The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
Timothy Egan, 2005
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780618773473


Summary 
Winner, 2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction

The Worst Hard Time is an epic story of blind hope and endurance almost beyond belief; it is also, as Tim Egan has told it, a riveting tale of bumptious charlatans, conmen, and tricksters, environmental arrogance and hubris, political chicanery, and a ruinous ignorance of nature's ways. Egan has reached across the generations and brought us the people who played out the drama in this devastated land, and uses their voices to tell the story as well as it could ever be told." — Marq de Villiers, author of Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource

The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the deaths of loved ones. Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and survived—those who, now in their eighties and nineties, will soon carry their memories to the grave—Egan tells a story of endurance and heroism against the backdrop of the Great Depression.

As only great history can, Egan's book captures the very voice of the times: its grit, pathos, and abiding courage. Combining the human drama of Isaac's Storm with the sweep of The American People in the Great Depression, The Worst Hard Time is a lasting and important work of American history. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Born—November 8, 1954
• Where—Seattle, Washington, USA
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize, Journalism (2001); National Book
   Award, Nonfiction; Washington State Book Award (twice)
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington


Timothy Egan is an American Pulitzer Prize winning author who resides in Seattle, Washington. He currently contributes opinion columns to the New York Times as the paper's Pacific Northwest correspondent. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his contribution to the series "How Race is Lived in America."

In addition to his work with the New York Times, he has written six books, including The Good Rain (Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, 1991), Breaking Blue, and Lasso the Wind.

The Worst Hard Time is his non-fiction account of those who lived through The Great Depression's Dust Bowl, for which he won the 2006 Washington State Book Award in history/biography and a 2006 National Book Award.

In 2009 he wrote The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, which details the Great Fire of 1910 that burned about three million acres (12,000 km²) and helped shape the United States Forest Service. The book also details some of the political issues of the time focusing on Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. Egan won a second Washington State Book Award in history/biography in 2010 for this work, and a second Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award.

In 2012 Egan published a biography of Western and Native American photographer, Edward Curtis: Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. (From Wikipedia.)

Also see the extensive interview with Egan and his publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Book Reviews
Mr. Egan makes this iconic material fresh by focusing on the plight of a handful of families from the hardest-hit bottom of the Dust Bowl, the western edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle known as No Man's Land; Dallam County due south in the Texas Panhandle; and Baca County in southeastern Colorado.
David Laskin - New York Times


Timothy Egan's searing history of the economic and ecological collapse of the southern Great Plains during the 1930s is an epic cautionary tale. Intertwining the stories of roughly a dozen individuals and families with a grim overview of the region-wide disaster, Egan's fluent narrative chronicles the terrifying consequences of a reckless hubris that in a few decades stripped the earth of prairie grass that for centuries had protected it from erosion. The American people and their government collaborated in transforming a sea of waving, waist-high bluestem—described by William Clark on his expedition west with Meriwether Lewis in 1804 as "one of the most pleasing prospects I ever beheld"—into a blasted landscape of abandoned farms surrounded by four-foot drifts of dust, scattered with dead farm animals and useless equipment.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post


On April 14, 1935, the biggest dust storm on record descended over five states, from the Dakotas to Amarillo, Texas. People standing a few feet apart could not see each other; if they touched, they risked being knocked over by the static electricity that the dust created in the air. The Dust Bowl was the product of reckless, market-driven farming that had so abused the land that, when dry weather came, the wind lifted up millions of acres of topsoil and whipped it around in “black blizzards,” which blew as far east as New York. This ecological disaster rapidly disfigured whole communities. Egan’s portraits of the families who stayed behind are sobering and far less familiar than those of the “exodusters” who staggered out of the High Plains. He tells of towns depopulated to this day, a mother who watched her baby die of “dust pneumonia,” and farmers who gathered tumbleweed as food for their cattle and, eventually, for their children.
The New Yorker


Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this visceral account of how America's great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious plains winds stirred up an endless series of "black blizzards" that were like a biblical plague: "Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains" in what became known as the Dust Bowl. But the plague was man-made, as Egan shows: the plains weren't suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat—along with a confluence of economic disaster, the Depression, and a natural disaster-eight years of drought— resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Egan details with stunning specificity. He grounds his tale in portraits of the people who settled the plains: hardy Americans and immigrants desperate for a piece of land to call their own and lured by the lies of promoters who said the ground was arable. Egan's interviews with survivors produce tales of courage and suffering: Hazel Lucas, for instance, dared to give birth in the midst of the blight only to see her baby die of "dust pneumonia" when her lungs clogged with the airborne dirt. With characters who seem to have sprung from a novel by Sinclair Lewis or Steinbeck, and Egan's powerful writing, this account will long remain in readers' minds.
Publishers Weekly


In vivid fashion, Egan reports on the grit, the drifts, and the figures bent against the gusts. All the elements of the iconic dust bowl photographs come together in the author's evocative portrait of those who first prospered and then suffered during the 1930s drought. —Gilbert Taylor
Booklist


Grim, riveting account by New York Times reporter Egan makes clear that, although hurricanes and floods have grabbed recent headlines, America's worst assault from Mother Nature came in the form of ten long years of drought and dust. The "dust bowl" of the 1930s covered 100 million acres spread over five states: Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska and Colorado. From 1930 to 1935, nearly a million people left their farms, littered with animal corpses and stunted crops. Schools closed. Towns simply disappeared. Thousands died from "dust pneumonia," a new condition born of swallowing and inhaling the swirling topsoil. The author personalizes this tragedy by focusing on a handful of hardy settlers who came to America's heartland with high hopes and boundless energy, then watched with growing despair as the earth turned against them. In truth, the dust bowl was largely a human creation. The great southern plains, once covered with native grasses that fed the buffalo and held the soil in place, were essentially stripped bare in the 1920s by wheat-farmers eager to cash in on cheap land and high grain prices. The newly invented tractor made the job easier, and unusually wet weather in the late '20s made farming on the arid plains seem feasible. But then the Depression hit, wheat prices crashed and once-bountiful farms went fallow, abandoned to the deepening drought and ever-blowing winds that literally sent the soil skyward. In the midst of disaster, Egan finds heroes. Among them is country physician Doc Dawson, who opened a sanitarium for dust pneumonia victims, lost all his money farming and spent his last, penniless years running a soup kitchen. Stark and powerful, a gripping if depressing read and a timely reminder that a Nature abused can exact a terrible retribution.
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 Worst Hard Time:

1. Discuss what Egan presents as the reasons for the dust bowl tragedy. Was it a confluence of unforeseen events that produced the perfect storm? Or was it a man-made disaster that might have been avoided, or at least mitigated?

2. Should everyone have known better—was there enough known at the time about the impact of farming techniques on erosion?

3. Who tried to warn about the dangers of farming in the grasslands and what were the gist of their warnings? Why were they ignored? Is it simply human nature to take heed in hindsight rather than in real time?

4. Talk about the different characters in Egan's story. Which of the families' stories do you find particularly poignant? Which characters do you find most admirable?

5. What descriptions of the dust storms did you find most shocking or most tragic—Black Sunday, static electrcity, dust pneumonia, just to name a few?

6. During the disaster, 250 million people left their homes—a disapora about which Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath is written. But most residents stayed. What made them stay? Would it have been better to have left? Which choice would you have made?

7. What was the political outfall of the dust bowl? How did Washington eventually respond? What have been the lasting effects?

8. What lessons, if any, have we learned from the dust bowl castastrophe—about how human actions, well-intentioned or not, can lead to environmental damage? Is there anything comparable on the horizon today?

9. "Surviving the Dust Bowl," a 2007 documentary, part of the American Experience series on PBS, would make a valuable contribution to any book club discussion. The film footage is stunning. You could get a copy through your public library or through Netflix.

10. You might also pair this work with Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and discuss the human tragedies—and bravery—in both accounts.

11. Finally, don't miss Timothy Egan's extensive interview with his publisher, Houghton Mifflin.

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

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The Wright Brothers 
David McCullough, 2015
Simon & Schuster
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476728759


Summary
Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story-behind-the-story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly: Wilbur and Orville Wright.

On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot.

Who were these men and how was it that they achieved what they did?

David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the surprising, profoundly American story of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

Far more than a couple of unschooled Dayton bicycle mechanics who happened to hit on success, they were men of exceptional courage and determination, and of far-ranging intellectual interests and ceaseless curiosity, much of which they attributed to their upbringing. The house they lived in had no electricity or indoor plumbing, but there were books aplenty, supplied mainly by their preacher father, and they never stopped reading.

When they worked together, no problem seemed to be insurmountable. Wilbur was unquestionably a genius. Orville had such mechanical ingenuity as few had ever seen. That they had no more than a public high school education, little money and no contacts in high places, never stopped them in their “mission” to take to the air. Nothing did, not even the self-evident reality that every time they took off in one of their contrivances, they risked being killed.

In this thrilling book, master historian David McCullough draws on the immense riches of the Wright Papers, including private diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks, and more than a thousand letters from private family correspondence to tell the human side of the Wright Brothers’ story, including the little-known contributions of their sister, Katharine, without whom things might well have gone differently for them. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 7, 1933
• Where—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Awards—National Book Award (twice); Pulitzer Prize (twice); Presidential Medal of Honor
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts


David McCullough is an American author, narrator, historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award.

McCullough's first book was The Johnstown Flood (1968), and he has since written nine more on such topics as Harry S. Truman, John Adams, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Wright Brothers. McCullough has also narrated numerous documentaries, such as The Civil War by Ken Burns, as well as the 2003 film Seabiscuit, and he hosted American Experience for twelve years.

McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, Truman (1992) and John Adams (2001), have been adapted by HBO into a TV film and a mini-series, respectively. McCullough's history, The Greater Journey (2011), is about Americans in Paris from the 1830s to the 1900s.

Youth and education
McCullough was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Ruth (nee Rankin) and Christian Hax McCullough. He is of Scots-Irish descent. He was educated at Linden Avenue Grade School and Shady Side Academy, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.

One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, ranging from sports to drawing cartoons. McCullough's parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books at an early age. His parents often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often. McCullough "loved school, every day"; he contemplated many career choices, everything from architect, actor, painter, writer, to lawyer, and contemplated attending medical school for a time.

McCullough attended Yale University, graduating with honors in English in 1955. He considered it a "privilege" to study at Yale because of faculty members such as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. He occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction.

While at Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, and American Heritage, where he enjoyed research. "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life."

Early career
After graduation, McCullough moved to New York City, where Sports Illustrated hired him as a trainee. He later worked as an editor and writer for the United States Information Agency in Washington, D.C. After working for twelve years, including a position at American Heritage, in editing and writing, McCullough reached a point where he believed he "could attempt something" on his own.

Although he had no idea that he would end up writing history, McCullough "stumbled upon" a story that he felt was "powerful, exciting, and very worth telling." After three years of writing in his spare time (while still at American Heritage), he published The Johnstown Flood. The book, a chronicle of one of the worst flood disasters in United States history, was published in 1968 to high praise. John Leonard, of the New York Times, said of McCullough, "We have no better social historian." Despite precarious financial times, but encouraged by his wife Rosalee, he decided to become a full-time writer.

People often ask me if I'm working on a book. That's not how I feel. I feel like I work in a book. It's like putting myself under a spell. And this spell, if you will, is so real to me that if I have to leave my work for a few days, I have to work myself back into the spell when I come back. It's almost like hypnosis.

Recognition
After the success of The Johnstown Flood, two new publishers offered him contracts, one to write about the Great Chicago Fire and another about the San Francisco earthquake. Not wishing to become "Bad News McCullough," he decided to write about people who "were not always foolish and inept or irresponsible." He also remembered Thornton Wilder telling told him that "he got an idea for a book or a play when he wanted to learn about something. Then, he'd check to see if anybody had already done it, and if they hadn't, he'd do it."

McCullough decided to write a history of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had walked across many times.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

Published in 1972, critics hailed The Great Bridge (1972) as "the definitive book on the event."

Five years later, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal was released, gaining McCullough widespread recognition. The book won the National Book Award in History, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Cornelius Ryan Award.

In 1977, McCullough traveled to the White House to advise Jimmy Carter and the United States Senate on the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which would give Panama control of the Canal. Carter later said that the treaties, which were agreed upon to hand over ownership of the Canal to Panama, would not have passed, had it not been for the book.

Other works
McCullough's fourth work was his first biography, reinforcing his belief that "history is the story of people." Released in 1981, Mornings on Horseback tells the story of seventeen years in the life of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States. The work ranged from 1869, when Roosevelt was ten years old, to 1886, and tells of a "life intensely lived." The book won McCullough's second National Book Award, his first Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography, and New York Public Library Literary Lion Award.

Next, he published Brave Companions, a collection of essays written over a period of twenty years. Essays cover historical or literary figures such as Louis Agassiz, Alexander von Humboldt, John and Washington Roebling, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Conrad Aiken, and Frederic Remington.

McCullough's next book, his second biography, Truman (1993), was about the 33rd president. That book won McCullough his first Pulitzer Prize for "Best Biography or Autobiography" and his second Francis Parkman Prize. Two years later, the book was adapted as an HBO television movie by the same name, with Gary Sinise in the role of Truman. Commenting on his subject, Truman said

I think it's important to remember that these men are not perfect. If they were marble gods, what they did wouldn't be so admirable. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.

Seven years later, in 2001, McCullough published his third biography John Adams, about the life of the second US president. One of the fastest-selling non-fiction books in history, it won McCullough's second Pulitzer Prize for "Best Biography or Autobiography." He intended the book to be about the two founding fathers and back-to-back presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, but he became so intrigued with Adams that he decided to focus on Adams alone. In 2008 HBO adapted the book as a seven-part miniseries by the same name, with Paul Giamatti in the title role.

Published in 2005, McCullough's 1776, tells the story of the founding year of the US, focusing on George Washington, the amateur army, and other struggles for independence. Because of McCullough's popularity, its initial printing was 1.25 million copies, many more than the average history book. Upon its release, the book became a number-one bestseller in the US.

