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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Dreams of My Father:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Conversation: How Black Men and Women Can Build Loving, Trusting Relationships
Harper Hill, 2009
Penguin USA
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781592405787


Summary
Only 34 percent of African-American children today are raised in two-parent households, a sharp contrast to 1966, when 85 percent of black children were raised by two parents.

In provocative but heartfelt words, Hill Harper takes on these urgent challenges, bringing a variety of issues out of the shadows. In The Conversation, Harper speaks to women and men with clear-eyed perspective, covering topics such as:

• The roots of the breakdown in the black family
• The myth that there are no mature, single, black male professionals
• What women can do to alleviate the "heaviness" they sometimes attach to dating
• What men can do to break the cycle of being a player
• The difference between sex and intimacy
• Bridging the communication gap
• Self-worth and net worth, and why you should never settle for an unworthy partner

Capturing the conversations Harper and his friends frequently have, this book is destined to be one of Harper's most healing contributions. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Aka—Francis Harper
• Birth—May 17, 1966
• Where—Iowa City, Iowa, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; J.D. and M.P.A., Harvard
   University
• Currently—N/A

Hill Harper is an American film, television and stage actor, as well as bestselling author.

Harper was born in Iowa City, Iowa, the son of Harry Harper, a psychiatrist, and Marilyn Hill, one of the first black practicing anesthesiologists in the United States. Acting since the age of 7, Harper has told of stories in which his mother had to pour water on him just to wake him up. He said he was and still is a hard sleeper.

Harper graduated from Brown University and also graduated with a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a Master of Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Govern-ment at Harvard University. During his years at Harvard, he was a full-time member of Boston's Black Folks Theater Company, one of the oldest and most acclaimed black theater troupes in the country.

He moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting, adopting the name "Hill" as tribute to both his maternal and paternal ancestors. He broke into both film and television in 1993, doing recurring work on the Fox series Married...with Children and making his film debut in the short Confessions of a Dog. His best-known role to date is that of coroner-turned-crime-scene-investigator Sheldon Hawkes on the American TV show CSI: NY.

Harper endorsed the 10,000 Bookbags back to school backpack campaign to help local disadvantaged children with Urban Change Ministries founder Pastor Jay Cameron of the Life Center and R&B singer Ginuwine.

He is also the bestselling author of Letters to a Young Brother (2006) Letters to a Young Sister (2008), and The Conversation (2009). (Bio adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Hill Harper trades solving crimes on-screen for a new mission: fixing relationship drama.
Essence


Hill Harper, the author of this book, wrote the bestseller Letters to a Young Brother, which won two NAACP awards and was named a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. Now, in his book for adults, he addresses the growing crisis in African-American relationships. In 1966, 85 percent of black children were raised by two parents; today only 34 percent are raised in two-parent households. Harper does not wallow in the sobering ramifications of that statistic; he attacks the problems at its roots. He writes frankly about racial myths that reinforce cynical dating attitudes among black men and women, and explains in detail how they can be neutralized. The Conversation is no bland nostrum; Harper offers specific, real-world responses to problems that African-American couples experience all too often.
Barnes & Noble Reviews


Hill's work presents a light, insightful, and accessible user's manual for African American men and women to better understand that which keeps us apart (and hopefully what can bring us closer together). 
Wearerespectablenegroes.blogspot.com

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 Conversation:

1. What does Harper Hill mean when he says that he views his book as a "dialogue across the barricades that men and women have erected to protect themselves from each other"?  To what kind of barricades is he referring? Have you "erected barricades" in your own life...or know others who have?

2. With topics such as "Dating a divorcé" and "Dating with kids,"is this book simply another dating how-to book? If so, in what way...and if not, how is it different?

3. Reading it, did you have the sense that it was aimed more toward men ... or women? Or do you feel Hill directs his message equally to both genders?

4. Do you agree with Hill's assessment when he writes this, in the following passage, about relationships between men and women:

We are growing jaded, cynical, tired, and world-weary before our time. We are expecting less and demanding less, and those lower expectations are making us unfulfilled and taking us farther from each other.

5. Hill wonders if men and women consider themselves friends. He writes that... 

despite all the emphatic "I love men" and "I love women" declarations—[I wonder] whether men and women really even liked each other at all.

What do you think—do men and women like each other? How does "liking" differ from "loving"? How important is it to "like" your partner?

6. Do you agree or disagree with Hill's assertion that, when Black men don't live up to their responsibilities in a relationship—with women or children, they are not held accountable? Is that a fair statement?

7. Where does Hill think the roots of the problems lie when it comes to creating and sustaining stable, loving relationships?

8. Overall, what do you think of The Conversation? Does Hill cover new ground or say things that have been said before? Does he offer new insights into issues? Does Hill offer viable solutions to the problems he considers...or is his book basically a "scold"? Is this book essential reading for men and women?

9. Does Hill's book speak to you, personally? Does it make you reflect on your own life experiences?

10. Do you notice any recent societal trends that might change—either by improving or exacerbating—the issues that concern Hill?

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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