January Not Fiction Book Discussion

We will open our 2008 Not Fiction Book Discussion with Bill Bryson's memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Unlike many recent memoirists who describe remarkably troubled childhoods, Bryson tells us that "My kid days were pretty good ones, on the whole. My parents were patient and kind and approximately normal." He describes in vivid and humorous detail growing up in the 1950s in Des Moines, Iowa, capturing the optimism of America in that decade. His remarkably normal childhood led him to a writing career that has produced such best sellers as A Walk in the Woods and A Short History of Nearly Everything. Capturing the tone of Bryson's book, Scott Simon of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday says, "[Bryson's] mix of exquisite detail and inspired exaggeration all add up to truth with a capital T that rhymes with G that stands for out-loud guffaws." We hope you will be able to join us, either Tuesday, January 8 at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of Main Library on Calhoun Street or here on the blog, for what should be an entertaining discussion!

Not Fiction Book Discussion List for 2008

We are excited to post the list of titles for the 2008 Not Fiction Book Discussion! (By the way, we have changed the name of the discussion to match the name of the blog.) You can find them listed at the right under Upcoming Not Fiction Book Discussions. We hope you will join our conversations, either at Main Library in Meeting Room A at 7:00 p.m. on the dates listed, or here on the blog.

Happy reading!

Why do we read nonfiction?

After a year of reading and talking about nonfiction, I have discovered that I am at a stage in my reading life where I am more drawn to nonfiction than fiction. I especially enjoy memoirs as my own storehouse of experiences and desire to make sense of them grow with each passing year.

Tell us about your nonfiction reading: What kind of nonfiction do you like to read? Why do you read it? Remember that nonfiction is anything that is not fiction, so you can tell us about your passion for poetry or car repair manuals or cookbooks or history . . . the possibilites are nearly limitless.

Notes from November's Nonfiction Book Discussion

We ended our Nonfiction Book Discussion series for 2007 with an inspiring conversation about Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

It is to Kidder's great credit that we talked about Paul Farmer as a complex person whom we admire. We especially respect Farmer's passion and compassion, his ability to connect with people whose backgrounds are different from his own. His insistence upon continuing to treat individual patients in spite of (or perhaps because of) his travel and speaking obligations is a testiment to his commitment to the corporal mercies presented in Matthew 25. As Kidder describes his first impression of Farmer in an interview with BookBrowse.com, "here was a person who seemed to be practicing more than he preached, who seemed to be living, as nearly as any human being can, without hypocrisy." We decided that what some readers see as Farmer's enormous personal sacrifices of time, money, and personal comfort are almost certainly not sacrifices to Farmer himself, that he is living his life exactly as he wants to live it, and that not doing the work he does on behalf of the poor would be the real sacrifice to him.

We also considered Kidder's use of a first person point of view in Mountains Beyond Mountains. We agreed that by including himself and his reactions to Farmer in the narrative, he served to legitimize our own complicated feelings about Farmer. Kidder confirms this intent in the same BookBrowse interview: "After I'd spent a lot of time with Farmer, I began to feel that altruism was plausible after all, indeed maybe even normal. But the sacrifices he's made aren't usual, and I knew that readers of my book would need an everyman, someone a lot less virtuous than Farmer, to testify, in effect, that this guy is for real, and someone who could register the occasional discomfort that anyone would feel in such a person's company."

And we had the special pleasure of hearing about the six months one of our discussion members had spent working as a physician with Doctors Without Borders in Malawi. She had been inspired by Farmer's example and Kidder's book to donate her time and talents to this cause, thus inspiring all of us and proving that one person really can make a difference, not only through his or her own actions but through example.

To learn more about Paul Farmer's nonprofit Partners in Health, visit http://www.pih.org/. The site includes a history of the organization, updates on its current activities, and a wonderful list of recommended reading about such topics as Haiti, Rwanda, HIV/AIDS, and Health and Human Rights.