McCullough considered writing a sequel to 1776 but instead wrote about Americans in Paris between 1830 and 1900. The Greater Journey, published in 2011, covers 19th-century Americans, including Mark Twain and Samuel Morse, who migrated to Paris and went on to achieve importance in culture or innovation. Others included in the book are Elihu Washburne, the American ambassador to France during the Franco-Prussian War, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the US.

Personal life
David McCullough lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and is married to Rosalee Barnes McCullough, whom he met at age 17 in Pittsburgh. The couple has five children and nineteen grandchildren. He enjoys sports, history and art, including watercolor and portrait painting.

His son David Jr., an English teacher at Wellesley High School in the Boston suburbs, achieved sudden fame in 2012 with his commencement speech. He told graduating students, "you're not special" nine times, and his speech went viral on YouTube. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/2/2015.)

Book Reviews
[McCullough] takes the Wrights’ story aloft.... Concise, exciting, and fact-packed... Mr. McCullough presents all this with dignified panache, and with detail so granular you may wonder how it was all collected.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


A story of timeless importance, told with uncommon empathy and fluency.... A story, well told, about what might be the most astonishing feat mankind has ever accomplished.... The Wright Brothers soars.
Daniel Okrent - New York Times Book Review


David McCullough has etched a brisk, admiring portrait of the modest, hardworking Ohioans who designed an airplane in their bicycle shop and solved the mystery of flight on the sands of Kitty Hawk, N.C. He captures the marvel of what the Wrights accomplished and, just as important, the wonder felt by their contemporaries.... Mr. McCullough is in his element writing about seemingly ordinary folk steeped in the cardinal American virtues—self-reliance and can-do resourcefulness.
Roger Lowenstein - Wall Street Journal


The nitty-gritty of exactly how [the Wrights] succeeded is told in fascinating detail.
Buzzy Jackson - Boston Globe


Few historians have captured the essence of America—its rise from an agrarian nation to the world's dominant power—like David McCullough.... McCullough has defined American icons and revealed new dimensions to stories that long seemed exhausted.... An elegant, sweeping look at the two Americans who went where no others had gone before and whose work helped create a national excellence in aviation that continues today.
Ray Locker - USA Today


McCullough’s magical account of [the Wright Brothers'] early adventures—enhanced by volumes of family correspondence, written records, and his own deep understanding of the country and the era—shows as never before how two Ohio boys from a remarkable family taught the world to fly.
Reeve Lindbergh - Washington Post


McCullough vividly re-creates the failures and disappointments as the Wright brothers puzzle out the science of bird- and insect-wing design.... [McCullough] continues to deliver high-quality material with familiar facility and grace.
Larry Lebowitz - Miami Herald


We all know what they did and where they did it—Kitty Hawk, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. But McCullough digs deeply to find out how they did it, and why they did it, and what happened to them in the years that followed.
Harry Levins - St. Louis Post-Dispatch


A compelling, upbeat story that underscores the importance of industriousness, creative intelligence and indomitable patience.
Doug Childers - Richmond Times-Dispatch


Pleasurable to read.... McCullough has a gift for finding the best in his subjects without losing perspective on their flaws.
Margaret Quamme - Columbus Dispatch


A master storyteller.... The brothers’ story unfolds and develops with grace and insight in a style at which McCullough is simply the best.
David Hendricks - San Antonio Express-News


[McCullough's] evident admiration for the Wrights leads him to soft-pedal their crasser side, like their epic patent lawsuits, which stymied American aviation for years. Still, McCullough's usual warm, evocative prose makes for an absorbing narrative; he conveys both the drama of the birth of flight and the homespun genius of America's golden age of innovation.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [I]mpeccable writing with historical rigor and strong character definition.... [The Wright brothers] had limited formal education, with the author instead attributing his subjects' success to industry, imagination, and persistence.... A signal contribution to Wright historiography.  —John Carver Edwards, formerly with Univ. of Georgia Libs.
Library Journal


A charmingly pared-down life of the "boys" that grounds their dream of flight in decent character and work ethic. There is a quiet, stoical awe to the accomplishments of these two unprepossessing Ohio brothers in this fluently rendered, skillfully focused study.... An educational and inspiring biography of seminal American innovators.
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 The Wright Brothers:

1. Talk about the Wright family circle—especially Sister Katharine and Bishop Milton Wright—and the influence its members had on Orville and Wilbur and their achievement. This leads, inevitably, to the roles that upbringing and genetics play in individual accomplishment. To what extent are all of us shaped by our family environment? How much of our accomplishments are fully our own?

2. Talk about the differences—and similarities—between the two brothers?

3. Follow-up to Question 1: What goes into making genius like the Wright brothers, aside from sheer intelligence? Consider traits such as perseverance, focus, and energy. What else? What about the role of imagination?

4. In his book, David McCullough reveals that when Wilbur Wright was in France, he spent a fair amount of time at the Louvre and that he was deeply moved by the great Gothic works he saw. What is the importance that the author ascribes to that interest—and why? What does it suggest about the importance of the liberal arts even in the fields of science and technology?

5. Why were the Wright brothers dismissed in the United States but taken seriously in France? What was the difference in culture and/or politics that generated interest on the part of the French but not the Americans?

6. Wilbur and Orville displayed few emotions. Do you think this hampered the author in his attempt to characterize the two men, to portray them as rich, fully-developed human beings? How does McCullough bring them to life—does he, or doesn't he? Do the two men come across as heroic? Why or why not?

7. Why was the story of the Wright brothers' achievement so unlikely? Talk about the hardships, knowledge deficits, and other obstacles they had to overcome in order to get their invention off the ground, so to speak?

8. What struck you most in the story of the the Wright brothers? What surprised you or impressed you? How much did you know (or understand) before you read McCullough's book...and what did you come away having learned?

9. In 1908, when the Wrights finally showed their plane to the press, one reporter wrote: "this spectacle of men flying was so startling, so bewildering to the senses...that we all stood like so many marble men." Imagine yourself in that situation: how might you have reacted? Can you think of a future technological advancement that might astonish you the same way?

10. Were the brothers compensated fairly for their invention? As someone replied to Wilbur, "I am afraid, my friend, that your usually sound judgment has been warped by the desire for great wealth." What is your assessment of that remark—fair or unfair?

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

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A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck
Jane Smiley, 2004
Random House
287 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400033171


Summary
The Pulitzer Prize—winning author of A Thousand Acres gallops into territory she first explored in her acclaimed best-selling novel Horse Heaven (“Deeply satisfying...a smart, warmhearted, winning book” –New York Times Book Review) with this irresistible account of her lifelong love affair with horses.

Smiley draws upon her firsthand knowledge of horses, as well as the wisdom of trainers, vets, jockeys, and even a real-life horse whisperer, to examine the horse on all levels–practical, theoretical, and emotional.

She shares not only “cute stories” about her own horses, but also fascinating and original insights into horse–and human–behavior. To all this she adds an element of drama and suspense as two of her own horses begin their careers at the racetrack. As the sexy black filly Waterwheel and the elegant gray colt Wowie aspire to the winner’s circle, we are enchanted, enthralled–and informed about what it’s really like to own, train, and root for a Thoroughbred.

A Year at the Races is charming, funny, and a bit outrageous: a candid exploration of the abiding bond between humans and horses, told with panache, intelligence, and humor. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 26, 1949
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Rasied—Webster Grove, Missouri
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; M.A., M.F.A, and Ph.D., Iowa University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1992; National Book Critics Circle Award, 1991
• Currently—lives in Northern California

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love & Good Will, A Thousand Acres (for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize), and Moo. She lives in northern California. (From the publisher.)

More
Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.

Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a B.A. at Vassar College, then earned an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar.

Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit.

From 1981 to 1996, she taught undergrad and graduate creative writing workshops at Iowa State University. She continued teaching at ISU even after moving her primary residence to California.

In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
To an equestrian reader, picking up A Year at the Races is like walking in on the kind of conversation that always starts when people gather around the horses they love. You hear that kind of talk, an easy mix of anecdote and theory, in stables at day's end, and at rodeos and fairs and shows. The conversation may go anywhere, but it's always about one thing: the nature of horses … so the question emerges: what is the nature of horses? In A Year at the Races, Smiley examines love, ambition, personality and intelligence in horses, mixed with enough good horse stories to keep any reader happy.
Verlyn Klinkenborg - The New York Times

Writing with nail-on-the-head precision, Smiley revels in the physical genius of horses, explores their five planes of equine awareness, delves into their sociology and psychology, and does it all with unapologetic obsession.
Sally Jenkins - The Washington Post

In a wide-ranging and detailed, yet somewhat flat memoir, Smiley (A Thousand Acres; Moo; etc.) examines the nuances of horses' lives and of the people who build their lives around them. She does not aim "to evoke horseness, but to evoke horse individuality; to do what a novelist naturally does, which is to limn idiosyncrasy and character, and thereby to shade in some things about identity." This she accomplishes through illustrative episodes with some of the horses she has owned, focusing on two and their fortunes at the track. While the book offers anecdotes and an array of Smiley's theories about horse personality and cognizance, it lacks the narrative or dramatic flair that one expects would come naturally from such an accomplished novelist. The writing can often be formulaic: "In June, Eddie died, and Alexis became my trainer. Hornblower was two. I was fifty. Alexis was forty-eight. Mr. T. had died the year before, at twenty. Jackie was three. Persey was four. Alexis and I began to become friends." Smiley talks of moving her horse from one track to another as "being asked to leave Harvard and take a course at Boston University," and she delights in cutting a grand figure when arriving at the more posh tracks in a publisher-provided Mercedes limousine. In the end, the book provides a meticulous look at the world of thoroughbred horses, but it has too many flaws to be a perfectly enjoyable read.
Publishers Weekly

Novelist Smiley (Good Faith, 2003, etc.) portrays her life with horses in a text full of quirks, neuroses, personal insights, theories, and lots of polished vignettes. "Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse," writes Smiley in this rangy memoir, which encompasses a whole lot more than a year at the racetrack. She gets one too, thanks to generous parents, and soon learns that "every horse story is a love story...(or, to be cooler about it, mutual attachment)." She draws upon a huge body of anecdotal material, much of it her own, to get at a horse's individuality, the idiosyncrasies and character traits that shade into something called identity. She explores the kinesthetic, psychological, and spatial intelligence possessed by horses; she comments on Thoroughbred companionability (a concept horsemen tend to scoff at), arguing that the animals seem to take pleasure in wandering or sparring and actually "like to form hierarchies." Smiley is a close observer, and what she notes is always interesting: a particular horse's desire for ritual, the intricate social world at the backside of the track, the expense of horses as compared to kids ("though it costs as much to keep a racehorse at Santa Anita as it does to keep a child at Harvard, the payoff can come within months"). Some of her experiences are truly strange: her relationship with a horse communicator whose talent is not just uncanny, but surreal; episodes with an "energy healer," not quite as otherworldly as those with the communicator but possessing their own mystical singularity. The surety and glow of her prose fragrantly convey the author's sensuous and protective love for horses; she's the kind of mother any foal would be lucky to have.
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)

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A Year in Provence 
Peter Mayle (Ill., Judith Clancey), 1989
Knopf Doubleday
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400095698


In Brief 
1989 British Book Award, Best Travel Book

In this witty and warm-hearted account, Peter Mayle tells what it is like to realize a long-cherished dream and actually move into a 200-year-old stone farmhouse in the remote country of the Lubéron with his wife and two large dogs. He endures January's frosty mistral as it comes howling down the Rhône Valley, discovers the secrets of goat racing through the middle of town, and delights in the glorious regional cuisine.

A Year in Provence transports us into all the earthy pleasures of Provençal life and lets us live vicariously at a tempo governed by seasons, not by days. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 14, 1939
• Where—Brighton, England, UK
• Awards—British Book Award (Best Travel Book)
• Currently—lives in Luberon, Provence, France

Peter Mayle spent fifteen years in the advertising business, first as a copywriter and then as a reluctant executive, before escaping Madison Avenue in 1975 to write books. His work has been translated into seventeen languages, and he has contributed to the London Sunday Times, the Financial Times, and the Independent, as well as Gentlemen's Quarterly and Esquire. A Year in Provence won the British Book Awards "Best Travel Book of the Year." Peter Mayle and his wife live in Provence (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
[Mayle] and his wife, Jenny, had vacationed often in the South of France, and finally decided to move there. "It's one of those areas that you can become addicted to quite quickly," he says. "Particularly the physical aspects: the light, the space, the beauty, the lack of crowds.... Mr. Mayle tells of his and his wife's encounters with the Provencal people, the countryside, the culture and the bureaucracy. There are the workers who tear apart and begin to renovate the house, arriving suddenly early one morning and departing just as unexpectedly, their return date unknown. There is the adventure of trying to move their new 1,200-pound stone table into the backyard. There is the truffle hunt, with dogs and even a pig; the smell of lavender and the solitude of the forests; the wine tasting, and tasting, and tasting; the chorus of toads; the pipes bursting in the freezing house in winter and the British tourists bursting into the now-famous writer's house in summer. And most of all, there is the food. Feast after Provencal feast, in restaurants small and large, fancy and cheap, and in the homes of neighbors and friends.
Mervyn Rothstein - New York Times

Stylish, witty, delightfully readable.
Sunday Times (London)

An account of the author's first frustrating but enlightening year in Provence opens with a memorable New Year's lunch and closes with an impromptu Christmas dinner. In nimble prose, Mayle...captures the humorous aspects of visits to markets, vineyards and goat races, and hunting for mushrooms.
Publishers Weekly

An amusing account of an English couple's first year as residents of rural Provence, from the unpleasantness of the winter mistral to the transgressions of summer tourists. Since the old farmhouse they purchased needed repairs, they were immediately beset with problems in dealing with the foibles of local craftspeople and officialdom, not to mention the neighbors—human and animal. Nowhere in France is the consumption of food and drink taken more seriously, and food preparation, dining, and wining anecdotes are prominent in virtually every chapter. A Francophile's delight, this is a highly entertaining book which also teaches a lesson in social life and customs. Recommended for most collections. Mayle is the author of such popular books for children as Where Did I Come From and What's Happening to Me. —Sondra Brunhumer, Western Michigan Univ. Libs., Kalamazoo
Library Journal

Discussion Questions 
1. How well did Mayle's frequent trips to Provence as a tourist prepare him for the reality of residing there? What were some of the initial surprises he and his wife encountered?

