Non-Fiction - Results from #650

Untamed
Glennon Doyle, 2020
Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781984801258

Summary
In her most revealing and powerful memoir yet, the beloved activist, speaker, and bestselling author of Love Warrior and Carry On, Warrior explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet the expectations of the world, and start trusting the voice deep within us.

This is how you find yourself.

There is a voice of longing inside each woman. We strive so mightily to be good: good partners, daughters, mothers, employees, and friends.

We hope all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed.

We look at our lives and wonder: Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful, hiding our discontent—even from ourselves.

For many years, Glennon Doyle denied her own discontent. Then, while speaking at a conference, she looked at a woman across the room and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There She Is.

At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. But she soon realized they had come to her from within. This was her own voice—the one she had buried beneath decades of numbing addictions, cultural conditioning, and institutional allegiances. This was the voice of the girl she had been before the world told her who to be.

Glennon decided to quit abandoning herself and to instead abandon the world’s expectations of her. She quit being good so she could be free. She quit pleasing and started living.

Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live.

It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table.

And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.

Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: The braver we are, the luckier we get. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 20, 1976
• Where—Burke, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., James Madison University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Naples, Florida

Glennon Doyle (formerly Doyle Melton) is a New York Times bestselling author of Untamed (2020), Love Warrior (2016), and Carry On, Warrior (2012). She is an activist, philanthropist and the creator of the online community Momastery. She is also president of Together Rising, a non-profit that has raised more than four million dollars for women and children in crisis.

Doyle was born in Burke, Virginia, and comes from a close family that includes one sister, Amanda Doyle. She completed her B.A. at James Madison University in 1998 and became a teacher in Northern Virginia. During her time at James Madison University.

Career
Doye began her online writing career in 2009, with the creation of her blog, Momastery. The funny, conversational and tell-all nature of her writing quickly gained popularity. Viral blog posts beginning with "2011 Lesson #2: Don't Carpe Diem" led to the publication of her memoir, Carry On, Warrior, and the growth of her social media audience.

Her 2016 memoir, Love Warrior, became an Oprah Book Selection. Doyle describes her career and life philosophy like this:

Life is brutal. But it's also beautiful. Brutiful, I call it. Life's brutal and beautiful are woven together so tightly that they can't be separated. Reject the brutal, reject the beauty. So now I embrace both, and I live well and hard and real. My job is to wake up every day, say yes to life's invitation, and let millions of women watch me get up off the floor, walk, stumble, and get back up again.

Glennon is a sought-after public speaker, and her work has been featured on The Today Show, The Talk, OWN, and NPR; in the New York Times, Ladies' Home Journal, Glamour, Family Circle, Parents Magazine, Newsweek,Woman's Day, and The Huffington Post; and in other television and print outlets.

Awards
In 2013, Carry On, Warrior received the Books for a Better Life Best Relationship Award and was a finalist in the Goodreads Choice Awards for "Best Memoir & Autobiography." In 2014, Parents Magazine named Doyle and Momastery the winner of its award for Best All-Around at Social Media. (Author bio adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia Retrieved 9/10/2016.)

Book Reviews
Doyle might just be the patron saint of female empowerment.… Here she inspires other women to listen to their intuition and break free of what cages them.… Her memoir has a message as clear as a "go" signal: Find and honor your truest self.
People

Filled with hopeful messages… encourag[ing] women to reject the status quo and follow their intuition.… This testament to female empowerment and self-love, with an endearing coming-out story at the center, will delight readers.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review) She is a terrific storyteller.… Whether discussing her children or the world outside,… her goal as a memoirist (and as a person) is to defy expectations and to help others break out of their cultural cages.… A bracing jolt of honesty.
Booklist

An emotional gut punch… [and] an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency. Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment.
Kirkus Reviews

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

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

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

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Until I Say Good-bye: My Year of Living with Joy
Susan Spencer-Wendel, 2013
HarperCollins
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062241450

Summary
In June 2011, Susan Spencer-Wendel learned she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)—Lou Gehrig's disease—an irreversible condition that systematically destroys the nerves that power the muscles. She was forty-four years old, with a devoted husband and three young children, and she had only one year of health remaining.

Susan decided to live that year with joy.

She quit her job as a journalist and spent time with her family. She built an outdoor meeting space for friends in her backyard. And she took seven trips with the seven most important people in her life. As her health declined, Susan journeyed to the Yukon, Hungary, the Bahamas, and Cyprus. She took her sons to swim with dolphins, and her teenage daughter, Marina, to Kleinfeld's bridal shop in New York City to see her for the first and last time in a wedding dress.

She also wrote this book. No longer able to walk or even to lift her arms, she tapped it out letter by letter on her iPhone using only her right thumb, the last finger still working.

However, Until I Say Good-Bye is not angry or bitter. It is sad in parts—how could it not be?—but it is filled with Susan's optimism, joie de vivre, and sense of humor. It is a book about life, not death. One that, like Susan, will make everyone smile.

From the Burger King parking lot where she cried after her diagnosis to a snowy hot spring near the Arctic Circle, from a hilarious family Christmas disaster to the decrepit monastery in eastern Cyprus where she rediscovered her heritage, <em >Until I Say Good-Bye is not only Susan Spencer-Wendel's unforgettable gift to her loved ones—a heartfelt record of their final experiences together—but an offering to all of us: a reminder that "every day is better when it is lived with joy." (From the publisher.)

Watch the video.

Author Bio
• Birth—December, 1966
• Raised—West Palm Beach, Florida, USA
• Education—B.B., University of North Carolina-
Chapel Hill; M.A., University of Florida
• Currently—lives in West Palm Beach, Florida

Susan Spencer-Wendel was an award-winning journalist at the Palm Beach Post for almost twenty years. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she holds a master's degree in journalism from the University of Florida. She has been honored for her work by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Florida Society of News Editors, and she received a lifetime achievement award for her court reporting from the Florida Bar. She lives in West Palm Beach, Florida, with her family.

Bret Witter has collaborated on five New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Decatur, Georgia. (Author bios from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Journalist Spencer-Wendel....writes with courage and strength. When she gets the news, the 40-something author is in her prime, blessed with a great reporter job at the Palm Beach Post and loving family. Using benefits from an insurance policy, she quits her job and decides to take trips with her family and friends, so that she can have all of the amazing experiences she's put off and create lasting memories.... There are certainly moments of heartbreak that she doesn't shy away from....but in writing her story, she shows her family and friends how to go on, choosing happiness and love over fear.
Publishers Weekly

Diagnosed at age 45 with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), Spencer-Wendel plunged into a live-each-day-fully whirlwind that has already made news (she was spotlighted in the Wall Street Journal, and the film rights to her story have been acquired for $2.5 million). Here she recounts trips to the Yukon to see the Northern Lights, for instance, and to Northern California to meet her birth mother. Most telling, she shops in New York with her 14-year-old daughter for the wedding dress she won't live to see her daughter wear.
Library Journal

Spencer-Wendel chronicles her life and the decisions she has made since being diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease).... In her mid-40s and a happily married mother of three with a thriving career, the author rejected the option of assisted suicide in favor of making her last years memorable despite the inevitability of increasing disability. Although not believing that her death would ruin the lives of her husband and children, she understood that it might "affect their ability to live with delight. To live with joy." Spencer-Wendel was determined to overcome her dread of losing mobility and to live her life to the fullest even as the disease progressed. As inspiration, the author found solace in Lou Gehrig's 1939 farewell speech, in which he described himself as "the luckiest man on the face of the Earth, even after 'catching a bad break.' " ... A poignant, wise love story.
Kirkus Reviews

Also consider thest talking points to help get a discussion started for Until I Say Good-bye:

1. What do you find most admirable about Susan when she learns of her illness? What enables her to approach her illness and coming death with such courage? Where does that kind of strength come from?

2. How might you respond to receiving such a diagnsis? What would be hardest for you? Would you forgo treatments to extend your life as she did? Would you ever choose assisted suicide...or reject it as Susan did?

3. If you had a year to live, how would you choose to live it? What would you do...where would you go?

4. Do you feel inspired by this book...and by Susan Spencer-Wendel?

5. Although Susan, her husband, and many reviewers insist that this book is not sad, there are certainly sad moments. What were some of the saddest occasions in the book for you. The memoir also contains humor—talk about the parts you found funny. Overall, how do you characterize this book—funny, sad, uplifting, depressing?

6. In an Amazon.com interview with Cokie Roberts, Susan says:

Desire is the root of all suffering, I believe. To want something you can't have. The cure is to not want it. I practice not wanting a cure, preparing to die. Choosing the path of least resistance. Going gracefully into the night.

Talk about that statement. Is desire "the root to all suffering"? A number of religious practices adhere to thata philosophy. Do you? What does that mean not to desire? Wouldn't life be flat and uninteresting without desire? Or would not-desiring lead to a better life?

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

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The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
George Packer, 2013
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374534608

Summary
Winner, 2013 National Book Award

A riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation

American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives.

The Unwinding journeys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who questions the Internet’s significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era’s leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents.

The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer’s novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 13, 1960
• Where—Santa Clara, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale College
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City

George Packer is an American journalist, novelist, and playwright. He is perhaps best known for his writings for The New Yorker about U.S. foreign policy and for his related book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. More recently he wrote "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America," covering the history of America from 1978-2012.

Life and career
Packer was born in Santa Clara, California. Packer's parents, Nancy (nee Huddleston) and Herbert Packer, were both academics at Stanford University; his maternal grandfather was George Huddleston Jr., a congressman from Alabama. His great-grandfather, George Huddleston Sr., was also a congressman from Alabama in the earlier part of the 20th Century. His sister, Ann Packer, is also a writer. His father was Jewish and his mother was from a Christian background.

Packer graduated from Yale College, where he lived in Calhoun College, in 1982, and served in the Peace Corps in Togo. His essays and articles have appeared in Boston Review, The Nation, World Affairs, Harper's, New York Times, and The New Yorker, among other publications. Packer was a columnist for Mother Jones and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since May 2003.[6]

Packer was a Holtzbrinck Fellow Class of Fall 2009 at the American Academy in Berlin.

His book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq analyzes the events that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and reports on subsequent developments in that country, largely based on interviews with ordinary Iraqis. He was a supporter of the Iraq war. He was a finalist for the 2004 Michael Kelly Award.

A more recent book, "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America," covers American history from 1978-2012,focuses on the ways that America has changed in the 34 years covered. The book achieves this mainly by tracing the lives of various individuals from different backgrounds through the years. Interspersed are capsule biographies of influential figures of the time such as Colin Powell, Elizabeth Warren, Jay-Z and Raymond Carver.

He is married to Laura Secor and was previously married to Michele Millon.a (From .)

Book Reviews
This book hums—with sorrow, with outrage and with compassion for those who are caught in the gears of America's increasingly complicated (and increasingly poorly calibrated) financial machinery.… The Unwinding contains many sweeping, wide-angle views of American life. Its portraits of Youngstown, Ohio; Tampa; Silicon Valley; Washington; and Wall Street are rich, complex and interlocking. Mr. Packer's gifts are Steinbeckian in the best sense of that term…he's written something close to a nonfiction masterpiece.
Dwight Garner - New York Times

Packer's is a big book, using close portraiture to make huge conclusions about who we've become and what we've lost…Packer's dark rendering of the state of the nation feels pained but true. He offers no false hopes, no Hollywood endings, but he finds power in another strain of American creativity, in the stories of Raymond Carver and the paintings of Edward Hopper, in the dignity and heart of a people who grow deeply lonely as their lives break down, but who somehow retain muscle memory of how to climb back up.
Marc Fisher - Washington Post

[M]any of the qualities of an epic novel...[a] professional work of journalism that also happens to be more intimate and textured—and certainly more ambitious—than most contemporary works of U.S. fiction dare to be.... What distinguishes The Unwinding is the fullness of Packer’s portraits, his willingness to show his subjects’ human desires and foibles, and to give each of his subjects a fully throated voice.
Hector Tobar - Los Angeles Times

Wide ranging, deeply reported, historically grounded and ideologically restrained.... Instead of compelling us to engage with his theory of the past 35 years of the American experience, Packer invites us to explore the experience itself, as lived by our fellow citizens. They’re human beings, not evidence for an agenda or fodder for talking points. Understanding that is the first step toward reclaiming the nation we share with them.
New York Review of Books

(Starred review.) Sometime in the late 1970s, the foundations of the American Century began to unravel. In this trenchant account, New Yorker writer Packer charts the erosion of the social compact that kept the country stable and middle class. Readers experience three decades of change via the personal histories.... Packer has a keen eye for the big story in the small moment, writing about our fraying social fabric with talent that matches his dismay.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Trenchant... [the] brief biographies of seminal figures that shaped the current state of affairs offer the book’s fiercest prose, such as in Packer’s brutal takedown of Robert Rubin, secretary of the Treasury during some key 1990s financial deregulation that amplified the severity of the Great Recession of 2008. Packer has a keen eye for the big story in the small moment, writing about our fraying social fabric with talent that matches his dismay.
Booklist

Packer describes the decline of America from a very specific time: If you were born half a century ago, around 1960, then, he writes, "you watched structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscape."... Exemplary journalism that defines a sobering, even depressing matter. A foundational document in the literature of the end of America--the end, that is, for the moment.
Kirkus Reviews

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Use Protection: An Employee's Guide to Advancement in the Workplace
Johanna Harris, 2013
Hire Fire and Retire, LLC
153 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781492961840

Summary
The purpose of Use Protection is to make sure you understand enough about workplace practices and employment law so that you do not get derailed from the career track you should be on. Many of the rules that govern work in any organization, whether it is a large corporation or a two-man office are not obvious. Some may be counterintuitive. If you do not know what the rules are, they can tangle you in a knot.

You may think that the company has a human resources person who will keep you out of trouble. This is a dangerous misconception. These HR reps are not your advocates. They work for the company not for you.They appear to be acting in your interest but they are not your advocates. You must be your own advocate. You must protect yourself.

Author Bio
• Birth—March 1, 1949
• Where—South Orange, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Pennsylvania; J.D., Villanova University
• Currently—lives in Providence, Rhode Island

Johanna Harris, a labor lawyer, specializes in investigating employee wrongdoing. She has been a trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Labor and in-house labor counsel for two multinational corporations. She is currently the CEO of Hire Fire and Retire LLC.

Apart from her extensive experience in human resources law and employee relations, Ms. Harris has served as chairman of the board, executive committee member or chairman of the governance/personnel committee of seven nonprofit organizations in the arts, education and historic preservation. (From the author.)

Book Reviews
Use Protection: An Employee’s Guide to Advancement in the Workplace isn’t your usual employee guide to office politics: it goes beyond typical HR-oriented advice to reveal the ‘hidden’ company processes and rules most general, non-union employees never know....The fact that author Johanna Harris is a labor lawyer, specializes in investigating employee wrongdoing, and that she holds extensive experience in human resources law and employee relations lends authority to advice which is not to be found in other general books on employment.Looking for strategies to assure success? Use Protection's case history examples from real-world scenarios blends with company savvy to translate all the “hidden” operations of business for any who would persevere in moving upward.
Diane Donovan - Midwest Book Reviews

See Amazon.com for additional customer reviews.

Discussion Questions
1.How can you prepare for most job interviews and how should you respond if an interviewer asks you an illegal question?

2.What kinds of information can an employer collect in a pre employment background check and is there anything you can do to correct negative information that may turn up in the check?

3.Why do some people sexually harass others, and is sexual harassment really about sex?

4.How can you use an annual performance review to your advantage?

5.How can you avoid being targeted for a Reduction-in-Force?

6.Is an employer required to offer flex time or flex location if you have small children?

7.Why is it crucial to have a mentor and how can you make the relationship successful?
(Questions provided courtesy of the author.)

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The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992
Tina Brown, 2017
Henry, Holt & Company
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781627791366

Summary
Tina Brown kept delicious daily diaries throughout her eight spectacular years as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. Today they provide an incendiary portrait of the flash and dash and power brokering of the Excessive Eighties in New York and Hollywood.

The Vanity Fair Diaries is the story of an Englishwoman barely out of her twenties who arrives in New York City with a dream.

Summoned from London in hopes that she can save Conde Nast's troubled new flagship Vanity Fair, Tina Brown is immediately plunged into the maelstrom of the competitive New York media world and the backstabbing rivalries at the court of the planet's slickest, most glamour-focused magazine company.

She survives the politics, the intrigue, and the attempts to derail her by a simple stratagem: succeeding. In the face of rampant skepticism, she triumphantly reinvents a failing magazine.

Here are the inside stories of Vanity Fair scoops and covers that sold millions — the Reagan kiss, the meltdown of Princess Diana's marriage to Prince Charles, the sensational Annie Leibovitz cover of a gloriously pregnant, naked Demi Moore.

In the diary's cinematic pages, the drama, the comedy, and the struggle of running an "it" magazine come to life. Brown's Vanity Fair Diaries is also a woman's journey, of making a home in a new country and of the deep bonds with her husband, their prematurely born son, and their daughter.

Astute, open-hearted, often riotously funny, Tina Brown's The Vanity Fair Diaries is a compulsively fascinating and intimate chronicle of a woman's life in a glittering era. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 21. 1953
• Where—Maidenhead, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York

Tina Brown CBE (Christina Hambley Brown) is a journalist, magazine editor, columnist, talk-show host and author. Born a British citizen, she took United States citizenship in 2005 after emigrating in 1984 to edit Vanity Fair. She is legally titled Lady Evans.

In 2000 Brown was appointed a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for her services to overseas journalism, and in 2007 was inducted into the Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame. As an editor, she has also been honored with four George Polk Awards, five Overseas Press Club awards, and ten National Magazine Awards.

Family
Tina Brown was born in Maidenhead, England, and she and her elder brother, Christopher Hambley Brown (who became a movie producer) grew up in Little Marlow, in Buckinghamshire, a Thames village in the countryside west of London. Her father, George Hambley Brown, was active in the British film industry producing the early Miss Marple films in the series starring Margaret Rutherford, based on the character created by Agatha Christie.

Her mother, Bettina Iris Mary (Kohr), was an assistant to Laurence Olivier. Brown's mother was of part Iraqi descent. As Brown recounted, “She was dark and I never knew why.” In her later years, Bettina wrote for an English-language magazine for expatriates in Spain where she and her husband lived in retirement until moving to New York in the early 1980s to be with their daughter and grandchildren.

Education
In Brown's own words she was considered "an extremely subversive influence" as a child, which resulted in her expulsion from three boarding schools. Offenses included organizing a demonstration to protest against the school's policy of allowing a change of underwear only three times a week, referring to her headmistress' bosoms as "unidentified flying objects" in a journal entry, and writing a play about her school being blown up and a public lavatory being erected in its place.

When she was 17, Brown entered St. Anne's College at the University of Oxford. Studying English literature, she also wrote for Isis, the university's literary magazine, contributing interviews with the journalist Auberon Waugh and the actor Dudley Moore. Her sharp, witty prose led to her some of her work being published by the New Statesman while still an undergraduate.

Her friendship with Waugh served as a boost to her writing career, and he used his influence to draw attention to her talent. Later, she went on to date the writer Martin Amis. Still at Oxford, she won the Sunday Times National Student Drama Award for her one-act play "Under the Bamboo Tree." A subsequent play, Happy Yellow, in 1977 was mounted at the London fringe Bush Theatre and later performed at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Personal life
In 1973, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh introduced Brown's writings to Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times, and in 1974 she was given freelance assignments in both the UK and US. When a relationship developed between Brown and Evans (who was married at the time), she resigned to write for a rival newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph.

Evans divorced his first wife in 1978, and in 1981 he and Brown married at Grey Gardens, the East Hampton, New York, home of then the Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. Brown lives in New York City with Sir Harold Evans (knighted in 2004) and their two children, a son, George, born in 1986 and a daughter, Isabel, born in 1990.

Career - Tatler
While doing freelance reporting after graduation, Brown was invited to write a weekly column by the literary humor magazine, Punch. These articles and her freelance contributions to the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph earned her the Catherine Pakenham Award for the best journalist under 25. Some of the writings from this era formed part of her first collection Loose Talk, published in 1979.

Also in 1979, when she was 25, Brown was invited by the Australian real estate millionaire Gary Bogard to edit his newly purchased magazine, Tatler. Brown transformed what was then a tiny, almost extinct, society magazine into a modern glossy magazine featuring covers by celebrated photographers. Tatler pulled in top writers from Brown's eclectic circle including Julian Barnes, Dennis Potter, Auberon Waugh, Brian Sewell, Georgina Howell, and Nicholas Coleridge (later President of Conde Nast International).

Brown herself wrote content for every issue, contributing irreverent surveys of the upper classes. She traveled through Scotland to portray the owners' stately homes. She also wrote short satirical profiles of eligible London bachelors under the pen-name Rosie Boot. Tatler covered the emergence of Lady Diana Spencer, soon to become known as Diana, Princess of Wales. On July 29, 1981, the day of the royal wedding, Brown joined NBC's Tom Brokaw in running commentary for The Today Show. Tatler sales jumped from 10,000 to 40,000.

In 1982 when S. I. Newhouse Jr., owner of Conde Nast Publications, bought Tatler, Brown resigned to become a full-time writer again. The break didn't last long, and Brown was lured back to Conde Nast. That year she also hosted several editions of the long running television series Film82 for BBC1 as a guest presenter.

Vanity Fair
In 1983, Brown was brought to New York by Newhouse to advise on Vanity Fair, the fabled style magazine that had ceased publication in 1936. Newhouse had resurrected it earlier that year, but it was failing — with its anemic circulation of only 200,000 and a mere 12 pages of advertising. Brown stayed on as a contributing editor and then was named editor-in-chief in January, 1984. Her words on taking it over? — "Pretentious, humorless. It wasn't too clever, it was just dull."

The first contract writer she hired was not a writer but a movie producer whom she met at a dinner party hosted by the writer Marie Brenner. The producer told her he was going to California for the trial of the strangler of his daughter. To aid him through his grief, Brown suggested that he keep a diary. The result became a report published in Vanity Fair under the headline "Justice." The article launched the long, and luminous, magazine career of Dominick Dunne.

Early stories like "Justice," as well as the magazine's new, livelier covers, brightened the prospects of Vanity Fair. Brown signed up other top writers, and the magazine became a mix of celebrity and serious foreign and domestic reporting.

Brown persuaded the novelist William Styron to write about his depression under the title "Darkness Visible," which subsequently became a best-selling nonfiction book. At the same time she formed fruitful relationships with photographer Annie Leibovitz, whose portrayals of Jerry Hall, Diane Keaton, Whoopi Goldberg and others came to define Vanity Fair. Its most famous cover was August 1991's of a naked and pregnant Demi Moore.

Three stories appeared in Vanity Fair: Harry Benson's cover shoot of Ronald and Nancy Reagan dancing in the White House; Helmut Newton's notorious portrait of accused murderer Claus von Bulow in his leathers with his mistress Andrea Reynolds (reported by Dominick Dunne), and Brown's own cover story on Princess Diana in October 1985 titled, "The Mouse that Roared," which broke the news of the fracture in the royal marriage. Those three stories from June to October, 1985, saved the magazine at end of a year rife with rumor that it would be folded into The New Yorker, another recent acquisition by Newhouse.

Sales of Vanity Fair rose from 200,000 to 1.2 million. Advertising topped 1,440 pages in 1991 with circulation revenues at $20 million. The magazine sold some 55 percent of its (highly profitable) newsstand issues, well above the industry average. Under Brown's editorship Vanity Fair won four National Magazine Awards, including a 1989 award for General Excellence. In 1988, Brown herself was named Magazine Editor of the Year by Advertising Age magazine.

The New Yorker
In 1992, Brown accepted the Newhouse company's invitation to become editor of The New Yorker, only the fourth editor in its entire 73-year history — succeeding legends Harold Ross, William Shawn and Robert Gottlieband. She was, of course, the first female to hold the position. Before taking the helm, Brown said she immersed herself in vintage editions, especially those issued under founding editor Harold Ross:

There was an irreverence, a lightness of touch, as well as a literary voice, that had been obscured in later years when the magazine became more celebrated and stuffy.… Rekindling that DNA became my passion.

Anxieties that Brown might change the identity of The New Yorker as a cultural institution prompted a number of resignations. George Trow, who had been with the magazine for almost three decades, accused Brown of "kissing the ass of celebrity" in his resignation letter. (To which Brown reportedly replied, "I am distraught at your defection but since you never actually write anything I should say I am notionally distraught.") The departing Jamaica Kincaid described Brown as "a bully" and "Stalin in high heels."

But Brown had the support of some New Yorker stalwarts, including John Updike, Roger Angell, Brendan Gill, Lillian Ross, Calvin Tomkins, Janet Malcolm, Harold Brodkey and Philip Hamburger, as well as newer staffers like Adam Gopnik and Nancy Franklin. During her editorship she let 79 staffers go and engaged 50 new writers and editors, most of whom remain to this day, including David Remnick (whom she nominated as her successor), Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane, Jane Mayer, Jeffrey Toobin, Hendrik Hertzberg. Brown introduced the concept of special double issues such as the annual fiction issue and the Holiday Season cartoon issue. She also cooperated with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates to devote a whole issue to the theme Black in America.

In 1992, Brown broke the magazine's longstanding taboo against serious photography by inviting Richard Avedon to be its first staff photographer. She also approved controversial covers from a new crop of artists, including Edward Sorel's October, 1992, cover that had people buzzing about the meaning of a punk rock passenger sprawled in the backseat of an elegant horse-drawn carriage: was it Brown's self-mocking riposte to fears she would downgrade the magazine?

A year later a national controversy was provoked by Brown's publication of Art Spiegelman's Valentine's Day cover of a Jewish man and a black woman in an embracing kiss, a comment on the mounting racial tensions between blacks and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York.

During Brown's tenure, the magazine was honored with 4 George Polk Awards, 5 Overseas Press Club Awards, and 10 National Magazine Awards, including a 1995 award for General Excellence, the first in the magazine's history. Newsstand sales rose 145 percent, and its circulation increased to 807,935 for the second half of 1997, up from 658,916 during the corresponding period in 1992. Critics maintained it was hemorrhaging money, but Newhouse remained supportive, viewing the magazine under Brown as a start-up (which routinely lose money):

It was practically a new magazine. She added topicality, photography, color. She did what we would have done if we invented The New Yorker from scratch. To do all that was costly. We knew it would be.

Under Brown's leadership, its economic fortunes improved every year: in 1995 losses were about $17 million, in 1996 $14 million, and in 1997 $11 million.

In 1998, Brown resigned from The New Yorker following an invitation from Harvey and Bob Weinstein of Miramax Films (then owned by the Disney Company) to be the chairman of a new multi-media company they intended to start with a new magazine, a book company and a television show. The Hearst company came in as partners with Miramax.

The verdicts following Brown's New Yorker departure included:

She had to move fast. She was decisive … went against the tradition of popular culture unfriendly to the written word. And what was she doing? She was pumping energy and life into a magazine devoted to publishing aesthetically and intellectually demanding writing. She saved The New Yorker. – Hendrik Hertzberg (editorial director)

The magazine will remain smarter and braver — more open to argument, and incomparably less timid — for her presence here. – Adam Gopnik (writer)

I assume we can now look forward to Miramax becoming a shallow, celebrity obsessed money loser she made The New Yorker. – Randy Cohen (writer)

She is the best magazine editor alive. What more can I say? – Michael Kinsley (writer)

The most important thing, I think, has been [Brown's] effort to bring together the intellectual material and the streets. When she was in charge, despite all the complaints from the old New Yorker crowd, one got a much stronger sense of the variousness of American society than one did under the editorship of perhaps the rightfully sainted Mr. Shawn. – Stanley Crouch (writer)

Talk and The Daily Beast
After Talk magazine and Talk Media and a stint at CNBC, Brown partnered with Barry Diller, chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, in October, 2008, to found and edit the online site, The Daily Beast. Two years later, in November 2010, The Daily Beast merged with the American weekly news magazine Newsweek in a joint venture to form The Newsweek Daily Beast Company. In September 2013, Brown announced she would be leaving her position as editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast to launch Tina Brown Media.

Books
Brown published The Diana Chronicles in 2007, a decade after the Princess's death. The Vanity Fair Diaries came out in 2017. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/11/2017.)

Book Reviews
A mile a minute memoir I read like a parrot with my nails embedded in Pirate Tina’s shoulder — yelling "what??!!’ ‘What!?!! WOWZA!" as she swashbuckles through the eighties, her sword slicing up the staid shibboleths of NY society. I remembered why I was afraid of her in those days. And why that energy & imagination, turned to making the world better, has galvanized so many of us now. A cultural catalyst — she makes things happen. Thank god she wrote it all down. Hang on. A wild ride.
Meryl Streep

Full of creative glee, passion and excitement, The Vanity Fair Diaries features a cast of characters like Mad Men (and women) on speed; an epic of a legendary magazine’s dazzling re-creation; moments of laugh-out-loud comic asides, juicy gossip and sketches of Austen-like sharpness, all put together by an editor of high octane genius who pauses only to reflect that however good she might be, it’s never quite good enough. Oh yes, it is. Read the diaries and feel better about everything. The word lives!
Simon Schama

High, low, smart, sexy, Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries is like the magazine she re-invented, a must read for anyone interested in Hollywood, high-society, and the movers and shakers of pop culture.
Anderson Cooper

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

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

(We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available.)

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Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire
Julia Baird, 2016
Random House
752 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400069880

Summary
This page-turning biography reveals the real woman behind the myth: a bold, glamorous, unbreakable queen—a Victoria for our times. Drawing on previously unpublished papers, this stunning new portrait is a story of love and heartbreak, of devotion and grief, of strength and resilience.

When Victoria was born, in 1819, the world was a very different place.

Revolution would threaten many of Europe’s monarchies in the coming decades. In Britain, a generation of royals had indulged their whims at the public’s expense, and republican sentiment was growing. The Industrial Revolution was transforming the landscape, and the British Empire was commanding ever larger tracts of the globe.

In a world where women were often powerless, during a century roiling with change, Victoria went on to rule the most powerful country on earth with a decisive hand.

Fifth in line to the throne at the time of her birth, Victoria was an ordinary woman thrust into an extraordinary role. As a girl, she defied her mother’s meddling and an adviser’s bullying, forging an iron will of her own. As a teenage queen, she eagerly grasped the crown and relished the freedom it brought her. At twenty, she fell passionately in love with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, eventually giving birth to nine children.

She loved sex and delighted in power. She was outspoken with her ministers, overstepping conventional boundaries and asserting her opinions. After the death of her adored Albert, she began a controversial, intimate relationship with her servant John Brown.

She survived eight assassination attempts over the course of her lifetime. And as science, technology, and democracy were dramatically reshaping the world, Victoria was a symbol of steadfastness and security—queen of a quarter of the world’s population at the height of the British Empire’s reach.

Drawing on sources that include fresh revelations about Victoria’s relationship with John Brown, Julia Baird brings vividly to life the fascinating story of a woman who struggled with so many of the things we do today: balancing work and family, raising children, navigating marital strife, losing parents, combating anxiety and self-doubt, finding an identity, searching for meaning. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1971 (?)
• Where—Sydney, Australia
• Education—B.A., Ph.D. University of Sydney
• Currently—lives in Sydney

Julia Baird is an Australian political journalist, television commentator, and author of two nonfiction books: Media Tarts: Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians (2004), and Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire (2016).

Early life and education
Baird was born in Sydney, the middle child of politician Bruce Baird and his wife Judy. Her older brother, Michael has served as Premier of New South Wales. The family lived in Rye, New York, in the U.S. during the 1970s while her father was Australian Trade Commissioner They returned to Australia in 1980, after which Baird attended Ravenswood School for Girls.

Baird earned her B.A. and, in 2001, her Ph.D in history from the University of Sydney. Her doctoral thesis was on women in politics. In 2005, she was a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University researching the globalization of American opinion in the lead up to the Iraq war.

Career
Baird started her journalistic career with the Sydney Morning Herald in 1998 and, by 2000, was editor of the Opinion pages. She was a campaigner for women in the Sydney diocese of the Anglican church and also worked as a religious commentator for Triple J and as a freelancer for ABC Radio. Her first book, Media Tarts was published in 2004.

In 2006, Baird became deputy editor at Newsweek in New York City, working there until it ceased print publication in 2012. She also wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her topics have included gender and politics, covering for example misogyny in Australian politics and transgender soldiers in the American military. She has also written about religious topics, and more recently about Donald Trump's political strategy.

She returned to Australia and currently hosts the The Drum, a current affairs television show. In 2016 she published her biography of Queen Victoria.

Personal life
Baird has two children. In 2015, she revealed in a New York Times column that she was recovering from surgery for ovarian cancer. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/11/2016.)

Visit the author's website.

Book Reviews
Victoria the Queen, Julia Baird’s exquisitely wrought and meticulously researched biography, brushes the dusty myth off this extraordinary monarch. Right out of the gate, the book thrums with authority as Baird builds her portrayal of Victoria. Overturning stereotypes, she rips this queen down to the studs and creates her anew. . . . Baird’s Victoria isn’t the woman we expect to meet. Her queen is a pure iconoclast: emotional, demonstrative, sexual and driven. . . . Baird writes in the round. She constructs a dynamic historical figure, then spins out a spherical world of elegant reference, anchoring the narrative in specific detail and pinning down complex swaths of history that, in less capable hands, would simply blow away (Editor’s Choice).
New York Times Book Review

Victoria: The Queen is that rare bird of serious historical biography, a page-turner. Writing with grace and authority, Baird reaches well beyond the conventional image of a reclusive and compliant queen to reveal “a robust and interventionist ruler,” iron-willed, uncompromising and sexually charged—a most unvictorian woman. . . . As a writer and historian, Baird has a wonderful gift for compressing complicated personalities and historical events.
Dallas Morning News

In this in-depth look at a feminist before her time, you’ll balk at, cheer on, and mourn the obstacles in the life of the teen queen who grew into her throne.
Marie Claire

Victoria’s rich personal life makes for interesting reading, but Baird’s attempts to trace the beginnings of the suffrage and anti-slavery movements to the values embodied in Victoria’s reign are unconvincing.... Baird’s empathy for her subject is apparent throughout, however, and...she imbues the chilly figure of Victoria with welcome humor and warmth.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Baird convincingly reframes the public perception of Victoria as a mother, along with providing unprecedented insight into her relationships following Prince Albert’s death.... Baird crafts a comprehensive study of the monarch and others with whom she was involved in an engaging, smoothly rendered narrative.... [An] excellent biography.
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Baird writes with such spirit and well-founded authority that readers will feel as though the story of the famous British queen is being told for the first time. . . . Baird does not turn a blind eye on Victoria’s darker sides, including her willfulness, selfishness, and self pity. But that simply adds dimensions to a significant character.
Booklist

Baird draws on previously unpublished sources to fashion a lively, perceptive portrait of the long-reigning queen.... Baird shrewdly assesses the quality of the queen’s family life and creates sharply drawn portraits of the major players in her circle.... A well-researched biography sensitive to Queen Victoria as a woman.
Kirkus Reviews

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

1. Talk about the surprising, indeed, ironic, ways that Queen Victoria defied the strict codes of decorum—standards of behavior that were encoded with her name for an entire era. In other words, how was Victoria not a Victorian?

2. Describe the Queen: her young self, and trace the ways in which she changed into her middle-aged and then older self—the public figure we are most familiar with: a short, round woman, draped in black and a frown.

3. How would you describe Prince Albert? What was the couple's marriage like? In what way did he undermine Victoria's confidence as a ruler or undercut her authority?

4. The Queen had nine children. What kind of mother was she?

5. How would you describe Victoria's "management skills" and treatment of the men who surrounded her? How did she manage to use her feminity to her advantage in that most masculine of worlds?

6. Victoria sought to endow the "primarily ceremonial and symbolic" role of her monarchy with power and influence. Was she successful?

7. The Queen's inner circle included luminaries such as Lord Melbourne and Benjamin Disraeli, to name only two. Talk about her relationship with Melbourne, for instance, as well as others. Who needed her, and whom did she need?

8. After reading Julia Baird's biography, what surprised you most about Victoria or the great events of her age? Before reading Baird's book, how much did you know about the politics of the age and the spread of the British empire? What new insights have you come away with?

9. For comparison (and for sheer fun) watch the new Amazon series on Queen Elizabeth II. Do you see any similarities in the situations of the two female monarchs?

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

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Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins
Susan Casey, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385537308

Summary
A breathtaking journey through the extraordinary world of dolphins.

Since the dawn of recorded history, humans have felt a kinship with the sleek and beautiful dolphin, an animal whose playfulness, sociability, and intelligence seem like an aquatic mirror of mankind.

In recent decades, we have learned that dolphins recognize themselves in reflections, count, grieve, adorn themselves, feel despondent, rescue one another (and humans), deduce, infer, seduce, form cliques, throw tantrums, and call themselves by name. Scientists still don’t completely understand their incredibly sophisticated navigation and communication abilities, or their immensely complicated brains.

While swimming off the coast of Maui, Susan Casey was surrounded by a pod of spinner dolphins. It was a profoundly transporting experience, and it inspired her to embark on a two-year global adventure to explore the nature of these remarkable beings and their complex relationship to humanity.

Casey examines the career of the controversial John Lilly, the pioneer of modern dolphin studies whose work eventually led him down some very strange paths. She visits a community in Hawaii whose adherents believe dolphins are the key to spiritual enlightenment, travels to Ireland, where a dolphin named as “the world’s most loyal animal” has delighted tourists and locals for decades with his friendly antics, and consults with the world’s leading marine researchers, whose sense of wonder inspired by the dolphins they study increases the more they discover.

Yet there is a dark side to our relationship with dolphins. They are the stars of a global multibillion-dollar captivity industry, whose money has fueled a sinister and lucrative trade in which dolphins are captured violently, then shipped and kept in brutal conditions. Casey’s investigation into this cruel underground takes her to the harrowing epicenter of the trade in the Solomon Islands, and to the Japanese town of Taiji, made famous by the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, where she chronicles the annual slaughter and sale of dolphins in its narrow bay.

Casey ends her narrative on the island of Crete, where millennia-old frescoes and artwork document the great Minoan civilization, a culture which lived in harmony with dolphins, and whose example shows the way to a more enlightened coexistence with the natural world.

No writer is better positioned to portray these magical creatures than Susan Casey, whose combination of personal reporting, intense scientific research, and evocative prose made The Wave and The Devil’s Teeth contemporary classics of writing about the sea. In Voices in the Ocean, she has written a thrilling book about the other intelligent life on the planet. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Susan Casey is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (2005),
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean (2010), and Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins (2015).

In addition to authoring books, she served as creative director of Outside Magazine, where she was part of the editorial team that developed the stories behind the bestselling books Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm, as well as the 2002 movie Blue Crush.

The Toronto-born Casey has been Editor-in-Chief of O, The Oprah Magazine since 2009. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[A] meticulously reported global odyssey.... Fans of Casey's writing know that she has an inexhastible curiosity and a knack for fully embracing her subject.... We're never quite sure where Casey's investigation will take us.... Casey isn't afraid.
Outside

Casey...embarks an investigation into the world of dolphins, impressing the reader with her curiosity and thrilling sense of discovery as she travels the world to learn about these unique creatures.... Casey’s book comes as a welcome addition on a topic also explored in the recent documentaries The Cove and Blackfish.
Publishers Weekly

This book does not provide scientific background as does Justin Gregg's Are Dolphins Really that Smart? but will interest general and YA readers, as well as nature lovers, who will lose their eagerness to visit dolphin shows and may be motivated toward further reading on the subject. —Judith B. Barnett, Univ. of Rhode Island Lib., Kingston
Library Journal

Casey takes the measure of the human-dolphin dance.... The most moving section of the book follows the author's visit to Crete...demonstrating their significance across ages. "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine," said astrophysicist Arthur Eddington. "It is stranger than we can imagine." That sublime wildness is exactly what Casey, ever the adventurer, reveals in this flawed but still entertaining book.
Kirkus Reviews

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Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again
Crystal McVea (with Alex Tresniowski), 2013
Howard Books
245 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476735856

Summary
The remarkable story of a woman, plagued with guilt and skepticism, dramatically changed by the nine minutes she spent in heaven.

God let me see me through His eyes. And in that instant I knew that God had always loved me, through all of those dark and difficult years when I doubted His existence, through every crisis and every heartbreak that made me turn away from Him more. I knew, in that instant, that His love was endless and boundless, and that if He loved me so much, how could I not love myself?

For most of her life, Crystal McVea was a skeptic whose history of abuse and bad choices made her feel beyond the reach of God—who questioned if God was even real. She had all but given up hope. Then came December 10, 2009—and the moment that changed everything.

For nine minutes that night, Crystal went into full respiratory arrest. She was unconscious and unable to breathe on her own, unaware of the crisis happening around her as the hospital staff rushed to save her life. Crystal doesn’t remember the trauma or losing consciousness; she just remembers waking up in heaven, next to God.

Waking Up in Heaven invites readers to witness the relentless pursuit of God in a life that was broken and seemingly beyond hope, an awe-inspiring account of love, forgiveness, and redemption, and the healing power of God’s presence. (From the publisher.)

Read interview with Crystal

Author Bios
• Crystal Leigh McVea was born in southwest Oklahoma and still lives there today. She is a schoolteacher and has four lovely children. Crystal and her husband Virgil, a US Army veteran, are devout Christians and active in their local church.