We hope you will share your reactions to Mountains Beyond Mountains here on the blog as well as tell us your story: Have you ever been so inspired by a book that you felt moved to action? Perhaps you donated your time to a good cause . . . or you set off on a journey . . . or you found a new hobby . . . or you learned a new way of looking at life . . .

November Nonfiction Book Discussion

Tuesday, November 6 will be our last Nonfiction Book Discussion of 2007. We will be discussing Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, an inspiring portrait of public health physician and infectious disease specialist Paul Farmer and his nonprofit organization Partners in Health. Farmer's life calling, deeply rooted in liberation theology, is to provide effective health care as a basic human right to the world's poor. Kidder's account shows how one remarkable person can make a difference in solving world health problems. But what makes Kidder's book such a good read is that he creates a narrative that reveals the complexity of Farmer's character--his brilliance, his energy, his convictions, but also the unsettling personal sacrifices he is willing to make to realize his vision. We hope you will join us at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room B of the Main Library to discuss this book that USA Today calls "an astonishing book that will leave you questioning your own life and political views."

Notes from October's Nonfiction Book Discussion

In the first sentence of The Places In Between, Rory Stewart claims, "I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan." In our October 2 discussion, we agreed that his motivations were complex, but that that complexity is what makes this book such a pleasure to read. Stewart obviously enjoyed learning about the ancient and recent history and culture of Afghanistan. Yet his greatest incentive seems to have been to walk for walking's sake, to enjoy the movement and to embrace the adventure and peril he met along the way. Stewart does a remarkable job of blending historical and cultural anecdotes with unsentimental yet lyrical descriptions of his day to day experiences and emotions. He segues from descriptions of ancient Ghorid architectural aesthetics to explanations of how he treated his dysentery and narrowly avoided being murdered by Taliban soldiers. And after reading The Places In Between, especially chapters like "Blair and the Koran" and "@afghangov.org," we understand why nation-building in Afghanistan is such a complicated undertaking. Stewart does not rely on political grandstanding to make his points. Instead, he allows his portraits of the various geographical regions, ethnic groups, political factions, and Islamic sects in Afghanistan to accumulate and contrast with those of the well-meaning but shortsighted efforts of foreign administrators and aid workers to bring order to this country that has been at war with outside forces and with itself for over thirty years. Stewart's book offers so much to its readers--it is history, travelogue, meditation journal, political commentary, heroic quest, all in one gorgeous, harrowing read. To learn more about Stewart's efforts to preserve the art and culture of Afghanistan while providing economic opportunities through the nonprofit Turquoise Mountain Foundation, visit www.turquoisemountain.org.

We hope you will join us for our November 6 discussion, the last one of 2007, of Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains, an inspiring portrait of public health physician Dr. Paul Farmer.

Author Jeanette Walls to visit Porter-Gaud School

Jeanette Walls, author of The Glass Castle, will visit Porter-Gaud School in October. In addition to her work with the students, she will speak at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 3, in the Wendell Center on the campus of the Porter-Gaud School. The event is open to the public, and a book signing will follow. Walls' memoir was one of the most stimulating books for the Nonfiction Book Discussion this year! For more information, visit www.portergaud.edu.

October Nonfiction Book Discussion

We hope you will join us Tuesday, October 2, at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room B at Main Library in downtown Charleston for a discussion of Rory Stewart's The Places In Between. Stewart's book is his account of his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002, which was part of a longer walk through four other Asian countries, just months after the fall of the Taliban and the invasion by U.S. forces. He provides poetic snapshots of the people and places he encounters on his journey, interspersed with anecdotes from Afghanistan's ancient and recent history. He also teases the reader with his purpose--the first line of his book reads, "I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan"--which provides a perfect opening to a discussion of this book The New York Times Book Review calls "A striding, glorious book . . . A flat-out masterpiece."

Notes from September's Nonfiction Book Discussion

We have been very busy here at Charleston County Public Library with the Big Read, an initiative of the National Endowment of the Arts designed to encourage literary reading and community discussion of great books! From September 9 to October 14, Charleston County Public Library and many partner organizations in the community are hosting a variety of events, from jazz performances to lectures to book discussions, all centered around the reading of Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. To learn more about the novel, the author, and the calendar of Big Read events, visit the Charleston County Public Library website at http://www.ccpl.org/ and the Big Read website at http://www.neabigread.org/.

