January Not Fiction Book Discussion

We begin our 2009 discussions with Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer's reflection on the death--and the life--of Chris McCandless, a young man from a well-to-do family who chose to leave the life he was expected to lead to experience life on the road and in the wilderness, ultimately dying of starvation in Alaska.

We should have much to talk about, as McCandless' story has captured readers' interest since his remains were first discovered in 1992. Krakauer published an article about McCandless' death in Outside, but he felt compelled to explore his life in more detail in a book. More than ten years later, Sean Penn created a film based on the book, reviving interest in McCandless' story, although Krakauer's book had already become a classic of sorts. We will compare the difference in narrative approach of the book and the film; we will no doubt debate the wisdom of McCandless' decisions; we will ponder the many ironies of his death; we will consider the American Romantic fascination with The Road, The West, The Wild. But we may find that we cannot resolve McCandless' story in any ultimately satisfying way--the word that most often appears in reviews of both the book and the film is "haunting."

We hope you will join one of our discussions: Tuesday, January 6 at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library in Meeting Room A; Thursday, January 22 at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch; or here on the blog.

Notes from December's Not Fiction Book Discussion

We ended our 2008 discussions with Maira Kalman's The Principles of Uncertainty, an illustrated journal of a year of her life originally published as a monthly blog for the New York Times. Many of us were surprised that such a whimsically illustrated book could address existential questions. Kalman asks, "How are we all so brave as to take step after step? Day after day? How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip, and then do trip, and then get up and say O.K." Even more boldly, she asks, "What is the point?" We agreed that her affectionate portraits of the people and things she encountered during that year are her answer to her questions--she finds meaning in the variety of life around her and in the very act of observing and recording that life. A few readers found Kalman's observation of people and things to verge on compulsive collecting. And a few also felt that this collecting and describing took the place of the meaningful personal detail usually found in a memoir. However, other readers appreciated the quirkiness and variety of her catalogs. They also felt that her reticence about the details of her personal life conveyed much about her experience of loss and grief over the death of her husband, Tibor Kalman, and mother, Sara Berman, which she mentions only by insisting that she cannot speak of those losses. The title of Kalman's book asks readers to consider what the principles of uncertainty are for them--the unavoidable facts of change and loss, the possibility of continuing on with hope and humor in spite of these facts. As we face a new year filled with both uncertainty and possibility, we can keep in mind Kalman's closing advice, gleaned from a World War II propaganda poster: "Keep Calm and Carry On."

Not Fiction Book Discussion at West Asheley Branch December 18

If you missed our discussion of Maira Kalman's The Principles of Uncertainty on Tuesday, you can join us Thursday, December 18 at the West Ashley Branch at 11:00 a.m. Kalman's warm and whimsical illustrations and quirky view of life may help brighten a chilly December day. We hope to see you there or hear from you here on the blog!

Not Fiction Book Discussion List for 2009

We are excited announce the list of titles we will be discussing at our Not Fiction Book Discussions in 2009. While the list includes a variety of genres and topics, including adventure, popular science, memoir, biography, history, sociology, and personal essay, an underlying theme for our discussions will be survival. You can find a complete list of titles and dates on the right side of the page under Not Fiction Book Discussions 2009. We hope you will join us, either in person or here on the blog.

December Not Fiction Book Discussion

We hope you will join us for the final Not Fiction Book Discussion of 2008. We will consider Maira Kalman's The Principles of Uncertainty, which existed first as a blog for the New York Times. Kalman has written and illustrated a dozen children's books, created numerous covers for The New Yorker, and designed products for The Museum of Modern Art, sets for Mark Morris Dance Group, accessories for Kate Spade and fabric for Isaac Mizrahi. The first question we will ponder? "What is this book?" Kalman answers that question on her book jacket with another. "What is anything?" She does, however, offer readers this description: "This is a year in my life profusely illustrated. Abounding with anguish, confusion, bits of wisdom. Musings, meanderings, buckets of joie de vivre and restful sojourns." While life is full of uncertainty, it is also full of possibility . . . especially the possibility that there will be mocha creme cake Tuesday, December 2 at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A at Main Library in downtown Charleston. We hope to see you there or hear from you here on the blog.