2. How does the form of the book--a month-by-month journal--enhance the immediacy of Mayle's observations and draw the reader into his experiences? How do the changing seasons mirror Mayle's own adjustment to his new environment?

3. Mayle writes that neighbors take on an importance in the country that they don't have in the city [p. 6]. How do his relationships with Faustin, Massot, Menicucci, and the other local workmen reflect this? Does the fact that Mayle is a foreigner influence the way he is treated? How do the men working on his house endear themselves to Mayle, despite his continuing frustrations with their casual attitude about completing the job?

4. Mayle notes there are "two areas of endeavor in which France leads the world-- bureaucracy and gastronomy" [p. 23]. What particular characteristics of the French does Mayle bring to light in stories about the bureaucracy involved in buying the house, a car, insurance, and other necessities?

5. The influx of tourists begins in May and reaches a high point in August. How does his status as a resident affect Mayle's attitudes about friends and acquaintances who, as he himself once did, try to take in everything Provence has to offer during a short holiday? Does he learn things about himself and the life he has chosen by looking through the eyes of visitors? To what extent are his own perceptions influenced by his English upbringing?

6. How does the Mayles' party for the workmen and their wives, as well as their own Christmas dinner at a local restaurant, put the events of the year into context and serve as a coda to the book as a whole?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person
Shonda Rhimes, 2015
Simon & Schuster
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476777122


Summary
From the creator of Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal and executive producer of How to Get Away With Murder shares how saying YES changed her life.

She’s the creator and producer of some of the most groundbreaking and audacious shows on television today. Her iconic characters live boldly and speak their minds.

So who would suspect that Shonda Rhimes is an introvert? That she hired a publicist so she could avoid public appearances? That she suffered panic attacks before media interviews?

With three children at home and three hit television shows, it was easy for Shonda to say she was simply too busy. But in truth, she was also afraid. And then, over Thanksgiving dinner, her sister muttered something that was both a wake up and a call to arms: You never say yes to anything.

Shonda knew she had to embrace the challenge: for one year, she would say YES to everything that scared her.

This poignant, intimate, and hilarious memoir explores Shonda’s life before her Year of Yes—from her nerdy, book-loving childhood to her devotion to creating television characters who reflected the world she saw around her.

The book chronicles her life after her Year of Yes had begun—when Shonda forced herself out of the house and onto the stage; when she learned to explore, empower, applaud, and love her truest self. Yes.  (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 13, 1970
• Where— Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Dartmouth College; M.F.A., University of Southern California
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California


Shonda Lynn Rhimes is a television producer and writer. Rhimes is the creator, head writer, executive producer, and showrunner of the medical drama television series Grey's Anatomy, its spin-off Private Practice and the political thriller series Scandal.

She is  also executive producer of ABC's legal series How to Get Away with Murder, which debuted in September, 2014, and The Catch which debuted in March, 2016. In May 2007, Rhimes was named one of Time magazine's 100 People Who Help Shape The World. She lives in Los Angeles, California, with her three daughters.

Early life
Rhimes was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Vera P. Cain, a university administrator, and Ilee Rhimes, Jr., a college professor. Her mother attended college while raising six children and earned a PhD in educational administration in 1991; her father, who holds an MBA, was the chief information officer at the University of Southern California until 2013.

Rhimes lived in Park Forest South (now University Park, Illinois), with two older brothers and three older sisters. She has said she exhibited an early affinity for storytelling and that her time spent as a hospital volunteer while in high school sparked an interest in hospital environments.

Rhimes attended Marian Catholic High School in Chicago Heights, Illinois, before enrolling at Dartmouth College, where she majored in English and film studies and earned her bachelor's degree in 1991. At Dartmouth, she joined the Black Underground Theater Association and divided her time between directing and performing in student productions and fiction. She also wrote for the college newspaper.

After college, Rhimes relocated to San Francisco with an older sibling and worked in advertising at McCann Erickson. She subsequently relocated to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California (USC) to study screenwriting, winninf a Gary Rosenberg Writing Fellowship. She obtained her M.F.A from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, ranking at the topof her class.

While at USC Rhimes was hired by Debra Martin Chase as an intern. Rhimes credits her early success in part to mentors like a prominent African-American producer, who hired her as an intern at Denzel Washington's production company Mundy Lane Entertainment. Chase would later serve as a mentor to Rhimes and they would work together on The Princess Diaries 2.

Career: 1995–2004
After graduation, Rhimes found herself an unemployed scriptwriter in Hollywood. To make ends meet, Rhimes worked at a variety of day jobs, including an office administrator, and then a counselor at a job center that taught mentally ill and homeless people job skills. During this period, Rhimes worked as research director on the 1995 Peabody Award-winning documentary, Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream (1995).

In 1998 Rhimes made a short film, Blossoms and Veils, starring Jada Pinkett-Smith and Jeffrey Wright—her only credit as director. A feature script she wrote was purchased by New Line Cinema, which was soon followed by an assignment to co-write the acclaimed 1999 HBO movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. The film earned numerous awards for its star, Halle Berry.

In 2001, Rhimes wrote Crossroads, the debut film of pop singer Britney Spears. Although panned by critics, the film grossed over $60 million worldwide. Rhimes then moved on to Disney’s sequel to its popular 2001 movie The Princess Diaries. While the 2004 sequel—The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement—was not the box office hit of the original, Rhimes later said later she treasured the experience for the opportunity of working with Julie Andrews.

Career: 2005–present
Rhimes is the creator and currently executive producer and head writer of Grey's Anatomy. The series debuted as a midseason replacement in March, 2005. The series focuses on the surgical staff at the fictional Seattle Grace Hospital (later to be named Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital), in Seattle, Washington. The series features an ensemble cast with Ellen Pompeo serving as titular character Meredith Grey, who provides narration for a majority of the series' episodes. On May 16, 2006, ABC announced plans to relocate Grey's Anatomy from Sunday evenings to Thursdays to anchor the network's Thursday evening programming, by airing Thursdays at 9 p.m.

Rhimes created and produced the Grey's Anatomy spin-off series Private Practice, which debuted in September, 2007, on ABC. The show chronicled the life of Dr. Addison Montgomery (Kate Walsh) as she left Seattle Grace Hospital for Los Angeles to join a private practice. The series featured an ensemble cast, including Tim Daly, Amy Brenneman, Audra McDonald and Taye Diggs among others. The first season was shortened because of a writers' strike and consists of only nine episodes. In May 2012, ABC picked up Private Practice for the 2012-13 television season with 13 episodes. The series finale was aired January 22, 2013.

In 2011, Rhimes served as executive producer for the medical drama, Off the Map, which was created by Grey's Anatomy writer, Jenna Bans. It focused on a group of doctors who practice medicine at a remote clinic in the Amazon. The series was officially cancelled by the ABC network on in May, 2011.

That same month ABC ordered Rhimes's pilot script Scandal to series. Kerry Washington stars as Olivia Pope, a political crisis management expert who is partially based on former Bush administration press aide Judy Smith. The series debut aired in April, 2012.

In December 2013, it was announced that ABC had ordered to pilot the ShondaLand production How to Get Away with Murder. Actress Viola Davis joined the cast as the lead character in February, 2014. It was officially picked up to series in May, 2014. Rhimes appeared as herself in the 5th episode of Season 3 of The Mindy Project, which aired October 14, 2014.

In 2015, Rhimes developed a pilot called The Catch, based on the Kate Atkinson novel, which columnist Cindy Elavsky described as a "thriller...about a woman who is about to get married...and about to get conned. Mireille Enos stars. The show got picked up by ABC and premiered Thursday March 24, 2016, at 10 pm, taking over How to Get Away with Murder's time-slot after the show ended its second season.

In March 2016, Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder. and Grey's Anatomy were respectively picked up for their sixth, third and thirteenth seasons, and will air during the 2016-2017 season.

ShondaLand
ShondaLand is the name of Rhimes's production company. ShondaLand and its logo also refer to the shows that Rhimes has created, and to Rhimes herself. Shows which are included in ShondaLand are

    Grey's Anatomy (2005–present)
    Private Practice (2007–2013)
    Off the Map (2011)
    Scandal (2012–present)
    How to Get Away with Murder (2014–present)
    The Catch (2016–present)

Personal life
Rhimes adopted her first daughter in June 2002 and adopted another girl in February 2012. In September 2013, Rhimes welcomed her third daughter via gestational surrogacy.

In 2014, Rhimes spoke at her alma mater Dartmouth College's commencement and received an honorary doctorate.

In September 2015, Rhimes revealed she had lost 117 pounds via exercise and dieting. She is an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/22/2016 .)

Book Reviews
Rhimes's style is comfortingly congenial, like spending a lazy afternoon chatting with an old friend. Even though the author comes across as more of a no-nonsense hard charger than a hand-holder, she slows down and takes our hand in hers anyway. She makes her battles our own by daring to be as honest as possible. As anyone who has watched her shows already knows, Rhimes is a natural storyteller. The tiniest epiphanies feel like revelations in her hands, yet she pulls it off without ever losing herself in a haze of sentimentality or cliches.... Folksy first-person books aren't usually so edgy or so hilariously self-effacing. But somehow, through her esoteric cadence and her delightfully self-indulgent digressions, Rhimes brings the full force of her personality to every page.
Heather Havrilesky - New York Times Book Review


Can help motivate even the most determined homebody to get out and try something new in the New Year.
Chicago Tribune


Instead of writing passionate narratives for her TV characters, Rhimes adopted their pluck and bold attitudes and attacked life with a new sense of purpose.... Who knew that such a small word could have such a life-changing impact? By saying "yes," she learned to dance it out and stand in the sun. Dr. Cristina Yang would be so proud.
Associated Press


[A]s fun to read as Rhimes' TV series are to watch. Her authorial voice is fresh and strong.
Los Angeles Times


If you enjoy the rapid-fire dialogue of her characters, reading this book will feel like home. Rhimes opens up, and inspires, discussing her personal experiences as a sister, daughter, mother, friend and boss tempered with biting insights on societal expectations of women…[a] blend of biography and badassery.
Ebony


A book that is fun, dishy and inspirational all at the same time…a powerful book, a great gift for a friend or yourself, whether you’re a fan of the Shondaland lineup or not.
Mother Load/New York Times.com


Shamelessly entertaining…an antic, funny and surprisingly funky portrait of what it’s like to be one of the most fascinating forces in contemporary network television.
Buffalo News (Editor's Choice Review)


This memoir/call to arms from the one-woman force behind Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away With Murder is basically a New Year’s resolution between two covers. Wherever you’re going, bring it with you.
Bloomberg Businessweek


Rhimes is, unsurprisingly, a fantastic memoirist: Her writing is conversational and witty and lyrical, inflected with the supple human breathiness you might expect from a person who spends her days writing dialogue. It features lots of great punchlines.... It features occasional, chatty, second-person asides.... [It] is also in many ways a side-door self-help book…[with] pieces of advice that concern not just Rhimes’s readers, but everyone.... Year of Yes is a book about the shifts taking place in Hollywood right now,and in the world right now, in the guise of a friendly memoir. It is, like Shondaland itself, making a statement. It is insisting that it is time for the people who used to be invisible to come forward and be seen.
Atlantic.com


Brilliant…a peek into Rhimes' wise, funny, surprisingly candid brain, which contains opinions on everything from accepting compliments and balancing show-running with single motherhood to, yes, the recent weight loss that's been (unfairly) making the most headlines. By the end of journey in The Year of Yes, you'll feel like you've gained a new best friend.
Women & Hollywood/ Indiewire.com


You’ll want to standup and cheer when she takes control, remakes her life, and learns to love herself.
Buzzfeed.com


(Starred review.) [A] powerful memoir and self-help book.... [Rhimes] shares some of the key beliefs and events behind this transformation, all with good humor and vivid prose. Rhimes comes across as inspiring and real.
Publishers Weekly


A sincere and inspiring account of saying yes to life…Rhimes tells us all about it in the speedy, smart style of her much-loved TV shows.... Following her may not land you on the cover of a magazine, but you'll be glad you did.
Kirkus Reviews

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

1. Name five characteristics of Shonda that mirror your own. How did her growth change your behavior from now until forever more?

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The Yellow Bird:  Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country
Sierra Crane Murdoch, 2020
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399589157


Summary
The gripping true story of a murder on an Indian reservation, and the unforgettable Arikara woman who becomes obsessed with solving it—an urgent work of literary journalism.

When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom.

In her absence, the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, her tribal government swayed by corporate interests, and her community burdened by a surge in violence and addiction.

Three years later, when Lissa learned that a young white oil worker, Kristopher “KC” Clarke, had disappeared from his reservation worksite, she became particularly concerned. No one knew where Clarke had gone, and few people were actively looking for him.
 
Yellow Bird traces Lissa’s steps as she obsessively hunts for clues to Clarke’s disappearance. She navigates two worlds—that of her own tribe, changed by its newfound wealth, and that of the non-Native oilmen, down on their luck, who have come to find work on the heels of the economic recession.

Her pursuit of Clarke is also a pursuit of redemption, as Lissa atones for her own crimes and reckons with generations of trauma.

Yellow Bird is an exquisitely written, masterfully reported story about a search for justice and a remarkable portrait of a complex woman who is smart, funny, eloquent, compassionate, and—when it serves her cause—manipulative.

Drawing on eight years of immersive investigation, Sierra Crane Murdoch has produced a profound examination of the legacy of systematic violence inflicted on a tribal nation and a tale of extraordinary healing. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Sierra Crane Murdoch, a journalist based in the American West, has written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker online, Virginia Quarterly Review, Orion, and High Country News.

