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!