenally successful writer and civil-rights campaigner, Buck did more than anyone else in her lifetime to change Western perceptions of China. In a world with its eyes trained on China today, she has much to tell us about what lies behind its astonishing reawakening. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 25, 1940
• Raised—Clifton, Bristol, UK
• Education—University of Oxford
• Awards—Whitbread Book of the Year; Duff
Cooper Prize; Rose Mary Crawshay Prize
• Currently—lives in North London, England

Hilary Spurling, CBE, FRSL* is a British writer, known as a journalist and biographer. She won the Whitbread Prize for the second volume of her biography of Henri Matisse in January 2006. Pearl Buck in China was published in March 2010. (From Wikipedia.)

More
Born in 1940, Spurling spent her childhood years in Clifton, Bristol—a port city heavily bombed during World War II. "I loved the bangs and flashes," she says. "Children ran free, in packs and alone, in the streets and in the woods. And bombsites were wonderful playgrounds—ruined houses, façades ripped away."

Later, she attended University of Oxford, and while there married John Spurling (playwright, critic, novelist) in 1961.

After Oxford, the couple moved to Ladbroke Grove, where Hilary became the theater critic for Spectator magazine, a post she held until 1969. She herself claims to have been "the most dreadful, scathing, swingeing, destructive critic, a battleaxe." Her notorious reviews got her banned from various venues, including the Royal Court theater. Other reviewers, however, pledged to stay away in solidarity with Spurling, and the ban was eventually lifted.

In 1974 Spurling published her first biography—on Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose unconventional novels about the Edwardian gentry had been long-time favorites of Spurling. The first volume, Ivy When Young, was considered a stunning debut.

The second Compton-Burnett volume wasn't published till 1984; in the 10 intervening years, Spurling had three children and wrote the well-received A Handbook to Anthony Powell's Mustic of Time (a detailed guide and index to Powell's 12-volume work...see the LitLovers Reading Guide). She was also chosen to write Powell's official biography after his death in 2000, which she is still working on.

Her next big book was published in 1990—Paul Scott, a biography of the author of the Raj Quartet (which includes The Jewel in the Crown; see the LitLovers Reading Guide). Spurling considers Soctt's Quartet an "extraordinarily vivid description of the end of the empire, the cracking apart of India."

It was with her biography of Henri Matisse, however, that Spurling achieved greatest acclaim. The first volume, The Unknown Matisse, came out in 1998; the second volume, Matisse the Master, issued in 2005, won the Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year. (The two volumes took Spurling 15 years to complete.)

In 2010 Spurling published her biography of the first half of Pearl S. Buck's life—Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China (the US title is Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth).

When not under the pressure of publishing, the Spurlings spend time in the Greek mountain village of Arcadia where they have a house. There's is, according the Hilary's long-time publisher, "a good, generous marriage." (Author bio adapted from The Guardian, April 17, 2010.)

* Commander of the Order of the British Empire; Fellow of the Royal Literary Society

Book Reviews
Penetrating.... Ms. Spurling’s book isn’t a full-dress biography. (For that, there’s Peter Conn’s sturdy Pearl S. Buck: a Cultural Biography, published in 1996.) It focuses instead on Buck’s first four decades, her formative years as a woman and as a writer. It’s a good story, easily as curious as any Buck herself put to paper. Ms. Spurling writes well, and with real feeling.... The resulting portrait is a complicated one, but it has an absorbing glow.... It's a good story, easily as curious as any Buck herself put to paper.
Dwight Garner - New York Times Book Review

This elegant, richly researched work is at once a portrait of a remarkable woman ahead of her time, an evocation of China between the wars, and a meditation on how the secrets and griefs of childhood can shape a writer…Spurling's biography is a compelling tribute to the woman who first focused American attention on [China].
Leslie T. Chang - Washington Post

Pearl Buck in China is one of those exceedingly rare biographies where the reader senses the most powerful connection between author and subject, enabling remarkably sensitive understanding and insight.
San Francisco Chronicle

From its wonderful opening sentence to its poignant close, this is a superb biography. Spurling has brought her characters to robust life. Readers will learn what they need to know about China in that tumultuous time and place at the beginning of the 20th century.
Peter Conn - Professor, University of Pennsylvania

(Starred review.) Weaving a colorful tapestry of Pearl Buck's life (1892–1973) with strands of Chinese history and literature, Spurling, winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize for Matisse the Master—vividly correlates Buck's experiences of China's turbulent times to her novels. Growing up in a missionary family in China, Buck lived through the upheavals of the Boxer Rebellion and China's civil war, two marriages, and a daughter with a degenerative disease; her closeup view of the horrors of China's extreme rural poverty made her an American literary celebrity as well as a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize winner when she enshrined her observations of China in the Good Earth trilogy. Back in the United States, having opened America's eyes to China, Buck worked to repeal America's discriminatory laws against the Chinese and established an adoption agency for minority and mixed race children. For her support of racial equality, Buck was blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer even as her books were banned in Communist China for spreading reactionary, imperialist lies; Spurling'sfast-paced and compassionate portrait of a writer who described the truth before her eyes without ideological bias, whose personal life was as tumultuous as the times she lived in, will grip readers who, unlike Spurling, didn't grow up reading Buck's work.
Publishers Weekly

[C]ritics reading Pearl Buck in Chinamostly used their articles as occasions to celebrate the subject rather than the biography.... Still, if reviewers were not effusive in their praise, they had few complaints about Spurling's book and clearly admired her thorough research and elegant prose.
Bookmarks Magazine

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 Pearl Buck in China:

1. What do you think of Pearl Buck's parents? How was it, for instance, that women had no souls, according to his beliefs?

2. Why, emerging from childhood, had Pearl developed such an abiding faith in the power of fiction? How might her childhood experiences have drawn her to read—and re-read—Charles Dickens. What would she have found so appealing in Dickens?

3. Why was Buck critical of the missionary zeal of the Christians who, like her father, worked in China? What did she observe in their treatment of the Chinese?

4. Buck's light-colored hair and gray-green eyes made her a stand-out in China. Her appearance was shocking to Chinese. How would you react to the constant stares—always made to feel different, even freakish? Nonetheless, despite the fact that she was caucasian, she still felt more comfortable in China than in the U.S. Why?

5. Talk about Pearl's marriage to John Lossing Buck. What was the initial attraction and what were the stress points? What were the reasons for its ultimate failure?

6. What do you make of Buck's decision to take her daughter to New Jersey—and leave her there while she returned to Nanjing?

7. In what way do Pearl Buck's experiences of China correlate to her novels?

8. What are the qualities, according to Spurling, that make Pearl Buck such a stirring writer? If you have read works by Buck, how would you describe her qualities as a writer?

9. Talk about the descriptions of Chinese rural poverty. What observations struck you most powerfullly?

10. What was America's racial attitudes toward the Chinese, and how were those attitudes put into practice in the U.S.? What was Buck's role in challenging a discriminatory legal system?

11. Describe China's patriarchal culture, especially how wives were treated, as well as the attitudes regarding female babies. Does that cultural bent exist today?

12. What happened to Buck's career, and life, after she moved back to the U.S., especially her involvement with Theodore Harris? What does Spurling mean when she says that Buck began writing on an "industrial scale"?

13. How was Buck's treated in the U.S. at the height of the anti-communist scare? How did the Chinese also feel about Buck? What's the irony here?

14. What did you learn from this book about Chinese culture and about Pearl S. Buck? Does this biography inspire you to read any..or more...of her books?

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

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The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Captured by the Nazis
Elizabeth Letts, 2016
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345544803

Summary
The riveting true story of the valiant rescue of priceless pedigree horses in the last days of World War II.

In the chaotic last days of the war, a small troop of battle-weary American soldiers captures a German spy and makes an astonishing find—his briefcase is empty but for photos of beautiful white horses that have been stolen and kept on a secret farm behind enemy lines.

Hitler has stockpiled the world’s finest purebreds in order to breed the perfect military machine—an equine master race. But with the starving Russian army closing in, the animals are in imminent danger of being slaughtered for food.

With only hours to spare, one of the U.S. Army’s last great cavalrymen, Colonel Hank Reed, makes a bold decision—with General George Patton’s blessing—to mount a covert rescue operation. Racing against time, Reed’s small but determined force of soldiers, aided by several turncoat Germans, steals across enemy lines in a last-ditch effort to save the horses.

Pulling together this multistranded story, Elizabeth Letts introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters: Alois Podhajsky, director of the famed Spanish Riding School of Vienna, a former Olympic medalist who is forced to flee the bomb-ravaged Austrian capital with his entire stable in tow; Gustav Rau, Hitler’s imperious chief of horse breeding, a proponent of eugenics who dreams of genetically engineering the perfect warhorse for Germany; and Tom Stewart, a senator’s son who makes a daring moonlight ride on a white stallion to secure the farm’s surrender.

A compelling account for animal lovers and World War II buffs alike, The Perfect Horse tells for the first time the full story of these events. Elizabeth Letts’s exhilarating tale of behind-enemy-lines adventure, courage, and sacrifice brings to life one of the most inspiring chapters in the annals of human valor. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth— June 23, 1961
• Where—Houston, Texas, US
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Currently—lives in southern California

Elizabeth Letts was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up in southern California. As a teenager, she was a competitive equestrian three-day eventer. She attended Northfield Mount Hermon School and Yale College where she majored in History. She served in the Peace Corps in Morocco.

Letts is the author of several books: Quality of Care (2005), Family Planning (2006), The Butter Man, a children's book (2008), The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman the Horse that Inspired a Nation (2011), and The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis (2016). The latter two books, both about horses, reached the New York Times Bestsellers List—at #1 and #7, respectively.

Letts's younger brother, John, is a retired professional tennis player. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/12/2016.)

Book Reviews
Winningly readable.... Letts captures both the personalities and the stakes of this daring mission with such a sharp ear for drama that the whole second half of the book reads like a WWII thriller dreamed up by Alan Furst or Len Deighton.... The right director could make a Hollywood classic out of this fairy tale.
Christian Science Monitor

Hard to put down.... One need not be an equestrian or horse lover in order to appreciate this story.
New York Journal of Books

The Perfect Horse raises the narrative bar. Applying her skills as a researcher, storyteller and horsewoman, Letts provides context that makes this account spellbinding.
Culturess

A truly fascinating chronicle of a dedicated group of horsemen and the risks they were willing to take to preserve the equine icon that is the Lipizzane.... I was hooked from start to finish by Letts’s incredible attention to detail and her gripping account of the events surrounding and leading up to the rescue mission.
Horse Nation

A wholly original, illuminating perspective on the war The Perfect Horse tells a fascinating story of bravery and benevolence that has gone far too long without reaching an audience. Full of action, heartbreak and well-developed characters, it has everything needed to be adapted into an outstanding war movie. To anyone with a love of horses or other animals, Letts’ fantastic, almost humanizing characterizations of some of the horses will make this book an instant favorite. And to history buffs, The Perfect Horse provides a totally fresh look at WWII that can’t be found anywhere else.
Bookreporter

An absorbing history of an unusual rescue mission in the closing days of the war in Europe . . . Letts does an excellent job of bringing the various players to life.
BookPage

Letts...eloquently brings together the many facets of this unlikely, poignant story underscoring the love and respect of man for horses.... The author's elegant narrative conveys how the love for these amazing creatures transcends national animosities.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Alois Podhajsky said, "Equestrian art is, perhaps more than any other, closely related to the wisdom of life." What does he mean by this? Is the relationship between horse and man fundamentally different from the relationship between humans and other animals, or is it similar?

2. The Spanish Riding School of Vienna has survived for five centuries in spite of wars and changes of governments that have toppled many more mighty institutions. What was special about the Spanish Riding School that helped it survive?

3. In The Perfect Horse we see how ideas developed to improve animal breeding contributed to the pseudoscience of eugenics—an early 20th century movement to improve the human race that eventually contributed to the Nazi philosophy of racial purity. Are there any drawbacks to breeding purebred animals? What made people want to apply the theories of animal breeding to humans? Do you think this could ever happen again?

4. Several of the major players in this story had a connection to the Olympic Games. George Patton competed in 1912, Podhajsky in 1936. Reed was an alternate for the 1932 team. How did the Olympic experience shape these men and how did it influence their decisions during the war?

5. George Patton famously said that during peacetime, playing polo was the closest that an officer could get to real combat. Many of World War II’s most brilliant leaders were horsemen, and many believed that eliminating the training on horseback would be an irreparable loss to the Army. What was it about their devotion to horses that made them so successful in war? Does working with animals teach skills that are impossible to learn in any other way?

6. There were surprisingly few events during World War II in which men from opposing sides joined together in a common task. Why did the German horsemen risk treason to join with the Americans? What would have likely happened if the Germans had decided to stay put and wait for the end of the war? Given the circumstances, did everyone involved make the right decision?

7. Critics of Patton have said that he was more concerned about gathering up Lipizzaner horses than with saving human refugees and concentration camp survivors. Given the number of other atrocities going on in late April, 1945, was it worth the sacrifice of men and manpower to safeguard the horses?

8. The bravery and selflessness of Captain Tom Stewart, who followed orders to ride across enemy lines to negotiate the stud farm’s release, seems striking to a modern reader. As the son of a sitting senator, certainly he could have been spared being put into such a dangerous situation. What was it about Tom Stewart’s character that was exceptional? Were the morals and motivations of the World War II’s citizen soldiers different from the way people view their duty and honor today?

9. While the Lipizzaner were mostly returned to their native Austria, Witez was shipped to America, eventually sold off at auction, and never returned to his native Poland. The author, in her research, discovered that the Poles were actively trying to reclaim Witez before he was ever shipped to America, but the Americans were distrustful of the Poles and dismissed their claims to the horse. Should Witez have been returned to Poland or was his rightful place in America?

10. At Hank Reed’s funeral, more than twenty of the men who had served under him came to pay their respects. What was it about Hank Reed’s background, training, or education made his men so devoted to him.? What can we learn about leadership by looking at the lives of the men and women who were part of "The Greatest Generation?"
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire
Amy Butler Greenfield, 2005
HarperCollins
352
ISBN-13: 9780060522766

Summary
In the sixteenth century, one of the world's most precious commodities was cochineal, a legendary red dye treasured by the ancient Mexicans and sold in the great Aztec marketplaces, where it attracted the attention of the Spanish conquistadors.

Shipped to Europe, the dye created a sensation, producing the brightest, strongest red the world had ever seen. Soon Spain's cochineal monopoly was worth a fortune.

As the English, French, Dutch, and other Europeans joined the chase for cochineal—a chase that lasted for more than three centuries—a tale of pirates, explorers, alchemists, scientists, and spies unfolds.

A Perfect Red evokes with style and verve this history of a grand obsession, of intrigue, empire, and adventure in pursuit of the most desirable color on earth. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969
• Raised—Adirondack Mountains of New York State, USA
• Education—B.A., Williams College; graduate studies, University of Wisconsin and Oxford
• Awards—PEN/Albrand Award, Veolia Prix du Livre Environnement, Beacon of Freedom Award
• Currently—lives in the English Cotswolds, UK

Amy Butler Greenfield was on her way to a history Ph.D. when she changed course to became a writer. She has written four young adult novels, including Virginia Bound (2003) and the Chantress trilogy (2013-2015). She has also written a work of historical nonfiction entitled A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (2005).

Amy grew up in a small town the Adirondack Mountains of New York State. Her family lived in a old Victorian house heated mainly by a wood stove in the kitchen. They raised chickens in the barns off the backyard. Of her childhood, Amy recalls roaming with her friends through the mountains, swimming in nearby lakes in the summer, and skating on them in the winter.

I also spent many afternoons reading my heart out in our local Carnegie library. In the summer I wrote plays, and my brothers and friends performed them in a theater we rigged up in one of the barns. I also wrote stories and poems, and I was a passionate diary-keeper. I've loved books and writing as long as I can remember.

In addition to literature, Amy fell in love with history and decided she wanted to teach at the college level. She headed to Williams College for her B.A. and later to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her Ph.D. She also became a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University where she studied Renaissance Europe, imperial Spain, and colonial Latin America.

A few months into her doctoral dissertation, Amy developed Lupus, which led to the revelation that she wanted devote her life to pursuing a long-deferred dream. So rather than complete her Ph.D., she turned to writing novels and "the sweeping histories" she had come to love.

Amy's first two books grew out of research while studying at Oxford. Virginia Bound was inspired by historical accounts she read of young English people who were essentially kidnapped and sent to the new world as indentured servants. Were they lonely? she wondered. Did they yearn for home and family? What happened to them?

Then, while in Spain researching the history of chocolate, a product introduced to Europe from the West Indies, Amy came across documents about another kind of product entirely—the red die that came from the cochineal, a tiny cactus parasite found in Mexico.

Gradually I realized that tons of cochineal had crossed the Atlantic and poured into Seville, where the dark red dye was unloaded on the city docks. I have a visual imagination, and I love color, so this fascinated me. It also amazed me that something so precious could have been forgotten by the modern world. I thought that someday I'd like to write a book about it.

More remarkably, the love of color and textile dyes is part of Amy's heritage. Her Scottish great-grandfather came to the U.S. where he studied dyes and worked in textiles. Eventually, he joined the faculty of Drexel University in Philadelphia as a professor of textile chemistry. His son, Amy's grandfather, worked for dye companies and married a woman who owned a yarn shop. Amy's mother also studied textiles and married a man who worked in physics and chemistry. Out of what would seem a genetic attraction to color came Amy's 2005 history, A Perfect Red.

Amy met her husband David while studying at Oxford. After living for a number of years outside of Boston, Massachusetts, the couple and their children now live on the edge of the Cotswolds in England. There Amy writes, reads, and bakes double-dark-chocolate cake.

She loves music, romantic adventure, history, quirky science, and suspense, which explains how she came to write her first YA novel, Chantress. (Author bio adapted from various web-based sources, including the author's website.)

Book Reviews
[An] intricate history.... Greenfield paints a broad historical panorama, never neglecting the intimate, eccentric, and often absurd human details.
Boston Globe

Greenfield does what the best historical authors do—follows the thread of a story through history without missing a stitch.
Cleveland Plain Dealer

With A Perfect Red, she does for [red] what Mark Kurlansky in Salt did for that common commodity.
Houston Chronicle

A gem of accessible history.
San Diego Union-Tribune

Delightful, rollicking history.... A fun read, well-supported by extensive research.
Los Angeles Times Book Review

Elusive, expensive and invested with powerful symbolism, red cloth became the prize possession of the wealthy and well-born, Greenfield writes in her intricate, fully researched and stylishly written history of Europe's centuries-long clamor for cochineal.
Publishers Weekly

Pirates! Kings! Beautiful ladies! Daring spies! Elements essential for a page-turning action/adventure thriller, yes, but who would think they'd turn up in a scholarly examination of a little-known substance called cochinea?... [E]minently entertaining and educational. —Carol Haggas
Booklist

Greenfield...brings a practitioner's knowledge to her study of cochineal, a dyestuff that the Spanish conquerors discovered in the great marketplaces of Mexico and soon brought to a world hungry for things red.... A smart blend of science and culture.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Why did attitudes toward dyers begin to change in Europe in the thirteenth century, and in what ways did that shift reflect the changing social organization of dyers at the time?

2. How did the shades of red worn by Renaissance Europeans serve as markers of class, and what do these divisions reveal about the general appetite for the color red in this era?

3. How would you describe the process by which female cochineal insects produce the "perfect red"?

4. What role did the Spanish conquistadors of the New World, led by Hernán Cortés, play in the introduction of cochineal to Europe?

5. Which group do you think was more responsible for the popularization of cochineal -- Renaissance Europeans or indigenous Mexicans, and why?

6. What do Spain's efforts to preserve its global monopoly over cochineal suggest about the significance of cochineal to its economy and its national pride?

7. How do historical figures as diverse as the poet, John Donne; the English pirate, Francis Drake; the French explorer, Samuel de Champlain; the Dutch inventor of the microscope, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte factor in the history of cochineal and the European fascination with the mystery of its origin?

8. To what extent was the 19th-century cultivation of cochineal in Spain seen by the Spaniards as a way of salvaging some of the wreckage of their vast empire?

9. How did the advent of synthetic dyes and chemical production of color affect producers of cochineal around the world?

10. How have politics and class influenced the status of the color red in contemporary times?(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky, 1999
MTV Books : Simon & Schuster
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451696196

Summary
Since its publication, Stephen Chbosky’s haunting debut novel has received critical acclaim, provoked discussion and debate, grown into a cult phenomenon with over a million copies in print, and inspired a major motion picture.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a story about what it’s like to travel (and run away from) that strange course through the uncharted territory of high school, the world of first dates, family dramas, new friends, and the loss of a good friend and a favorite aunt. It's a world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show....of those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 25, 1970
• Where—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Southern California
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California

Chbosky was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in the Pittsburgh suburb of Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania. He is the son of Lea (nee Meyer), a tax preparer, and Fred G. Chbosky, a steel company executive and consultant to CFOs. He was raised Catholic, and has a sister, Stacy. As a teenager, Chbosky "enjoyed a good blend of the classics, horror, and fantasy." He was heavily influenced by J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye and the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tennessee Williams.

Chbosky graduated from Upper St. Clair High School in 1988, around which time he met Stewart Stern, screenwriter of the 1955 James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause. Stern became Chbosky's a friend and mentor, and proved a major influence on Chbosky's career.

Career
In 1992, Chbosky graduated from the University of Southern California's screenwriting program. He wrote, directed, and acted in the 1995 independent film The Four Corners of Nowhere, which got Chbosky his first agent, was accepted by the Sundance Film Festival, and became one of the first films shown on the Sundance Channel. In the late 1990s, Chbosky wrote several unproduced screenplays, including ones titled Audrey Hepburn's Neck and Schoolhouse Rock.

In 1994, Chbosky was working on a "very different type of book" than The Perks of Being a Wallflower when he wrote the line, "I guess that's just one of the perks of being a wallflower." Chbosky recalled that he "wrote that line. And stopped. And realized that somewhere in that [sentence] was the kid I was really trying to find." After several years of gestation, Chbosky began researching and writing The Perks of Being a Wallflower, an epistolary novel that follows the intellectual and emotional maturation of a teenager who uses the alias Charlie over the course of his freshman year of high school. The book is semi-autobiographical; Chbosky has said that he "relate[s] to Charlie[...] But my life in high school was in many ways different."

The book, Chbosky's first novel, was published by MTV Books in 1999, and was an immediate popular success with teenage readers; by 2000, the novel was MTV Books' best-selling title, and The New York Times noted in 2007 that it had sold more than 700,000 copies and "is passed from adolescent to adolescent like a hot potato." Wallflower also stirred up controversy due to Chbosky's portrayal of teen sexuality and drug use. The book has been banned in several schools and appeared on the American Library Association's 2006 and 2008 lists of the 10 most frequently challenged books.

In 2000, Chbosky edited Pieces, an anthology of short stories. The same year, he worked with director Jon Sherman on a film adaptation of Michael Chabon's novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, though the project fell apart by August 2000. Chbosky wrote the screenplay for the 2005 film adaptation of the Broadway rock musical Rent, which received mixed reviews. In late 2005, Chbosky said that he was writing a film adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

In the mid-2000s, Chbosky decided, on the advice of his agent, to begin looking for work in television in addition to film. Finding he "enjoyed the people [he met who were working] in television," Chbosky agreed to serve as co-creator, executive producer, and writer of the CBS serial television drama Jericho, which premiered in September 2006. The series revolves around the inhabitants of the fictional small town of Jericho, Kansas, in the aftermath of several nuclear attacks. Chbosky has said the relationship between Jake Green, the main character, and his mother, reflected "me and my mother in a lot of ways." The first season of Jericho received lackluster ratings, and CBS canceled the show in May 2007. A grassroots campaign to revive the series convinced CBS to renew the series for a second season, which premiered on February 12, 2008, before being canceled once more in March 2008.