However, we did find time this month for a stimulating discussion of Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. For those of us who had not read much about the history of al-Qaeda and the United States intelligence response to it prior to 9/11, the book provided an informative narrative overview with compelling portraits of major figures such as Osama bin Laden and FBI counterterrorism chief John O'Neill. Several members of our discussion recommended other titles that they felt provided more comprehensive coverage of this history, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 by Ron Suskind and Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll. And several members expressed disappointment that Wright's book did not give more coverage to the events and personalities of 9/11 itself. For the most part, however, we enjoyed Wright's use of what he calls horizontal and vertical reporting, that is, offering the perspective of as many people as he could interview while at the same time providing in-depth information from and profiles of people he interviewed on many different occasions.

Our next book, The Places In Between by Rory Stewart, will provide a nice contrast in style and perspective to The Looming Tower, yet will deepen our understanding of Afghanistan and political Islam.

September Nonfiction Book Discussion

For the September Nonfiction Book Discussion, we will be reading The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright, a compellingly written narrative history of the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the American intelligence mistakes that led to the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. His narrative provides the broad perspective of five decades of history along with portraits of major figures such as Osama bin Laden and FBI counterterrorism chief John O'Neill. On more than twenty-five Best Books of the Year lists and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and many other awards, The Looming Tower, according to the Christian Science Monitor, "Should be required reading for every American; yes it is that good. It is hard to imagine a better portrait of 9/11 and its causes emerging anytime soon." We hope you will join us for our discussion Tuesday, September 4, at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room B of the Main Library in downtown Charleston or here on our blog!

Notes from August's Nonfiction Book Discussion

At last week's discussion of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell, we talked about Gladwell's engaging style and eclectic use of examples, we questioned how convincing his theory really is, we considered the political and ethical implications of what some critics have said is a potential for social engineering latent in Gladwell's ideas, and we connected his ideas to several recent news stories.

We enjoyed Gladwell's ability to draw the reader into a discussion of a potentially abstract concept, for example The Power of Context, or how our environment influences our behavior in any given situation, by illustrating it with stories about Bernie Goetz and New York City's attempt to fight high crime rates, children's honesty in test-taking situations, seminarians' willingness to help an injured person when late for a meeting, the popularity of Rebecca Wells' Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood with reading groups, the spread of Methodism in the 1780s, the relationship of brain size to social group size, and the corporate structure of Gore Associates, makers of the fabric Gore-Tex. Yet we agreed with several reviewers who felt that Gladwell's book does not adequately integrate all of his wonderful anecdotes into a unified narrative. To some readers, his book feels like a collection of his New Yorker articles pieced together.

We also agreed that Gladwell's theory, like his style, felt pieced together. Most of his examples nicely illustrate one of his Three Rules of Epidemics, but few of his examples clearly show all rules working together. We decided that aspects of his theory provide new ways of looking at social interactions and social epidemics, but that these aspects do not add up to a comprehensive explanation of all social interactions and social epidemics. Those of us who had read Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking agreed that it provided a more unified read than The Tipping Point in both style and content.

In an interview with Gladwell at http://www.gladwell.com/, he says, "One of the things I'd like to do is to show people how to start 'positive' epidemics of their own." Some critics have suggested that Gladwell's prescriptive purpose in this book has a tinge of social engineering about it. However, we felt that his motives were more benign than that term implies. As he says in the conclusion of the book, "In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action." We agreed that it is up to each individual to apply the information in the book ethically.

One of Gladwell's points in discussing The Power of Context is that our environment influences us far more than we realize. We noted that two recent news stories illustrate his point. In one story, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that obesity spreads in social networks. The other story, from The New York Times, is that psychologists have discovered that our subconscious brains are far more active and independent than we realized and that our subconscious goals can be primed, or manipulated, without our awareness. These stories confirm that knowledge of how social epidemics work and the desire to work with them for a positive goal is essential. Gladwell's book offers this knowledge to a broad readership.