• Alex Tresniowski is a former human-interest writer at People and has written several books, most notably The Vendetta, which was purchased by Universal Studios and used as a basis for the movie Public Enemies. His most recent book, An Invisible Thread, has spent more than twenty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
As of yet, there are no mainstream press reviews online. For helpful customer reviews see Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Discussion Questions
1. Waking Up in Heaven opens with a letter from Laura Schroff, author of An Invisible Thread. How does this letter help frame Crystal’s story? What do you think made Laura pay attention to Crystal’s message?

2. Revisit the moment when Crystal dies, beginning on page 10. What is your reaction to this scene? Are the details—the bright light, the warmth, the love—what you would expect? Why do you think Crystal chose to begin her story with her death, rather than with her troubled childhood?

3. Crystal describes the first person she met in heaven—herself: “Unlike on Earth, where I was plagued by doubts and fears, in heaven there was nothing but absolute certainty about who I was. . . . I was flooded with self-knowledge . . . revealing, for the first time ever, the real me.” Why do you think God reveals ourselves to us when we get to heaven? Do you think everyone on Earth is still waiting to meet himself or herself? What did Crystal learn about herself that surprised her? What do you imagine God might show you about yourself?

4. Crystal seems to have been followed by death for her entire life, beginning when her stepfather Hank “stood just inside [her] bedroom and aimed his gun at [her] bed.” What are other moments in the story when Crystal comes face-to-face with death? What is the significance of so many close encounters?

5. “I was the common denominator. The problem had to lie with me,” says Crystal, in reference to the abuse she endured from three different people during her childhood. Do you think Crystal’s gut reaction to blame herself is typical? Describe a time in your life where a pattern of encounters has made you feel responsible, even though the situation may have been out of your control.

6. An important theme in Crystal’s story is forgiveness: forgiveness of herself, of her parents, of her abusers. Why is forgiveness so important to Crystal? Why was Crystal only able to find forgiveness in her heart after dying and meeting God?

7. How does suffering shape the person Crystal is today? In what ways has she suffered physically, mentally, economically, spiritually? Have you had similar struggles in your life? Do you believe like Crystal that “suffering can bring us even closer to Him” and that “our very worst moments are precisely when God’s grace is most brightly revealed”? Why or why not?

8. Discuss Virgil. What role does he play in “saving” Crystal’s life? How would you characterize him? Do you see him as angel-like? Crystal says that Virgil brought stability to her life, but what else did he bring?

9. Crystal talks about her demonic events as tests from God to strengthen her faith. How would you describe these events?

10. What are the ways in which Crystal describes God making her feel “whole” (165), and why is this feeling so important?

11. What does Crystal see as her mission from God? What made her realize this mission? Who do you think you are called to be?

12. Crystal defines God’s message as the following: “God is real, and we are all worthy of His love and salvation because He finds us worthy.” Crystal understands God’s role as a parent who loves His children. Do you think of God as a parent figure? If you had to define God’s message to you, what would it be?

13. Do you think that Crystal’s story of dying and coming back to life is important for us to hear? In what ways? What does Waking Up in Heaven teach us about blind faith?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement
John Lewis and Michael D'Orso, 2015 (reissue, 2020)
Simon & Schuster
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476797717

Summary
An award-winning national bestseller, Walking with the Wind is one of our most important records of the American Civil Rights Movement. Told by John Lewis, who Cornel West calls a “national treasure,” this is a gripping first-hand account of the fight for civil rights and the courage it takes to change a nation.

In 1957, a teenaged boy named John Lewis left a cotton farm in Alabama for Nashville, the epicenter of the struggle for civil rights in America.

Lewis’s adherence to nonviolence guided that critical time and established him as one of the movement’s most charismatic and courageous leaders.

Lewis’s leadership in the Nashville Movement—a student-led effort to desegregate the city of Nashville using sit-in techniques based on the teachings of Gandhi—set the tone for major civil rights campaigns of the 1960s.

Lewis traces his role in the pivotal Selma marches, Bloody Sunday, and the Freedom Rides. Inspired by his mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lewis’s vision and perseverance altered history. In 1986, he ran and won a congressional seat in Georgia, and remains in office to this day, continuing to enact change.
.
The late Edward M. Kennedy said of Lewis, "John tells it like it was.… Lewis spent most of his life walking against the wind of the times, but he was surely walking with the wind of history." (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 21, 1940
• Born—Troy, Alabama, USA
• Death—July 17, 2020
• Education—American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville
• Awards—National Book Award (more below)

Congressman John Lewis was a leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. He was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and played a key role in the struggle to end segregation. Despite more than 40 arrests, physical attacks, and serious injuries, Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the philosophy of nonviolence.

He is co-author of the first comics work to ever win the National Book Award, the #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novel memoir trilogy MARCH, written with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell. He is also the recipient of numerous awards from national and international institutions including the Lincoln Medal, the John F. Kennedy "Profile in Courage" Lifetime Achievement Award, and the NAACP Spingarn Medal, among many others. (From the publisher.)

His 1998 memoir, Walking with the Wind, was reissued in 2015. Two years later, in 2017, after a very public spat with President Donald Trump, Amazon announced that copies of his memoir had reached #3 on its bestseller list—and were sold out. Used copies were going for nearly $100.

Book Reviews
In Walking With the Wind, John Lewis evokes, with simplicity and passion, how the 1960's transformed the United States. In the first half of that decade, the civil rights movement toppled the legal structure of racial segregation, held forth the hope of building a society based on reconciliation and justice and helped create the foundation for other social movements. Yet by the end of the 60's, assassinations, disillusionment with the political system and a tragic war 9,000 miles away had eroded optimism and a sense of possibility. In this powerful memoir (written with Michael D'Orso…), Lewis provides a compelling account of that topsy-turvy journey—an account rooted in his own history.
William H. Chafe - New York Times

Rep. John Lewis was among those who spilled blood on Bloody Sunday. He was among the civil-rights leaders who marched near Selma 50 years ago tomorrow… was struck down by the baton of official oppression…. [Lewis], a deep believer in nonviolent protest, lost consciousness and thought he was going to die that day. Instead, a half-century later, he stands tall as a symbol of change…. Congressman Lewis’ account in Walking With The Wind is vivid, and almost more important, reveal[s] the lens through which he processed the sights and sounds of the bridge.
Michael Cavna - Washington Post

For those too young to remember and those too old to forget, for everyone of race, we owe a debt of gratitude to this American hero, and the nameless, frightened (but ultimately fearless) multitudes that walked with him down those rugged roads of history.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Lewis imbues [this memoir] with his own observations as a participant. He…has a sharp eye, and his account of Selma and the march that followed is vivid and personal…. His book, a uniquely well-told testimony by an eyewitness, makes clear that such an impression is entirely inaccurate.
Publishers Weekly

[A] passionate, principled, and absorbing first-person account of the civil-rights movement—dramatic, well-paced history…. [Lewis] memorializes not only the drama [of the Selma March], but the patience and steely courage of "the days and days of uneventful protest" that laid the groundwork…. A classic, invaluable blockbuster history of the civil-rights movement.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion of WALKING WITH THE WIND … then take off on your own:

1. In reading his memoir, how would you piece together, what John Lewis was like as a person? How did the events of his childhood affect his strength and passion to fight for civil rights in the 1960s—especially, as written in his memoir, growing up on the family farm in "a small world, a safe world, filled with family and friends"? In what way did that safe environment propel him to become a leader in the Civil Rights movement? Consider, for instance, his reference to caring for the family's chickens and what ideals that instilled in him.

2. What it was like to live in the Jim Crow South society of the 1940 ad 50s, as recalled to us by Lewis?

3. What role did Lewis's faith play in his life, starting from the time he was a child? How did Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermon on the radio, entitled "Paul's Letter to the American Christians" affect Lewis?

4. What role did Lewis play in galvanizing the nation once Americans learned of the brutality meted out to demonstrators in Montgomery, Alabama?

5. In August, 1963, Lewis gave a speech as head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at the March on Washington. What did he call for? Did the speech work? Would it have worked today? How did the Black Power movement undermine Lewis's goals?

6. Discuss what happened at the 1964 Democratic National Convention? Talk about how Lyndon Johnson's decision, or compromise, affected John Lewis and the momentum of the civil rights movement.

7. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, what affect did it have on the movement, and on Lewis himself?

8. How is Lewis's memoir relevant today?

9. How much did you know, or understand, about the history of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement before reading Walking with the Wind? Did John Lewis's memoir expand your knowledge or confirm your ideas of that era in history?

10. Why, in your opinion, has the Civil Rights movement persisted? Or has it persisted? What happened to the momentum of the 60s? Did it stall out? Did it continue? Why, after 50 years, are Black citizens still struggling for equality?

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

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War of the Whales: A True Story
Joshua Horowitz, 2014
Simon & Schuster
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451645019

Summary
Two men face off against an all-powerful navy—and the fate of the ocean’s most majestic creatures hangs in the balance.

War of the Whales is the gripping tale of a crusading attorney who stumbles on one of the US Navy’s best-kept secrets: a submarine detection system that floods entire ocean basins with high-intensity sound—and drives whales onto beaches.

As Joel Reynolds launches a legal fight to expose and challenge the Navy program, marine biologist Ken Balcomb witnesses a mysterious mass stranding of whales near his research station in the Bahamas. Investigating this calamity, Balcomb is forced to choose between his conscience and an oath of secrecy he swore to the Navy in his youth.

When Balcomb and Reynolds team up to expose the truth behind an epidemic of mass strandings, the stage is set for an epic battle that pits admirals against activists, rogue submarines against weaponized dolphins, and national security against the need to safeguard the ocean environment.

Waged in secret military labs and the nation’s highest court, War of the Whales is a real-life thriller that combines the best of legal drama, natural history, and military intrigue. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Joshua Horwitz is the Founder and Publisher of Living Planet Books, which specializes in works by thought leaders in science, medicine and psychology.

In addition to War of the Whales (2014), Horwitz is the co-author of two books of non-fiction: Wrestling with Angels (with Naomi Rosenblatt, 1995), and If I Get to Five (with Fred Epstein, MD, 2003), which won the Christopher Award for Adult Nonfiction in 2004. He has also written a young adult novel and several children’s books.b

In 1990 Horwitz co-founded Living Planet Press, an environmental press that published books with leading environmental, conservation and humane organizations, including the National Resources Defence Council (NRDC), Wilderness Society, World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, the Wilderness Society, American Forests, Animal Legal Defense Fund, and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASCPA).

In 1995, he launched Living Planet Books, a front-list non-fiction packaging firm specializing in books by thought leaders in science, medicine, and psychology such as the bestselling Raising Cain: the Emotional Lives of Boys (1998) and The Promise of Sleep (1998).
b
In 2000, Horwitz co-founded AuthorsOnline, a website featuring the homepages of award-winning and best-selling authors. In 2003, he founded Waterford Life Sciences, which publishes health and medical books for physicians and patients.

Whales
Horowitz knew virtually nothing about whales or submarines seven years ago, when the newspaper headline: "Navy v. Whales" first caught his attention. The article recounted an environmental attorney’s long-running lawsuit to limit navy sonar exercises that caused whales to mass strand. It wasn’t until he dug deeper into the background of the story that Josh discovered the 50-year relationship between the Navy and whales that stretched from the beginning of the Cold War to the present. The Navy v. Whales courtroom drama, which was heading for the Supreme Court, was the final divorce proceedings in long and complicated marriage.

After visiting environmental lawyer Joel Reynolds at a Baja, Mexico gray whale lagoon he’d help save from industrial development, Joshua then caught up with the book’s other protagonist, Ken Balcomb at a humpback whale sanctuary in Hawaii. He realized that this unlikely pair of activists, faced off against the world’s most powerful navy, had all the ingredients of a remarkable—and untold—tale of conscience and environmental justice, in the tradition of A Civil Action and Erin Brockovich. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
As War of the Whales…makes convincingly clear, the connection between naval sonar and deadly mass strandings of whales is scientifically undeniable…. By telling the sonar-and-the-whales story in such detail and breadth, the author may provoke a more substantial debate about what human advances and priorities are doing to the rest of the planet.
Marc Kaufman - Washington Post

Intimate and urgent storytelling…. Horwitz's years of research and observation lend genuine drama to this save-the-whales tale. The author paints rich portraits of his subjects, much fuller than the rote physical descriptions and caricatures that might pass for characterization in a breezier work of nonfiction.
Chicago Tribune

The story is so artfully constructed that you are drawn in and forget that you are not reading a novel…. [A] story that is fascinating even if you have no interest in whales or navy sonar…. [H]is masterfully crafted book is guaranteed to bring the issues to a larger audience.
Seattle Post Intelligencer

In a riveting and groundbreaking new book, War of the Whales, Joshua Horwitz, chronicles the true story of the 20-year battle led by scientists and environmental activists against military sonar. It reads like the best investigative journalism, with cinematic scenes of strandings and dramatic David-and-Goliath courtroom dramas as activists diligently hold the Navy accountable. A page-turning detective story, War of the Whales…chillingly tracks the US Navy’s culture of secrecy as it collides with environmental groups and grassroots’ demand for transparency.
Brenda Peterson - Huffington Post

In this gripping detective tale,science writer Horwitz recreates a day-by-day account of the quest to find thereasons for the mass strandings; the Navy’s resistance and cover-up of theiruse of sonar in the area; and the drawn out struggles between Balcomb, Joel Reynolds, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Navy…. Riveting.
Publishers Weekly

Author Joshua Horwitz structures this account like an eco-legal thriller, layering his research so that film of a Navy ship seen in the water near the site of the beachings hangs there like damning evidence…. As humans encroach ever further into wild spaces, the impact on the creatures living there must be minimized or mitigated. War of the Whales tells one story among many of its type, but it speaks to the need for improved stewardship with urgency.
BookPage

(Starred review.) [A]n ongoing collision of epic proportions between the U.S. Navy, intent on protecting its submarine warfare program, and environmental activists, who fight to save whales from extinction…. Horwitz delivers a powerful, engrossing narrative that raises serious questions about the unchecked use of secrecy by the military to advance its institutional power.
Kirkus Reviews

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Isabel Wilkerson, 2010
Random House
640 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679444329

Summary
Winner, 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner, 2010 Pulitizer Prize

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.

From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.

Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.

With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals:

—Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat;

—George Starling, sharp and quick-tempered, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God;

—Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard wor

Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land.

Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.A., Howard University
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize (twice); National Book Critics Circle Award; George S. Polk Award; Journalist of the Year Award from The National Association of Black Journalists.
• Currently—lives in in Boston, Massachusetts

Isabel Wilkerson is a journalist and the author, in 2010, of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, which won the Pulitizer Prize, as well as the Book Critics Circle Award. In 2020, she published Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, a book that also received wide critical acclaim..

Born in Washington D.C., Wilkerson studied journalism at Howard University, becoming editor-in-chief of the college newspaper The Hilltop. During college, Wilkerson interned at many publications, including the The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.

In 1994, while Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism, winning the feature writing award for her coverage of the 1993 midwestern floods and her profile of a 10-year-old boy who was responsible for his four siblings. Several of Wilkerson's articles are included in the book Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing, 1979 - 2003, edited by David Garlock.

Wilkerson has also won a George S. Polk Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Journalist of the Year award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

She has also held the positions of James M. Cox Professor of Journalism at Emory University, Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and the Kreeger-Wolf endowed lecturer at Northwestern University. She also served as a board member of the National Arts in Journalism Program at Columbia University.

Wilkerson is now a Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction in the College of Communications at Boston University.

After fourteen years of research, she has just released a book called The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, which examines the three geographic routes that were commonly used by African Americans leaving the southern states between 1915 and the 1970s, illustrated through the personal stories of people who took those routes.

During her research for the book, Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,000 people who made the migration from the South to Northern and Western cities. The book almost instantly hit number 11 on the NYT Bestseller list for nonfiction and has since been included in lists of best books of 2010 by many reviewers, including Salon.com, Atlanta Magazine, New Yorker, Washington Post, Economist, and The Daily Beast. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
[A] landmark piece of nonfiction.... [Wilkerson] works on a grand, panoramic scale but also on a very intimate one, since this work of living history boils down to the tenderly told stories of three rural Southerners who immigrated to big cities from their hometowns. She winds up with a mesmerizing book that warrants comparison to The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann's study of the Great Migration's early phase, and Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas's great, close-range look at racial strife in Boston.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

[A] massive and masterly account of the Great Migration.... Based on more than a thousand interviews, written in broad imaginative strokes, this book, at 622 pages, is something of an anomaly in today's shrinking world of nonfiction publishing: a narrative epic rigorous enough to impress all but the crankiest of scholars, yet so immensely readable as to land the author a future place on Oprah's couch.
David Oshinsky - New York Times Book Review

A brilliant and stirring epic, the first book to cover the full half-century of the Great Migration.... Wilkerson combines impressive research…with great narrative and literary power. Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.
John Stauffer - Wall Street Journal

[Its] power arises from its close attention to intimate details in the lives of regular people...if you want to learn about what being a migrant felt like, read Wilkerson. Her intimate portraits convey as no book prior ever has what the migration meant to those who were a part of it. The Warmth of Other Suns stands as a vital contribution to our understanding of the black American experience and of the unstoppable social movement that shaped modern America.
Atlanta Journal Constitution

[Black Southerners] did not cross the turnstiles of customs at Ellis Island. They were already citizens. But where they came from, they were not treated as such,'' writes Isabel Wilkerson in The Warmth of Other Suns, her sprawling and stunning account of the Great Migration, the 55-year stretch (1915 70) during which 6 million black Americans fled the Jim Crow South. Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, uses the journeys of three of them a Mississippi sharecropper, a Louisiana doctor, and a Florida laborer to etch an indelible and compulsively readable portrait of race, class, and politics in 20th-century America. History is rarely distilled so finely.
Entertainment Weekly

(Starred review.) Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man's turkeys and was almost beaten to death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to California in 1953, embittered by "the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn't operate in his own home town." Anchored to these three stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively researched study of the "great migration," the exodus of six million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an "uncertain existence" in the North and Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling, and Pershing settling in new lands, building anew, and often finding that they have not left racism behind. The drama, poignancy, and romance of a classic immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp, and resonate long after the reading is done.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
1. The Warmth of Other Suns combines a sweeping historical perspective with vivid intimate portraits of three individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster. What is the value of this dual focus, of shifting between the panoramic and the close-up? In what ways are Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster representative of the millions of other migrants who journeyed from South to North?

2. In many ways The Warmth of Other Suns seeks to tell a new story—about the Great Migration of southern blacks to the north—and to set the record straight about the true significance of that migration. What are the most surprising revelations in the book? What misconceptions does Wilkerson dispel?

3. What were the major economic, social, and historical forces that sparked the Great Migration? Why did blacks leave in such great numbers from 1915 to 1970?

4. What were the most horrifying conditions of Jim Crow South? What instances of racial terrorism stand out most strongly in the book? What daily injustices and humiliations did blacks have to face there?

5. In what ways was the Great Migration of southern blacks similar to other historical migrations? In what important ways was it unique?

6. After being viciously attacked by a mob in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today” (p. 389). Why were northern working-class whites so hostile to black migrants?

7. Wilkerson quotes Black Boy in which Richard Wright wrote, on arriving in the North: “I had fled one insecurity and embraced another” (p. 242). What unique challenges did black migrants face in the North? How did these challenges affect the lives of Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster?

8. Wilkerson points out that the three most influential figures in jazz were all children of the Great Migration: Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane. What would American culture look like today if the Great Migration hadn’t happened?

9. What motivated Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster to leave the South? What circumstances and inner drives prompted them to undertake such a difficult and dangerous journey? What would likely have been their fates if they had remained in the South? In what ways did living in the North free them?

10. Near the end of the book, Wilkerson asks: “With all that grew out of the mass movement of people, did the Great Migration achieve the aim of those who willed it? Were the people who left the South—and their families—better off for having done so? Was the loss of what they left behind worth what confronted them in the anonymous cities they fled to?” (p. 528). How does Wilkerson answer these questions?

11. How did the Great Migration change not only the North but also the South? How did the South respond to the mass exodus of cheap black labor?

12. In what ways are current attitudes toward Mexican Americans similar to attitudes toward African Americans expressed by Northerners in The Warmth of Other Suns? For example, the ways working-class Northerners felt that Southern blacks were stealing their jobs.

13. At a neighborhood watch meeting in Chicago’s South Shore, Ida Mae listens to a young state senator named Barack Obama. In what ways is Obama’s presidency a indirect result of the Great Migration?

14. What is the value of Wilkerson basing her research primarily on firsthand, eyewitness accounts, gathered through extensive interviews, of this historical period?

15. Wilkerson writes of her three subjects that “Ida Mae Gladney had the humblest trappings but was perhaps the richest of them all. She had lived the hardest life, been given the least education, seen the worst the South could hurl at her people, and did not let it break her.... Her success was spiritual, perhaps the hardest of all to achieve. And because of that, she was the happiest and lived the longest of them all” (p. 532). What attributes allowed Ida Mae Gladney to achieve this happiness and longevity? In what sense might her life, and the lives of George Starling and Robert Foster as well, serve as models for how to persevere and overcome tremendous difficulties?
(Discussion Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors
Dan Jones, 2014
Penguin Group (USA)
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670026678

Summary
The author of The Plantagenets chronicles the next chapter in British history—the historical backdrop for Game of Thrones.

The crown of England changed hands five times over the course of the fifteenth century, as two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty fought to the death for the right to rule. In this riveting follow-up to The Plantagenets, celebrated historian Dan Jones describes how the longest-reigning British royal family tore itself apart until it was finally replaced by the Tudors.

Some of the greatest heroes and villains of history were thrown together in these turbulent times, from Joan of Arc to Henry V, whose victory at Agincourt marked the high point of the medieval monarchy, and Richard III, who murdered his own nephews in a desperate bid to secure his stolen crown. This was a period when headstrong queens and consorts seized power and bent men to their will.

With vivid descriptions of the battles of Towton and Bosworth, where the last Plantagenet king was slain, this dramatic narrative history revels in bedlam and intrigue. It also offers a long-overdue corrective to Tudor propaganda, dismantling their self-serving account of what they called the Wars of the Roses. (From the publisher.)

The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England (2012) is Jones's prequel to The Wars of Roses and was adapted as a BBC documentary series 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.

Historian
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).

Journalist
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
Jones tells a good story. That is a good thing, since storytelling has gone out of favor among so many historians.... He admits that the era is at times incomprehensible, yet he manages to impose upon it sufficient order to render this book both edifying and utterly entertaining. His delightful wit is as ferocious as the dreadful violence he describes.
The Times (UK)

Jones is a born storyteller, peopling the terrifying uncertainties of each moment with a superbly drawn cast of characters and powerfully evoking the brutal realities of civil war. With gripping urgency he shows this calamitous conflict unfold.
Evening Standard (UK)

Exhilarating, epic, blood-and-roses history. There are battles fought in snowstorms, beheadings, jousts, clandestine marriages, spurious genealogies, flashes of chivalry and streaks of pure malevolence.... Jones’s material is thrilling, but it is quite a task to sift, select, structure, and contextualize the information. There is fine scholarly intuition on display here and a mastery of the grand narrative; it is a supremely skilful piece of storytelling.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)

Jones’s greatest skill as a historical writer is to somehow render sprawling, messy epochs such as this one into manageable, easily digestible matter; he is keenly tuned to what should be served up and what should be omitted. And he still finds rooms for the telling anecdote and vivid descriptive passage. It makes for an engrossing read and a thoroughly enjoyable introduction to the Lancastrian-Yorkist struggle.
Spectator (UK)

A fine new history.... Tautly structured, elegantly written, and finely attuned to the values and sensibilities of the age, The Wars of the Roses is probably the best introduction to the conflict currently in print.
Mail on Sunday (UK)

(Starred review.) It’s not often that a book manages to be both scholarly and a page-turner, but British historian Jones succeeds on both counts in this entertaining follow-up to his bestselling The Plantagenets.... Jones sets a new high-water mark in the current revisionism of the Tudor era.
Publishers Weekly

[H]istorian Jones traces the British crown from the fall of Henry V in 1422 to the rise of the Tudor dynasty in the early 1500s.... [T]he author's painstaking attention to detail is the same as in his previous work.... This excellent and fairly accessible contribution to the history of the Wars of the Roses serves as a helpful corrective to previous mythologized versions. —Ben Neal, Richland Lib., Columbia, SC
Library Journal

In a follow-up to The Plantagenets...British historian Jones authoritatively sets the scene for the next brutal act: the 15th-century succession crises.... Henry V's widow, Catherine of Valois, ... remarried in some obscurity in 1431 a charming Welsh squire named Oweyn Tidr, aka Owen Tudor. Their grandson in exile, Henry Tudor, would emerge gloriously to...become King Henry VII.
Kirkus Reviews

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The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir
Sonia Taitz, 2012
McWitty Press
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780975561881

Summary
The Watchmaker's Daughter tells the story of a child of two refugees: a watchmaker who saved lives within Dachau prison, and his wife, a gifted concert pianist about to make her debut when the Nazis seized power.

In this memoir, Sonia Taitz is born into a world in which the Holocaust is discussed constantly by her insular concentration camp-surviving parents. This legacy, combined with Sonia's passion and intelligence, leads the author to forge an adventurous life in which she seeks to heal both her parents and herself through travel, achievement, and a daring love affair. Ironically, it is her marriage to a non-Jew that brings her parents the peace and fulfillment they would never have imagined possible.

Sonia manages to combine her own independence with a tender dutifulness, honoring her parents' legacy while forging a new family of her own. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1950s
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College/Columbia University;
J.D., Yale University; M.Phil, Oxford University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York

Sonia Taitz is a graduate of Barnard College/Columbia University (Phi Beta Kappa; summa cum laude), Yale Law School, and Oxford University, where she was granted an M.Phil in English literature.

She has written extensively for the New York Times and New York Observer, where she held a column, and is also a columnist for Psychology Today and Huffington Post.

Her first book, Mothering Heights, was highlighted in O Magazine and featured in a PBS special on love; In The King's Arms, a novel published in 2011, was praised by the New York Times Book Review, ForeWord Reviews (which placed the author in the ranks of “the best poets, playwrights, and novelists), and Jewish Book World, the publication of the Jewish Book Council. In the King's Arms as also nominated for the Sami Rohr Prize.

Sonia Taitz’s new memoir, The Watchmaker's Daughter, depicts her life as the American child of European concentration camp survivors, and her efforts—through education, travel, and a controversial romance—to bridge past and future. The Watchmaker's Daughter has been praised by People magazine, Jerusalem Report, Vanity Fair, and Readers’ Digest, which placed it on the “Can’t Miss” list. The book has been nominated by the ALA for the Sophie Brody Medal, and listed by ForeWord Magazine as one of the year’s “Best Memoirs.” (From the author.)

Book Reviews
A heartbreaking memoir of healing power and redeeming devotion, Sonia Taitz's The Watchmaker's Daughter has the dovish beauty and levitating spirit of a psalm. The suffering and endurance of Taitz' parents—Holocaust "death camp graduates" who met at the Lithuanian Jewish Survivor's Ball in a New York hotel (imagine Steven Spielberg photographing that dance floor tableau)—form the shadow-hung backdrop of a childhood in a high-octance, postwar America where history seems weightless and tragedy a foreign import—a Hollywood paradise of perky blondes, Pepsodent smiles, and innocent high-school hijinks where our author and heroine longs to fit in. Although the wonder years that Taitz scrupulously, tenderly, beautifully, often comically renders aren't that far removed from us, they and the Washington Heights she grew up in, the shop where her father repaired watches like a physician tending to the sick tick of life itself, the grand movie houses where the image of Doris Day sunshined the giant screen, have acquired the ache and poignance of a lost, Kodachrome age. A past is here reborn and tenderly restored with the love and absorption of a daughter with a final duty to perform, a last act of fidelity.
James Wolcott: New Yorker and Vanity Fair cultural critic, author of Lucking Out

Not your typical coming-of-age story....American Sonia Taitz, born to survivors of the Holocaust, lives under its long shadow in The Watchmaker's Daughter.
Elissa Schappell - Vanity Fair

Funny and heartwrenching.
People

Taitz writes beautifully about religious roots, generational culture clashes, and a family's abiding love.
Reader's Digest

Even now, as the last Holocaust survivors pass away, wrenching reverberations run through Taitz's poignant, poetic memoir
Booklist

An invigorating memoir about coming of age as the daughter of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors. Taitz's (In the King's Arms, 2011, etc.) childhood was punctuated by stories of her parents' and grandmother's loss as well as their faith during their time in the ghetto and Dachau.... Though the author focuses mostly on her [own] experiences, it is Simon and Gita's perseverance that truly shines—the former a respected watchmaker who began life anew more than once, the latter a concert-level pianist whose dreams were thwarted by war and who rescued her own mother from the Nazis' infamous selections. Taitz portrays her parents with tenderness while acknowledging their imperfections. An affecting, brisk read, especially noteworthy for its essential optimism and accomplished turns of phrase.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Sonia Taitz describes being born into a “binocular” world (her parents emerged from a war-torn European past, but she is born into modern, hopeful America). How does this contrast affect her?

2. Do all parents live in different worlds than that of their children—simply because they grow up in different generations? How is your reality different than that of your parents or your children?

3. In our modern lives, children often travel away from their parents. But Sonia’s father asks her to stay home for college. Are separations more difficult for parents who are immigrants?

4. To what extent does the author keep her “Vow” to her father as she leaves law school to travel to England and Oxford University?

5. The author says her parents were not victims, but heroes. How does this idea of “heroism” propel her into the adventures of the book—achievement, travel, romance?

6. How much do we owe our parents in terms of preserving their culture and traditions? How much do our children owe us?

7. This memoir features star-crossed lovers. Should the choice of a marriage partner be affected by one’s family culture, or is this a dated (or even discriminatory) view?

8. Sonia’s father is very ambitious about his precocious child. The women’s movement also propels the author to “succeed” in worldly terms. What lessons does the author learn from her mother as time goes by?

9. The final line of the book is: “I was not just the watchmaker’s daughter. I was hers.” What is the author saying with these words?

10. Did the book leave you sad, happy, or a bit of both—and why?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean
Susan Casey, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
326 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780767928854

Summary
For centuries, mariners have spun tales of gargantuan waves, 100-feet high or taller. Until recently scientists dismissed these stories—waves that high would seem to violate the laws of physics.

But in the past few decades, as a startling number of ships vanished and new evidence has emerged, oceanographers realized something scary was brewing in the planet’s waters.

They found their proof in February 2000, when a British research vessel was trapped in a vortex of impossibly mammoth waves in the North Sea—including several that approached 100 feet.

As scientists scramble to understand this phenomenon, others view the giant waves as the ultimate challenge. These are extreme surfers who fly around the world trying to ride the ocean’s most destructive monsters.

The pioneer of extreme surfing is the legendary Laird Hamilton, who, with a group of friends in Hawaii, figured out how to board suicidally large waves of 70 and 80 feet. Casey follows this unique tribe of people as they seek to conquer the holy grail of their sport, a 100-foot wave.

In this mesmerizing account, the exploits of Hamilton and his fellow surfers are juxtaposed against scientists’ urgent efforts to understand the destructive powers of waves—from the tsunami that wiped out 250,000 people in the Pacific in 2004 to the 1,740-foot-wave that recently leveled part of the Alaskan coast.

Like Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, The Wave brilliantly portrays human beings confronting nature at its most ferocious. (From the publisher.)

Author
Susan Casey is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (2005),
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean (2010), and Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins (2015).

In addition to authoring books, she served as creative director of Outside Magazine, where she was part of the editorial team that developed the stories behind the bestselling books Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm, as well as the 2002 movie Blue Crush.

The Toronto-born Casey has been Editor-in-Chief of O, The Oprah Magazine since 2009. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
"[Susan Casey] examines big waves from every angle, and goes in deep with those who know the phenomenon most intimately.... Casey makes a convincing, entertaining case (nifty cliffhangers and all) that there is a heretofore little-known monster in our midst.... She pushes the scientists on the big question.... Casey is fluent in 'gnarly' and proficient in 'wonk,' and she writes lucidly so the rest of us can come along for the ride. Her wonderfully vivid, kinetic narrative...offers a prescient vision of watery perils—and sometimes, bittersweet triumphs.... Amid the images of demolition, Casey hangs on to the magic and beauty of waves.
Holly Morris - New York Times Book Review

The book dives deeply into the world of top-level surfers....Casey does a commendable job of surveying the broader problems confronting wave studies...compelling and wonderfully detailed...engrossing.... Casey adroitly moves beyond what we think we know about big-wave surf culture and churns out a series of action chapters that are not for the faint of heart.
Los Angeles Times

Extraordinary....fascinating, heroic, dazzling, terrifying, amazing, unbelievable, mesmerizing, instructive, enlightening, superb. This is the Dragon Tattoo, Moby Dick, Into Thin Air for our time; a powerful, articulate ride into a world you never knew existed but that you will never, never forget. I am honoured to write this review. Bravo, Susan Casey.
Globe and Mail (Canada)

Immensely powerful, beautiful, addictive and, yes, incredibly thrilling....takes the reader into the hearts and minds of the world's renowned surfers....Through the eyes of the surfers, readers get a remarkable sense of how they choose their waves, the skill that it takes to rocket across them, what it feels like to fall, what happens when surfers and Jet Skis are flung into coral reefs, what it's like to be rolled and pounded by tons of water, and what it is like physically and psychologically to be held under for too long - how some surfers make it back to the surface, and others drown.

But The Wave is far more than a book about surfing. Casey's quest is also to understand the characteristics of giant waves and rogue waves. She explores the impact giant waves have on ships, oil rigs, fishing boats and passenger ships.....Casey explains the science of waves in a straightforward but always engaging manner.... Casey also illuminates recent mind-boggling discoveries.... Casey unlocks the mysteries of waves in her fascinating and enlightening book. And like a surfer who is happily hooked, the reader simply won't be able to get enough of it.
San Francisco Chronicle

You think Jaws made you fear the ocean? In this adrenaline rush of a book, Casey...describes "nature's biggest tantrum".... Her eerie, majestic descriptions...make The Wave an unsettling thrill ride that's as terrifying as it is awe inspiring.
People

Casey writes compellingly of the threat and beauty of the ocean at its most dangerous.... Casey also smoothly translates the science of her subject into engaging prose. This book will fascinate anyone who has even the slightest interest in the oceans that surround us.
Publishers Weekly

Casey writes up a fascinating compendium of information about the scientists’ specialties and the global shipping industry’s concern with high-amplitude waves.... Stoking the ever-popular topic of extremities of nature, Casey imparts awe in her rogue-wave connection of commerce, science, and sport. —Gilbert Taylor
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think there isn’t more news coverage on sunken freighters, tankers, and bulk carriers? Do tragedies at sea strike a different chord in the popular imagination than say, a plane crash?

2. What’s the difference between surfing a wave and surviving it? What drives people to extreme situations and how does one draw the line between determination and courting disaster?

3. Many big wave surfers, like Laird Hamilton, are married with children. How do you think they rationalize putting their lives on the line for what many would consider sport?

4. Why do you think the psychological beating is often worse than the physical for surfers? Do you think Brett Lickle’s mishap towards the end of the book helped him see what was really important in life or psychologically cripple him?

5. Surfers and scientists have different methods of judging a wave’s intensity. Is one rubric more accurate than the other?

6. Susan Casey detected a strong female presence in the scientific community that seems to be lacking in the surfing world. Why do you think surfing—and tow surfing in particular—seems to be so male-dominated? How much of it is physical and how much is psychological?

7. Why is respect for the waves so important? What happens if you lose this respect?

8. Many surfers in the book refer to themselves as “watermen.” They’re not simply athletes, or thrill seekers—they almost have a sixth sense when it comes to the water. What can we learn from these watermen in regards to how they regard and harmonize with the ocean? What responsibility, if any, do you think these adventurers have to the ocean and to each other?

9. Geological history has a long memory but humans have largely forgotten devastating natural disasters of the past couple of hundred years like the Lisbon tsunami of 1755. Do you think this ability to forget and move on is part of what makes our species so resilient? Or do these sorts of memory lapses leave us ill-prepared to deal with future disasters?

10. After Susan Casey witnesses a sixty-eight foot wave at Killers, she remembers Laird Hamilton’s assertion—“If you can look at one of these waves and you don’t believe that there’s something greater than we are, then you’ve got some serious analyzing to do…” How has your perception of the ocean—and those who study it and ride its waves—changed after reading The Wave?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Wave
Sonali Deraniyagala, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307962690

Summary
On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami that she miraculously survived.

In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since: how she struggled through the first months following the tragedy, furiously clenched against a reality that she cannot face and cannot deny.

Over the ensuing years, we follow Sonali as she emerges reluctantly, slowly allowing her memory to take her back through the rich and joyous life she mourns—from her family’s home in London, to the birth of her children, to the year she met her English husband at Cambridge, to her childhood in Colombo.

All the while Sonali must learn the difficult balance between the almost unbearable reminders of her loss and the need to keep her family, somehow, still alive within her. Wave is an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account of tragedy, survival, and healing. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Colombo, Sri Lanka
• Education—B.B., Cambridge Univeristy; Ph.D., Oxford
University
• Currently—lives in New York City and London

Sonali Deraniyagala teaches in the Department of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is currently a visiting research scholar at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, New York, working on issues of economic development, including post-disaster recovery. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Wave is a granular, tactile working through of grief, regret and survivor's guilt. It maintains a tight focus. Don't arrive here looking for statistics and a journalistic overview of the tsunami…It's a somber volume that suggests that Julian Barnes was right about grief, when he wrote in Flaubert's Parrot that you don't emerge from it cleanly, as if from a tunnel into sunshine.... Stories of grief, like stories of love, are of permanent literary interest when done well. I'm not convinced that Ms. Deraniyagala is a great writer…but a form of greatness reverberates from her simple and supple prose here.
Dwight Garner - New York Times

It is a meditation through grief and a meditation on grief. It is courageous, truthful and, above all, generous. In the first place, it dares to tell an impossibly difficult story. Deraniyagala gives a bravely detailed account of shock, of the hunger and anger of early grief, of its consuming selfishness, its fearful pain. She gives us a powerful exposition of the relationship between grief and shame, in her case so extreme she doubts whether she could have been her children’s mother if it were possible for her to survive them. Instead of assuming we could never understand, she writes a book that trusts we will.
Sunila Galappatti - Toronto Globe and Mail

An indelible and unique story of loss and resolution written with breathtaking refinement and courage.... In rinsed-clear language, Deraniyagala describes her ordeal, surreal rescue, and deep shock, attaining a Didionesque clarity and power. We hold tight to every exquisite sentence as, with astounding candor and precision, she tracks subsequent waves of grief.... But here, too, are sustaining tides of memories that enable her to vividly, even joyfully, portray her loved ones.
Booklist

The Indian Ocean tsunami that broke loose on December 26, 2004, killed...230,000 people, including Deraniyagala's parents, husband, and two young sons. And though she opens by taking us straight into the wave, 30 feet high and rushing toward Sri Lanka at 25 miles an hour, her book is ultimately an account of her coping with her grief while also celebrating the memories of those she loved. As she ranges over her childhood in Colombo, meeting her English husband at Cambridge, and the birth of her children, we learn how she managed to keep these wrenching memories, and hence her family, with her.
Library Journal

(Starred review.) A devastating but ultimately redemptive memoir by a survivor of the 2004 Sri Lankan tsunami, who must come to terms with the deaths of her husband, her young sons and her parents from the natural disaster that somehow spared her. Deraniyagala is an economist, and her matter-of-fact account is all the more powerful for its lack of literary flourish, though the craft and control reflect an exceptional literary command. Every word in these short, declarative sentences appears to have been chosen with great care, as if to sentimentalize the experience or magnify the horror (as if that were possible) would be a betrayal of all she has lost..... Excellent. Reading her account proves almost as cathartic as writing it must have been.
Kirkus Reviews

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The Way of the World
Nicolas Bouvier; Illus., Thierry Vernet, 1963 (1994, U.S.)
New York Review of Books
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781590173220

Summary
In 1953, twenty-four-year old Nicolas Bouvier and his artist friend Thierry Vernet set out to make their way overland from their native Geneva to the Khyber Pass.

They had a rattletrap Fiat and a little money, but above all they were equipped with the certainty that by hook or by crook they would reach their destination, and that there would be unanticipated adventures, curious companionship, and sudden illumination along the way.

The Way of the World, which Bouvier fashioned over the course of many years from his journals, is an entrancing story of adventure, an extraordinary work of art, and a voyage of self-discovery on the order of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

As Bouvier writes, "You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making—or unmaking—you." (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 6, 1929, Lancy
• Where—Lancy, Switzerland
• Death—February 17, 1998
• Where—Geneva, Switzerland
• Education—L.L., University of Geneva

Nicolas Bouvier was a 20th-century Swiss traveller, writer, icon painter and photographer.

Khyber Pass (1953-1954)
Without even waiting for the results of his exams (he would learn in Bombay that he had obtained his Licence in Letters and Law, he left Switzerland in June, 1953, with his friend Thierry Vernet in a Fiat Topolino.

First destination: Yugoslavia. The voyage lasted till December 1954. The voyage led the two men to Turkey, to Iran and to Pakistan, Thierry Vernet leaving his friend at the Khyber Pass. Bouvier continued alone, recounting the journey in L'Usage du monde, published in English translation as The Way of the World.

The pilgrim finds the words to express himself, and his feet follow them faithfully:

A journey does not need reasons. Before long, it proves to be reason enough in itself. One thinks that one is going to make a journey, yet soon it is the journey that makes or unmakes you.