It has been announced that Chbosky has written the screenplay for the movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower and will also direct it. Production of the film adaptation took place in Spring 2011, and is now completed. The film stars Logan Lerman and Emma Watson, and is expected to be released in September, 2012. Chbosky resides in Los Angeles, California. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
A trite coming-of-age novel that could easily appeal to a YA readership.... Charlie, the wallflower of the title, goes through a veritable bath of bathos in his 10th grade year, 1991. The novel is formatted as a series of letters to an unnamed "friend," the first of which reveals the suicide of Charlie's pal Michael. Charlie's response—valid enough—is to cry.... Into these standard teenage issues Chbosky infuses a droning insistence on Charlie's supersensitive disposition. Charlie's English teacher and others have a disconcerting tendency to rhapsodize over Charlie's giftedness, which seems to consist of Charlie's unquestioning assimilation of the teacher's taste in books. In the end we learn the root of Charlie's psychological problems, and we confront, with him, the coming rigors of 11th grade, ever hopeful that he'll find a suitable girlfriend and increase his vocabulary,
Publishers Weekly

(Grade 9 & up.) An epistolary narrative cleverly places readers in the role of recipients of Charlie's unfolding story of his freshman year in high school. From the beginning, Charlie's identity as an outsider is credibly established.... Grounded in a specific time (the 1991/92 academic year) and place (western Pennsylvania), Charlie, his friends, and family are palpably real. His grandfather is an embarrassing bigot; his new best friend is gay; his sister must resolve her pregnancy without her boyfriend's support. Charlie develops from an observant wallflower into his own man of action, and, with the help of a therapist, he begins to face the sexual abuse he had experienced as a child. This report on his life will engage teen readers for years to come. —Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Library Journal

Aspiring filmmaker/first-novelist Chbosky adds an upbeat ending to a tale of teenaged angst—the right combination of realism and uplift to allow it on high school reading lists, though some might object to the sexuality, drinking, and dope-smoking. More sophisticated readers might object to the rip-off of Salinger, though Chbosky pays homage by having his protagonist read Catcher in the Rye. Like Holden, Charlie oozes sincerity, rails against celebrity phoniness, and feels an extraliterary bond with his favorite writers (Harper Lee, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Ayn Rand, etc.).... A plain-written narrative suggesting that passivity, and thinking too much, lead to confusion and anxiety.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think Charlie wants to remain anonymous? Have there been times when you wish you could have, or did?

2. Would you be friends with Charlie? Why or why not?

3. What do we learn about Michael? Do you sympathize with Charlie's reaction?

4. What do you think about Susan's relationship with her boyfriend? When Charlie tells Bill, did you think Bill would call his parents? Do you think that was the right thing to do? What do you think of her parent's reaction?

5. Discuss Charlie's reaction to his brother and sister throwing a party. What did you think about the couple in his room? What about Charlie's response?

6. What do you think being a wallflower is? Do you agree with Bob's definition?

7. How do you feel about Patrick and Brad's relationship? Do you think Patrick is understanding of Brad's feelings? What chance at a relationship do they have? Do you think that you can have a 'true' relationship built on secrets?

8. Charlie mentions that his dad "had glory days once." What do you think Charlie's glory days will be? Do you think he is worried about not having any?

9. Discuss Charlie's family holidays. Are there elements that are universal to every family dynamic? Has anything about Charlie's family surprised you? Describe aunt Helen. What kind of person is she?

10. Talk about the mixed tapes in the story. Are you familiar with the songs and bands? Why do you think Charlie speaks about them so often?

11. Do you like that the story is told through letters? Do you feel you know the kind of person Charlie is? His friends and family?

12. Several important issues come up during the course of the book, ranging from molestation to drug use. How does Charlie deal with these? How have the issues affected his friends and family?

13. Charlie has a few breakdowns. Do you feel hopeful for him? How much of his past explains his present?

14. Charlie's friends are moving away at the end of the story. Where does this leave Charlie? Can he make new friends?

15. Bill is very supportive of Charlie. How does this affect Charlie?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Peter the Great: His Life and World
Robert K. Massie, 1980
Random House
928 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679645603

Summary
Winner, 1981 Pulitizer Prize

Against the monumental canvas of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and Russia unfolds the magnificent story of Peter the Great, crowned co-tsar at the age of ten.

Robert K. Massie delves deep into the life of this captivating historical figure, chronicling the pivotal events that shaped a boy into a legend—including his “incognito” travels in Europe, his unquenchable curiosity about Western ways, his obsession with the sea and establishment of the stupendous Russian navy, his creation of an unbeatable army, his transformation of Russia, and his relationships with those he loved most: Catherine, the robust yet gentle peasant, his loving mistress, wife, and successor; and Menshikov, the charming, bold, unscrupulous prince who rose to wealth and power through Peter’s friendship.

Impetuous and stubborn, generous and cruel, tender and unforgiving, a man of enormous energy and complexity, Peter the Great is brought fully to life. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1929
• Where—Lexington, Kentucky, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; Oxford
University (Rhodes Scholar)
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—lives in Irvington, New York

Robert Kinloch Massie III is an American historian, author, Pulitzer Prize recipient. He has devoted much of his career to studying the House of Romanov, Russia's royal family from 1613-1917.Born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1929, Massie spent much of his youth in Nashville, Tennessee and currently resides in the village of Irvington, New York. He studied United States and modern European history at Yale and Oxford University, respectively, on a Rhodes Scholarship. Massie went to work as a journalist for Newsweek from 1959 to 1962 and then took a position at the Saturday Evening Post.

In 1969—before he and his family moved to France—Massie wrote and published his breakthrough book, Nicholas and Alexandra, a biography of the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra of Hesse. Massie's interest in the Imperial family was triggered by the birth of his son, Reverend and politician Robert Kinloch Massie IV, who was born with hemophilia—a hereditary disease that also afflicted Nicholas's son, Alexei. In 1971, the book was the basis of an Academy Award winning film of the same title. In 1995, in his book The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, Massie updated Nicholas and Alexandra with much newly-discovered information.

In 1975 Robert Massie and his then-wife Suzanne Massie chronicled their experiences as the parents of a hemophiliac child and the significant differences between the American and French health-care systems in their jointly-written book, Journey. Massie won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Peter the Great: His Life and World. This book inspired a 1986 NBC miniseries that won three Emmy Awards and starred Maximilian Schell, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave. In 2011 Massie published his biography, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (2011).

Massie was the president of the Authors Guild from 1987 to 1991, and he still serves as an ex officio council member. While president of the Guild, he famously called on authors to boycott any store refusing to carry Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. He is currently married to Deborah Karl. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Enthralling...as fascinating as any novel and more so than most.
New York Times Book Review

Written in a style that combines vigor, clarity, and sensitivity...should be the envy of historians and novelists alike.
Chicago Sun-Times

Fascinating...an absorbing book.
Cleveland Plain Dealer

Urgently readable...the work of a master of narrative history.
Newsweek

Exceptional.
The New Yorker

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 Peter the Great:

1. Describe Peter the Great as he is presented in Robert K. Massie's biogaphy. What kind of a man, and what kind of a ruler, was he? What qualities in him do you find admirable, even likable? What qualities do you find repugnant? Overall, was he a ruler with a vision, a cruel and violent dictator, or a combination of both? Did his means justify the ends?

2. Peter tortured his enemies to achieve political ends. Massie indicates that torture was also used routinely throughout a more "enlightened" Europe. Given today's ethos, and our revulsion against torture, is it possible to view it in a historical context? Can torture be condoned if used in a different era under a different ethical system?

3. What do you consider Peter's greatest accomplishments?

4. How does Massie present the differences between Russia and post-Renaissance Western Europe? In what areas did Russia lag behind...and why?

5. Talk about Peter's experiences in Amsterdam and England...and how they inspired him to bring changes to his country.

6. When Peter returned to Russia from Europe, he prohibited the wearing of beards, heavy boots, and long robes. Massie observes these habits were based on common sense. What does he mean?

7. Massie gives mixed reviews to the Westernization of Russia. Why, to this day, do Peter's actions to modernize Russia remain controversial? What are the competing viewpoints?

8. Why was Peter so intent on gaining access to the sea for his country?

9. Talk about the differences, and similarities, between Peter and Charles II of Sweden? What strategies did Peter employ that resulted in the defeat of Charles, who was considered a military genius. Is all fair in love and war?

10. Massie has said elsewhere that he believes in the "great man" theory of history: that turning points in history occur as a result of individuals, their vision, strength, and talent. Other historians believe that powerful forces outside of individuals—mass movements of populations, the spread of ideas, geography, and a land's natural wealth—are responsible for history's forward movement. What do you think?

11. What struck you most in this book? What have you learned about the history of Russia that you didn't know beforehand?

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

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A Place to Stand
Jimmy Santiago Baca, 2001
Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802139085

Summary
Jimmy Santiago Baca's harrowing, brilliant memoir of his life before, during, and immediately after the years he spent in a maximum-security prison garnered tremendous critical acclaim and went on to win the prestigious 2001 International Prize. Long considered one of the best poets in America today, Baca was illiterate at the age of twenty-one and facing five to ten years behind bars for selling drugs.

A Place to Stand is the remarkable tale of how he emerged after his years in the penitentiary—much of it spent in isolation—with the ability to read and a passion for writing poetry. A vivid portrait of life inside a maximum-security prison and an affirmation of one man's spirit in overcoming the most brutal adversity, A Place to Stand offers proof that hope exists even in the most desperate of lives. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 2, 1952
• Where—Sante Fe, New Mexico, USA
• Education—B.A., Ph.D., University of New Mexico
• Awards—American Book Award, Pushcart Prize, International
Hispanic Heritage Award, International Award.
• Currently—lives in southwestern USA

Born in New Mexico of Indio-Mexican descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was raised first by his grandmother and later sent to an orphanage. A runaway at age 13, it was after Baca was sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison that he began to turn his life around: he learned to read and write and unearthed a voracious passion for poetry.

During a fateful conflict with another inmate, Jimmy was shaken by the voices of poets Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca, and made a choice that would alter his destiny. Instead of becoming a hardened criminal, he emerged from prison a writer. Baca sent three of his poems to Denise Levertov, the poetry editor of Mother Jones. The poems were published and became part of Immigrants in Our Own Land, published in 1979, the year he was released from prison.

He earned his GED later that same year. He is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award and for his memoir, A Place to Stand, the prestigious International Award. In 2006 he won the Cornelius P. Turner Award. The national award recognizes one GED graduate a year who has made outstanding contributions to society in education, justice, health, public service and social welfare.

Baca has devoted his post-prison life to writing and teaching others who are overcoming hardship. His themes include American Southwest barrios, addiction, injustice, education, community, love and beyond. He has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries, and universities throughout the country.

In 2005 he created Cedar Tree Inc., a nonprofit foundation that works to give people of all walks of life the opportunity to become educated and improve their lives. Cedar Tree provides free instruction, books, writing material and scholarships. Cedar Tree has an ongoing writing workshop in the Albuquerque Women's Prison and at the South Valley Community Center. Cedar Tree also has an Internship program that provides live-in writing scholarships at Wind River Ranch, and in the south valley of Albuquerque. The program allows students, writers and poets the opportunity to write, attend poetry readings, conduct writing workshops, and work on documentary film production.

Radio/TV Appearances
National Public Radio, Good Morning America, National Discovery Channel, PBS Language of Life with Bill Moyers, CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood.

Special Projects
Founded Black Mesa Enterprises, a grassroots entertainment cooperative that modeled constructive patterns of living to troubled and at-risk teenagers and focused on respect of self and others. Members abided by strict rules regarding responsible behavior and avoidance of drugs, alcohol and violence, while participating in the business by writing, performing and recording rap and poetry, designing and selling T-shirts, promoting literacy with free books.

Facilitated an intensive writing workshop for unemployed steelworkers in Chicago, and the compilation of In the Heat, an anthology of their poetry, which was published by Cedar Hill Publications to acclaim.

Provided free readings and workshops at countless elementary, junior high and high schools, colleges, universities, reservations, barrio community centers, white ghettos and housing projects from coast to coast. Tutored many kids in reading and writing, arranged readings for them at local bookstores, mentored and motivated children and young adults in writing, publishing and constructive living. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Elegant and gripping.... The velocity of Baca's transformation through literature is breathtaking.
Los Angeles Times

A wild ride through poverty and alcoholism, abandonment, and orphanage scenes from Dickens.... A Place to Stand is a hell of a book, quite literally. You won't soon forget it.
San Diego Union-Tribune

A Place to Stand is an astonishing narrative that affirms the triumph of the human spirit.... A benchmark of Southwestern prose.
Arizona Daily Star

At once brave and heartbreaking.... A thunderous artifact...by a poet whose voice, brutal and tender, is unique in America.
Nation

Worth reading from both a literary and a social perspective, this book is recommended for all public and academic libraries. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

While readers may find Baca's poetry more dazzling than this prose memoir about how he became a poet, the author still manages to capture both the reader's interest and sympathies. Baca traverses his life, starting with his childhood in rural New Mexico where both parents essentially abandoned him his adolescence in "juvee" halls and his days as a drug dealer. The story leads up to an account of five years in a maximum-security prison in Arizona, and the unusual personal transformation that occurs there through his learning to read and write; eventually, he discovers his poetic voice. The text is structured like a conversion narrative in which Baca's past symbolizes all that is unhealthy and his poetry-oriented future is filled with the hope and optimism that come from discovering something divine in the midst of darkness. The darkness is often literal, as when Baca is describing his lengthy solitary confinements. He also recounts the intricacies of prison politics, in which failure to gain respect and alliances forged with the wrong people can mean death. Oddly, certain story lines are simply dropped along the way, such as his charge that the prison was lacing his food with strong psychoactive drugs. It is too bad that Baca's prose is frequently flat ("Poetry enhanced my self-respect. It provided me with a path for exploring possibilities for life's enrichment that I follow to this day"), especially when reflecting upon abstract topics, since the content of his story is so interesting and his poetry simply shines. Forecast: Baca has won a Pushcart Prize, among other awards, including his title as a one-time champion of the International Poetry Slam.
Publishers Weekly

Poetry seems antithetical to the poverty, racism, and violence that wracked Baca's tragic youth, but the power of language is what kept him alive and sane while he served hard time in a hellish federal prison. Now a prizewinning poet and screenwriter, Baca, born in New Mexico in 1952, was abandoned by his parents and put in an orphanage at age seven. He learned to fight but not to read and, in spite of good intentions, ran into nothing but trouble. Baca chronicles his brutal experiences with riveting exactitude and remarkable evenhandedness. An unwilling participant in the horrific warfare that rages within prison walls and a rebel who refused to be broken by a vicious and corrupt system, Baca taught himself to read and write, awoke to the voice of the soul, and converted "doing time" into a profoundly spiritual pursuit. Poetry became a lifeline, and Baca's harrowing story will stand among the world's most moving testimonies to the profound value of literature.
Library Journal

A mercifully brief memoir of the Pushcart Prize—and American Book Award-winning Hispanic poet's criminal past, and his agonizingly slow discovery of the redemptive power of writing while serving a prison term. Born in New Mexico as the third child of an alcoholic father and philandering mother, Baca (Black Mesa Poems) was handed off at seven to his grandparents when his father disappeared and his mother ran off with another man-only to find himself in an orphanage when his grandfather died shortly thereafter. Early efforts at schooling failed, and the marginally literate Baca ran away and experimented with criminal behavior. Without any strong role models, fruitful employment, or defenses against anti-Hispanic bigotry, Baca, unusually strong for his youth, developed a vicious proficiency at streetfighting and deliberately resisted attempts by occasional benefactors to set him straight. When he discovered that his first lover was unfaithful to him, Baca drifted to California, where he was fired from his job as an unlicensed plumber after he refused the sexual advances of a housewife. In Arizona, a life as a drug dealer soon landed him a five-year sentence in Florence State Prison—an overcrowded, maximum-security facility where Baca turned to books as an escape and began writing angry, bitterly ironic poetry to purge himself of emotional turmoil. "I am Healing Earthquakes," he writes in one of his early poems, "a man awakening to the day with a place to stand / And ground to defend." After he was released, his attempts at reaching a reconciliation with surviving family members ended in horror when a brother died from alcoholism and his stepfather murdered his mother and then killed himself. Baca finally married, clinging to the love of his wife and his poetry "to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the hopeless, of which I am one." A brutally unflinching look back at a dead-end youth that became a crucible for vivid and vital art.
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 A Place to Stand:

1. To what extent was Jimmy Santiago Baca's youth and young adulthood a result of a broken family? What kind of example does Jimmy's story offer for the nurture vs. nature argument?

2. How did the childcare and legal system fail Jimmy? To what degree was he...or was he not...responsible for his actions?

3. When he headed to prison at the age of 21, was there any reason to think he would become anything other than a hardened criminal? Were there hints that there might be another outcome for Jimmy?

4. Talk about Jimmy's steps toward redemption? What was the turning point or points? Who helped him along the way? What kind of qualities within Jimmy himself made the difference?

5. Jimmy pulls himself back from killing an inmate when he hears "the voices of Neruda and Lorca...praising life as sacred and challenging me: How can you kill and still be a poet?" Comment on that passage.

5. In what way did reading literature help Jimmy begin to heal? Same question for Jimmy's writing—how did it help him?

6. Talk about one of Jimmy's early poems: "I am Healing Earthquakes," in which he writes, "a man awakening to the day with a place to stand / And ground to defend." What is the significance of those lines?

6. In a larger sense, how does the written word have the power to remake the personal world? In your own experience, have you ever been moved deeply by reading poetry or prose—or by the process of your own writing—to rethink the way you live your life?

7. To what extent has this memoir opened your eyes to life in prison? What kind of life do prisoners endure? Is there a better system? If so, what would it be?

8. After his release, Jimmy attempted to reconcile with his family, only to witness more horror. How much can one individual endure? (This may or may not be a rhetorical question...it's up to you.)

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

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The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England
Dan Jones, 2012 (Rev. ed., 2014)
Penguin Group (USA)
560 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143124924

Summary
The first Plantagenet king inherited a blood-soaked kingdom from the Normans and transformed it into an empire stretched at its peak from Scotland to Jerusalem.

In this epic history, Dan Jones vividly resurrects this fierce and seductive royal dynasty and its mythic world. We meet the captivating Eleanor of Aquitaine, twice queen and the most famous woman in Christendom; her son, Richard the Lionheart, who fought Saladin in the Third Crusade; and King John, a tyrant who was forced to sign Magna Carta, which formed the basis of our own Bill of Rights.

This is the era of chivalry, of Robin Hood and the Knights Templar, the Black Death, the founding of Parliament, the Black Prince, and the Hundred Year’s War. It will appeal as much to readers of Tudor history as to fans of Game of Thrones. (From the publisher.)

The Plantagenets has been adapted as a 2014 BBC documentary series. Jones's followup book, The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors, was published in 2014.

Author Bio
• Birth—July 27, 1981
• Where—Reading, England, UK
• Education—B.A., University of Cambridge
• Currently—lives in London, England

Dan Gwynne Jones is a British writer, historian, and journalist. He was born in Reading, England, to Welsh parents and attended The Royal Latin School, a state grammar school in Buckingham. In 2002, he took a first in history at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. Currently, he lives in Battersea, London, with his wife and children.

Historical works
Jones's first history book was Summer of Blood, a popular narrative history of the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. It was published in 2009.

His second book, The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made England, was published in 2012 in the UK and a year later in the US, where it became a New York Times bestseller. The book is a family portrait of the Plantagenet kings from Henry II to Richard II. In 2014, the BBC adapted the book into a documentary series.

The Wars of the Roses, Jones's third book was published in 2014. It picks up where The Plantagenets leaves off—the death of Henry V to the arrival of the Tudors (1420-1541).

Journalism
Jones is also a columnist at the London Evening Standard, where he writes regularly about sports. He has written for the Times (London) Sunday Times (London), Telegraph, Spectator, Daily Beast, Newsweek, Literary Review, New Statesman, GQ, BBC History Magazine, and History Today. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/20/14.)

Book Reviews
Like the medieval chroniclers he quarries for juicy anecdotes, Jones has opted for a bold narrative approach anchored firmly upon the personalities of the monarchs themselves yet deftly marshaling a vast supporting cast of counts, dukes, and bishops.... Fast-paced and accessible, The Plantagenets is old-fashioned storytelling and will be particularly appreciated by those who like their history red in tooth and claw. Mr. Jones tackles his subject with obvious relish.
Wall Street Journal

Delicious.... Jones has produced a rollicking, compelling book produced a rollicking, compelling book about a rollicking, compelling dynasty, one that makes the Tudors who followed them a century later look like ginger pussycats.... The Plantagenets is told with the latest historical evidence and rich in detail and scene-setting. You can almost smell the sea salt as the White Ship sinks, and hear the screams of the tortured at the execution grounds at Tyburn.
USA Today

Jones has brought the Plantagenets out of the shadows, revealing them in all their epic heroism and depravity. His is an engaging and readable account—itself an accomplishment given the gaps in medieval sources and a 300-year tableau—and yet researched with the exacting standards of an academician. The result is an enjoyable, often harrowing journey through a bloody, insecure era in which many of the underpinnings of English kingship and Anglo-American constitutional thinking were formed.
Washington Post

[T]he “unnaturally cruel” and powerful Plantagenets were the longest-reigning English royal dynasty, ruling for more than two centuries, from Henry II’s ascendance in 1154 after a violent civil war to Richard II’s deposition at the hands of his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in 1399.... Blood-soaked medieval England springs to vivid life in Jones’s highly readable, authoritative, and assertive history.
Publishers Weekly

[A] riveting portrait of the royal lineage from Henry II through Richard II.... The author's special focus is on the qualities and decisions that led to each ruler's eventual downfall. Despite the density caused by any attempt to cram centuries of English history into one volume, Jones manages to create a work that is highly accessible to readers with only a basic knowledge of this era.
Library Journal

They may lack the glamour of the Tudors or the majesty of the Victorians, but in Jones’ latest book, the Plantagenets are just as essential to the foundation of modern Britain.... Written with prose that keeps the reader captivated throughout accounts of the span of centuries and the not-always-glorious trials of kingship, this book is at all times approachable, academic, and entertaining. —James Orbesen
Booklist

A novelistic historical account of the bloodline that "stamped their mark forever on the English imagination."... Perhaps Jones' regular column in the London Standard has given him a different slant on history; however he manages, it's certainly to our benefit. Historians may question a few dates and events, but for enjoyable historical narratives, this book is a real winner.
Kirkus Reviews

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Possible Side Effects
Augusten Burroughs, 2007
Macmillan Picador
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312426811

Summary
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Running with Scissors comes Augusten Burroughs's most provocative collection of true stories yet. From nicotine gum addiction to lesbian personal ads to incontinent dogs, Possible Side Effects mines Burroughs's life in a series of uproariously funny essays. These are stories that are uniquely Augusten, with all the over-the-top hilarity of Running with Scissors, the erudition of Dry, and the breadth of Magical Thinking.

A collection that is universal in its appeal and unabashedly intimate, Possible Side Effects continues to explore that which is most personal, mirthful, disturbing, and cherished, with unmatched audacity. A cautionary tale in essay form. Be forewarned—hilarious, troubling, and shocking results might occur. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 23, 1965
• Where—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—no formal beyond elementary school
• Currently—lives in New York and western Massachusetts

Although Augusten Burroughs achieved moderate success with his debut novel, Sellevision, it was his 2002 memoir, Running with Scissors, that catapulted him into the literary stratosphere. Indeed, few writers have spun a bizarre childhood and eccentric personal life into literary gold with as much wit and panache as Burroughs, whose harrowing accounts of dysfunction and addiction are offset by an acerbic humor readers and critics find irresistible.