She has held fellowships from Middlebury College and from the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a MacDowell Fellow. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Remarkable…. [The book’s] strength derives not from vast panoramas but from an intimate gaze…. I’ve long felt that Native communities are perceived… as places in America but not of America.… Yellow Bird’s fanatical but dignified search brought closure to Clarke’s family and change to Fort Berthold. In her telling of the story, Murdoch brings the same fanaticism and dignity to the search for and meaning of modern Native America.
David Treuer - New York Times


A great true-crime story…. Lissa Yellow Bird is one of the most fascinating characters I’ve ever read about—and she’s a real person…. It’s Yellow Bird’s incremental fight that makes the book addictive, full of twists and turns and surprising choices…. Murdoch reports the hell out of it, digging up text messages and conversations and business dealings and shifts in tribal power. She also gets deep into personal relationships and reveals their richness from all sides. It’s a remarkable accomplishment.
Los Angeles Times


Murdoch follows an Arikara woman named Lissa Yellow Bird who is determined to solve the mystery of a missing white oil worker on the North Dakota reservation where her family lives. The book offers a gripping narrative of Yellow Bird’s obsession with the case, but it’s also about the harsh history of the land where the man vanished, how it was flooded and remade, first by an uncaring federal government and then again by industry. Yellow Bird teaches us that some things aren’t random at all—that a crime, and its resolution, can be a product of a time and a place, and a history bringing together the people involved.
Outside magazine


[A] powerful portrayal of an unusual sleuth whose dogged pursuit of a missing person inquiry led to justice.… Murdoch deepens her narrative with a searing look at the deficiencies of law and order on Native American land, corruption, and the abrogation of responsibility by the federal government.
Publishers Weekly


[E]xpertly blends true crime, environmental drama, and family saga.… Murdoch has outdone herself by telling the story in a beautifully narrative way, allowing readers to watch the scene unfold as Lissa Yellow Bird investigates the disappearance of Kristopher "KC" Clarke.  —Ahliah Bratzler, Indianapolis P.L.
Library Journal


A murder on an Indian reservation changes lives—at least one for the better but most for the worse.… Thanks to Yellow Bird's tireless search, the truth eventually emerged…. An impressive debut that serves as an eye-opening view of both the oil economy and Native American affairs.
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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Yes Please 
Amy Poehler, 2014
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594206276


Summary
Do you want to get to know the woman we first came to love on Comedy Central's Upright Citizens Brigade? Do you want to spend some time with the lady who made you howl with laughter on Saturday Night Live, and in movies like Baby Mama, Blades of Glory, and They Came Together?

Do you find yourself daydreaming about hanging out with the actor behind the brilliant Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation? Did you wish you were in the audience at the last two Golden Globes ceremonies, so you could bask in the hilarity of Amy's one-liners?

If your answer to these questions is "Yes Please!" then you are in luck.

In her first book, one of our most beloved funny folk delivers a smart, pointed, and ultimately inspirational read. Full of the comedic skill that makes us all love Amy, Yes Please is a rich and varied collection of stories, lists, poetry (Plastic Surgery Haiku, to be specific), photographs, mantras and advice.

With chapters like "Treat Your Career Like a Bad Boyfriend," "Plain Girl Versus the Demon" and "The Robots Will Kill Us All," Yes Please will make you think as much as it will make you laugh. Honest, personal, real, and righteous, Yes Please is full of words to live by. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 16, 1971
• Where—Newton, Massachusetts USA
• Education—B.A., Boston College
• Awards—Golden Globe Award for Best Actress (TV)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York, and in Los Angeles, California


Amy Meredith Poehler is an American actress, comedian, voice artist, director, producer, and writer. She moved to Chicago in 1993 to study improv at The Second City and ImprovOlympic. In 1996, she moved to New York City after becoming part of the improvisational comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade, which later developed into an eponymous television show that aired on Comedy Central for three seasons. She was also one of the founding members of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in 1999.

Amy Poehler was a cast member on the NBC television series Saturday Night Live from 2001 to 2008. In 2004, she became the co-anchor of the "Weekend Update" sketch alongside her friend and colleague Tina Fey. Poehler is known for voicing Bessie Higgenbottom in the 2008–2011 Nickelodeon series, The Mighty B! and Homily Clock from the English dub of The Secret World of Arrietty. From 2009 to 2015, she starred as Leslie Knope in the sitcom Parks and Recreation, for which she won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Television Musical or Comedy Series in 2014.

Poehler served as an executive producer on the Swedish-American sitcom Welcome to Sweden, along with her brother Greg Poehler. The series aired on NBC. She is also an executive producer on Broad City which airs on Comedy Central, and appeared in the Season 1 finale.

She also voiced Joy in the 2015 animated Pixar film Inside Out, and received critical acclaim for her work. Since August 2015, she has served as an executive producer on the Hulu original series, Difficult People, which stars her former Parks and Recreation co-star Billy Eichner and comedian Julie Klausner, the latter of which is the creator of the show.

Early life
Poehler was born in Newton, Massachusetts to high school teachers Eileen Frances (nee Milmore) and William Grinstead Poehler. Her brother, Greg Poehler, is a producer and actor. She grew up in nearby Burlington.

While attending Boston College, Poehler was a member of My Mother's Fleabag, the oldest collegiate improv comedy troupe in the United States. She graduated from Boston College with a bachelor's degree in media and communications in 1993 and moved to Chicago, where she studied improv at Second City with friend and future co-star Tina Fey.

Upright Citizens Brigade
During her time at Second City and Improv Olympic in Chicago, Poehler studied under Del Close and Charna Halpern along with Matt Besser, where they were part of the original improv team called the Upright Citizens Brigade.

Poehler, along with Bresser, Matt Walsh, and Ian Roberts, performed sketch and improv around Chicago until the four moved to New York City in 1996. There the group quickly scored a TV gig, appearing as sketch regulars on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

In 1998, the group debuted at Comedy Central and opened an improv theatre/training center at 161 W. 22nd Street, in the space of a former strip club. The UCB theatre held shows seven nights a week in addition to offering classes in sketch comedy writing and improv.

Comedy Central canceled the Upright Citizens Brigade program in 2000 after its third season. The foursome continues to perform together in live improv shows at their comedy theatres in both New York and Los Angeles.

Saturday Night Live
Poehler joined the cast of SNL during the 2001–02 season; her debut episode—the first produced after the 9/11 attacks—included host Reese Witherspoon, musical guest Alicia Keys, and New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani as a special guest. Poehler was promoted from featured player to full cast member in her first season on the show, only the third person to have earned this distinction (after Harry Shearer and Eddie Murphy).

Beginning with the 2004–05 season, she co-anchored "Weekend Update" with Tina Fey, replacing the newly departed Jimmy Fallon. When Fey left after the 2005–06 season to devote time to the sitcom she created, 30 Rock, Seth Meyers joined Poehler at the anchor desk.

It was officially announced on September 16, 2008, that Poehler would be leaving SNL in October due to the birth of her child. She returned to the show on November 3, 2008, during the "SNL Presidential Bash '08," "hosting" as Hillary Clinton but left the show formally at the end of the year. She returned several times for special shows, including hosting a 2010 show with Katy Perry and anchoring "Weekend Update" in 2015 with Tina Fey and Jane Curtin for SNL's 40th anniversary show.

Parks and Recreation
On July 21, 2008, NBC officially announced Poehler's new series, Parks and Recreation in which Poehler plays Deputy Director of the Parks Department, Leslie Knope, in the fictional city of Pawnee, Indiana. After a poorly regarded first season, the show's second, third, fourth and fifth have been well received by critics, and Poehler received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for her role.

Poehler has written four episodes of the series and has also directed episodes, winning several Emmy nomoniations for both efforts, as well as nominations for best actress. In 2014, she won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Series—Comedy at the 71st Golden Globe Awards, which she co-hosted with Tina Fey.

Other work and recognition
Poehler has appeared in numerous films—Wet Hot American Summer, Mean Girls, Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, Blades of Glory, Envy, Shrek the Third, Mr. Woodcock, and Hamlet 2. She also appeared in various comedy segments on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, often playing her recurring role as Andy Richter's little sister.

In 2011, Poehler was included as one of Time magazine's "100 most influential people in the world." She also delivered the Class Day address to Harvard University's class of 2011.

Poehler and Fey have jointly hosted the Golden Globe Awards ceremony three times: the first time in 2013. Their inaugural appearance garnered attention due to a joke directed at Taylor Swift, who later responded with a Madeleine Albright quote: "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women." Poehler's response to Swift's comment, made as part of a Vanity Fair interview, was humorous, agreeing that she will go to hell, but for "other reasons."

Poehler hosted the Golden Globes ceremony with Fey again in 2014 as part of a three-year contract. Gilbert Cruz, of the Vulture website, wrote: "They killed it last year with their opening monologue and they did so again this year."

The two hosted the Golden Globe Awards ceremony for the third successive time in 2015, confirming prior to the event that the third time would be their last. Rolling Stone magazine wrote afterward that the pair "left no superstar unscathed during their riotous opening monologue," in which they "casually roasted the assembled masses." The Interview (2014), Bill Cosby, and Steve Carell were among the numerous subjects covered in the routine.

In 2014, Poehler published a memoir, Yes Please. She explained in a promotional interview with National Public Radio (NPR) that she was

...used to writing in characters and not really writing about myself.... [I]t was easier to share the early parts of my life rather than my own current events.

Topics covered in the book include body image, parenthood and learning about the limitations of physical appearance.

Personal life
Poehler married actor Will Arnett in 2003 and had a recurring role on the series Arrested Development as the wife of Arnett's character Gob Bluth. They also played a quasi-incestuous brother-sister ice skating team in the 2007 film Blades of Glory, and appeared together in Horton Hears a Who!, On Broadway, Spring Breakdown, and Monsters vs. Aliens. Arnett also had a guest appearance on Parks and Recreation. Both also did voice acting in The Secret World of Arrietty.

Together, Poehler and Arnett have two sons: Archibald (2008) and Abel (2010). After the couple announced in 2012 that they were ending their nine-year marriage, Poehler began dating actor and comedian Nick Kroll. He is mentioned in her memoir, Yes Please. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/25/2015.)

Book Reviews
Her heart isn’t in this book, which is O.K.—heart is overrated. But the jokes aren’t very good, either. “Yes Please” reminds you of that squeaky fact: Even smart, hilarious people, the ones you wish were your great friends, sometimes can’t write. The world isn’t fair that way.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


Funny, wise, earnest, honest, spiritually ambitious.... [Amy Poehler is] a smart and funny woman who isn't either of those things all the time and doesn't mind admitting it because she thinks that's important.
LA Times


The funniest, smartest and frankest memoir I've ever read. (Books of the Year 2014.)
Doug Johnstone - Herald (UK)


A joy.... [Poehler] has particularly smart advice on how to ignore the internal whispers that give rise to self-loathing; it should be piped into the girls' changing rooms at every secondary school. (Books of the Year 2014.)
Evening Standard (UK)


Hilarious...wickedly funny and razor sharp.
Observer (UK)


Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the only book I care about these days: Yes Please by Amy Poehler. Amy Poehler is an American actor, comedian and writer. She is also a mighty force for good... I know you're sick of celebrity memoirs, you're sick of female celebrities talking about feminism, blah blah blah. Well, that's just fine because Poehler's book is so much more than that. Poehler is the only person in the world other than Nora Ephron who can be funny about divorce (and she is so funny about divorce), and she is definitely the only person in the world from whom I will accept sex tips (and her sex tips are great). But most of all, she's super smart.
Hadley Freeman - Guardian (UK)


Required reading for all young women. (Best Books of 2014.)
Huffington Post


[A] bristlingly intelligent, guffaw-out-loud memoir.... Yes Please isn't a scan of the comedic brain so much as it is something far better-the full exposure of Poehler's funny and very magnanimous heart.
Elle


Yes Please is what happens if you take the wit of Saturday Night Live, sprinkle it with the warmth of Nora Ephron and marinade it in the spirit of the best, most empowering women's magazine.... Poehler is that rare thing: wise without being bossy, smart without making you feel a bit stupid, funny without making you wince. And her book is like sitting in your kitchen with your best friend, drinking too much wine, laughing, crying and maybe doing embarrassing mum dancing.
Harper's Bazaar


Half memoir, half advice column, and 100 percent wisecracking, sharp-as-hell, belly-laugh-making Poehler.
GQ


[Amy Poehler] is simply one of the best things about the 21st century so far.... [O]ne of this year's essential reads.
Stylist


As brilliant and hilarious and adorable as the woman herself.
Marie Claire


Life advice, personal anecdotes and a touch of sex all beautifully handled by the warmest US comedy goddess... Actually adorable.
Grazia Daily


Our favourite agony aunt... Witty, real-life advice Vogue A part-memoir, part-manual mashup of inspirational career counsel and laugh-out-loud sex advice.
Good Housekeeping


Anyone who loves Amy Poehler's biting comedic style will love the SNL star's autobiography... hilarious Stylist Poehler's first book of personal stories and advice, in the vein of Tina Fey's Bossypants and Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?... One of America's most beloved comics and actresses.
The Millions


Poehler, the sharp and self-deprecating Emmy-winning star of TV's Parks and Recreation, takes a stab here at autobiography mixed with advice on sex, babies, and even divorce.... Her memoir is as bewitching and chameleonlike as Poehler herself is when she appears onstage and on-screen.
Publishers Weekly


The author's successful career proves that collaboration, good manners and gratitude are assets in both business and life. She has written a happy, angst-free memoir with stories told without regret or shame....a series of lessons learned about achieving success through ambition and a resolute spirit.... A wise and winning—and polite—memoir and manifesto.
Kirkus Reviews

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

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

Also, consider using these LitLovers talking points to help start your discussion:

1. Amy Poehler comes across as modest and self-deprecating, especially when she says she fears that she hasn't "lived a life full enough to look back on." Think about that sentence. Is she right? Has her life lacked fullness, or has she lived a rather full life? Do you believe that you have lived a full-enough life to write about? At what age, or under what circumstances, have any of us lived long enough to reflect on and, perhaps, to offer solice or advice to others?