The book has been described as a voyage of self-discovery with comparisons to Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Sri Lanka/Ceylon (1955)
With intermittent company, Bouvier crossed Afghanistan, Pakistan and India before reaching Ceylon. Here he lost his footing: the solitude and the heat floored him. It took him seven months to leave the island and almost thirty years to free himself of the weight of this adventure with the writing of Le Poisson-scorpion. It ends on a quote from Louis-Ferdinand Celine: "The worst defeat of all is to forget and especially the thing that has defeated you."

Japan (1955-1956)
After Ceylon, he left for another island: Japan, where he found a country in the throes of change. He left but would return a few years later. These experiences led to Japon, which would become Chroniques japonaises after a third sojourn in 1970 (Bouvier had produced books for the Swiss pavilion at the World Exposition in Osaka) and a complete re-edition.

Of this country, he said: "Japan is a lesson in economy. It is not considered good form to take up too much space." In The Japanese Chronicles, he blended his personal experiences of Japan with Japanese history and rewrote a Japanese history from a Western perspectives.

Ireland (1985)
Building on a report for a journal in the Aran Islands, Bouvier wrote Journal d'Aran et d'autres lieux, a tale of travel that slips at times into the supernatural, the voyager suffering from typhoid. His appreciation of the air of the Irish islands is described as that which...

dilates, tonifies, intoxicates, lightens, frees up animal spirits in the head who give themselves over to unknown but amusing games. It brings together the virtues of champagne, cocaine, caffeine, amorous rapture and the tourism office makes a big mistake in forgetting it in its prospectuses.

(Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/4/2016.)

Thierry Vernet (1927-1993) was born in Grand-Saconnex in the canton of Geneva. He studied painting and stage design with Jean Plojoux and Xavier Fiala, and worked as a stage designer for productions throughout Europe. He was married to the painter Floristella Stephanie. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
The exhilaration of the open road and the feeling of connectedness to the natural world that it can produce, is, after all, a common human experience. Simply expressed, it has produced some of mankind’s greatest writing. The Swiss travel writer Nicolas Bouvier explores this territory in his youthful masterpiece, The Way of the World, where he conveys as well as anyone the raw intoxication of being on the road.
New York Times

A genuine masterpiece, an exhilarating, innocent, perceptive and wholly enjoyable young man's travel book, and a discovery of the Asian road that by rights deserves to occupy the same shelf as great classics of the genre such as Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana or Eric Newby's Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.
Financial Times (UK)

The Way of the World is a masterpiece which elevates the mundane to the memorable and captures the thrill of two passionate and curious young men discovering both the world and themselves. Racy and meditative, romantic and realistic, the book is as brilliant as Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, but with its erudition more lightly worn and as alive as Kerouac's On the Road, though without a whisper of self-aggrandisement.... On every page a gem or two glitters, and the accumulation of colour, detail and inspired metaphor produce an intensely hypnotic effect.... If you read any travel book this year—or indeed the next forty years—this should be it.
Rory Maclean - Guardian (UK)

Bouvier has all the gifts a travel writer could want—curiosity, tolerance, hardiness—but above all he has a poet's sensibility with words. His is a lyrical style that is as pure as spring air.
James Owen - Telegraph (UK)

In the tradition of great travel writing it is beautifully written and works on many levels—being an account of the journey, a meditation on life and an appreciation of the spirit of a place.
Sarah Anderson - Guardian (UK)

Bouvier's recollections of their 18 months of travel captures the timeless nature of what happens when different cultures interact regardless of the events surrounding them. Originally published in 1963 under the title, L'Usage du Monde, the book became a cult classic in France and was translated into several European languages.
Library Journal

Lyrical reminiscences of a footloose journey from Yugoslavia to India, undertaken 40 years ago by the then-25-year-old author of the enchanting The Japanese Chronicles (1992).... Wherever he travels, Bouvier displays an artist's eye for the image-conjuring detail.... Travel writing to be cherished and reread.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
(The following Discussion Questions were developed by Conrad Beatty, a member of MeRG, a book group in Douglasville, Georgia. Many thanks, Conrad.)

1. In his introduction to the book, Patrick Leigh Fermor (an accomplished travel writer himself) comments that it is hard to determine exactly what makes Nicolas Bouvier’s books and journeys different from other travel writers. Assuming you have read other travel writers, it what way do you think they are different?

2. One of the most well-known quotes from this book occurs close to the beginning. "Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you—or unmaking you." What has motivated you to travel and, if you have done so, how has that changed you?

3. "The virtue of travelling is that it purges life before filling it up." What idea was Bouvier trying to convey with that statement?

4. Bouvier talks of how traveling changes the traveler:

Ideas one had held on to without reason depart; others, however, are readjusted and settle like pebbles at the bottom of a stream. There’s no need to interfere: the road does the work for you.

How far or how long does one need to travel in order to experience these subtle changes taking place?

5. Speaking of a priest in Macedonia, Bouvier writes: "He represented the sacred, and the sacred—just like liberty—is not a preoccupation until one feels it is under threat." Coming from a free Western European country, what impact do you imagine life under a communist regime had on him?

6. "Beyond a certain degree of hardship or misery, life often revives and heals the scars." Is this more than merely becoming acclimated to the conditions? If so, in what ways?

7. In speaking of sickness (which seemed to go hand in hand with travel) Bouvier writes:

There were warnings , but no iron rules: it was just a case of listening to the body’s music, unnoticed for so long, which gradually returned and with which one needs to be in harmony.

Are we, in our sedentary lifestyles, out of touch with our body’s music? If so, what can we do to restore that harmony?

8. Travelling, according to Bouvier,

provides occasions for shaking oneself up but not, as people believe, freedom. Indeed it involves a kind of reduction: deprived of one’s usual setting, the customary routine stripped away like so much wrapping paper, the traveller finds himself reduced to more modest proportions—but also more open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight.

How, do you think, travel differs today from that experienced by the author? What would it take to experience the kind of travel of which he writes?

9. In writing about fear, Bouvier says:

There are such moments in travelling when it arises, and the bread you are chewing sticks in your throat. When you are over-tired, or alone for too long, or are let down for a moment after a burst of enthusiasm, it can take you unawares as you turn a corner, like a cold shower…The next day you will romantically berate yourself—quite wrongly. At least half of this uneasiness—you understand later—is instinct aroused by serious danger.

Have you experienced such moments of fear while travelling? If so, how did you handle the situation and what actions did you take to minimize the threat?

10. In rural Turkey, Bouvier experiences a clash of cultures. He writes:

They lack technology: we want to get out of the impasse into which too much technology has led us, our sensibilities saturated to the nth degree with Information and a Culture of distractions. We’re counting on their formulae to revive us; they’re counting on ours to live. Our paths cross without mutual understanding, and sometimes the traveler gets impatient, but there is a great deal of self-centeredness in such impatience.

When you travel are you seeking an escape from technology or do you find that it provides a comforting link to all that is familiar to you?

11. Bouvier writes:

In the end, the bedrock of existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say or think of you, but of moments … when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love. Life dispenses them parsimoniously; our feeble hearts could not stand more.

Can you recall any such moments as he describes? Perhaps a sunrise or sunset over an ocean or a view from a mountain top? How did you feel in those moments?

12. In Azerbaijan, Bouvier converses with a French priest who speaks of the re-emergence of fanaticism with its black banners and violent ways. "Fanaticism, you see, is the last revolt of the poor, the only one they can’t be denied." How do you think that reflects on the re-emergence of fanaticism today?

13. In Tabriz, Bouvier makes the acquaintance of some Americans who are attempting to build a school because in the American mindset a school is one of the main ingredients in the American recipe for happiness, but as he points out such a recipe for happiness cannot be exported with adjustments. He alludes to the fact that there are worse things than countries without schools. For example, countries without hope or justice. How has American foreign policy failed to understand those subtleties? Can you think of examples where our approach to helping other nations has failed because of this?

14. In Tehran they met with friends who came to see them off on the next leg of their journey. Bouviere says:

What took their fancy was the concept of the Voyage: the surprises, the trials, the mystique of the road. The voyage was perennially fascinating to the East, and this often worked to our advantage.

How does the romance of travel capture your imagination? To what limits would you be prepared to push yourself?

15. At one point in Isfahan he writes:

It’s odd how the world suddenly goes bad, turns rotten…I believe there are landscapes that are out to get you, and you must leave them immediately or the consequences are incalculable. There are not many of them, but they certainly exist; five or six on this earth for each of us.

Does that seem like paranoia or the voice of experience? Have you ever encountered a place where you had such feelings?

16. Late in his journey, in Afghanistan, Bouvier writes, "There isn’t a single country—as I now know—which doesn’t exact its pound of flesh." In what way do you think he meant that? Was he referring simply to the hardships of travel or of something more?

17. Standing in the Khyber Pass, Bouvier muses:

That day I really believed that I had grasped something and that henceforth my life would be changed. But insights cannot be held forever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colors. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself, confronting that central inadequacy of soul, which you must learn to rub shoulders with and to combat, and which paradoxically, may be our surest impetus.

As this is Bouvier's closing thought, what do you think he learned or gained from this journey?

18. In conclusion, how would you summarize this book? In what way is it a journey of discovery versus a journey of self-discovery?

(Questions courtesy of Conrad Beatty.)

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What Happened
Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2017
Simon & Schuster
504 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501175565

Summary
In the past, for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net. Now I’m letting my guard down.” —Hillary Rodham Clinton, from the introduction of What Happened

For the first time, Hillary Rodham Clinton reveals what she was thinking and feeling during one of the most controversial and unpredictable presidential elections in history.

Now free from the constraints of running, Hillary takes you inside the intense personal experience of becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major party in an election marked by rage, sexism, exhilarating highs and infuriating lows, stranger-than-fiction twists, Russian interference, and an opponent who broke all the rules. This is her most personal memoir yet.

In these pages, she describes what it was like to run against Donald Trump, the mistakes she made, how she has coped with a shocking and devastating loss, and how she found the strength to pick herself back up afterward.

With humor and candor, she tells readers what it took to get back on her feet — the rituals, relationships, and reading that got her through, and what the experience has taught her about life. She speaks about the challenges of being a strong woman in the public eye, the criticism over her voice, age, and appearance, and the double standard confronting women in politics.

She lays out how the 2016 election was marked by an unprecedented assault on our democracy by a foreign adversary. By analyzing the evidence and connecting the dots, Hillary shows just how dangerous the forces are that shaped the outcome, and why Americans need to understand them to protect our values and our democracy in the future.

The election of 2016 was unprecedented and historic. What Happened is the story of that campaign and its aftermath — both a deeply intimate account and a cautionary tale for the nation. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 26, 1947
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Wellesley College; J.D., Yale University
• Currently—lives in Chappaqua, New York

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is an American politician who was the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001, U.S. Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009, 67th United States Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, and the Democratic Party's nominee for President of the United States in the 2016 election. Her account of that 2016 presidential campaign is the subject of What Happened (2017).

Born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Clinton graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 and earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1973. After serving as a congressional legal counsel, she moved to Arkansas and married Bill Clinton in 1975.

In 1977, she co-founded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. She was appointed the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978 and became the first female partner at Rose Law Firm the following year. As First Lady of Arkansas, she led a task force whose recommendations helped reform Arkansas's public schools.

As First Lady of the United States, Clinton was an advocate for gender equality and healthcare reform. Her marital relationship came under public scrutiny during the Lewinsky scandal, which led to her issuing a statement reaffirming her commitment to the marriage.

In 2000, Clinton was elected as the first female Senator from New York. She was re-elected to the Senate in 2006. Running for president in 2008, she won far more delegates than any previous female candidate, but lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama.

As Secretary of State in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2013, Clinton responded to the Arab Spring, during which she advocated the U.S. military intervention in Libya. She helped organize a diplomatic isolation and international sanctions regime against Iran, in an effort to force curtailment of that country's nuclear program; this would eventually lead to the multinational Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement in 2015.

Leaving office after Obama's first term, she wrote her fifth book, Hard Choices: A Memoir (2014) and undertook speaking engagements.

Clinton made a second presidential run in 2016, accepting her party's nomination for president on July 28, 2016, thus becoming the first female candidate to be nominated for president by a major U.S. political party. Her vice presidential running mate was Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia. Despite winning the national popular vote by three million votes, Clinton lost the electoral college vote and presidency to her Republican opponent Donald Trump. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/12/2017.)

Book Reviews
What Happened is not one book, but many. It is a candid and blackly funny account of her mood in the direct aftermath of losing to Donald J. Trump. It is a post-mortem, in which she is both coroner and corpse. It is a feminist manifesto. It is a score-settling jubilee…. It is worth reading.
New York Times

What Happened is a raw and bracing book, a guide to our political arena.
Washington Post

The most useful way to read What Happened is as one last instance of Clinton doing what she calls her civic duty.
Los Angeles Times

Contains…insights into Ms. Clinton’s personality, character, and values, and the challenges confronting women in politics.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The writing in What Happened is engaging — Clinton is charming and even funny at times, without trying to paint herself in too flattering of a light…. Ultimately, the book might be a historical artifact most of all — the chronicling of what, exactly, it was like to run for president as the first woman major-party candidate (and, yes, a Clinton as well). Plenty may disagree with Clinton’s opinions on what went wrong for her, but her story will still be an important part of that history when America looks back on the melee that was the 2016 election.
NPR

An engaging, beautifully synthesized page-turner.
Slate

In What Happened, the former Secretary of State reflects on her failed presidential campaign, reflecting on her concerns about the direction President Trump is taking the country and how she handled her loss.… Clinton peppers the book with references to books that she thinks help explain Trump's rise and how America should respond to it as well as poems, novels and essays that inspired her and helped her cope with her loss
Time

Here is Clinton at her most emotionally raw.… While What Happened records the perspective of a pioneer who beat an unprecedented path that stopped just shy of the White House, it also covers territory that many women will recognize.… She demonstrates that she can mine her situation for humor.
People

What Happened is not a standard work of this genre. It’s interesting; it’s worth reading; and it sets out questions that the press, in particular, has not done enough to face.
Atlantic

[Clinton] indicts everyone responsible for her stunning defeat in this rancorous memoir.… [H]er sense of entitlement clouds her analysis, and …[t]he lack of serious reflection…makes the book a telling epitaph for Clinton's campaign.
Publishers Weekly

Clinton…[is] eagle-eyed about her faults and clearly recognizes where her statements and actions (deplorables, anyone?) worked against her.… Clinton brings much-needed perspective… [as to] what happened and why. — Ilene Cooper
Booklist

Gracious, sometimes-wonkish post-mortem of the last presidential election.… A touch too reserved and polite…. Still, a useful book to read — and, for many, to mourn over.
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 What Happened … then take off on your own:

1. Well, what did happen? To what does Clinton attribute her 2016 electoral college loss? What factors were beyond her control? What mistakes does she accept responsibility for? At whom or what does she point a finger?

2. Some reviewers say that, in her book, Clinton refuses to accept responsibiity for her own missteps. Other reviewers say she is gracious and self-effacing in taking much of the blame. What do you think: does she level blame at others …or accept the role she played in her loss?

3. Is Clinton "letting [her] guard down" as she claims she does in this book? Do you feel she goes inward in order to reveal aspects of her true self? Or does she put up a screen? In other words, how open and frank is Clinton in this account?

4. Follow-up to Question 3: At one point, Clinton says, "I wear my composure like a suit of armor—for better or for worse" Good thing? Bad thing? What actually does she mean?

5. How would you describe Senator Bernie Sanders' role in the campaign and in Clinton's ultimate loss? How does Clinton describe his role?

6. How does Clinton assess her West Virginia missteps? Talk about her insights into why so many of the coal miners seem to have voted against their own economic interests? Do you think Clinton is correct …or at least close?

7. Be sure to talk about the email imbroglio, then-FBI-director James Comey's actions, and Russian interference.

8. What are some of the lessons on the campaign trail Clinton says she learned from Donald Trump — lessons she feels can be applied in predicting the kind of President he will make (has made, is making)? How accurate or inaccurate do you think her predictions have been so far?

9. What do you think of Hillary Rodham Clinton? Does this book confirm or alter your views of her?

10. How does Clinton say she consoled herself after losing?

11. What role did feminism and antifeminism play in the election?

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

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What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Randall Munroe, 2014
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544272996

Summary
From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask

Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe’s iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans’ strangest questions.

The queries he receives range from merely odd to downright diabolical:

• What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool?

• Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?

• What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City?

• Are fire tornadoes possible?

His responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, gleefully and accurately explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements.

The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.(From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 17, 1984
• Where—Easton, Pennsylvania, USA
• Raised—near Richmond, Virginia
• Education—B.S., Christopher Newport University
• Currently—lives in Somerville, Massachusetts

Randall Patrick Munroe is an American webcomic author/artist and former NASA roboticist. He is the creator of the webcomic xkcd, which after leaving NASA, he has devoted himself to full time. His book, What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions was published in 2014.

Munroe was a fan of the funny pages from an early age, starting off with Calvin and Hobbes. After attending the Chesterfield County Mathematics and Science High School at Clover Hill, he graduated from Christopher Newport University in 2006 with a degree in physics.

Before and after graduation, Munroe worked as an independent contracting roboticist for NASA at the Langley Research Center. In October, 2006, when his contract with NASA was not renewed, he began to write xkcd full-time. He now supports himself by the sale of xkcd related merchandise. The webcomic quickly became very popular, garnering up to 70 million hits a month by October 2007.

According to Munroe, xkcd is unpronounceable. Here are his own words:

It's not actually an acronym. It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation—a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.

He has also toured the lecture circuit, giving speeches, including a TED Talk at Google's Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

Munroe lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. In June, 2011, he announced that his fiancee had been diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. The couple were married that September.

In September 2013, Munroe announced that a group of xkcd readers had submitted his name as a candidate for the renaming of asteroid (4942) 1987 DU6 to 4942 Munroe which was accepted by the International Astronomical Union. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/10/2014.)

Visit the author's book page.

Book Reviews
By speaking the language of geeks...while dealing with relationships and the meaning of a computer-centric life, xkcd has become required reading for techies across the world…. The Internet has also created a bond between Mr. Munroe and his readers that is exceptional. They reenact in real life the odd ideas he puts forward in his strip.
New York Times

For scientists, the price of progress is specialization. When the goal of any researcher is to lay claim to a tiny niche in a crowded discipline, it’s hard for laypeople to find answers to the really important interdisciplinary questions. Questions like, "Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?" Fortunately, such people can turn to Randall Munroe, the author of the xkcd comic strip loved by fans of internet culture.... For Munroe, who writes with a clarity and wit honed over eight years of writing captions for his webcomic, the fact that a question might be impossible to solve is no deterrent to pursuing it.
Wall Street Journal - Speakeasy blog

With his steady regimen of math jokes, physics jokes, and antisocial optimism, xkcd creator Randall Munroe, a former NASA roboticist, scores traffic numbers in NBC.com or Oprah.com territory. One key to the strip’s success may be that it doesn’t just comment on nerd culture, it embodies nerd culture.
Wired

What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions includes old favorites, new inquiries and the mix of expert research and accessible wit that has made Munroe a favorite among both geeks and laymen.
Time magazine

Munroe takes inane, useless and often quite pointless questions asked by real humans (mostly sent to him through his website), and turns them into beautiful expositions on the impossible that illuminate the furthest reaches, almost to the limits, of the modern sciences. The answers are all illustrated with XKCD’s trademark stick figures...and these are eminently approachable.
Newsweek

What If? maintains a delightfully free-wheeling tone throughout, especially when complicated calculations lead to whimsical results. (Did you know that Yoda’s Force power roughly translates to the amount of energy used to drive a smart car?) Despite all the hard facts and gigantic numbers, it never feels like a textbook—and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to enjoy it.
Entertainment Weekly

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What Mama Taught Me: The Seven Core Values of Life
Tony Brown, 2003
HarperCollins
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060934309

Summary
Millions of viewers of Tony Brown's Journal, the longest-running series on PBS, know Tony Brown as an advocate for self-reliance and self-enrichment. Now, in his most personal book yet, he introduces us to the woman who brought him up and taught him the seven core values he lives by to this day: reality, knowledge, race, history, truth, patience, and love.

What Mama Taught Me states that only by understanding one's place in the world can one become free in mind and spirit, which is the path to true success. Brown argues that by following other people's rules, we betray ourselves and our desires, resulting in a vicious cycle of disconnection, unhappiness, and spiritual death./

Enhanced by the homespun storytelling he heard as a child, this is Brown's personal recipe for achievement, imparting values that provide a blueprint for reaching success and happiness — on one's own terms. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 11. 1933;
• Where—?
• Education—B.A., M.A., Wayne State University (USA);
• Awards—member, Silver Circle, National Academy of
Television Arts & Sciences
• Currently—

Tony Brown hosts Tony Brown's Journal, the longest-running series on PBS. He is also the host of the radio call-in show Tony Brown on WLS-ABC Chicago, and is the author of Black Lies, White Lies and Empower the People. A sought-after speaker, he lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)

More
• 1971, he became the founding dean of Howard University's School of Communication.

• 1989, he wrote, directed, produced and distributed a dramatic movie with an anti-drug message, The White Girl.

• 2002, he was inducted into the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences' Silver Circle.

• 2004, he became the dean of Hampton University's Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications.

Throughout the 1980s, Brown was instrumental in improving the outlook and atmosphere for African Americans in the academic world. He launched "Black College Day" in 1982, in what was called a one-man effort to save and support colleges dedicated to serving blacks. In 1985, he founded the Council for the Economic Development of Black Americans, whose motto is "Buy Freedom." The group's main platform is that blacks should patronize businesses displaying the "Freedom Seal," which signified a black owner who had agreed to be courteous, offer competitive prices, provide employment, give discounts, and stay involved in the community.

Brown's most inspired attempt to reach African Americans through the media came in 1988, when he released a cautionary film about cocaine abuse titled The White Girl. He wrote, directed, produced, and distributed the film himself, and while it was panned by the critics, it gave Brown a medium in which to address what he perceived as "two destructive trends in society: drug addiction and self-hate." Ignoring the negative reviews, he circulated the film throughout the black community for the next 18 months. Local groups showed it for a small profit, benefiting both Brown and charitable causes. (From Wikipedia)

Book Reviews
(Some books have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

In a meandering volume full of personal anecdotes and indirectly phrased advice, Brown uses himself as an informal case study to prove that self-empowerment is the key to success. The conviction was bred into him by the woman he called Mama: Elizabeth Sanford, who was not a relation, rescued him at the age of two months from near starvation and raised him as her own. And Brown (Black Lies, White Lies), host of PBS's Tony Brown's Journal, attributes his achieve-ments to the lessons he learned from her as a child. A poor, uneducated black Charleston maid, Sanford nonetheless instructed her adopted son in what she saw as life's fundamental values. In an atmosphere of unquestioning love she taught him to be true to himself, to invest in his abilities and to live joyfully. Brown participated in the early Civil Rights struggle with Martin Luther King, Jr., and soon decided that mass media was the best way to get his message across. A firm believer in black self-empowerment, he criticizes welfare and race-based college admission programs, and charges some black leaders with encouraging followers to victimize themselves and play the "racial blame game." Among other ideas, he recommends that African-Americans empower themselves by investing and spending money in their own communities. While not all will agree with his beliefs, many will enjoy his personal recollections of a childhood he spent with an inspiring woman.
Publishers Weekly

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

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

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What the Dog Saw And Other Adventures
Malcolm Gladwell, 2009
Little, Brown & Co.
410 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316075848

Summary
What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century?

In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books that have radically changed how we understand our world and ourselves: The Tipping Point; Blink; and Outliers. Now, in What the Dog Saw, he brings together, for the first time, the best of his writing from TheNew Yorker over the same period.

Here is the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill, and the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz. Gladwell sits with Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen, as he sells rotisserie ovens, and divines the secrets of Cesar Millan, the "dog whisperer" who can calm savage animals with the touch of his hand. He explores intelligence tests and ethnic profiling and "hindsight bias" and why it was that everyone in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate.

Good writing," Gladwell says in his preface, "does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head. What the Dog Saw is yet another example of the buoyant spirit and unflagging curiosity that have made Malcolm Gladwell our most brilliant investigator of the hidden extraordinary. (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
Gladwell is a writer of many gifts. His nose for the untold back story will have readers repeatedly muttering, "Gee, that's interesting!" He avoids shopworn topics, easy moralization and conventional wisdom, encouraging his readers to think again and think different. His prose is transparent, with lucid explanations and a sense that we are chatting with the experts ourselves. Some chapters are masterpieces in the art of the essay.
New York Times Book Review- Steven Pinker

This book full of short conversation pieces is a collection that plays to the author's strengths. It underscores his way of finding suitably quirky subjects (the history of women's hair-dye advertisements; the secret of Heinz's unbeatable ketchup; even the effects of women's changing career patterns on the number of menstrual periods they experience in their lifetimes) and using each as gateway to some larger meaning. It illustrates how often he sets up one premise (i.e. that crime profiling helps track down serial killers) only to destroy it.
New York Times - Janet Maslin

Uniformly delightful...Malcolm Gladwell can write engrossingly about just about anything...His witty, probing articles are as essential to David Remnick's New Yorker as those of Wolcott Gibbs and A.J. Liebling were to Harold Ross's...Gladwell has a gift for capturing personalities, a Borscht Belt comic's feel for timing and a bent for counterintuitive thinking. He loves to start a piece by settling you onto a cushion of received ideas, then yanking it out from under you.
Craig Seligman - Bloomberg News

In What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell leads the reader on delightful side excursions, shows with insightful conversation how one path interweaves with another, and suggests meaning-he is, in short, an interpretative naturalist of American culture.
Alice Evans - Oregonian

Malcolm Gladwell triumphantly returns to his roots with this collections of his great works from The New Yorker magazine....Do yourself a favor and curl up with What the Dog Saw this week: It is more entertaining and edifying than should be legal for any book.
Louisville Courier-Journal - Scott Coffman

(Audio version.) Gladwell's fourth book comprises various contributions to The New Yorker and makes for an intriguing and often hilarious look at the hidden extraordinary. He wonders what... hair dye tell[s] us about twentieth century history, and observes firsthand dog whisperer Cesar Millan's uncanny ability to understand and be understood by his pack. Gladwell pulls double duty as author and narrator; while his delivery isn't the most dramatic or commanding, the material is frequently astonishing, and his reading is clear, heartfelt, and makes for genuinely pleasurable listening.
Publishers Weekly

Gladwell has gathered 22 of his pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker since 1996, arranging them into three sections: "Obsessive, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius," "Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses," and "Personality, Character and Intelligence." Fans who are not familiar with Gladwell's articles will be delighted to discover that his shorter work contains the same level of insight, wit, and talent for making the mundane fascinating as they've come to expect from his longer work. Gladwell's writing here is filled with colorful characters, acute analyses, and intriguing questions. However, be warned that the organization of the articles by topic rather than by date can be confusing, especially since much of what Gladwell is discussing has since changed. For instance, although articles about the Challenger explosion, the stock market, and Enron all have postscripts about developments that occurred after the original publication of these pieces, the original publication dates are indicated neither in the table of contents nor at the start of the pieces, frustrating readers' attempts to learn what time period each article covers.
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 What the Dog Saw:

1. According to Steven Pinker's review in the New York Times, Gladwell's essays in What the Dog Saw have to do with "counterintuitive knowledge." In this book what findings, specifically, seem to subvert or turn common sense on its head?

2. Another way in which Gladwell styles his essays is that he uses specific set pieces and and expands them into a wider inquiry. Consider some examples—say, ketchup or hair dye. Where else does Gladwell move from an initial focus on a narrow topic to the larger implications.

3. Gladwell also uses the "straw man" method of persuasion. He begins with a premise that we easily accept (the straw man) then proceeds to knock it down. It leads to surprise, a sort of "wow, I never saw it that way!" What are some of the essays in which Gladwell uses the straw dog approach? Do you find it affective?

4. Which essays did you most enjoy and why? Which surprised you the most?

5. Gladwell has sometimes been described—in this and other works—as facile. In other words, he's been accused of reaching for easy conclusions that fit his overall view, while sometimes ignoring messy evidence that doesn't. Can you find any evidence that this is the case? Does Gladwell present a world that is too neatly wrapped? Or is he simply exploring anomalies where he finds them?

Now for more a few specific questions:

6. Why do we have one type of ketchup as opposed to multiple varieties of mustard?

7. From the essay, "Blowing Up," talk about Taleb Nassim and his theory of markets and investment. Can his basic ideas be applied to other experiences or events?

8. If by any chance you've read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, do Cesar Millan's dog training methods seem familiar...or completely different than what David Wroblewski wrote about in his novel?

9. In "Open Secrets," how does Gladwell connect Enron, Watergate, prostate cancer research, and Osama Bin Laden— three seemingly disparate subjects? Do you agree with his assessment? What is the difference, according to Gladwell, between puzzles and mysteries? Is this just semantics...or is he reaching for something deeper?

10. Talk about what Gladwell has to say about the accuracy of mammograms as a diagnostic tool.

11. Do you accept Gladwell's argument about plagiarism in the essay, "Something Borrowed"?

12. In "The Art of Failure," Gladwell discusses the difference between choking and panicking? How does he differentiate the two? Are they really mutually exclusive as he presents them? What do you think of his assessment of John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s plane crash? Is Gladwell's analysis glib... or has he hit on some buried structure of the human psyche?

13. In his chapter about the Challenger explosion, do you agree with his assessment that "we don't really want the safest of all possible worlds"? Do you believe that any of the disasters in Part Two could have been foretold and prevented?

14. In what way is criminal profiling not "a triumph of forensic analysis," but a "party trick"? Does Gladwell make his point?

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

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What We See When We Read
Peter Mendelsund, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804171632

Summary
A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading—how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader.

What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like?

The collection of fragmented images on a page—a graceful ear there, a stray curl, a hat positioned just so—and other clues and signifiers helps us to create an image of a character. But in fact our sense that we know a character intimately has little to do with our ability to concretely picture our beloved—or reviled—literary figures.

In this remarkable work of nonfiction, Knopf's Associate Art Director Peter Mendelsund combines his profession, as an award-winning designer; his first career, as a classically trained pianist; and his first love, literature—he considers himself first and foremost as a reader—into what is sure to be one of the most provocative and unusual investigations into how we understand the act of reading. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969-70 (?)
• Where—Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in New York, New York

Peter Mendelsund is the associate art director of Alfred A. Knopf and a recovering classical pianist. He has risen to become part of the all-star lineup of designers at Random House, and his designs have been described by The Wall Street Journal as being “the most instantly recognizable and iconic book covers in contemporary fiction." He is also the art director for Vertical Press, an independent Japanese-American publisher. (Adapted from the publisher and designrelated.com.)

In his words:
The arts always played a large role in my family—my father was an architect-turned-sculptor, and my sister was a painter. I always thought (and still suspect that) I was the one in the family who lacked visual aptitude—We’d go to museums together (incidentally, my mother works at the Metropolitan Museum) and I’d wonder what all the fuss was about.

I think my dad considered me a lost cause in the visual-department as well, because he shackled me to the piano when I was five and I’ve been playing ever since. I went to Columbia U. and was a Philosophy major, though I spent most of my time playing the piano. After College, I got various useless graduate degrees in music from various conservatories, then performed, taught, and wrote classical music for a spell.

When my first daughter was born, it became clear that a certain someone needed more income.... and after some soul-searching about what I enjoyed doing other than music (reading, making stuff), I taught myself Quark etc., volunteered to design some CD covers for a NY record label where I’d made some recordings, and six months after that, I showed up with a "book" at John Gall’s door, met Carol [Devine Carson] and Chip [Kidd] (ok, I had no idea who any of these people were, which helped A TON).

The following week, I was working here; first at Vintage, eight months after that, Knopf hardcovers. Improbably, the entire process from music to design took less than a year. I count my lucky stars that John and Carol were up for a gamble. (Excerpted from designrelated.com.)

View Mendelsund's archive at Book Cover.

Book Reviews
[Mendelsund] has a wide range of reference…and he quotes with care…Mr. Mendelsund is an adept memoirist…He can be a canny close reader…The best critics and philosophers slide, necessarily, to and fro on the scale from butterfly to pedant. To his credit, Mr. Mendelsund keeps his tone light while thinking deliberately about fundamental things.
Dwight Garner - New York Times

A playful, illustrated treatise on how words give rise to mental images.... Mendelsund argues that reading is an act of co-creation, and that our impressions of characters and places owe as much to our own memory and experience as to the descriptive powers of authors.... [What We See When We Read] explore[s] the peculiar challenges of transforming words into images, and blend[s] illustrations with philosophy, literary criticism and design theory.
Alexandra Alter - New York Times Book Review

Mendelsund, throughout this thought-provoking book, helps the lay reader contemplate text in ways you hadn’t thought about previously.
Los Angeles Times

A conversation piece, created to entice repeated thumb-throughs.... [The author is] a highly regarded book-jacket designer.... Reading is often considered (especially by those who don’t love to do it) a passive activity. But Cambridge native Mendelsund...makes a nice case that it is, in fact, a kind of active collaboration.... What We See When We Read, itself a work of conceptual design, unfolds the author’s ideas about what makes reading a creative, visual act all its own on pages—some packed with text, others just a line or two—that incorporate sketches, clip art, images of classic book covers and more.
Boston Globe

The liveliest, most entertaining and best illustrated work of phenomenology you'll pick up this year. An acclaimed book-jacket designer and art director, Mendelsund investigates, through words and pictures, what we see when we read text and where those images come from. His breakdown of the reading and visualizing processes yields many insights.... Playfully, he offers us a police composite sketch of Anna, based on the description in Tolstoy's novel.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Mendelsund has creatively combined nuggets of philosophy, the notion of the "reader," and art to expand playful, abstract ideas on what readers process to produce the multitude of feelings and meanings within a reading experience.... This work was written for those who enjoy fully the creative experience of reading, and who read about reading. —Jesse A. Lambertson, Metamedia Management, LLC, Washington, DC
Library Journal

Offhandedly brilliant, witty, and fluent in the works of Tolstoy, Melville, Joyce, and Woolf, Mendelsund guides us through an intricate and enlivening analysis of why literature and reading are essential to our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the spinning world.
Booklist

(Starred review.) In this brilliant amalgam of philosophy, psychology, literary theory and visual art...Mendelsund inquires about the complex process of reading.... In 19 brief, zesty chapters, the author considers such topics as the relationship of reading to time, skill, visual acuity, fantasy, synesthesia and belief.... Mendelsund amply attains his goal to produce a quirky, fresh and altogether delightful meditation on the miraculous act of reading.
Kirkus Reviews

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What's a Dog For? The Surprising History, Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Man's Best Friend
John Homans, 2012
Penguin Group USA
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594205156

Summary
John Homans adopted his dog, Stella, from a shelter for all the usual reasons: fond memories of dogs from his past, a companion for his son, an excuse for long walks around the neighborhood. Soon enough, she is happily ensconced in the daily workings of his family. And not only that: Stella is treated like a family member—in ways that dogs of his youth were not. Spending humanlike sums on vet bills, questioning her diet and exercise regimens, contemplating her happiness—how had this all come to pass, when the dogs from Homans’s childhood seemed quite content living mostly out in the yard?

In What’s a Dog For?, Homans explores the dog’s complex and prominent place in our world and how it came to be. Evolving from wild animals to working animals to nearly human members of our social fabric, dogs are now the subject of serious scientific studies concerning pet ownership, evolutionary theory, and even cognitive science. From new insights into what makes dogs so appealing to humans to the health benefits associated with owning a dog, Homans investigates why the human-canine relationship has evolved so rapidly—how dogs moved into our families, our homes, and sometimes even our beds in the span of a generation, becoming a $53 billion industry in the United States in the process.

As dogs take their place as coddled family members and their numbers balloon to more than seventy-seven million in the United States alone, it’s no surprise that canine culture at large is also undergoing a massive transformation. They are now subject to many of the same questions of rights and ethics as people, and the politics of dogs are more tumultuous and public than ever—with fierce moral battles raging over kill shelters, puppy mills, and breed standards.

Incorporating interviews and research from scientists, activists, breeders, and trainers, What’s a Dog For? investigates how dogs have reached this exalted status and why they hold such fascination for us. With one paw in the animal world and one paw in the human world, it turns out they have much to teach us about love, death, and morality—and ultimately, in their closeness and difference, about what it means to be human. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
John Homans has been Executive Editor of New York magazine since 1994, and previously worked at Esquire, Details, Harpers, and the New York Observer. He lives with his wife, son, and dog, Stella in Manhattan. This is his first book. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[An] engaging, informative book that is both a survey of the latest research on canine cognition and a memoir of [Homans's] years with his Lab mix, Stella... perfect and poignant.
New York Times Book Review

A fascinating tour through ever-changing perceptions of dogs as pets.
New York Post

[An] artful exploration of human-canine relations... Homans travels around the country, exploring various dog cultures and speaking to scientists, aid workers, lawyers, and breeders to discover how dogs have achieved this "honorary personhood."
The New Yorker

A remarkable chronicle of the domestic dog's journey across thousands of years and straight into our hearts, written with equal parts tenderness and scientific rigor… Beautifully written and absolutely engrossing, What's a Dog For? goes on to examine such fascinating fringes of canine culture as how dogs served as Darwin's muse, why they were instrumental in the birth of empathy, and what they might reveal about the future of evolution.
Atlantic

If you've ever pondered the lump or fluff on your rug and wondered what he's thinking—and why you care—this wonderful look at dogs' increasingly central place in our lives will strike a chord.
People

Retraces [the] journey from Darwin's study of canine emotions to puppy mills to a canine-science conclave in Vienna... covers doggie consciousness and evolution.... Homans hits his stride on topics like the read-state (pro)/blue state (con) divide over euthanasia and the aristocratic origins of canine pedigree. Sprinkled throughout are charming anecdotes that will delight dog lover and even likely appeal to die-hard cat people.
Mother Jones

In his first book (inspired by his faithful canine companion, Stella), longtime New York magazine executive editor Homans examines the humble domestic dog, taking us on a trip that ranges thousands of years into the past and across the globe, examining how we shaped dogs and dogs shaped us. The competing models of how the partnership between human and dog was forged are presented, as are speculations on what exactly, if anything, is going on behind the friendly eyes of a dog. Homans ponders whether canines are as cognitively simple as Thorndike claimed or whether Darwin’s naïve anthropomorphism is closer to the mark. Writing in an engaging, straightforward manner, Homans combines great personal charm with an intense interest in his subject matter. Although the book is quite brief, Homans manages nevertheless to provide an impressive overview of his chosen subject.
Publishers Weekly

Lots of books out there on the human-canine relationship. But Homans, executive director of New York magazine, references scientific studies as he homes in on a particular aspect of our love affair with dogs—our treating them as if they were human beings and just one of the family. (Um, they aren't?)
Library Journal

An intriguing look into the life of dogs. Through careful observation and analysis, New York executive editor Homans opens the door into the world of dogs, from the scientific to the humorous. The author explains that dogs are much more than man's best friend; they are faithful companions, sure, but also separate entities with their own personalities and personal histories to rival those of humans.... Although aimed primarily at dog owners and dog lovers, other animal enthusiasts will find illuminating nuggets of information on the ever-changing and complex world of people and their pets.
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)

Sorry, the publisher has not issued specific questions. We'll add them if and when they're made available.

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When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi, 2016
Random House
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812988406

Summary
A profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question—What makes a life worth living?

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live.

And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.

When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student "possessed," as he wrote, "by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life" into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all:

I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything. Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: "I can’t go on. I’ll go on."

When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 1, 1977
• Raised—Westchester, New York; Kingman, Arizona, USA
• Died—March 9, 2015
• Where—San Francisco Bay Area, California
• Education—2 B.As, M.A., Stanford University; M.P., Cambridge University; M.D. Yale University
• Awards—Lewis H. Nahum Prize (research on Tourette's)

Paul Kalanithi was an American neurosurgeon and writer. His book When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir about his life and illness, battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was posthumously published by Random House in January 2016.

Kalanithi was born to Cardiologist Paul Kalanithi and his wife, Sue, on April 1, 1977 and lived in Westchester, New York. Kalanithi had two brothers.The family moved to Kingman, Arizona when Kalanithi was 10 where he graduated as the valedictorian of Kingman High School.

He attended Stanford University and graduated with a bachelor of arts and an master's degree in English literature as well as a bachelor of science in human biology. After Stanford, he earned a master’s in the history and philosophy of science and medicine from the University of Cambridge. He went on to the Yale School of Medicine. He graduated from Yale Medicine in 2007 cum laude, winning the Lewis H. Nahum Prize for his research on Tourette’s syndrome.

In May 2013, Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic lung cancer. He died 22 months later, having completed his neurosurgery residency at the Stanford Medical School and having become a first-time father only eight months before. At the time of his death, he was an instructor in the Department of Neurosurgery and a fellow at the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/10/2016.)