Born Christopher Robison (he changed his name when he turned 18), Burroughs is the son of an alcoholic father who abandoned his family and a manic-depressive mother who fancied herself a poet in the style of Anne Sexton. At age 12, he was farmed out to his mother's psychiatrist, a deeply disturbed—and disturbing—man whose medical license was ultimately revoked for gross misconduct. In Running with Scissors, Burroughs recounts his life with the pseudonymous Finch family as an experience tantamount to being raised by wolves. The characters he describes are unforgettable: children of assorted ages running wild through a filthy, dilapidated Victorian house, totally unfettered by rules or inhibitions; a variety of deranged patients who take up residence with the Finches seemingly at will; and a 33-year-old pedophile who lives in the backyard shed and initiates an intense, openly homosexual relationship with the 13-year-old Burroughs right under the doctor's nose.

That he is able to wring humor and insight out of this shocking scenario is testimony to Burroughs's writing skill. Upon its publication in 2002, Scissors was hailed as "mordantly funny" (Los Angeles Times), "hilarious" (San Francisco Chronicle), and "sociologically suggestive and psychologically astute" (New York Times). The book became a #1 bestseller and was turned into a 2006 movie starring Annette Bening, Alec Baldwin, and Joseph Fienes.

[Although the doctor who "raised" Burroughs was never named in the memoir, six members of the real-life family sued the author and his publisher for defamation, claiming that whole portions of the book were fabricated. Burroughs insisted that the book was entirely accurate but agreed in the 2007 settlement to change the wording of the author's note and acknowledgement in future editions of the book. He was never required to change a single word of the memoir itself.]

Since Running with Scissors, Burroughs has mined snippets of his life for more bestsellers, including further installments of his memoir (Dry, A Wolf at the Table) and several well-received collections of razor-sharp essays. His writing continues to appear in newspapers and magazines around the world, and he is a regular contributor to National Public Radio's Morning Edition.

Extras
From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview:

• When I was very young, maybe six or seven, I used to make little books out of construction paper and wallpaper. Then I'd sew the spine of the book with a needle and thread. Only after I had the actual book did I sit down with a pencil and write the text. I actually still have one of these little books and it's titled, obliquely, "Little Book."

• Well, all of a sudden I am obsessed with PMC. For those of you who think I am speaking about plastic plumbing fixtures, I am not. PMC stands for Precious Metal Clay. And it works just like clay clay. You can shape it into anything you want. But after you fire it, you have something made of solid 22k gold or silver. So you want to be very careful. Anyway, I plan to make dog tags. So there's something.

• I'm a huge fan of English shortbread cookies, of anything English really. I very nearly worship David Strathairn. And I'm afraid that if I ever return to Sydney, Australia, I may not return.

• I will never refuse potato chips or buttered popcorn cooked in one of those thingamajigs you crank on top of the stove.

• And my politics could be considered extreme, as I truly believe that people who molest or otherwise abuse children should be buried in pits. And I do believe our country has been served by white male presidents quite enough for the next few hundred years. I really could go on and on here, so I'd best stop.

• When asked about what book influenced him most as an author, here is his response:

Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz was the first book I read as an adult, at the age of twenty-four. Until this time, I'd never had the opportunity to sit down and read. Reading takes solitude and it takes focus. My life had been extremely chaotic. By the time I was twenty-four, I was already an active alcoholic. But during a brief period of sobriety, I went to a local bookstore and selected Midaq Alley out of all the other books, simply because I liked the cover. It turned out to be a profound experience for me. I was completely absorbed in the book, in the experience of reading. I felt transported from my life into a different, better life. From that moment forward, I was a heavy reader, often devouring three or four books a week.

Book Reviews
Unflinchingly, Augusten Burroughs gouges himself (literally and figuratively), bleeds, gets it on paper—often without a neat resolution or the genre's obligatory epiphany—and then makes you laugh. Now that's genius.
New York Times Book Review

The primary reason for reading the essays in Possible Side Effects is to enjoy the sound of his rueful, funny, faintly sulky voice.... This is a book by someone who understands the frailty and absurdity of the human condition.
Washington Post

Augusten Burroughs's spare style and facility with double entendre are well suited to the biting comic essay form. He tackles everything from the tooth fairy to doll-collecting innkeepers to lesbian personal ads in this volume, and the result is fairly even and definitely hard to put down once you begin. Burroughs's greatest strengths as a memoirist are his refusal to fit into one easy box (gay man, alcoholic, ad man, New Yorker, hypochondriac, compulsive slob) and his ability to elevate reader curiosity using tone and plain observations.... He somehow manages to lure you in time after time with his unique way of describing things that could have happened to anyone, but didn't—at least not quite this way.
Globe and Mail (Canada)

At this point, labeling Augusten Burroughs a memoirist is a bit of an understatement.... Burroughs has excavated every crevice of his personal life for material. So maybe calling him a miner is more accurate. Fortunately, his work is much more environmentally friendly.... Burroughs is funny—when he's not breaking your heart.... Burroughs's breezy, clear-cut writing style is perfectly matched to his subject matter: prose-y when necessary but highly conversational, fluid, and frank. Something wonderful and new to savor.
Toronto Star

(Audio version.) Nostalgia, entertainment and humor are possible side effects of listening to this audiobook. Burroughs delivers a slew of reflections about both serious and mundane aspects of his life. His style of delivery fluctuates from piece to piece so one is never sure what the theme or moral is until he finishes. When he's not highlighting the idiosyncrasies of humanity or his own eccentricities, he romanticizes life in New York City, plots John Updike's death and expounds upon the love of his partner or pets. Though his performance keeps listener's attention, it's far from stellar. He fluctuates with character accents. He voices all of his women in the same tone and quality. His overemphasis with expletives often detracts because it's not usually necessary; expletives will stand out on their own. His youthful voice does help legitimate the stories in that the experiences shared need vibrancy to imply truthfulness. Light and endearing with the occasional somber thought, this audiobook takes hold of listeners from the beginning and carries them through adventures and mishaps that prove worth the trip.
Publishers Weekly

Memoir-essays, which, like those in Magical Thinking, run the gamut from appealing to appalling. The author of Running with Scissors offers another no-holds-barred look at his eventful life, including his troubled childhood, his former career in advertising and current career as a memoirist, his love life, his struggles with alcoholism, and his great love of animals. An absolutely brilliant writer as well as a gifted narrator, Burroughs easily draws listeners into descriptions of the everyday (vacations, business proposals, doctor visits) and his life-altering events, such as the day he took his dog to the ASPCA because his alcoholism prevented him from properly caring for the animal. While public libraries need to be aware that several of Burroughs's essays would merit the equivalent of an NC-17 rating, this outstanding work deserves serious consideration for an Audie and/or Grammy Award. Highly recommended. —Beth Farrell, Portage Cty. Dist. Lib, OH
Library Journal

Popular memoirist Burroughs again turns his whirligig neuroses into something resembling a book. In this general updating of life in the world of bestsellerdom, the author pulls together a string of autobiographical essays and sketches that consistently entertain, even if they don't always enlighten. You can almost see the child from a disturbed home dancing frantically about in these pages, doing anything to ward off the darkness. It brings a grimace with the laughter. Like many creative people who don't know what to do with themselves, Burroughs once worked in advertising, an experience summed up in a particularly gruesome piece about working on a Junior Mints campaign. "I hadn't been on the account for one week," he writes, "and already the phrase mint threshold was being bandied about." While the ad game is good for several anecdotes, Burroughs always spirals back to the morass of his inner world, which seems at times an endless parade of worry and addiction. After years of drinking and drugging, the author appears to have managed the transition from those substances to other dependencies: junk food, QVC, chain hotels, nicotine gum. Each of these provides grist for his self-mocking, Sedaris-like humor. Later chapters journey into territory more familiar to his fans: the tempestuous landscape of his childhood, complete with a manic-depressive mother and a brother afflicted with Asperger's Syndrome. The book peters out amidst less successful pieces of this sort; oddly, the less serious his subject matter, the more meaningful and heartfelt his prose. Readers will likely disregard the post-James Frey author's note indicating that "some of the events described happened as related, other were expanded and changed." As if we didn't know. Wears a little thin by the end, but still no mean effort. Sometimes, a genuine laugh or 20 is enough..
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In her New York Times review of Possible Side Effects, Janet Maslin writes that “somewhere along the way to his fourth autobiographical volume, Augusten Burroughs changed from a guy with a story to tell into a guy with a knack for telling stories.” What do you think she means? Do you agree? What makes a good storyteller? Can you name any other writers with a similar talent for making the incidental interesting and/or humorous?

2. As the twenty-five essays in Possible Side Affects shift back and forth in time, how are Burroughs’ preoccupations different before and after becoming a famous writer? In what ways are they the same?"

3. On page 20, Burroughs’ writes: “I am prone to envy. It is one of my three default emotions, the others being greed and rage. I have also experienced compassion and generosity, but only fleetingly and usually while drunk, so I have little memory.” Do you think Burroughs is being completely serious? How might essays like “Killing John Updike” and “Little Crucifixions” both prove and refute Burroughs’ statement? Why is Burroughs’s self-assessment both striking and funny?

4. “Many people assume I have a ‘funny and charming’ self,” Burroughs states in his essay “Team Player” after being invited to speak publicly at colleges and universities. “Many people are wrong” [p 36]. Does this confession surprise you? Where do you think it would be most fun to hang out with Burroughs: a redneck rodeo, a Jean Paul Gautier fashion show, or the Westminster dog show? Why? What, if anything, do you think you can know about a writer’s personality from his or her work?

5. Considering the essays “The Sacred Cow,” “Fetch” and “Kitty Kitty,” how does Burroughs view dogs? If you have pets, would you trust them with him? What about his brother? Why do you think some people find the company of animals preferable to humans?

6. Based on “GWF Seeks Same” and “Getting to No You,” do you think Burroughs would make a good host of a reality television dating show? When placing an internet ad, about what do you think it is most acceptable to lie: age, weight or income? Who do you think has the best odds when it comes to internet dating: men, women, gays or straights?

7. Reviewing his pre-celebrity resume in the essays “Mint Threshold,” “Taking Tests, Taking Things,” “Unclear Sailing,” and “Druggie Debbie,” what do you think would have become of Burroughs had he never become a successful writer? Do you he would have returned to advertising and become a bitter alcoholic, taken to the streets and become boozed-out beggar, or carved out a sober and rewarding career in some other profession?

8. Recalling his experiences in “Attacked by Heart,” “The Wisdom Tooth,” “Peep,” “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” and “Little Crucifixions,” with which of Burroughs’ numerous compulsions and neuroses do you most identify? Do you think being a celebrity allows you to get away with being more eccentric? Why? If you were a celebrity, what eccentricity would you like to cultivate?

9. Do “Try Our New Single, Black Mother Menu” and “Mrs. Chang” reinforce or challenge stereotypes? Why? Do you think it’s possible to talk honestly and humorously about race and not offend anyone? How do some food or retail chains in your area cater to certain demographics?

10. In “Pest Control” and “The Georgia Thumper,” how does Burroughs view his two grandmothers? If you could magically make any of your relatives disappear, would you? Which ones? Can you recall any non-relatives you knew while growing that you wished were part of your family? Why?

11. How does Burroughs use humor to address the subject of mental illness in “The Forecast for Sommer,” “The Wonder Boy,” and “Julia’s Child”? Does finding the comedy in such situations make those stories more accessible and emotionally affecting to readers? Why? Do you think “Julia’s Child” is a good essay with which to end the book?
(Questions issued by publishers.)

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The Post-American World
Fareed Zakaria, 2008
W.W. Norton & Co.
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393334807

Summary
One of our most distinguished thinkers argues that the "rise of the rest" is the great story of our time. "This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." So begins Fareed Zakaria’s important new work on the era we are now entering.

Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world.

The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems.

How should the United States understand and thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 20, 1964
• Where—Bombay, Maharashtra, India
• Education—B.A., Yale; Ph.D., Harvard (both USA)
• Awards—World Affairs Councils of America International
Journalist Award
• Currently—lives in New York City

Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International and writes a weekly column on international affairs. His previous book was the New York Times bestseller The Future of Freedom. He lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)

More
Zakaria was born in India to a practicing Muslim family. His father, Rafiq Zakaria, was a former government minister, deputy leader of the Congress party and a respected scholar. His mother, Fatima Zakaria, was for a time the Sunday editor of the Times of India. His brother Arshad is a former head of investment banking at Merrill Lynch and is currently the head of New Vernon Capital, the largest hedge fund investing in India. His two other siblings, a brother Mansoor and a sister Tasneem, are from his father's first marriage.

Fareed attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, India, where he was School Prefect and House Captain for Palmer, one of the four school Houses. After graduating from the Anglican school, Zakaria attended Yale University where he was a member of Berkeley college, Scroll and Key Society, President of the Yale Political Union, and a member of the Party of the Right. Zakaria received a B.A. from Yale and later graduated with a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, where he studied under Samuel P. Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann.

Before his current position with Newsweek, Zakaria was managing editor of the magazine Foreign Affairs, a journal of international politics and economics.

Prior to joining Foreign Affairs, Zakaria ran a research project on American foreign policy at Harvard University. He has taught courses in international relations and political philosophy at Harvard, Columbia and Case Western universities. He has written for such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and the New Republic, and has also worked as a wine columnist for the webzine Slate. His 2002 essay for The New Yorker on America's global role has been widely quoted, as have several of his Newsweek cover-essays.

He is the author of the 1998 book From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton University Press), his Ph.D. thesis, and co-editor of The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (Basic Books). His book The Future of Freedom was published in the spring of 2003 and became a New York Times bestseller, as well as a bestseller in several other countries. It has been translated into more than eighteen languages. His most recent book, published in 2008, is The Post-American World, an examination of America's role in a world where it is still the political-military superpower but where economic, industrial, financial, and cultural power is being dispersed around the world.

In April 2005, Zakaria premiered as host of a new foreign affairs program on PBS, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria.

During the December 28th, 2007 airing of his program Zakaria announced his retirement from Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria to pursue other broadcast opportunities. The new host is Daljit Dhaliwal.

Zakaria has won several awards for his Newsweek columns, including for his October 2001 cover story, "The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us". In 1999, he was named "one of the 21 most important people of the 21st Century" by Esquire. In 2005, he won the World Affairs Councils of America's International Journalist Award. In 2006, he was named one of the 100 most influential graduates of Harvard University. He currently serves on the boards of Yale University, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, New America Foundation and Columbia University's International House. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Make no mistake. This is a relentlessly intelligent book that eschews simple-minded projections from crisis to collapse. There is certainly plenty to bemoan—from the disappearing dollar to the subprime disaster, from rampant anti-Americanism to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that will take years to win. Yet Zakaria's is not another exercise in declinism. His point is not the demise of Gulliver, but the "rise of the rest."
Josef Joffe - New York Times Book Review

Many of this volume's more acute arguments echo those that have been made by other analysts and writers, most notably, the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman on globalization, and Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, on America's growing isolation in an increasingly adversarial world. But Mr. Zakaria uses his wide-ranging fluency in economics, foreign policy and cultural politics to give the lay reader a lucid picture of a globalized world (and America's role in it) that is changing at light speed, even as he provides a host of historical analogies to examine the possible fallout of these changes.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

When a book proclaims that it is not about the decline of America but "the rise of everyone else," readers might expect another diatribe about our dismal post-9/11 world. They are in for a pleasant surprise as Newsweekeditor and popular pundit Zakaria (The Future of Freedom) delivers a stimulating, largely optimistic forecast of where the 21st century is heading. We are living in a peaceful era, he maintains; world violence peaked around 1990 and has plummeted to a record low. Burgeoning prosperity has spread to the developing world, raising standards of living in Brazil, India, China and Indonesia. Twenty years ago China discarded Soviet economics but not its politics, leading to a wildly effective, top-down, scorched-earth boom. Its political antithesis, India, also prospers while remaining a chaotic, inefficient democracy, as Indian elected officials are (generally) loathe to use the brutally efficient tactics that are the staple of Chinese governance. Paradoxically, India's greatest asset is its relative stability in the region; its officials take an unruly population for granted, while dissent produces paranoia in Chinese leaders. Zakaria predicts that despite its record of recent blunders at home and abroad, America will stay strong, buoyed by a stellar educational system and the influx of young immigrants, who give the U.S. a more youthful demographic than Europe and much of Asia whose workers support an increasing population of unproductive elderly. A lucid, thought-provoking appraisal of world affairs, this book will engage readers on both sides of the political spectrum.
Publishers Weekly

According to Newsweek International editor Zakaria, the weakened global economic and political position of the United States results not from the waning of its own powers but from the rapid rise of many other global players. The optimistic tone of his previous book, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, permeates this work. After 500 years of world dominance and following the decline of great states in other parts of the world, the Western powers are seeing countries such as China and India emerge as new and formidable rivals. Zakaria is sharply critical of the current U.S. presidential administration, citing its dysfunctional political stalemate and foreign and military policies that hinder adaptation to the current realities. He argues that it is incumbent upon the Western powers to adapt if they want to thrive instead of trying to reverse these realities, and he remains optimistic that they can change, as they have historically shown themselves able to do so. Zakaria's arguments are accessible to general readers, and his supporting data are not overwhelming to digest. Most libraries will want this.
Library Journal

Pity the poor think-tanked neocons: Just a moment ago, the talk was of empire and the new world order, and now, it seems, America's day in the sun is about to grow cold. Newsweek International editor Zakaria (The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, 2003, etc.), born in India and a longtime resident of New York, seems unconcerned that his adopted country is sailing down the tubes: "This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else." He enumerates: Macao takes in more gambling revenue than Las Vegas, the biggest Ferris wheel in the world is in Singapore, Bollywood has surpassed Hollywood. Even as the global population grows, the number of those living in extreme poverty is falling, at least in three-quarters of the world's nations. Even after 9/11, the author notes, the world economy "grew at its fastest rate in nearly four decades." Inflation exceeds 15 percent only in a dozen-odd failed states such as Burma and Zimbabwe, and fewer and fewer people are dying in wars or spasms of political violence than ever. That all should be good news to globalists, and it's comforting to know, as Zakaria helpfully points out, that Iran spends less than a penny for every dollar we spend on the military. Yet the United States has dawdled, economically speaking, as China, India and other nations have skyrocketed. It helps, Indians note, that the Chinese government, the commander of that nation's command economy, hasn't really had to respond to public opinion, though even that is changing. The good news? By Zakaria's account, America's strength will lie in freedom and diversity—and the post-American era may not last all that long, since America's population is growing, and growing younger, while the demographics of Asia and Europe are largely pointing to older populations and, in time, fewer workers. A sharp, well-written work of political economy.
Kirkus Reviews

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

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

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The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Charles Duhigg, 2012
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400069286

Summary
A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.

Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.

An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.

What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives.

They succeeded by transforming habits.

In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.

At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.

Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1974
• Where—the State of New Mexico, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.B.A,
Harvard University
• Awards—see below
• Currently—lives in Brookly, New York City, New York

Charles Duhigg is a reporter at the New York Times where he writes for the business section. Prior to joining the staff of the Times in 2006, he was a staff writer of the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Brooklyn, New York City and is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School.

He is currently working on a series titled "The iEconomy" about Apple, and the company's influence within the U.S. and abroad. He wrote the series "Toxic Waters, Golden Opportunities," and was part of the team that wrote "The Reckoning."

Duhigg's book about the science of habit formation, titled The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, was published in 2012. An extract was published in the New York Times entitled "How Companies Learn Your Secrets.

Awards
2007 George Polk Award
2007 Heywood Broun Award
2008 Hillman Prize
2008 Gerald Loeb Award
2009 Scripps Howard National Journalism Award
2010 National Academy of Sciences Reporting Award
2010 Society of Environmental Journalists Investigative Reporting Award
Awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers,the Deadline Awards, and the John B. Oakes Awards.
(Author bio from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
I imagine that most people…would love to find an easy way of breaking a bad habit or two. Charles Duhigg…has written an entertaining book to help us do just that, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Duhigg has read hundreds of scientific papers and interviewed many of the scientists who wrote them, and relays interesting findings on habit formation and change from the fields of social psychology, clinical psychology and neuroscience. This is not a self-help book conveying one author's homespun remedies, but a serious look at the science of habit formation and change.
Timothy D. Wilson - New York Times Book Review

Duhigg brings a heaping, much-needed dose of social science and psychology to the subject, explaining the promise and perils of habits via an entertaining ride that touches on everything from marketing to management studies to the civil-rights movement.... A fascinating read.
Newsweek Daily Beast

A fascinating exploration of our pathologically habitual society—we smoke, we incessantly check our BlackBerrys, we chronically choose bad partners, we always (or never) make our beds. Duhigg digs into why we are this way, and how we can change, both as individuals and institutionally.
The Daily

According to Duhigg (investigative reporter, New York Times), if people can understand how behaviors became habits, they can restructure those patterns in more constructive ways. He presents information on habit formation and change from academic studies, interviews with scientists and executives, and research conducted in dozens of companies. Three sections deal with the neurology of habit formation in individuals, the habits of successful companies and organizations, and the habits of societies and tough ethical issues. Duhigg offers a fascinating analysis'.
Library Journal

With a light touch and utterly believable characters, Close’s...appealing debut manages to capture the humor, heartache and cautious optimism of her protagonists.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Why was E.P. described as “a man who would upend much of what we know about habits”? What did researchers learn from him?

2. What ability do patients with basal ganglia damage lose?

3. Thinking back to the example of McDonald’s restaurants presented on page 26 in the book, how does this company use cues and rewards to trigger habit loops in its customers?

4. What cues and rewards can you identify when you’ve been to fast food restaurants? What about other settings, like movie theaters, or clothing stores?

5. Using the graph on page 19 as a guide, diagram your own habit loop for entering a password on your email account or your pin number at the ATM. Identify the cue, routine, and reward for this habit.

6. Can you diagram the habit loop for when you go into the cafeteria, or have a meal at home?

7. Do you think it was ethical for psychologists to study E.P.? Was he able to consent to research onducted on his memory and habits? Explain why (or why not) the benefits of this research outweigh the negative effects it may have had on his life.

8. On page 21 the author writes, “Habits are often as much a curse as a benefit.” What are examples of habits that are beneficial or detrimental in your own life?

9. The author writes that it is possible to reawaken a habit, and that habits never disappear, but are changed by new cues, routines, or rewards. Describe a habit of yours that has been changed or replaced. Do you agree or disagree that this habit can be reawakened? Why? What would it take to reawaken your habit?

10. Psychologists have learned a great deal about habit and memory from studying individuals who have memory deficits. How are lessons from people like E.P. and H.M. relevant to your life?

11. Make a plan for a new habit you would like to develop. Identify what you can use as a cue, the steps involved in creating a routine and the reward this new habit will deliver.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions

The Power of Now
Eckhart Tolle, 1999
New World Library
235 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781577314806

In Brief
A spiritual teaching of rare power and clarity, presented in the form of dialogue between teacher and seeker. Profound insights are gained—we are not our mind; we can find our way out of psychological pain; authentic power is found in surrendering to the now. More than a book—a precious gift, a loving companion, a guide to enlightened living.

Tolle has evolved a philosophy that has parallels in Buddhism, relaxation techniques, and meditation theory but is also eminently practical. In The Power of Now he shows readers how to recognize themselves as the creators of their own pain, and how to have a pain-free existence by living fully in the present. Accessing the deepest self, the true self, can be learned, he says, by freeing ourselves from the conflicting, unreasonable demands of the mind and living present, fully, and intensely, in the Now. (From the publisher.)

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About the Author

• Birth—1948
• Where—Germany
• Education—Universities of London and Cambridge
• Currently—lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada

Eckhart Tolle was born in Germany in 1948. He spent his teenage years living with his father in Spain, then moved in his early 20s to England where he attended the Universities of London and Cambridge. Following a period of intense personal crisis, he underwent a profound spiritual awakening at the age of 29. He embarked on a long, transformative inner journey that effectively dissolved his old identity and changed the course of his life. Today he is recognized as a great spiritual counselor and an author of inspirational self-help guides. He remains unaffiliated with any organized religion or specific philosophical tradition.