2. Follow-up to Question 1: Poehler also goes on to say in that same sentence (from above) that she's "too old to get by on being pithy and cute."  In Yes Please does she fall back on cuteness...or does she offer solid insights into her own life—insights which can serve as advice to others? In other words, what do you think of Poehler's book: is it cute, or is it substantive...or a bit of both?

3. Poehler seems to indicate that her success hasn't been a matter of luck or due to the kindness of others (yes, many people offered helped along the way) but rather the result of desire, hard work, and ability. What do you think of her claim? To what extent are any of us responsible for our successes...and failures? How much do we depend on sheer luck and help from family or mentors. On the other hand, how important is personal drive, focus, and ability?

4. In what way is Yes Please as much (if not more) a book about Poehler's path to maturity than it is about her road to success?

5. What insights have you gained in reading Yes Please? Is there any part of Poehler's experience that parallels your own journey in life?

6. One critic has said that the chapter "I'm So Proud of You," should be required reading in high school. Do you agree? Why or why not?

7. What about the chapter "Sorry, Sorry, Sorry"? Why was it so difficult for Poehler to admit her error? What does it reveal about her as a person? Has something similar ever happened to you?

8. Talk about the book's structure. Does it feel coherent, disorganized, over-stuffed with fillers...or just about right?

9. What does Yes Please reveal about the field of entertainment and the people who work in it? Has it altered your opinion of celebrities and show business...for the better or for the worse? Or has it confirmed your previous beliefs?

10. On the whole, how do you feel about Amy Poehler after reading Yes Please?

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

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You Don't Have to Say You Love Me:  A Memoir
Sherman Alexie, 2017
Little, Brown and Co.
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316270755

Summary
A searing, deeply moving memoir about family, love, loss, and forgiveness from the critically acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award-winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Family relationships are never simple. But Sherman Alexie's bond with his mother Lillian was more complex than most.

She plunged her family into chaos with a drinking habit, but shed her addiction when it was on the brink of costing her everything. She survived a violent past, but created an elaborate facade to hide the truth. She selflessly cared for strangers, but was often incapable of showering her children with the affection that they so desperately craved.

She wanted a better life for her son, but it was only by leaving her behind that he could hope to achieve it. It's these contradictions that made Lillian Alexie a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent, complicated, and very human woman.

When she passed away, the incongruities that defined his mother shook Sherman and his remembrance of her. Grappling with the haunting ghosts of the past in the wake of loss, he responded the only way he knew how: he wrote.

The result is a stunning memoir filled with raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine, much less survive. An unflinching and unforgettable remembrance, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is a powerful, deeply felt account of a complicated relationship. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 7, 1966
• Raised—Spokane, Washington, Indian Reservation
• Education—B.A., Washington State University
• Awards—National Book Award; PEN/Faulkner Award
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington


Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr. is an American poet, writer, and filmmaker. Much of his writing draws on his experiences as a Native American with ancestry of several tribes, growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Childhood
Alexie was born  in 1966 at Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, Washington, and spent his childhood on the Spokane Indian Reservation, located west of Spokane. His father, Sherman Joseph Alexie, was a member of the Coeur d'Alene tribe (though a grandfather was of Russian descent). Alexie's mother, Lillian Agnes Cox, was of Colville, Choctaw, Spokane and European American ancestry.

Alexie was born with hydrocephalus, a condition that occurs when there is an abnormally large amount of cerebral fluid in the cranial cavity. He underwent brain surgery when he was only six months old and was not expected to survive or, if he did, would be at high risk of mental disabilities. Alexie's surgery was successful and he survived with no mental damage but had other effects.

His father was an alcoholic who often left the house for days at a time. To support her six children, Alexie's mother Lillian sewed quilts and worked as a clerk at the Wellpinit Trading Post.

Alexie has described his life at the reservation school as challenging because he was constantly teased by other kids. He was nicknamed "The Globe" because his head was larger than usual due to the hydrocephalus. Until the age of seven, Alexie suffered from seizures and bedwetting and had to take strong drugs to control them. Because of his health problems, he was excluded from many of the activities that are rites of passage for young Indian males. However, he excelled academically, reading everything available, including auto repair manuals.

Education
In order to better his education, Alexie decided to leave the reservation and attend high school in Reardan, Washington, 22 miles off the reservation. The only Native American student, he excelled at his studies, became a star player on the basketball team, and was elected class president. He was also a member of the debate team.

His success in high school won him a scholarship in 1985 to Gonzaga University, a Roman Catholic university in Spokane. Originally enrolling in the pre-med program, he found he was squeamish during dissection in his anatomy classes. He switched to law but found that unsuitable, as well. Feeling pressure to succeed and beset with anxieity, he began drinking.

In 1987 Alexie dropped out of Gonzaga and enrolled at Washington State University. He was at a low point in his life when he enrolled in a creative writing course taught by Alex Kuo, a respected poet of Chinese-American background. Kuo served as a mentor to Alexie and gave him Songs of This Earth on Turtle's Back, an anthology by Joseph Bruchac. It was a book, Alexie later said, that changed his life—teaching him "how to connect to non-Native literature in a new way." He remained similarly inspired, however, by Native American poets.

With his new appreciation of poetry, Alexie started work on his first collection, The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Viviane Poems, published in 1992. With that success, Alexie stopped drinking and quit school just three credits short of a degree. Three years later, however, in 1995 he finally attained his bachelor's from Washington State University.

Short stories
Some of Alexie's best-known works are The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), a collection of short stories, and Smoke Signals (1998), a film based on that collection, for which he also wrote the screenplay.

His stories have been included in several anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories 2004, edited by Lorrie Moore; and Pushcart Prize XXIX of the Small Presses. Additionally, a number of his pieces have been published in various literary magazines and journals, as well as online publications.

His 2009 collection of short stories and poems, War Dances, won the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Novels
Alexie's first novel, Reservation Blues (1995), revisits some of the characters from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Victor Joseph, and Junior Polatkin, who have grown up together on the Spokane Indian reservation, were teenagers in the short story collection. In Reservation Blues they are now adult men in their thirties. The novel received one of the fifteen 1996 American Book Awards.

Indian Killer (1996) is a murder mystery set among Native American adults in contemporary Seattle, where the characters struggle with urban life, mental health, and the knowledge there is a serial killer on the loose.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) is a semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age story that began as a memoir of Alexie's life and family on the Spokane Indian reservation. The novel focuses on a fourteen-year-old Indian named Arnold Spirit and won the 2007 U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature. It also won the Odyssey Award as best 2008 audiobook for young people (read by the author himself).

Films
In 1998 Alexie broke barriers by creating the first all-Indian movie, Smoke Signals. Alexie based the screenplay on his short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and characters and events from a number of Alexie's works make appearances in the film.

The Business of Fancydancing, written and directed by Alexie in 2002, explores themes of Indian identity, cultural involvement vs. blood quantum, living on the reservation or off it, and other issues around what makes someone a "real Indian." The title refers to the protagonist's choice to leave the reservation and make his living performing for predominantly white audiences. Much of the dialogue was improvised, based on real events in the actors' lives.

Style and themes
Alexie's poetry, short stories and novels explore themes of despair, poverty, violence, and alcoholism in the lives of Native American people living on and off the reservation. Although exploring grim subjects, the works are leavened by wit and humor.

According to Sarah A. Quirk from the Dictionary of Library Biography, Alexie asks three questions across all of his works:

What does it mean to live as an Indian in this time?
What does it mean to be an Indian man?
What does it mean to live on an Indian reservation?

The protagonists in most of his literary works exhibit a constant struggle with themselves and their own sense of powerlessness in white American society.

Alexie’s writings "blends elements of popular culture, Indian spirituality, and the drudgery of poverty-ridden reservation life to create his characters and the world they inhabit," according to Quirk. His work is laced with often startling humor.

Personal
In 2005, Alexie became a founding board member of Longhouse Media, a non-profit organization that teaches filmmaking skills to Native American youth. It holds to the belief that media can be used for both cultural expression and social change.

Alexie is married to Diane Tomhave, who is of Hidatsa, Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi heritage. They live in Seattle with their two sons. (Adapted from Wikipoedia. Retrieved 1/31/2016.)

Book Reviews
What would we do without Sherman Alexie? Having a long, abiding fascination with Native America, I’ve always reached for his books. More than any other writer, he has given me an understanding of contemporary Amerindian life…. Now we have his latest book, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: a Memoir. I have to say: reading it was painful. There is much suffering — mental illness, sexual abuse, violent deaths, bullying, and alcoholism — within Sherman’s family and on the Spokane Indian Reservation where he grew up. Largely this book tackles his rather maddening relationship with his mother and was written after she passed away in 2015.
Keddy Ann Outlaw - LitLovers


The overwhelming takeaway from Mr. Alexie's memoir is triumph, that of one writer's ability to overcome hardscrabble roots, medical bad luck and generations of systemic racism — all through an uncommon command of language and metaphor.
James Yeh - New York Times Book Review


These pages are scored by resentment, hurt, guilt, anger, fear, but they are also full of gratitude, admiration, and tenderness.
Priscilla Gillman - Boston Globe


[A] marvel of emotional transparency, a story told with the fewest possible filters by a writer grieving the loss of a complicated mother.… [His lines of poetry] successfully convey the inevitable contradictions that beguile and beleaguer anyone who has ever tried to write honestly about someone they hoped to love, someone they hoped would love them.
Beth Kephart - Chicago Tribune


If candor is Alexie's superpower, accuracy might be his nemesis.… Throughout, Alexie is courageous and unflinching, delivering a worthy and honest eulogy by showing us his mother and himself in full, everything spectacular and everything scarred.
Michael Kleber-Diggs - Minneapolis Star Tribune


He's compulsively readable, a literary writer with the guts of a stand-up comedian.
Jim Higgins - Milwaukee Sentinel Journal


Everything you love about Alexie's writing is here: he still manages to find honest human comedy in the darkness of America's genocidal past and our deeply racist present.… His personality is large and, as he survives each passing trial, it's only getting larger; from his adoring audience's vantage point, Alexie is now a giant.
Paul Constant - Seattle Review of Books


The text is rambling, digressive, and sometimes baggy, with dozens of his poems sprinkled in; it wanders among lucid, conversational prose, bawdy comic turns, and lyrical, incantatory verse. This is a fine homage to the vexed process of growing up,
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [M]emories of a difficult childhood.… Highly recommended for all readers. Alexie's portrayals of family relationships, identity, and grief have the universality of great literature. —Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Alexie is a consummate, unnerving and funny storyteller…pouring himself into every molten word. Courageous, anguished, grateful, and hilarious, this is an enlightening and resounding eulogy and self-portrait.… [A]ll will be reaching for this confiding and concussive memoir.
Booklist


Written in his familiar breezy, conversational, and aphoristic style, the book makes even the darkest personal experiences uplifting and bearable with the author's wit, sarcasm, and humor.… [A] powerful, brutally honest memoir about a mother and the son who loved her.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for You Don't Have to Say You Love Me … then take off on your own:

1. In writing this memoir, Sherman Alexie told his sister that there would be a lot of blank spaces. "But I like the blank spaces." What do you think he means — why does he like blank spaces? What might they signify for him?

2. Follow-up to Question 1: Alexie also says, "This book is a series of circles, sacred and profane." Again, what do you think he means? What are the circles — and which are sacred and which profane?

3, Alexie takes an entire book, some 400 pages, to talk about his mother. So … in less than 400 pages … how would you describe Lillian? Talk about those traits that are both admirable and not so admirable, or just plain awful. Does she generate sympathy? Did your feelings toward her change during the course of reading the memoir?

4. Follow-up to Questions 3: How did the process of writing this memoir — and grappling with some memories he says are so painful he almost did not include them — affect Alexie's understanding of his mother? Does he find peace by the end? If so, in what way?

5. At times Alexie moves the book's focus away from Lillian and back to his own childhood: his medical emergencies, high school years, mental health problems. Talk about those years. What did you find particularly moving or remarkable about his background?

6. Reviewers make much of the humor in You Don't Have to Say You Love Me. Did it make you laugh as you read it? What in particularly did you find funny.

7. What is the significance of the book's cover photo?

8. The book includes 160 poems. Do you have a favorite? Do you find that the poems illuminate the narrative? If so in what way? Or do you find the poetry distracting? Consider the times that the author broke out of a poem into prose, then back into poetry again. Is there anything in particular that seems to prompt the changes from one mode to the other?

9. What have you learned about life on an Indian Reservation? What insights have you gleaned from this memoir into Native American culture? Did anything especially surprise you, impress you, delight you, anger you, or sadden you?

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

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You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know
Heather Sellers, 2010
Penguin Group USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594487736


Summary 
Heather Sellers is face-blind—that is, she has prosopagnosia, a rare neurological condition that prevents her from reliably recognizing people's faces. Growing up, unaware of the reason for her perpetual confusion and anxiety, she took what cues she could from speech, hairstyle, and gait. But she sometimes kissed a stranger, thinking he was her boyfriend, or failed to recognize even her own father and mother. She feared she must be crazy.

Yet it was her mother who nailed windows shut and covered them with blankets, made her daughter walk on her knees to spare the carpeting, had her practice secret words to use in the likely event of abduction. Her father went on weeklong "fishing trips" (aka benders), took in drifters, wore panty hose and bras under his regular clothes. Heather clung to a barely coherent story of a "normal" childhood in order to survive the one she had.

That fairy tale unraveled two decades later when Heather took the man she would marry home to meet her parents and began to discover the truth about her family and about herself. As she came at last to trust her own perceptions, she learned the gift of perspective: that embracing the past as it is allows us to let it go. And she illuminated a deeper truth-that even in the most flawed circumstances, love may be seen and felt. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—c. 1964
• Where—Florida, USA
• Education—Ph.D., University of Florida
• Currently—teaches at Hope College-Holland, Michigan

Heather Sellers has a PhD in English/Creative Writing from Florida State University. She’s a professor of English at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, where she teaches poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing courses. She won an NEA grant for fiction and her first book of fiction, Georgia Under Water, was part of the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers program.