Notes from October and November's Not Fiction Book Discussion

Although different in genre, style, and tone, Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, a memoir of his search for information about six family members who perished during the Holocaust, and Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story, a biography of Antonina Zabinski and her family, keepers of the Warsaw Zoo during World War II who helped to shelter over 300 refugees from the Warsaw Ghetto, share an abiding interest in the particulars of the lives they discuss. Mendelsohn notes that at one point during the many interviews he and his family conducted with survivors, his brother Matt exclaimed, "A lot of people want to know how they died, but not how they lived!" In our discussions of these two works, we continually returned to the amazing fact of how the people described managed not only to live, but also to do so with hope, dignity, ingenuity, and courage.

Most members of our discussion groups seemed to enjoy the experience of reading The Zookeeper's Wife more than that of reading The Lost, perhaps because Ackerman shapes a more coherent and uplifting "story of what happened," as Mendelsohn would say. Mendelsohn had hoped to be able to tell a coherent story of what happened to his grandfather's brother, wife, and daughters, "[a] story that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story that, like my grandfather's stories, began with all the time in the world, and then speeded up as the lineaments became clear, the characters and personalities and plot, and ended with something memorable, a punch line or a tragedy that you'd always remember," but in the end, he was unable to do so. He did, however, meet many survivors who were willing, in spite of the pain of their personal memories, to share how they had lived and how those they knew and loved had died. He suggests that "How to be the storyteller . . . [is] the unique problem that faces my generation, the generation of those who had been, say, seven or eight years old during the mid-1960s, the generation of the grandchildren of those who'd been adults when it all happened; a problem that will face no other generation in history. We are just close enough to those who were there that we feel an obligation to the facts as we know them; but we are also just far enough away, at this point, to worry about our own role in the transmission of those facts, now that the people to whom those facts happened have mostly slipped away." Reading these books together perhaps gives us a more complete sense of the enormity of the Holocaust than reading either book alone, the reality that there were, of course, so many heroic and uplifting or tragic and sad stories, but that most of them are lost forever along with the original tellers, making each story that we do have that much more precious.

Not Fiction Book Discussion at West Ashley Branch

We are excited to announce that the Not Fiction Book Discussion will travel to the West Ashley Branch of Charleston County Public Library! Our first discussion there will be of Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife, this Thursday, November 20, at 11:00 a.m. Please see the previous post for a brief description of Ackerman's biography of Antonina Zabinski and her family, who were zookeepers of the Warsaw Zoo during World War II. We look forward to having more discussions at West Ashley in the future, and we hope you will join us to share your ideas about the books there, at Main Library, or here on the blog.

November Not Fiction Book Discussion

We invite you to join us Tuesday, November 4, at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of Main Library for a discussion of Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife, a biography of Antonina Zabinski. Antonina and her husband Jan were zookeepers of the Warsaw Zoo in Poland in the 1930s and 40s. Horrified by the Nazi regime's racist beliefs about both people and animals and supporting the Polish Underground resistance movement, the Zabinskis sheltered over 300 refugees from the Nazis in the remnants of the zoo left after German bombing and Nazi hunting parties. Although the Holocaust is a dark subject, Ackerman's story shimmers with a deep appreciation for the natural world, warm admiration for the Zabinskis, and humorous affection for the animals and humans who lived at the zoo. Ackerman's prose captures the feeling of Antonina's own writing, and one gets the feeling that Ackerman is channeling Antonina's personality as well. Her story provides many topics for discussion, including the perennial question of why some people insist on seeing the difference between themselves and others while other people embrace difference and will even risk their own well-being for the sake of others. We hope you will help us while away the anxious hours leading up to the election results on Election Day!

October is National Reading Group Month

The Women's National Book Association (WNBA) is sponsoring its second National Reading Group Month in October 2008 to promote reading groups and to celebrate the joy of shared reading. For more information, visit the Women's National Book Association Inc. website.
Read, share, enjoy!

October Not Fiction Book Discussion

We invite you to join us for a discussion of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn on Tuesday, October 7 at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library in downtown Charleston. As a boy in the 1960s, Mendelsohn could cause elderly relatives to cry simply by entering a room. He comes to understand that his family is haunted by the deaths of six relatives who disappeared during the Holocaust, who were "killed by the Nazis," and that he resembles one of them, his grandfather's brother. While still a child, Mendelsohn became the official historian of his family, and as an adult, he obsessively searches for answers to the mystery of the disappearance of the six, traveling to many countries and continents, conducting interviews with those last few remaining people who witnessed the events of the Holocaust and might have known his family. His narrative combines memoir, travelogue, genealogical research, and Biblical and Torah commentary to create a rich meditation on family, loss, and the relationship between memory and truth. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award and chosen as a notable book by many book reviews, The Lost is an important addition to Holocaust literature. According to Adam Kirsch of the New York Sun, "More than just an act of familial piety, this kind of recuperation is one of the distinctive ethical acts of our time."