In his first book, The Power of Now (1999), Tolle stressed the importance of living, fully present, in the moment. His powerful message of active self-awareness resonated with millions of readers—including kingmaker Oprah Winfrey—and launched a range of related literature and teaching materials. In 2008, Winfrey selected another Tolle title, A New Earth, for her influential Book Club, joining the author for an online workshop. A sought-after public speaker, Tolle travels extensively, taking his teachings throughout the world. (From Barnes & Noble.)

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Critics Say . . .
This is not just another candy-ass elementary level celestine prophetic conversation supposedly with God clone. It is fresh, revealing, current, new inspiration. Power of Now is written from a depth of a person who has considered suicide, gone through his dark night of the soul and has come out the other side into his very personal and ecstatic enlightenment. If you are considering getting back in touch with your soul this book is a great companion.
Common Ground

Now and then, time cultivates these perfect jewels. You find one and think nothing better is possible. Such is The Power of Now. A regular customer at our store, and student of Chi Gong said, "It not only synthesizes everything i've delved into, but it does it so clearly and simply." Many customers report back literally "thrilled" to have come across the book.
Library Journal

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Book Club Discussion Questions

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Power of Now:

1. Try to sum up as cogently as possible Tolle's premise for self-enlightenment.

2. What are the ways in which Tolle believes people suffer spiritually? In what ways do individuals create their own pain? What does Tolle mean by the false-created self?

3. Is there a single point—or multiple points—in the book in which you felt an "ah-ah!" Did you experience a moment of revelation or major insight into your life?

4. What role do relationships play in Tolle's path to spiritual awakening? To what extent are they hindrances...or aids...or part of the goal?

5. How helpful do you find Tolle's book as it applies to your own life?

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

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Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948
Madeleine Albright, 2012
HarperCollins
467 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062030344

Summary
Before Madeleine Albright turned twelve, her life was shaken by the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia—the country where she was born—the Battle of Britain, the near total destruction of European Jewry, the Allied victory in World War II, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War.

Albright's experiences, and those of her family, provide a lens through which to view the most tumultuous dozen years in modern history. Drawing on her memory, her parents' written reflections, interviews with contemporaries, and newly available documents, Albright recounts a tale that is by turns harrowing and inspiring. Prague Winter is an exploration of the past with timeless dilemmas in mind and, simultaneously, a journey with universal lessons that is intensely personal.

The book takes readers from the Bohemian capital's thousand-year-old castle to the bomb shelters of London, from the desolate prison ghetto of Terezín to the highest councils of European and American government. Albright reflects on her discovery of her family's Jewish heritage many decades after the war, on her Czech homeland's tangled history, and on the stark moral choices faced by her parents and their generation.

Often relying on eyewitness descriptions, she tells the story of how millions of ordinary citizens were ripped from familiar surroundings and forced into new roles as exiled leaders and freedom fighters, resistance organizers and collaborators, victims and killers. These events of enormous complexity are nevertheless shaped by concepts familiar to any growing child: fear, trust, adaptation, the search for identity, the pressure to conform, the quest for independence, and the difference between right and wrong.

"No one who lived through the years of 1937 to 1948," Albright writes, "was a stranger to profound sadness. Millions of innocents did not survive, and their deaths must never be forgotten. Today we lack the power to reclaim lost lives, but we have a duty to learn all that we can about what happened and why."

At once a deeply personal memoir and an incisive work of history, Prague Winter serves as a guide to the future through the lessons of the past—as seen through the eyes of one of the international community's most respected and fascinating figures. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 15, 1937
• Where—Prague, Czechoslovakia
• Education—B.A., Wellesley College; M.A., Ph.D.,
Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Washington, DC, and the state
of Virginia, USA

Madeleine Albright was the first woman to become the United States Secretary of State. She was nominated by US President Bill Clinton on December 5, 1996, and was unanimously confirmed by a U.S. Senate vote of 99–0. She was sworn in on January 23, 1997.

A Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University, Albright holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and numerous honorary degrees. In May 2012, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President Barack Obama. Secretary Albright also serves as a Director on the Board of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Albright is fluent in English, French, Russian, and Czech; she speaks and reads Polish and Serbo-Croatian as well.

Early years
Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelova in the Smichov district of Prague, Czechoslovakia. At the time of her birth, Czechoslovakia had been independent for less than twenty years, having gained independence from Austria-Hungary after World War I. Her father, Josef Korbel, was a Czech Jewish diplomat and supporter of the early Czech democrats, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and Edvard Benes. She was his first child with his Jewish wife, Anna (nee Spieglova), who later also had another daughter Katherine (a schoolteacher) and son John (an economist).

At the time of Albright’s birth, her father was serving as press-attache at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade. However, the signing of the Munich Agreement in March 1938 and the disintegration of Czechoslovakia at the hands of Adolf Hitler forced the family into exile because of their links with Benes. Prior to their flight, Albright's parents had converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. Albright spent the war years in England, while her father worked for Bene’s Czechoslovak government-in-exile. They first lived on Kensington Park Road in Notting Hill, London, where they endured the worst of The Blitz, but later moved to Beaconsfield, then Walton-on-Thames, on the outskirts of London. While in England, a young Albright appeared as a refugee child in a film designed to promote sympathy for all war refugees in London.

Albright was raised Catholic, but converted to Episcopalianism at the time of her marriage in 1959. Albright did not learn until late in life that her parents were Jewish and that many of her Jewish relatives in Czechoslovakia had perished in The Holocaust, including three of her grandparents.

After the defeat of the Nazis in the European Theatre of World War II and the collapse of Nazi Germany and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Albright and family moved back to Prague, where they were given a luxurious apartment in the Hradcany district (which later caused controversy, as it had belonged to an ethnic German Bohemian industrialist family forced out by the Benes decrees. Korbel was named Czechoslovak Ambassador to communist Yugoslavia, and the family moved to Belgrade. Communists governed Yugoslavia, and Korbel was concerned his daughter would be indoctrinated with Marxist ideology in a Yugoslav school, so she was taught by a governess and later sent to the Prealpina Institut pour Jeunes Filles in Chexbres, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Here, she learned French and went by Madeleine, the French version of Madlenka, her Czech nickname.

However, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia took over the government in 1948, with support from the Soviet Union, and as an opponent of Communism, Korbel was forced to resign from his position. He later obtained a position on a United Nations delegation to Kashmir, and sent his family to the United States, by way of London, to wait for him when he arrived to deliver his report to the U.N. Headquarters, then in Lake Success, New York. The family arrived in New York City, New York, in November 1948, and initially settled in Great Neck, on Long Island, New York. Korbel applied for political asylum, arguing that as an opponent of Communism, he was now under threat in Prague. With the help of Philip Mosely, a professor of Russian at Columbia University in New York City, Korbel obtained a position on the staff of the political science department at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. He became dean of the university’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, and later taught future U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Life in the United States
Albright spent her teen years in Denver, and graduated from the Kent Denver School in Cherry Hills Village, a suburb of Denver, in 1955, where she founded the school’s international relations club and was its first president. She attended Wellesley College, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on a full scholarship, majoring in political science and graduated in 1959 Her senior thesis was written on Czech Communist Zdenek Fierlinger. She became a U.S. citizen in 1957, and joined the College Democrats of America.

While home in Denver from Wellesley, Albright worked as an intern for The Denver Post, where she met Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, the nephew of Alicia Patterson, owner of Newsday and wife of philanthropist Harry Frank Guggenheim. The couple were married in Wellesley in 1959, shortly after her graduation. They lived first in Rolla, Missouri, while he served his military service at nearby Fort Leonard Wood. During this time, she worked at the Rolla Daily News.

In January 1960, the couple moved to his hometown of Chicago, Illinois, where he worked at the Chicago Sun-Times as a journalist, and Albright worked as a picture editor for Encyclopedia Britannica. The following year, Joseph Albright began work at Newsday in New York City, and the couple moved to Garden City on Long Island. That year, she gave birth to twin daughters, Alice Patterson Albright and Anne Korbel Albright. The twins were born six weeks premature, and required a long hospital stay, so as a distraction, Albright began Russian classes at Hofstra University in the Village of Hempstead, New York.

In 1962, the family moved to Georgetown in Washington, D.C., and Albright began studying international relations and continued studying Russian at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC. However, in 1963 Alicia Patterson died, and the family returned to Long Island with the notion of Joseph taking over the family business Albright gave birth to another daughter, Katherine Medill Albright, in 1967, and continued her studies at Columbia University. She earned a certificate in Russian, a Masters of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy, writing her Master's thesis on the Soviet diplomatic corps, and her doctoral dissertation on the role of journalists in the Prague Spring of 1968. She also took a graduate course given by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would later be her boss at the U.S. National Security Council.

Early career
Albright returned to Washington in 1968, and commuted to Columbia for her Ph.D., which she received in 1975. She began fund-raising for her daughters' school, involvement which led to several positions on education boards. She was eventually invited to organize a fund-raising dinner for the 1972 presidential campaign of U.S. Senator Ed Muskie of Maine. This association with Muskie led to a position as his chief legislative assistant in 1976. However, after the 1976 U.S. presidential election of Jimmy Carter, Albright's former professor Brzezinski was named National Security Advisor, and recruited Albright from Muskie in 1978 to work in the West Wing as the National Security Council’s congressional liaison.

Following Carter's loss in 1980 to Ronald Reagan, Albright moved on to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where she was given a grant for a research project. She chose to write on the dissident journalists involved in Poland's Solidarity movement, then in its infancy but gaining international attention. She traveled to Poland for her research, interviewing dissidents in Gdansk, Warsaw and Krakow. Upon her return to Washington, her husband announced his intention to divorce her for another woman.

Albright joined the academic staff at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 1982, specializing in Eastern European studies. She has also directed the University's program on women in global politics. She has also served as a major Democratic Party foreign policy advisor, and briefed Vice-Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988 (both campaigns ended in defeat).

In 1992, Bill Clinton returned the White House to the Democratic Party, and Albright was employed to handle the transition to a new administration at the National Security Council. In January 1993, Clinton nominated her to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, her first diplomatic posting.

Ambassador to the UN
Albright was appointed Ambassador to the United Nations, her first diplomatic post, shortly after Clinton was inaugurated, presenting her credentials on February 9, 1993. During her tenure at the U.N., she had a rocky relationship with the U.N. Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whom she criticized as "disengaged" and "neglect[ful]" of genocide in Rwanda.Albright wrote:

My deepest regret from my years in public service is the failure of the United States and the international community to act sooner to halt these crimes.

In Shake Hands with the Devil, Romeo Dallaire claims that in 1994, in Albright's role as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the U.N., she avoided describing the killings in Rwanda as "genocide" until overwhelmed by the evidence for it; this is now how she describes these massacres in her memoirs. She was instructed to support a reduction or withdrawal (something which never happened) of the U.N. Assistance Mission for Rwanda but was later given more flexibility. Albright later remarked in PBS documentary Ghosts of Rwanda that

it was a very, very difficult time, and the situation was unclear. You know, in retrospect, it all looks very clear. But when you were [there] at the time, it was unclear about what was happening in Rwanda.

Also in 1996, after Cuban military pilots shot down two small civilian aircraft flown by the Cuban-American exile group Brothers to the Rescue over international waters, she announced, "This is not cojones. This is cowardice." The line endeared her to President Clinton, who said it was "probably the most effective one-liner in the whole administration's foreign policy."

On May 12, 1996, Albright defended UN sanctions against Iraq on a 60 Minutes segment in which Lesley Stahl asked her

We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" and Albright replied "we think the price is worth it.

Albright later criticized Stahl's segment as "amount[ing] to Iraqi propaganda"; said that her question was a loaded question; wrote "I had fallen into a trap and said something I did not mean"; and regretted coming "across as cold-blooded and cruel." Sanctions critics took Albright's failure to reframe the question as confirmation of the statistic. The segment won an Emmy Award.

Secretary of State
When Albright took office as the 64th U.S. Secretary of State on January 23, 1997, she became the first female U.S. Secretary of State and the highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government. Because she was not a natural-born citizen of the U.S., she was not eligible as a U.S. Presidential successor and was excluded from nuclear contingency plans. In her position as Secretary of State, Albright reinforced the U.S.'s alliances; advocated democracy and human rights; and promoted American trade and business, labor and environmental standards abroad.

During her tenure, Albright considerably influenced American policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Middle East. She incurred the wrath of a number of Serbs in the former Yugoslavia for her role in participating in the formulation of US policy during the Kosovo War and Bosnian war as well as the rest of the Balkans. But, together with President Bill Clinton, she remains a largely popular figure in the rest of the region, especially Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Croatia. According to Albright's memoirs, she once argued with Colin Powell for the use of military force by asking, "What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can't use it?"

As Secretary of State she represented the U.S. at the Transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong on July 1, 1997. She boycotted the swearing-in ceremony of the China-appointed Hong Kong Legislative Council, which replaced the elected one, along with the British contingents.

According to several accounts, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Prudence Bushnell repeatedly asked Washington for additional security at the embassy in Nairobi, including in an April 1998 letter directly to Albright. Bushnell was ignored. In Against All Enemies Richard Clarke writes about an exchange with Albright several months after the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed in August 1998. "What do you think will happen if you lose another embassy?" Clarke asked. "The Republicans in Congress will go after you." "First of all, I didn't lose these two embassies," Albright shot back. "I inherited them in the shape they were." Albright was booed in 1998 when the brief war threat with Iraq revealed that citizens were opposed to such an invasion, although this is often overlooked.

In 1998, at the NATO summit, Albright articulated what would become known as the "three Ds" of NATO, "which is no diminution of NATO, no discrimination and no duplication—because I think that we don't need any of those three "Ds" to happen."

Both Bill Clinton and Albright insisted that an attack on Hussein could be stopped only if Hussein reversed his decision to halt arms inspections. "Iraq has a simple choice. Reverse course or face the consequences," Albright said.

In 2000, Albright became one of the highest level Western diplomats ever to meet Kim Jong-il, the communist leader of North Korea, during an official state visit to that country.

In one of her last acts as Secretary of State, Albright on January 8, 2001, paid a farewell call on Kofi Annan and said that the U.S. would continue to press Iraq to destroy all its weapons of mass destruction as a condition of lifting economic sanctions, even after the end of the Clinton administration on January 20, 2001.

Post-2001 career
In 2001, Albright was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The same year, she founded the Albright Group, an international strategy consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. It has Coca-Cola, Merck, Dubai Ports World, and Marsh & McLennan Companies among its clients, who benefit from the access that Albright has through her global contacts. Affiliated with the firm is Albright Capital Management, which was founded in 2005 to engage in private fund management related to emerging markets.

Albright currently serves on the Council on Foreign Relations Board of directors and on the International Advisory Committee of the Brookings Doha Center. She is also currently the Mortara Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C..

In 2003, she accepted a position on the Board of Directors of the New York Stock Exchange. In 2005, Albright declined to run for re-election to the board in the aftermath of the Richard Grasso compensation scandal, in which Grasso, the chairman of the NYSE Board of Directors, had been granted $187.5 million in compensation, with little governance by the board on which Albright sat. During the tenure of the interim chairman, John S. Reed, Albright served as chairwoman of the NYSE board's nominating and governance committee. Shortly after the appointment of the NYSE board's permanent chairman in 2005, Albright submitted her resignation.

On October 25, 2005, Albright guest starred on the television drama Gilmore Girls as herself.

On January 5, 2006, she participated in a meeting at the White House of former Secretaries of Defense and State to discuss U.S. foreign policy with George W. Bush administration officials. On May 5, 2006, she was again invited to the White House to meet with former Secretaries and Bush administration officials to discuss Iraq.

In an interview given to Newsweek International published July 24, 2006, Albright gave her opinion on current U.S. foreign policy. Albright said: "I hope I'm wrong, but I'm afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy – worse than Vietnam."

Albright has mentioned her physical fitness and exercise regimen in several interviews. She has said she is capable of leg pressing 400 pounds. Albright was listed as one of the fifty best-dressed over 50s by the Guardian in March 2013. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/20/2013.)

Book Reviews
A gripping account of World War II.... In taut prose, Albright weaves a powerful narrative that wraps her family’s story into the larger political drama unfolding in Europe.
Philadelphia Inquirer

A riveting tale of her family’s experience in Europe during World War II [and] a well-wrought political history of the region, told with great authority.... More than a memoir, this is a book of facts and action.
Los Angeles Times

A compelling personal exploration of [Albright’s] family’s Jewish roots as well as an excellent history of Czechoslovakia from 1937 to 1948.... Highly informative and insightful.... I can’t recommend Prague Winter highly enough.
Washington Post Book World

In the crowded field of memoirs written by former secretaries of state, Madeleine Albright’s books stand out... Albright is a charming and entertaining storyteller.
New York Review of Books

Albright’s book is a sprightly historical narrative of this long decade.... Her account of the destruction of inter-war Czechoslovakia, both as a geographical entity and as an idea of democracy, first by the Nazis and then by the Communists, is balanced and vivid.
Economist

A blend of history and memoir that reveals in rich, poignant and often heartbreaking detail a story that had been hidden from her by her own parents.... The beating heart of the book is Albright’s searing account of her intimate family saga.
Jewish Journal

An extraordinary book.... Albright artfully presents a wrenching tale of horror and darkness, but also one in which decent and brave people again and again had their say.
New Republic

(Starred review.) The author’s childhood reminiscences of her first 11 years and savvy grasp of history inform this absorbing account of Czechoslovakia’s travails and Albright’s family’s suffering in the Holocaust.... The story is enriched by Albright’s colorful thumbnails of Eduard Benes, Jan Masaryk, and other principals and by her insights into geopolitics, which yield sympathetic but clear-eyed assessments of the compromises statesmen made to accommodate the ruthless powers surrounding Czechoslovakia. Showing us villainy, heroism, and agonizing moral dilemmas, Albright’s vivid storytelling and measured analysis brings this tragic era to life.
Publishers Weekly

Most people are aware of the result of the Munich agreement in 1938. Albright (born Marie Jana Korbelova), the first female U.S. secretary of state, provides a deeper account of the Czech Republic's road to independence. From Prague to the Terezin concentration camp (where many of her Jewish relatives perished) to the "winter" of the republic's existence as it endured the dictatorships of the Nazis and then the Communists, Albright details the situations and personalities prominent in this struggle.... The accessible style and inclusion of notes and timelines make this an excellent addition to any library. —Maria Bagshaw, Elgin Community Coll. Lib., IL
Library Journal

The former U.S. secretary of state blends World War II-era history and memoir.... The most gripping parts are those personal stories; the others mostly repeat what can be found in many histories of the war and Holocaust. Retellings do not, of course, diminish the horror, but Albright sometimes focuses more on the politics and the war than on the remembrance.... Also engaging are the later sections, which deal with the postwar politics in Czechoslovakia, especially the communists' moves to subvert the fledgling democracy.... [T]he personal...animates and brightens the narrative.
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)

1. Talk abouth the book's title. What is meant by the term "Prague Winter"?

2. Describe the cultural differences between the Czechs and Slovaks.

3. Follow-up to Question 2: What were the differing visions for the country, during the intervening war years, of Masaryk and Benes vs. those of Stefanik and Hodza?

4. Discuss the impact of the 1938 Munich Agreement on Czechoslavakia as described by Albright. In what way is Munich a scar on the nation's psychic? What is meant by the famous outcry"about us, without us"? Who does Albright blame for the sell-out? What was (or was not) the role of the US?

5. Albright delivers a history lesson about the World War II era from the Czechoslovakian prospective. Has that approach altered or enlarged your understanding of the war years?

6. How does Albright describe Tito's takeover in 1948?

7. To what does Albright attribute the Czech Republic's "Atlanticism," it's strong attachment to America?

8. How does Albright view the 2009 "open letter" to Barak Obama from Central European intellectuals and politicians in which they bemoaned the decline in transatlantic ties? Why does Albright consider it "whiny"? Is she correct?

9. Why do Albright's parents convert to Catholicism? Talk about her shock at the later discovery of her Jewish heritage. How would such a discovery affect your own sense of identity?

10. Near the end of her book, Albright writes about "the capacity within us for unspeakable cruelty or...at least some degree of moral cowardice....

There is a piece of the traitor within most of us, a slice of collaborator, an aptitude for appeasement, a touch of the unfeeling prison guard. Who among us has not dehumanized others, if not by word or action, then at least in thought? From the maternity ward to the deathbed, all that goes on within our breasts is hardly sweetness and light. Some have concluded from this that what is needed from our leaders is an iron hand, an ideology that explains everything, or a historical grievance that can serve as a center of our lives.

Do you agree with those sentiments? Do you see yourself in that statement?

11. In the same vein as Question 10: What do you make of Vaclav Havel who saw humanity divided into two groups: those who "wait for Godot" and those who insist on "speaking the truth." What did Havel mean? Which group would you place yourself under?

12. In what way might Albright's book serve as a guidepost for our own times? What lessons can we learn from the history of world events recounted in Prague Winter?

13. The book is both history and memoir. Which parts most engaged you—the personal or the historical?

14. Why, according to Madeleine Albright, is it important that the world remember the events of 1938-1945?

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

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Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
Caroline Fraser, 2018
Henry, Holt & Company
640 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781627792769

Summary
Winner, 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Winner, National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography

Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls—the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books.

But the true story of her life has never been fully told.

The Little House books were not only fictionalized but brilliantly edited, a profound act of myth-making and self-transformation. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser—the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series—masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder’s biography, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books and uncovering the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life.

Set against nearly a century of epochal change, from the Homestead Act and the Indian Wars to the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, Wilder’s dramatic life provides a unique perspective on American history and our national mythology of self-reliance.

Settling on the frontier amidst land-rush speculation, Wilder’s family encountered Biblical tribulations of locusts and drought, fire and ruin. Deep in debt after a series of personal tragedies, including the loss of a child and her husband’s stroke, Wilder uprooted herself again, crisscrossing the country and turning to menial work to support her family.

In middle age, she began writing a farm advice column, prodded by her self-taught journalist daughter. And at the age of sixty, after losing nearly everything in the Depression, she turned to children’s books, recasting her hardscrabble childhood as a triumphal vision of homesteading—and achieving fame and fortune in the process, in one of the most astonishing rags-to-riches stories in American letters.

Offering fresh insight and new discoveries about Wilder’s life and times, Prairie Fires reveals the complex woman who defined the American pioneer character, and whose artful blend of fact and fiction grips us to this day. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—SEattle, Washington, USA
• Education—Ph.D., Harvard University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize; National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Caroline Fraser is an American writer. She won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, and the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, for Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Formerly on the editorial staff of the New Yorker, her work has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and New York Review of Books, among others.

In addition to Prairie Fires, she is the author of God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church (1999), Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution (2009), She is also the editor of the two volumes of the Library of America's Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Little House Books (2012).

Fraser was born in Seattle to a Christian Science family. She obtained a PhD in English and American literature in 1987 from Harvard University for a thesis entitled A Perfect Contempt: The Poetry of James Merrill.[2]

Whitney Balliett (1926–2007), himself a former Christian Scientist, described in God's Perfect Child as a "critical history that… casts a clear, merciless light" on the religion. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/20/2018.)