Her books include the short story collection, Georgia Under Water, a children’s book, Spike and Cubby’s Ice Cream Island Adventure, three volumes of poetry and three books on the craft of writing. She has also taught at the University of Texas—San Antonio and St. Lawrence University.

Her memoir about face blindness was published by Riverhead Books in 2010. She loves to ride her Bianchi bicycle and she rides in the rain. Heather was born and raised in Florida. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
It sometimes appears that contemporary memoir has become a game of misery poker, authors competing for the most appalling hand of woes. Face blindness would seem to be a trump card, but Sellers doesn't play it that way. On the contrary.... She views prosopagnosia as a gift...[and] believes her condition helped her as a writer by forcing her to focus on "the essence of the person," not the surface. The writing bears this out. Sellers captures the people in her life in spare, perfect strokes.... Her calm, glass-half-full-to- overflowing worldview could, in another writer's hands, veer toward treacle, but she pulls it off beautifully.
Mary Roach - New York Times

(Four-star review.) Never forget a face? What if you couldn't remember any? Sellers...learns to appreciate the upside: Being blind to faces makes it easier to see herself and those she loves as they really are.
People

Stunning...This is a memoir to be devoured in great chunks. The pleasure of reading it derives both from its graceful style and from its ultimate lesson: that seeing our past for what it really was, and forgiving those involved, frees us up to love them all the more, despite their (and our) limitations.
Bookpage

With buoyant honesty and vibrant charm, Sellers paints a spirited portrait of a dysfunctional family and a woman who nearly loses herself in her attempts to deny their abnormalities. Sure to appeal to fans of The Glass Castle (2005), Sellers limns an acutely perceptive tale of triumph over parental and physical shackles. —Carol Haggas
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 You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know:

1. Borrowing a line from the movie, Men in Black...do you see anything "unusual" about the author's parents? What do you think of them—are they despicable, sad...or something else?

2. As a writer, Sellers draws on a rich vein of imagery to describe her mother and father—why might she have used that technique? Does her use of simile and metaphor paint a more, or less, vivid portrait than if she had used straight-forward prose?

3. As a child, how did Sellers justify her parents' strange behavior—how did she explain them to herself?

4. Later, Sellers tells us she has come to understand how her face-blindness enabled her to cope with her parents. What does she mean when she says, "I could sit and not-know the hell out of something, and it was a perfectly pleasant, nonchaotic way to spend time"?

5. Readers and reviewers alike have commented that, given both her face-blindness and upbringing, Sellers's memoir is remarkably free of anger. How do you explain the lack of bitterness? Compwhichare the tone of Sellers' memoir with other personal accounts you've read of painful childhoods.

6. Talk about Sellers' passage through the difficult years of adolescence—tough years to negotiate for any young person, let alone someone like Heather. What were her teenage struggles, and how do they compare to yours...or to anyone's typical teen years?

7. How does her then-fiance, Dave, enable Sellers to realize her family was not normal? What are the other ways in which Dave helps her?

8. Why does her marriage begin to fall apart? And why does it take so much time for Sellers to make the final break? What role does prosopagnosia play in the breakup...or does it play a role? Now that it's over, how does Sellers look back on her marriage?

9. Sellers is diagnosed with prosopagnosia in middle-age. Why has it taken so long to learn about her disorder? At first, Sellers feels tremendous relief. But a delayed reaction sets in, undermining her initial relief. Why the conflicting emotions?

10. People with Sellers' disorder have some delightful quirks: they love conferences—"festivals with labeled strangers." What else do prosopagnosiacs find enjoyable that the rest of us dislike?

11. Imagine that you have prosopagnosia. What would it be like? How well do you think you would cope? What would be most difficult? What techniques would you develop to make your world an easier place?

12. In what way has Sellers come to see prosopagnosia as a gift? How has it affected her writing...and her ability to comprehend people? Talk about her belief that the disorder fosters "the ability to live with uncertainty, to be receptive to all that a person might turn out to be, literally and metaphorically." What does she mean?

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

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You Never Forget Your First:  A Biography of George Washington
Alexis Coe, 2020
Penguin Publishing
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735224100 


Summary
Alexis Coe takes a closer look at our first—and finds he is not quite the man we remember.

Young George Washington was raised by a struggling single mother, demanded military promotions, caused an international incident, and never backed down—even when his dysentery got so bad he had to ride with a cushion on his saddle.

But after he married Martha, everything changed. Washington became the kind of man who named his dog Sweetlips and hated to leave home. He took up arms against the British only when there was no other way, though he lost more battles than he won.

After an unlikely victory in the Revolutionary War cast him as the nation's hero, he was desperate to retire, but the founders pressured him into the presidency—twice. When he retired years later, no one talked him out of it. He left the highest office heartbroken over the partisan nightmare his backstabbing cabinet had created.

Back on his plantation, the man who fought for liberty must confront his greatest hypocrisy—what to do with the men, women, and children he owns—before he succumbs to death.

With irresistible style and warm humor, You Never Forget Your First combines rigorous research and lively storytelling that will have readers—including those who thought presidential biographies were just for dads—inhaling every page. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Southern California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California-Santa Barbara; M.A., Sarah Lawrence College
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New


Alexis Coe is the award-winning author of Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis (soon to be a major motion picture). Coe has frequently appeared on CNN and the History Channel, and has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, and many other publications.

Coe is a host of Audible's Presidents Are People Too! and No Man's Land. Coe holds a graduate degree in American history and was a research curator at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn, New York (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
An important achievement. [Coe] has cleverly disguised a historiographical intervention in the form of a sometimes cheeky presidential biography.
Tatiana Schlossberg - New York Times Book Review


In her form-shattering and myth-crushing book… Coe examines myths with mirth, and writes history with humor…. [You Never Forget Your First] is an accessible look at a president who always finishes in the first ranks of our leaders.
Boston Globe


You've never quite read a biography like this. Chock full of remarkable facts about George Washington—and surprisingly easy to read—this one feels more like reading your favorite fiction.
Newsweek


Alexis Coe jolts readers with a fresh retelling of the first president. It’s Washington without the pomp—the United States’ first president like you’ve never seen him before.
Reader’s Digest


[B]reezy yet fact-filled revisionist biograph…. The book’s brisk pace and contrarian perspective leave significant gaps…, but it succeeds in humanizing the Founding Father. Readers who like their history with a dose of wry humor will savor this accessible account.
Publishers Weekly


[This] accessible, humorous work casts Washington in a personal light.… An adept, highly approachable read that will appeal to history buffs and anyone seeking a compact overview of the man and the myth. —Stacy Shaw, Denver
Library Journal


(Starred review) In the insightful and entertaining You Never Forget Your First, historian Alexis Coe moves past the well-worn tropes we’ve come to associate with George Washington… with style and humor…. Coe makes colonial history not just fascinating but relevant.
BookPage


A biography of George Washington that debunks many of the tall tales surrounding his legacy.… The author has clearly done her homework…. Evenhanded and engaging, this biography brings fresh insight to one of America's most written-about leaders.
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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Your BFF Really? : It Takes One to Have One
Linda K. Lee, 2015
CreateSpace
101 pp.
ISBN-13: 978151483293617


Summary
Are you dealing with the pleasures of friendships yet only to feel such pain at the same time?

Perhaps you're choosing the wrong friends or they are the perfect ones... Would you know the difference? Whether you're interested in learning how to keep your friendships healthy and thriving or you need to remove yourself from one that is draining you. Your BFF Really? Is for you.

Linda K Lee takes a practical yet spiritual look into a topic that is very important though immensely misunderstood. This book is written to give a better understanding of the pivotal yet purposeful platonic relationships in our lives. 

Author Bio
• Birth—April 19, 1963
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Education—Atlanta Technical College; Columbia School of Broadcasting
• Currently—lives in Atlanta, Georgia


Linda K. Lee has been married to Antonio Lee for 29 years. They have 3 children, Edwin, Tony, and Sharenda. Linda is also a grandmother of  four. She is a relationship mentor, a motivational speaker and a playwright as well.

Linda co wrote her first book three years ago with her husband. The book was entitled Flat Lined Love.
Linda loves to read mystery novels in her spare time.  She is a Bible teacher and trains other Bible teachers.

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

Discussion Questions
1. Do you consider yourself to be a friend?

2. Have you ever had a friendship to end?

3. What do you and your friends have in common?

(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands
Aidan Hartley, 2003
Penguin Group USA
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594480119


Summary
Hartley, a frontline reporter who covered the atrocities of 1990s Africa, embarks on a journey to unlock the mysteries and secrets of his own family's 150-year-colonial legacy in Africa, and delivers a beautiful, sometimes harrowing memoir of intrepid young men cut down in their prime, of forbidden love and its fatal consequences, and of family and history, and the collision of cultures that defined them both. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—1965
• Where—Nairobi, Kenya
• Education—Oxford University
• Currently—lives in Kenya

Aidan Hartley is a Kenyan journalist. He was born in Nairobi in 1965. From age 7-12 he attended Ravenswood School, a boarding school near Tiverton in Devon, England. He graduated from Oxford and the School of Oriental and African Studies, (SOAS) with a degree in Area Studies.

As a foreign correspondent for Reuters news agency, Hartley covered Africa in the 1990s—wars in Somalia, famine in Ethiopia and genocide in Rwanda. He is the author of The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands, which was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He is currently a columnist for the Spectator, and a correspondent for Unreported World. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
The former Reuters correspondent has written the most startling memoir of Africa for a generation. It is a complicated book. A white Kenyan, born of a line of colonial adventurers...he saw [in journalism] an opportunity to re-engage with the continent of his birth, yet his experience of Africa's postcolonial dismantling seems only to confirm he doesn't belong.... As a quest for belonging, his years on the road seem more likely to have been a failure. Yet his recollection of them is gripping, and often intensely moving
Guardian (UK)

A lyrical, passionate memoir of this dark continent. On the surface, Hartley's book professes to explore why his father and so many other Englishmen of his generation turned time and time again to Africa. Its real aim is far more ambitious: to explore the motives of many generations of white people—good and bad, but mostly confused—who have washed up on Africa's wilder shores of love. His judgement of the foreign politicians who have involved themselves in the continent is tough without being hysterical. And he has a sure pen for character! he writes best about the dichotemies within himself—his ache for Africa, his rage at its horrors, his longing for peace.
Economist

Toward the end of this mesmerizing chronicle, Hartley writes simply of Rwanda, "Like everything in Africa, the truth [is] somewhere in between." Hartley appreciates this complexity, mining the accounts that constitute his book not for the palliative but for the redemptive. Born in 1965 in Kenya into a long lineage of African colonialists, Hartley feels, like his father whose story he also traces, a magnetic, almost inexplicable pull to remain in Africa. Hartley's father imports modernity to the continent (promoting irrigation systems and sophisticated husbandry); later, Hartley himself "exports" Africa as a foreign correspondent for Reuters. Both men struggle to find moral imperatives as "foreigners" native to a continent still emerging from colonialism. Hartley's father concludes, "We should never have come here," and Hartley himself appears understandably beleaguered by the horrors he witnesses (and which he describes impressively) covering Ethiopia, Somalia and Rwanda. Emotionally shattered by the genocide in the latter ("Rwanda sits like a tumour leaking poison into the back of my head"), the journalist returns to his family home in Kenya, where he happens upon the diary of Peter Davey, his father's best friend, in the chest of the book's title. Hartley travels to the Arabian Peninsula to trace Davey's mysterious death in 1947, a story he weaves into the rest of his narrative. The account of Davey, while the least engaging portion of the book, provides Hartley with a perspective for grappling with the legacy that haunts him. This book is a sweeping, poetic homage to Africa, a continent made vivid by Hartley's capable, stunning prose.
Publishers Weekly


Only a person who truly understands Africa, having been born, raised and nurtured by the continent, could be as honest a reporter of its glories and horrors as Aidan Hartley. He worked as a reporter during the '90s and was witness to some of the terrible massacres, famines and suffering; but as an African native himself, though one with Western eyes, he reveals an Africa rarely seen by Americans. Contrasting with his own adventures are those of his father's friend, Peter Davey, who experienced different trials in East Africa a generation before Hartley, an honest and vivid writer. Much of what he writes is not pretty, but everything is insightful. (Ages 15 to adult.)
KLIATT

Hartley, a journalist and British subject...offers a startlingly refreshing perspective on the political, social, and cultural impact of British colonialism in Africa and Arabia.... He criticizes the policies of the UN and the U.S. in many of the world's trouble spots, putting a contemporary face on historic colonialism with an accuracy and veracity seldom seen in Western critiques. —Vernon Ford.
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 for The Zanzibar Chest:

1. Is Aidan Hartley Kenyan or British? What does he consider himself?

2. Describe the era into which Hartley was born—the changes in Africa as it moved from colonialism to post-colonialism? How does Hartley see the impact of European colonialism on Africa as its nations attempt to become stable, productive sovereign states?

3. What do you make of Hartley's father? What does Hartley make of him?

4. The Zanzibar Chest is in many ways a quest story. Why does Hartley want to connect with the past generations of his family? What does he hope for? Does he ever "find" what he's looking for?

5. As a follow-up to Question 3: Hartley says, "What I was looking for was a war that I could call my own—a complete experience that would define me as the son of my father and involve me as an insider." What does he mean?

6. How did the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States affect Africa? What happened to the continent once the cold war "cooled off"?

7. What does being a journalist mean to Hartley? What did he hope to accomplish as a journalist—in Somalia and elsewhere?

8. Describe the conditions in Somalia when Hartley arrived: the "Dionysian orgy of destruction." Hartley says it was a privilege to have witnessed "a people who tumbled into the abyss with such style." What does he mean?

9. To what does Hartley attribute the Somalian U.S. military disaster? Does his depiction of events square with accounts you might have read, or seen, before, say, in Black Hawk Down?