We welcome your comments to our discussion!

For next month's discussion, to be held Tuesday, September 4, at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room B at Main Library, we will read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright. We hope you will join us!

August Nonfiction Book Discussion

For the August Nonfiction Book Discussion, we will be reading The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is the author of the bestselling Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Through his clear, elegant prose and cohesive use of a broad range of examples from the fashion world, children's educational programming, New York City crime rates, bestseller lists, teen smoking rates and more, Gladwell illuminates how small things make a big difference in social epidemics. According to Fortune, The Tipping Point is "[a] fascinating book that makes you see the world in a different way." We will meet at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room B at Main Library at 68 Calhoun Street in downtown Charleston. To check availability of this title at Charleston County Public Library, please click on the link to the title. We hope you will join our discussion, either in person or online!

Notes from July's Nonfiction Book Discussion

Our engaging discussion of David McCullough's 1776 ranged from a favorable assessment of McCullough's narrative and descriptive abilities and use of primary sources, through a critique of the scope and context of this book, to a consideration of the book's bestseller status and its relevance to our country today.

McCullough narrates the events of the year 1776 in a manner that creates suspense and excitement. One of McCullough's interests is landscape painting, and we could feel its influence in his descriptions of the people, events, and especially places of that year. His liberal use of quotations from primary sources such as the letters and diaries of officers and enlisted men helps readers tap into the emotion and ideas of the time.

McCullough has said that he sees 1776 as a companion book to his biography John Adams. While John Adams relates the events and ideas of the Continental Congress and the writing and signing of the Declaration of Independence, 1776 focuses on Washington, his officers, and his battles with the British from Boston through Princeton. We understood McCullough's intention behind limiting the scope of 1776, but we felt that the book could provide more context for a general reader unfamiliar with the Revolutionary War. We wondered why McCullough's editors did not encourage him to provide this useful context through an introduction or through more informative endnotes.

McCullough does a wonderful job of conveying the role of chance and coincidence in the survival of the Continental Army in the year 1776. That drama alone could account for the bestseller status of the book! However, we decided that this story of Washington and his army may be popular now because it provides a national narrative of a war fought for a justifiable cause. And of course it is uplifting to read that is was carried out with courage by very human but admirable men and women in the face of incredible odds. McCullough said in an interview with Simon & Schuster, "Some have said, in the aftermath of 9/11, that this is the darkest, most perilous hour in our history. But we've been through worse and we've come through it. Further, we need to be reminded always of the ideas and ideals that this country was founded on, and never take our blessings for granted."

We hope you will add your ideas to our discussion!

July Nonfiction Book Discussion

For our next Nonfiction Book Discussion, we will be reading 1776 by David McCullough. McCullough provides compelling portraits of the people on both sides of the Revolutionary War, as well as a dramatic description of the events of the year of the Declaration of Independence. According to Publishers Weekly, 1776 is " . . . a narrative tour de force, exhibiting all the hallmarks the author is known for: fascinating subject matter, expert research and detailed, graceful prose. . . . Simply put, this is history writing at its best from one of its top practitioners." We will meet Tuesday, July 10, at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room B at Main Library at 68 Calhoun Street in downtown Charleston. To check availability of this title at Charleston County Public Library, please click on the link to the title. To check availability of large print and audio formats, click here. We hope you will join us!

Summer Reading

The words "summer reading" call up contradictory feelings for me. On the one hand are memories of required reading lists and feelings of obligation, resentment, and, as summer crept on towards fall and the start of school, despair at ever finishing all of the reading and finding something meaningful to say about it in an analytical paper. On the other hand are more pleasant memories of desultory and dilettante wandering and reading in the stacks of my neighborhood library, the oscillating fans rustling the pages of each new book I discovered, and of seemingly endless afternoons on the porch swing immersed in another world. Sometimes, to my surprise and delight, a book from the required reading list would migrate to the pleasure list . . .