Notes from September's Not Fiction Book Discussion

Many of us attending the September 2 discussion of Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir The Fun Home had never read a graphic narrative before. We admitted that we assumed the graphics would merely reiterate the text. Needless to say, we were surprised and gratified by Bechdel's book. We discovered that her graphics are an essential part of her narrative, a "text" to be read just as carefully as her words. Bechdel told an interviewer for The Comics Journal, "It's very important for me that people be able to read the images in the same kind of gradually unfolding way as they're reading the text. I don't like pictures that don't have information in them. I want pictures that you have to read, that you have to decode, that take time, that you can get lost in. Otherwise what's the point?" We enjoyed sharing and decoding some of our favorite panels. One of my favorites is on the first page, where we see Bruce Bechdel has been reading Anna Karenina. It was with great delight that I recalled the first line of that novel: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This panel taught me how to read the book and introduced its subject in a delightful and compact way.

Several critics feel that Bechdel's use of literary and pop culture allusions is too heavy-handed, rather unnecessary to telling her story, and ultimately weakens the story. We disagreed with these critics. We found the allusions to be an integral part of her story, another opportunity for the reader to decode Bechdel's tone and purpose. Bechdel self-consciously refers to the tone of her memoir, in large part created by her use of allusion, as "my cool aesthetic distance." This "cool aesthetic distance" serves both to indicate the pain her relationship with her father has caused her and, at the same time, to show her great debt to him. Her purpose in writing the book, we decided, is to reconcile the pain with the debt and to acknowledge the identity she shares with her father beyond genetics, familial obligation, or sexuality. Bechdel told The Village Voice that " . . . the book is an expansion of my childhood diary, in that it's this perseveration on detail. You know? In some ways I felt like it was almost a penance to trace everything out in such detail." And she told The Advocate, "I realized eventually that what the book was really about was not his suicide or our shared homosexuality or the books we read. It was about my creative apprenticeship to my father; it was about becoming an artist."

We will continue our discussion of family secrets and identity October 7 with Daniel Mendelsohn's memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. We hope you will join us at the Main Library or here on the blog.

September Not Fiction Book Discussion

We will continue our consideration of identity with tomorrow's discussion at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library of The Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. Bechdel has created a new genre with her book, the graphic memoir, in which she describes her ironically charged relationship with her father, Bruce Bechdel. Alison Bechdel learned that her father was gay shortly after coming out as a lesbian to her family. A short time later, Bruce Bechdel was killed in an accident that Alison suggests might have been suicide. Bechdel circles around both the painful and touching moments of their life together, keeping emotion at just the right distance with controlled and elaborate literary allusion. Would Bechdel have had this utterly original perspective on her search for her sexual identity without her complicated love/hate, recognition/denial relationship with her father? We hope you will join our conversation, either in person or here on the blog, of this groundbreaking work that was acclaimed a best book of the year by more than twenty review journals.

Notes from August's Not Fiction Book Discussion

In an interesting follow-up to our July discussion of Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, one of our discussion members brought in a newspaper article about the erosion and loss of top soil caused by the flooding in the Midwest this summer. The article notes that, just as with the Dust Bowl, farmers and environmentalists disagree about what to do with erosion-prone land: farm it in hopes of good yields and high prices to make up for crops lost in the floods, or plant it with native grasses, ground cover, and trees to prevent further erosion. We agreed that the Dust Bowl offered a very clear lesson in the best way to proceed.


A central topic of our discussion of One Drop by Bliss Broyard was whether Anatole and Sandy Broyard should have concealed Anatole's identity as a person of mixed race from his children until his death. All of us felt that he should have shared this information earlier in their lives, yet we did question whether we have a right to know everything about our families and what information ought to be shared and what kept private. This question begs another about Anatole Broyard: To what extent were his decisions regarding his identity related to his desire to preserve his own self-image, and to what extent were they the result of his concern for his family? We agreed that Bliss Broyard does a remarkable job of portraying her father's complex motivations, motivations that he may not have been entirely aware of himself, and that she does so in a manner that is both candid and forgiving. Bliss Broyard is also honest about her own motivations in researching her father's family history: "I hoped to discover that I was a complicated person, and since I was too young to feel I'd earned my own complications, I'd happily take some from my father."