Book Reviews
I guarantee that finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option.... Part of this book’s tremendous impact comes from the obvious fact that its author was such a brilliant polymath. And part comes from the way he conveys what happened to him—passionately working and striving, deferring gratification, waiting to live, learning to die—so well. None of it is maudlin. Nothing is exaggerated. As he wrote to a friend: "It’s just tragic enough and just imaginable enough." And just important enough to be unmissable.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

Possesses the gravity and wisdom of an ancient Greek tragedy.... [Kalanithi] delivers his chronicle in austere, beautiful prose. The book brims with insightful reflections on mortality that are especially poignant coming from a trained physician familiar with what lies ahead.
Boston Globe

Devastating and spectacular.... [Kalanithi] is so likeable, so relatable, and so humble, that you become immersed in his world and forget where it’s all heading.
USA Today

It’s [Kalanithi’s] unsentimental approach that makes When Breath Becomes Air so original—and so devastating.... Its only fault is that the book, like his life, ends much too early.
Entertainment Weekly

Inspiring.... Kalanithi strives to define his dual role as physician and patient, and he weighs in on such topics as what makes life meaningful and how one determines what is most important when little time is left.... This deeply moving memoir reveals how much can be achieved through service and gratitude when a life is courageously and resiliently lived.
Publishers Weekly

[A] moving and penetrating memoir.... This eloquent, heartfelt meditation on the choices that make live worth living, even as death looms, will prompt readers to contemplate their own values and mortality.
Booklist

(Starred review.) A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. Writing isn't brain surgery, but it's rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former.... A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.
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 When Breath Becomes Air...then take off on your own:

1. How would you describe Dr. Paul Kalanithi? What kind of a person was he?

2. One of the most profound questions addressed in this book is what makes life worth living in the face of death. We all face death, but Paul Kalanithi knew his was imminent. What answers, or at least consolations, does he find?

3. Kalanithi quotes Samuel Beckett's seven words: I can't go on. I'll go on." Talk about what that means, not just for Paul Kalanithi but for all of us. In the face of dying, especially prolonged, how does one "go on" or, in popular parlance, "keep on keeping on"?

4. One of the ironies of Kalanithi's life is that he postponed learning how to live in order to learn how to be a doctor. But once he knew he had lung cancer, he had to learn how to die. What are the ways in which he learned to live...and learned to face his death? Would you be as brave and thoughtful as Katanithi was?

5. Describe Kalanithi's love-hate relationship with medicine. He saw it as a job that kept his cardiologist father away from home. But how else did he see it?

6. What kind of a doctor was Kalanithi? Why was he, even at a young age, able to understand the needs of his patients more than so many other young doctors?

7. Kalanithi said that he acted in caring for his patients as "death's ambassador." "Those burdens, he wrote, "are what makes medicine holy and wholly impossible." What does he mean?

8. Once Kalanithi and his wife learned that he had terminal cancer, why did they decide to have a child? Even Kalanithi wonders if having a child wouldn't make it harder to die. What would you do?

9. How would you (or will you) go about dying? How do you think of death—as something distant, something frightening or horrible, as part of the normal spectrum of life, as a closing of this chapter of your life and the opening of another? What comes to mind when you think of your own demise?

10. Do you find When Breath Becomes Air enlightening, insightful, spiritual, maudlin? Would you describe it as an important book or merely interesting?

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

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When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present
Gail Collins, 2009
Little, Brown & Co.
471 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316014045

Summary
Picking up where her previous successful and highly lauded book America's Women left off, Gail Collins recounts the sea change women have experienced since 1960. A comprehen-sive mix of oral history and Collins's keen research, this is the definitive book about five crucial decades of progress, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone this beloved New York Times columnist is known for. The interviews with women who have lived through these transformative years include an advertising executive in the 60s who was not allowed to attend board meetings that took place in the all-male dining room; and an airline stewardess who remembered being required to bend over to light her passengers' cigars on the men-only 'Executive Flight' from New York to Chicago.

We, too, may have forgotten the enormous strides made by women since 1960—and the rare setbacks. "Hell yes, we have a quota [7%]" said a medical school dean in 1961. "We do keep women out, when we can." At a pre-graduation party at BarnardCollege, "they handed corsages to the girls who were engaged and lemons to those who weren't." In 1960, two-thirds of women 18-60 surveyed by Gallup didn't approve of the idea of a female president. Until 1972, no woman ran in the Boston Marathon, the year when Title IX passed, requiring parity for boys and girls in school athletic programs (and also the year after Nixon vetoed the childcare legislation passed by congress).

What happened during the past fifty years—a period that led to the first woman's winning a Presidential Primary—and why? The cataclysmic change in the lives of American women is a story Gail Collins seems to have been born totell. (From the publisher.)

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

Gail Collins was the editorial page editor of the New York Times from 2001 to January 1, 2007. She was the first female Editorial Page Editor at the Times. Prior to that, she was an editorial board member and an op-ed columnist. In January 2007 Collins stepped down as Editor to write a book; she returned to the Times to reprise her role as columnist six months later. Her column presently runs every Thursday and Saturday and usually covers contemporary American politics and other current events in a humorous or satirical light.

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

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

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

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

Critics Say . . .
Did feminism fail? Gail Collins's smart, thorough, often droll and extremely readable account of women's recent history in America not only answers this question brilliantly, but also poses new ones about the past and the present, as she explicates moments that were widely recorded and illuminates scenes that were barely remarked upon at the time.
Amy Bloom - New York Times Book Review

'The past is a foreign country' is the kind of hallowed quotation that's resolutely opaque until you stumble on something that drives home its emotional truth. The uncanny feeling it references is one that recurs frequently as you read When Everything Changed, the absorbing history of feminism and American women's lives by Gail Collins, the resident editorial fount of wry Midwestern common sense at the New York Times.... Ho-hum, you think-been there, done that, or Mom told me about it, and at rather tiresome length. Except that what Collins does, which so pitiably few pop-history writers do, is bring the stories, the anecdotes that come to life and pull you in.
Ben Dickinson - Elle

You've come a long way, baby: that's Collins's conclusion about American women, who once lacked the right to publicly wear pants and now take their place on the presidential campaign trail and the battlefield. New York Times columnist Collins attempts a comprehensive account of the last 50 years of women's history in this sequel to America's Women, primarily focusing on the 1960s. Giving relatively short shrift to the current generation of young women, Collins centers the bulk of her attention on the baby boom generation (to which she belongs) and leaders like NOW founder Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, as well as dozens of ordinary struggling women. The book's stronger parts include highlighting pioneers like Congresswoman Martha Griffiths, who began her political career in the 1940s and stories of laughably shortsighted sexism against Sandra Day O'Connor. Collins captures the conundrums of feminism's success (does a see-through blouse make a woman liberated or a sex object?), but the book will probably resonate most for her generational peers.
Publishers Weekly

The impressive sequel to America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines (2003). Collins-the first-ever female editor of the New York Times, and currently an op-ed contributor-offers an enormously entertaining cultural and social history. Her extensive research weaves the compelling stories of more than 100 women, ranging in age from 20 to 80, into a larger narrative of politics, economics and sexual mores. The author chronicles the story of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the women's-liberation movement and its forerunner, the civil-rights movement, the failed struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment and the impact of Roe v. Wade and Title IX. She populates her account with dozens of well- and lesser-known female leaders, including Sherri Finkbine, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Alice Paul, Margaret Chase Smith, Phyllis Schlafly, Helen Gurley Brown and Billy Jean King. Collins paints a vivid picture of the world as it was, and as it has so radically altered life for American girls and women. Fashions, hairstyles, dating, birth control-all are grist for her mill. Without preaching, she shows the sexism that women (and men) once accepted as the norm, and she backs up her often eye-opening stories with hard facts and solid statistics. From the opening anecdote of a woman expelled from traffic court in 1960 for appearing in slacks, to the closing one of a woman fired from her job as a bus driver in 2007 for refusing to wear slacks, this an engrossing account of how not just the daily lives, but the assumptions and expectations of women have changed so much in so short a time. Collins can be deadly serious and great fun to read at the same time. A revelatory book for readers of both sexes, and sure to become required reading for any American women's-studies course.
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 When Everything Changed:

1. Point out some of the most egregious episodes that Collins recounts of female discrimination in the 1960's. What was most surprising to you...or most infuriating?

2. What led to—or precipitated—that moment in time "when everything changed"? Was there a single event or an accumulation of events? How do we account for it?

3. Talk about women's fashions and the degree to which they have reflected changing attitudes toward women's role in culture? What statement does today's fashion make about women?

4. What role has birth control played in the feminist movement?

5. Where does Collins see failures in feminism's ability to achieve change? Do you agree with her assessment?

6. Talk about the overall impact on society-at-large that has come about through the gains in female equality. In your opinion, what is beneficial...and what is problematic?

6. Discuss some of the follow-up interviews and epilogues at the end of the book. Which strike you most? Which do you find most enlightening?

7. In terms of freedom of opportunity, how does your life differ from your grandmother's or mother's life...or your daughter's (-in-law) life? Looking ahead, what do you see as the future of feminism?

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

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When in French: Love in a Second Language
Lauren Collins, 2016
Penguin Publishing
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594206443

Summary
A language barrier is no match for love.

Lauren Collins discovered this firsthand when, in her early thirties, she moved to London and fell for a Frenchman named Olivier—a surprising turn of events for someone who didn’t have a passport until she was in college. But what does it mean to love someone in a second language?

Collins wonders, as her relationship with Olivier continues to grow entirely in English. Are there things she doesn’t understand about Olivier, having never spoken to him in his native tongue? Does "I love you" even mean the same thing as "je t’aime"?

When the couple, newly married, relocates to Francophone Geneva, Collins—fearful of one day becoming "a Borat of a mother" who doesn’t understand her own kids—decides to answer her questions for herself by learning French.

When in French is a laugh-out-loud funny and surprising memoir about the lengths we go to for love, as well as an exploration across culture and history into how we learn languages—and what they say about who we are.

Collins grapples with the complexities of the French language, enduring excruciating role-playing games with her classmates at a Swiss language school and accidently telling her mother-in-law that she’s given birth to a coffee machine.

In learning French, Collins must wrestle with the very nature of French identity and society—which, it turns out, is a far cry from life back home in North Carolina. Plumbing the mysterious depths of humanity’s many forms of language, Collins describes with great style and wicked humor the frustrations, embarrassments, surprises, and, finally, joys of learning—and living in—French. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979-80
• Raised—Wilmington, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton University
• Currently—lives in Paris, France

Lauren Collins is a writer for The New Yorker, whose memoir, When in French: Love in a Second Language was published in 2016.

Collins was raised in Wilmington, North Carolina. Her mother grew up outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and her father, a lawyer, was raised on New York's Long Island. The two met at Duke University, then settled in Wilmington. As a child, Collins traveled frequently to visit family in New York, becoming familiar with the city and prompting a move to Manhattan during and after college.

Collin majored in English at Princeton University, and in the summer after her junior year, she interned for Legal Aid in New York City, where she gathered evidence as an investigator. She came to the realization that what she cared about were not the legal aspects of the job but the personal stories she obtained while interviewing people. That interest led her to consider journalism.

Following graduation, and a short stint as an editorial assistant at Vogue, she landed a job in 2003 at The New Yorker. After a time she became a staff writer.

Eventually Collins moved to London, where she met her French-speaking husband, Oliver. From there the couple moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and finally, to Paris, where they now live.

The subject of Collins's memoir is her struggle to learn French in order to communicate with her husband on a deeper level. She also feared becoming "a Borat of a mother," unable to understand her own children. What ensues is a funny story about the lengths we go to for love. She breaks from personal journey to share historical knowledge and linguistics and the history of language.

Book Reviews
An exceptionally insightful meditation on how language informs culture and personality. It's a lovely read that gets better the more you sit with it.
Jason Zinoman - New York Times

A thoughtful, beautifully written meditation on the art of language and intimacy. The book unfolds like several books in one: on moving abroad, on communication in human relationships, on the history of language, and in the end, on the delights of cross-cultural fusion.
Suzy Hansen - New York Times Book Review

[An] engaging and surprisingly meaty memoir…. When in French ranges from the humorously personal to a deeper look at various theories of language acquisition and linguistics….There’s far more to Collins’ book than screwball comedy, and those who have weathered linguistic crossings themselves are apt to find particular resonance in its substantive inquiry into language, identity, and transcultural translation.
NPR.org

In her emotional, erudite memoir…[Collins] documents her linguistic labors, including the missteps–she accidentally tells her mother-in-law she gave birth to a coffeemaker–on the road to mastery. At times she expounds on the history and philosophy of language; at others, it feels like catching up with a clever friend you haven’t seen since college. But the most intriguing question posed is as much about identity as language: Are you someone else when you speak and live in a non-native tongue?
Time

A memoir of the New Yorker writer's experience falling in love with a French banker and winding up in Geneva, recounted in [Collins's] distinctive and deeply intelligent mix of insight and humor.
Thomas Chatterton Williams - Nation

We can't all fall in love with a dashing Frenchman and move to France, but that's what Lauren Collins found herself doing when she met Olivier. This delightful memoir explores the New Yorker staff writer's experience learning the French language—and the culture and people besides.
Elle.com

This smart memoir by New Yorker writer Collins is an extended essay on how the languages we speak shape who we are.... The transitions can be clunky as Collins shifts between story telling and embarking on academic discussions, but her writing is often elegant and exact.
Publishers Weekly

[A] wry memoir…[Collins] unearths other tidbits of trivia and history that will fascinate lovers of words and language…The heart of the book lies in Collins' personal story, which she tells with humor, humility and a deep affection for the people and cultures involved.
BookPage

As Collins gradually decided to commit to learning French because Olivier seemed worth the effort, she breaks from the personal narrative to share scholarly knowledge with lay readers.... Throughout, the author ably weaves together the personal and the historical. A memoir filled with pleasing passages in every chapter.
Kirkus Reviews

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

1. Start with your own attempts to learn a foreign language. How difficult—or easy—was it for you? What level of facility have you ever achieved in a foreign language? Have any of your experiences match those of Lauren Colllins?

2. Talk about the reasons the author decided to take the plunge and learn French.

3. How is the word "love" used differently in America and French? What else did you find surprising about the differences between English, particularly American English, and French?

4. Aside from language, what other differences existed between Lauren and Oliver—particularly in terms of belief systems, professions, or even the way in which their minds worked?

5. Oliver told Lauren that speaking to her in English was like touching her with gloves. What did her mean, specifically?

6. (Follow-up to Question 5): Collins writes of her relationship with Oliver:

We didn’t possess that easy shorthand, encoding all manner of attitudes and assumptions, by which some people seem able, nearly telepathically, to make themselves mutually known.

Is it perhaps impossible to ever achieve lasting intimacy while spanning two languages? Is language difference an insurmountable barrier in a long-lasting relationship?

7. Collins provides historical insights into the problems caused by language barriers. Locate specific examples to talk about—in international realtions or simply everyday life. What problems have you faced in your personal life. During your travels, perhaps? On the job?

8. What do you think of Collins's assertion that...

It is unhealthy for the global community to rely too heavily on one language as it is to mass-cultivate a single crop.

Do you agree? Are you old enough recall Esperanto—the vision of a single world language? If you're not familiar with the movement, Google the term and talk about what you find.

9. What does the author have to say about Americans' seeming aversion to foreign languages? Do you agree with her?

10. What did you find funny in Collins's struggle to learn French? The birth of Lauren's coffee machine—there is that! What else made you laugh?

11. What knowledge have you gained about language you didn't have before you read When in French? Prior to reading Collins's memoir, did you have any background in linguistics, grammar, or language history?

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

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When the Shoe Fits: Essays of Love, Life and Second Chances
Mary T. Wagner, 2014
Waterhorse Press
244 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780615991740

Summary
When a hard fall from a tall horse landed Mary T. Wagner—then a freelance writer and a soccer mom with four young children—in a body cast for three months with a broken back, she didn't take it as a sign to ease back on the throttle. Instead, she changed careers, went to law school, took a job as a criminal prosecutor, and bought her first pair of spike heels.

And THEN she started writing again. More than a dozen national and regional writing awards later, Wagner has compiled this "best of" collection of her inspiring and empowering essays from her first three books, and added a few more for good measure. Wagner's earlier books, Running with Stilettos, Heck on Heels, and Fabulous in Flats, earned recognition for humor, inspiration and memoir, and their kudos included both an Indie Excellence Award and a silver IPPY. Two were finalists in ForeWord Review's Book of the Year Awards. Her legal experience has been similarly eclectic, ranging from handling speeding tickets to arguing cases before the Wisconsin Supreme Court...sometimes in the same week!

In essays ranging widely from "Turbo Dating-the Year in Review" to "Riding Pillion," "The Limoncello Diaries" and "Angels in the Snow," Wagner's signature writing style combines humor, insight, and grace under pressure. Whether reflecting on subjects as diverse as motherhood, the view from the back of a Harley, the impending loss of a parent or the therapeutic effects of a post-divorce bonfire, Wagner's inspiring and empowering essays resonate with universal experiences of love, life and reinvention. A must-read for any woman who's asked herself "is there at least one more dream I can reach for?"... and then answered "YES!!". (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—won't say; will admit to "north of fifty"
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., J.D., Marquette University
• Currently—lives in southeastern Wisconsin

Mary T. Wagner is a former newspaper and magazine journalist who changed careers at forty by going to law school and becoming a criminal prosecutor. Her legal experience has ranged from handling speeding tickets to arguing and winning several cases before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

A mother of four and a recent grandmother, she lives in rural Wisconsin, where she draws much inspiration for writing from daily walks in the countryside with her dog, Lucky, and the cat who thinks he's a dog...The Meatball. While she was still a full-time "soccer mom," Wagner balanced diapers, dinners and driving duty with freelance writing about public broadcasting programming. Her PBS interviews ran the gamut from Fred Rogers and Captain Kangaroo to legendary conservative icon William F. Buckley, Jr.

Wagner's slice-of-life essays have appeared on her signature website, "Running with Stilettos," as well as at Flashionista, More.com, Shortbread Stories, RedRoom, Open Salon, The Front Porch Review, Growing Bolder, and The Write City.

Her third essay collection, Fabulous in Flats, was named "Published Book of the Year" in 2011 by the Florida Writers Association.

Life experience includes motherhood, and stints as a girl scout troop leader, truck stop waitress, office temp, judicial clerk, and radio talk show host. She counts both wearing spike heels and learning to use a cordless drill and chainsaw among her "late blooming" discoveries, and would be hard pressed to surrender either her favorite stilettos or her power tools." (From the author.)

Visit Mary on Facebook.

Book Reviews
Wagner shows us, with her signature charm and humor, how to find our inner shock absorbers.
Randy Richardson, author, "Lost in the Ivy"

Wagner captivated me from the first chapter with her wit, charm, and honesty.
Jaimie Engle, author "Clifton Chase and the Arrow of Light"

This memoir sparkles with the joy of life, Mary's style.
Catherine McCall, author, "Never Tell: The True Story of Overcoming a Terrifying Childhood"

Read it, devour it, digest it and live some of life's most precious moments...a gem of a read.
Laurie Scheer, author and Director of UW-Madison's Writers Institute

Mary knows how to crack the shell and get deep into the real stuff, the stuff that matters, the stuff of the heart.
David Berner, author, "Any Road Will Take You There"

Discussion Questions
1. In the essay "Of Shoes and Strategy," Mary describes her "turning point" in footwear, going from sneakers and sensible shoes to spike heels for the first time when midway through her forties. What do you think that first pair of stiletto heels really symbolized in her life?

2. Mary describes wrenching transitions in her life when she was a teenager in "Cookie Therapy." How do you think her past family relationships affect her relationships with her children? Do chocolate chip cookies really make everything better?

3. In the essay "Turbo Dating—A Year in Review," Mary describes jumping into the dating world with both feet after 25 years of marriage. What did you think of her kamikaze approach? In retrospect, do you think she should have waited longer before making that transition? Was she brave, dumb, headstrong, or some other combination?

4. In "Ripple Effect," Mary shares the story of how her life and career path was changed by someone else’s encouragement, and reminds her children that "kindness is never wasted." Has there been a time in your life when someone’s belief in you has pushed you farther than you thought you could go?

5. In "Love in Wood and Wax," Mary talks about how her definitions and understanding of "romance" and "romantic gestures" have changed over time. Have yours? Is that a good thing or not? If they have, do you still miss the old patterns?

6. After her divorce, Mary’s transition in tools went by necessity from cupcake pans and a hand-mixer to the chain saw and a tool kit. Can you see yourself in her shoes? Are you in them already? What was the last tool you used and what for?

7. In "Return to the Fatherland," Mary writes of taking her elderly father and her teenaged sons to Germany for a reunion with their relatives, only to find en route that his mind was far more fragile than she had known. The roles of parent and child immediately and sadly changed. Did the trip have the result that she had wanted? What good things came from the journey despite her father’s increasing frailty? Do you think that her sons learned more from it than they expected to as well?

8. In "The Island," Mary describes renting a cabin in a vacation spot she had only experienced before this with her husband and children, long before the divorce. Her stated intention was to spend the week writing in peace and quiet. Was that the most important thing she took away from it? Could it have gone badly instead? How would YOU step out of your"pressure cooker" life for a week?

9. Mary has often been described as "living in the moment," letting serendipity guide her choices and experiences. Do you enjoy that as well in your own life...or does that "make it up as you go" quality drive you bonkers? Why or why not? Would you trust her to pack your suitcase before a trip abroad?

10. In "The Volcano Diaries," Mary abandons her quest to reach the summit of a mountain because of her fear of heights...but eventually realizes that she has still gone farther than she thought she could. Is there a time you have "fallen short" in your own life’s journey that still feels like a success of sorts? Do you think that people learn more from success or failure?

11. Do you think that Mary’s introduction to gardening also made her grow as a person? What does her flower garden symbolize for her? Have you had a similar experience of taking a wasteland and bringing it to life? How did it make you feel? Were there any surprises along the way?

12. In "Pelican Lessons," Mary writes of ignoring her first instincts while standing in the marsh, watching a trio of enormous white birds descend, and the eventual discovery that "logic" had proved wrong and her gut feelings about what she saw were right the first time. Can you think back to something similar in your own life? Is there a single experience that has tipped the balance for you in terms of trusting your instincts in the future?

13. In "Tool Time," Mary pivots between celebrating her growing independence in handling household problems after her divorce, and mourning the fact that independence can sometimes feel a lot like loneliness. What would you have told her as she sat at the kitchen table and wept that day? Have you ever had to balance a wish or a need to change as a person with caution as to how it would affect the relationship that you are or were in? What did you ultimately do?

14. In "Angels in the Snow," Mary describes the accident that landed her and her daughter in the home of total strangers in the middle of a blizzard. She describes the married couple that took them in as "angels." Have you felt the presence of angels in your life? When and how?

15. Is there a lesson to be taken away from this author’s life? What do you think it is, and why do you think it’s important?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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When You Are Engulfed in Flames
David Sedaris, 2008
Little, Brown & Co.
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316154680

Summary
Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside to a hilariously uncomfortable memory of buying drugs in a mobile home in rural North Carolina.

In essay after essay, Sedaris proceeds from bizarre conundrums of daily life—having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger on a plane or armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds—to the most deeply resonant human truths. Culminating in a brilliant account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris's sixth essay collection is a new masterpiece of comic writing from "a writer worth treasuring" (Seattle Times). (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 26, 1956
• Where—Johnson City, New York, USA
• Education—B.F.A., Art Institute of Chicago
• Awards—Thurber Prize; Time Humorist of the Year;
Advocate Lambda Award.
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK

According to Time Out New York, "David Sedaris may be the funniest man alive." He's the sort of writer critics tend to describe not in terms of literary influences and trends, but in terms of what they choked on while reading his latest book. "I spewed a mouthful of pastrami across my desk," admitted Craig Seligman in his New York Times review of Naked.

Sedaris first drew national attention in 1992 with a stint on National Public Radio, on which he recounted his experiences as a Christmas elf at Macy's. He discussed "the code names for various posts, such as 'The Vomit Corner,' a mirrored wall near the Magic Tree" and confided that his response to "I'm going to have you fired" was the desire to lean over and say, "I'm going to have you killed." The radio pieces were such a hit that Sedaris, then working as a house cleaner, started getting offers to write movies, soap operas and Seinfeld episodes.

In subsequent appearances on NPR, Sedaris proved he wasn't just a velvet-clad flash in the pan; he's also wickedly funny on the subjects of smoking, speed, shoplifting and nervous tics. His work began appearing in magazines like Harper's and Mirabella, and his first book Barrel Fever, which included "SantaLand Diaries," was a bestseller. "These hilarious, lively and breathtakingly irreverent stories...made me laugh out loud more than anything I've read in years," wrote Francine Prose in the Washington Post Book World.

Since then, each successive Sedaris volume has zoomed to the top of the bestseller lists. In Naked, he recounts odd jobs like volunteering at a mental hospital, picking apples as a seasonal laborer and stripping woodwork for a Nazi sympathizer. The stocking stuffer-sized Holidays on Ice collects Sedaris' Christmas-themed work, including a fictional holiday newsletter from the homicidal stepmother of a 22-year-old Vietnamese immigrant ("She arrived in this house six weeks ago speaking only the words 'Daddy,' 'Shiny' and 'Five dollar now'. Quite a vocabulary!!!!!").

But Sedaris' best pieces often revolve around his childhood in North Carolina and his family of six siblings, including the brother who talks like a redneck gangsta rapper and the sister who, in a hilarious passage far too dirty to quote here, introduces him to the joys of the Internet. Sedaris' recent book Me Talk Pretty One Day describes, among other things, his efforts to learn French while helping his boyfriend fix up a Normandy farmhouse; he progresses "from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. 'Is thems the thoughts of cows?' I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window."

Sedaris has been compared to American humorists such as Mark Twain, James Thurber and Dorothy Parker; Publisher's Weekly called him "Garrison Keillor's evil twin." Pretty heady stuff for a man who claims there are cats that weigh more than his IQ score. But as This American Life producer Ira Glass once pointed out, it would be wrong to think of Sedaris as "just a working Joe who happens to put out these perfectly constructed pieces of prose." Measured by his ability to turn his experiences into a sharply satirical, sidesplittingly funny form of art, David Sedaris is no less than a genius.

Extras
• Sedaris got his start in radio after This American Life producer Ira Glass saw him perform at Club Lower Links in Chicago. In addition to his NPR commentaries, Sedaris now writes regularly for Esquire.

• Sedaris's younger sister Amy is also a writer and performer; the two have collaborated on plays under the moniker "The Talent Family." Amy Sedaris has appeared onstage as a member of the Second City improv troupe and on Comedy Central in the series Strangers with Candy.

• If I weren't a writer, I'd be a taxidermist," Sedaris said in a chat on Barnes and Noble.com. According to the Boston Phoenix, his collection of stuffed dead animals includes a squirrel, two fruit bats, four Boston terriers and a baby ostrich.

• When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer, he's what he said:

I guess it would be Cathedral by Raymond Carver. His sentences are very simple and straightforward, and he made writing seem deceptively easy—the kind of thing anyone could do if they put their mind to it. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Sedaris tallies up the last 25 years, the prime of his life, and isn't impressed by the sum: "How had 9,125 relatively uneventful days passed so quickly," he writes, "and how can I keep it from happening again?" As usual, Sedaris has lots of answers to the first question but not many to the second in this delightful compilation of essays circling the theme of death and dying, with nods to the French countryside, art collecting and feces.
Vanessa Grigoriadis - New York Times

David Sedaris's ability to transform the mortification of everyday life into wildly entertaining art.
Christian Science Monitor

The Sedaris genius is to be incredibly particular, not to mention peculiar, and yet take fantastic and rapid leaps to the universal.... He'll be telling some weird story, and all of a sudden, just at the end, it turns out not only to be about him, but also about you. He's a master at evoking fellow feeling.
Nancy Dalva - New York Observer

(Audio version.) Sedaris's sparkling essays always shimmer more brightly when read aloud by the author. And his expert timing, mimicry and droll asides are never more polished than during live performances in front of an audience. Happily, four of the 22 pieces are live recordings, and listeners can hear Sedaris's energy increase from the roaring, rolling laughter of the appreciative audience. Sedaris's studio recording of his 10-page "Of Mice and Men" runs 16 minutes, while the live recording of "Town and Country," which runs the same length in print, expands to 22 minutes thanks to an audience that often doesn't let him finish a sentence without making him pause for laughter to subside. The studio recordings usually begin with an acoustic bass and brief sound effect (a buzzing fly, the lighting of a cigarette, the clinking of ice in a drink, etc.). Sedaris's brilliant magnum opus, "The Smoking Section" (about his successful trip to Tokyo to quit smoking) stretches across the final two CDs.
Publishers Weekly

(Audio version.) Sedaris once again enchants and amuses with his observations about the absurdity of ordinary life situations in this, his sixth collection of essays. As wonderful as it is reading Sedaris's work, it's an even greater pleasure listening to him read it himself, as he provides just the right delivery and cadence to maximize the humor (four of the recordings are live). Track listings with titles are printed on each CD, allowing listeners to find their favorites easily. Highly recommended for all collections.
Library Journal

This latest collection of 22 essays proves that not only does Sedaris still have it, but he’s also getting better. True, the terrain is familiar.... Nevertheless, Sedaris’ best stuff will still—after all this time—move, surprise, and entertain. —Jerry Eberle
Booklist

Older, wiser, smarter and meaner, Sedaris defies the odds once again by delivering an intelligent take on the banalities of an absurd life. The author's faithful fans probably won't be turned off by his copyright-page admission that these pieces, most seen before in the New Yorker, are only "realish." They feel real, whether Sedaris is revealing his troubling obsession with a certain species of spider or describing a lift from a tow-truck driver who kept saying things like, "yes, indeedy, a little oral give-and-take would feel pretty good right about now"—the ring of truth adds to the book's horrified-laughter factor. The author still draws from the well of familial tragicomedy in pieces that dissect his parents' taste in modern art ("Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool") and their reactions to what he wrote about them in his first book ("fifty pages later, they were boarding up the door and looking for ways to disguise themselves"). Most of the essays, however, chronicle expatriate life in England, France and Japan with his long-suffering and improbably talented boyfriend Hugh. Sedaris positions himself as a hapless Bertie Wooster to Hugh's Jeeves, lazily allowing his partner's mother to clean their apartment ("I just sit in a rocker, raising my feet every now and then so she can pass the vacuum") and marveling at Hugh's interest in, well, doing things. A highpoint is "All the Beauty You Will Ever Need," which starts as a rant about his boyfriend's ludicrous self-sufficiency ("Hugh beats underpants against river rocks or decides that it might be fun to grind his own flour") but twists into a sharp declaration of love that's all the more touching for its lack of sentimentality. Just when Sedaris seems to have disappeared down the rabbit hole of ironic introspection, he delivers a cracking blow of insight that leaves you reeling.
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 When You Are Engulfed in Flames:

1. Of course, the best place to start with Sedaris is to recount the funniest, LOL moments in his books. At which parts did you find yourself laughing out loud? Any favorites?

2. Sedaris tallies up the days over the past 25 years, feeling he hasn't accomplished much...and he'd like to prevent the same number of "uneventful" days from occurring again. Of course, this is a little precious given that Sedaris has a fabulous writing and performance career. But nonetheless, it is a cry of angst in a typical midlife crisis. Ever feel that way yourself? At any time, at any age? What's the antidote—does Sedaris suggest one? Can you?

3. Sedaris says of his relationship with his partner Hugh, that they are "two decent people trapped in a rather dull play." How does he then parlay what at first seems like a typical litany of complaints about a loved one into a profession of love? What does Sedaris come to realize about the nature of love, at least his love for Hugh?

4. In "The Monster Mash," Sedaris recounts his time spent researching a story in the medical examiner's office. He says the experience was a matter of "seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: no one is safe." The realization hit him that soon or later he is going to die. Did you find that chapter funny or poignant or upsetting or .... what?

5. Talk about how Sedaris finally decides to quit smoking after 30 years. He writes about it in three phases. For any non-smokers, does it ring true? Did you find his account funny or realistic?

6. As always, Sedaris gets good mileage out of his eccentric but loving family. This time he talks about his parents' reaction to his first book. How would it feel to have a writer/humorist/ social critic in your family? How fair is it of a writer to use family members as fodder?

7. If you have read or heard any of Sedaris's other works, how does this one compare? Which was your favorite Sedaris book/recording?

8. For a book club meeting, it would be fun to listen to a number of selections from the audio version of When You Are Engulfed.

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

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Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman
Jon Krakauer, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307386045

Summary
The bestselling author of Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, and Under the Banner of Heaven delivers a stunning, eloquent account of a remarkable young man’s haunting journey.

Like the men whose epic stories Jon Krakauer has told in his previous bestsellers, Pat Tillman was an irrepressible individualist and iconoclast. In May 2002, Tillman walked away from his $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist in the United States Army. He was deeply troubled by 9/11, and he felt a strong moral obligation to join the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Two years later, he died on a desolate hillside in southeastern Afghanistan.

Though obvious to most of the two dozen soldiers on the scene that a ranger in Tillman’s own platoon had fired the fatal shots, the Army aggressively maneuvered to keep this information from Tillman’s wife, other family members, and the American public for five weeks following his death. During this time, President Bush repeatedly invoked Tillman’s name to promote his administration’s foreign policy. Long after Tillman’s nationally televised memorial service, the Army grudgingly notified his closest relatives that he had “probably” been killed by friendly fire while it continued to dissemble about the details of his death and who was responsible.

In Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer draws on Tillman’s journals and letters, interviews with his wife and friends, conversations with the soldiers who served alongside him, and extensive research on the ground in Afghanistan to render an intricate mosaic of this driven, complex, and uncommonly compelling figure as well as the definitive account of the events and actions that led to his death. Before he enlisted in the army, Tillman was familiar to sports aficionados as an undersized, overachieving Arizona Cardinals safety whose virtuosity in the defensive backfield was spellbinding. With his shoulder-length hair, outspoken views, and boundless intellectual curiosity, Tillman was considered a maverick. America was fascinated when he traded the bright lights and riches of the NFL for boot camp and a buzz cut. Sent first to Iraq—a war he would openly declare was “illegal as hell” —and eventually to Afghanistan, Tillman was driven by complicated, emotionally charged, sometimes contradictory notions of duty, honor, justice, patriotism, and masculine pride, and he was determined to serve his entire three-year commitment. But on April 22, 2004, his life would end in a barrage of bullets fired by his fellow soldiers.

Krakauer chronicles Tillman’s riveting, tragic odyssey in engrossing detail highlighting his remarkable character and personality while closely examining the murky, heartbreaking circumstances of his death. Infused with the power and authenticity readers have come to expect from Krakauer’s storytelling, Where Men Win Glory exposes shattering truths about men and war. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—April 2, 1954
• Where—Brookline, Massachusetts, USA
• Reared—Corvalis, Oregon
• Education—B.S., Hampshire College (Massachusetts)
• Awards—American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1999
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington

Krakauer was born as the third of five children. He competed in tennis at Corvallis High School and graduated in 1972. He went on to study at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, where in 1976 he received his degree in Environmental Studies. In 1977, he met former climber Linda Mariam Moore; they married in 1980 and now live in Seattle, Washington.

More
In 1974, Krakauer was part of a group of seven friends pioneering the Arrigetch Peaks of the Brooks Range in Alaska and was invited by American Alpine Journal to write about those experiences. Though he neither expected nor received a fee, he was excited when the Journal published his article. A year later, he and two others made the second ascent of The Moose's Tooth, a highly technical peak in the Alaska Range.

One year after graduating from college (1977), he spent three weeks by himself in the wilderness of the Stikine Icecap region of Alaska and climbed a new route on the Devils Thumb, an experience he described in Eiger Dreams and in Into the Wild.

Much of Krakauer's early popularity as a writer came from being a journalist for Outside magazine. In 1983, he was able to abandon part-time work as a fisherman and a carpenter to become a full-time writer. His freelance writing appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic Magazine, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Architectural Digest.

Into the Wild was published in 1996 and secured Krakauer's reputation as an outstanding adventure writer, spending more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list, which was adapted for film (director Sean Penn) and released in 2007.

In 2003, Under the Banner of Heaven became Krakauer's third non-fiction bestseller. The book examines extremes of religious belief, particularly fundamentalist offshoots of Mormonism. The book inspired the documentary, Damned to Heaven.

2010 saw the publication of Where Men Win Glory, about former NFL football player Pat Tillman, who became a US Army Ranger after 9/11. Tillman was eventually killed in action under suspicious circumstances in Afghanistan. (Adapated from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Once Tillman lands in Afghanistan…Krakauer's narrative lifts off. The death of Tillman is handled deftly—and sad it is, the end of a series of errors and misjudgments, some of which border on the criminal…While most of the facts have been reported before, Krakauer performs a valuable service by bringing them all together—particularly those about the cover-up. The details, even five years later, are nauseating to read.
Dexter Filkins - New York Times

Krakauer—whose forensic studies of the Emersonian Man in books such as Into Thin Air and Into the Wild yield so much insight—has turned in a beautiful bit of reporting, documenting Tillman's life with journals and interviews with those close to him...Must be counted as the definitive version of events surrounding Tillman's death.
Los Angeles Times

Jon Krakauer has done his job well; Where Men Win Glory is a tough read...[He] has tackled a task that required the distillation and organization of volumes of disparate information. That he has fielded a coherent narrative is a victory. That he has made it compelling and passionate is a difficult blessing...In mining Tillman's life and death, Krakauer uncovers a story much more compelling than anything that could be spun.
The Denver Post

Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer's narrative of pro football player Pat Tillman's "odyssey," as he calls it, from the playing field to the battlefield, is nuanced, thorough, and chilling...[He] is up to the task of telling this brave man's story...Krakauer's tone is somber and judicious as he reports this ludicrous hijacking of the truth and its shameful cover-up, but the anger behind it charges every word. [He] has made sure that this shameful episode will not fade into obscurity and that Pat Tillman will be remembered for the man he truly was—and not as the faux symbol of a failed policy.
Portland Oregonian

In this masterful work, bestselling adventure writer Jon Krakauer renders an intimate portrait of Tillman and brilliantly captures the sadness, madness, and heroism of the post-9/11 world...Drawing on interviews with family, fellow soldiers and correspondence, Krakauer's page-turning account captures every detail—Tillman's extraordinary character, including the "tragic vitures" that led him to give up a comfortable life and athletic stardom for the army; the harshness of military training and life; the rugged terrain of remote Afghanistan— and, of course, the ravages of war.Most critically, by telling Tillman's personal story and blowing apart the "cynical cover-up" that followed his killing, Krakauer lays bare the best—and worst—of America's War on Terror.
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 Where Men Win Glory:

1. Pat Tillman was a complex figure. Talk about the kind of man he was. What were the personal qualities that led him to forego a life of wealth and put his life on the line in the U.S. military? Where some of those traits evident in his childhood? If so, which ones?

2. Describe his sense of moral obligation after 9/11. Why did he feel it was vital to take part, personally, in the fight against Al Quaeda and the Taliban?

3. Tillman was first sent to Iraq. What were his feelings about that war?

4. What did Tillman reveal both about himself and the war in his journal and letters back home?

5. What, if anything, did you learn from Krakauer's book about Iraq and Afghanistan? Did you find his diversions about those countries, their history and politics, enlightening? Or did you feel they dragged down the pace of the overall narrative?

6. Talk about the way in which Tillman lost his life, the series of events—as well as the errors and misjudgments made by those far from the line of fire—that led to the tragedy. How common is friendly fire?

7. How did military commanders and politicians make use of Tillman's death? What were they hoping to achieve...or avoid? How was the cover-up promulgated...and what led to its eventual unraveling?

8. What were Tillman's own suspicions about the possibility of becoming a poster boy should he die in battle?

9. What was your experience reading this book? Were your emotions charged as you worked your way through the story? If so, in what ways?

10. Despite the manner of Tillman's death, can he still be considered an American hero? Is everyone who dies in the line of duty a hero? Or is "hero" a designation we hold in reserve for special circumstances?

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

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Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir
Amy Tan, 2017
Ecco Books
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062319296

Summary
In Where the Past Begins, Amy Tan reveals herself in a way she never has before, delving into her childhood, adolescence, family history, beginnings as a writer and professional life to explore the answers to questions of purpose and meaning that we all ask ourselves as we get older.

Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal-writing and travelling.

Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer.

With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist’s fiction. Interspersed with direct correspondence between the author and her editor, the book will give fans and critics unparalleled insight into the author’s process, her thoughts on the literary enterprise, and her singularly warm, intelligent mind. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Also named—En-Mai Tan
• Birth—February 15, 1952
• Where—Oakland, California, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., San Jose State University
• Currently—San Francisco, California

Amy Tan is a Chinese-American writer, many of whose works explore mother-daughter relationships. Her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989) brought her fame and has remained one of her most popular works. It was adapted to film in 1993.

Early yeaars
Tan is the second of three children born to Chinese immigrants John and Daisy Tan. Her father was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister who traveled to the US to escape the Chinese Revolution. Although she was born in Oakland, California, her family moved a number of times throughout her childhood.

When she was fifteen, her father and older brother Peter both died of brain tumors within six months of each other. Tan subsequently moved with her mother and younger brother, John Jr., to Switzerland, where she finished high school at the Institut Monte Rosa in Montreux.

It was during this period that Tan learned about her mother's previous marriage in China, where she had four children (a son who died in toddlerhood and three daughters). Her mother had left her husband and children behind in Shanghai — an incident that became the basis for Tan's first novel, The Joy Luck Club. In 1987, she and her mother traveled to China to meet her three half-sisters for the first time.

Tan enrolled at Linfield College in Oregon, a Baptist college of her mother's choosing. After she dropped out to follow her boyfriend to San Jose City College in California, she and her mother stopped speaking for six months. Tan ended up marrying the young man in 1974 and subsequently earned both her B.A. and M.A. in English and linguistics from San Jose State University. She began her doctoral studies in linguistics at University of California-Santa Cruz and Berkeley, but abandoned them in 1976.