10. Hartley is open and frank about his drug and alcohol abuse. Were you sympathetic, or not, to his reasons?

11. Why is Hartley drawn to violence? How does it affect his relationships to both men and women?

12. Talk about the horrors of Rwanda. How did it affect Hartley? How does his account of the bloodshed and tragedy compare with other accounts you might have read of or seen?

13. Hartley writes about Rwanda, "Like everything else in Africa, the truth lies somewhere in between." Can you explain what he means?

14. How does Hartley portray some of his fellow correspondents?

15. How does Peter Davey's story compare to Hartley's own story? What does Hartley see in Davey's story that resonates with his own life?

16. How did Davey's death represent the loss of innocence of Hartley's father?

17. Talk about the ways in which Hartley criticizes both the United States and the United Nations? How does he feel they have failed Africa? Are his criticisms fair?

18. What did you find most disturbing, or chilling, as you read this book? What was most difficult to read about?

19. What solutions exist for Africa to participate fully in the 21st century? What does Africa need to do...and what is required of the international community?

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

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Zealot:  The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Reza Aslan, 2013
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400069224


Summary
From the internationally bestselling author of No god but God comes a fascinating, provocative, and meticulously researched biography that challenges long-held assumptions about the man we know as Jesus of Nazareth.

Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher and miracle worker walked across the Galilee, gathering followers to establish what he called the “Kingdom of God.” The revolutionary movement he launched was so threatening to the established order that he was captured, tortured, and executed as a state criminal.

Within decades after his shameful death, his followers would call him God.

Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history’s most influential and enigmatic characters by examining Jesus through the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived: first-century Palestine, an age awash in apocalyptic fervor. Scores of Jewish prophets, preachers, and would-be messiahs wandered through the Holy Land, bearing messages from God.

This was the age of zealotry—a fervent nationalism that made resistance to the Roman occupation a sacred duty incumbent on all Jews. And few figures better exemplified this principle than the charismatic Galilean who defied both the imperial authorities and their allies in the Jewish religious hierarchy.

Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against the historical sources, Aslan describes a man full of conviction and passion, yet rife with contradiction; a man of peace who exhorted his followers to arm themselves with swords; an exorcist and faith healer who urged his disciples to keep his identity a secret; and ultimately the seditious “King of the Jews” whose promise of liberation from Rome went unfulfilled in his brief lifetime.

Aslan explores the reasons why the early Christian church preferred to promulgate an image of Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary. And he grapples with the riddle of how Jesus understood himself, the mystery that is at the heart of all subsequent claims about his divinity.

Zealot yields a fresh perspective on one of the greatest stories ever told even as it affirms the radical and transformative nature of Jesus of Nazareth’s life and mission. The result is a thought-provoking, elegantly written biography with the pulse of a fast-paced novel: a singularly brilliant portrait of a man, a time, and the birth of a religion. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 3, 1972
• Where—Tehran, Iran
• Raised—San Francisco, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Santa Clara University; M.T.S, Harvard
   University; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop; Ph.D.,
   University of California-Santa Barbara
• Awards—see below
• Currently—lives in Hollywood, California


Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American writer and scholar of religions. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, a Research Associate at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy, and a contributing editor for The Daily Beast.

His books include the international bestseller No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (2005, 2011), which has been translated into 13 languages, and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013), which offers an interpretation of the life and mission of the historical Jesus. Aslan currently  lives in Hollywood, California.

Background
Aslan's family came to the United States from Tehran in 1979, fleeing the Iranian Revolution. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. At the age of 15 he converted to evangelical Christianity. He converted back to Islam the summer before attending Harvard. In the early 1990s, Aslan taught courses at De La Salle High School in Concord, California.

Aslan holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in religions from Santa Clara University, a Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, where he was named the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction. Aslan also received a Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology, focusing in the history of religion, from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His dissertation was titled "Global Jihadism as a Transnational Social Movement: A Theoretical Framework."

In August 2000, while serving as the Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Aslan was named Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Iowa, becoming the first full-time professor of Islam in the history of the state.

Aslan was the 2012–13 Wallerstein Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Drew University Center on Religion, Culture & Conflict.

Writing
As Contributing Editor, Aslan has written articles for The Daily Beast. He has also written for various newspapers and periodicals, including the Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Slate, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Guardian, Chicago Tribune, and The Nation. He has made numerous appearances on TV and radio, including National Public Radio (NPR), PBS, Rachel Maddow Show, Meet the Press, Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Colbert Report, Anderson Cooper 360°, Hardball, Nightline, Real Time with Bill Maher, Fareed Zakaria GPS, and ABC Australia's Big Ideas.

War on terrorism
Aslan refers to Al Qaeda's jihad against the west as "a cosmic war," distinct from holy war, in which rival religious groups are engaged in an earthly battle for material goals. "A cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens." American rhetoric of "war on terrorism," Aslan says, is a precise "cosmic dualism" to Al Qaeda's jihad.

Aslan draws a distinction between Islamism and Jihadism. Islamists have legitimate goals and can be negotiated with, unlike Jihadists, who dream of an idealized past of a pan-Islamic, borderless "religious communalism." Aslan's prescription for winning the cosmic war is to not fight, but rather engage moderate Islamic political forces in the democratic process. "Throughout the Middle East, whenever moderate Islamist parties have been allowed to participate in the political process, popular support for more extremist groups has diminished."

Religious freedom
Aslan has argued for religious freedom and protection for religious minorities throughout the Middle East. He has called for Iran to protect and stop the "horrific human rights abuses" against its Baha'i community. Aslan has also said that the persecution and displacement of Middle Eastern Christian communities "is nothing less than a regional religious cleansing that will soon prove to be a historic disaster for Christians and Muslims alike."

FoxNews controversy
On 26 July 2013, Aslan was interviewed on "Spirited Debate," a FoxNews webcast by anchor Lauren Green about his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Green was "unsatisfied with Aslan's credentials," and she pressed Aslan, questioning why a Muslim would write about Jesus. The interview lasted about ten minutes and focused "on Aslan's background more than the actual contents of the book. Reading comments from Aslan's critics, Green included negative criticism from William Lane Craig, a noted Christian apologist.

In the end, Green claimed that "Aslan had somehow misled readers by not disclosing his religion," whereupon he pointed out that his personal religious faith "is discussed on page two of his book" and called himself "quite a prominent Muslim thinker in the United States." Green was almost universally criticized for the premise of her questions during the interview.

The video clip of the interview went viral within days and the book, which was up to that point selling "steadily," appeared at the 4th place on the New York Times print hardcover best-seller list. By late July 2013, it was topping the U.S. best-seller list on Amazon.

Academic credentials
Following Aslan's interview with Fox News, some questioned Aslan's academic claims. An article written by Manuel Roig-Franzia in the Washington Post entitled "Reza Aslan: A Jesus scholar who's often a moving target" observed that Green had asked "astonishingly absurd questions," but that Aslan was a "moving target" and described him as being "eager—perhaps overeager—to present himself as a formidable academic with special bona fides in religion and history" and "boast[ing] of academic laurels he does not have." The article quoted Aslan's dissertation adviser, Mark Juergensmeyer, as saying that he did not have a problem with Aslan’s characterization of his credentials.

A day later, the New Republic printed an article critical of the Washington Post piece entitled "Now The Washington Post Owes Reza Aslan An Apology, Too." The Philadelphia Inquirer article entitled "Reza Aslan's 'Zealot': Muslim's book about Jesus stirs things up" also defended Aslan’s characterization of his academic credentials, noting that UC Santa Barbara "is famous for its interdisciplinary program—students tailor their studies around a topic, not a department. They choose a department only for the diploma." The Nation's Elizabeth Castelli wrote that Aslan "reasonably opened himself to criticism" on the basis of his claim to speak "with authority as a historian."

Awards
2013—Media Bridge-Builder Award, Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding
2013—Peter. J. Gomes Memorial Honor, Harvard Divinity School
2012—East-West Media Award, The Levantine Center (Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/16/2014.)

Book Reviews
A real strength of the book is that it provides an introduction to first-century Palestine, including economics, politics and religion. Mr. Aslan uses previous scholarship to describe the precarious existence of Jewish peasants and the lower classes, and how the Romans and the Jewish upper class exploited the land and the people…Zealot shares some of the best traits of popular writing on scholarly subjects: it moves at a good pace; it explains complicated issues as simply as possible; it even provides notes for checking its claims…[Aslan] is a good writer. Zealot is…an entertaining read. It is also a serious presentation of one plausible portrait of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
Dale B. Martin - New York Times Book Review

[A] compelling argument for a fresh look at the Nazarene, focusing on how Jesus the man evolved into Jesus the Christ.... Carefully comparing extra-biblical historical records with the New Testament accounts, Aslan develops a convincing and coherent story of how the Christian church, and in particular Paul, reshaped Christianity’s essence, obscuring the very real man who was Jesus of Nazareth. Compulsively readable and written at a popular level, this superb work is highly recommended.
Publishers Weekly


Aslan brings a fine popular style, shorn of all jargon, to bear on the presentation of Jesus of Nazareth.... He isn’t interested in attacking religion or even the church, much less in comparing Christianity unfavorably to another religion. He would have us admire Jesus as one of the many would-be messiahs who sprang up during Rome’s occupation of Palestine.... You don’t have to lose your religion to learn much that’s vitally germane to its history from Aslan’s absorbing, reader-friendly book
Booklist


A well-researched, readable biography of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus of Nazareth is not the same as Jesus Christ. The Gospels are not historical documents, nor even eyewitness accounts of Jesus' life..., and they certainly weren't written by the men whose names are attached to them. In fact, every word written about Jesus was written by people who never knew him in life.... Why has Christianity taken hold and flourished? This book will give you the answers in the simplest, most straightforward, comprehensible manner.
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 Zealot:

1. Begin with a discussion about the many ways Jesus has been presented throughout the ages—as itinerant preacher, faith healer, lover of peace, charismatic teacher, moral philosopher, Jewish rabbi, apocalyptic prophet, Messiah and the son of God. Do you have a particular way of seeing Jesus that predominates over others?

2. Overall, what is your opinion of Aslan's portrait of Jesus? Do you take issue with it? If so, what in particular do you find problematic? Or...do you find Aslan's book enlightening? Has it altered or made you rethink your ideas of who Jesus was? Or...does Zealot basically reaffirm your previous understanding?

3. In what ways does Aslan's portrait of Jesus add to, contradict, and/or confirm what others have said and written about Jesus?

4. Aslan claims that Jesus was a provocateur, that he entered Jerusalem in what was construed as a royal entrance. Do you accept the idea that Jesus was a "politically conscious Jewish revolutionary,” whose kingdom is rooted in this world, not the next?

5. Much has been made of Aslan's academic background. Does he have, in your opinion, the credentials as an historian and/or theologian to write this book?

6. What do you think of Aslan's own religious background: a conversion to Christianity followed by reconversion to Islam? As a non-Christian, can he rightfully claim credibility when writing about Christianity? Is he writing about Christianity...or is he writing about an historical figure? Is there a difference?

7. How and why did early Christians attemtpt to discredit John the Baptist and diminish his stature?

8. How does Aslan describe first-century Palestine, it's economic, political, and religious life? Who in this society consorted with whom...and at whose expense? In other words, who were the winners and who were the losers?

9. In what way was the Temple more than a place of worship? When Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers, why were Jews and Romans alike enraged?

10. How does Aslan describe the spread of Christianity?

11. The author insists that it was unthinkable for Jesus in his time to have been unmarried. Other recent scholarship has overturned that assumption. Perhaps you might do some research to explore the issue of marriage in first-century Palestine.

12. Follow-up to Question 11: What other current scholarship challenges or supports Aslan's book? How much of any Biblical scholarship, inlcuding Aslan's, is backed by evidence and how much is speculative?

13. One could say that Zealot is not a work of academic scholarship; it was written, instead, to appeal to a wider audience. If this was indeed Aslan's intent, has he succeeded in engaging you?

14. Talk about the parts of the New Testament about which Aslan is skeptical. Which Biblical narratives does he question...and why?

15. Have you read Bill O'Reilly's Killing Jesus, also published in 2013? If so, compare the two books: what do they have in common and what are their differences? What other Biblical histories or works of textual analyses have you read? How do they compare with Reza Aslan's Zealot?

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

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Zeitoun 
Dave Eggers, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307387943


Summary
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared.

Eggers’s riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy—an American who converted to Islam—and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible.

Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research—in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 12, 1970
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Reared—Lake Forest, Illinois
• Education—University of Illinois
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California

Dave Eggers is the author of four books, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, How We Are Hungry, and What Is the What. He is the editor of McSweeney’s, a quarterly magazine and book-publishing company, and is cofounder of 826 Valencia, a network of nonprofit writing and tutoring centers for young people.

His interest in oral history led to his 2004 cofounding of Voice of Witness, a nonprofit series of books that use oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. As a journalist, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Believer. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and daughter. (From the publisher.)

More
Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, grew up in suburban Lake Forest (where he was a high-school classmate of the actor Vince Vaughn), and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He lives in San Francisco and is married to the writer Vendela Vida. In October 2005, Vendela gave birth to a daughter, October Adelaide Eggers Vida.

Eggers's brother Bill is a researcher who has worked for several conservative think tanks, doing research on privatization. His sister, Beth, claimed that Eggers grossly understated her role in raising their brother Toph and made use of her journals in writing A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius without compensating her. She later recanted her claims in a posting on her brother's own website McSweeney's Internet Tendency, referring to the incident as "a really terrible LaToya Jackson moment". On March 1, 2002, the New York Post reported that Beth, then a lawyer in Modesto, California, had committed suicide. Eggers briefly spoke about his sister's death during a 2002 fan interview for McSweeney's.

Eggers was one of three 2008 TED Prize recipients. His TED Prize wish: for community members to personally engage with local public schools.

Eggers began writing as a Salon.com editor and founded Might magazine, while also writing a comic strip called Smarter Feller (originally Swell, then Smart Feller) for SF Weekly. His first book was a memoir (with fictional elements), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). It focuses on the author's struggle to raise his younger brother in San Francisco following the sudden deaths of their parents. The book quickly became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The memoir was praised for its originality, idiosyncratic self-referencing, and for several innovative stylistic elements. Early printings of the 2001 trade-paperback edition were published with a lengthy, apologetic postscript entitled "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making."