An important theme of Bliss Broyard's book is the authenticity of one's identity. In one important scene, Bliss Broyard takes a personality test four different times, only to have it reveal each time that she is an imposter, that, as the administrator tells her, she is "not living in a way that's true to who you are." In a later scene, Bliss imagines the thoughts that must have gone through her father's mind when he was faced with a decision about which race/ethnicity box to check on his application for a social security card. She tells us that "the occasion has become the repository for all my imaginings about the different moments over the years when he had to make a calculation about how to describe his race." We discussed whether Anatole Broyard was an imposter, and decided that to some degree he was. One group member suggested that Anatole was unable to complete his novel because he would not follow the advice to "write what you know." Another member pointed out the anger that some of his relatives felt about his insistence that race was not important to his identity--because he looked white, he could choose to pass and claim it was not as important to him as it actually was. However, we decided that Bliss Broyard has come to an understanding of both herself and her father that offers all of us a useful way of thinking about race and identity in the United States today: "From my own father, I inherited a legacy that connected me to the worst and best American traditions: from the racial oppression spawned by slavery to the opportunities created through becoming self-made. Recognizing my forebears' place in the continuum of history has made me appreciate my own responsibilities as a citizen--of my community, my country, and the world--in a way that simply paying my taxes or casting a vote never did. . . . I may never be able to answer the question What am I? yet the fault lies not in me but with the question itself."

How important do you believe being "true to who you are" is? If you have read One Drop, has it influenced that opinion in any way? We hope you will join our discussion of this multilayered book and the many important questions it raises.

August Not Fiction Book Discussion

We hope you will join us August 5 at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library on Calhoun Street for our discussion of Bliss Broyard's memoir One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets. With this memoir, the Not Fiction Book Discussion group begins an exploration of identity that we will continue with each book through December. Broyard's father, influential New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard, concealed from his children until his death the fact that he was of mixed race ancestry, that he was black. Broyard examines not only her own response to her father's choice, but also what his choice could have meant to him, and she provides a social and historical view of her family's 250-year history in America. While intensely personal, Broyard's narrative is also a broader consideration of racial identity in America and the basic human urge to "know" who we are.

Notes from July's Not Fiction Book Discussion

Timothy Egan's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, asked him in an interview, "Why a book on the Dust Bowl now?" He responded, " To me, there was an urgency to get this story now because the last of the people who lived through those dark years are in their final days. It's their story, and I didn't want them to take this narrative of horror and persistence to the grave. At the same time, this part of America--the rural counties of the Great Plains--looks like it's dying. Our rural past seems so distant, like Dorothy's Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. Yet it was within the lifetime of people living today that nearly one in three Americans worked on a farm. Now, the site of the old Dust Bowl--which covers parts of five states--is largely devoid of young families and emptying out by the day. It's flyover country to most Americans. But it holds this remarkable tale that should be a larger part of our shared national story." Indeed, none of us who attended the discussion of The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl were fully aware of the causes, extent, and results of the Dust Bowl until we read Egan's book. And reading it in the context of what we learned about the connection between agricultural policies and the fundamental health of our environment from both Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe, we wondered how it can be that this event seems to have slipped from common memory and why we just cannot seem to learn from history.

We marveled at the tenacity of those who remained in the Dust Bowl in spite of the poverty, desolation, and death they faced. They seemed to have felt a strong sense of place, even when that place changed beyond recognition into a desert of dust. We agreed that Egan does a good job of conveying their stories and describing the power of the dust storms. One of the most poignant passages in Egan's book, however, one that illustrates this love of place, is from the diary of Don Hartwell: " . . . this year gives us one more day to hold to the place which has meant so much to me in life and tradition in the last 35 years, from the scent of the wild plum bush and the violets and the blue grass in April, to the little dry thunder showers in June which break away late in the afternoon, with the meadow larks singing and the wild roses which seem to be brighter and smell sweeter when wet with rain than any other time." We also gained a great appreciation for the insight and foresight of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Hugh Bennett, the head of the soil conservation effort Operation Dust Bowl, whose policies helped to begin the healing of the country and the land of the Dust Bowl.