Career
While in school, Tan worked odd jobs — serving as a switchboard operator, carhop, bartender, and pizza maker. Eventually, she started writing freelance for businesses, working on projects for AT&T, IBM, Bank of America, and Pacific Bell, writing under non-Chinese-sounding pseudonyms.

In 1985, she turned to fiction, publishing her first story in 1986 in a small literary journal. It was later reprinted in Seventeen magazine and Grazia. On her return from the China trip with her mmother, where she had met her half-sisters, Tan learned her agent had signed a contract for a book of short stories, only three of which were written. That book eventually became The Joy Luck Club and launchd Tan's literary career.

Extras
In addition to her novels (see below), Tan has written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an animated series airing on PBS. She has also appeared on PBS in a short spot encouraging children to write.

Tan is a member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band consisting of published writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Matt Groening, Dave Barry and Stephen King, among others. In 1994 she co-wrote, with the other band members, Mid-Life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America With Three Chords and an Attitude.

In 1998, Tan contracted Lyme disease, which went undiagnosed for a few years. As a result, she suffers from epileptic seizures due to brain lesions. Tan co-founded LymeAid 4 Kids, which helps uninsured children pay for treatment, and wrote about her life with Lyme disease in a 2013 op-ed piece in the New York Times.

Tan is still married to the guy she ran off with from Linfield College and married in 1974. He is Louis DeMattei, a lawyer, and the two live in San Francisco.

Books
1989 - The Joy Luck Club
1991 - The Kitchen God's Wife
1995 - The Hundred Secret Senses
2001 - The Bonesetter's Daughter
2003 - The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (Essays)
2005 - Saving Fish from Drowning
2013 - The Valley of Amazement
2017 - Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website.)

Book Reviews
In this wise and profound memoir, novelist Tan, now 65, looks back on her life, illuminating the path that led her to writing. Tan’s fans and writers of all kinds will find her latest work fascinating.
Publishers Weekly

[Tan's] new book digs deeper [than The Opposite of Fate], revealing more about he difficult childhood, her … relationship with her father, family secrets, and how all these experiences led inevitably to her becoming a writer.
Library Journal

(Starred review.) In her…revealing memoir, beloved novelist Tan chronicles with striking candor, sharp wit, and storytelling magic stranger-than-fiction traumas.… A profound work of endless fascination, discovery, and compassion.
Booklist

Tan's candid revelations make much of the book entertaining, but the slight journal entries and short pieces she calls "quirks" read like filler, and many chapters would have benefited from further editing. A composite portrait that should appeal to the author's fans.
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 start a discussion for Where the Past Begins … then take off on your own:

1. The subtitle of Amy Tan's book is "A Writer's Memoir," but its structure feels like something different — a collage, perhaps, with letters to her editor, an essay written when she was 14, a drawing from age 12, and so-called "interludes" and "quirks." What was your experience reading Where the Past Begins? Do you consider it a memoir … or something else? Did it's fragmentary nature distract from your enjoyment? Or did you find the fragments enjoyable?

2. What does the book reveal about the path or inspirations that led Tan to become a writer? Mary Karr, a friend of Tan and the author of both Lit (2009) and Art of a Memoir (2015), says that Tan is "an interesting person because she is both tortured and happy." What role, in particular, does personal family trauma play in Tan's writing career?

3. Talk about the letters Tan and her editor exchange. How would you describe their relationship? What do those letters suggest, if anything, about the role an editor plays in shaping a writer's career and/or works?

4. Talk about the family secrets that Tan has revealed in Where the Past Begins. She has said she worries that other family members might feel she has gone too far. What do you think about authors who mine family background for artistic reasons? Many, if not most, authors do. Fair? Unfair?

5. Tan traces her participation as a youngster in a psychological experiment about early childhood readers. How did that experience reveal her parents' expectations for her? What half-truths did they tell Tan? Years later, when Tan located the mystery woman who administered the tests, according to Tan, "She had said exactly what I needed to hear." What was the revelation and why was it so powerful (Tan later told an interviewer that she "heard it through tears")?

6. Talk about Tan's mother and also their relationship with one another — a relationship that has been central to Tan's writing.

7. Tan writes that "While writing this memoir, I was conscious that much of what I think I remember is inaccurate, guessed at, or biased by experience that came later." How much of anyone's memory is accurate and/or reliable? What about your own? What affect does Tan's acknowledgment about the frailty of her own memories have on your reading of Where the Past Begins? Is she a trustworthy recorder of her own life?

7. Tan considers the role of music in her life and in her writing. Discuss the comparison she makes of writing to jazz improvisation.

8. What do you find most surprising, maybe even shocking, about Tan's life: her mother's prior secret life in China, her mother's attempt to throw herself out of the family car, her father's and brother's deaths, her own battle with Lyme disease? Something else?

9. Talk about the book's title: what does it mean? Where does the past begin in Amy Tan's life?

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

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Originally published as: The Taliban Shuffle
Kim Barker, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101973127

Summary
From tea with warlords in the countryside to parties with drunken foreign correspondents in the "dry" city of Kabul, journalist Kim Barker captures the humor and heartbreak of life in post-9/11 Afghanistan and Pakistan in this profound and darkly comic memoir.

As Barker grows from awkward newbie to seasoned reporter, she offers an insider’s account of the region’s "forgotten war" at a time when all eyes were turned to Iraq.

Candid, self-deprecating, and laugh-out-loud funny, Barker shares both her affection for the absurdities of these two hapless countries and her fear for their future stability. (From the publisher.)

See the 2016 film with Tina Fey and Margot Robbie.
Listen to our Movies Meet Book Club Podcast as Hollister and O'Toole discuss the movie and book.

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969-70
• Where—Billings, Montana, USA
• Education—B.A., Northwestern University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York

Kim Barker is an American memoirist and journalist, best known for The Taliban Shuffle—later titled Whiskey Tango Foxtrot after the 2016 film adaptation by Tina Fey. The book recounts her time as Chicago Tribune war correspondent in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Barker was born in Montana, living in Billings until 13 when her family moved. She attended Northwestern University, earning her B.A. in journalism. Working the Chicago Tribune metro desk during the 9/11 attack, she decided to ask for an overseas assignment. Up to that point, she had made only a couple of overseas trips as a reporter, and the most danger she'd experienced had been misreading a map and finding herself at the head of a fast-moving forest fire—a background which didn't exactly prepare her for the rigors of working in the world's war zones.

Yet as she told the paper's foreign editor, "I am single and I have no children, therefore I'm expendable, and I'll go anywhere you want"...which is how she eventually became the paper's South Asian Bureau chief, interviewing Afghan warlords and evading suicide bombs. Despite the danger—or perhaps because of it—Barker admits to never having felt more alive then when she was close to death. As she told The Missoulian:

[T]here's something about being there, in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, where I felt like everything mattered. It just all seemed so important. All of our conversations revolved around world affairs, and this war, and what should be done in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Everything was just covered in this idea that this was vital, what's happening over here...and that you were writing history.

During the time of her coverage (2004-2009), Barker developed a deep affection for Afghanistan, which she points out is similar in many ways—with its mountains and rural lifestyle—to the beauty and hardiness of Montana. As much as she was drawn to the region and its people, however, she left once she realized that by continuing as a war correspondent, she risked becoming a "war hack." Barker now works for the New York Times.

Read Vanity Fair about what it feels like for Barker to have Tina Fey play her in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Book Reviews
Remarkable.... [Barker] has written an account of her experiences covering Afghanistan and Pakistan that manages to be hilarious and harrowing, witty and illuminating, all at the same time.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

[An] immensely entertaining memoir.
Boston Globe

[P]art war memoir, part tale of self-discovery that, thanks to Barker’s biting honesty and wry wit, manages to be both hilarious and heartbreaking.
Chicago Tribune

What you’d hear if the reporter never turned off the voice recorder between interviews—brilliant firsthand outtakes that wind up telling us more about the Afghan debacle than any foreign policy briefing.
Seattle Times

At once funny and harrowing, insightful and appalling.... [The book] will pull you in so deep that you’ll smell the poppies and quake from the bombs.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

If you’re looking for a window on the challenges facing Afghanistan and Pakistan today—from a resurgent Taliban to American incompetence to Afghan and Pakistani corruption and nepotism—Barker provides a sterling vantage point.
San Francisco Chronicle

[A]n insider’s perspective of Afghanistan and Pakistan—their fascinating cultures, unstable governments, and burgeoning terrorist groups.... With dark, self-deprecating humor and shrewd insight, Barker chronicles her experiences as a rookie foreign reporter and the critical years when the Taliban resurged amidst the collapse of the Afghan and Pakistani. governments.
Daily Beast

Reveals many enduring truths.... Novel both for its humor and for its perspective...it rises (or sinks) to levels of seriousness that will be remembered long after the po-faced analysis of other writers has been forgotten.
National

Brilliant, tender, and unexpectedly hilarious.
Marie Claire

Candid and darkly comic.... With self-deprecation and a keen eye for the absurd, Barker describes her evolution from a green, fill-in correspondent to an adrenaline junkie.
Publishers Weekly

Politically astute and clearly influenced by Hunter S. Thompson, Barker provides sharp commentary on the impotence of American foreign policy in South Asia after the victory against the Taliban.... Fierce, funny and unflinchingly honest.
Kirkus Reviews

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White Dresses: A Memoir of Love and Secrets, Mothers and Daughters
Mary Pflum Peterson, 2015
HarperCollins
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062386977

Summary
In this riveting, poignant memoir of three generations of women and the white dresses that adorned them—television producer Mary Pflum Peterson recounts a journey through loss and redemption, and her battle to rescue her mother, a former nun, from compulsive hoarding.

As a successful television journalist at Good Morning America, Mary Pflum is known as a polished and highly organized producer. It’s a persona at odds with her tortured childhood, where she watched her emotionally vulnerable mother fill their house with teetering piles of assorted "treasures."

But one thing has always united mother and daughter—their love of white dresses. From the dress worn by Mary’s mother when she became a nun and married Jesus, to the wedding gown she donned years later, to the special nightshirts she gifted Mary after the birth of her children, to graduation dresses and christening gowns, these white dresses embodied hope and new beginnings.

After her mother’s sudden death in 2010, Mary digs deep to understand the events that led to Anne’s unraveling. At twenty-one, Anne entered a convent, committed to a life of prayer and helping others. But lengthy periods of enforced fasting, isolation from her beloved students, and constant humiliation eventually drove her to flee the convent almost a decade later.

Hoping to find new purpose as a wife and mother, Anne instead married an abusive, closeted gay man—their eventual divorce another sign of her failure.

Anne retreats into chaos. By the time Mary is ten, their house is cluttered with broken appliances and stacks of unopened mail. Anne promises but fails to clean up for Mary’s high school graduation party, where Mary is being honored as her school’s valedictorian, causing her perfectionist daughter’s fear and shame to grow in tandem with the heaps upon heaps of junk.

In spite of everything, their bond endures. Through the white dresses, pivotal events in their lives are celebrated, even as Mary tries in vain to save Anne from herself.

Unflinchingly honest, insightful, and compelling, White Dresses is a beautiful, powerful story—and a reminder of the unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1972-73
• Raised—Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, USA
• Education—B.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Emmy Awards (TV production)
• Currently—New York, New York

Mary Pflum Peterson is a veteran multi-Emmy-Award winning producer at Good Morning America. Her work has taken her to the ravaged remains of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to the royal wedding in London and to numerous Oscar ceremonies in between. Pflum Peterson was also a producer and reporter for CNN, where, from her post in Istanbul, she traveled in and out of numerous warzones. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, Dean, and their four young children. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
In a debut memoir, a former CNN reporter and current Emmy Award-winning Good Morning America producer recounts her family's painful history.... Peterson's generous homage to her mother offers an empathetic look at a baffling, frustrating mental illness. A candid, moving memoir about the many complexities of family.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. "I think of white dresses as a way of starting over. They’re sort of a way of wiping the whole slate clean. Just like what happens in the wintertime when the snow comes. It wipes away everything in preparation for a new year, a new spring." Anne tells a young Mary that white dresses are often worn to "start over...white is great for beginnings." In what way do each of the dresses in White Dresses signify a beginning for Anne and Mary?

2. Aurelia, Anne, and Mary all share a love for reading and writing. What role do literature and writing play in each of their lives? At what points in their lives do they turn to books for solace or escape? In what ways does their shared passion help bring them together?

3. Anne confesses that one reason for her hoarding is that she wanted to find a way to make the house into something that was truly hers, while Mary resented that the mess made her childhood home no longer feel like it belonged to her. What is the importance of having a place that belongs to you? Why is it so difficult and painful to have these places taken away?

4. Anne’s childhood blanket is described as her "one true constant," and the idea of having a constant comes up multiple times throughout White Dresses. What is the importance of having something solid you can count on during times of change? In what ways do the characters hold onto constants throughout the story?

5. "From the time she was old enough to read, Anne Diener had craved every bit as much the unconditional love of a dashing suitor as she did the affection and approval of a mother she couldn’t seem to reach." In what ways did Anne’s frayed relationship with her mother spark her desire for unconditional love? How does this desire eventually lead her to join the convent, and what effect does it have on her relationship with religion?

6. Although White Dresses focuses primarily on the relationships between parents and children; Anne, Mary, and Dale also have complicated relationships with their siblings. What are each of these relationships like, and how do they reflect or influence their family dynamics? Do the relationships continue to affect them as they grow older, and if so, how?

7. Anne sees two options for her life: join the convent, or become a wife and mother. What does this say about society’s view of women at the time? How much of this thinking stems from Anne herself, and how much is influenced by the culture she lives in?

8. "The dress was so pure. If only life could be as unblemished. How delicious that would be –to feel as perfect on the inside as this dress appeared on the outside." In what ways do the characters in White Dresses rely on creating "perfect" outsides to mask their unhappiness and troubles? How effective are they in doing so? How does this keep them from opening up to others, even to the people closest to them?

9. "Trust me on this one, sweetheart: stick with those who understand life is all gray and that most of us are, too. The people who see the gray are more fun anyway." In what way have Anne’s past experiences and family history allowed her to see past the black and white way that others see the world? How does this way of thinking help her forgive more easily and understand people better? Does Mary inherit her mother’s same ability?

10. How do different characters in White Dresses define "home," and how do their ideas on the subject differ from each other? What is the importance of home in the book?

11. "Every child reaches that point when he or she realizes the parent is fallible." Compare the two moments when Mary and Anne first come to see of the fallibility of their respective mothers. To what extent do these new realizations alter their mother-daughter relationships? Why is the realization that their parents are imperfect such a monumental event for children?

12. "Her philosophy: something good could always come out of something bad." Which characters best exemplify this life philosophy? In what ways is the very act of writing White Dresses itself an attempt to make "something good come out of something bad?"

13. For all the white dresses they own, Mary never wears any of Anne’s old dresses; even at her baptism she wears a dress passed down through her father’s side of the family. Why is it significant that although white dresses are something they have in common, they each have their own, separate dresses?

14. Why does Anne continue to have faith in the church even after it has rejected her more than once? Are we meant to respect her for her unwavering devotion or find her faith misguided? How does her faith influence other aspects of her life?

15. In what ways is Anne’s parenting style and her relationship with her daughter a response to her relationship with her own mother? How is she trying to avoid making the same mistakes her mother did? How is Anne trying to keep Mary from making the same mistakes she made?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
Robin DiAngelo, 2018
Beacon Press
156 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780807047415

Summary
The/00 best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality.

In this "vital, necessary, and beautiful book" (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and "allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine).

Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence.

These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Robin DiAngelo is an academic, lecturer, and author and has been a consultant and trainer on issues of racial and social justice for more than twenty years. She formerly served as a tenured professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
The value in White Fragility lies in its methodical, irrefutable exposure of racism in thought and action, and its call for humility and vigilance. Combatting one’s inner voices of racial prejudice, sneaky and, at times, irresistibly persuasive, is a life’s work.
New Yorker

[O]ne-part jeremiad and one-part handbook. It is by turns mordant and then inspirational, an argument that powerful forces and tragic histories stack the deck fully against racial justice.… White Fragility reads better as evidence of where we are mired than as a how-to guide.…White Fragility may… be too pessimistic as well as too cheery…. But it does much help us to get there.
Los Angeles Review of Books

DiAngelo wants white people to… start uncomfortable conversations with family and friends.… It is easy to overstate the value of "conversations about race" and, in the process, de-emphasize the need for material change. But it is hard to deny that a great many new conversations are likely needed…. The number of conversations coaxed into existence by DiAngelo's work will be a central measure of its success. I hope it is a great one.
Pacific Standard

(Starred review) [T]houghtful, instructive, and comprehensive… primarily intended for white audiences… in order to challenge racism.…[I]mpressive in its scope and complexity… a powerful lens for examining, and practical tools for grappling with, racism today.
Publishers Weekly

[C]oncrete examples of how to move awareness of white fragility into meaningful antiracist action.… [H]elpful for those new to the critical analysis of whiteness… [and] useful refresher to anyone committed to… self-assessment and antioppression work. —Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc.
Library Journal

(Starred review) White Fragility is a book everyone should be exposed to. With any luck, most who are will be inspired to search themselves and interrupt their contributions to racism.
Shelf Awareness

Discussion Questions

Questions are written by Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo and distributed by the publisher.
For more information on gathering people and structuring a discussion, visit

Understanding and Dismantling Privelege
"Calling in: Strategies for Cultivating Humility and Critical Thinking in Antiracism Education"
Robin DiAngelo, Ozlem Sensoy
Open the PDF

RECOMMENDED DISCUSSION PRINCIPLES
Keep the following principles in mind.
You may need to return to them on occasion,
so consider posting them in the room…
or having them available on cards:

1. A strong opinion is not the same as informed knowledge.

2. There is a difference between agreement and understanding. When discussing complex social and institutional dynamics such as racism, consider whether "I don’t agree" may actually mean "I don’t understand."

3. We have a deep interest in denying the forms of oppression that benefit us. We may also have an interest in denying forms of oppression that harm us. For example, people of color can deny the existence of racism and even support its structures. This denial may keep them from feeling overwhelmed by the daily slights or protect them from the penalties of confronting white people on racism. However, regardless of the reason, this denial still benefits whites at the group level, not people of color.

4. Racism goes beyond individual intentions to collective group patterns.

5. We don’t have to be aware of racism in order for it to exist.

6. Our racial position (whether we identify as white, a person of color, or multiracial) will greatly affect our ability to see racism. For example, if we swim against the "current" of racial privilege, it’s often easier to recognize, while it’s harder to recognize if we swim with the current.

7. Putting our effort into protecting rather than expanding our current worldview prevents our intellectual and emotional growth.

CHAPTER 1
The Challenges of Talking to White People About Racism

1. Identify a passage from chapter 1 that invokes any sense of discomfort. Highlight this passage and return to reading it periodically as you work through the book. What does this passage reveal about your socialization into the white racial frame? Does your discomfort shift over time? If so, what supported that shift?

2. If you are working through these questions as part of a white discussion group, how will you keep the discussion on track (focused on ourselves and our own participation)? How will you ensure that when common white patterns surface (distancing, intellectualizing, rationalizing), you will work to identify and challenge them rather than ignore or avoid them?

3. How do so many white people feel so confident in their opinions on racism, even as they live their lives in segregation?

4. How can we make generalizations about what it means to be white when we don’t know each person’s individual story?

5. What are some constructive ways to use your emotional reactions when your opinions on racism are challenged?

6. Explain in your own words the author’s critique of the ideology of individualism.

CHAPTER 2
Racism and White Supremacy

1. What does it mean to say that race is "socially constructed"?

2. What is the difference between racial prejudice, racial discrimination, and racism?

3. What does the author mean when she says that there is no such thing as reverse racism?

4. How does the birdcage metaphor illustrate oppression?

5. What is scientific racism? Give some examples of how scientific racism is conveyed today.

6. What does Cheryl Harris mean when describing whiteness as a form of property?

7. What is problematic about the idea of the U.S. as a great "melting pot"? How did the melting pot actually work?

8. Discuss Coates’s statement that race is the child of racism, not the father.

9. The author cites Ruth Frankenberg’s description of whiteness as "a location of structural advantage, a standpoint from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society, and a set of cultural practices that are not named or acknowledged." Explain each of these dimensions in your own words.

10. How is the author using the term "white supremacy"?

The White Racial Frame

1. Explain the concept of the white racial frame. What are some examples?

2. Take a few minutes to share some of your answers to the reflection questions on pp. 35-37. What surprised you? (These questions can be downloaded as a handout from www.robindiangelo.com.)

3. What patterns in the answers to the reflection questions do you notice within the group?

4. What insights do the answers give you on implicit aspects of our racial socialization?

5. What are some ways in which racism is "deeply embedded in the fabric" of society? Provide some examples.

CHAPTER 3
Racism After the Civil Rights Movement

1. What is the impact of white people not knowing our racial history?

2. What is color-blind racism and why is it problematic?

3. How did racism change and adapt after the civil rights era? Consider attitudes as well as behaviors.

4. Why does the author say that white progressives cause the most daily harm to people of color?

5. Why does the author consider young white people today to be no less racist than white people in the past?

6. How would you respond to someone who says, "Doesn’t it all come down to what your parents taught you?

CHAPTER 4
How Does Race Shape the Lives of White People?

1. The author traces some of the specific ways that her life has been shaped by racism. Consider your own socialization. In what specific ways has your life been shaped by racism? (If you are white, try to answer this question without mentioning people of color).

2. Identify at least three ways that white racial belonging has been conveyed to you in the last week (you might start by opening your wallet and looking at the bills there).

3. What are the earliest racial messages you can recall? Try to move beyond what you were openly told and work to identify implicit messages.

4. In what settings have you experienced the expectation of white solidarity/racial silence? How has that expectation been communicated to you? How have you responded? What consequences have you faced or fear you will face by breaking with white solidarity?

5. The author describes the power of segregation. She argues that this segregation is "active." What does this mean?

6. Discuss how various patterns of segregation across your lifespan shape your racial frame.

7. If you are white, which of the patterns discussed in this chapter have you seen in yourself? Which of the patterns challenge you the most? Why?

8. Consider some aspects of your identity other than race (i.e., gender, sexuality, religion, class, ability, nationality, age). How does race shape how you experience these identities? For example, how might being white shape how you experience disability? Poverty? Gender identity and expression?

9. If you are a person of color, how have you witnessed white people enacting white solidarity?

10. The author states that white ignorance is not simply a matter of not knowing; it is a highly effective response that protects white investments in racism and thus is actively maintained. Discuss this statement.

11. What does the author mean when she says that white people are not, in fact, racially innocent? How can we know much about race if we have lived separately?

CHAPTER 5
The Good/Bad Binary

1. What does it mean to say that racism is "a structure, not an event"?

2. The author suggests that one of the most effective barriers to talking about racism with white people is the good/bad binary. How have you seen this binary underlying common white responses to charges of racism? How might you respond when the binary surfaces in discussions about racism?

3. If you are white, share some examples of the good/bad binary in your own responses to suggestions that you are complicit with racism.

4. When the author challenges the idea that we are all unique and therefore cannot be generalized about, what thoughts and feelings come up for you? How might these thoughts and feelings function?

5. The author lists two types of narratives that are commonly used by white people to deny complicity with racism: color-blind and color-celebrate (p. 77). Which narratives have you used yourself, or still use? If you could speak back to yourself with the voice of the author, how would you counter the narrative?

6. How can a white person still enact racism in a close relationship with a person of color? Doesn’t the close relationship itself prove that the person is not racist? Explain how and why enacting racism in a close relationship with a person of color is not only possible but inevitable.
7. If you are white, when was the last time someone challenged you to look at an aspect of yourself related to racism? How did you feel? How did you respond? What insights did/can you gain from the exchange? If no one has ever challenged you (or not in a very long time), what might that tell you about how whiteness shapes your life?

CHAPTER 6
Anti-Blackness

1. The author claims that in the white mind, black people are the ultimate racial other. What does this mean?

2. What does it mean to say that anti-blackness is present across all communities of color, even within black communities?

3. How does the author make the case that the construction of white identity and white superiority was in fact dependent upon the simultaneous creation of a particular idea of blackness? How are these ideas sustained?

4. What are some of the misunderstandings about affirmative action and what do these misunderstandings reveal about anti- blackness?

5. Why haven’t affirmative action programs changed our racial outcomes?

6. What does the author mean when she suggests that causing pain and suffering for black people rests on a sense of white righteousness?

7. Return to the reflection questions on the white racial frame on pp. 34-36 and answer them while replacing the term "people of color" with the term "black people." What do you notice?

8. The author states that the film The Blind Side is "insidiously anti-black." Using the framework of the book, explain how a viewer can not notice the anti-black messages yet still be shaped by them.

9. Consider the bulleted list following the author’s analysis of The Blind Side. In which other films have you seen these racial scripts?

CHAPTER 7
Racial Triggers for White People

1. Discuss the social taboos mentioned on p. 100. Give examples of each from your own life.

2. Explain the triggers listed in this chapter in your own words and share examples of each in daily life.

3. The author writes that white people have limited information about what racism is and how it works, while at the same time they have very strong opinions about racism. Explain how both of these can be true at the same time. In your own words, practice stating the difference between having information about what racism is and having opinions about what racism is.

4. The author shares the story of Mr. Roberts and lists the ways that the two teachers in the story dismissed what they did not understand. Discuss this example. How have you seen or participated in these forms of dismissal?

5. How does the author challenge the idea that our intentions are "what count"?

6. Discuss Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a way to understand the racial disequilibrium that leads to white fragility. In what ways is this concept helpful in explaining how racial disequilibrium works?

CHAPTER 8
The Result: White Fragility

1. What is the "discourse of self-defense"? Have you ever used it yourself? If so, thinking about it now, how did it function in the interaction?

2. Share a time that you experienced your own white fragility or witnessed another white person’s.

3. What strategies do white people use to reset white racial equilibrium?

4. As a white colleague, how would you explain to Karen (p. 107) what is problematic about her response? If you are a person of color, what strategies could you use to address Karen’s white fragility?

5. Why are questions such as "What is the right thing to say?" or "What am I supposed to say?" the wrong questions? How might you respond the next time you hear these questions?

6. The author claims that white fragility functions as a form of bullying. How so?

7. What is meant by the statement that white fragility is "white racial control." How does white fragility function as racial control?

8. The author ends this chapter by sharing an interaction with a man of color who, when asked what it would be like for white people to be open to feedback, replied, "It would be revolutionary." She asks white readers to consider the profundity of this man’s reply. What feelings did you have when you read that response?

9. How might this man’s reply inform how you respond to feedback from people of color, going forward?

CHAPTER 9
White Fragility in Action

1. Why are white people more receptive to other white people (rather than people of color) educating them on race? What does this say about the role white people must play in addressing systemic racism in society broadly and specifically in our homes, with our friends and family members, and in our workplaces with our colleagues?

2. What are the opportunities and dilemmas of white people educating each other on racism?

3. Discuss the claims on pp. 119-120. Have you ever made any of these claims yourself?

4. Now consider the assumptions underlying those claims on p. 121. Which ones have you held? Do you still hold some of these? If so, how do they function for you and what would it mean to you to shift them (what do you see yourself as having to "give up")?

5. In your group, take turns speaking back to the assumptions your group members shared in question 4. Which speak backs were the most effective for you?

6. What is the language of self-defense and why is it problematic?

CHAPTER 10
White Fragility and the Rules of Engagement

1. The author presents a set of eleven "cardinal rules" (pp. 123-24) when giving feedback to white people regarding racist assumptions and patterns. For each rule of engagement, provide an example of the rule in action.

2. What assumptions do these rules rest on?

3. DiAngelo presents these rules in a language of critique in order to reveal how they function. Of course the "rules" are rarely explicitly expressed this way. Consider what you hear white people say that communicates "do not give me feedback under any circumstances" etc.? Go through each of the eleven rules and share how you have heard these rules expressed in practice.

4. How would you rewrite these rules from an antiracist framework? (A worksheet for rewriting the rules of engagement can be downloaded from robindiangelo.com/resources.)

5. In your own words, what is problematic about common guidelines for building trust in discussions about racism (e.g., "don’t judge")? How do these guidelines function? Who are they for? Whose comfort do they protect?

6. The rules of engagement around white fragility have at least three parts: those giving feedback, those receiving feedback, and those witnessing these exchanges. Practice some language for each by preparing your own "sentence starters" such as the silence breakers above. How might you begin to give feedback? How might you respond to feedback given to you? What might you say as you witness an exchange of feedback?

CHAPTER 11
White Women’s Tears

1. The author opens this chapter with the story of a woman of color in a multiracial group stating that she did not want to be subjected to white women’s tears. Why were white women asked not to cry in the group?

2. The author argues that emotions are political. How are emotions political?

3. There have been social media critiques of white feminism. What are some examples of "white feminism"?

4. What does it mean to take an "intersectional" approach? Provide some examples.

5. Throughout the book the author reinforces the idea that we "bring our histories with us." What does this mean and why is it so important?

6. White women often assume a shared sisterhood with women of color. What is problematic about this assumption?

7. Discuss some of the ways in which white men’s fragility manifests. What is important for white men to understand about the impact of each of these behaviors?

8. The author writes, "Since many of us have not learned how racism works and our role in it, our tears may come from shock and distress about what we didn’t know or recognize. For people of color, our tears demonstrate our racial insulation and privilege" (pp. 135-36). Discuss this passage and the ways that white emotional distress and shock (tears, defensiveness, anger, grief) shape conversations on racism. What do these dynamics reveal about the sociopolitical function of emotions?

9. Consider how emotions function in public space. For instance, how do white people often read the emotions of women of color, and peoples of color generally? Consider how emotions are read racially by white people with cultural figures such as Serena Williams, Nicki Minaj, Cory Booker, Maxine Waters, and Mazie Hirono, as well as the way that institutions (like media) respond to emotions in racialized ways. Conversely, how are the emotions of white people read (and the intersections between race and gender in all readings)? Consider cultural figures such as Christine Blasey Ford, Elizabeth Warren, Brett Kavanaugh, Lindsey Graham, and Donald Trump.

CHAPTER12
Where Do We Go from Here?

1. Using an antiracist framework, how would you respond to a white person who said, "You just want me to feel bad and guilty about something that I had nothing to do with"?

2. Very little if anything in society at large supports us to persist in the work of antiracism. In fact, much pressures us not to continue the work. Because of this, we need to set up support for ourselves to continue. How will you set up support for yourself to stay on the journey? How will you resist complacency? Consider both in-group support and racially mixed group support networks. How will both settings be important in different ways?

3. The author states that it isn’t enough for white people to be nice and that, in fact, racism depends on white people simply being nice. Discuss this statement. How does niceness alone uphold the racial status quo?

4. If we accept that racism is always operating, the question becomes not "Is racism taking place?" but rather "How is racism taking place in this specific context?" How does awareness of that change how we think about our lives and our actions?

5. Why must white people resist cynicism and remain hopeful? At the same time, what are the pitfalls of hopefulness? What is the difference between hope and denial?

6. The author shares a time that she perpetrated racism toward a coworker and the steps she took to repair the damage. Identify the underlying antiracist assumptions listed on pp. 142-143 that are demonstrated in these steps.

7. Discuss the suggestions for continuing the work of antiracism. Which are the most challenging? How can you meet those challenges?

(Questions are written by Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo and distributed by the publisher.)

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White Houses
Amy Bloom, 2018
Random House
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812995664

Summary
Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt’s first presidential campaign.

Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, "Hick," as she’s known to her friends and admirers, is not quite instantly charmed by the idealistic, patrician Eleanor.

But then, as her connection with the future first lady deepens into intimacy, what begins as a powerful passion matures into a lasting love, and a life that Hick never expected to have. She moves into the White House, where her status as "first friend" is an open secret, as are FDR’s own lovers.

After she takes a job in the Roosevelt administration, promoting and protecting both Roosevelts, she comes to know Franklin not only as a great president but as a complicated rival and an irresistible friend, capable of changing lives even after his death.

Through it all, even as Hick’s bond with Eleanor is tested by forces both extraordinary and common, and as she grows as a woman and a writer, she never loses sight of the love of her life.

From Washington, D.C. to Hyde Park, from a little white house on Long Island to an apartment on Manhattan’s Washington Square, Amy Bloom’s new novel moves elegantly through fascinating places and times, written in compelling prose and with emotional depth, wit, and acuity. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1953
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A. Weslyan University; M.S.W. Smith College
• Awards—Costa Award; National Magazine Award
• Currently—lives in Connecticut, USA

Amy Bloom is an American writer best know for her 2007 novel Away. Her next novel, Lucky Us, was published in 2014. She has also penned short stories—in 1993 her collection, Come to Me, was nominated for National Book Award, and in 2000 her collection, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Bloom received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theater/Political Science, Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Wesleyan University, and a M.S.W. (Master of Social Work) from Smith College.

Having trained and practiced as a clinical social worker, Bloom used her psychotherapeutic background in creating the Lifetime Television network TV show, State of Mind. She is listed as creator, co-executive producer, and head writer for the series, which examines the professional lives of psychotherapists.

Bloom has also written articles in periodicals including The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Slate, and Salon.com. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories and several other anthologies, and has won a National Magazine Award.

Bloom has been a University Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University and before that a senior lecturer of Creative Writing in the department of English at Yale University, where she taught Advanced Fiction Writing, Writing for Television, and Writing for Children.

In August 2012, Bloom published her first children's book entitled Little Sweet Potato. According to the New York Times, the story "follows the trials of a 'lumpy, dumpy, bumpy' young tuber who is accidentally expelled from his garden patch and must find a new home. On his journey, he is castigated first by a bunch of xenophobic carrots, then by a menacing gang of vain eggplants."

Bloom resides in Connecticut. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/3/2014.)

Book Reviews
Historical fiction about "forgotten women’s lives" has become a comfortably familiar, if not always scintillating, literary form. Leave it to Amy Bloom to give the genre a swift kick in the knickers with White Houses, her irresistibly audacious re-creation of the love affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena "Hick" Hickok.
USA Today

Bloom beautifully captures the affection the women felt for each other…. Cleverly structured through reminiscences that slowly build in intimacy, Bloom’s passionate novel beautifully renders the hidden love of one of America’s most guarded first ladies.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Bloom elevates this addition to the secret-lives-of-the-Roosevelts genre through elegant prose and by making Lorena Hickok a character engrossing enough to steal center stage from Eleanor Roosevelt.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. White Houses is a fictional account of relationships and events that happened from the 1930s to the ’60s. Did any historical information in the book interest or surprise you? Did you know anything about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, or FDR’s affairs before reading the book?

2. Lorena had a very difficult childhood, filled with poverty, violence, and uncertainty. Eleanor’s childhood was also fraught with violence and uncertainty, but she still had every opportunity and comfort, because she was a Roosevelt. How do you think their backgrounds affected who they became as adults, in both their personal and professional lives? Did it affect the dynamics of their relationship?

3. Lorena’s short time in the circus introduced us to many unforgettable and unique characters on the outskirts of society. Who do you think Lorena most related to? Did you relate to any of them?

4. Lorena and Eleanor shared a love that was taboo because of how people viewed sexuality at the time and Eleanor’s high-profile marriage. How do you think their love story would play out today? Do you think it would have ended differently, or the same?

5. Lorena and FDR shared a complicated relationship—he was her president and her friend, and also her lover’s husband. How did this affect Lorena’s relationship with FDR, and her relationship with Eleanor?

6. White Houses is told from Lorena’s perspective—a woman on the sidelines of history who was literally cropped out of photos. How do you think her view of history differs from how other people viewed it? How do you think Eleanor and Lorena’s story would have changed if it was told from the perspective of Eleanor, or FDR, or anyone else who worked at the White House?

7. Eleanor Roosevelt was a groundbreaking First Lady, a politician and activist in her own right, who even publically disagreed with her husband’s politics from time to time. Were you familiar with Eleanor Roosevelt’s work before this novel? Were you surprised by her politics and behavior, given the period she lived in? What could women today learn from her approach to politics?

8. Before covering the White House, Lorena established herself as a respected journalist. How does her relationship with Eleanor affect her professional aspirations? Do you agree with the decisions she makes regarding her career?
(Questions issued by the publishers.)

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Who Moved My Cheese? An A-mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life
Spencer Johnson, 1998
Penguin Group USA
96 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399144462

Summary
With over a million copies in print, the #1 New York Times bestseller Who Moved My Cheese? An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life has grown from a guide and training tool for America's top corporations and organizations to a cultural phenomenon that is changing people's lives. While a few analytical or skeptical people find the story too simple on the surface, the vast majority of readers' responses reveal it is the clear simplicity that makes it so easy to understand and apply to changing situations at work or in life.

This amazing bestseller, written by Spencer Johnson, M.D., the co-author of The One Minute Manager, the world's most popular management method, is reaching beyond the business community, where it has been the #1 Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller for more than 30 consecutive weeks. It is now being embraced by hundreds of thousands of readers-from community leaders and college coaches to parents and children-helping them to adapt to change.

Whether it's the challenge of a changing relationship, or moving to a new neighborhood, or the downsizing and merging of corporations, people are finding that the basic lesson of Who Moved My Cheese? is an unthreatening and invaluable source of comfort and advice. It is no wonder that this diminutive tome has become a runaway bestseller! (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 1, 1940
• Where—South Dakota, USA
• Raised—in Hollywood, California
• Education—B.A., University of Southern California; M.D.,
Royal College of Surgeons (Ireland)
• Currently—lives in Hawaii and New Hampshire

Spencer Johnson is an M.D. who has become better known for fixing ailing corporations than healing the sick, first with his 1982 business classic The One Minute Manager (coauthored with psychiatrist Kenneth Blanchard) and then, unforgettably, with Who Moved My Cheese?, a word-of-mouth sensation that eventually remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years and has been translated into 11 languages.

Word had slowly built up about Cheese, based on the strength of recommendations from heavy-hitter executives at Procter & Gamble, GE, Hewlett-Packard and others. Businesses, hit by the downshifting economy, began ordering copies by the thousands; by 2000, it was a national bestseller. The book sets up a story about four characters who live in a maze: Hem and Haw, who are little people; and Sniff and Scurry, who are mice.

Johnson, who based the story on the fact that mice rarely go back to the same place to look for cheese and felt that humans might benefit from the example, created the story for himself as a way of helping himself get through a divorce. Urged by former writing partner Blanchard to set the story down in book form, Johnson finally did – and nothing happened, at first. But over two years, the book picked up momentum, not only among companies who were trying to deal with everything from sales downturns to massive layoffs, but among individuals who found the book helped them gain a new perspective on personal situations as well.

Johnson’s forte is to create allegorical stories that present simple, digestible solutions (or paths to solutions) for seemingly huge challenges. The approach is far from immune to criticism from those who complain that Who Moved My Cheese? is simplistic and silly; Johnson doesn’t argue with either barb (though he might prefer "simple" over "simplistic"). His message is that being simpler and sillier makes us better adapters and decision-makers, and all of his books boil down to opening oneself to possibility and better communication. The ideas aren’t revolutionary: As Johnson said in an ABC News chat, “The challenge always for me and for others is to live the story and not just read about it.” (From Barnes & Noble and Wikipedia.)

His own words:
My five year old son told me a cheese joke: "What do you call cheese that's not yours?" When I gave up, he laughed and said, "Nacho Cheese!" It made me smile and reminded me to keep having fun with Cheese.

I've just seen a new software product that also made me smile. It's called the "Who Moved My Cheese? Change Survival Kit. It has an electronic game with animated prompts and reminders showing the characters running around inside a maze, reminding us to laugh at ourselves and discover how to do well in changing times.

Many years ago, when I was struggling with a difficult change in my life, I created the story of "Who Moved My Cheese?" to help me take my changing situation seriously, but not take myself so seriously. When my friends noticed how much better life had become for me and asked why, I told them about the "Cheese" story. Several friends said, sometimes years later, how hearing the story helped them to keep their sense of humor, change, and gain something better themselves.

Two decades after the story was created, it was published as a book, and to my amazement and almost everyone else's, within two years of publication, more than three million people had read it. Many have reported that what they discovered in the story has saved their careers, businesses, health and marriages. It has spread around the world in many foreign languages. It's appeal seems universal.

Critics on the other hand think the story is too cheesy and do not understand how so many people could find it so valuable. They say it is so simple a child could understand it and it insults their intelligence, as it is just obvious common sense. They get nothing out of the story. Some even fear it suggests all change is good and that people should mindlessly conform to unnecessary changes imposed by others, although that is not in the story.

It seems to me that both fans and critics are "right" in their own way. It is not what is in the story of "Who Moved My Cheese?" but how you interpret it and apply it to your own situation that gives it value. The challenge however is to remember to use what you discover in the story. So I thought it was great when I learned that the new entertaining piece of software has animated characters from the book prompting and reminding us to use what we find most valuable in the story to change and win and enjoy it.

Some people who have seen the "Change Survival Kit" say that it is "better than cheddar!" Let's hope the way you interpret Who Moves My Cheese? and act on it, will help you find and enjoy the "New Cheese" you deserve. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
This quick read of simple ideas will provide at least one character to relate to and some advice to hold on to during a busy day.
Christy Ellington - Christian Science Monitor

I'm giving this book to colleagues and friends. Spencer Johnson's storytelling abilities and unique insights make this a rare book that can be read and understood by everyone who wants to succeed in these changing times.
Randy Harris - Former Vice-Chairman, Merrill Lynch, Intl.