Book Reviews
Caroline Fraser's absorbing new biography…deserves recognition as an essential text for getting a grip on the dynamics and consequences of this vast literary enterprise.… For anyone who has drifted into thinking of Wilder's Little House books as relics of a distant and irrelevant past, reading Prairie Fires will provide a lasting cure. Just as effectively, for readers with a pre-existing condition of enthusiasm for western American history and literature, this book will refresh and revitalize interpretations that may be ready for some rattling. Meanwhile, Little House devotees will appreciate the extraordinary care and energy Fraser brings to uncovering the details of a life that has been expertly veiled by myth (front page).
Patricia Nelson Limerick - New York Times Book Review

Fraser discovers failed farm ventures and constant money problems, as well as natural disasters even more terrifying and devastating in real life than in Wilder’s writing. She also…opens her subject to new scrutiny, which, for Wilder’s many fans, may be both exhilarating and disconcerting.
Publishers Weekly

[A] great way to celebrate the 150th anniversary of her birth. Fraser draws on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records to address gaps in Wilder's story and put to rest charges of ghostwriting. Fans are frothing.
Library Journal

Unforgettable.… magisterial…. Richly documented…, it is a compelling, beautifully written story.… One of the more interesting aspects of this wonderfully insightful book is… the fraught relationship between Wilder and her deeply disturbed, often suicidal daughter.
Booklist

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Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Thanks to the Little House books, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood is one of the most legendary in our literature. Discuss how the factual account of Laura Ingalls’s real childhood in Prairie Fires differs from the ction. How does an understanding of Wilder’s life affect our perception of her work?

2. Fraser writes, “Wilder made history” (page 5). How is this true, and in what ways does the biography bear this out? Discuss how women made history in earlier eras and how female historical gures depart from traditional male spheres of politics, government, and the military. How do Wilder’s life and reputation differ, for example, from those of famous frontier icons such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett? How reluctant are we to acknowledge women as heroes and why?

3. Discuss the Dakota Boom of the late 1870s and 1880s. Why was it a bad idea for homesteaders to farm in Dakota Territory? Since the government knew about the arid nature of the Great Plains, why did it encourage settlement there?

4. Discuss Laura and Almanzo’s courtship and early marriage. Why did they come together, and how were they compatible (or not)? How did the tensions that developed between them affect their later lives?

5. What kind of mother was Laura? How did her experience of caring for Rose compare to what we know of Caroline Ingalls’s mothering skills? How did Rose respond to the tragedies of her parents’ early married life—Almanzo’s illness and disability, their loss of a child, the house lost to fire—and how would it affect her later life and relationship to her parents?

6. In 1894, after failing to make a go of it in Dakota Territory, the Wilders joined a mass exodus out of the region, journeying to the “Land of the Big Red Apples” in the Missouri Ozarks. How would Laura’s exile from her family affect her, and why would she return to De Smet only once in the next couple of decades, for her father’s death? Why do you think she did not return to see her mother or her sister Mary?

7. Women’s clubs, farmers’ clubs, and book groups were crucial to the development of Wilder’s writing career. Does such networking still play a central role for urban and/or rural women?

8. Discuss Wilder’s development as a farm columnist—how did her writing for the Missouri Ruralist shape her ambitions and style?

9. Talk about how Rose Wilder Lane’s return to Rocky Ridge Farm in the 1920s and 1930s affected her life. Why did she build another house for her parents, after their successful completion of their own farmhouse? What do you think the Wilders thought of the Rock House?

10. Laura Ingalls Wilder worked for ten years for the National Farm Loan Association. So why did she object so vehemently to the New Deal programs designed to help farmers? Why was federal aid acceptable for her and not for others? If you were a rural farmer in the 1930s, how would you have felt about the federal government?

11. Do you see the influence of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression in Wilder’s memoir and the Little House books—and if so, how? Discuss the other, more personal events that led to her writing.

12. The way in which Wilder and Lane passed manuscripts back and forth between them has been described as a “collaboration.” It’s even been called “ghostwriting.” How would you describe it? Do you know of other mother/daughter professional writing relationships?

13. How have perceptions of the Little House books changed over the years, or even over the course of your own life? How has Prairie Fires changed your perceptions?
(Questions issued by the publishers).)

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Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges
Amy Cuddy, 2015
Little, Brown & Co.
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316256575

Summary
Have you ever left a nerve-racking challenge and immediately wished for a do over?

Maybe after a job interview, a performance, or a difficult conversation? The very moments that require us to be genuine and commanding can instead cause us to feel phony and powerless. Too often we approach our lives' biggest hurdles with dread, execute them with anxiety, and leave them with regret.

By accessing our personal power, we can achieve "presence," the state in which we stop worrying about the impression we're making on others and instead adjust the impression we've been making on ourselves.

As Harvard professor Amy Cuddy's revolutionary book reveals, we don't need to embark on a grand spiritual quest or complete an inner transformation to harness the power of presence. Instead, we need to nudge ourselves, moment by moment, by tweaking our body language, behavior, and mind-set in our day-to-day lives.

Amy Cuddy has galvanized tens of millions of viewers around the world with her TED talk about "power poses." Now she presents the enthralling science underlying these and many other fascinating body-mind effects, and teaches us how to use simple techniques to liberate ourselves from fear in high-pressure moments, perform at our best, and connect with and empower others to do the same.

Brilliantly researched, impassioned, and accessible, Presence is filled with stories of individuals who learned how to flourish during the stressful moments that once terrified them. Every reader will learn how to approach their biggest challenges with confidence instead of dread, and to leave them with satisfaction instead of regret. (From the publisher.)

See Amy Cuddy's TED talk.

Author Bio
• Birth—July 27, 1972
• Where—Robesonia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Colorado; M.A., Ph.D., Princeton University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in

Amy Joy Casselberry Cuddy is an American social psychologist known for her research on stereotyping and discrimination, emotions, power, nonverbal behavior, and the effects of social stimuli on hormone levels. She is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Cuddy speaks about the psychology of power, influence, nonverbal communication, and prejudice. Her TED talk, delivered in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2012, has been viewed more than 27 million times and ranks second among the most-viewed TED talks.

Personal backgrond
Cuddy grew up in a very small Pennsylvania Dutch town, Robesonia, Pennsylvania. She is a classically trained ballet dancer and worked as a roller-skating waitress when she was an undergraduate at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

When she was a sophomore in college she sustained a serious head injury in a car accident. Her doctors told her she was not likely to fully recover and should anticipate significant challenges finishing her undergraduate degree. Her IQ fell temporarily by two standard deviations, which is about 30 points in IQ test.

She eventually completed her undergraduate studies, earning a B.A. degree in Social Pschology at the University of Colorado. She continued her studies in Social Psychology at Princeton, attaining both her M.A. and Ph.D.

Cuddy has often tweeted of her love for live music, and spent a number of seasons following the Grateful Dead. She has one son. In August 2014, in Aspen, Colorado, she married Paul Coster.

Career
Prior to joining Harvard Business School, Cuddy was an Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where she taught leadership in organizations in the MBA program and research methods in the doctoral program. She was also an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University, where she taught undergraduate social psychology. At Harvard Business School, she has taught MBA courses on negotiation, and power and influence, as well as executive education courses.
Research

Cuddy studies the origins and outcomes of how people judge and influence each other. She has done experimental and correlational research on stereotyping and discrimination (e.g., against Asian Americans, elderly people, Latinos, working mothers), the causes and consequences of feeling ambivalent emotions (e.g., envy and pity), nonverbal behavior and communication, and hormonal responses to social stimuli.

Research
Along with Susan Fiske and Peter Glick (Lawrence University), Cuddy developed the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) and the Behaviors from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes (BIAS) Map. These are used to make judgments of other people and groups within two core trait dimensions, warmth and competence, and to discern how these judgments shape and motivate our social emotions, intentions, and behaviors. [10] This work has been cited over 9000 times.
Power posing

Cuddy carried out an experiment with Dana Carney and Andy Yap (UC-Berkeley) on how nonverbal expressions of power (i.e., expansive, open, space-occupying postures) affect people’s feelings, behaviors, and hormone levels.

In particular, they claimed that adopting body postures associated with dominance and power (“power posing”) for as little as two minutes can increase testosterone, decrease cortisol, increase appetite for risk, and cause better performance in job interviews. This was widely reported in popular media. New York Times columnist David Brooks summarized the findings, “If you act powerfully, you will begin to think powerfully.”

This and related research has been published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Psychological Science, Research in Organizational Behavior, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, and Science.

Criticism
In 2014, Eva Ranehill and other researchers tried to replicate this experiment with a larger group of participants and a double-blind setup. Ranehill et al. found that power posing increased subjective feelings of power, but did not affect hormones or actual risk tolerance. They published their results in Psychological Science.

Carney, Cuddy, & Yap responded in the same issue of Psychological Science, with an overview of 33 published studies related to power posing, including the Ranehill et al. study. Almost all had reported significant effects of some kind. The overview noted methodological differences between their 2010 study and the Ranehill replication, which may have moderated the effects of posing.

Two statistics researchers at the Wharton School, Simmons & Simonsohn, later shared a meta-analysis of the same 33 studies on their statistics blog. Based on the distribution of p-values reported across the studies (the 'p-curve'), they concluded that studies so far have demonstrated little to no average effect of power posing. This remains a point of contention among other researchers[citation needed].

Awards and honors
2014 - World Economic Forum Young Global Leader
2012 - TEDGlobal Speaker
2013 - Time magazine "Game Changer"
2011 - Rising Star Award, Association for Psychological Science (APS)
2010 - Psychology Today, The Top 10 Psychology Studies of 2010
2010 - Cover story, Harvard Magazine, Nov-Dec, 2010
2009 - The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2009, Harvard Business Review

(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/14/2015.)

Book Reviews
Cuddy is very sharp in her analysis of...affirmation; body language; how to nudge yourself along via incremental changes.... [But] Cuddy falls back too often on the unchallenged insights of “a widely recognized expert” as well as unhelpful diagnostic questions—e.g., “What three words best describe you as an individual?”
Kirkus Reviews

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Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir
Wednesday Martin, 2015
Simon & Schuster
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476762623

Summary
Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe.

After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place.

She understood the other mothers’ snobbiness at school drop-off when she compared them to olive baboons. Her obsessional quest for a Hermes Birkin handbag made sense when she realized other females wielded them to establish dominance in their troop. And so she analyzed tribal migration patterns; display rituals; physical adornment, mutilation, and mating practices; extra-pair copulation; and more. Her conclusions are smart, thought-provoking, and hilariously unexpected.

Every city has its Upper East Side, and in Wednesday’s memoir, readers everywhere will recognize the strange cultural codes of powerful social hierarchies and the compelling desire to climb them. They will also see that Upper East Side mothers want the same things for their children that all mothers want—safety, happiness, and success—and not even sky-high penthouses and chauffeured SUVs can protect this ecologically released tribe from the universal experiences of anxiety and loss. When Wednesday’s life turns upside down, she learns how deep the bonds of female friendship really are.

Intelligent, funny, and heartfelt, Primates of Park Avenue lifts a veil on a secret, elite world within a world—the exotic, fascinating, and strangely familiar culture of privileged Manhattan motherhood. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
• Education—B.S., University of Michigan; Ph.D., Yale University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York

Wendy "Wednesday" Martin is an American author, blogger, and commentator on parenting, step-parenting, and popular culture. She has written for Psychology Today, New York Post, Daily Telegraph, New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Fitness, Glamour, and Huffington Post. To promote her two books, she has commented on CNN, NPR, BBC radio, Fox News, and Weekend Today.

Background
Martin was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She did her undergraduate work at the University of Michigan where she studied anthropology. She also received a doctorate in comparative literature and cultural studies from Yale University. Her doctoral work examined early psychoanalysis and anthropology.

Martin has taught literature and cultural studies at Yale, The New School, and Baruch College.

Books
Martin is the author of Marlene Dietrich (1995); Stepmonster: A New Look at Why Real Stepmothers Think, Feel and Act the Way We Do (2009), and Primates of Park Avenue (2015).

Primates controversy
Martin moved to the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan with her family in 2004. Inspired by Jane Goodall's work, she began researching her experiences there for Primates of Park Avenue. The memoir documents life among the wealthy, stay-at-home mothers in the area, examining the women's behavior from a social researcher's perspective.

In May, 2015, prior to the release of Primates, Martin published an article in the New York Times detailing the practice of "wife bonuses," which she uncovered in her research for the book. According to Martin, some of the Upper East Side wives receive "bonuses"—in the form of cash payouts—from their husbands as a reward for domestic performance. Subsequent articles in other papers, however, refuted the practice.

Further articles—in the New York Post and Washington Post—also noted discrepancies in the book, prompting Martin's publisher, Simon & Schuster, to point out that altering names, dates, and other details out of concern for privacy is not uncommon in memoir writing. A disclaimer to that effect will be included in future editions of Primates. Martin insists, however, on her work's accuracy: "I stand by what I wrote, absolutely 100 percent."

Personal
Martin is married to Joel Moser, a lawyer, financier, and adjunct professor at Columbia University. The couple has two sons together (born in 2001 and 2007) and two-daughters from Moser's previous marriage. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/2/2015.)

Book Reviews
An amusing, perceptive and, at times thrillingly evil takedown of upper-class culture by an outsider with a front-row seat…Martin’s writing is confident and evocative…. Her reading of the fashion attire of real estate brokers for "triple mint" apartments is brilliant…at a time when a social comedy of the rich a la Tom Wolfe has been lost in national discourse…. [I]t’s fun to dip into a sophisticated, if silly, look at the Upper East Side’s Twilight Zone. Primates of Park Avenue is also a good reminder that as much as we may envy the wealthy, they fight every day for a place in their own social hierarchy, too.
New York Times Book Review

Juicy, sexy, bawdy stuff...the perfect summer beach book...the tasty tome we'll all be devouring when the weather warms.
New York Daily News

Applying the chimpanzee research of Jane Goodall or the observations of bonobos by Frans de Waal to one's neighbors and co-workers is great fun…, Martin rewards those of us in humbler circumstances the undeniably pleasant frisson of superiority that comes with finding fault with those better endowed financially, socially, sartorially.
Chicago Tribune

Martin puts her academic background (anthropology classes and a doctorate in cultural studies) to witty good use in describing this wealthy tribe’s extremes…it became clear to me, reading Martin’s book, that our Bay Area tribes aren’t so different from those of New York.
San Francisco Chronicle

Picture Real Housewives, add in pop-science, and you have Wednesday Martin’s new book.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A very funny, and slightly scary, look at the denizens of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Connecticut Post

An eye-popping insider's guide.
People

Think privileged NYC wives are another species? Martin goes undercover in this dishy memoir and reminds us that we all have something in common.
Glamour

Amusing...incisive...a wryly entertaining guide to this rarefied subculture.
Economist

Recalls Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique…. Primates is pacy and skillfully weaves cultural insight with personal anecdote…. This is an intriguing insight into a closed world. It is easy to dismiss the subjects as frivolous and mean, which many seem to be. But our envy and schadenfreude makes the rich a compelling curiosity.
Financial Times

The Midwest-raised Martin is easy for readers to sympathize with as she attempts to find new friends while old ones drift away.... It's hard, though, to care about her neighbors—and even about Martin when she finds herself coveting an $8,000 Berkin bag in order to show dominance within the pack.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) This anthropological journey into the wilds of New York City's most exclusive zip code could have easily devolved into condescension, but instead it proves that mothers everywhere want the same thing: health and happiness for their progeny.
Library Journal

Any population is fair game for anthropological research, so why not the super-rich, super-thin, and oh-so-well-dressed mothers of New York's Upper East Side?... Illuminating and fun.
Booklist

[T]he book becomes a useful guide for...upwardly mobile...women looking inward to understand themselves better—or...to socially maneuver more efficiently. Sometimes funny but effective for the same reason a Birkin is: it's designed for a certain group of people, and likely them alone.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In her introduction, author Wednesday Martin asks herself "who were they really, these glamorous, stylishly turned out women with sophisticated babies?" (2). Answer Wednesday’s question with your group. Who are the women of the Upper East Side really? Is there an Upper East Side in your town? Did your conception of these women change after reading Primates of Park Avenue? Why or why not?

2. On page 8, Wednesday discusses her strong desire to fit in with the mommies of her new neighborhood, and for her son to fit in by extension. She writes that from her studies in literature and anthropology, she knows that "without a sense of belonging, and actually belonging, we great apes are lost.... Particularly female ones...do not fare well." Do you think that all people feel this way to some extent? What about all mothers? Is wanting to fit in and feel a sense of community particularly important for new mothers?

3. Why do you think Wednesday Martin chooses to frame the beginning of her memoir as an academic study? Does the format add humor? Does it give greater credibility to the author? Both? Think about how you would describe your own world anthropologically. Are you part of a tribe? If so, which tribe?

4. Discuss the way gender figures into life on the Upper East Side, according to Primates of Park Avenue. Wednesday writes on page 24 that "in Manhattan, the woman is in charge of finding a place for the family to live." What else do the women seem "in charge" of in Manhattan? Of what are they decidedly not in charge?

5. "Women on the Upper East Side, particularly women in their thirties and women on the downhill slope of middle age, are utterly attuned to and obsessed with power" (83). Consider this power obsession in connection with Wednesday Martin’s obsession with acquiring a Birkin bag. What is the implicit connection between expensive handbags and power? Does owning a Birkin on the Upper East Side make one more powerful? What is your tribe’s "it" bag? Is it a "fetish object"?

6. Many of the women in Primates of Park Avenue are described as hyper-dedicated, particularly when it comes to their bodies. Describing a workout class in the Hamptons, Wednesday Martin writes that these women, herself included, put themselves through hell "to bond with their fellow tribe members, but also to measure up to, and to take the measure of, others, day by day, evening by evening, event by event, class by class" (129). Does their physical appearance symbolize something intrinsic? Something about their worth? What is the connection between the body and the person, in the case of an Upper East Side mommy?

7. What surprised you the most about Wednesday’s memoir? Which aspect of these women’s lives feels most foreign to you and your life? Which aspects feel more familiar?

8. How does the loss of Wednesday’s unborn daughter, Daphne, change the course of the story? Do you think losing a baby changes her perspective on life—particularly life on the Upper East Side?

9. Compare and contrast Wednesday Martin with her new circle. How are they similar? How do they differ? According to what you’ve read, does Wednesday retain her subjective view of this "tribe," or does she become too similar to be subjective?

10. "From an anthropological perspective, these wealthy women who seem and are so fortunate are also marooned in their sex-segregated world" (162) writes Wednesday Martin about the marriages she sees all around her in New York City. She describes these so-called arrangements as "fragile and contingent and women are still dependent...on their men" (163). Does sex segregation and complete dependence on one’s partner seem strange in the twenty-first century, or do these marriages seem relatively standard? Do you agree with Wednesday that these women are perhaps in a less enviable position than one might assume? Why or why not?

11. Consider the ways in which anxiety is described in Primates of Park Avenue. Do you agree that "having too many choices is stressful" (178), or that a luxurious lifestyle ultimately leads to more—not less—unhappiness?

12. Discuss the title of the memoir: Primates of Park Avenue. Do you agree, as the title suggests, that these women who live a certain kind of lifestyle on the Upper East Side are really no different than any other women anywhere? Are we all just animals, doing what we can to survive and create the safest, most favorable conditions we can for our families?

13. Primates of Park Avenue is ultimately a testament to the strength of all women to endure the pain that so often accompanies motherhood. In her grief, Wednesday discovers another side of the beautiful, competitive women around her: love. In her time of need, these women came forward and offered emotional support and understanding, bolstering the bond between women of the same tribe who know "just how closely the territories of mothering and loss overlap" (198). Discus this "secret," as Wednesday coined it, with your group members. Why do you think motherhood, in particular, feels so deeply connected to loss?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia
Jean Sasson, 1992
Midpoint Trade Books
296 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780967673745

Summary
Sultana is a Saudi Arabian princess, a woman born to fabulous, uncountable wealth. She has four mansions on three continents, her own private jet, glittering jewels, designer dresses galore.

But in reality she lives in a gilded cage. She has no freedom, no vote, no control over her own life, no value but as a bearer of sons. Hidden behind her black floor-length veil, she is a prisoner, jailed by her father, her husband, her sons, and her country. Sultana is a member of the Saudi royal family, closely related to the king.

For the sake of her daughters, she has decided to take the risk of speaking out about the life of women in her country, regardless of their rank. She must hide her identity for fear that the religious leaders in her country would call for her death to punish her honesty. Only a woman in her position could possibly hope to escape from being revealed and punished, despite her cloak of anonymity. She tells of her own life, from her turbulent childhood to her arranged marriage—a happy one until her husband decided to displace her by taking a second wife—and of the lives of her sisters, her friends, and her servants.

Although they share affection, confidences and an easy camaraderie within the confines of the women's quarters, they also share a history of appalling oppressions, everyday occurrences that in any other culture would be seen as shocking human rights violations: thirteen-year-old girls forced to marry men five times their age, young women killed by drowning, stoning, or isolation in the "woman's room," a padded, windowless cell where women are confined with neither light nor conversation until death claims them. Servants are forced into sexual servitude and severely beaten if they attempt escape.

By speaking out, Sultana risks bringing the wrath of the Saudi establishment upon her head and the heads of her children. In the barren, hopeless wasteland that is the life of Saudi women today, free speech is punishable by death. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1947
• Where—Louisville, Alabama, USA
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in Atlanta, Georgia

Jean P. Sasson is an American writer who writes mainly about women in the Middle East.

In 1978 she traveled to Saudi Arabia to work in the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh as an administrative coordinator in Medical Affairs. She worked at the hospital for 4 years, then married, living in Saudi Arabia until 1990. She is currently based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Her first book, The Rape of Kuwait about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, was published in 1991. It was based on interviews she conducted with Kuwaitis who had fled to Cairo, Saudi Arabia, London and Washington, D.C. The book was published before the war broke out. Advertisements in the major newspapers and on network television featured the book with the accompanying tag line: "Read it and you'll know why we're there." The Kuwaiti Embassy in Washington paid to send 200,000 copies of it to American troops in the Persian Gulf.

Sasson's second book Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia chronicles the life of Sultana, a purported Saudi princess. It claims to be a true story, detailing gender inequalities experienced by Saudi Arabian women. The identity of Sultana (a pseudonym) is concealed to assure her safety. The book remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for 13 weeks. In 1995, a lawsuit was brought against the author of the book alleging plagiarism. The lawsuit was later dismissed. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
In this consistently gripping work, the American-born Sasson (The Rape of Kuwait) recounts the life story of a Saudi princess she met while living in Saudi Arabia. The pseudonymous Sultana is a niece of King Faisal. Her father had four wives and a palace for each of them. Her older sister was circumcised before a "modern" doctor intervened on behalf of Sultana and her eight other sisters; their father treated all 10 as breeding animals, useless until old enough to be married off and to produce sons for their husbands. One sister, wed to a 62-year-old sexual sadist, attempted suicide. Sultana, the family's rebel, had the luck to marry a man who valued her spirit and intelligence. Yet when, after bearing five children, she could bear no more, he prepared to take another wife; Sultana fought this, as she had fought every other injustice and indignity her culture inflicted on her. In Sasson's telling, Sultana's story is a fast-paced, enthralling drama, rich in detail about the daily lives of the Saudi royals and packed with vivid personal sketches of the ruling clan and sharp opinions about the sexual mores, politics, religion and culture of this still-feudal nation. An appalling glimpse of the conditions endured by even such privileged women as the attractive, well-born Sultana.
Publishers Weekly

One must keep in mind the context of time and place when reading this emotional and exciting book to alleviate some of the horror of the injustices endured by the women described here. Equality of men and women has not worked out in any society, but the status of women in Islam is more problematic in that canon law is applied according to the social climate. Consequently, countries influenced by the West, such as Egypt, are more relaxed than countries like Saudi Arabia that are ruled by strict Hanbali law, which subjects women to unwelcome marriages, execution at whim, and the boredom of purdah. In this book, Sasson ( The Rape of Kuwait , 1991) tells the fascinating story of "Sultana,'' an unidentified Saudi princess who yearns for recognition in her own right, not as an adjunct of men. For those who wish to know more, Soraya Altorki's Women in Saudi Arabia and Paryeen Shaukat Ali's Status of Women in the Muslim World (1975) are good. —Louise Leonard, Univ. of Florida Libs., Gainesville
Library Journal

Throughout, the princess's feisty spirit is the book's saving feature. Her conniving and arrogant refusal to conform to this system are marvelous yet heart-breaking to behold. Human rights, not solely women's rights, are at issue here.
Denise Perry Donavin - Booklist

Sasson (The Rape of Kuwait, 1991) brings us "Sultana," a pseudonymous member of the Saudi royal family whose memoir documents the suffocating sexism that pervades Saudi life.... But Sasson's device of telling Sultana's story in the first person trivializes the princess's important material. Her voice echoes that of a pulp-fiction heroine ("I was drowning in Kareem's eyes...").... But when Sultana stops talking about herself and takes time to observe, we get amazing details: of Saudi wealth... and cultural brutality.... Worth paging past the trivial, then, to absorb a chilling and enraging portrait of women's absolute powerlessness in Saudi society.
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 Princess:

1. How would you describe Princess Saltana's personality? Does it change as she matures into womanhood and marriage? Would you have her courage?