Although we enjoyed the drama and immediacy of Egan's narrative, we wish he had spent more time describing the aftermath of the decade of the Dust Bowl, how the land was slowly but only partially restored and what life is like there today. Several of us also felt oppressed by the accumulation of negative description and event in Egan's narrative, but we agreed that this sense of loss and also of foreboding was Egan's purpose, to sober us and to provoke us to avoid similar mistakes in the future. In fact, in the interview with Houghton Mifflin, he notes that "[t]he Dust Bowl story is a parable, in a way, about what happens when people push the limits of the land."

To see some images of the Great Plains and the Dust Bowl, you can visit the Library of Congress's American Memory collection online. To view part of the film The Plow That Broke The Plains, created in 1936 by Pare Lorentz, visit the Internet Archive online.

We hope you will add your comments about Egan's book to our discussion. And we hope that you will join us for our next discussion, either Tuesday, August 5, at Main Library or here on the blog, of Bliss Broyard's memoir One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Hidden Secrets, as we move on to a consideration of identity.

July Not Fiction Book Discussion

At our July Not Fiction Book Discussion, we will explore the connections we see between the last several books we have read and Timothy Egan's National Book Award-winning The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. During the 1930's, America's High Plains were swept by terrible dust storms that were the result of irresponsible agricultural practices combined with drought. The Dust Bowl is our nation's greatest environmental disaster--to date. We will read about and discuss this event from America's history in an attempt to understand how it happened and perhaps also how to be better stewards of our land and the food it provides in the future. Egan brings to life the Dust Bowl and the families and communities it affected through vivid historical reportage that, as a reviewer from the Cleveland Plain Dealer notes, "haunts a reader from the first pages." We invite you to join our discussion Tuesday, July 1 at 7:00 p.m. in the Main Library's Meeting Room A or here on the blog.

Notes from June's Not Fiction Book Discussion

Do you recall when you first heard about global warming and climate change? For some of us attending last Tuesday's discussion of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert, it was as long ago as the 1970s, when the first official reports were released on human impact on climate change, and some of us also recalled Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring that exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT and questioned the concept of benign technological progress.

So why has it taken so long for politicians and the general public to become alarmed about human impact on climate change? We noted that the issue seemed to drop out of general public consciousness during the 1980s and and early 1990s. Kolbert even-handedly and succinctly outlines what happened during those years--environmentally, scientifically, and politically--while we were not paying attention.

We acknowledged that global warming could become more than a media buzz word for those of us here in Charleston, SC who own or rent houses at or below sea level. Our discussion revealed that we are ambivalent about whether man or nature will prove more powerful--whether we will cooperate and use technology or find other solutions to potentially catastrophic climate change, or whether we will continue to put personal comfort and corporate profit before the collective good. However, we did agree that there seem to be many grass roots movements to offer hope, such as The Compact, which encourages people not to buy anything except essentials such as food and medicine for a period of time, and the local food movement. We shared the small ways we as individuals try to make a difference, such as using refillable water bottles rather than disposable plastic ones, carpooling, shopping at the local farmers market, reducing or eliminating meat from our diets, taking reusable shopping bags to the grocery store, replacing incandescent bulbs with fluorescent ones, and using heat and air conditioning moderately. And we are encouraged that grade school, high school, and college students are much more aware of the immediacy and importance of the issue of global warming than we were at their age.

Here is a brief list of resources Kolbert presents for learning more about climate change and how we as individuals can reduce our "carbon footprints." For others, see the Resources section at the end of her book.

• Cities for Climate Protection Campaign http://www.iclei.org/


• Southern Alliance for Clean Energy http://www.cleanenergy.org/


• RealClimate http://www.realclimate.org/


• Goddard Institute for Space Studies/National Aeronautics and Space Administration http://www.giss.nasa.gov/


• National Environmental Trust http://www.net.org/


• American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy http://www.aceee.org/ and http://www.greencars.com/


• Natural Resources Defense Council http://www.nrdc.org/


• Union of Concerned Scientists http://www.ucsusa.org/

We hope you will add your thoughts to our discussion and consider joining our next discussion, about Timothy Egan's book The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, either Tuesday, July 1, at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library on Calhoun Street, or here on the blog.

June Not Fiction Book Discussion

For our June Not Fiction Book Discussion, we will be reading Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert. The book began as a three-part series for The New Yorker, for which she won a National Magazine Award in 2006. Kolbert's title suggests her approach to the overwhelming topic of global warming--she provides a concise written record of her observations, interactions, and conversations from her travels around the world investigating her topic. We hope you will join our conversation, either on Tuesday, June 3, 2008, at 7:00 p.m. at the Main Library on Calhoun Street in Meeting Room A or here on the blog, about this brief but powerful book that many reviewers have called the Silent Spring (by Rachel Carson) for our time.