(Audio version.) This is a brief tale of two mice and two humans who live in a maze and one day are faced with change: someone moves their cheese. Reactions vary from quick adjustment to waiting for the situation to change by itself to suit their needs. This story is about adjusting attitudes toward change in life, especially at work. Change occurs whether a person is ready or not, but the author affirms that it can be positive. His principles are to anticipate change, let go of the old, and do what you would do if you were not afraid. Listeners are still left with questions about making his or her own specific personal changes. Capably narrated by Tony Roberts, this audiotape is recommended for larger library collections. —Mark Guyer, Stark Cty. Dist. Lib., Canton, OH
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—and activities—to help get a discussion started for Who Moved My Cheese:

1. In Johnson's book the cheese is a metaphor. What does it represent?

2. What does the maze represent?

3. Identify both the cheese and the maze in your own life. Then consider what might happen if someone moved your cheese. Imagine the ways you might have to cope with the changes.

4. What changes have you already experienced in your life? How did you react to the changes? Were you threatened, angry, frightened, disoriented, or excited by the challenge (come on...be honest!)? After reading Who Moved My Cheese? do you feel you dealt as well as you could have with those changes?

5. Has Johnson's book helped you see how change can be beneficial...in life in general, as well as in your own work or personal life?

6. If you read "A Discussion," the book's third section, what did you learn from the way others interpreted the book? Were any situations similar to your own?

7. Do you wish Johnson had offered concrete answers to the question of dealing with change? Would you have preferred a "how-to" approach, say, a step-by step guide? Or do you appreciate the way in which readers are free to interpret and apply the parable for themselves? Which approach is more helpful to you?

8. In the parable, Johnson says the four characters represent the four parts of ourselves, from the simple to the complex. What does he mean: which character represents which part of ourselves? Is there one character you relate to more than the others?

9. Why is it so hard for most of us (all of us?) to accept change?

_______________

Activities

1. For the hostess or leader of the discussion: without telling members ahead of time, change the format of the book club meeting— perhaps where you sit, when you discuss vs. when you socialize, the manner in which you discuss... whatever changes you can think of (and only for this meeting). This is an experiment to see how members deal with the changes facing them in the here and now.

2. Invite members to write down on a sheet of paper an aspect of their own lives that could be—or is in the process of being—affected by change—a move, new job, a child off to college, a divorce...whatever. Then pass around a basket or hat holding folded pieces of paper with the names of the characters from the parable (Hem, Haw, etc.). Make sure there are enough papers for everyone. Each member should draw one of the folded papers and talk about how that parable character would approach the change he/she wrote on the sheet of paper.

3. Pass around paper and pencils for each member to write down and describe his/her personal maze. Fold the paper. Appoint a moderator to collect and read out loud each member's maze—anonymously. The group tries to guess which maze belongs to which member. (This requires a high degree of trust among members.)

4. Divide up into teams of 2-4 people. Each team begins working on its own project—a jigsaw puzzle, or solving a riddle, or writing a group story—anything that involves teamwork. After several minutes, a moderator rings a bell and chooses a member from each team to move to another team. Let everyone begin working on their team projects again, this time with a new member. Wait for another interval, ring the bell, and shuffle members around again. Keep this up as long as you can stand it. The idea is to replicate how difficult it is to change— both in terms of disrupting group coherence and having to fit into a new group.

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

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Why Not Me?
Mindy Kaling, 2015
Crown/Archetype
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804138147

Summary
A collection of essays that are as hilarious and insightful as they are deeply personal.

In Why Not Me?, Kaling shares her ongoing journey to find contentment and excitement in her adult life, whether it’s

... falling in love at work
... seeking new friendships in lonely places
... attempting to be the first person in history to lose
weight without any behavior modification whatsoever
... or most important, believing that you have a place in
Hollywood when you’re constantly reminded that no one looks like you.

In “How to Look Spectacular: A Starlet’s Confessions,” Kaling gives her tongue-in-cheek secrets for surefire on-camera beauty, (“Your natural hair color may be appropriate for your skin tone, but this isn’t the land of appropriate–this is Hollywood, baby. Out here, a dark-skinned woman’s traditional hair color is honey blonde.”) “Player” tells the story of Kaling being seduced and dumped by a female friend in L.A. (“I had been replaced by a younger model. And now they had matching bangs.”) In “Unlikely Leading Lady,” she muses on America’s fixation with the weight of actresses, (“Most women we see onscreen are either so thin that they’re walking clavicles or so huge that their only scenes involve them breaking furniture.”) And in “Soup Snakes,” Kaling spills some secrets on her relationship with her ex-boyfriend and close friend, B.J. Novak (“I will freely admit: my relationship with B.J. Novak is weird as hell.”)

Mindy turns the anxieties, the glamour, and the celebrations of her second coming-of-age into a laugh-out-loud funny collection of essays that anyone who’s ever been at a turning point in their life or career can relate to.

And those who’ve never been at a turning point can skip to the parts where she talks about meeting Bradley Cooper. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 24, 1979
• Where—Cambridge, Massachesetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Darthmouth College
• Awards—Emmy
• Currently—lives in West Hollywood, California

Vera Mindy Chokalingam, known professionally as Mindy Kaling, is an American actress, comedian, and writer. She is the creator and star of the Fox and Hulu sitcom The Mindy Project, and also serves as executive producer and writer for the show. She is also known for her work on the NBC sitcom The Office, where she portrayed the character Kelly Kapoor and served as executive producer, writer and director.

Her memoir Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concers) was published in 2011. Her second book, Why Not Me? was released in 2015. Both became top sellers.

Early life
Kaling was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a Tamil father, Avu Chokalingam, an architect, and a Bengali mother, Dr. Swati Chokalingam (nee Roysircar), an obstetrician/gynecologist.

Both of Kaling's parents are Hindus from India, who met while working at the same hospital in Nigeria. Kaling's mother was working as an OBGYN, and her father was overseeing the building of a wing of the hospital. The family emigrated in 1979, the same year Kaling was born. Kaling's mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2012. Kaling has an older brother, anti-affirmative action activist Vijay Jojo Chokalingam.

Kaling graduated from Buckingham Browne & Nichols, a private school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1997. The following year, she entered Dartmouth College where she graduated with a B.A. in Playwriting.

While at Dartmouth, she was a member of the improvisational comedy troupe, The Dog Day Players, and the a cappella singers, The Rockapellas. She was creator of the comic strip Badly Drawn Girl in The Dartmouth (the college's daily newspaper), and a writer for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern (the college's humor magazine). She was a Classics major for much of college, studying Latin, which she had not studied since 7th grade.

Career
While a 19-year-old sophomore at Dartmouth, Kaling was an intern on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. She described herself as a terrible intern, "less of a 'make copies' intern and more of a 'stalk Conan' intern."

After college, Kaling moved to Brooklyn and took what she said was one of her "worst job" experiences"—a production assistant for three months on the Crossing Over With John Edward psychic show. At the same time, Kaling did stand-up in New York City.

In August 2002, Kaling and Brenda Withers, a college friend, wrote an off=Broadway play called Matt & Ben, Kaling played Ben Afflect to Brenda Withers' Matt Damon. The play was named one of Time magazine's "Top Ten Theatrical Events of The Year" and was "a surprise hit" at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival. The play reimagined how Damon and Affleck came to write the movie Good Will Hunting.

Kaling also wrote a popular blog called "Things I’ve Bought That I Love," which reemerged on her website on September 29, 2011. The blog was written under the name Mindy Ephron, "a name Kaling chose because she was amused by the idea of her 20-something Indian-American self as a long-lost Ephron sister."

The Office
When working in 2004 to adapt The Office from its BBC progenitor, producer Greg Daniels hired Kaling as a writer-performer after reading a spec script she wrote. Daniels called Kaling "very original," saying that "if anything feels phony or lazy or passé, she’ll pounce on it."

Kaling joined the The Office, as the only woman on a staff of eight. She was only 24. She took on the role of character Kelly Kapoor, debuting in "Diversity Day"—the series’ second episode. Since then she wrote at least 22 episodes, including "Niagara," for which she was co-nominated for an Emmy with Greg Daniels. Kaling both wrote and directed the webisode "Subtle Sexuality" in 2009.

In a 2007 interview with The A.V. Club, she stated that her character Kelly is "an exaggerated version of what I think the upper-level writers believe my personality is." After the "Diwali" episode, Kaling appeared with Daniels on NPR's Fresh Air.

Kaling's contract was set to expire at the end of Season 7. But in September, 2011, she signed a new contract to stay for Season 8; she was promoted to full Executive Producer status. Her Universal Television contract included a development deal for a new show (eventually titled The Mindy Project), in which she appears as an actor and contributes as a writer.

The Mindy Project
In 2012, Kaling pitched a single-camera comedy to Fox called The Mindy Project, which she wrote and produced. Fox began airing the series in 2012. Although canceled by Fox in May 2015, the series was later picked up by Hulu for a 26 episode fourth season.

Additional TV and film
Kaling's TV appearances include a 2005 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, playing Richard Lewis's assistant. She is featured on the CD Comedy Death-Ray and guest-wrote parts of an episode of Saturday Night Live in April 2006.

After her film debut in The 40-Year-Old Virgin with Steve Carell, Kaling appeared as a waitress in the film Unaccompanied Minors. In 2007 she held a small part in License to Wed starring fellow The Office actors John Krasinski, Angela Kinsey, and Brian Baumgartner.

She was also in the 2009 film Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian as a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum tour guide and voiced Taffyta Muttonfudge in Disney's animated comedy film, Wreck-It Ralph. In 2011 she played the role of Shira, a doctor who is a roommate and colleague of the main character Emma (played by Natalie Portman) in No Strings Attached. Kaling also made an appearance as Vanetha in The Five-Year Engagement (2012). She also did voiced the role Disgust in the 2015 Pixar animated film, Inside Out.

Personal life
Kaling has said she has never been called Vera, her first name,[15] but has been referred to as Mindy since her mother was pregnant with her while her parents were living in Nigeria. They were already planning to move to the United States and wanted, Kaling said, a "cute American name" for their daughter, and liked the name Mindy from the TV show Mork & Mindy. The name Vera is, according to Kaling, the name of the "incarnation of a Hindu goddess."[15]

When Kaling started doing stand-up, the emcees could never pronounce her last name, Chokalingam, so they made fun of it. Eventually she changed it to Kaling. She stopped doing stand-up because it required a lot more time than she had. She toured solo as well as with Craig Robinson before he was on The Office.

Kaling has said that she never saw a family like hers on TV, which gave her a dual perspective she uses in her writing.[2] The "everyone against me mentality" is what she thinks she learned as a child of immigrants.[2] She loves reading books by Jhumpa Lahiri, even naming her Mindy Lahiri character after her.[29]

Kaling considers herself Hindu. She lives in West Hollywood, California. (From .)

Book Reviews
No online mainstream media reviews have been posted for this book yet. See Amazon for helpful customer 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 I?

1. Kaling has said elsewhere that the title has two meanings. One has to do with wondering why isn't she getting married like a number of her friends—it makes her feel left out. The second meaning has to do with her ambition: when someone succeeds in a certain endeavor, she wonders, "Why not me?" Talk about what those two meaning reveal about Mindy Kaling.

2. What does the chapter titled "For the Ladies: How to Look Spectacular, A Starlet's Confessions" say about Hollywood's obsession and ours (and yours?) with body shape and image? Does the media merely give us what we want: in other words, do we want celebrities to look unrealistically glamorous, like idealized versions of how we wished we looked? Or would we prefer stars to look more like us—everyday women and men?

3. In her discussion of friendships, Kaling talks about how hard it is to make female friends—it's more difficult than having sex. Is that difficulty a result of Kaling's fame and her hyper suspicious nature that she's being "played?" Or is it, perhaps, an common problem in the Hollywood environment? Have you ever had a friend like the one in "Player"?

4. Kaling says that she wants her readers to get the know the "real" Mindy Kaling. Did you come away after reading this book feeling that you DO know Mindy? How do you feel about her after reading Why Not Me?

5. Have you read her previous book Why is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (2011), and if so, how do the two books compare?

6. What parts of the book do you find especially funny or sad...or insightful or shallow? Do parts of the book resonate with your experiences or observances of life?

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

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Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis
Ada Calhoun, 2002
Grove/Atlantic Press
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802147851

Summary
A generation-defining exploration of the new midlife crisis facing Gen X women and the unique circumstances that have brought them to this point, Why We Can’t Sleep is a lively successor to Passages by Gail Sheehy and The Defining Decade by Meg Jay.

When Ada Calhoun found herself in the throes of a midlife crisis, she thought that she had no right to complain. She was married with children and a good career.

So why did she feel miserable? And why did it seem that other Generation X women were miserable, too?

Calhoun decided to find some answers.

She looked into housing costs, HR trends, credit card debt averages, and divorce data. At every turn, she saw a pattern: sandwiched between the Boomers and the Millennials, Gen X women were facing new problems as they entered middle age, problems that were being largely overlooked.

Speaking with women across America about their experiences as the generation raised to "have it all," Calhoun found that most were exhausted, terrified about money, under-employed, and overwhelmed. Instead of being heard, they were told instead to lean in, take "me-time," or make a chore chart to get their lives and homes in order.

In Why We Can’t Sleep, Calhoun opens up the cultural and political contexts of Gen X’s predicament and offers solutions for how to pull oneself out of the abyss—and keep the next generation of women from falling in.

The result is reassuring, empowering, and essential reading for all middle-aged women, and anyone who hopes to understand them. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Ada Calhoun is the author of the memoir Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, named an Amazon Book of the Month and one of the top ten memoirs of 2017 by W magazine; and the history St. Marks Is Dead, one of the best books of 2015, according to Kirkus and the Boston Globe. She has collaborated on several New York Times bestsellers, and written for the New York Times, New York Magazine, and New Republic. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[It] grew out of an article for O Magazine that went viral, so perhaps it’s facile to say that it reads like a book that grew out of an article ... The results of this format are mixed. Some statistics feel cherry-picked or just hard to prove…. By contrast, the economic and labor statistics are both convincing and sobering…. Calhoun’s essential premise is highly persuasive.…. [T]here are pleasures to be had in the familiar pop cultural references and the darkly amusing anecdotes…. Ultimately, however, so many women appear that they blur together…. I wished Calhoun had included fewer women’s stories but gone into those stories in greater detail.
Curtis Sittenfeld - New York Times Book Review

The book makes a powerful argument to Gen X women…. Calhoun speaks directly to her own generation, peppering the book with so many specific cultural touchstones, from the Challenger explosion to Koosh balls to the slime-filled TV show Double Dare, that I found reading Why We Can’t Sleep to be a singular experience—driving home her point that Gen X is so often overlooked.
Emily Bobrow - Wall Street Journal

[A]sprint through everything—and I mean everything—that is bothering Generation X women…. [A] remarkably slender and breezy book…. Reading Why We Can’t Sleep is like attending a party where the hostess didn’t want to leave anyone off the list: It’s noisy, crowded and everyone remains a stranger. And they’re all complaining.… The advice is common-sensical, a little corny and hardly a panacea for the multitude of problems she’s spent the previous 200 pages describing…. But the final chapter is the most accessible and engaging in the book. Calhoun’s ambitious wide-angle shot of Gen X midlife malaise is blurry and overwhelming. Paradoxically, when she zeroes in on a specific woman with a first and last name, a strong voice, and a textured backstory—herself—that larger picture starts to come into focus.
Jennifer Reese - Washington Post

[A]n engaging hybrid of first-person confession, reportage, pop culture analysis, and statistics… it aspires to something larger than memoir.
New Republic

[B]racing, empowering study…. Calhoun persuasively reassures Gen X women that they can find a way out of their midlife crises by “facing up to our lives as they really are.” Women of every generation will find much to relate to in this humorous yet pragmatic account.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred revicw) Built on personal narratives and research-based data,… Calhoun asks why she and others continue to feel miserable despite traditional markers of success…. Her research offers women ways to look at but not devalue their own experiences . —Emily Bowles, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison
Library Journal

An assured, affable guide, Calhoun balances bleakness with humor and the hope inherent in sharing stories that will make other women feel less alone. She also gives good advice for finding support through midlife hardship. This is a conversation starter.
Booklist

Calhoun argues that Generation X women find middle age harder than those older or younger. … [and] that aging inevitably means that some life choices are no longer viable. An occasionally amusing and insightful but scattershot exploration of midlife woes.
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 WHY WE CAN'T SLEEP … then take off on your own:

1. How closely (if at all) do you relate to the central concerns and issues laid out in Calhoun's book? In other words, do you have trouble sleeping through the night? Even though the book is written for Gen Xers, if you're a Millennial or a Boomer, does Why Can't We Sleep still speak to you?

2. Given the many women Calhoun has interviewed for this book, and their many problems, are there some you find particularly sympathetic? How similar are some of these women's issues to yours? Is the large number of people included in the book helpful or too diverting?

3. Calhoun also includes societal economic data in her work, as well as financial woes at the household level. Is the inclusion of these observations and statistics creditable? Do the facts bolster her argument? Which of her arguments do you find most persuasive… and which less so?

4. The ’70s and ’80s "was a rough time to be a kid," Calhoun writes. "The economy was sinking, crime was spiking, nuclear war was plausible, divorce rates were soaring and helicopter parenting was anomalous. Many of us knew about AIDS long before we had sex, and we watched the Challenger explode on live TV." How much do you recall of that era? Is Calhoun correct—did that time make for a hard childhood?

5. Some of the anecdotes Calhoun recounts are humorous, even if on the dark side. Can you point to a few?

6. Many, if not most, of the women Calhoun includes in her book tend to be "well-educated, middle- and upper-middle-class" women—which might make their problems easy to dismiss, or even to disparage. What do you think? Do their troubles seem serious or trivial to you? Or something in between?

7. What do you think of the advice Calhoun provides, her tips for curing a midlife crisis? Do you agree with her recommendations? Do you have any suggestions of your own to add?

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

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Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed, 2012
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307476074

Summary
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.

Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 17, 1968
• Where—Spangler, Pennsylvania, uSA
• Education—B.A., University of Minnesota; M.F.A,
Syracuse University
• Awards—Pushcart Prize
• Currently—Portland, Oregan

Cheryl Strayed is a New York Times bestselling author, who lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children. Her autobiographical debut novel, Torch, was published 2006. In 2012 she published another bestseller, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, the true account of her trek along the Pacific Crest Trail. Strayed also writes the online advice column "Dear Sugar."

Strayed was born in Pennsylvania and raised in Minnesota, where she graduated from McGregor High School in Aitkin County, a place upon which the fictional Coltrap County in Torch is based. She received her B.A. from the University of Minnesota and her M.F.A in fiction writing from Syracuse University, where she was mentored by writers George Saunders and Mary Gaitskill among others. She is married to filmmaker Brian Lindstrom.

Published works
Strayed's essays have been published in the Washington Post Magazine, New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Allure and other imprints. Her work has been selected twice for inclusion in The Best American Essays ("Heroin/e" in the 2000 edition, and "The Love of My Life" in the 2003 edition). Torch, a story based on Strayed's mother's death from cancer at age 45, was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and was selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books of 2006 by writers living in the Pacific Northwest.

Her memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which details her 1,100-mile hike up the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to northernmost Oregon has since been optioned by actress Reese Witherspoon. Wild was also excerpted in Vogue.

On February 14, 2012, Strayed came forward as the formerly anonymous author of the "Dear Sugar" advice column at The Rumpus online literary magazine. Strayed took over the column from originator Steve Almond. On July 10, 2012 her new book Tiny Beautiful Things, a compilation of her best and new "Dear Sugar" columns, will be released by Vintage Books.

Awards
Strayed's essay "Munro County", about a letter from Alice Munro, was published in the Missouri Review and won a Pushcart Prize in 2010.

Wild was chosen in June, 2012, as the inaugural selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0, a re-launch of the famous Oprah's Book Club which ended in 2011. Oprah's Book Club 2.0 uses online social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and e-readers, so that participants can cut and paste passages from books and communicate online. Oprah discussed Wild in her video announcement of the new Club (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
It’s not very manly, the topic of weeping while reading. Yet for a book critic tears are an occupational hazard. Luckily, perhaps, books don’t make me cry very often. Turning pages, I’m practically Steve McQueen. Strayed’s memoir, Wild, however, pretty much obliterated me. I was reduced, during her book’s final third, to puddle-eyed cretinism. I like to read in coffee shops, and I began to receive concerned glances from matronly women, the kind of looks that said, ‘Oh, honey.’ To mention all this does Strayed a bit of a disservice, because there’s nothing cloying about Wild. It’s uplifting, but not in the way of many memoirs, where the uplift makes you feel that you’re committing mental suicide. This book is as loose and sexy and dark as an early Lucinda Williams song. It’s got a punk spirit and makes an earthy and American sound.... Wild recounts the months Strayed spent when she was 26, hiking alone on the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State. There were very frightening moments, but the author was not chewed on by bears, plucked dangling from the edge of a pit, buried by an avalanche or made witness to the rapture. No dingo ate anyone’s baby. Yet everything happened. The clarity of Ms. Strayed’s prose, and thus of her person, makes her story, in its quiet way, nearly as riveting an adventure narrative as Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Into Thin Air.... Her grief, early in this book, is as palpable as her confusion. Her portrait of her mother, who died of cancer at 45, is raw and bitter and reverent all at once.... Wild is thus the story of an unfolding. She got tougher, mentally as well as physically [and she] tells good, scary stories about nearly running out of water, encountering leering men and dangerous animals.... The lack of ease in her life made her fierce and funny; she hammers home her hard-won sentences like a box of nails. The cumulative welling up I experienced during Wild was partly a response to that too infrequent sight: that of a writer finding her voice, and sustaining it, right in front of your eyes.
Dwight Garner - New York Times

Strayed comes off as a total screw-up and a wise person at the same time, perhaps because she has the ineffable gift every writer longs for of saying exactly what she means in lines that are both succinct and poetic... Some memoirs make the steps between grief and healing so clear that the path seems easy for readers to follow. Strayed, on the contrary, respects mystery.... No epiphanies here, no signs from the gods. Just a healthy respect for the uncertainty we all live with, and an inborn talent for articulating angst and the gratefulness that comes when we overcome it.
Fiona Zublin - Washington Post

[A] vivid, touching and ultimately inspiring account of a life unraveling, and of the journey that put it back together. . . . The darkness is relieved by self-deprecating humor as [Strayed] chronicles her hiking expedition and the rebirth it helped to inspire. . . . Wild easily transcends the hiking genre, though it presents plenty of details about equipment ordeals and physical challenges. Anyone with some backpacking experience will find Strayed's chronicle especially amusing. Her boots prove too small. The trail destroys her feet. Then there is the possibility of real mortality: She repeatedly finds herself just barely avoiding rattlesnakes. Strayed is honest about the tedium of hiking but also alert to the self-discovery that can be stirred by solitude and self-reliance. . . . Pathos and humor are her main companions on the trail, although she writes vividly about the cast of other pilgrims she encounters. Finding out ‘what it was like to walk for miles,’ Strayed writes, was ‘a powerful and fundamental experience.’ And knowing that feeling has a way of taming the challenges thrown up by modern life.
Michael J. Ybarra - Wall Street Journal

Brilliant...pointedly honest.... Part adventure narrative, part deeply personal reflection, Wild chronicles an adventure born of heartbreak. . . . While it is certain that the obvious dangers of the trail are real — the cliffs are high, the path narrow, the ice slick, and the animal life wild — the book’s greatest achievement lies in its exploration of the author’s emotional landscape. With flashbacks as organic and natural as memory itself, Strayed mines the bedrock of her past to reveal what rests beneath her compulsion to hike alone across more than one thousand primitive miles: her biological father’s abuse and abandonment, her mother’s diagnosis and death, and her family’s unraveling. Strayed emerges from her grief-stricken journey as a practitioner of a rare and vital vocation. She has become an intrepid cartographer of the human heart.
Bruce Machart - Houston Chronicle

Strayed writes a crisp scene; her sentences hum with energy. She can describe a trail-parched yearning for Snapple like no writer I know. She moves us briskly along the route, making discrete rest stops to parcel out her backstory. It becomes impossible not to root for her.
Karen R. Long - Cleveland Plain Dealer

One of the most original, heartbreaking and beautiful American memoirs in years.... The unlikely journey is awe-inspiring, but it's one of the least remarkable things about the book. Strayed, who was recently revealed as the anonymous author of the ‘Dear Sugar’ advice column of the literary website The Rumpus, writes with stunningly authentic emotional resonance—Wild is brutal and touching in equal measures, but there's nothing forced about it. She chronicles sorrow and loss with unflinching honesty, but without artifice or self-pity. There are no easy answers in life, she seems to be telling the reader. Maybe there are no answers at all. It's fitting, perhaps, that the writer chose to end her long pilgrimage at the Bridge of the Gods, a majestic structure that stretches a third of a mile across the Columbia, the largest river in the Pacific Northwest. We think of bridges as separating destinations, just as we think of long journeys as the price we have to pay to get from one place to another. Sometimes, though, the journey is the destination, and the bridge connects more than just dots on a map—it joins reality with the dream world, the living with the dead, the tame with the wild.
Michael Schaub - NPR Books

A rich, riveting true story.... During her grueling three-month journey, Strayed circled around black bears and rattlesnakes, fought extreme dehydration by drinking oily gray pond water, and hiked in boots made entirely of duct tape. Reading her matter-of-fact take on love and grief and the soul-saving quality of a Snapple lemonade, you can understand why Strayed has earned a cult following as the author of Dear Sugar, a popular advice column on therumpus.net.... With its vivid descriptions of beautiful but unforgiving terrain, Wild is a cinematic story, but Strayed’s book isn’t really about big, cathartic moments. The author never "finds herself" or gets healed. When she reaches the trail’s end, she buys a cheap ice cream cone and continues down the road. . . . It’s hard to imagine anything more important than taking one step at a time. That’s endurance, and that’s what Strayed understands, almost 20 years later. As she writes, "There was only one [option], I knew. To keep walking." Our verdict: A.
Melissa Maerz - Entertainment Weekly

Strayed’s journey is the focal point of Wild, in which she interweaves suspenseful accounts of her most harrowing crises with imagistic moments of reflection. Her profound grief over her mother’s death, her emotional abandonment by her siblings and stepfather, and her personal shortcomings and misadventures are all conveyed with a consistently grounded, quietly pained self-awareness. On the trail, she fends of everything from loneliness to black bears; we groan when her boots go tumbling off a cliff and we rejoice as she transforms from a terrified amateur hiker into the ‘Queen of the PCT.’ In a style that embodies her wanderlust, Strayed transports us with this gripping, ultimately uplifting tale.
Catherine Straut - ELLE

In the summer of 1995, at age 26 and feeling at the end of her rope emotionally, Strayed resolved to hike solo the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,663-mile wilderness route stretching from the Mexican border to the Canadian and traversing nine mountain ranges and three states. In this detailed, in-the-moment re-enactment, she delineates the travails and triumphs of those three grueling months. Living in Minneapolis, on the verge of divorcing her husband, Strayed was still reeling from the sudden death four years before of her mother from cancer; the ensuing years formed an erratic, confused time “like a crackling Fourth of July sparkler.” Hiking the trail helped decide what direction her life would take, even though she had never seriously hiked or carried a pack before. Starting from Mojave, Calif., hauling a pack she called the Monster because it was so huge and heavy, she had to perform a dead lift to stand, and then could barely make a mile an hour. Eventually she began to experience “a kind of strange, abstract, retrospective fun,” meeting the few other hikers along the way, all male; jettisoning some of the weight from her pack and burning books she had read; and encountering all manner of creature and acts of nature from rock slides to snow. Her account forms a charming, intrepid trial by fire, as she emerges from the ordeal bruised but not beaten, changed, a lone survivor.
Publishers Weekly

Strayed delves into memoir after her fiction debut, Torch. She here recounts her experience hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) in 1995 after her mother's death and her own subsequent divorce. Designated a National Scenic Trail in 1968 but not completed until 1993, the PCT runs from Mexico to Canada, and Strayed hiked sections of it two summers after it was officially declared finished. She takes readers with her on the trail, and the transformation she experiences on its course is significant: she goes from feeling out of her element with a too-big backpack and too-small boots to finding a sense of home in the wilderness and with the allies she meets along the way. Readers will appreciate her vivid descriptions of the natural wonders near the PCT, particularly Mount Hood, Crater Lake, and the Sierras—what John Muir proclaimed the "Range of Light." Verdict: This book is less about the PCT and more about Strayed's own personal journey, which makes the story's scope a bit unclear. However, fans of her novel will likely enjoy this new book. —Karen McCoy, Northern Arizona Univ. Lib., Flagstaff
Library Journal

Unsentimental memoir of the author's three-month solo hike from California to Washington along the Pacific Crest Trail.... Along the way she suffered aches, pains, loneliness, blistered, bloody feet and persistent hunger. Yet the author also discovered a newfound sense of awe; for her, hiking the PCT was "powerful and fundamental" and "truly hard and glorious." Strayed was stunned by how the trail both shattered and sheltered her.... A candid, inspiring narrative of the author's brutal physical and psychological journey through a wilderness of despair to a renewed sense of self.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. “The Pacific Crest Trail wasn’t a world to me then. It was an idea, vague and outlandish, full of promise and mystery. Something bloomed inside me as I traced its jagged line with my finger on a map” (p. 4). Why did the PCT capture Strayed’s imagination at that point in her life?

2. Each section of the book opens with a literary quote or two. What do they tell you about what’s to come in the pages that follow? How does Strayed’s pairing of, say, Adrienne Rich and Joni Mitchell (p. 45) provide insight into her way of thinking?

3. Strayed is quite forthright in her description of her own transgressions, and while she’s remorseful, she never seems ashamed. Is this a sign of strength or a character flaw?

4. “I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told” (p. 51). Fear is a major theme in the book. Do you think Strayed was too afraid, or not afraid enough? When were you most afraid for her?

5. Strayed chose her own last name: “Nothing fit until one day when the word strayed came into my mind. Immediately, I looked it up in the dictionary and knew it was mine...: to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress” (p. 96). Did she choose well? What did you think when you learned she had assigned this word to herself—that it was no coincidence?

6. On the trail, Strayed encounters mostly men. How does this work in her favor? What role does gender play when removed from the usual structure of society?

7. What does the reader learn from the horrific episode in which Strayed and her brother put down their mother’s horse?

8. Strayed writes that the point of the PCT “had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets” (p. 207). How does this sensation help Strayed to find her way back into the world beyond the wilderness?

9. On her journey, Strayed carries several totems. What does the black feather mean to her? And the POW bracelet? Why does she find its loss (p. 238) symbolic?

10. Does the hike help Strayed to get over Paul? If so, how? And if not, why?

11. Strayed says her mother’s death “had obliterated me.... I was trapped by her but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could fill” (p 267). How did being on the PCT on her mother’s fiftieth birthday help Strayed to heal this wound?

12. What was it about Strayed that inspired the generosity of so many strangers on the PCT?

13. “There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another.... But I was pretty certain as I sat there that night that if it hadn’t been for Eddie, I wouldn’t have found myself on the PCT” (p. 304). How does this realization change Strayed’s attitude towards her stepfather?

14. To lighten her load, Strayed burns each book as she reads it. Why doesn’t she burn the Adrienne Rich collection?

15. What role do books and reading play in this often solitary journey?
(Questions by publisher.)

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Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me
Adrienne Brodeur, 2020
Houghton Mufflin Harcourt (HMH Books)
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781328519030

Summary
A daughter’s tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity.

On a hot July night on Cape Cod when Adrienne was fourteen, her mother, Malabar, woke her at midnight with five simple words that would set the course of both of their lives for years to come …

Ben Souther just kissed me.

Adrienne instantly became her mother’s confidante and helpmate, blossoming in the sudden light of her attention, and from then on, Malabar came to rely on her daughter to help orchestrate what would become an epic affair with her husband’s closest friend.

The affair would have calamitous consequences for everyone involved, impacting Adrienne’s life in profound ways, driving her into a precarious marriage of her own, and then into a deep depression. Only years later will she find the strength to embrace her life—and her mother—on her own terms.

Wild Game is a brilliant, timeless memoir about how the people close to us can break our hearts simply because they have access to them, and the lies we tell in order to justify the choices we make.

It’s a remarkable story of resilience, a reminder that we need not be the parents our parents were to us. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Adrienne Brodeur began her career in publishing as the cofounder, with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, of the National Magazine Award–winning Zoetrope: All-Story. She has worked as a book editor and is currently the executive director of Aspen Words. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Exquisite and harrowing…. [Wild Game] is so gorgeously written and deeply insightful, and with a line of narrative tension that never slacks, from the first page to the last, that it’s one you’ll likely read in a single, delicious sitting.
New York Times Book Review

As the saying goes, you can’t make this stuff up. [A] remarkable web of relationships in a privileged, Cape Cod world and the lies a daughter was forced to tell. Riveting.
Toronto Star

Wild Game is a memoir, but it reads very much like a novel with a first-person narrator, bringing readers closely into scenes with vivid sensual detail that paints the atmosphere with the adoring eyes of the enthralled daughter the author once was. Wild Game, for all its luscious prose and tantalizing elements, is ultimately about the slow and painful process of losing a mother.
NPR

[A] vivid memoir…[Brodeur] writes beautifully, even tenderly, as a mother herself, aware of repercussions, knowing how it all ended.
BBC

I can’t stop thinking about this extraordinary memoir.… Brodeur takes on the complicated subjects of mother-daughter relationships and family secrets with masterful storytelling and cinematic style. Be forewarned that this book requires the buddy system; you’ll need to discuss it with someone the minute you finish!
Orange County Register

Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me works effortlessly to earn my highest compliment for a memoir: It reads like a novel. The story immediately drew me in into [its] magnetic and complicated world.
Psychology

Brodeur is a deft memoirist, portraying Malabar as a woman traumatized by a violent parent and early tragedy. In this stunning tale of treachery—unsettling yet seductive—we are led through some of the darkest and most alluring corridors of the human heart.
Oprah Magazine

Adrienne Brodeur's stunning memoir is the kind of true story that makes you wonder why we'd ever need fiction. It's a beautifully written, totally engrossing story unlike any we've read before—and will surely be one of the most talked-about books of the year.
Town and Country Magazine

This electrifying, gorgeously written memoir will hold you captive until the last word.
People

[A] mother’s affair with her husband’s best friend… set in motion years of consequences, grief and family struggles, retold intimately by Brodeur and layered with detail, excitement and heartbreak throughout years of Cape Cod summers.
Parade

(Starred review) This page-turning memoir about an especially fraught mother-daughter relationship from novelist Brodeur reads like heady beach fiction.… This layered narrative of deceit, denial, and disillusionment is a surefire bestseller.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review) Brodeur's story explores the bond between mother and daughter and the ripple effect a family secret can have when passed among generations. Highly recommended. —Erin Shea, Ferguson Lib., CT
Library Journal

An absorbing story of secrets, love, and family.
Booklist

[A] candid, deftly crafted narrative.… A vivid chronicle of a daughter's struggle to find herself
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What do we learn about the author from how she tells her tale—both what she chooses to tell, and the tone of voice in which she tells it? Is this a story about her mother’s misbehavior, or about something else?

2. Revisit the Mary Oliver poem, “The Uses of Sorrow,” that serves as an epigraph to the book. Do you see the darknesses in your own life as gifts, or would you wish some of them away? Is growth possible without suffering? Consider Margot’s advice to Rennie that happiness is a choice. Is gratitude in the face of life’s difficulties a habit of mind we can choose to cultivate?

3. Malabar makes life more interesting for everyone, including us as readers. Do you feel a little bewitched by her charms? Would she be as compelling without her flaws? Doyou admire her? If so, in what ways?

4. How does Malabar upend traditional roles for women, and how does she subscribe to them? How has her mother Vivian’s influence shaped her sense of identity, as well as her relationships with other women? Rennie’s friend Kyra diagnoses Malabar as lonely, and says that loneliness is about not being known for who you are. Does Malabar know herself?

5. Malabar’s marriage to Charles and her romance with Ben occur within a privileged milieu at a time when gender roles were narrowly defi ned. What are the values of this social set, and how do they do harm to its members? Can the follies of the characters be blamed in part on an unhealthy worldview?

6. Compare Ben’s conduct during the affair to Malabar’s. Whom do you feel more sympathy for? When you look at all the adult characters in the book, is there a villain in this story?

7. Rennie is a victim of harm, a beneficiary of kindness, and an actor—for good and ill—in other people’s lives. Which of these roles does she have the most diffi cultyacknowledging? Do we learn more about how to live from our parents’ mistakes orfrom what they do right?

8. "Understandable but not acceptable" becomes Jack and Rennie’s mantra in light of the affair. Where does Rennie demonstrate that she doesn’t accept her mother’s behavior? Do you think she might hold her mother more accountable? Who is helped more by forgiveness: the forgiven or the forgiver?

9. How does Rennie’s involvement in her mother’s deception hurt her relationship with herself? And how does it damage her relationships with other people in her life? By the end of the book, have all the wounded relationships been healed?

10. Rennie manages to separate from her mother, assume ownership of her own life, and chart a new path. What are her strengths, and how do we see her using them first to help her mother, and later, using them as a force for good in her own life? What other resources does she employ to help her become the person she wants to be? Does she inspire you to address aspects of your own life that are holding you back?

11. Rennie has two experiences where time collapses and the layers of her past rush in: just before her wedding and after she gives birth to her daughter (pp. 176, 223). Whatdo these moments do for her? Have you had a similar experience that has granted you a profound glimpse of your life?

12. Throughout the story, secrets are kept—about Christopher, about the affair, about Charles’s aneurism—ostensibly to protect others from pain. Is there anything wrong with this logic? The author says that lying comes with the territory when your parents get divorced, and you don’t share information about one parent if you think it will disturb the other. Do lies of omission pave the way for bigger lies? Is a lie ever completely harmless?

13. Is it fair of Malabar to demand that Rennie never sell the necklace? Which verdict of an appraisal would be worse: for the necklace to be valuable or valueless? Would you do as Rennie does and avoid the question? Is there an heirloom in your family that’s been divisive?

14. The author shows us Cape Cod as a place of beauty, history, and bounty. In what ways does the setting contribute to the meaning of the story?

15. Rennie actively reads to help her clarify and articulate her experience. Margot tells her, "You have no idea how much you can learn about yourself by plunging into someone else’s life (138)." What light does this story shed on your own experience as a parent or child? Have books helped you make sense of your own life?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Jung Chang, 1991
Simon & Schuster
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743246989

Summary
Blending the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history, Wild Swans has become a bestselling classic in thirty languages, with more than ten million copies sold.

The story of three generations in twentieth-century China, it is an engrossing record of Mao's impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love.

Jung Chang describes the life of her grandmother, a warlord's concubine; her mother's struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents' experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a "barefoot doctor," a steelworker, and an electrician.

As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 25, 1952
• Where—Yibin, Sichuan Province, China
• Education—Ph.D., York University (UK)
• Currently—lives in London

Jung Chang is a Chinese-born British writer now living in London, best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans, selling over 10 million copies worldwide but banned in mainland China.

Her 832-page biography of Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, written with her husband, the British historian Jon Halliday, was published in June 2005 and is a highly critical description of Mao Zedong's life and work.

Early life
Chang was born March 25, 1952 in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China. Her parents were both Communist Party of China officials, and her father was greatly interested in literature. She quickly developed a love of reading and writing, composing poetry as a child.

As Party cadres, life was relatively good for her family at first; her parents worked hard, and her father became successful as a propagandist at a regional level. His formal ranking was as a "level 10 official", meaning that he was one of 20,000 or so most important cadres, or ganbu, in the country. The Communist Party provided her family with a dwelling in a guarded, walled compound, a maid and chauffeur, as well as a wet-nurse and nanny for the children. This level of privilege in China's relatively impoverished 1950s was extraordinary.

Her given name, Er-hong ("Second Swan"), sounded like the Chinese word for "faded red". As communists were "deep red", the young Er-hong, at the age of 12, asked her father to give her a new name. She wanted a name with "a military ring to it." He suggested "Jung", which means "martial affairs."

Like many of her peers, Chang chose to become a Red Guard at the age of 14, during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. In Wild Swans she said she was "keen to do so", "thrilled by my red armband". In her memoirs, Chang states that she refused to participate in the attacks on her teachers and other Chinese, and she left after a short period as she found the Red Guards too violent.

The Cultural Revolution
The failures of the Great Leap Forward had led her parents to oppose Mao Zedong's policies, though not him by name. They were targeted during the Cultural Revolution, as most high-ranking officials were. When Chang's father criticized Mao by name, Chang writes in Wild Swans that this exposed them to retaliation from Mao Zedong's supporters. Her parents were publicly humiliated — ink was poured over their heads, they were forced to wear placards denouncing them around their necks, kneel in gravel and to stand outside in the rain — followed by imprisonment, her father's treatment leading to lasting physical and mental illness. Their careers were destroyed, and her family was forced to leave their home.

Before her parents' denunciation and imprisonment, Chang had unquestioningly supported Mao and criticized herself for any momentary doubts.But by the time of his death, her respect for Mao, she writes, had been destroyed. She wrote that when she heard he had died, she had to bury her head in the shoulder of another student to pretend she was grieving.

The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. Weeping for Mao was perhaps just another programmed act in their programmed lives.

Jung Chang's depiction of the Chinese people as having been "programmed" by Maoism would ring forth in her subsequent writings.