In 2002, Eggers published his first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, a story about a frustrating attempt to give away money to deserving people while haphazardly traveling the globe. An expanded and revised version was released as Sacrament in 2003 and retitled You Shall Know Our Velocity! for its Vintage imprint distribution. He has since published a collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry, and three politically-themed serials for Salon.com. In November 2005, Eggers published Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, compiling the book of interviews with exonerees once sentenced to death. The book was compiled with Lola Vollen, "a physician specializing in the aftermath of large-scale human rights abuses" and "a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of International Studies and a practicing clinician." Novelist Scott Turow wrote the introduction to Surviving Justice. Eggers's most recent novel, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (McSweeney's, 2006), was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Eggers is also the editor of the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, an annual anthology of short stories, essays, journalism, satire, and alternative comics.

Eggers is the founder of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house. McSweeney's produces a quarterly literary journal, McSweeney's, first published in 1998; a monthly journal, The Believer, which debuted in 2003 and is edited by wife Vida; and, beginning in 2005, a quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin. Other works include The Future Dictionary of America, Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, and the "Dr. and Mr. Haggis-On-Whey" children's books of literary nonsense, which Eggers writes with his younger brother. Ahead of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Eggers wrote an essay about the US national team and soccer in the United States for The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, a book published with aid of the journal Granta, that contained essays about each competing team in the tournament.

Eggers currently teaches writing in San Francisco at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit tutoring center and writing school for children that he cofounded in 2002. Eggers has recruited volunteers to operate similar programs in Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, Chicago, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, all under the auspices of the nonprofit organization 826 National. In 2006, he appeared at a series of fundraising events, dubbed the Revenge of the Book–Eaters tour, to support these programs. The Chicago show, at the Park West theatre, featured Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Other performers on the tour included Sufjan Stevens, Jon Stewart and David Byrne. In September 2007, the Heinz Foundations awarded Eggers a $250,000 Heinz award given to recognize "extraordinary achievements by individuals". The award will be used to fund some of the 826 Valencia writing centers. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews 
In Zeitoun, what Dave Eggers has found in the Katrina mud is the full-fleshed story of a single family, and in telling that story he hits larger targets with more punch than those who have already attacked the thematic and historic giants of this disaster. It's the stuff of great narrative nonfiction. Eggers...has given us 21st-century Dickensian storytelling—which is to say, a character-driven potboiler with a point. But here's the real trick: He does it without any writerly triple-lutzes or winks of post­modern irony. There are no rants against President Bush, no cheap shots at the authorities who let this city drown. He does it the old-fashioned way: with show-not-tell prose, in the most restrained of voices.
Timothy Egan - New York Times Book Review

Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) chronicles the tribulations of Syrian-born painting contractor Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who, while aiding in rescue efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, was inexplicably arrested by military personnel and swept into a bureaucratic maelstrom of civil injustices. This Kafkaesque story is sure to shock, horrify, and outrage listeners and will especially appeal to those who enjoy nonfiction survival stories. It should be required reading to ensure that nothing like the events described here will ever be repeated. —Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence
Library Journal

Discussion Questions 
1. “Notes About This Book” (xv) gives a sense of how the book was written, whose point of view it reflects, and Eggers’s efforts at accuracy and truth in his depiction of events. By choosing to portray the response to the hurricane through its effects on one family, what kind of story (or history) does he achieve?

2. The book opens with “Friday, August 26,” an expository chapter that introduces us to Zeitoun’s family life and his business life, the two very interconnected. What are some of the ways in which the descriptions here draw you in as a reader, and make these people and their situation real? Why is the timeline a good structural choice for this story?

3. Kathy has grown up as a Southern Baptist. Drawn to Islam through her childhood friend Yuko, she decides to convert. Why, when she comes to visit wearing her hijab, does her mother tell her, “Now you can take that thing off” (57)? Why does the prayer from the Qur’an quoted on page 51 have a strong effect on her? What does her reaction to the evangelical preacher who mocks Islam and says that Kathy’s temptation to convert was the work of the devil (65–66), say about Kathy’s character and intelligence?

4. Do Abdulrahman, Kathy and their children make up an unusual American family, or not? How would you describe the relationship between Zeitoun and Kathy, in marriage and in business? What effect does their religion have on the way others in the community see them?

5. Why has Eggers woven into the story accounts of Zeitoun’s past in Syria, his upbringing, his brother Mohammed, the champion swimmer, his brother Ahmad, and their close bond? What effect does this framework of family have on your perception of Zeitoun’s character, his ethics, his behavior?

6. The plight of the neighborhood’s abandoned dogs comes to Zeitoun’s attention as “a bewilderment, an anger in their cries that cut the night into shards” (93). The next day, he sets out in the canoe and tries to do what he can for animals and people trapped by the flood. How does Zeitoun feel about what he is doing? How does he think about these days after he has been imprisoned (262–64)?

7. Discuss what happens when Zeitoun and the others are forced to get into the boat and are taken into custody. Is it clear why they are being arrested? What assumptions are made about Zeitoun and the other three men (275–87)?

8. Part IV (203–90) tells the story of Zeitoun’s imprisonment. Here we learn in great detail how Zeitoun is denied the right to call Kathy, how his injured foot is not attended to, how the other men are beaten, stripped, and starved, how he prays constantly, yet loses hope. What is the impact, as you read, of this narrative?

9. “Zeitoun is a more powerful indictment of America’s dystopia in the Bush era than any number of well-written polemics” (Timothy Egan, New York Times, August 13, 2009). Would you agree with this statement? Can Zeitoun be read as a contribution to the history of hurricane Katrina and the failure of government to handle the disaster effectively?

10. Discuss Kathy’s situation, and her actions once she learns where Zeitoun is. The aftermath is more difficult, and she still suffers from physical and psychological problems that seem to be the result of post-traumatic stress. What was the most traumatic part of her experience, and why (319)?

11. Given that the other men who were imprisoned with Zeitoun were held much longer than he was, and that Nasser lost his life savings, is it surprising that these men were not compensated in any way for their time in prison (320–21)?

12. What is Zeitoun’s feeling now about what happened? How does he move forward into the future, as expressed in the book’s closing pages (322-25)?

13. If you have read What is the What, Eggers’ novel about Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, how does Zeitoun compare? Discuss Eggers’ approach to writing about traumatic regional and political events through the lives of individuals impacted by them.  
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story
Diane Ackerman, 2008 
W.W. Norton & Co.
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393333060


Summary 
A true story—as powerful as Schindler’s List—in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.

When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw—and the city’s zoo along with it.

With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jews into empty cages. Another dozen "guests" hid inside the Zabinskis’ villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing, and, during rare moments of calm, piano concerts. Jan, active in the Polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital.

Meanwhile, Antonina kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants—otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes.

With her exuberant prose and exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman engages us viscerally in the lives of the zoo animals, their keepers, and their hidden visitors. She shows us how Antonina refused to give in to the penetrating fear of discovery, keeping alive an atmosphere of play and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her. (From the publisher.)

See the 2017 film version with Jessicaa Chastain.
Listen to our Movies Meet Book Club Podcast as Hollister and O'Toole discuss the movie and book.

Author Bio 
• Birth—October 7, 1948 
• Where—Waukegan, Illinois, USA 
• Education—B.A., Penn State; M.A., M.F.A, Ph.D., Cornell University 
• Awards—D. Lit. from Kenyon College; Guggenheim
   Fellowship; Orion Book Award; John Burroughs Nature
   Award; Lavan Poetry Prize; honored as a Literary Lion by
   New York Public Library.
• Currently—lives in Ithaca, New York

Diane Ackerman was born in Waukegan, Illinois. She received an M.A., M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Her works of nonfiction include, most recently, The Zookeeper's Wife, narrative nonfiction about one of the most successful hideouts of World War II, a tale of people, animals, and subversive acts of compassion; An Alchemy of Mind, a poetics of the brain based on the latest neuroscience; Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden; Deep Play, which considers play, creativity, and our need for transcendence; A Slender Thread, about her work as a crisisline counselor; The Rarest of the Rare and The Moon by Whale Light, in which she explores the plight and fascination of endangered animals; A Natural History of Love; On Extended Wings, her memoir of flying; and the bestseller A Natural History of the Senses.

Her poetry has been published in leading literary journals, and in the books Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire; I Praise My Destroyer; Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems; Lady Faustus; Reverse Thunder: A Dramatic Poem; Wife of Light; The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral. She also writes nature books for children: Animal Sense; Monk Seal Hideaway; and Bats: Shadows in the Night.

Ms. Ackerman has received many prizes and awards, including a D. Lit. from Kenyon College, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Orion Book Award, John Burroughs Nature Award, and the Lavan Poetry Prize, as well as being honored as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library.

She also has the rare distinction of having a molecule named after her—dianeackerone. She has taught at a variety of universities, including Columbia, the University of Richmond, and Cornell. Her essays about nature and human nature have appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian, Parade, The New Yorker, National Geographic, and many other journals, where they have been the subject of much praise. She hosted a five-hour PBS television series inspired by A Natural History of the Senses. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Nature is patient, people and animals fundamentally decent, and the writer, as she always does, outlives the killer—that is the message of The Zookeeper's Wife. This is an absorbing book, diminished sometimes by the choppy way Ackerman balances Antonina's account with the larger story of the Warsaw Holocaust. For me, the more interesting story is Antonina's. She was not, as her husband once called her, "a housewife," but the alpha female in a unique menagerie. I would gladly read another book, perhaps a novel, based again on Antonina's writings. She was special, and as the remaining members of her generation die off, a voice like hers should not be allowed to fade into the silence.
D.T. Max - New York Times

A lovely story about the Holocaust might seem like a grotesque oxymoron. But in The Zookeeper's Wife, Diane Ackerman proves otherwise. Here is a true story—of human empathy and its opposite—that is simultaneously grave and exuberant, wise and playful. Ackerman has a wonderful tale to tell, and she tells it wonderfully.
Susie Linfield - Washington Post

Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses) tells the remarkable WWII story of Jan Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw Zoo, and his wife, Antonina, who, with courage and coolheaded ingenuity, sheltered 300 Jews as well as Polish resisters in their villa and in animal cages and sheds. Using Antonina's diaries, other contemporary sources and her own research in Poland, Ackerman takes us into the Warsaw ghetto and the 1943 Jewish uprising and also describes the Poles' revolt against the Nazi occupiers in 1944. She introduces us to such varied figures as Lutz Heck, the duplicitous head of the Berlin zoo; Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, spiritual head of the ghetto; and the leaders of Zegota, the Polish organization that rescued Jews. Ackerman reveals other rescuers, like Dr. Mada Walter, who helped many Jews "pass," giving "lessons on how to appear Aryan and not attract notice." Ackerman's writing is viscerally evocative, as in her description of the effects of the German bombing of the zoo area: "...the sky broke open and whistling fire hurtled down, cages exploded, moats rained upward, iron bars squealed as they wrenched apart." This suspenseful beautifully crafted story deserves a wide readership. (8 pages of illus.)
Publishers Weekly

The 1939 Nazi bombing of Warsaw left its beloved zoo in ruins with many of its animals killed or wounded. Worse was to come when Berlin zoo director Lutz Heck had surviving rare species shipped back to Germany as part of a Nazi breeding program and held a New Year's Eve hunting party for German officers to finish off the remaining animals. Witnessing this horror was the zookeeper's wife, who wondered, as she recalled later in her memoirs, how many humans would die in the same manner in the coming months. As Antonina Zabinski and her husband, Jan, soon learned, the Nazis had targeted Poland's large Jewish population for extermination, and the couple, who were already supplying food to friends in the Warsaw Ghetto, pledged to help more Jews. And help they did. Ackerman's (A Natural History of the Senses) moving and eloquent narrative reveals how the zookeepers, with the aid of the Polish underground, boldly smuggled some 300 Jews out of the Ghetto and hid them in their villa and the zoo's empty cages. Based on Antonina's own memoirs and newspaper interviews, as well as Ackerman's own research in Poland, the result is an exciting and unforgettable portrait of courage and grace under fire. While some critics might feel she glosses over Polish anti-Semitism, Ackerman has done an invaluable service in bringing a little-known story of heroism and compassion to light. Highly recommended.
Wilda Williams - Library Journal

Discussion Questions 
1. How does Diane Ackerman's background as a naturalist and a poet inform her telling of this slice of history? Would a historian of World War II have told it differently, and, if so, what might have been left out?

2. Reviews have compared this book to Schindler's List and Hotel Rwanda. How would you compare them?

3. Did this book give you a different impression of Poland during World War II than you had before?

4. Can you imagine yourself in the same circumstances as Jan and Antonina? What would you have done?

5. How would you describe Antonina's relation to animals? To her husband? How does she navigate the various relationships in the book, given the extreme circumstances? Is her default position one of trust or distrust?

6. Do people have a "sixth sense" and how does it relate to "animal instinct"?

7. Some might judge Jan and Antonina guilty of anthropo-morphizing animals and nature. Would you? Why or why not?

8. Can nature be savage or kind—or can only humans embody those qualities? As science and the study of animal behavior and communication teach us more and more about the commonalities between animals and humans, is there still any dividing line between the human and the animal world? If so, how would you describe it?

9. The Nazis had a passion for animals and the natural world. How could Nazi ideology embrace both a love of nature and the mass murder of human beings?

10. The drive to "rewrite the genetic code of the entire planet" is not distinct to Nazism. What similar efforts are alive today? Are there lessons in Jan and Antonina's story for evaluating the benefits and dangers of trying to modify or improve upon nature? Do you see any connection between this story of more than sixty years ago and contemporary environmental issues?

11. Genetic engineering of foodstuffs is highly contentious. So are various reproductive technologies that are now common, such as selecting for—or against—various characteristics when choosing from sperm or egg banks. How would various characters in this book have approached these loaded issues? (Questions from author's website.)

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