Notes from May's Not Fiction Book Discussion

We began our discussion of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by comparing our own shopping and eating habits to Pollan's four meals and how the book had impacted these habits. Many of us said we were more conscious of the health, economic, environmental, and cultural implications of our shopping and eating choices. Some of us have already made small changes in our shopping and eating habits, such as visiting our local farmers' market more often and reading labels to look for hidden corn ingredients and other signs of highly processed food. However, all of us were left perplexed by how best to incorporate the information in Pollan's book into our lives. We thought we were doing ourselves and the environment a favor by buying organic products at our local alternative commercial markets; we thought we were upholding our intention to support businesses that treat animals humanely by buying dairy and meat products sold in these stores. We now realize that industrial organic has complicated our choices. Rather than answering questions for us, The Omnivore's Dilemma left us with more. Thus Pollan has accomplished for us as readers what he intended, for the theme of his book is the importance of knowing how our eating links us to the world around us. He asks us, "But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found it's way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. . . . For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world."

To read an exchange between Michael Pollan and John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, regarding that company's efforts to offer consumers products that are ethically and environmentally sound, visit The CEO's Blog at http://www.wholefoods.com/. To read more articles by Michael Pollan about food, visit his website at http://www.michaelpollan.com/ and look under Writing.

We will continue our conversation about our relationship with our environment in the next two Not Fiction Book Discussions. For June we will read Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert, and for July we will read The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan. We hope you will join us, either at Main Library or here on the blog.

Notes from April's Not Fiction Book Discussion

In his preface to The United States of Arugula, David Kamp says, "This is a book about how we got to this point--how food in America got better, and how it hopped the fence from the ghettos of home economics and snobby gourmandism to the expansive realm of popular culture." Our discussion of his book on April 1 focused largely on whether he accomplished this goal for us as readers. We decided that perhaps his background as a writer of short profile pieces for Vanity Fair and GQ influenced his style and content--a tendency toward name-dropping and sharing gossipy bits about the personal lives of the many chefs he names. We agreed that we had expected more of a social and cultural history of the ordinary eaters who had participated in this food revolution, although we understand after reading his book that television programs, restaurant reviews, and cook books by celebrity chefs certainly ignited the revolution. Our favorite chapters were "Righteous and Crunchy" and "The New Sun-Dried Lifestyle"--both move beyond a mere timeline of events into a more in-depth presentation of the characters and trends they present, and the trends involved the world outside the walls of a five-star restaurant.

Kamp's book did spark a fun discussion of our own childhood memories of food and the transformations described in the book that have been most relevant in our lifetime. For example, one of our group was planning a dinner of penne with arugula, roma tomatoes, pine nuts, extra virgin olive oil, and parmigiano reggiano . . . a dish her mother certainly never made for the family back in the 1960s! And as soon as I finish this post, I will head out for a latte break . . .

Kamp's book will provide an interesting comparison for our next book, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. While Kamp is unreservedly optimistic about our culture's current abundance of ingredients and culinary sophistication, Pollan points out the many dilemmas involved in that plastic box of arugula from California, those tomatoes in early April . . .

We hope you will join our conversation!

Celebrate National Poetry Month!

April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate it, the Academy of American Poets is encouraging poetry lovers to participate in the first national Poem in Your Pocket Day on April 17. Simply choose a poem you love and carry it with you to share with family, friends, and coworkers on April 17 and throughout the month. Visit poets.org, the official website of the Academy of American Poets, for more information and to find poems to download!

You can also celebrate by participating in an online event hosted by the Library of Congress through the Online Programming for All Libraries Online Auditorium: "On April 17, join with the Library of Congress in an online celebration of the first national Poem In Your Pocket Day. Select a favorite published poem (not your own) in advance to share with others. Participants will present their poem in the order in which they log in to the OPAL Auditorium, the online venue for this program. Those who have a microphone have the option of reading their poem aloud, and to share a URL (if available) at which the poem can be found online. Participants without microphones may provide a link to their poem; Library of Congress employees will take turns reading these poems." For more information about OPAL, visit http://www.opal-online.org/progschrono.htm and to go to the Online Auditorium, visit http://www.conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs1641902f62b4.