The disruption of the university system by the Red Guards led Chang, like most of her generation, away from the political maelstroms of the academy. Instead, she spent several years as a peasant, a barefoot doctor (a part-time peasant doctor), a steelworker and an electrician, though she received no formal training because of Mao's policy, which did not require formal instruction as a prerequisite for such work

The universities were eventually re-opened and she gained a place at Sichuan University to study English, later becoming an assistant lecturer there. After Mao's death, she passed an exam which allowed her to study in the West, and her application to leave China was approved once her father was politically rehabilitated.

Leaving China
Chang left China in 1978 to study in Britain on a government scholarship, staying first in Soho, London. She later moved to Yorkshire, studying linguistics at the University of York with a scholarship from the university itself, living in Derwent College. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from York in 1982, becoming the first person from the People's Republic of China to be awarded a Ph.D. from a British university.

She has also been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Buckingham, the University of York, the University of Warwick, and the Open University. She lectured for some time at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, before retiring in the 1990s to concentrate on her writing.

In 2003, Jung Chang wrote a new foreword to Wild Swans, describing her early life in Britain and explaining why she wrote the book. Having lived in China during the 1960s and 1970s, she found Britain exciting. After the initial culture-shock, she soon grew to love the country, especially its diverse range of culture, literature and arts. She found even colourful window-boxes worth writing home about — Hyde Park and the Kew Gardens were inspiring. She took every opportunity to watch Shakespeare's plays in both London and York. However she still has a special place for China in her heart, saying in an interview with HarperCollins, "I feel perhaps my heart is still in China."

Chang lives in West London with her husband, the British historian Jon Halliday, who specializes in Soviet history. She regularly visits mainland China to see her family and friends there, with permission from the Chinese authorities, despite carrying out research on her biography of Mao there.

The publication of Jung Chang's first book Wild Swans made her a celebrity. Chang's unique style, using a personal description of the life of three generations of Chinese women to highlight the many changes that the country went through, proved to be highly successful. Large numbers of sales were generated, and the book's popularity led to it being sold around the world and translated into several languages.

Chang became a popular figure for talks about Communist China, and she has travelled across Britain, Europe, America, as well as the rest of the world. She returned to the University of York on June 14, 2005 to address the university's debating union and spoke to an audience of over 300, most of whom were students. The BBC invited her onto the panel of Question Time for a first-ever broadcast from Shanghai on 10 March 2005, but she was unable to attend when she broke her leg a few days beforehand. (Author bio from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Bursting with drama, heartbreak and horror, this extraordinary family portrait mirrors China's century of turbulence. Chang's grandmother, Yu-fang, had her feet bound at age two and in 1924 was sold as a concubine to Beijing's police chief. Yu-fang escaped slavery in a brothel by fleeing her "husband'' with her infant daughter, Bao Qin, Chang's mother-to-be. Growing up during Japan's brutal occupation, free-spirited Bao Qin chose the man she would marry, a Communist Party official slavishly devoted to the revolution. In 1949, while he drove 1000 miles in a jeep to the southwestern province where they would do Mao's spadework, Bao Qin walked alongside the vehicle, sick and pregnant (she lost the child). Chang, born in 1952, saw her mother put into a detention camp in the Cultural Revolution and later "rehabilitated." Her father was denounced and publicly humiliated; his mind snapped, and he died a broken man in 1975. Working as a "barefoot doctor" with no training, Chang saw the oppressive, inhuman side of communism. She left China in 1978 and is now director of Chinese studies at London University. Her meticulous, transparent prose radiates an inner strength.
Publishers Weekly

(Audio version.) Wild Swans is a memoir of three generations of women growing up in 20th-century China. Chang, the author, is the final link in this chain. The story reads like the sweeping family sagas of genre fiction but rises far above the norm. The characters are well drawn, the events are riveting, and the story teaches lessons of history as well as lessons of the heart. It also allows listeners to visit a world unfamiliar to most Westerners. The author brings memories of a foreign life and illuminates them with graceful prose. The narration by Anna Massey is excellent, as are the production values. This is a good choice for public libraries as well as academic libraries with a popular listening component. Multicultural collections will also benefit from this recording. —Jacqueline Smith, Philadelphia Coll. of Pharmacy & Science Lib.
Library Journal

An exceptional tribute to three generations of courageous and articulate Chinese women: the grandmother, born in 1909 into a still feudal society; the mother, a Communist official and then "enemy of the people''; and the daughter, the author, raised during the reactionary Cultural Revolution, then sent abroad in 1978, when the story ends, to study in England, where she now, at age 39, serves as Director of Chinese Studies for External Services, Univ. of London. In recounting her grandmother's early life—the binding of her feet, her time as the concubine of a warlord, her escape with her infant daughter after his death, and her marriage to a respectable middle-class doctor—Chang provides a vivid picture of traditional China and the place of women before the Communist Revolution. After the Revolution, the position of women rose: Chang's mother, who grew up during the Japanese occupation and married a Maoist guerrilla soldier, bore five children while enduring the discipline and hardship of those early revolutionary years, and later, as a civil servant and wife of an official, acquired in the new government status and advantages, especially education for her children. Raised in this "Privileged Cocoon" between 1958-65, Chang was protected from the injustices that led to the Cultural Revolution—the purges, repression, public denunciations and humiliations, the confusing and arbitrary shifts in ideology that led ultimately to the conviction of her parents, idealistic but old-time Communists, as "enemies of the people." As part of her "re-education," Chang was sent to the countryside to live as a peasant, serving without any training as a doctor and then as an electrician before being sent abroad. A valuable historical perspective on the impact of Mao on traditional Chinese culture and character—as well as an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world. Mostly, however, Chang offers an inspiring story of courage, sensitivity, intelligence, loyalty, and love, told objectively, without guilt or recrimination, in an unassuming and credible documentary style.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. All three of the women at the center of Wild Swans display great courage, often to a stunning extent — speaking out in times of enforced unanimity, facing firing squads, risking their lives for the sake of others. Compare the kinds of bravery they exemplified. Does one stand out as particularly courageous?

2. The 20th century could rightly be called an era of violence in China, and the lives of these three women were indeed remarkably touched by brutality. Although none was violent by nature, all three were witnesses to — and sometimes victims of — naked savagery, to the extent that it may have begun to seem almost mundane. How did it affect their lives, and specifically their political feelings?

3. The women of Wild Swans lived through an era of such upheaval that they were constantly being called upon to pledge allegiance to a new regime or a new leading figure, each one distant from their day-to-day lives, and each usually claiming to be more "revolutionary" or diehard than the one before. What was the effect of this disorientation? Did the women ever show a sense of political or spiritual homelessness?

4. For each of the principal figures in this book, romantic love was strictly controlled and radically circumscribed — and yet such feelings played a powerful role. How did the politicization of the deeply personal affect the lives recounted in Wild Swans? At what cost did these men and women pursue love?

5. Familial love was also the object of close government scrutiny and control in the last century, despite the historical importance of the clan in Chinese tradition. Particularly watchful was the Communist regime, which stipulated heavy penalties for "putting family first." The key players in Wild Swans often found themselves caught in the middle between concern for their loved ones and the social and political demands placed on them. Discuss the range of ways in which they reacted to this tension.

6. Ceremony, pageantry and ritual have been important elements of Chinese culture for millennia. As the author notes, it was not uncommon even in the 20th century for a family to bankrupt themselves to put on an impressive wedding or funeral. Did prevailing attitudes about ceremony seem to change over the course of the narrative in Wild Swans? What attitudes did the individual women appear hold on the subject?

7. After the decidedly mixed Kuomintang era (not to mention the brief occupations in the North by the Soviets and Japanese), the advent of Communism was embraced by the author's parents. Soon Jung Chang herself, born during the early years of the CCP, was swept up in the widespread fervor. But seeds of doubt slowly begin to appear in the book. What do you think were the key moments in Jung Chang's and her parents' changes of heart? Why?

8. For obvious reasons, Jung Chang's tale bears the most details, reported feelings and other personal touches. Describe her psychological growth or transformation during the course of her young life. Did you feel she reported her thoughts honestly? Did you ever applaud her choices? Did you ever disapprove?

9. Wild Swans is a work of biography and autobiography with many novelistic elements. It is also, however, a valuable work of 20th-century Chinese history. What did you learn about the country from reading it? If you knew the basic outline of the history, did anything strike you freshly because of the personal narrative approach?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America
Douglas Brinkley, 2009
HarperCollins
960 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060565312

Summary
In this groundbreaking epic biography, Douglas Brinkley draws on never-before-published materials to examine the life and achievements of our "naturalist president." By setting aside more than 230 million acres of wild America for posterity between 1901 and 1909, Theodore Roosevelt made conservation a universal endeavor.

This crusade for the American wilderness was perhaps the greatest U.S. presidential initiative between the Civil War and World War I. Roosevelt's most important legacies led to the creation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and passage of the Antiquities Act in 1906. His executive orders saved such treasures as Devils Tower, the Grand Canyon, and the Petrified Forest.

Tracing the role that nature played in Roosevelt's storied career, Brinkley brilliantly analyzes the influence that the works of John James Audubon and Charles Darwin had on the young man who would become our twenty-sixth president. With descriptive flair, the author illuminates Roosevelt's bird watching in the Adirondacks, wildlife obsession in Yellowstone, hikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains, ranching in the Dakota Territory, hunting in the Big Horn Mountains, and outdoor romps through Idaho and Wyoming.

He also profiles Roosevelt's incredible circle of naturalist friends, including the Catskills poet John Burroughs, Boone and Crockett Club cofounder George Bird Grinnell, forestry zealot Gifford Pinchot, buffalo breeder William Hornaday, Sierra Club founder John Muir, U.S. Biological Survey wizard C. Hart Merriam, Oregon Audubon Society founder William L. Finley, and pelican protector Paul Kroegel, among many others. He brings to life hilarious anecdotes of wild-pig hunting in Texas andbadger saving in Kansas, wolf catching in Oklahoma and grouse flushing in Iowa. Even the story of the teddy bear gets its definitive treatment.

Destined to become a classic, this extraordinary and timeless biography offers a penetrating and colorful look at Roosevelt's naturalist achievements, a legacy now more important than ever. Raising a Paul Revere–like alarm about American wildlife in peril—including buffalo, manatees, antelope, egrets, and elk—Roosevelt saved entire species from probable extinction.

As we face the problems of global warming, overpopulation, and sustainable land management, this imposing leader's stout resolution to protect our environment is an inspiration and a contemporary call to arms for us all. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 14, 1960
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Raised—Perrysville, Ohio
• Education—B.A., Ohio State University; M.A., Ph.D.,
Georgetown University
• Currently—lives in Austin, Texas

Douglas Brinkley is a prolific and acclaimed historian, writer, and editor. Currently a professor of history at Rice University, he was previously a professor of history at Tulane University. There he also served as director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilization. Brinkley is the history commentator for CBS News and a contributing editor to the magazine Vanity Fair. He joined Rice and the James Baker Institute for Public Policy on July 1, 2007.

Brinkley was born in Atlanta, Georgia. His parents were high school teachers. Raised in Perrysburg, Ohio, he earned his B.A. from Ohio State University (1982), and his M.A. (1983) and Ph.D. (1989) from Georgetown University in U.S. Diplomatic History. He has taught at Princeton University, the U.S. Naval Academy, and Hofstra University, and he has earned several honorary doctorates for his contributions to American letters including Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

During the early 1990s, Brinkley taught American Arts and Politics out of Hofstra aboard the Majic Bus [sic], a roving transcontinental classroom, from which emerged the book, The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey (1993). In 1993, he left Hofstra to teach at the University of New Orleans, where he taught the class again using two natural-gas fueled buses. According to the Associated Press, "if you can't tour the United States yourself, the next best thing is to go along with Douglas Brinkley aboard The Majic Bus."

Brinkley worked closely with his mentor, historian Stephen E. Ambrose, then director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans. Ambrose chose Brinkley to become director of the Eisenhower Center, a post Brinkley manned for five years before moving to Tulane University.

Writing and editing
Brinkley and Ambrose wrote three books together: The Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938 (1997), Witness to History (1999), and The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today (2002), a National Geographic Society best-seller (published on the bicentennial of Thomas Jefferson's doubling the size of America).

Brinkley’s first book was Jean Monnet: The Path to European Unity (1992).

It was the publication of Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years (1992) that brought Brinkley widespread acclaim. A board member of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, Brinkley then co-edited a monograph series with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and William vanden Heuvel in the 1990s. Brinkley also edited a volume entitled Dean Acheson and the Making of US Foreign Policy with Paul H. Nitze (1993).

Driven Patriot (1992), a biography of James Forrestal, received the Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt Naval History Prize.

In 1998, Brinkley's comprehensive American Heritage History of the United States was published.

The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House (1999) is widely considered instrumental in the ex-president's winning of the Nobel Peace prize.

Brinkley's epic Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and A Century of Progress (2003) won Business Week book of the year.

Brinkley was selected as the official biographer of Rosa Parks.

Brinkley is the literary executor for his late friend, the journalist Hunter S. Thompson. He is the editor of a three-volume collection of Thompson's letters.

Brinkley is also the authorized biographer for Beat generation author Jack Kerouac, having edited Kerouac's diaries as Windblown World (2004).

He has also written profiles of Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and Ken Kesey and Bob Dylan for Rolling Stone magazine.

In January 2004, Brinkley released Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, about U.S. Senator John Kerry's military service and anti-war activism during the Vietnam War. The 2004 documentary movie, Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, is loosely based on Brinkley's book

In January 2006, Brinkley and fellow historian Julie M. Fenster released Parish Priest, a biography of Father Michael J. McGivney, the founder of the Knights of Columbus.

In May 2006, Brinkley released The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a record of the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast. The book won the 2007 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was a Los Angeles Times book prize finalist. He also served as the primary historian for Spike Lee's documentary about Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.

Brinkley edited the New York Times best-selling The Reagan Diaries (2007).

Brinkley is also the author of The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion (2005), which rose to #5 on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Brinkley’s The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America was featured on the bestseller lists for National Independent bookstore (for non-fiction), The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

Extras

• Stephen Ambrose called Brinkley "the best of the new generation of American historians."

• In contrast, historian Wilfred McClay in the New York Sun appraised Brinkley's scholarship as one that has failed to "put forward a single memorable idea, a single original analysis or a single lapidary phrase." Taking note of Brinkley's biography of John Kerry, the Weekly Standard noted that it contained "various factual inaccuracies and contradictions," describing it as a "famously sycophantic biography."

• Six of his books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
For the patient reader Mr. Brinkley's fervent enthusiasm for his material eventually prevails over the book's sprawling data and slow pace. He clearly shares Roosevelt's rapture for mesmerizing settings like the North Dakota Badlands.... He conveys the great vigor with which Roosevelt approached his conservation mission. And he delves into the philosophical contradictions inherent in a man whose Darwinian thinking led him both to revere and kill the same creatures.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

How a city-born child of privilege became one of the greatest forces in American conservation is the subject of Douglas Brinkley's vast, inspiring and enormously entertaining book.... [T]his book has Rooseveltian energy. It is largehearted, full of the vitality of its subject and a palpable love for the landscapes it describes.
Jonathan Rosen - New York Times Book Review

Brinkley fully inhabits Roosevelt ’s mind, a condition that has its disadvantages—the book, with blow-by-blow accounts of college hiking trips and squabbles between naturalists, does not entirely earn its nine hundred pages, making it harder to see the forests (and the story of how T.R. rescued them) for the trees
The New Yorker

Brinkley has mastered the art of balancing scholarship and research with readability. In Wilderness Warrior, though, the author's affinity for his subject and the vastness of the literature on Roosevelt get in the way of a message that might have been made clearer with some prudent cutting
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 Wilderness Warrior:

1. What does Brinkley mean when he says that "History still hasn't caught up with the long-term magnitude of [Roosevelt's] achievement"?

2. To what does Brinkley attribute T.R.'s drive to protect an astonishing 300 million acres of America's wilderness? How did his childhood passions and the loss of his first wife affect his later policies as president? Was there a coherent philosophy behind his convictions?

3. Brinkley suggests complex motives: "It's hard to escape the feeling that Roosevelt enjoyed creating national forests and... monuments in part because it was rubbing his opponents' faces in his wilderness philosophy of living." What do you think?

4. How does the author present Roosevelt's character, both as a man and a president? How would you describe Roosevelt's internal contradictions—his stance on hunting, for instance?

5. Talk about the political methods Roosevelt used to enact his conservation policies: would you describe them as "bold" (imaginative and gutsy) or "blunt" (dictatorial).

6. Who were the opponents of Roosevelt's conservation efforts—and what were their arguments? How similar is the situation today—those arrayed on either side of environmental issues, as well as their arguments pro and con?

7. What about John Lacey of Iowa? What role did he play in the history of American conservation? What are some of the other neglected figures who helped shape the country's conservation movement?

8. Describe Roosevelt's approach to Darwinism.

9. What do you make of the effort to save Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite National Park, which was eventually flooded to provide water for San Francisco. How does one balance conservation and growth? What was Roosevelt's attitude? What is the author's? What is yours?

10. How many of America's scenic jewels described in this book have you visited? Are there those you would particularly like to see? Does the author do a credible job of painting the landscapes in your mind's eye—in other words, does Brinkley create a sense of place?

11. What are some of the most interesting facets of Roosevelt's life—or of American history—that you learned from this book? What else surprised or enlightened you?

12. A number of reviewers found this book overly long, bogged down in details. Do you agree with them?

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

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Wildflower: An Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Death in Africa
Mark Seal, 2009
Random House
232 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812979091

Summary
Wildflower is a compelling work of narrative nonfiction in which the shocking death of a dedicated environmentalist becomes a broader story of a beautiful, breathtaking country in peril.

In January 2006, Joan Root, a sixty-nine-year-old naturalist, Oscar-nominated wildlife filmmaker, and staunch conservationist, was murdered by two masked men armed with an AK-47 shortly after midnight in her bedroom on the shore of Kenya’s beautiful Lake Naivasha. Was it a random robbery gone bad, as the local police seemed to think, or was it a cold-blooded contract killing carried out at the behest of enemies Root had made in her efforts to protect Kenya’s wildlife? Veteran journalist Mark Seal set out to investigate this gripping real-life murder mystery—and instead found an unforgettable story not only of a tragic death but of the remarkable life that preceded it.

With compassion and an unswerving regard for the truth, Seal lays bare the deeply moving, inspirational history of Joan Root, covering her early days in Kenya as a shy young woman with an almost uncanny ability to connect to animals; her whirlwind courtship with the dashing Alan Root, their marriage, and the twenty years of nonstop adventure, passionate romance, and groundbreaking wildlife filmmaking that followed, both in Africa and around the world; the shattering disintegration of the marriage and partnership; and Joan’s triumphant struggle to reinvent herself as the protector of her lakeshore community’s fragile ecosystem–a struggle that would lead to her death.

Wildflower is also the story of Kenya itself. A country blessed with unmatched beauty that is one of the lastrepositories of rare wildlife on the African continent, Kenya has also been scarred by decades of colonization and a culture of corruption fueled by the frequently competing agendas of conserva-tionists and business interests. Joan Root dreamed of a bright future for Kenya and spent her life fighting with quiet heroism and courage to make that dream a reality. Her life ended too soon, but her legacy lives on. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Mark Seal has been a journalist for more than thirty years. Currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he has written for many major magazines and served as a collaborator on almost twenty nonfiction books.

Although he has written thousands of stories, Seal says none has struck a chord with readers more than the story of the incredible life and brutal death of Joan Root, which he originally reported in the August 2006 issue of Vanity Fair. He lives in Aspen, Colorado (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
More significant than Seal’s investigation into Root’s murder is his portrait of this extraordinary adventurer.
Washington Post

Fascinating...[Mark Seal pulls] various elements into a compelling narrative: the personal love story. The physical splendor of Africa and its endangered wildlife.
USA Today

Compelling . . . [a] strange, brutal, sad and beautiful story...a vivid and intensely captivating chronicle of fairy-tale lives played out against a once wild and seductive backdrop that is quickly disappearing.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

Featuring an extraordinary real-life heroine, exotic settings, a love triangle, and a mysterious death, [Mark] Seal’s riveting portrayal of famous wildlife filmmaker Joan Root is not to be missed.
Good Housekeeping

Vanity Fair contributing editor Seal expands on his August 2006 article for the magazine in this sweeping and atmospheric biography of the conservationist and wildlife filmmaker Joan Root, who was brutally murdered in her home on Lake Naivasha, Kenya, a region she was trying to save from poachers and environmental ruin. Intrigued by Root's suspicious death and cinematic life with husband and nature documentarian Alan Root, Seal mines Joan's diaries and writings to offer a lush love story set in the heyday of British colonialism in Nairobi, where amid the decadence and dilettantism, Alan fell in love with the lovely Joan Thorpe, an "Ingrid Bergman lookalike" and daughter of an English adventurer. Their partnership produced award-winning documentaries (their 1978 film on termite mounds, Mysterious Castles of Clay, was narrated by Orson Welles and nominated for an Oscar) and television specials. Their inability to have children was a source of constant sorrow for the couple, and despite the romance of their joint pursuits, their marriage unraveled. Seal's effort is a seamless story redolent with adventure, passion and heartbreak; its beauty nearly eclipses the tragedy of Root's untimely-and unsolved-death in 2006.
Publishers Weekly

Seal, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a journalist for 34 years, expands on his portrait of British naturalist and filmmaker Joan Root, which appeared in the August 2006 issue of Vanity Fair following her brutal murder at her Kenyan farmhouse. Seal gives us the sad details up front and then leads us, gently and sensitively, through the story of this shy yet remarkable woman. The films she made with husband Alan Root became international hits, and one, Mysterious Castles of Clay, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1978. After her divorce, Joan Root became an ardent conservationist who fought poaching and illegal fishing on Lake Navaisha, a passion that may have led to her death. This is a great story built from many interviews of friends and family and from Root's extensive diaries and letters. What an adventure! What an example! Highly recommended.
Library Journal

Zesty biography of wildlife documentarian and conservationist Joan Root (1937-2006). By the time Alan and Joan Root's marriage ended in 1981, they had gained renown as documentary filmmakers of Africa's fauna—or rather Alan had, as Vanity Fair contributing editor Seal makes clear. Spouting ideas and exuding reckless energy, Alan was the kind of gentleman who tended to hog all the oxygen, while shy, retiring Joan sturdily managed their affairs and the support side of the operation. ("You were the wind beneath my wings," he admitted in a letter after their divorce.) But she would involuntarily steal the headlines in 2006 when she was shot to death in her home in Kenya, perhaps by robbers, perhaps by people angered by her strong stand against poaching and pollution. To make sense of that unsolved crime, Seal offers a detailed look at Root's life. The author talked extensively with her former husband and had access to a trove of Joan's diaries and letters (many unsent to Alan). Limning the Roots' marriage and professional collaboration, Seal captures both the extraordinary quality of their work and Joan's personality—specifically her attraction to her emotional opposite in Alan and her depression when he left. Seal expertly draws out the drama of the Roots' days afield, "being chased, mauled, bitten, gored, and stung by every conceivable creature as they drove, flew, ran, and swam across Africa," filming as they went. Even more compelling is the author's portrait of the years Joan spent alone on the shores of Kenya's Lake Naivasha, her fortitude in trying to protect the ecologically fragile area from poaching and illegal fishing and the fallout of the flower industry that sprang up on its shore. These were complex issues that braided social, economic and cultural factors, further fraught by Joan's relationship with a poacher. Transports readers into the midst of an incandescent, doomed life.
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 Wildflower:

1. There are two transformations in this book: first, the flowering of Joan Root from a shy, reticent wife in the shadow of her flamboyant husband into a fierce defender of African wildlife and natural beauty; second, the destruction of the once edenic land beloved by Root, Kenya's Lake Naivasha. Which story do you find most compelling?

2. Describe Joan and Alan Root—how different from one another were they? Were there any similarities?

3. What was the nature of the couple's marriage? What role did Joan play in Alan's career as a filmmaker? At some point, Joan believed she had been "too dutiful" as Alan's assistant. Is that an accurate self-assessment?

4. What did you find most interesting about filmmaking wild animals? Talk about your favorite episodes...the baby elephant on the cover, perhaps?

5. The book, purposely or not, raises interesting questions about the dichotomy of economic development vs. environmental conservation. Is the flower industry helping the Kenyan economy and its people? What about its workers—what benefits, if any, do they derive from the industry? What insights have you gained into this dilemma?

6. How well does this book capture the complex feelings on the part of the Africans toward the British settlers—resentment vs. appreciation? How did Joan Root's life and death reflect those paradoxical attitudes?

7. We know at the outset that Joan Root will lose her life. What effect does that knowledge have on your reading? Does knowing lend the book a sense of inevitability...fate beyond our control...sadness...irony?

8. Did Joan Root want what was best for Africa...or what was best for her, based on her personal vision of what Africa should be?

9. We learn much about Joan Root through letters she had written years earlier and through Alan Root, who didn't know the transformed Joan. Do you feel we get a true portrait of Joan Root?

10. Who killed Joan Root...and why? What is the "official" explanation? What do you think?

11. What is the significance of the book's title, "Wildflower"?

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

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Will My Cat Eay My Eyeballs?: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals about Death
Caitlin Doughty, 2019
W.W. Norton & Co.
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393652703

Summary
Best-selling author and mortician Caitlin Doughty answers real questions from kids about death, dead bodies, and decomposition.

Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. The best questions come from kids.

What would happen to an astronaut’s body if it were pushed out of a space shuttle? Do people poop when they die? Can Grandma have a Viking funeral?

In Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, Doughty blends her mortician’s knowledge of the body and the intriguing history behind common misconceptions about corpses to offer factual, hilarious, and candid answers to thirty-five distinctive questions posed by her youngest fans.

In her inimitable voice, Doughty details lore and science of what happens to, and inside, our bodies after we die. Why do corpses groan? What causes bodies to turn colors during decomposition? And why do hair and nails appear longer after death?

Readers will learn the best soil for mummifying your body, whether you can preserve your best friend’s skull as a keepsake, and what happens when you die on a plane.

Beautifully illustrated by Dianne Ruz, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? shows us that death is science and art, and only by asking questions can we begin to embrace it. 36 illustrations (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 19, 1984
• Raised—Oahu, Hawaii, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Chicago; B.S., Cypress College
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California

Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and the of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (2014), From Here to Eternity (2017), and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? (2019). She is the creator of the web series "Ask a Mortician." She lives in Los Angeles, California, where she owns and runs a funeral home. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? is funny, dark, and at times stunningly existential, revealing not only how little we understand about death, but also how much kids can handle.
Marianne Eloise - Guardian (UK)

There’s serious science here, but also cultural lessons in death and dying, a little history, and a touch of gruesomeness wrapped in that shroud of sharp, witty humor.
Terri Schlichenmeyer - Philadelphia Tribune

[E]very one of Doughty’s answers serves as a charming guide into something we take enormous pains to avoid.
B. David Zarley - Paste Magazine

With every ounce of straight-talking spunk one could muster for this topic, Doughty delivers a surprisingly heart-warming read.
Christy Lynch - BookPage

[Doughty] provides answers to questions both humorous and moving, bringing tiny and full-sized mortals alike to a greater comfort with and understanding of the one transition that will happen to us all.
Anna Spydell - BookPage

[A] delightful mixture of science and humor.
Library Journal

Doughty's writing is unusually conversational in tone for a book with subjects that can be considered taboo. Not only does she manage to make it extremely informative, throughout she includes her comments with sometimes profound thoughts, real humor and a significant dose of brilliant wit.
Pamela Kramer - BookReporter

Doughty's answers are as delightful and distinctive as the questions. She blends humor with respect for the dead…. Her investigations of ritual, custom, law and science are thorough, and she doesn't shy from naming the parts of Grandma's body that might leak after she is gone.
Julia Kastner - Shelf Awareness

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

1. Of the 35 questions asked in this book, which do you find most intriguing? Which are the funniest? What questions would you want to ask Caitlin Doughty?

2. What have you learned after reading Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?

3. Doughty compares the silence surrounding issues of death to the ways we deal with conversations around sex. Do you agree?

4. (Follow-up to Question 3) Adults tend to shut down children's questions about death. Is that wise? What about instituting "death education" classes in school or in church for children? At what age should young people learn about dying and death?

5. Doughty's mission, in her books, including this one, and on her YouTube series, "Ask a Mortician," is to dispel our fear of death, adults' as well as children's. Does this book help in achieving that goal? After reading Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, do you have a different attitude toward, or understanding of, death and dying?

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

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Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
David Zucchino, 2020
Grove/Atlantic
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802128386

Summary
From Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino comes a searing account of the Wilmington riot and coup of 1898, an extraordinary event unknown to most Americans.

By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina’s largest city and a shining example of a mixed-race community.

It was a bustling port city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a Fusionist government of Republicans and Populists that included black aldermen, police officers and magistrates.

There were successful black-owned businesses and an African American newspaper, The Record. But across the state—and the South—white supremacist Democrats were working to reverse the advances made by former slaves and their progeny.

In 1898, in response to a speech calling for white men to rise to the defense of Southern womanhood against the supposed threat of black predators, Alexander Manly, the outspoken young Record editor, wrote that some relationships between black men and white women were consensual. His editorial ignited outrage across the South, with calls to lynch Manly.

But North Carolina’s white supremacist Democrats had a different strategy. They were plotting to take back the state legislature in November “by the ballot or bullet or both,” and then use the Manly editorial to trigger a “race riot” to overthrow Wilmington’s multi-racial government.

Led by prominent citizens including Josephus Daniels, publisher of the state’s largest newspaper, and former Confederate Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, white supremacists rolled out a carefully orchestrated campaign that included raucous rallies, race-baiting editorials and newspaper cartoons, and sensational, fabricated news stories.

With intimidation and violence, the Democrats suppressed the black vote and stuffed ballot boxes (or threw them out), to win control of the state legislature on November eighth.

Two days later, more than 2,000 heavily armed Red Shirts swarmed through Wilmington, torching the Record office, terrorizing women and children, and shooting at least sixty black men dead in the streets. The rioters forced city officials to resign at gunpoint and replaced them with mob leaders. Prominent blacks—and sympathetic whites—were banished. Hundreds of terrified black families took refuge in surrounding swamps and forests.

This brutal insurrection is a rare instance of a violent overthrow of an elected government in the U.S. It halted gains made by blacks and restored racism as official government policy, cementing white rule for another half century.

It was not a "race riot," as the events of November 1898 came to be known, but rather a racially motivated rebellion launched by white supremacists.

In Wilmington’s Lie, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino uses contemporary newspaper accounts, diaries, letters and official communications to create a gripping and compelling narrative that weaves together individual stories of hate and fear and brutality. This is a dramatic and definitive account of a remarkable but forgotten chapter of American history. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
David Zucchino is a contributing writer for The New York Times. He has covered wars and civil conflicts in more than three dozen countries. Zucchino was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from apartheid South Africa and is a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for his reporting from Iraq, Lebanon, Africa, and inner-city Philadelphia. He is the author of Wilmington's Lie (2020) Thunder Run (2004), and Myth of the Welfare Queen. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
David Zucchino is one of the finest foreign correspondents I have ever worked with in 40 years of journalism. Now imagine you take someone with David’s reporting skills and transport him back in history to 1898 and Wilmington, North Carolina. And you tell him to tell us the story of the only violent overthrow of an elected government in American history. It was perpetrated by white supremacists seeking to reverse the remarkable advances in racial pluralism in Wilmington of that day—a positive example that was primed to spread throughout the state, and beyond. What you end up with is a gripping, cannot-put-down book that is both history and a distant mirror on just how much can go wrong in this great country of ours when populist politicians play the race card without restraint.
Thomas L. Friedman - New York Times

Brilliant…. Zucchino, a contributing writer for the New York Times, does not overwrite the scenes. His moral judgement stands at a distance. He simply describes what happened and the lies told to justify it all…. The details contained in the last part of the book are heart-wrenching. With economy and a cinematic touch, Zucchino recounts the brutal assault on black Wilmington.
Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. - New York Times Book Review

David Zucchino offers a gripping account of one of the most disturbing, though virtually unknown, political events in American history…. Thanks to Mr. Zucchino’s unflinching account, we now have the full, appalling story. As befits a serious journalist, he avoids polemics and lets events speak for themselves. Wilmington’s Lie joins a growing shelf of works that unpeel the brutal realities of the post-Civil War South…. [I]t is books such as these, not least Wilmington’s Lie, that have redeemed the truth of post-Civil War history from the tenacious mythology of racism.
Wall Street Journal

In Wilmington’s Lie, David Zucchino, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has covered conflicts around the world, punctures the myths surrounding the insurrection and provides a dynamic and detailed account of the lives of perpetrators and victims…. Deeply researched and profoundly relevant, Wilmington’s Lie explains how [the coup] happened and suggests how much work remains to be done to come to terms with what took place.
Washington Post

This is an amazing story.
Dave Davies - NPR Fresh Air

David Zucchino offers a gripping account of one of the most disturbing, though virtually unknown, political events in American history…. Thanks to Mr. Zucchino’s unflinching account, we now have the full, appalling story. As befits a serious journalist, he avoids polemics and lets events speak for themselves. Wilmington’s Lie joins a growing shelf of works that unpeel the brutal realities of the post-Civil War South…it is books such as these, not least Wilmington’s Lie, that have redeemed the truth of post-Civil War history from the tenacious mythology of racism.
Wall Street Journal

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Zucchino cuts through a century of propaganda, myth, and big white lies to unmask the stunning history of the Wilmington coup, its origins in the political climate of the era, and its far-reaching implications for North Carolina and the rest of the resurgent Confederacy in the decades that followed.
New York Journal of Books

(Starred review) [S]earing…. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Zucchino paints a disturbing portrait of the massacre and how it was covered up by being described as a "race riot" sparked by African-Americans.… [M]asterful.
Publishers Weekly

[A] tragic story of denied civil rights…. Even astute readers of history and civil rights will be alarmed by this story, which is why it should be read. For fans of American history, politics, and civil rights. —Keith Klang, Port Washington P.L., NY
Library Journal

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Zucchino shines his reporter's spotlight on what he aptly calls a murderous coup as well as exploring its background and longterm consequences…The result is both a page-turner and a sobering reminder of democracy's fragility.
Booklist

(Starred review) A searing and still-relevant tale of racial injustice at the turn of the 20th century.… Zucchino's narrative is clear and appropriately outraged without being strident. A book that does history a service by uncovering a shameful episode, one that resonates strongly today.
Kirkus Reviews

Pierces layers of myth and invented history…. Wilmington's Lie reconstructs the only violent overthrow of an elected government in U.S. history, tying the white supremacist bloodshed to political goals that are still relevant today.
Shelf Awareness

Wilmington’s Lie is a riveting and mesmerizing page turner, with lessons about racial violence that echo loudly today.
BookPage

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 WILMINGTON'S LIE … then take off on your own:

1. Had you known of the Wilmington massacre before reading David Zucchino's book? If so, what was your understanding of the events recounted in the book?

2. Does Wilmington's Lie challenge your view of who we are as a nation? Have we changed over the past 120+ years? How or how not?

3. Why do white people have difficulties with black peoples' self-assertion? To what extent does white anger still exist in the 21st century? What is or was the source of white anger? What about black anger?

4. Josephus Daniels, publisher of the Record, and Furnifold Simmons of the state's Democratic Party were able to exploit the anger and fears of the white population through an intentional campaign of disinformation. Is today's public as gullible as it was at the turn of the 20th century? Or, given the impact of social media, are we perhaps more so?

5. Talk about the response of the governor of North Carolina, as well as that of President William McKinley? What prevented both men from intervening?

6. Overall, what parallels, if any, does Wilmington's Lie have to today? What lessons, if any, can we learn?

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

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Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind
Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, 2015
Penguin Publishing Group
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399174100

Summary
Is it possible to make sense of something as elusive as creativity?

Based on psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman’s groundbreaking research and Carolyn Gregoire’s popular article in the Huffington Post, Wired to Create offers a glimpse inside the “messy minds” of highly creative people.

Revealing the latest findings in neuroscience and psychology, along with engaging examples of artists and innovators throughout history, the book shines a light on the practices and habits of mind that promote creative thinking.

Kaufman and Gregoire untangle a series of paradoxes—like mindfulness and daydreaming, seriousness and play, openness and sensitivity, and solitude and collaboration—to show that it is by embracing our own contradictions that we are able to tap into our deepest creativity.

Each chapter explores one of the ten attributes and habits of highly creative people:

• Imaginative Play
• Passion
• Daydreaming
• Solitude
• Intuition
• Openness to Experience
• Mindfulness
• Sensitivity
• Turning Adversity into Advantage
• Thinking Differently

With insights from the work and lives of Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Marcel Proust, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Edison, Josephine Baker, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, musician Thom Yorke, chess champion Josh Waitzkin, video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, and many other creative luminaries, Wired to Create helps us better understand creativity—and shows us how to enrich this essential aspect of our lives. (From the publisher.)

Author Bios
Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D., is scientific director of the Imagination Institute and investigates the measurement and development of imagination, creativity and well-being in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written or edited six previous books, including Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined (2013). He is also co-founder of The Creativity Post, host of The Psychology Podcast, and he writes the blog Beautiful Minds for Scientific American. Kaufman lives in Philadelphia. (From the publisher.)

Carolyn Gregoire is a senior writer at the Huffington Post, where she reports on psychology, mental health, and neuroscience. She has spoken at TEDx and the Harvard Public Health Forum, and has appeared on MSNBC, the Today show, the History Channel and HuffPost Live. Gregoire lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[T]he authors explore 10 “habits of mind” that great creative thinkers...cultivate in themselves.... By studying the standouts in creativity, they conclude, we can all learn how to enrich our well-being.... [N]ever pedantic, and always educational and inspiring.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Kaufman...and Gregoire...delineate the untidy ins and outs of inventiveness and how a person might also dislike his or her creative potential.... [An] explorative how-to guide...fascinating and clearly written. —Kaitlin Connors, Virginia Beach P.L.
Library Journal

For artistic people who've always wondered why they might not fit the norm, Kaufman and Gregoire provide some valid answers. For those curious about how writers, artists, and musicians manifest their art..., the authors pull back the curtains on the fascinating world of creativity.
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 start a discussion for Wired to Create...then take off on your own:

1. The authors say that "creative people tend to have messy minds." How so? They postulate that creativity is a contradictory trait. What are the conflicting mental states that creativity draws upon or fuses?

2. We generally consider the creative mind restricted to a select group of artists, scientists, writers, and musicians. Why do the authors suggest that personal creativity is important for everyone's sense of well-being, not just the geniuses?

2. Put another way, what does it mean to say that we are all "wired to create"?

3. Do you find Wired to Create empowering on a personal level? If you have never thought of yourself as particularly creative—but wish you were—how might you tap into some of the book's ideas in order to enhance the creative side of yourself?

4. Follow-up to Question 3: If you consider yourself a fairly (or very) creative individual, have you often felt alone or outside the norm? Why, according to Kaufman and Gregoire, is that experience not uncommon for creative people?

5. Do you have anyone in your life, a family member or friend, whom you consider highly creative? Is that person different—in terms of personality, life style, or career trajectory—from others you know?

6. Consider the 10 habits of mind the authors put forth. Which do you find yourself most aligned with? Which is most alien to you? Which habit do you wish you had but don't.

7. The authors draw from creative individuals in history, a fairly select group of geniuses. Whose story do you find most interesting, or perhaps relate to on a personal level?

8. Talk about some of the more recent neurological findings that explain the creative impulse. It was once believed, for instance, that creativity was restricted to the right side of the brain, but our understanding has changed. What else have scientists learned recently about creativity?

9. What have you learned from reading Wired to Create? What surprised you? Did the book inspire you to think differently about yourself and your own creative ability?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
James Surowiecki, 2004
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385721707

Summary
In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1967
• Where—Meriden, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina; graduate
studies at Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, NY

James Surowiecki is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the popular business column, “The Financial Page.” His work has appeared in a wide range of publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Artforum, Wired, and Slate. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. (From the publisher.)

More
Surowiecki was born in Meriden, Connecticut and spent several childhood years in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico where he received a junior high school education from Southwestern Educational Society (SESO).

On May 5, 1979, he won the Scripps-Howard Regional Puerto Rico Spelling Bee championship. He is a 1984 graduate of Choate Rosemary Hall and a 1988 alumnus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar. Surowiecki pursued Ph.D. studies in American History on a Mellon Fellowship at Yale University before becoming a financial journalist. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and is married to Slate culture editor Meghan O'Rourke.

Before joining The New Yorker, he wrote “The Bottom Line” column for New York magazine and was a contributing editor at Fortune.

He got his start on the Internet when he was hired from graduate school by Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner, to be the Fool's editor-in-chief of its culture site on America Online, entitled "Rogue" (1995-6). As The Motley Fool closed that site down and focused on finance, the versatile Surowiecki made the switch over to become a finance writer, which he did over the succeeding three years, including being assigned to write the Fool's column on Slate from 1997-2000.

