Wednesday, November 26, 2008

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.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

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.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

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.