And you can celebrate here on the Not Fiction blog--tell us about your favorite poem(s) and/or any favorite memories about poems or poetry.

"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?" ~Emily Dickinson

April Not Fiction Book Discussion

For our April Not Fiction Book Discussion we are reading The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp. Kamp, who is a regular contributor to periodicals including Vanity Fair and GQ, presents a social history of American food culture over the last five decades that chronicles what he sees as the happy evolution of American taste from provincial and conventional to multicultural gourmet. Kamp's history is rich with details about the lives of the celebrity chefs who helped create this movement, from the Big Three of James Beard, Julia Child, and Craig Claiborne to current stars of the Food Network such as Emeril Lagasse and Rachael Ray, and it also suggests the importance of the media and of consumer capitalism in shaping American trends and tastes. Possible topics for conversation could include the role of media and business in creating taste and demand, evolving American notions of gender and culture as reflected in our food culture, whether we agree with Kamp that the gourmet trend in American food culture is completely positive, and the relevance of the food revolution to our own lives. We hope you will be able to join us for our discussion, either at the Main Library on Tuesday, April 1, at 7:00 in Meeting Room A, or here on the blog.

Notes from March's Not Fiction Book Discussion

We opened our discussion of Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin by considering why this book is so popular, such a word-of-mouth book. We decided that Mortenson's story is inspiring because it proves that one person can make a difference on a large scale and provides hope for a confusing, seemingly insoluble political situation. It is the kind of book that can inspire individuals to take action.

We questioned the purpose of the book, and decided that it is not just a biography or adventure story, but also an advertisement for Mortenson's work through his nonprofit Central Asia Institute. In addition, it provides a convincing argument by example for the "three cups of tea" approach to foreign diplomacy. We compared Three Cups of Tea to The Places In Between by Rory Stewart, which we read last October, and agreed that while both books promote this approach to political relationships, Stewart's book, written in first person, is much more of a personal story, a true memoir.

We enjoyed discussing Mortenson's character, especially his transformation from climbing bum to head of an international nonprofit organization. We admire his ability to connect with people very unlike himself culturally and to learn from them the best way to procede to accomplish their mutual goals. We also marveled at his perseverance and disregard for personal comfort and safety.

And we discussed Relin's writing, his style and choice of point of view. Some reviewers of the book have criticized Relin's style, saying that his prose is occasionally clunky and that some of his metaphors are awkward and exaggerated. While we admitted that this criticism is true, we also agreed that Relin creates a sense of drama and provides some vivid portraits of the people and places Mortenson encountered. We compared Relin's choice of point of view to Tracy Kidder's in his book about Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains, which we read last November, and we came away with an even greater appreciation of Kidder's choice to include himself and his reactions to Farmer in the story, acting as a touchstone for the reader's own reaction to Farmer. Relin admits in his introduction that he could not serve as an objective observer but felt compelled to advocate for Mortenson, which caused some of us to question whether we are getting a full, truthful portrait of Mortenson's character. And Relin's choice to use a point of view that provides access to Mortenson's thoughts caused some of us to question to what degree those thoughts were truly Mortenson's, accurately recalled, or Relin's artistic creation.

Overall, we enjoyed Three Cups of Tea and found that it opens up many important political, cultural, literary, and personal discussions. We invite you to join those discussions here on the blog.

Visit these links to learn more about Mortenson's nonprofit Central Asia Institute and to get involved with fundraising through Pennies for Peace.

March Not Fiction Book Discussion

For our March Not Fiction Book Discussion, we will be discussing the New York Times bestseller Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, the story of how Mortenson became a humanitarian who has helped impoverished villages in remote and war-torn areas of Central Asia build over fifty schools for girls. The village of Korphe in the remote Karakoram mountains of Pakistan generously helped Mortenson regain his health after his failed attempt to summit the world's second highest peak,K2, in 1993, so Mortenson promised to build the village a school. The story of how he kept that promise and its far-reaching consequences provides drama, romance, humor, cultural insight, and hope that one person can make a difference. As we discuss Relin's role as narrator of Mortenson's life and work, Mortenson's powerful and sometimes difficult personality, the many challenges of humanitarian work, and the political implications of this book as America continues its military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, perhaps we will also come to understand why Three Cups of Tea has become a bestseller, a book for our times. We hope you will join our discussion, either Tuesday, March 4, at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of Charleston County Public Library's Main Library or here on the blog.