2. Care to comment on this statement from Sultana?—"I waited for my destiny to unfold, a child as helpless as an insect trapped in a wicked web not of it's own making." Aside from being "trapped," what does the simile suggest?

3. Why is misogyny so pervasive throughtout the Muslim world? What do men fear...or dislike about women?

4. Saltana insists that the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia is a misinterpretation of the Q'uran rather than a true and accurate reading. How does Saltana portray the Islamic faith? After reading the translated passages at the back of the book, what do you think?

5. Other than the obvious wearing of the veil, talk about the numerous ways are women treated as non-entities in Saudi Arabia.

6. Which episodes in this book do you find you most horrifying—Sara's arranged marriage ... Nadia's drowning ... Madeline's nightly rape...others?

7. A number of women in the book display courage in the face of oppression and abject powerlessness. Talk about some of those women. How do you account for their strength and perseverance? How would you fare under such oppressive conditions?

8. Despite the lack of respect they show her, Sultana says she maintains respect for the men in her life. Would you be so generous in spirit?

9. If you were a woman in Saudi Arabia, what would you find most difficult: living in fear...the boredom of purdah...the sense of degradation...the injustice of it all...or what?

10. What can we in the Western world do to help women of Saudi Arabia? Should we do anything? Consider this: if citizens of a sovereign country believe that their treatment of women adheres to the dictates of their religious faith, is it right for the Western world to impose its particular moral values on them?

11. Having read Sasson's book, how do you feel about sending billions of petrol dollars from the US to Saudi Arabia—thus upholding a way of life we find abhorrent?

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

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The Private Lives of the Tudors: Uncovering the Secrets of Britain's Greatest Dynasty
Tracy Borman, 2016
Grove/Atlantic
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802125996

Summary
England’s Tudor monarchs—Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I—are perhaps the most celebrated and fascinating of all royal families in history. Their love affairs, their political triumphs, and their overturning of the religious order are the subject of countless works of popular scholarship. But for all we know about Henry’s quest for male heirs, or Elizabeth’s purported virginity, the private lives of the Tudors remain largely beyond our grasp.

In The Private Lives of the Tudors, Tracy Borman delves deep behind the public face of the monarchs, showing us what their lives were like beyond the stage of court.

Drawing on the accounts of those closest to them, Borman examines Tudor life in fine detail. What did the monarchs eat? What clothes did they wear, and how were they designed, bought, and cared for? How did they practice their faith? And in earthlier moments, who did they love, and how did they give birth to the all-important heirs?

Delving into their education, upbringing, sexual lives, and into the kitchens, bathrooms, schoolrooms, and bedrooms of court, Borman charts out the course of the entire Tudor dynasty, surfacing new and fascinating insights into these celebrated figures. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1972
• Where—Scothern, Lincolnshire, England (UK)
• Education—Ph.D., University of Hull
• Currently—lives in London, England

Tracy Borman is a historian and author from Scothern, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom. She is the author of several histories, many but not all of which are centered on the Tudor Dynasty. Her most recent work is The Private Lives of the Tudors (2016).

Borman was born and brought up in the village of Scothern, near Lincoln. She was educated at Ellison Boulters Academy, William Farr School, Welton, and Lincoln Castle Academy. She taught history at the University of Hull, where she was awarded a Ph.D in 1997.

Borman is perhaps best known for Elizabeth's Women (2010), which was serialized (before publication) as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week in September 2009. That same month, Borman appeared on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour.

In 2013 she was appointed Joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces alongside Lucy Worsley. She is also chief executive of the Heritage Education Trust.

Borman and her husband, whom she married at the Tower of London, live in New Malden, south-west London.

Books
♦ 2016 - The Private Lives of the Tudors: Uncovering the Secrets of Britain's Greatest Dynasty
♦ 2014 - Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII's Most Faithful Servant
♦ 2013 - Witches: A Tale of Sorcery, Scandal and Seduction
♦ 2011- Matilda: Queen of the Conqueror
♦ 2011- The Ring and the Crown: A History of Royal Weddings, 1066-2011 (with Alison Weir, Kate Williams and Sarah Gristwood)
♦ 2010 - Elizabeth's Women: Friends, Rivals, and Foes Who Shaped the Virgin Queen
♦ 2007 - Henrietta Howard: King's Mistress, Queen's Servant

(From Wikipeida. Retrieved 1/2/2017.)

Book Reviews
For Borman, the intimate particulars of everyday life are what help the past come bracingly, stirringly alive. Her full-quivered social history of the Tudor monarchs—Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I—who, beginning in 1485, constituted one of the most celebrated royal families of all time, furnishes readers with a "Hey, did you know...?" on almost every page.... Social history lives and dies in the integrity of its details, and this authoritative work teems with well-sourced material, presenting the Tudor world with a particular focus on the personal habits and strengths of its women, making the claim that "the art of majesty was as evident behind closed doors as it was in public."
Jean Zimmerman - New York Times Book Review

[A] fascinating, detailed account.... Borman ranges far and wide in her quest to throw light on what the Tudor kings and queens ate, what they wore, what they did with their days and how they spent their nights.... This is a book of rich scholarship. Tracy Borman...knows her Tudor history inside out.
Daily Mail (UK)

Borman approaches her topic with huge enthusiasm and a keen eye.... All good fun. And there is plenty of it.... Borman really succeeds when she uses her store of homely tidbits to recast our perceptions of Tudors we thought we knew.... This is a very human story of a remarkable family, full of vignettes that sit long in the mind.
Sunday Times (UK)

Tracy Borman’s eye for detail is impressive; the book is packed with fascinating courtly minutiae.... [Borman is] a very good historian and this is a wonderful book.
London Times (UK)

Like Alison Weir...Borman is an authoritative and engaging writer, good at prising out those humanizing details that make the past alive to us.
Guardian (UK)

[T]he amount of detail about the rarefied world that the Tudors inhabited can be overwhelming, but she does unearth some obscure and intriguing tidbits that have been overlooked by other historians.... Borman’s fine book goes far toward humanizing [them].
Publishers Weekly

[T]his work uniquely focuses on the minutiae of court life and the personal, behind-the-scenes details of Tudor royals.... Borman's history expands well beyond public knowledge to the definite delight of Tudor fans. —Katie McGaha, County of Los Angeles P.L.
Library Journal

Amusing, well-researched.... A mostly entertaining mixture of esoteric social history and well-known details of the personal lives of Tudor monarchs.
Kirkus Reviews

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

1. What surprised you most about Tracy Borman's personal history of the Tudor royalty? What did you find, well..."over the top" in terms of self-indulgence? How coddled were the Tudors in terms of their personal habits? After reading her book, does medieval royalty seem particularly romantic or attractive as perhaps you once thought?

2. Borman's title is titillating: uncovering secrets heretofore unknown (or revealed). Does the book live up to its tempting title? Or is the focus of the book something else entirely?

3. Talk about the 15th and 16th century concept of privacy, especially in terms of the royal families. How different was their idea of privacy from today's?

4. Follow-up to Question 3: Talk about how the primary duty of royalty—which was to produce an heir—affected the sense of privacy. What does Borman mean when she writes, "The art of majesty was as evident behind closed doors as it was in public"?

5. Discuss Borman's descriptions of the era's medications and medical treatments. Funny? Horrifying? Positively "medieval"?

6. Borman writes, "for a person of royal blood, private desires could have deadly outcomes." Consider, then, the dire consequences of Lord Seymour's indiscretions with young Princess Elizabeth.

7. Would you have wanted to live in the Tudor era considering its level of sanitation, disease, and bodily odors?

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

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The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less
Terry Ryan, 2002
Simon & Schuster
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743273930

Summary
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio introduces Evelyn Ryan, an enterprising woman who kept poverty at bay with wit, poetry, and perfect prose during the "contest era" of the 1950s and 1960s.

Standing up to the church, her alcoholic husband, and antiquated ideas about women, Evelyn turned every financial challenge into an opportunity for innovation, all the while raising her six sons and four daughters with the belief that miracles are an everyday occurrence. The inspiration for a major motion picture, Evelyn Ryan's story is told by her daughter Terry with an infectious joy that shows how a winning spirit and sense of humor can triumph over adversity every time. (From the publisher.)

Prize Winner was adapted into a 2005 film with Julianne Moore and Woody Harrelson.

Author Bio
• Birth—July 14, 1946
• Where—Defiance, Ohio, USA
• Death—May 16, 2007
• Where—San Francisco, CA
• Education—B.A., Bowling Green State University (Ohio)

After a long bout with cancer, Terry Ryan died peacefully at home on May 16, 2007. She had been buoyed throughout her illness by notes and calls from readers who had just finished reading the book or watching the movie, and couldn't wait to tell her how much they enjoyed it. More than anything, Tuffy Ryan loved to hear people's comments about her prize-winning mother, Evelyn, whose sense of humor and indomitable spirit surfaced so often in Terry's own response to life. After the shock of hearing her diagnosis in November of 2004, for example, Tuff said pensively, "Well, my old life is over, and my new life is just beginning." This is a legacy her fans have the privilege of carrying on every day. (From the book's official website.)

More
Terry "Tuff" Ryan was originally from Defiance, Ohio, resided in San Francisco for most of her adult life. She was best known for her memoir The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio.

She was born to Leo (nicknamed Kelly) and Evelyn Ryan, and was the sixth of ten children. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio was a memoir of her life and that of her family, especially her mother, a 1950s housewife with 10 children who provided for the family by winning contests. The book was released as a theatrical film in November 2005. It stars Julianne Moore as Evelyn Ryan and Woody Harrelson as Kelly Ryan. Terry Ryan was a consultant on the film.

Ryan was also the creator of the long running cartoon T.O. Sylvester in the San Francisco Chronicle. She was married to her long-time partner, Pat Holt, on St Valentine's Day 2004. Her account of her wedding, titled We Do! was published by Chronicle Books.

In 2004, when the movie The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio was being filmed, Terry discovered that she had Stage IV brain cancer. On May 16, 2007, Terry died of cancer at her San Francisco, California home. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
This plucky middle American chronicle, starring an unsinkable, relentlessly resourceful mother and her Madison Avenue-style magic, succeeds on many levels—as a tale of family spirit triumphing over penury, as a history of mid-century American consumerism, and as a memoir about a woman who was both ahead of her time and unable to escape it.
The New Yorker

A good-natured memoir as compelling as a commercial jingle.
O, The Oprah Magazine

In the 1950s, the Ryan family struggled to make ends meet. Ten kids and a father who spent most of his paycheck on booze drained the family's meager finances. But mom Evelyn Ryan, a former journalist, found an ingenious way to bring in extra income: entering contests on the backs of cereal boxes and the like. The author, Evelyn's daughter, tells the entertaining story of her childhood and her mother's contest career with humor and affection. She is not a professional narrator, but her love and admiration for her mother come through in every sentence. Evelyn won supermarket shopping sprees that put much-needed food on the table, provided washing machines and other appliances the family couldn't afford, and delivered cash to pay the mounting pile of bills. This well-told, suspenseful tale is peppered with examples of Evelyn's winning poems and slogans, taken from the years of notebooks that she saved and passed on to her daughter, and has a fiction-worthy climax that will keep listeners laughing even as they're glued to Ryan's tale.
Publishers Weekly

Evelyn Ryan, wife of an alcoholic husband and mother of ten children, lived in a small town in a time and place when women did not seek "jobs." When finances ran low, feeling desperate, she turned to her parish priest who suggested she "take in laundry." Ryan had to laugh at the advice because she could barely keep up with her own family's washing and ironing. A lesser woman might have succumbed to poverty, but she was determined to keep her family financially afloat and to teach her children that the life of the mind was important. In the early 1950s, Ryan started entering contests, composing her jingles, poems, and essays at the ironing board. She won household appliances, bikes, watches, clocks, and, occasionally, cash. She won a freezer, and several weeks later, she won a supermarket shopping-spree. When the family was faced with eviction, she received a $5000 first place check from the regional Western Auto Store. Ryan's unconventionality and sense of humor triumphed over poverty, and her persistence makes the listener cheer her on. Read by the author, this story is delightful. Recommended for all public libraries. —Pam Kingsbury, Florence, AL
Library Journal

(Adult/High School) While her sometimes abusive husband drank away a third of his weekly take-home pay, Evelyn Ryan kept her ever-growing family afloat by entering every contest she came across, beginning with Burma Shave roadside-sign jingles. In post-World War II America, money, appliances, food, excursions—anything you could think of-were routinely offered to the person who sent in the best jingle, essay, or poem, accompanied, of course, by the company's box-top or other product identification. Although she more often won prizes of products, such as a case of Almond Joy candy bars, Mrs. Ryan once won enough for a down payment on a house just as her family was being turned out of their two-bedroom rental house. That contest also won her a bicycle for her son. She entered so many contests, often several times under different forms of her name, that hardly a week went by without some prize being delivered by the postman. Charmingly written by one of her 10 children, this story is not only a chronicle of contesting, but also of her mother's irrepressible spirit. With a sense of humor that wouldn't quit, she found fun in whatever life sent her way, and passed that on to all her children who, despite the poverty they grew up in, lived and still live happy, useful lives. YAs who like family stories should love this winning account. —Sydney Hausrath, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA
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)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio:

1. How would you describe Terry Ryan's mother Evelyn and the challenges she faced as wife, mother, and family breadwinner.

2. Could Evelyn survive, even triumph as she did, in today's world? Or is ours a different time with its own set of circumstances?

3. You might read and discuss this work in tandem with Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle: both books are memoirs about parenting and growing up in difficult circumstances.

4. Have some fun...set up a display of several personal or household items and devise clever prize-winning jingo entries for each, like Evelyn did. Not easy!

5. Watch the movie version, in part or full, and compare it to the book. How closely does the film follow the book, especially in its characters? Does Julianne Moore capture your idea of what Evelyn was like?

(From LitLovers. Please feel free to use these ideas/questions, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, & the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Simon Winchester, 1998
HarperCollins
242 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060839789

Summary
It is known as one of the greatest literary achievements in the history of English letters. The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took 70 years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story of a friendship—an account of two remarkable men whose strange 20-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking. Professor James Murray, a former schoolmaster and bank clerk, was the brilliant editor of the OED project.

Dr. W. C. Minor, a retired American surgeon who had served in the Civil War, was one of thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. But Minor was no ordinary contributor. Not only was he remarkably prolific, sending in as many as ten thousand definitions, but he was also a murderer, clinically insane, and locked up in Broadmoor, England's asylum for criminal lunatics.

The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness and genius and the incredible obsessions of two men at the heart of the Oxford English Dictionary and literary history. With riveting insight and detail, Simon Winchester crafts a fascinating glimpse into one man's tortured mind and his contribution to another man's magnificent dictionary. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 28, 1944
• Where—England, UK
• Education—B.A., M.A., Oxford University
• Awards—Order of the British Empire (OBE)
• Currently—lives in Massachusetts, USA and Western Isles,
Scotland

Simon Winchester was a geologist at Oxford and worked in Africa and on offshore oil rigs before becoming a full-time globe-trotting foreign correspondent and writer. He is the author of Krakatoa, The Map that Changed the World, The Professor and the Madman, and The Fracture Zone, among many other titles. He currently lives on a small farm in the Berkshires in Massachusetts and in the Western Isles of Scotland.

Back in the spring of 2001, Simon Winchester was annoyed that readers had hijacked Roget's Thesaurus and turned it into a catalog of synonyms. Or was it that he was vexed?

He was fairly cheesed off, at any rate, taking both to the pages of the Atlantic Monthly and the studios of National Public Radio to decry how Peter Mark Roget's project to classify and organize the English language has turned into little more than a crutch for students hoping to impress their teachers with 10-cent words. Winchester's suggestion? Burn it.

"We think of Roget as an omnium-gatherum, if you like, an olla podrida, a gallimaufry, a collection of synonyms," he told NPR's Bob Edwards, "whereas it has to be said that the English language—now I know that people will ring up with howls of derision and say this isn't true, but the English language is so precise a collection of words that there really is no synonym."

Winchester certainly has the standing to make such an argument. A writer and adventurer for more than 30 years—with articles in such publications as the National Geographic and Condé Nast Traveler and more than a dozen books on travel and history—Winchester is today best known for The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Oxford English Dictionary.

His 1998 book was the unlikeliest of best sellers, a book about a book, the world's first and still most comprehensive dictionary. With more than 400,000 definitions and almost 2 million usage examples, the OED was quite an undertaking, a more than seven-decade effort. Winchester takes great care to illustrate how mammoth and meticulously organized the process was: contributions from more than 2,000 of volunteers pouring in through the mail, carefully filed away into cubbyholes for future use. It may have been a labor of love over the English language, but it was also an excellent example of effective project management.

Winchester's book wasn't supposed to be one that would stay on the New York Times hardcover best seller list for more than a year. In fact, when it came time to publish book in the United States (it had already come out in the U.K.), Winchester's regular U. S. publisher passed, saying this was the subject of magazine articles, not books. Take it to the Atlantic Monthly.

It shows, I think, that there is deep, deep down—but underserved for a long time—an eagerness for real stories, real narratives, about rich and interesting things. We—writers, editors—just ignored this, by passed this. Now we are tapping into it again.

Winchester was heralded for his precise language, his brisk storytelling and re-creation of the fascinating relationship between the OED editor and his most prolific contributor, a murderer and asylum resident who complained of demons who would whisk him away to Constantinople brothels in the middle of the night.

Winchester, who, before his Madman success, had already filled bookshelves with tales from the Yangtze River, the Balkans, Argentina and Ulster, has now become publishing's king of what the New York Times calls "cocktail-party science." Reviewing Winchester's 2002 book, Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883, the Times said:

This manner of amplifying science or history with odd, figurative footnotes has become extremely popular; just read a full-length book about salt, for example.... But since The Professor and the Madman...Mr. Winchester has emerged as the leading practitioner of the method.... The rich and fascinating Krakatoa confirms his pre-eminence.

Winchester himself has said he simply likes to be precise. In fact, when NPR's Bob Edwards said that the author's pro-precision/anti-thesaurus position might live him open to charges of anti-populism, even elitism, Winchester shrugged it off.

I have to say that I'm not against elitism in writing," he responded. "Not at all. I'm going to attempt till I go to my grave, I think, to write in as precise and evocative and romantic way as I can and to care about the language. So maybe the readers won't like it. So maybe I am elitist. So suck it up.

Extras
• Winchester once spent three months looking at whirlpools on assignment for Smithsonian magazine.

• He once wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times to correct a factual error in an article about where the millennium would first hit land on the morning of Jan. 1, 2000. (It was the island of Tafahi, not the coral atoll Kirabati.)

• He reportedly loves the words "butterfly" and "dawn." (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
This is almost my favorite kind of book, the work of social and intellectual history which through the oblique treatment of major developments manages to throw unusual light on humankind and its doings.
Will Self - The Times of London

Simply wonderful, a beautifully written narrative that worked both as a history of lexicography's greatest hit and as a drama.
Michael Kelly - Atlantic Monthly

In this elegant book the writer has created a vivid parable, in the spirit of Nabokov and Borges. There is much truth to be drawn from it, about Victorian pride, the relation between language and the world, and the fine line between sanity and madness.
The Wall Street Journal

It is one of the strengths of this book that it will, by its very sensationalism, attract and inform readers who might never normally lay down cold hard cash for the 'fascinating story of the history of English lexicography'.... For those who know little of lexicography, this book is an entertaining, though not wholly reliable, introduction to the subject, particularly enlightening for those who labour under the delusion that the OED's role is to prescribe what is 'proper' and 'improper' English. It's a story for readers who know the joy of words and can appreciate side trips through the history of dictionaries and marvel at the idea that when Shakespeare wrote, there were no dictionaries to consult.... Winchester, a British journalist who's written 12 other books, combines a reporter's eye for detail with a historian's sense of scale. His writing is droll and eloquent
Bob Minzesheimer - USA Today

When we're children, the easiest way for writers and teachers and parents to hook us with a story is to begin with the words "Imagine a time when there was no..." Simon Winchester, in his splendid, oddball slice of history The Professor and the Madman has come up with an irresistible hook. Imagine a time, Winchester asks us, when there were no dictionaries. That's such an unthinkable prospect to most readers (and writers) that Winchester needn't do any more to keep our interest. But he does. Winchester, a Salon contributor, uses this utterly fascinating account of how a combination of scholarship and nationalism begat what would become the Oxford English Dictionary (a project that would eventually take 70 years and 12 volumes to complete) to tell the story of the odd friendship the project sparked.

The project began in earnest in 1878 under the editorship of Professor James Murray, a philologist and school teacher. Handbills were distributed through bookstores and libraries asking for volunteer readers to begin assembling word lists and quotations that illustrated the meanings of those words. One of the most productive of the volunteers was Dr. William Charles Minor, an American Army surgeon who had served in the Civil War. Gratified, Murray repeatedly invited Minor to visit him, invitations Minor always turned down. Murray finally discovered why: Minor had been an inmate at the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane since 1871, when, in a deluded state, he had killed a man.

Winchester wisely doesn't try to explain Minor's madness, though he suggests that it may have had something to do with his wartime experiences (particularly one episode in which he was made to brand an Irish deserter). Winchester doesn't need to point up the irony that at Broadmoor, Minor found a more humane environment than he did in the Army. His cell consisted of two rooms, one large enough to house the books he used to pass what he probably knew would be a life sentence. Minor emerges as a learned, essentially decent man (even the widow of the man he killed was a regular visitor for a time), sadly caught in the grip of obsessive delusions.

If the initial sections of his tale have the appeal of a gaslight Victorian thriller, Winchester doesn't leave it at that. He's a superb historian because he's a superb storyteller. Nothing he includes here—whether it's an examination of the section of London where Minor committed his crime, the genealogy of the two protagonists (usually the dullest part of any history or biography) or a brief history of the very notion of dictionaries—feels like it's impeding his story. The strange richness of it all is enhanced by the flawless clarity of Winchester's prose. His Victorian style, far from being a pastiche or postmodernist game-playing, is his natural mode of expression. In this passage, he imagines Shakespeare composing Twelfth Night without aid of a dictionary: "Now what, exactly, did William Shakespeare know about elephants? Moreover, what did he know of Elephants as hotels? The name was one that was given to a number of lodging houses in various cities dotted around Europe.... But however many there were—just why was this the case? Why name an inn after such a beast? And what was such a beast anyway? All of these are questions that, one would think, a writer should at least have been able to answer."