In 2002, Surowiecki edited an anthology, Best Business Crime Writing of the Year, a collection of articles from different business news sources that chronicle the fall from grace of various CEOs. In 2004, he published The Wisdom of Crowds, in which he argued that in some circumstances, large groups exhibit more intelligence than smaller, more elite groups, and that collective intelligence shapes business, economies, societies and nations. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
The author has a knack for translating the most algebraic of research papers into bright expository prose.
New York Times Book Review

Surowiecki, who has fashioned a fascinating financial column in the New Yorker by using cutting-edge social science research to interpret market life, finds ample evidence to support his argument. He writes with command and flair, weaving together entertaining anecdotes from popular culture and business history and accessible summaries of arcane theoretical debates in behavioral economics, sociology and psychology. The Wisdom of Crowds is both intellectually challenging and a pleasure to read.
Eric Klinenberg - Washington Post

This book is not just revolutionary but essential reading for everyone.
Christian Science Monitor

Convincingly argues that under the right circumstances, it’s the crowd that’s wiser than even society’s smartest individuals. New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki enlivens his argument with dozens of illuminating anecdotes and case studies from business, social psychology, sports and everyday life.
Entertainment Weekly

While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we're all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest). His rubric, then, covers a range of problems, including driving in traffic, competing on TV game shows, maximizing stock market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google. If four basic conditions are met, a crowd's "collective intelligence" will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don't know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. "Wise crowds" need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people's errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single expert had been in charge. Surowiecki's style is pleasantly informal, a tactical disguise for what might otherwise be rather dense material. He offers a great introduction to applied behavioral economics and game theory. While armchair social scientists (e.g., readers of The Tipping Point) will find this book interesting, college economics, math, statistics and finance students could really profit from spending time with Surowiecki.
Publishers Weekly

According to Surowiecki, the "simple but powerful truth" at the heart of his book is that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." Surowiecki, a staff writer for the Financial Page of The New Yorker, analyzes the concept of collective wisdom and applies it to various areas of the social sciences, including economics and politics. The author examines three kinds of problems involved in collective wisdom: cognition, or problems with definite solutions; coordination, where members of a group figure out how to coordinate their behavior with one another; and cooperation, involving getting self-centered individuals to work together. Part 1 studies the three problems (cognition, coordination, and cooperation) and the factors it takes for the crowd to be wise (diversity, dependence, and a specific type of decentralization). Part 2 contains case studies illustrating both success and failure of collective intelligence. Surowiecki also draws upon studies and works of past theorists of collective intelligence, including Charles Mackay's landmark Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. This work is an intriguing study of collective intelligence and how it works in contemporary society. —Lucy Heckman, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica, NY
Library Journal

Multitudes are generally smarter than their smartest members, declares New Yorker writer Surowiecki. With his theory of the inherent sagacity of large groups, Surowiecki seems to differ with Scottish journalist Charles Mackay's 1841 classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which dealt with such stupidities as the South Sea Bubble, tulipmania, odd styles of whiskers, and dueling. Our 21st-century author admits that there are impediments and constraints to the intelligence of large groups, usually problems of cognition, coordination, and cooperation. A group must have knowledge, Surowiecki states: not extensive knowledge, but rudimentary comprehension of basic fact with harmonized behavior by individual members. Finally, individuals must go beyond self-interest for the good of all. That's how capital markets and Google's algorithm work, and how science isolated the SARS virus. Lack of the basics leads to traffic jams, the dot-com crash, and the Columbia shuttle mission disaster. If crowds are inherently clever, a reader may be prompted to ask, just how smart is a flock of turkeys? Not very smart, certainly, but smarter, Surowiecki would assert, than the smartest turkey individual. A school of herring is going to be more intelligent than any single fish in it. All this may be less than encouraging to hot-stock analysts, high-profile CEOs, and others who sell their personal expertise for a high salary, but the author argues persuasively that collective wisdom works better than the intelligent fiat of any individual. His wide-ranging study links psychology and game theory, economics and management theory, social science and public policy. And it advances Mackay's report from times when, as the Scot put it, "knavery gathered a rich harvest from cupidity." Valuable insights regarding information cascades, crowd herding, cognitive collaboration, and group polarization. There is some individual, independent wisdom to be found here.
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 Wisdom of Crowds:

1. In what way does Surowiecki's central proposition—that a crowd is smarter than its smartest person—seem counter-intuitive? Consider our culture, which is steeped in the twin beliefs of individualism and meritocracy.

2. What does Surowiecki mean when he says crowds are "information minus error"?

3. Care to comment on this: The more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made." How does that remark challenge the idea of "expert authority"? Does that mean that decisions are best made by committees?

4. What is the reason that crowds are smarter and make better decisions than individuals?

5. What are the basic problems, or obstacles, that all groups face and that must be overcome if a group is to act with intelligence?

6. What conditions must be met if groups are to reach sound decisions? How difficult are these conditions to meet?

7. Talk about how groups fail to attain wisdom? How does Surowiecki suggest this happens?

8. In terms of group failure, discuss the NASA Challenger disaster. How does that tragedy fit within this book's framework?

9. Contrast Surowiecki's theory with "group think," or crowd psychology, in which groups tend toward conformity, often to the detriment of sound decisions. What does Surowiecki believe is necessary to guard against group think?

10. Consider your personal experience with groups and organizations—personal or professional. Of those groups, do any meet the necessary conditions of Question 6? How do decisions get made in the groups you belong to?

11. The Wisdom of Crowds was written four years before the 2008 collapse of the housing bubble and subsequent global recession. How would (does) Surowiecki explain the irrational behavior of Wall Street and Main Street?

12. Which of the numerous anecdotes which Surowiecki includes in his book do you find most intriguing? Do his case studies sufficiently support his ideas? Might the author be open to the charge that he chooses only those exaples that support his position?

13. Talk about the ramifications of crowd wisdom for businesses, governance, science, and everyday life—walking down a busy sidewalk, driving in traffic, or the audience on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" Does the theory have application to your own life?

14. Can you think of examples where Surowiecki's therory of crowd intelligence might not apply? Say, in situations that undergo continual change—warfare, consumer preferences, growth in technology?

15. Does Surowiecki adequately justify (or prove) his thesis...at least to your satisfaction?

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

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Witches: Salem, 1692
Stacy Schiff, 2015
Little, Brown and Co.
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316200608

Summary
It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death.

The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other.

Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic.

As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal, The Witches is Stacy Schiff's account of this fantastical story—the first great American mystery unveiled fully for the first time by one of our most acclaimed historians. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 26, 1961
• Where—Adams, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Williams College
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize in Biography (more below)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York

Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American nonfiction author. Born in Adams, Massachusetts, Schiff attended Phillips Andover Academy preparatory school and went on to earn her B.A. degree from Williams College in 1982. She was a Senior Editor at Simon & Schuster until 1990.

Her essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times and Times Literary Supplement. She is a guest columnist at the New York Times, as well as a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, which noted that she has been "regularly praised for both her meticulous scholarship and her witty style."

In 2000, Schiff won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Vera Nabokov, wife and muse of author Vladimir Nabokov. She was also a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Saint-Exupéry: A Biography of Antoine de Saint Exupery.

Her work, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (2005) won a number of awards. In discussing the book, author and historican Ron Chernow wrote, "Even if forced to at gunpoint, Stacy Schiff would be incapable of writing a dull page or a lame sentence." Gordon S. Wood hailed the book as "Stunning. A remarkably subtle and penetrating portrait of Franklin and his diplomacy."

Schiff's 2010 biography Cleopatra: A Life reached number 3 on the New York Times Best Seller list and garnered extraordinary reviews. The Wall Street Journal's critic wrote, "Stacy Schiff does a rare thing; she gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist." Rick Riordan declared Cleopatra "impossible to put down;" Simon Winchester predicted the book would become a classic.

Witches: Salem, 1692, published in 2015, recounts the witch trials and mass hysteria in New England, as well as Europe. Harvard historian David D. Hall said the book "is as close as we will ever come to understanding what happened in and around Salem in 1692. Courtrooms, streets, churches, farm yards, taverns, bedrooms-all became theater-like places where anger, anxiety, sorrow, and tragedy are entangled. An astonishing achievement."

Schiff resides in New York City. She is a trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Award and honors
Fellowships
♦ National Endowment for the Humanities
♦ Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers, New York Public Library
♦ John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

Awards and honors
2000 - Pulitzer Prize, Vera
2006 - Academy Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters
2006 - Gilbert Chinard Prize, A Great Improvisation
2006 - George Washington Book Prize, A Great Improvisation
2006 - Ambassador Book Award (American Studies), A Great Improvisation
2010 - EMMA Award for journalistic excellence, "Who's Buried in Cleopatra's Tomb?"
2011 - Library Lion by the New York Public Library
2011 - PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, Cleopatra
2012 - Phillips Academy Alumni Award of Distinction
2012 - The French-American Foundation Vergennes Achievement Award
2014 - BIO Award, Biographers International Organization
2015 - Newberry Library Award
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/13/2015.)

Book Reviews
Enchanting. Out of the shadows of the past come excitable young girls, pompous ministers, abusive judges, grieving parents, and angry neighbors, all of them caught up in a terrifying process that seemed to have no end: discovering who among them deserved death for being in league with Satan. The Witches is as close as we will ever come to understanding what happened in and around Salem in 1692. Courtrooms, streets, churches, farm yards, taverns, bedrooms-all became theater-like places where anger, anxiety, sorrow, and tragedy are entangled. An astonishing achievement.
David D. Hall, Bartlett Research Professor of New England Church History - Harvard University

Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a reliably entertaining guide...[to] one of the strangest, most fascinating chapters in American history.
Tom Beer - Newsday

Schiff, who had a hit with her biography Cleopatra, may get even more attention for her new look at America's infamous witch trials.
Jane Henderson - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A vivid picture of 1692 Massachusetts [that] brings the Salem trials to life.
Steve Bennett - San Antonio Express News

Schiff has made a career of exploring the private lives of iconic women throughout history.... Now she's expanding her focus to a group of notable women: the women in the center of the hysteria over witches that consumed the early days of the U.S. colonies.... The episode lasted only a year, but had a sizable influence on our nation's history, which Schiff's book will unpack with her elegant prose and exhaustive research.
Shelby Pope - KQED

(Best of the Fall) The Pulitzer-winning historian conjures a big year for witchcraft hysteria and hangings.
New York Magazine

Riveting nonfiction.
Entertainment Weekly

Few authors set the scene of history quite like Stacy Schiff.... The Witches brings a fresh eye to the worst misogynist atrocity in American history, tracing the complex cultural and psychological origins of the Puritan hysteria.
Megan O'Grady - Vogue.com

[Schiff] reconstructs the time and place in remarkable detail, offering portraits of the protagonists in all their poignant, if often infuriating, humanity. Through an immersive narrative involving a cast of dozens pulled from the historical record, Schiff skillfully re-creates the visceral tensions at the heart of everyday life in the Massachusetts Bay settlement.
Peter Manseau - Bookforum

No stone [is] left unturned.... Schiff recreates the most chill-inducing, finger-pointing months in American history.
Steph Opitz - Marie Claire

Schiff applies her descriptive prowess and flair for the dramatic to the Salem witch trials. The book is packed with details and delivered with a punch, but it suffers from a dearth of nuance.... This retelling succeeds as a work of gripping popular nonfiction, but for those already familiar with the subject, it will serve only as light reading.
Publishers Weekly

Schiff traces the course of the witch hunts, ... provid[ing] exciting digressions into the nature of...witchcraft, local political and social disputes, religious instruction, and Puritan life; though....the work is weak in structure and organization...[it] will find a welcome audience among readers of witchcraft or colonial histories. —Evan M. Anderson, Kirkendall P.L., Ankeny, IA
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Compulsively readable.... The best-selling Schiff never disappoints, and her eagerly anticipated account of the Salem witchcraft tragedy lives up to expectations, providing a fascinating account of one of the most infamous years in American history. —Margaret Flanagan
Booklist

[Shciff] ably weaves together all the assorted facts and many personalities from the 1692 Salem witch trials and provides genuine insight into a 17th-century culture that was barely a few steps away from the Dark Ages.... As history, The Witches is intelligent and reliable; as a story, it's a trudge over very well-trod ground.
Kirkus Reviews

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With or Without You
Domenica Ruta, 2013
Spiegel & Grau
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812983401

Summary
Domenica Ruta grew up in a working-class, unforgiving town north of Boston, in a trash-filled house on a dead-end road surrounded by a river and a salt marsh.

Her mother, Kathi, a notorious local figure, was a drug addict and sometimes dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches, and whose highbrow taste was at odds with her hardscrabble life. And yet she managed, despite the chaos she created, to instill in her daughter a love of stories.

Kathi frequently kept Domenica home from school to watch such classics as the Godfather movies and everything by Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, telling her, “This is more important. I promise. You’ll thank me later.” And despite the fact that there was not a book to be found in her household, Domenica developed a love of reading, which helped her believe that she could transcend this life of undying grudges, self-inflicted misfortune, and the crooked moral code that Kathi and her cohorts lived by.

With or Without You is the story of Domenica Ruta’s unconventional coming of age—a darkly hilarious chronicle of a misfit ’90s youth and the necessary and painful act of breaking away, and of overcoming her own addictions and demons in the process. In a brilliant stylistic feat, Ruta has written a powerful, inspiring, compulsively readable, and finally redemptive story about loving and leaving. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1979
• Where—Danvers, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College; M.F.A.,
University of Texas at Austin
• Currently—Brooklyn, New York City

Domenica Ruta was born and raised in Danvers, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, Jentel, and Hedgebrook. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
A fierce, smart account of a devastating childhood, in a memoir drawing comparisons to the The Glass Castle. Not surprisingly, Ruta, whose mother was an addict, struggled with her own demons; her memoir is a testament to her own redemption.
Reader's Digest

Life under an erratic single mom, first on welfare, then a millionaire, in the 1980s proved a wearying contest for survival of the fittest as recounted in this valiant, bittersweet debut by Danvers, Mass., native Ruta. Five feet tall and Italian American, with a loud gutter-mouth, copious breasts, and bleached blond hair, Kathi aka Mum lived from one menial job to the next that kept her comfortably supplied with pain killers she happily shared with her only daughter while concocting conflicting plans for her including school scholarships and early pregnancy.... Ruta's account is a fairly dry, restrained chronicle of a wrenching embrace of health and sobriety.
Publishers Weekly

Billed dramatically as the debut of a prodigy—Ruta was finalist for the Keene Prize of the University of Texas at Austin, where she received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers—this memoir assays the author's rise from a particularly tough childhood. Her mother was a drug dealer and user, and Ruta had to break from her to survive. An in-house favorite being compared to Mary Karr's The Liar's Club and Jeanette Walls's The Glass Castle.
Library Journal

The memoir of the emancipation of a daughter from her drug-dealer, addict mother. Despite the hardships she endured as a child, Ruta demonstrates a deep and loving bond with her mother. Other family members meander in and out of the narrative, but it is Ruta's mom who features the most prominently in these stories of coming-of-age during the 1980s.... The use of dark humor and explicit language...makes the book so intriguing, and Ruta shows how a strong maternal bond at an early age can lead to forgiveness regardless of the circumstances. A sharp portrayal of recovery from a lifetime of pitfalls and the love that held it all together.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Ruta begins her book with a scene from her childhood, when Kathi takes her along with her when she goes to destroy someone’s car. Why do you think Ruta chose to begin her book with that scene? What does it tell you about Kathi? How are the themes that it sets out subsequently explored throughout the rest of the book?

2. The dedication of With or Without You is “For Her.” Why do you think that is her dedication?

3. In her late twenties, Domenica worked for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. “If only all battered wives could be so conveniently sympathetic,” Ruta writes. “The real picture is something more complicated, a prism that captures the full spectrum of good and evil and shatters it into fractured pieces of color and light” (p. 43). How does With or Without You explore this theme?

4. In a quietly momentous scene in the book, Domenica sees her sister lying on Carla’s stomach and whispers a single word. “It wasn’t until much later that I understood what had happened that day,“ Ruta writes. “Inside me was someone new waiting to be born…someone who would devote her life to describing such moments in time” (p. 53). What does Ruta mean? Why is that moment so significant?

5. What do you consider Kathi’s biggest betrayal?

6. What would you consider Kathi’s best attribute?

7. What do Kathi and Domenica have in common?

8. The extended Ruta family is almost continuously burdened with debt. Explore the theme of debt, both literal and metaphoric, in the novel. How do debts affect their relationships and hold them back?

9. Why does Domenica enjoy working in the dementia ward?

10. When Domenica is recovering, how does she find solace?

11. While in Austin, Domenica falls in love with another writer. “It was just as awful as my mother had said it would be,” Ruta writes. “It was even worse that she was right” (p. 145). What is Ruta referring to? What is the larger significance of Domenica’s realization?

12. Near the end of the book, Ruta wonders why she can’t have compassion for Kathi. Do you think that Kathi is deserving of Domenica’s compassion? Do you believe that Domenica does not have compassion for Kathi?
(Questions courtesy of domenicaruta.com.)

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A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
Sonia Purnell, 2019
Penguin Publishing
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735225299

Summary
In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her."

The target in their sights was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite who talked her way into Special Operations Executive, the spy organization dubbed Winston Churchill's "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare."

She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and—despite her prosthetic leg—helped to light the flame of the French Resistance, revolutionizing secret warfare as we know it.

Virginia established vast spy networks throughout France, called weapons and explosives down from the skies, and became a linchpin for the Resistance. Even as her face covered wanted posters and a bounty was placed on her head, Virginia refused order after order to evacuate.

She finally escaped through a death-defying hike over the Pyrenees into Spain, her cover blown. But she plunged back in, adamant that she had more lives to save, and led a victorious guerilla campaign, liberating swathes of France from the Nazis after D-Day.

A Woman of No Importance is the breathtaking story of how one woman's fierce persistence helped win the war. Based on new and extensive research, Sonia Purnell has for the first time uncovered the full secret life of Virginia Hall—an astounding and inspiring story of heroism, spycraft, resistance, and personal triumph over shocking adversity. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Sonia Purnell is a British biographer and journalist who has worked at The Economist, Telegraph, and Sunday Times, all UK publications.

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win the War, is Purnell's most recent book and was published in 2019. Her previous book, Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill (2015, published as First Lady in the UK) was chosen as a book of the year by the Telegraph and Independent, and was a finalist for the Plutarch Award.

Purnell's first book, Just Boris: A Tale of Blonde Ambition (2011), was longlisted for the Orwell prize. The book is a biography of Boris Johnson, the colorful former Mayor of London, current member of Parliament, and outspoken Brexit supporter. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[A] compelling saga of a remarkable woman whose persistence was honed early on by her battles against low gender expectations and later on by her disability.
USA Today

[R]eads like a detailed novel.… Purnell’s fascinating book supports her description of Hall’s life as a "Homeric tale" of adventure, action, and seemingly unfathomable courage.
Columbus Dispatch

Sonia Purnell has written a riveting account of Hall’s work as a ferociously courageous American spy.… [She] writes with compelling energy and fine detail.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune

[V]ividly resurrects an underappreciated hero and delivers an enthralling story of wartime intrigue.… Purnell does a fine job of bringing Hall’s story to life. Fans of WWII history and women’s history will be riveted. Illus.
Publishers Weekly

Purnell's work is well researched, fast paced, and gives a captivating look at one of World War II's unsung heroes. This will interest readers intrigued by the history of espionage as well as women's and military history. —Crystal Goldman, Univ. of California, San Diego Lib.
Library Journal

(Starred review) Purnell’s writing is as precise and engaging as her research, and this book restores overdue attention to one of the world’s great war heroes. It’s a joy to read, and it will swell readers' hearts with pride.
Booklist

A remarkable chronicle… [and] lively examination.… [I]f Hall had been a man… she would now be as famous as James Bond.… Meticulous research results in a significant biography of a trailblazer who now has a CIA building named after her.
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 A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE … and then take off on your own:

1. Sonia Purcell describes Virginia Hall's resistance work during World War II as "a Homeric tale of adventure, action and seemingly unfathomable courage." How would you describe Hall? What was it about her personality and inner character that attracted her to spy-craft—and what made her so adept at its practice?

2. Consider the danger involved involved in undercover operations—a field in which its participants are at high risk for capture, torture, and death. What drives people, both men and women, to take such dire risks and to play the high-stakes game of cat and mouse?

3. Purnell observers, "Dispatching a one-legged thirty-five-year-old desk clerk on a blind mission into France was, on paper, an almost insane gamble." Almost insane? What was their thinking?

4. Talk about the good-old-boy office politics underlying some of the decisions to place under trained personnel in the field, and some of the fatalities those decisions led to.

5. It's almost as if Hall had a sixth sense, which repeatedly kept her out of the Nazis' clutches. Talk about her use of disguises, her ability to build trust across borders, her sudden appearances and just as sudden disappearances. What are some of the close calls in which she escaped capture? Do some episodes stand out more than others—in terms as being more daring, more thrilling, or more anxiety-drenching?

6. Discuss the many other individuals involved in the resistance network, those doing extraordinary work. Consider, for instance, Germaine Guerin. Or perhaps the woman who simply asks for three aspirins at a cafe.

7. What about Hall's post-war life in which she had to fight another type of tyranny: sexism? Discuss the offer of a low-level clerkship at the CIA despite Hall's brilliant performance in the field. Or recall the man who referred to Hall as a "gung-ho lady left over from OSS days overseas." Talk about the other women who made untold (literally) sacrifices for the Allied forces during the war. See our LitBlog post detailing some recent works hailing women's service.

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

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Women in Clothes
Editors: Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton, 2014
Blue Rider Press
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399166563

Summary
Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities—famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old—on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives.

It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than fifty questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style. Writers, activists, and artists including Cindy Sherman, Kim Gordon, Kalpona Akter, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tavi Gevinson, Miranda July, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Molly Ringwald answered these questions with photographs, interviews, personal testimonies, and illustrations.

Even our most basic clothing choices can give us confidence, show the connection between our appearance and our habits of mind, express our values and our politics, bond us with our friends, or function as armor or disguise. They are the tools we use to reinvent ourselves and to transform how others see us.

Women in Clothes embraces the complexity of women’s style decisions, revealing the sometimes funny, sometimes strange, always thoughtful impulses that influence our daily ritual of getting dressed. (From the publisher.)

Author Bios

Sheila Heti
• Birth—25 December 1976
• Where—Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Education—University of Toronto; National Theater School of Canada
• Currently—lives in Toronto

Sheila Heti is a Canadian writer and editor. She was born in Toronto, Canada, as the child of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. She studied art history and philosophy at the University of Toronto and playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada. She works as Interviews Editor at The Believer where she herself conducts interviews regularly. She previoiusly wrote a column on acting for Maisonneuve. Her brother is the comedian David Heti, a stand-up comedian.

Books
Heti's short story collection, The Middle Stories, was published in 2001, when she was twenty-four

Her novel, Ticknor, was released in 2005. The novel's main characters are based on real people: William Hickling Prescott and George Ticknor, although the facts of their lives are altered.

The Chairs are Where The People Go, published in 2011, was co-written with her friend, Misha Glouberman. The New Yorker called it "a triumph of conversational philosophy" and named it one of the Best Books of 2011.

Heti describes her 2010 book How Should a Person Be? as a constructed reality, based on recorded interviews with her friends, particularly the painter Margaux Williamson. The New York Times selected it as one of the 100 Best Books of 2012, and James Wood of The New Yorker also considered it one of the best books of the year.

In a 2007 interview with Dave Hickey for The Believer, she commented:

Increasingly I'm less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just can't do it.

Extras
• Heti is the creator of Trampoline Hall, a popular monthly lecture series based in Toronto and New York, at which people speak on subjects outside their areas of expertise. The New Yorker praised the series for "celebrating eccentricity and do-it-yourself inventiveness." It has sold out every show since its inception in December 2001.

• For the early part of 2008, Heti kept a blog called The Metaphysical Poll, where she posted the sleeping dreams people were having about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary season, which readers sent in.

• Heti was an actress as a child, and as a teenager appeared in shows directed by Hillar Liitoja, the founder and Artistic Director of the experiemental DNA Theatre. Heti appears in Margaux Williamson's 2010 film, Teenager Hamlet.

• Heti plays Lenore Doolan in Leanne Shapton's book, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry

• In November 2013, Jordan Tannahill directed Heti's play All Our Happy Days are Stupid at Toronto's Videofag. Heti's decade-long struggle to write the play is a primary plot element in her book How Should a Person Be? (From the publisher.)

Heidi Julavitz
• Birth—1968
• Where—Portland, Maine, USA
• Education—B.A., Dartmouth College; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in New York City and Camden, Maine

Heidi Suzanne Julavits is an American author and co-editor of The Believer magazine. She has been published in The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2, Esquire, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, and McSweeney’s Quarterly. Her novels include The Mineral Palace (2000), The Effect of Living Backwards (2003), The Uses of Enchantment (2006), and The Vanishers (2012).

Background and education
Julavits was born and grew up in Portland, Maine, before attending Dartmouth College. She later went on to earn an MFA from Columbia University.

The Believer
For the debut issue of The Believer, she wrote one of the lead articles, titling it "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!: A Call For A New Era of Experimentation and a Book Culture That Will Support It." The Believer, is a literary magazine founded by Dave Eggers in 2003 and publised nine times a year from San Franciso. It urges its readers and writers to "reach beyond their usual notions of what is accessible or possible."

New York Times cultural critic A.O. Scott described the magazine as part of "a generational struggle against laziness and cynicism, to raise once again the banners of creative enthusiasm and intellectual engagement." It has a "cosmopolitan frame of reference and an eclectic internationalism," mixing pop genres with literary theory.

In 2005, Julavits told Scott how she decided on The Believer's tone:

I really saw 'the end of the book' as originating in the way books are talked about now in our culture and especially in the most esteemed venues for book criticism. It seemed as though their irrelevance was a foregone conclusion, and we were just practicing this quaint exercise of pretending something mattered when of course everyone knew it didn't.

She added that her own aim as book critic would be "to endow something with importance, by treating it as an emotional experience."

Personal
Julavits currently lives in Maine and Manhattan with her husband, the writer Ben Marcus, and their children. (Adapted from Wikipedia articles. Retrieved 10/12/2014.)

Leanne Shapton
• Birth—June 25, 1973
• Where—Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Education—McGill University; Pratt Institute
• Awards—National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York USA

Leanne Shapton is a Canadian artist and graphic novelist, now living in New York City. Her second work, Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry, has been optioned for a film slated to star Brad Pitt and Natalie Portman. The novel, which takes the form of an auction catalog, uses photographs and accompanying captions to chronicle the romance and subsequent breakup of a couple via the relationship's significant possessions or "artifacts."

Shapton's first work, Was She Pretty?, was a 2007 nominee for the Doug Wright Award, a Canadian award for comics and graphic novels. It explored, via a series of line-drawn illustrations, the issues of relationship jealousy and feminine insecurity as told through the imagined superior traits of the subjects' boyfriends' exes.

Shapton is also an art director for newspapers and magazines. Formerly associated with Saturday Night, Maclean's and the National Post in Canada, she has worked as art director for the op-ed page at The New York Times. She has created hand lettering for a number of book covers, including Chuck Palahniuk's 2003 novel Diary. She is also a partner in J&L Books.

Her autobiographical book Swimming Studies (2012) deals with her youth as a national competitive swimmer, who made it as far as the 1988 and 1992 Canadian Olympic trials. It is a "meditation on the grueling years of training, the ways swimming is refracted through her memory now." It won the National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography).

Shapton created the "armpit sex drawing" for Spike Jonze's 2013 film Her. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/12/2014.)

Book Reviews
[P]art advice manual, part anthropological study, part feminist document…The volume contains hundreds of stories, which is why it's not the kind of book you'll read straight through but is perfect for flipping around in late at night in the tub, or for giving as a gift with certain parts marked…All three of the editors, when they appear in the text as interlocutors, are wonderful interviewers and essayists—subtle, probing, sympathetic—but Heti, especially, has a gift for pulling insight from details of other women's lives that might at first seem banal or irrelevant.
Sasha Weiss - New York Times Book Review

This charming patchwork expands the scope of fashion writing by looking not at forerunners of style but at how those outside the industry think about what they wear….The range of women involved [is] dazzling…a welcome addition to writing that often focuses on a single trend for all.
Madeleine Schwartz - Boston Globe

Thoughtfully crafted and visually entertaining, this collection...uses personal reflections from 642 contributors to examine women’s relationship with clothes in a deceptively lighthearted and irreverent tone.... A provocative time capsule of contemporary womanhood, this collection is highly recommended. B&w illus and photos throughout, 32 pages in full color.
Publishers Weekly

[A] delirious assortment of conversations, essays, journal entries, and photographs…This big, busy book feels like a thrift store brimming with jumbles of clothes and accessories and alive with women’s voices.... A uniquely kaleidoscopic and spirited approach to an irresistible subject of universal resonance.
Booklist

A quirky anthology exploring the meaning of clothes. [The editors] are interested not in what women wear, but why.... Poems, interviews, pieces that read like diary or journal entries—all these responses help the editors fulfill their aims: to liberate readers from the idea that women have to fit a certain image or ideal.... [A] delightfully idiosyncratic book.
Kirkus Reviews

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The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
Thomas L. Friedman, 2005
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
672 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312425074

Summary
This new edition of The World Is Flat is Thomas L. Friedman’s account of the great changes taking place in our time, as lightning-swift advances in technology and communications put people all over the globe in touch as never before-creating an explosion of wealth in India and China, and challenging the rest of us to run even faster just to stay in place.

This updated and expanded edition features more than a hundred pages of fresh reporting and commentary, drawn from Friedman’s travels around the world and across the American heartland--from anyplace where the flattening of the world is being felt.

In The World Is Flat, Friedman at once shows "how and why globalization has now shifted into warp drive" (Robert Wright, Slate) and brilliantly demystifies the new flat world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, he explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; how governments and societies can, and must, adapt; and why terrorists want to stand in the way.

More than ever, The World Is Flat is an essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 20, 1953
• Where—Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• Education—B.A., Brandeis University; M.A., Oxford
• Awards—Pulitzer Prizes for international reporting, 1983 and
1988; National Book Award;1989; Pulitzer Prize for
commentary, 2002
• Currently—lives in the Washington, D.C. area

Thomas L. Friedman has won the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work at the New York Times, where he serves as the foreign affairs columnist. He is the author of three previous books, all of them bestsellers: From Beirut to Jerusalem, winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction; The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization; and Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11. In 2005 The World Is Flat was given the first Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and Friedman was named one of America’s Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his family. (From the publisher.)

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When September 11 drastically reshifted America's focus and priorities, Thomas L. Friedman was the author readers turned to as a guide to the dynamics of the Middle East. In a mediascape crowded with pundits, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist and author has emerged as the preeminent commentator in his field, informed by his 20-plus years as a journalist covering the rapidly shifting politics in the region.

The title of his first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, describes his trajectory as New York Times bureau chief in both cities in the '80s. He interrupted his journalism career in 1988 when the Guggenheim Foundation awarded him a fellowship to write a book about his experiences. The result was a personal narrative that described not only his harrowing experiences in Lebanon and Israel but also contained exposition about the roots of his interest in the Middle East, a visit to Israel that burgeoned into a full-blown obsession. Friedman himself put it best, in the book's prelude: "It is a strange, funny, sometimes violent, and always unpredictable road, this road from Beirut to Jerusalem, and in many ways, I have been traveling it all my adult life." From Beirut to Jerusalem won the National Book Award and spent a year on the Times bestseller list.

This road analogy is one of several Friedman will make over the course of a column or book. He reduces the intimidation factor of complex subjects by offering ample (but not copious) background, plain but intelligent language, and occasional humor. On Iraq's history before Saddam: "Romper Room it was not." On globalization: "If [it] were a sport, it would be the 100-meter dash, over and over and over. And no matter how many times you win, you have to race again the next day."

Friedman again offered complex concepts in appealingly dramatic terms in 1989's The Lexus and the Olive Tree, his distillation of the new global economy. He sets up the contrast between the old, Cold War system ("sumo wrestling") and the new globalization system (the 100-meter dash). Another part of why Friedman can be so readable is that he sometimes makes it seem as if his life is one big kaffeeklatsch with the scholars and decision makers of the world. In a chapter from The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he mentions a comment made by a friend who is also "the leading political columnist in Jordan." The day after seeing this friend, Friedman writes, "I happen to go to Israel and meet with Jacob Frenkel, then governor of Israel's Central Bank and a University of Chicago-trained economist." Thus another illustrative point is made. Friedman frames the world not just as he sees it, but also includes the perspective of the many citizens he has made it a point to include in the dialogue.

In 2002, Friedman won a third Pulitzer for his writing in the New York Times, and the demand for his perspicacity post-September 11 makes the release of Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 almost a foregone conclusion. Breaking the book into before, during, and after, Friedman presents what he calls a "word album" of America's response to the tragedy. It is undeniably a changed world, and Friedman is undeniably the man to help readers make sense of it.

Extras
• Friedman lives with his wife Ann and daughters Orly and Natalie in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington.

• In high school, Friedman became "insufferable" in his obsession with Israel, he says. He wrote in From Beirut to Jersualem: "When the Syrians arrested thirteen Jews in Damascus, I wore a button for weeks that said Free the Damascus 13, which most of my high-school classmates thought referred to an underground offshoot of the Chicago 7. I recall my mother saying to me gently, 'Is that really necessary?' when I put the button on one Sunday morning to wear to our country-club brunch."

• As the chief diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times from 1989 to 1992, Friedman logged some 500,000 miles following Secretary of State James Baker and chronicling the end of the Cold War. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Terrorism remains a threat, and we will all continue to be fascinated by upheavals in Lebanon, events in Iran and reforms in Egypt. But ultimately these trends are unlikely to shape the world's future. The countries of the Middle East have been losers in the age of globalization, out of step in an age of free markets, free trade and democratic politics. The world's future -- the big picture -- is more likely to be shaped by the winners of this era. And if the United States thought it was difficult to deal with the losers, the winners present an even thornier set of challenges. This is the implication of the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman's excellent new book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.
Fareed Zakaria - The New York Times

The World Is Flat continues the franchise Friedman has made for himself as a great explicator of and cheerleader for globalization, building upon his 1999 The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Like its predecessor, this book showcases Friedman's gift for lucid dissections of abstruse economic phenomena, his teacher's head, his preacher's heart, his genius for trend-spotting and his sometimes maddening inability to take himself out of the frame. It also shares some of the earlier volume's excitement (mirroring Rajesh Rao's) and hesitations about whether we're still living in an era dominated by old-fashioned states or in a postmodern, globalized era where states matter far less and the principal engine of change is a leveled playing field for international trade.
Warren Bass - The Washington Post

Lively and provocative as always, Friedman returns with an updated thesis on globalization. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman argued that technological innovation, foreign investment, capital flows, and trade were transforming the world — breaking down national borders, constraining governments, and triggering grand struggles between nationalism and the forces of economic integration. Here he argues — in a swirl of anecdotes about software designers, intrepid entrepreneurs, globetrotting investors, and the famous telephone call centers in Bangalore, India — that globalization has reached a new stage. Now individuals, rather than governments or corporations, are the agents of change, empowered by e-mail, computers, teleconferencing, and production networks, all of which are drawing more and more people around the world into competition and cooperation on an equal footing. In this sense, Friedman argues, the world is becoming flat, and his book is organized as a sort of travel guide to globalization, a kinetic portrait of the wired global village. The rest of the book examines how countries, companies, and workers will need to adapt to flatness. For the United States, this entails, above all, investing in education, technology, and training.

But Friedman's image of a flat earth is profoundly misleading — a view of the world from a seat in business class. Flatness is another way of describing the transnational search by companies for cheap labor, an image that misses the pervasiveness of global inequality and the fact that much of the developing world remains mired in poverty and misery. It also misses the importance of the global geopolitical hierarchy, which guarantees the provision of stability, property rights, and other international public goods. The rise of China and India is less about flatness than it is about dramatic upheavals in the mountains and valleys of the global geopolitical map.
Foreign Affairs

(Starred review.) Before 9/11, New York Times columnist Friedman was best known as the author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, one of the major popular accounts of globalization and its discontents. Having devoted most of the last four years of his column to the latter as embodied by the Middle East, Friedman picks up where he left off, saving al-Qaeda et al. for the close. For Friedman, cheap, ubiquitous telecommunications have finally obliterated all impediments to international competition, and the dawning "flat world" is a jungle pitting "lions" and "gazelles," where "economic stability is not going to be a feature" and "the weak will fall farther behind." Rugged, adaptable entrepreneurs, by contrast, will be empowered. The service sector (telemarketing, accounting, computer programming, engineering and scientific research, etc.), will be further outsourced to the English-spoken abroad; manufacturing, meanwhile, will continue to be off-shored to China. As anyone who reads his column knows, Friedman agrees with the transnational business executives who are his main sources that these developments are desirable and unstoppable, and that American workers should be preparing to "create value through leadership" and "sell personality." This is all familiar stuff by now, but the last 100 pages on the economic and political roots of global Islamism are filled with the kind of close reporting and intimate yet accessible analysis that have been hard to come by. Add in Friedman's winning first-person interjections and masterful use of strategic wonksterisms, and this book should end up on the front seats of quite a few Lexuses and SUVs of all stripes.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
Introduction
Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman delivers a vivid account of the human element behind both the triumphs and the perils of globalization. This timely and essential report from the front lines of offshoring, outsourcing, and other "flattening" factors in our world makes sense of the often bewildering economic, political, and security issues currently at play in the international realm. Friedman examines hundreds of fascinating pieces in this puzzle-from the intricate systems that produce rich rewards for Wal-Mart to Y2K's role in rocketing the careers of computer scientists in India-and assembles them with refreshing clarity.

Whether in Bangalore or Beijing, Friedman asks brilliant questions of everyone he encounters. The truth he distills from their responses brings a new perspective to the ways in which CEOs and religious radicals, entrepreneurs and garden-variety consumers, all create ripples that stir the geopolitical tide The World Is Flat shows how each of us has an undeniable stake in globalization.

_________________

1. The first chapter in The World Is Flat recalls the voyage of Columbus, colonization, and industrialization. Are the motivations behind twenty-first-century globalization much different from the ones recorded throughout history?

2. Thomas L. Friedman discusses the many occupations that can now be outsourced or offshored, including his own job as a journalist. Could your job be done by someone in another country? Could you do your job better from home, as the JetBlue telephone agents do? Would you feel comfortable knowing that your taxes had been prepared by an overseas accountant, or your CAT scan read by an overseas radiologist? (Chapter One)

3. The second chapter outlines "Ten Forces That Flattened the World," ranging from the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, to the open-source software movement. In what way did politics influence entrepreneurship in the 1990s? What psychological impact did November 9 have on the world, particularly when paired with new means for global communication?

4. What is your opinion of the open-source movement? Should there be any limit to the amount of freedom, including "freedom" from the demand to make a profit, in the technology marketplace? (Chapter Two)

5. What qualities enabled India to take center stage when the looming Y2K scenario generated unprecedented demand for programmers? What can other nations learn from India's success in this realm? What are India's greatest vulnerabilities? (Chapter Two)

6. Discuss the ruthless efficiency demanded by supply-chaining. In the long run, does it benefit consumers? Do you believe it enhances or reduces production quality? (Chapter Two)

7. Were you familiar with the concept of "insourcing" prior to reading The World Is Flat? Does it matter to you whether your computer is repaired by an employee of Toshiba or of UPS? Should it matter? (Chapter Two)

8. Friedman calls the tenth flattener "steroids." Are these crucial to success, or are they luxuries? Will the globe's nonsteroidal citizens be able to compete without them? (Chapter Two)

9. In what ways has the Triple Convergence affected your day-to-day life? (Chapter Three)

10. Discuss the "Indiana versus India" anecdote, recounted in the second section of Chapter Four. Which approach benefits Americans more: offshoring state projects and cutting taxpayer expenditures, or paying higher wages to maintain job security at home?

11. Chapter Six, "The Untouchables," features the story of Friedman's childhood friend Bill Greer. What does his story indicate about flattening in the creative fields? Will illustrators lose out to Illustrator? What would it take for you to become an untouchable?

12. Chapter Seven, "The Quiet Crisis," outlines three dirty secrets regarding American dominance: fewer young Americans pursuing careers in math and science, and the demise of both ambition and brainpower among American youth. What accounts for this? What would it take to restore academic rigor and the enthusiasm enjoyed during the "man on the moon" days?

13. Which of the proposals in Chapter Eight, "This Is Not a Test," would you be able to implement?

14. In Chapter Nine's third section, "I Can Only Get It for You Retail," Friedman offers a vivid portrait of the "neighborhoods" comprising various parts of the globe today. How will those neighborhoods look one hundred years from now? Will America still be a gated community, and Asia "the other side of the tracks"?

15. Friedman contemplates the cultural traits (such as motivated, educated workers and leaders who don't squander the nation's treasure) that drive a nation's success. He uses this to illustrate why Mexico, despite NAFTA, has become the tortoise while China has become the hare. Does America fit Friedman's cultural profile as a nation poised for prosperity? (Chapter Nine)

16. Do you work for a company that is implementing any of Friedman's coping strategies? Which of them would be the most controversial in your industry? (Chapter Ten)

17. What do you make of the approach taken by Bill Gates's foundation to combat disease? In your opinion, what are the roots of the public-health crisis in the Third World? (Chapter Eleven)

18. How did the book's images of India compare to your previous perceptions of it, from the country-club atmosphere described on the first page to the tragedy of the untouchables? (Chapters One and Eleven)

19. Compare The World Is Flat and Longitudes and Attitudes to Friedman's pre-9/11 books, The Lexus and the Olive Tree and From Beirut to Jerusalem. Has the author's approach to current affairs changed much since 9/11? Has al-Qaeda achieved any of its political goals in the fifteen-year span represented by all four books?

20. Do you have faith in Michael Dell's theory of conflict prevention? What can we do to ensure that the strategic optimists win? And when they do, what dreams do you have for the world they will create? (Chapter Twelve).
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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