This summer, the book discussion group at my yoga studio is reading the novel The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri about the lives of the inhabitants of a Bombay apartment building and the death of Vishnu, their odd-job man. Suri's allusions to Hindu mythology and religious texts have led me to some fascinating nonfiction reading. The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hinduism by Linda Johnson is a comprehensive overview of the history, philosophy, and traditions of this ancient religion. The material is easy to read and understand yet not reductive, and the book easily lends itself to browsing. The Bhagavad Gita translated by Stephen Mitchell is a poetic rendering of one of the greatest spiritual books of all time. Mitchell's translation makes timeless the conversation between the warrior Arjuna and his spiritual guide, Krishna. Their conversation takes place on a battlefield as Arjuna finds he must fight a battle against members of his own family. Krishna shows Arjuna the possibility of wisdom and freedom that lie within reach of all who can renounce the fruits of their actions. I hope to eventually read Ralph Waldo Emerson's and Henry David Thoreau's reflections on the Gita.

What does summer reading mean to you? What are you reading this summer, especially nonfiction?

In medias res

We are beginning the Not Fiction Book Discussion blog in media res--literally, in the middle of things--as the Nonfiction Book Discussion has been meeting since January of this year. Here are the titles we have read so far and some highlights from our discussions:

For our first three meetings, we read memoirs about unusual and challenging childhoods: Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, and The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer. We admired the humor and honesty of the writers' portrayals of their experiences and marveled especially at the compassion with which Walls portrays her family. Burroughs' legal troubles with the Turcotte family, upon whom the Finches are based, provided some juicy gossip. One of our guests for the discussion of The Tender Bar had lived in Manhasset, the home town of the infamous bar Dickens, and he shared his memories of the town, characters, and bar. We speculated about why memoirs of dysfunctional childhoods are so popular with readers right now. We also pondered the ethical and artistic line between memory and invention.

For our next two meetings, we took up the topic of the rise and fall of civilizations with Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse. Some critics have accused Diamond of geographic determinism (the idea that geography is fate) and Malthusianism (the idea that population will always outrun food production, so improving conditions for humankind depends upon limits on reproduction). We found, however, that Diamond's theses are broader than his critics' portrayed and much more optimistic. Through his many engagingly narrated examples, Diamond presents the ideas that accidents of geography, not genetics, determined the rise of great civilizations, and that environmental neglect precipitated their fall. He emphasizes that what individuals and civilizations make of their geographical circumstances determines their fate. While we agreed that we would enjoy being students in one of Professor Diamond's classes, we decided that his 400+ page tomes could have been edited to good effect.

Earlier this month, we read Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick, a narrative of the infancy of our nation. We agreed it offers a more complex--and more disturbing--picture of Plymouth Colony, the Pilgrims who established it, and the Native Americans they "discovered" here than we received in school. I don't think any of us will look at Thanksgiving quite the same way again! We enjoyed Philbrick's compelling narrative style and good use of end notes for academic debate and citation. We decided that narrative histories written in this style are a necessary genre to introduce reluctant readers to complex considerations of history beyond names and dates.

We welcome your ideas and opinions about these titles!

Next month, we will read 1776 by David McCullough, a master of narrative history, for a dramatic rendering of that crucial year in our nation's childhood and a commeration of Independence Day. We will meet Tuesday, July 10, at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room B of Main Library at 68 Calhoun Street in downtown Charleston. Watch for future posts about this title and plan to join us!

Preface

Welcome to the Not Fiction Book Discussion blog! We will provide a forum for extending conversations from the Nonfiction Book Discussion at Charleston County Public Library's Main Library at 68 Calhoun Street in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. The discussion is an outreach of our reference department and will include works shelved in that department: memoirs, biographies, histories, current events, commentary, and possibly even poetry, photography, and other genres. Watch for posts about upcoming discussions and plan to join us. We welcome comments about the books we are reading. We also encourage suggestions for further reading and conversations about reading and writing. We look forward to composing this blog together!