Minor's diligence as a contributor resulted in his being responsible for something like 10,000 words in the final OED. He hoped that focusing on this task would deliver him from his psychosis, but Minor was also following his curiosities. Winchester, investigating an odd bit of background trivia about the making of one of the world's great books, has the courage of his own curiosity. The elegant curio he has created is as enthralling as a good story can be and as informative as any history aspires to be.
Charles Taylor - Salon

The Oxford English Dictionary used 1,827,306 quotations to help define its 414,825 words. Tens of thousands of those used in the first edition came from the erudite, moneyed American Civil War veteran Dr. W.C. Minor—all from a cell at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Vanity Fair contributor Winchester (River at the Center of the World) has told his story in an imaginative if somewhat superficial work of historical journalism. Sketching Minor's childhood as a missionary's son and his travails as a young field surgeon, Winchester speculates on what may have triggered the prodigious paranoia that led Minor to seek respite in England in 1871 and, once there, to kill an innocent man. Pronounced insane and confined at Broadmoor with his collection of rare books, Minor happened upon a call for OED volunteers in the early 1880s. Here on more solid ground, Winchester enthusiastically chronicles Minor's subsequent correspondence with editor Dr. J.A.H. Murray, who, as Winchester shows, understood that Minor's endless scavenging for the first or best uses of words became his saving raison d'etre, and looked out for the increasingly frail man's well-being. Winchester fills out the story with a well-researched mini-history of the OED, a wonderful demonstration of the lexicography of the word 'art' and a sympathetic account of Victorian attitudes toward insanity. With his cheeky way with a tale ("It is a brave and foolhardy and desperate man who will perform an autopeotomy," he writes of Minor's self-mutilation), Winchester celebrates a gloomy life brightened by devotion to a quietly noble, nearly anonymous task.
Publishers Weekly

William C. Minor (1834-1920) was a Civil War surgeon whose war experience caused his personality to change. He became paranoid and was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenic. After three years in an asylum, he went to Europe in 1871 in pursuit of rest, getting as far as London before his paranoia caught up with him and he killed George Merritt. An English court found him not guilty on the ground of insanity, and Minor was sent to Broadmoor. Coming across a leaflet for volunteers to help compile a history of the English language, Minor offered his services, remaining vague about his background. After 17 years of correspondence, the editor of the came to meet Minor, who had submitted 10,000 definitions to the project, and was surprised that the genius was a patient at the Broadmoor Asylum. Finally released in 1910, Minor returned to the United States. Winchester's delightful, simply written book tells how a murderer made a huge contribution to what became a major reference source in the Western world. — Michael Sawyer, Northwestern Regional Library, Elkin, North Carolina
Library Journal

Remarkably readable, this chronicle of lexicography roams from the great dictionary itself to hidden nooks in the human psyche that sometimes house the motives for murder, the sources for sanity, and the blueprint for creativity. Manchester Guardian journalist Winchester (The River at the Center of the World) turns from Asia toward that most British of topics: the Oxford English Dictionary. His account is studded with odd persons and unexpected drama. To wit: When OED editor Professor James Murray headed off to meet a major contributor (of more than 10,000 entries) to his epochal reference work, he discovered that this distinguished philologist, Dr. William Chester Minor, was incarcerated for life in an asylum for the criminally insane. Minor, apparently a paranoiac killer, had committed murder in 1872.... Ailing (and sexually repressed), he clung to his lexicographic efforts for dear life and the sake of his sanity, or what remained of it. 'All those Dictionary slips,' opines Winchester, 'were [Minor's] medication, [and] became his therapy.' When he describes the original OED's '12 tombstone-sized volumes," we get a whiff of the grueling mental task exacted from its servants by the work, reminiscent of the labors involved in Melville's classic Bartleby the Scrivener, a book that is similarly a psychological masterwork. In praising the achievement of the work, Winchester rejoices, 'It wears its status with a magisterial self-assurance, not least by giving its half-million definitions a robustly Victorian certitude of tone.' Winchester's own tone and his prose are wonderfully Victorian, an apt mirror for his subject. The author begins each chapter with an entry from the original OED as an appropriate heading, such as 'murder,' 'lunatic,' 'polymath' ('a person of much or varied learning') and, eventually, 'acknowledgment.' First-rate writing: well-crafted, incisive, abundantly playful.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Who is Dr. W.C. Minor? How do you first come to know him at the beginning of The Professor and the Madman? What role does he play in the "Lambeth Tragedy?"

2. Who is James Murray? How would youcharacterize his early interest in philology? How does Murray come to work on the Oxford English Dictionary? What was the initial projection of how long the OED would take to complete?

3. How does Dr. Minor's madness first reveal itself? How do his experiences in Ceylon, at the Battle of the Wilderness, and in Florida relate to his condition? What are some of the symptoms of his illness? How would you describe his personality?

4. What did you think of the elaborate process of creating the Oxford English Dictionary? Was it easy to visualize? Did it surprise you to learn that in the end more than 6 million slips with definitions were submitted by volunteers?

5. How would you describe Dr. Minor's life at the asylum? How did he have access to books? What unusual visitor helped him in this respect? What aspects of his situation at the asylum did you find especially unusual? According to the author, how might Dr. Minor have learned of the creation of the OED?

6. How does his work on the OED change Dr. Minor's personality? How does it impact his madness? What are some of the ideas and rumors about Minor that float around the Scriptorium, where the OED is being written and edited?

7. How does Murray first learn of Dr. Minor's status as a criminally insane asylum inmate? How does Murray eventually come to know Minor? How would you describe their relationship? What aspects of their interaction lead you to this assessment?

8. How does Dr. Minor injure himself while he is at Broadmoor? How did you interpret this act? Do you agree with the author that his dismemberment was an attempt to purge himself of "unsavory" thoughts and deeds? How does the arrival of Dr. Brayn change the living conditions at Broadmoor for Dr. Minor?

9. What elements of this story did you find especially harrowing, fascinating, bewildering, surprising? Did you feel sympathetic toward Dr. Minor? Were you surprised at the strong bond that developed between him and James Murray?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife
Eben Alexander, M.D., 2013
Simon & Schuster
196 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451695199

Summary
A scientist's case for the afterlife.

Thousands of people have had near-death experiences, but scientists have argued that they are impossible. Dr. Eben Alexander was one of those scientists. A highly trained neurosurgeon, Alexander knew that NDEs feel real, but are simply fantasies produced by brains under extreme stress.

Then, Dr. Alexander’s own brain was attacked by a rare illness. The part of the brain that controls thought and emotion—and in essence makes us human—shut down completely. For seven days he lay in a coma. Then, as his doctors considered stopping treatment, Alexander’s eyes popped open. He had come back.

Alexander’s recovery is a medical miracle. But the real miracle of his story lies elsewhere. While his body lay in coma, Alexander journeyed beyond this world and encountered an angelic being who guided him into the deepest realms of super-physical existence. There he met, and spoke with, the Divine source of the universe itself.

Alexander’s story is not a fantasy. Before he underwent his journey, he could not reconcile his knowledge of neuroscience with any belief in heaven, God, or the soul. Today Alexander is a doctor who believes that true health can be achieved only when we realize that God and the soul are real and that death is not the end of personal existence but only a transition.

This story would be remarkable no matter who it happened to. That it happened to Dr. Alexander makes it revolutionary. No scientist or person of faith will be able to ignore it. Reading it will change your life. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December, 1953
• Where—Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina-Chapel
Hill; M.D., Duke University
• Currently—lives in Lynchburg, Virginia

Eben Alexander, III, is an American neurosurgeon and the author of the best-selling Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife, in which he describes his 2008 near-death experience and asserts that science can and will determine that heaven really does exist.

Education and training
Alexander attended Phillips Exeter Academy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (A.B., 1975), and the Duke University School of Medicine (M.D., 1980).

Alexander was an Intern in General Surgery at Duke University Medical Center, a resident at Duke, Newcastle (U.K.) General Hospital. He was a resident and research fellow at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital and is certified by the American Board of Neurological Surgery and the American College of Surgeons (F.A.C.S.).

Academic and clinical appointments
Alexander has taught at Duke University Medical Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, University of Massachusetts Medical School, and the University of Virginia Medical School.

He has had hospital appointments at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston Children's Hospital, Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, and Lynchburg (Virginia) General Hospital-CentraHealth. He is currently an attending neurosurgeon.

Professional activities
Alexander is a member of the American Medical Association and various other professional societies. He has been on the editorial boards of various journals.

Proof of Heaven
Alexander is the author of the autobiographical book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (2012) in which he asserts that his out of body and near death experience (NDE) while in a meningitis-induced coma in 2008 proves that consciousness is independent of the brain, that death is an illusion, and that an eternity of perfect splendor awaits us beyond the grave—complete with angels, clouds, and departed relatives, but also including butterflies and a beautiful girl in peasant dress who Alexander finds out later was his departed sister.

The current understanding of the mind, according to Alexander, “now lies broken at our feet”:

What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.

Alexander’s book was excerpted in a Newsweek magazine cover story in October 2012. (In May 2012, Alexander had provided a slightly more technical account of the events described in his book in an article, "My Experience in Coma," in AANS Neurosurgeon, the trade publication of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons.)

Proof of Heaven has been on the New York Times Best Seller list since its release in October, 2012.

Criticism
In a wide-ranging investigation of Alexander's story and medical background, Esquire magazine reported (August 2013 issue) that prior to the publication of Proof of Heaven, Alexander had been terminated or suspended from multiple hospital positions, and had been the subject of several malpractice lawsuits, including at least two involving the alteration of medical records to cover up a medical error.

The magazine also found what it claimed were discrepancies with regard to Alexander's version of events in the book. Among the discrepancies, according to an account of the Esquire article in Forbes, was that...

Alexander writes that he slipped into the coma as a result of severe bacterial meningitis and had no higher brain activity, while a doctor who cared for him says the coma was medically induced and the patient was conscious, though hallucinating.

Alexander issued a statement after the Esquire article's publication:

I wrote a truthful account of my experiences in Proof of Heaven and have acknowledged in the book both my professional and personal accomplishments and my setbacks. I stand by every word in this book and have made its message the purpose of my life. Esquire's cynical article distorts the facts of my 25-year career as a neurosurgeon and is a textbook example of how unsupported assertions and cherry-picked information can be assembled at the expense of the truth.

Alexander’s book and publicity campaign have been criticized by scientists, including neuroscientist Sam Harris, who described Alexander’s NDE account (chronicled in Newsweek, October 2012) as "alarmingly unscientific," and that...

everything—absolutely everything—in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was "shut down," "inactivated," "completely shut down," "totally offline," and "stunned to complete inactivity." The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science.... Even in cases where the brain is alleged to have shut down, its activity must return if the subject is to survive and describe the experience. In such cases, there is generally no way to establish that the NDE occurred while the brain was offline.

Neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks agreed with Harris, saying that...

to deny the possibility of any natural explanation for an NDE, as Dr. Alexander does, is more than unscientific—it is antiscientific.... The one most plausible hypothesis in Dr. Alexander's case...is that his NDE occurred not during his coma, but as he was surfacing from the coma and his cortex was returning to full function. It is curious that he does not allow this obvious and natural explanation, but instead insists on a supernatural one.

In November 2012, Alexander responded to critics in a second Newsweek article:

My synapses—the spaces between the neurons of the brain that support the electrochemical activity that makes the brain function—were not simply compromised during my experience. They were stopped. Only isolated pockets of deep cortical neurons were still sputtering, but no broad networks capable of generating anything like what we call "consciousness." The E. coli bacteria that flooded my brain during my illness made sure of that. My doctors have told me that according to all the brain tests they were doing, there was no way that any of the functions including vision, hearing, emotion, memory, language, or logic could possibly have been intact.

(Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/04/2013.)

Book Reviews
Dr. Alexander, 58, was so changed by the experience that he felt compelled to write a book, “Proof of Heaven,” that recounts his experience. He knew full well that he was gambling his professional reputation by writing it, but his hope is that his expertise will be enough to persuade skeptics, particularly medical skeptics, as he used to be, to open their minds to an afterworld
Leslie Kaufman - New York Times

A neurosurgeon’s first-person account of his near-death experience after an E. coli meningitis-related seizure and seven-day coma will reassure afterlife believers, though it is unlikely to convince skeptics. Alexander’s credentials are impressive: medical school at Duke and 15 years at Harvard-affiliated hospitals. But to agnostics and atheists, Alexander may not come across as a completely objective observer. He writes that he attended his Episcopal church even as he questioned how God, heaven, and an afterlife could exist, yet the heaven he describes seeing certainly seems like a biblical one; a typical line is, “the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above.” His story includes interesting asides about past struggles with alcohol and with adoption. (His birth mother delivered him when she was 16 and for years did not want to meet him.) But the book mostly focuses on religion. It ends with a request to support Eternea, Alexander’s nonprofit that has as its mission, “increasing global acceptance of the reality of our eternal spiritual existence . . . under an all-loving God.” For believers, not skeptics. —Karen Springen
Booklist

4. Does Alexander's medical background bolster his claims for having experienced heaven? In other words, does the fact that he is a man of science accord him more credibility than others who have had mystical NDEs?

5. Why did Alexander decide to publish Proof of Heaven knowing that he would be subjected to cricticism and would possibly risk his medical reputation?

6. Do you envy individuals like Eben Alexander and others who have had powerful religious encounters during NDEs? Have you ever had a similar mystical experience, near death or not?

7. Have you read any of the criticism directed toward Alexander after publishing Proof of Heaven? (See the author bio above.) What would you say to these critics?

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

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The Prosperous Thief
Andrea Goldsmith, 2002
Allen & Unwin Publishers
300 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781741144697

Summary
There are thieves who prosper. But are there thefts which can never be forgiven?

The Prosperous Thief covers the turbulent sweep of the twentieth century. Rich in ideas and emotions, it is an epic story of the entwined lives of two vastly different families spanning three continents.

Alice Lewin survived the war as a young child. After decades of burying her past she decides to visit the Kindertransport archive, where she learns of the existence of a possible relative, Henry Lewin. She travels to Australia to hear his story, but it's a story that she's in no way prepared to hear.

The truth has profound ramifications and both Alice's son, Raphe, and Henry's daughter, Laura, struggle to deal with their connected lives. But just as the thefts of the Second World War define their past, so deception threatens their future.

From the horrors of war to the fiery landscape of one of the world's most active volcanoes, this compelling novel generates its own unsettling shadows. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 24, 1950
• Where—Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
• Currently—lives in Melbourne

Andrea Goldsmith born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, was trained as a speech pathologist and spent several years working with children. From 1987, she has taught creative writing at Deakin University. The Prosperous Thief, short-listed for the 2003 Miles Franklin award, is Goldsmith's 5th novel. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
With the sensuous pace of a poet, she unravels an epic tale of two families, spanning the world of pre-war Berlin to late-20th century Melbourne, and counting the cost of the horror from both sides of the moral fence. It is a rare novel; endowed with intelligence and beauty. Canberra Times, Ian McFarlane 'this is a novel that seeks to provoke questions rather than provide answers; a novel about theft and appropriation in myriad disguises as much as it is an attempt to understand the Holocaust's dark shadow.
Bron Sibree - Brisbane Courier Mail (Australia)

An epic tale.... A rare novel; endowed with intelligence and beauty.
Canberra Times (Australia)

Goldsmith's gripping Holocaust epic begins with two German children: Heinrik Heck, born poor in 1910, and Alice Lewin, who is six when Kristallnacht shatters her elegant secular Jewish family. As an army deserter in 1945, Heinrick comes across Martin, a typhoid-stricken concentration camp survivor, and makes a desperate choice. "There's his own future to consider, he tells himself as he squats down and lays his hands one each side of Martin's head. He twists." Martin is Alice's father; Heinrik, having killed Martin, takes part of Martin's identity and reinvents himself as Henry Lewin, a Jew, and starts a new life in Australia. Alice, saved by the Kindertransport, lands in California, marries a non-Jew and erases the un-American lilt in her voice. But her son, Raphe, is obsessed with the Jewish grandfather with whom he shares a passion for volcanoes. His urging sends Alice to Australia, where she confronts Henry Lewin. Henry dies; Alice dies. Raphe, guardian of the truth, goes to Australia with such rage inside him, it seems he might murder Henry's daughter. Despite a melodramatic ending on the rim of a volcano and a few lapses in craft and language ("loathe" for "loath"), Australian Goldsmith's fifth novel has undeniable power.
Publishers Weekly

A riveting tale that takes on every piety about the Holocaust and holds it up to heartbreaking and unflinching scrutiny. It may technically be about the Holocaust, but at its heart, this is about what happens when a cataclysmic event has been too often narrated and too often dramatized on television and in films. Can an individual feel the burden of history? Should history be reduced to memory? At the center of this story is Henry, an impoverished, disenfranchised German thief, for whom the war is a godsend, and the Lewin family, cultured, educated and Jewish, and unlike Henry, unable to believe that Germany would turn its back on its most accomplished citizens. The German thief steals the identity of the Jewish family, and after the war, he builds a full, happy life in Australia—his son is an observant Jew, his daughter a worker for human rights. When members of the Lewin family come to Australia to confront the thief and his children, everyone is made to consider what good knowledge actually does in the world—how does knowing the truth of anyone's experience change one's own? Any account of the plot cannot give a sense of the story's beauty. Goldsmith's feeling for the subtleties and contradictions of individual characters evoke the stylized, layered sentences of Henry James, even Tolstoy. This is all compulsively readable, almost hypnotic in its ability to draw the reader in. A superbly crafted novel that's less interested in the historical events of the Holocaust than the ways in which the late-20th century inherited and struggled with its multiple legacies.
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 Prosperous Thief:

1. Heini does what he must to survive. Under such duress, how forgivable is his crime? Does the fact that he loves his wife and children—and saves them—absolve him of guilt? Is he a bad person?

2. Andrea Goldsmith has said in an interview that she sees Alice as the "fulcrum of the novel." In other words, the novel revolves around her character. Do you agree? If so, in what ways. Or do see another character as the fulcrum?

3. Goldsmith has also said that Heini is not the only thief in the novel. She points to Raphe, who appropriates his grandfather's life to fill the gaps in his own life. She also mentions Nell, a film maker, as a very modern "opportunistic thief." Do you agree with her assessments.

4. What do you make of Raphe's fascination with volcanoes? Metaphorically, volcanoes possess dangerous, undpredictable undercurrents, like like itself.

5. Talk about the irony of Laura's politics, championing the cause of oppressed people. Do her actions atone for her father's crimes—even without her full knowledge of what his sins were? Should Laura ever be told the truth? What do you make of Laura's brother, Daniel?

6. The Prosperous Thief contemplates philosophical yet deeply personal issues—all of which can make for excellent discussions: does the long arm of guilt extend from one generation to another? Is the modern concept of victimhood justified? Does the pursuit of revenge yield justice? How does the novel present those ideas—and how do you respond to them?

7. Some believe the novel falls a little flat when moving to modern times; in particular, the characters seem less well-developed or convincing. Do you agree or disagree?

8. Would you say the ending is happy or tragic? For whom?

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

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Queen of the Road: The True Tale of 47 States, 22,000 Miles, 200 Shoes, 2 Cats, 1 Poodle, a Husband, and a Bus With a Will of Its Own
Doreen Orion, 2008
Random House
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780767928533

Summary
A pampered Long Island princess hits the road in a converted bus with her wilderness-loving husband, travels the country for one year, and brings it all hilariously to life in this offbeat and romantic memoir.

Doreen and Tim are married psychiatrists with a twist: She’s a self-proclaimed Long Island princess, grouchy couch potato, and shoe addict. He's an affable, though driven, outdoorsman. When Tim suggests “chucking it all” to travel cross-country in a converted bus, Doreen asks, “Why can’t you be like a normal husband in a midlife crisis and have an affair or buy a Corvette?” But she soon shocks them both, agreeing to set forth with their sixty-pound dog, two querulous cats—and no agenda—in a 340-square-foot bus.

Queen of the Road is Doreen’s offbeat and romantic tale about refusing to settle; about choosing the unconventional road with all the misadventures it brings (fire, flood, armed robbery, and finding themselves in a nudist RV park, to name just a few). The marvelous places they visit and delightful people they encounter have a life-changing effect on all the travelers, as Doreen grows to appreciate the simple life, Tim mellows, and even the pets pull together. Best of all, readers get to go along for the ride through forty-seven states in this often hilarious and always entertaining memoir, in which a boisterous marriage of polar opposites becomes stronger than ever. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Great Neck, Long Island, New York, USA
• Education—Cornell University; M.D., George Washington
University
• Currently—lives in Boulder, Colorado

Doreen Orion is a triple-boarded psychiatrist on the faculty of the University of Colorado Health Science Center. She is an award-winning author, has lectured throughout the U.S. and has appeared on major national media such as Larry King Live, 48 Hours, Good Morning America and been interviewed by the New York Times, People Magazine and many others. Still, she considers her greatest accomplishment that her bus was the centerfold for Bus Conversions magazine (which she is the travel writer for), thus fulfilling a life-long ambition of being a Miss September (From the publisher.)

Extras
Her own words:

• I loved to write and could always be counted on to take creative license where none was called for. (To whit, the Ode to Geometry I foisted on my eighth grade math teacher.)

• My literary agent suggested I write a screenplay based on I Know You Really Love Me and I found that I immensely liked that form, so much so, I wrote many more and even had a few optioned. ("Extras" From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
The subtitle indicates all the makings of a funny account of a cross-country romp, but Orion (I Know You Really Love Me) doesn't deliver. Her humor is forced, and there's a terminally cute quality to her writing. The author and husband Tim are practicing psychiatrists. While she enjoys a "couch potato" existence, he longs for a life on the open road. After some convincing on Tim's part, the two agree to take a year's leave from their careers to ride cross-country in an RV. Doreen's cocktail recipes (e.g., "Phobic Friar," containing Frangelico, raspberry liqueur, and Baileys) begin most chapters. Her accounts of their travels have a similar flavor. Doreen and Tim's adventure begins with a shake-down cruise from the couple's home in Boulder, CO, passes through several Western states, then heads east (the "real" part of the trip), making a convoluted circuit of the country. The book ends with lists of "Special Places and People" and books the authors read on the trip—as well as the author's request to be invited to speak at book groups. An easy read, though maps or photos might have helped; for libraries with patrons likely to appreciate such a work.
Library Journal

How to get away from it all while taking it all with you. A self-described Jewish princess from Long Island, Orion (Psychiatry/Univ. of Colorado; I Know You really Love Me: A Psychiatrist's Account of Stalking and Obsessive Love, 1997) grudgingly accompanied her gung-ho husband on a yearlong trek around the country in a converted bus, despite her addiction to designer couture and general disinterest in leaving the house. A series of minor setbacks ensued (malfunctioning door, difficulties parking, etc.), but the journey passed pleasantly enough, as the author learned to prioritize relationships and experiences over material things and engage with the world beyond her television set. Mildly amusing situations and observations abound; Orion is relentlessly quippy, making the book resemble a low-impact remake of the screwball road-trip comedy The Long, Long Trailer with Rita Rudner playing the Lucille Ball role. It's difficult, however, to sustain interest in the author's many anecdotes concerning the cute antics of her pets or her beloved husband's zeal for DIY projects. The material is simply too mundane, and while Orion tries gamely, her employment of goofy puns, warmed-over self-deprecatory shtick and Erma Bombeckian wry homilies fails to transform the proceedings into comic gold. Her spiritual epiphanies likewise grate: Grand renunciation of material pleasures is a bit much coming from someone who can afford to take a year off work and seek out "authentic" experiences from the comforts of a diesel-guzzling luxury recreational vehicle. The book is also unsatisfying as a travelogue, since Orion's interest remains stubbornly focused on her cozy domestic concerns. The surprising paucity of reportage on local color and customs or the variations in landscape, architecture and cuisine contributes to an overriding atmosphere of self-congratulation as the author announces her newfound willingness to hike a mountain path or cut back on her television consumption. Charming enough in small doses, but ultimately irritating and inconsequential.
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 Queen of the Road:

1. What was the impetus behind Orion and her husband's bus trip? Why did Orion agree to go along?

2. What particular anecdotes, experiences, or adventures did you find intreresting...or funny?

3. What did Orion learn during her year? What kind of personal growth or transformation did she undergo?

4. Talk about the relationship between Tim and Doreen during the year and how they resolved their differences.

5. Could you see yourself in Orion's shoes, doing what she and Tim did?

6. Some criticism of the book (above) is that Orion's focus was not on the sights and experiences of the journey itself, but on the narrow concerns of domesticity. Do you agree? If so, did you want more from the book? Or do you feel the book is precisely about those concerns, rather than the larger world the two traveled through?