Notes from February's Not Fiction Book Discussion

Our discussion of Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories and the City centered on Pamuk's conviction that "Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am." As one member of our discussion group suggested, Pamuk has embraced his fate and from it created for his readers an almost palpable sense of Istanbul as he knows it, a city of huzun, or shared melancholy, inseparable from his family's life and his interior life as a young artist. Another member of our discussion group, who is a native of Istanbul and an admirer of all of Pamuk's works, asked us whether we felt we could "see" Istanbul after reading Pamuk's memoir, saying that he felt it did a wonderful job of portraying Istanbul but that he was biased by knowing the city and being a fan of Pamuk's writing. We agreed that we do feel we now know Istanbul, but that if we were suddenly to find ourselves in its streets, we would be surprised to see the vibrant, full-color, present-day city rather than the black and white city Pamuk portrays. It is to Pamuk's credit that the city we know so well is the city of his memories.

Readers who enjoyed Pamuk's family stories and honest portrayal of his inner life as an artist will enjoy reading his Nobel Lecture, My Father's Suitcase, in which he presents a poignant story about his relationship with his father as well as his view of the role of literature in today's politically sensitive world.

February Not Fiction Book Discussion

For our February Not Fiction Book Discussion, we are reading Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk, who won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, tells us in his first chapter, "Here we come to the heart of the matter: I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood. . . . My imagination . . . requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am." Thus his book is a memoir of a city as much as it is a memoir of a self, offering readers a lushly detailed cultural, social, political, and religious history of Istanbul as well as a startlingly honest portrait of this artist as a young man. Pamuk has enriched his text with evocative photographs of his family and the city, enhancing his presentation of the sensibility of huzun, or melancholy, he feels he shares with all Istanbullus as a result of living in this lost empire. Our discussion should be rich as we explore Pamuk's literary allusions, compare and contrast his memoir with Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, discuss the idea of a shared cultural sensibility, and share favorite passages, so we hope you will join us, either Tuesday, February 5 at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library on Calhoun Street or here on the blog.

To hear an interview with Orhan Pamuk and learn more about Istanbul, visit this link to Public Radio International's program The World, which recently featured a week of programming about this city titled Istanbul: A Past and Future City.

Notes from January's Not Fiction Book Discussion

We began our discussion of Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir with a question asked by book reviewer William Leith of the London Evening Standard: "Is this the most cheerful book I've ever read, or the saddest?" We all agreed that Bryson does a wonderful job of conveying the parallel currents of optimism and paranoia that defined the 1950s--the excitement of space travel and television and the fear of communist spies and nuclear war--and he also succeeds at evoking the hyperbolic enthusiasm of childhood and the nostalgia of adulthood.

We disagreed with critics who feel that Bryson is not much of a memoirist. We decided that some readers might not understand Bryson's purpose in writing this book--to recreate the feel of childhood in a particular time and place rather than to provide a psychological evaluation of himself and his family. Bryson confirmed his intentions in a September 2006 interview with Emma Brooks of the Guardian: "This is not a deeply analytical book. The points it makes are pretty obvious points. It is not a huge intellectual exercise. It's really just a book about what an interesting state childhood is and what an interesting and promising place the United States was 50 years ago and how I think it's kind of gone wrong. . . . I've been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don't tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family."

We all enjoyed reminiscing about our own childhoods, prompted by the humor and lyricism of passages such as this one: " . . . I knew more things in the first ten years of my life than I believe I have known at any time since. . . . I knew the cool feel of linoleum on bare skin and what everything smelled like at floor level. I knew pain the way you know it when it is fresh and interesting--the pain, for example, of a toasted marshmallow in your mouth when its interior is roughly the temperature and consistency of magma. I knew exactly how clouds drifted on a July afternoon, what rain tasted like, how ladybugs preened and caterpillars rippled, what it felt like to sit inside a bush. I knew how to appreciate a really good fart, whether mine or someone else's." However, just as Bryson's book strikes a balance between cheerful and sad, so we found ourselves drawn to reflect, just as Bryson does in his melancholy last lines, "What a wonderful world that would be. What a wonderful world it was. We won't see its like again, I'm afraid."

To view an animated VidLit clip of a passage from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, click here!

If you have read Bryson's memoir or simply want to reminisce about your childhood, we hope you will add your comments here. What passages of the book were humorous to you? What memories of your childhood did the book bring back for you?