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

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Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena
Julia Reed, 2004
Crown Publishing
240pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812973617

Summary
Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena collects a bevy of wise, witty, often hilarious essays by the inimitably charming, staunchly Southern Julia Reed.

In classic Dixie storytelling fashion, Reed wends her way through the South—from politics, religion, and women to weather, pestilence, guns, and what she calls "drinking and other Southern pursuits"—with a rare blend of literary elegance and plainspoken humor.

To hear Reed tell it, the South is another country. She builds an entertaining and persuasive case, using as examples everything from its unfathomable codes of conduct to its disciplined fashion sense. When a bemused Reed once commented on the cross-dressing get-ups of an upstanding community member, her austere grandfather said, "He's been wearing them lately. Now come on." A friend of her aunt's merely said, "I wonder where he gets his shoes. I can't ever find good-looking shoes in Nashville."

Southern food, of course, is an entire world apart: gumbo, grits, greens, okra, chess pie, Lady Baltimore cake, and Frito chili pie make memorable appearances in Reed's stories, which will amuse, delight, and even explain a thing or two to baffed Yankees everywhere. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Greenville, Mississippi, USA
• Education—attended Georgetown and American Universities
• Currently—lives in New Orleans, Louisiana

Julia Reed grew up in Greenville, Mississippi. She is a contributing editor at Newsweek and is the author of the essay collection Queen of the Turtle Derby and the memoir The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story. She lives in New Orleans (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Julia Reed's effervescent collection of essays is an under-the-hair-dryer book (a cousin of the beach book), and even though no woman I know still sits under the dryer at the salon, a beauty parlor is the perfect place to inhale Queen of the Turtle Derby: And Other Southern Phenomena. Reed is both a senior writer at Vogue and a native daughter of the Mississippi Delta, and her voice and tone are those of your most consistently amusing girlfriend.... In the end, there's a satisfying match here between the subtext and the text. Reed embodies exactly what she's trying to convey: her tone is charming, glancing, amusing, sometimes a tad superficial, sometimes biting, but never offensive. These are captivating qualities in a storyteller, appreciated not just in the South but everywhere.
Karen Karbo - New York Times Book Review

A rambunctiously charming essay collection.... As refreshing and bracing as a mint julep.... Even the most hopeless Yankee will have no trouble getting in touch with her inner Poultry Princess.
Vogue

In this engaging collection of essays, Mississippi native Reed—a writer for Vogue and the New York Times Magazine who now splits her time between New Orleans and New York City—presents a fresh and eclectic portrait of the South. Reed’s vision is both celebratory and critical, and it underscores her assertion that the South is "much more complicated and more interesting" than standard perceptions and caricatures of the region suggest. She tackles amusing topics like Southern hairdos and fashion, and the unrivaled pride Southern women take in their appearance ("I once saw three Chi Omegas jogging on the Ole Miss campus at seven-thirty in the morning in pale pink sweatsuits, full makeup and perky ponytails ties with matching pink bows"). She also addresses more serious issues, such as the area’s high rates of violence and lack of gun control. And as she renders an honest portrayal of the quirks, foibles and wonders of the region, she even pays homage to (and provides a recipe for) that Southern food staple: fried chicken.
Publishers Weekly

Reed, bless her heart, has written a laugh-aloud collection of personal essays about the South. God, guns, beauty queens, fashion accessories, booze, hurricanes, and, of course, recipes are featured in these 30 previously published works by Reed, a senior writer at Vogue and contributing writer at Newsweek. Readers are sent on a roaring roller-coaster ride around Reed's childhood in Mississippi and her current life in New Orleans and New York. "Lady Killers," a prickly essay, may raise the eyebrows of unsuspecting readers with its examination of the belief that a "white, well-dressed, churchgoing" Mississippi woman can get away with murder owing to a double standard regarding capital cases. "The Morning After" explains how a good fight adds to the zest of a high-quality party. Several essays repeat the same details when describing and explaining Southern fashion, beauty, and hair styles. Satirical, spirited writing for fans of the Sweet Potato Queens who appreciate recipes for fried chicken and frozen tomatoes, this is recommended for larger regional libraries. —Joyce Sparrow, Juvenile Welfare Board of Pinellas Cty., FL
Library Journal

For a region that lives and dies by its time-honored, if tawdry, traditions and is known for its colorful, if not controversial, characters, the South has some explaining to do for its excessive eccentricities. And there is no one more capable than Reed,...[who] humorously and humbly celebrates the quirkiness that lies deep in the heart of Dixie. —Carol Haggas
Booklist

In 22 lively essays, 10 reprinted from Vogue, the New York Times Magazine, etc., Reed defends, with wry humor and an agreeable appreciation of the absurd, the South's continuing distinctiveness. Some of these pieces overlap in content, but collectively they form a portrait of a region that, despite shopping malls and national chains, continues to follow its own idiosyncratic ways. The subjects are South lite, reflecting rather regional quirks than the darker history, as Reed writes of debutantes, food, and alcohol consumption in essays titled, respectively, "Debutantes," "Eat Here," and "Booze." Debutante balls in the South, Reed observes, are burdened with a whole lot of history as they try to resurrect the past by honoring old well-born families and "the myth of our cavalier past in all its full-blown weirdness." In "Eat Here," she observes that though tastes are now more sophisticated, southerners eat okra, drink iced tea (sweet or unsweet), and, unlike Yankees, when asked to name the best meal ever eaten, will recall one served at home. Mississippi, where Reed was born, kept Prohibition laws on the books until 1966 ("Booze"), but that didn't stop the state having the cheapest and most plentiful alcohol as well as more liquor retail outfits than any of the legally wet states. Other essays explain southern fashion (soft and ladylike), justice (women murderers rarely hang despite committing some pretty lurid crimes), and attitudes about life (they subscribe to an idea of living with, as John Keats had it, "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." The title comes from an event that began in Arkansas in 1930 and includes a 60-foot turtle race,and the crowning of a derby queen. It illustrates, Reed suggests, the South's capacity for entertaining themselves with whatever is available. This capacity is celebrated in every piece, as Reed deftly mixes personal reminiscences with facts and local lore. Engaging evidence that the South is still different.
Kirkus Reviews>

Discussion Questions
1. In her introduction, Reed says that when she returned to her native South in 1991, there was a theory in vogue that the region was losing its identity as a separate place. She says she found plenty of proof that the South's identity is still firmly intact. Do her essays make a convincing case?

2. More than twenty years ago, John Egerton wrote The Americanization of Dixie. In the 2004 election, "NASCAR dads" comprised a sought-after votingbloc and "red" states placed an emphasis on family and religious values that are typically seen as Southern. Also, every Southern state voted red. Do you think that it is now possible to make the case that it is the rest of America that is being Southernized?

3. On the basis of Reed's observations, would you say that politics and religion are more closely intertwined in the South than in other regions?

4. In "To Live and Die in Dixie," Reed quotes Mississippi writer Willie Morris, who said, "It's the juxtapositions that drive you crazy." She points out that Southerners are the most violent people in the nation but also the most religious. What are some other examples of double standards found throughout the book?

5. In "American Beauty" and "Southern Fashion Explained," Reed makes the case that women's looks are largely defined by their region. Do you believe that? If so, how would you describe the "look" of the place where you live?

6. In "Miss Scarlett" Reed makes the case that Scarlett O'Hara was an early feminist. But she was also manipulative and used her beauty to get what she wanted. Have Southern women evolved from the Scarlett stereotype? In what ways do they still mimic Scarlett?

7. In one of the more memorable scenes from the film Gone with the Wind, Scarlett rips the silk curtains off the windows so that she can make a proper gown of them. On page 132 of "Miss Scarlett." Reed writes that "Scarlett was Southern, she was a woman, she was going to keep up appearances." Give examples found in the book of the importance of "keeping up appearances" to both male and female Southerners.

8. Reed writes affectionately and enthusiastically about what she obviously feels is the superiority of Southern cuisine. Discuss the larger importance of food in Southern culture.

9. Throughout the book there are examples of well-meaning people who could easily be the objects of laughter or scorn--the beauty queen who supplies the title of the book, for example, or the man who swears he's grown closer to God since he found a cross-shaped sweet potato in his vegetable patch. Do you think Reed means to ridicule them, or does she succeed in painting an affectionate but clear-eyed portrait of the characters that populate her native land, despite their many foibles?

10. Reed gives several examples of Southerners' proclivity toward socializing, whether it be at a funeral or a party thrown the day after a party just because there was some whiskey left (page 177). What factors do you think contribute to the more aggressively social part of Southerners' natures?

11. Do you think that if Reed used the material in these essays to write a work of fiction, readers would have found it believable? Or are the stories included here a case of "truth is stranger than fiction"? Give examples of some of the more outlandish—but true—tales found in the book.

12. Is there anything else about the South you wish you knew and would you prefer to learn it from fiction or nonfiction?

13. If you know the South well, do you think Reed has given an accurate portrait of its peculiarities? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Susan Cain, 2012
Random House
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307352156

Summary
At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking, reading to partying; who invent and create but prefer not to pitch their own ideas; who favor working on their own over brainstorming in teams. Although they are often labeled “quiet,” it is to introverts we owe many of the great contributions to society—from Van Gogh’s sunflowers to the invention of the personal computer.

Passionately argued, impressively researched, and filled with the indelible stories of real people, Quiet shows how dramatically we undervalue introverts, and how much we lose in doing so. Susan Cain charts the rise of “the extrovert ideal” over the twentieth century and explores its far-reaching effects—how it helps to determine everything from how parishioners worship to who excels at Harvard Business School.

And she draws on cutting-edge research on the biology and psychology of temperament to reveal how introverts can modulate their personalities according to circumstance, how to empower an introverted child, and how companies can harness the natural talents of introverts. This extraordinary book has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1968
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., Princeton University; J.D., Harvard
University Law School
• Currently—lives "on the bank of the Hudson River" in New York State

Susan Cain is an American writer and lecturer, and author of the 2012 non-fiction book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which argues that modern Western culture misunderstands and undervalues the traits and capabilities of introverted people

Cain graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School. She worked first as an attorney, and then as a negotiations consultant as owner and principal of The Negotiation Company. Cain has been a fellow and a faculty/staff member of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, an educational non-profit organization.

Cain left her careers in corporate law and consulting, for a quieter life of writing at home with her family. She later wrote that she looks back on her years as a Wall Street lawyer "as time spent in a foreign country."

Quiet
When asked what she would be doing if she were not a writer, Cain explained that she would be a research psychologist, saying she is insatiably curious about human nature Cain's interest in writing about introversion reportedly stemmed from her own difficulties with public speaking, which made Harvard Law School "a trial.

While still an attorney, Cain noticed that others at her firm were putting personality traits like hers to good use in the profession, and that gender per se did not explain those traits. She eventually realized that the concepts of introversion and extroversion provided the "language for talking about questions of identity" that had been lacking.[12]

Cain explained that in writing Quiet, she was fueled by the passion and indignation that she imagined fueled the 1963 feminist book, The Feminine Mystique.[11] Cain likened Introverts today to women at that time—second-class citizens with gigantic amounts of untapped talent. Saying that most introverts aren’t aware of how they are constantly spending their time in ways that they would prefer not to be and have been doing so all their lives, Cain explained that she was trying to give people entitlement in their own minds to be who they are.

Cain added that for her, Quiet was not just a book but a mission. Specifically, she said she was interested in working with parents and teachers of introverted kids and to re-shape workplace culture and design, and in particular replace what she terms "The New Groupthink" with an environment more conducive to deep thought and solo reflection. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Rich, intelligent...enlightening.
Wall Street Journal

An important book that should embolden anyone who's ever been told, "Speak up!"
People

Cain offers a wealth of useful advice for teachers and parents of introverts.... Quiet should interest anyone who cares about how people think, work, and get along, or wonders why the guy in the next cubicle acts that way. It should be required reading for introverts (or their parents) who could use a boost to their self-esteem.
Fortune.com

American culture and business tend to be dominated by extroverts, business consultant Cain explores and champions the one-third to one-half of the population who are introverts. She defines the term broadly, including “solitude-seeking” and “contemplative,” but also “sensitive,” “humble,” and “risk-averse.” Such individuals, she claims (though with insufficient evidence), are “disproportionately represented among the ranks of the spectacularly creative.” Yet the American school and workplace make it difficult for those who draw strength from solitary musing by over-emphasizing teamwork and what she calls “the new Groupthink.” Cain gives excellent portraits of a number of introverts and shatters misconceptions. For example, she notes, introverts can negotiate as well as, or better than, alpha males and females because they can take a firm stand “without inflaming counterpart’s ego.” Cain provides tips to parents and teachers of children who are introverted or seem socially awkward and isolated. She suggests, for instance, exposing them gradually to new experiences that are otherwise overstimulating. Cain consistently holds the reader’s interest by presenting individual profiles, looking at places dominated by extroverts (Harvard Business School) and introverts (a West Coast retreat center), and reporting on the latest studies. Her diligence, research, and passion for this important topic has richly paid off.
Publishers Weekly

The introvert/extrovert dichotomy is easily stereotyped in psychological literature: extroverts are buoyant and loud, introverts are shy and nerdy. Here, former corporate lawyer and negotiations consultant Cain gives a more nuanced portrait of introversion. Introverts are by nature more pensive, quiet, and solitary, but they can also act extroverted for the pursuit of their passions.... Verdict: This book is a pleasure to read and will make introverts and extroverts alike think twice about the best ways to be themselves and interact with differing personality types. Recommended to all readers. —Maryse Breton, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montreal
Library Journal

An enlightened Wall Street survivor exhorts wallflowers everywhere to embrace their solitude-seeking souls and fully appreciate the power of the lone wolf. Could up to one-half of a nation obsessed with Jersey Shore narcissism and American Idol fame really be inhabited by reserved, sensitive types? According to Cain, yes—and we better start valuing their insight.... The author's insights are so rich that she could pen two separate books: one about parenting an introverted child, and another about how to make an introvert/extrovert relationship work. An intriguing and potentially life-altering examination of the human psyche that is sure to benefit both introverts and extroverts alike.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Based on the quiz in the book, do you think you’re an introvert, an extrovert, or an ambivert? Are you an introvert in some situations and an extrovert in others?

2. What about the important people in your lives—your partner, your friends, your kids?

3. Which parts of Quiet resonated most strongly with you? Were there parts you disagreed with—and if so, why?

4. Can you think of a time in your life when being an introvert proved to be an advantage?

5. Who are your favorite introverted role models?

6. Do you agree with the author that introverts can be good leaders? What role do you think charisma plays in leadership? Can introverts be charismatic?

7. If you’re an introvert, what do you find most challenging about working with extroverts?

8. If you’re an extrovert, what do you find most challenging about working with introverts?

9. Quiet explains how Western society evolved from a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality. Are there enclaves in our society where a Culture of Character still holds sway? What would a twenty-first-century Culture of Character look like?

10. Quiet talks about the New Groupthink, the value system holding that creativity and productivity emerge from group work rather than individual thought. Have you experienced this in your own workplace?

11. Do you think your job suits your temperament? If not, what could you do to change things?

12. If you have children, how does your temperament compare to theirs? How do you handle areas in which you’re not temperamentally compatible?

13. If you’re in a relationship, how does your temperament compare to that of your partner? How do you handle areas in which you’re not compatible?

14. Do you enjoy social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and do you think this has something to do with your temperament?

15. Quiet talks about “restorative niches,” the places introverts go or the things they do to recharge their batteries. What are your favorite restorative niches?

16. Susan Cain calls for a Quiet Revolution. Would you like to see this kind of a movement take place, and if so, what is the number-one change you’d like to see happen?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Rabbi's Daughter
Reva Mann, 2007
Random House
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385341431

Summary
In this honest, daring, and compulsively readable memoir, Reva Mann paints a portrait of herself as a young woman on the edge—of either revelation or self-destruction. The daughter of a highly respected London rabbi, Reva was a wild child, spiralling into a whirlwind of sex and drugs by the time she reached adolescence. But as a young woman, Reva had a startling mystical epiphany that led her to a women’s yeshivah in Israel, and eventually to marriage to the devoutly religious Torah scholar she thought would take her to ever greater heights of spirituality.

But can the path to spiritual fulfillment ever be compatible with the ecstasies of the flesh or with the everyday joys of intimacy and pleasure to which she is also strongly drawn? With unflinching candor, Reva shares her struggle to carve out a life that encompasses all the impulses at war within herself. An eye-opening glimpse into the world of the ultra-Orthodox and their elaborately coded rituals for eating, sleeping, bathing, and lovemaking, as well as a deeply personal rumination on identity, faith, and self-acceptance, The Rabbi’s Daughter is at its heart a universal story, a journey toward redemption that is an unforgettable read. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Aka—Reva Unterman
• Birth—1957
• Where—London, UK
• Education—Hebrew University; Neve Yerushalayim Seminary
• Currently—lives in Jersulam, Israel

Reva Unterman is a columnist and author who uses the pen name Reva Mann.

Mann is the granddaughter of the former Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of the State of Israel, Isser Yehuda Unterman, and the daughter of Morris Unterman, rabbi of the West End Marble Arch synagogue in London. She was born in London but has lived in Israel since the mid-1980s. She attended a Jewish school in London until the age of ten. After her expulsion from Sinai College, a Jewish boarding school, her father sent her to Queen's College, a non-Jewish upper class high school.

Her autobiographical book, The Rabbi's Daughter: Sex, Drugs and Orthodoxy, describes her teenage experiments with sex and drugs, study at the Or Zion women's yeshiva in Jerusalem, and eventual return to the Orthodox fold.

Mann is a columnist for The Jewish Advocate and TotallyJewish.com. She is divorced with three children. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
A gripping tale of a woman searching in all the wrong places.... The book is hard to put down—it’s so personal and raw.
Sunday Times Magazine (London)

Reva Mann reveals how she rejected the respectability of her London parents for years of wild partying and how she has won her battle with addiction.
Evening Standard (London)

Reva’s gripping memoir of her long journey to find herself. This first-time author has written a compelling book about her own experiences, and...insight into the closed world of Orthodox Judaism.... Her story is fascinating and harrowing in equal measure.
Daily Express (London)

There is more to this book than gratuitous sex...there are moments of profound insights.... Reva’s considerable talent with the English language and profound insights into Judaism are in evidence throughout the book.
Manchester Telegraph (UK)

Sometimes shocking, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes very funny, Reva Mann’s story is a fascinating glimpse into a hidden world.
Elle

In her misspent youth, Mann, a journalist and daughter of a prominent London rabbi and granddaughter of a chief rabbi of Israel, was hooked on drugs and promiscuous sex, which led to hepatitis B infection and an arrest for drug possession. In her 20s, she went to Jerusalem, where again she disappointed her progressive Orthodox parents by marrying a born-again American Jew who had become an obsessive and separatist Hasid. Unhappiness and tragedy were Mann's constant companions: a retarded sister; the abortion of a brain-damaged fetus; the unraveling of her passionless marriage and her disenchantment with Hasidism; breast cancer; and her elderly widowed mother's suicide. Mann parades unsavory aspects of her behavior: she and her boyfriend, Sam, knowingly have raucous sex in earshot of her anxious children, and after Sam's brother is killed in a terrorist attack, Mann is upset that Sam isn't paying enough attention to her at the burial. While Mann's clever, fast-paced memoir offers an intimate glimpse of Orthodox Judaism and aptly demonstrates the human yearning for redemption, some of the events she recounts strain credulity, particularly her deflowering in her father's synagogue and a lesbian affair in an ultra-Orthodox women's yeshiva that is overheard by a religiously zealous tattletale.
Publishers Weekly

Mann tells her story with genuine humor and self-deprecating wit, winning the sympathy of even disapproving readers. Mann’s coming-of-age story speaks directly to young people struggling with questions of family, faith and identity.
Booklist

Jerusalem-based newspaper columnist Mann recounts her struggles with men, procrustean religion, drugs, sex, motherhood, breast cancer and the loss of loved ones. Employing the present tense throughout—perhaps to add an urgency that the narrative doesn't always deliver—the first-time author reveals a profound sadness at her center. The daughter and granddaughter of prominent rabbis, Mann rebelled as a teen with drugs and bad boyfriends. Reeling out of a troubled relationship with a druggie, she decided to move from London to Israel, where she studied midwifery and was attracted to the most fundamentalist form of Judaism she could find. She married a Hassidic scholar and adopted a pious lifestyle that puzzled even her father, a more moderate Jew. As she desperately sought happiness, she found herself increasingly repelled by her husband and his ways. Then a hunk of a handyman came to remodel the kitchen. Leers turned to frantic, clawing, biting sex-there is much explicit detail about her romps with this kitchen aide and with other lovers-which, of course, eventually led to the dissolution of her marriage and anguish for their three children. Later, another relationship with another slovenly drug addict went awry, but not before the author describes some luscious nubile bodies on a nude beach with nipples "soft and pink like candy." Lying on that same beach, she felt a lump, learned that she had breast cancer and endured surgery, chemo and radiation. Along the way, her father died, then her mom, in most disturbing fashion. The author then decides it's time to reunite with her sister, institutionalized back in England with Down's syndrome, whom she hasn't seen in 20 years. She vows to visit once a year from now on. A woeful life, related in prose that's largely hollow and unremarkable.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the narrative approach used in The Rabbi's Daughter. What is it like to watch the events in Reva’s life unfold in the present tense, with occasional flashbacks to the past? Why do you think she chose to write in the present tense? Is this approach effective?

2. The Rabbi's Daughter explores many levels of intolerance. For example, Reva’s father, who is a religious man, has contempt for what he sees as the overly extreme religiosity of her husband, while the ultra-Orthodox look down on everyone who does not share their beliefs or their rigid adherence to the elaborate rituals and codes of behavior that govern their every act. Discuss how Reva reacts to these forms of intolerance, and how they shape the life she eventually chooses to lead.

3. Do you think being pregnant and becoming a mother changes Reva? How so? How does it affect her relationship with her own mother?

4. What do you think are the most important lessons that Reva carries over from her ultra-Orthodox life into the quite different way of life she has created for herself by the end of the book?

5. Men play a prominent role in Reva’s life. Discuss Reva’s romantic/sexual relationships with Chris, Simcha, and Sam. How do these relationships differ from one another and what does each bring her? Does Reva change through her encounters with each man? How so?

6. Why is Reva’s relationship with her father so strained? Why was it easier for her to relate to her grandfather, despite the fact that he was even more pious than her father?

7. Why is Reva drawn to Simcha? Do you think her initial doubts about him are well-founded? What role does Simcha play toward the end of the book? Do your initial impressions of him change?

8. When her mother dies, Reva decides to visit the sister she had not seen in twenty years. Why? Do you think her mother’s death played a role in that difficult decision? How did Reva feel about the visit?

9. During the course of the years described in this book, Reva must come to terms with the illness and death of both parents, and must face up to her own mortality as well. How do you think these experiences change her?

10. Describe your thoughts on the following passage that opens the third chapter (p. 58): “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make a helpmate for him (Genesis 2:18).” How does it illustrate the woman’s role in society according to the Old Testament? How does Reva feel about being a “helpmate?”

11. Do you think the chapter titles are appropriate? Do the Scripture and Talmudic writings present each chapter effectively?

12. Reva says, “I am jealous of his ability to study the holy books into the night while I have been trashing the very values written there” (page 234). Is this inner conflict ever resolved? Does Reva find a balance between her spiritual self and her sensual self?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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