January Not Fiction Book Discussions

We will open the year of discussions with Outliers:The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. In the clear, anecdotal style that made The Tipping Point and Blink bestsellers, Gladwell attempts to answer the question "Why do some people succeed far more than others?" using examples such as the Beatles and Bill Gates, star athletes and Asian math whizzes. His conclusion--that success is as much the result of culture and circumstance as it is of intelligence or ambition--may change the way you view human potential. In an interview, Gladwell said, "My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. . . . and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds--and how many of us succeed--than we think" (www.gladwell.com/outliers/index.html).

We will use Gladwell's ideas in Outliers throughout our discussions this year, considering, for example, how much of Steve Martin's success as a comedian is the result of talent, ambition, hard work, or circumstance in our conversation about his memoir Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life; or the implications for how best to help women of the Third World overcome oppression in our conversation about Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

We hope you will join our discussions, Tuesday, January 5, at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, January 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; or here on the blog.

Not Fiction Book Discussions List for 2010

We are excited to announce the list of titles for our 2010 Not Fiction Book Discussions! We will begin with Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success, which will set the theme for the year's discussions. You can find a complete list of titles and dates on the right side of the page under Not Fiction Book Discussions 2010.

And don't miss the final Not Fiction Book Discussion of 2009! We will be discussing Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey at the West Ashley Branch on Thursday, December 17 at 11:00 a.m.

We hope you will join us, either in person or here on the blog.

December Not Fiction Book Discussions

Have you ever wished you could take a behind-the-scenes tour of a great museum? Then join us for a discussion of Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum!

Fortey, who was a senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, guides readers on a rambling walk through the museum's vast collections of fossils, jewels, rare plants, and exotic species, pulling open drawers full of orderly rows of specimens, wandering down seldom-used passageways, and poking around in the miscellany of the Dry Storeroom No. 1 of the title. He also introduces readers to the sometimes eccentric scientists who have devoted their professional lives to studying the museum's collections. Full of fascinating detail about such items as Charles Darwin's barnacle collection or the cursed amethyst of Edward Heron-Allen, and of humorous anecdotes such as the one about the time Fortey nearly set the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History on fire, Fortey's tour is, according to the L.A. Times, "Worth the price of admission." Yet Fortey hopes to do more than entertain us; he hopes to persuade us of the essential role museums play in preserving our collective cultural memory and the diversity of life.

Join the conversation Tuesday, December 1 at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, December 17 at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; or here on the blog.

November Not Fiction Book Discussions

Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes is a personal essay in the truest sense, both a literary composition on a single subject presenting the personal view of the author and an attempt or endeavor to understand that subject--in Barnes' case, mortality, especially his own. Identified as "a memoir" on the book jacket, the book combines unsentimental philosophical speculation on death with mordantly funny family stories and a consideration of the consolations of art. However, early on in the essay, Barnes notes, "This is not, by the way, 'my autobiography.' Nor am I 'in search of my parents.' . . . Part of what I am doing - which may seem unnecessary - is trying to work out how dead they are." He also confides, "Perhaps I should warn you (especially if you are a philosopher, theologian, or biologist) that some of this book will strike you as amateur, do-it-yourself stuff. But then we are all amateurs in and of our own lives." So what, exactly, is this book about? In an interview with The Oxonian Review of Books, Barnes said, "I think of this book as an exercise in examining myself as a case and as an answer to a question: at this point in time, what does it mean not to believe in anything and yet not be reconciled to the notion that you're going to die?" In our discussions, we will consider what Barnes' answer seems to be and whether or not it seems to console him - and whether or not it consoles us. After all, one could read the title of Barnes' essay in two very different ways . . .

We hope you will join one of our discussions of the book that Men's Vogue has called, "that most urgent kind of self-help manual: the one you must read before you die": Tuesday, November 3, at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, November 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; or here on the blog.

October Not Fiction Book Discussions

Kathleen Norris began her writing career as a poet, and after graduating from Bennington College in Vermont in 1969, she lived in New York and associated with Andy Warhol and his circle. However, in 1974, she and her future husband traveled to Lemmon, South Dakota, after her grandmother's death and eventually settled there permanently. Although a married Protestant, she sought and found spiritual support at a Benedictine monastery near her new home. Norris' spiritual memoirs, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, The Cloister Walk, and Amazing Grace, have captured readers' attention and affection. These works blend essay and memoir with an examination of scholarly topics concerning spiritual life as well as a meditation on how these topics relate to Norris' personal life, transcending denomination and doctrine.

In Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life, Norris provides an in-depth history and discussion of acedia, a soul-weary indifference that she suggests is similar to, but distinct from, clinical depression, describing how it has manifested in her marriage to poet David Dwyer, her spiritual life, and her writing career. In our discussions, we will consider Norris' contention that this ancient concept and its remedies are especially relevant to the quality of our lives in the 21st century. We will also explore connections to other books we have read this year. For example, what connections can be made between Laurence Gonzales' "Rules of Adventure" in his book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why and Norris' suggestions for how to work with acedia? Do you think Chris McCandless' wandering across the country and his final, tragic journey to Alaska were a manifestation of acedia? What about Mildred Armstrong Kalish, author of Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, and Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I'm Dying, and her family? Why didn't they succumb to acedia's temptations? And what about us? Can we rise to the complex challenges facing our global climate, culture, and economy using the suggestions offered by Barbara Kingsolver in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Bill McKibben in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, and Fareed Zakaria in The Post-American World?

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

Meanwhile, consider these quotations from the last chapter of Acedia & Me, a commonplace book of other writers' reflections on acedia, and how they resonate with the ideas of the authors we have read so far this year:

A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase. --Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) The Conquest of Happiness

Why does man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making over the world for his own use?

Why has man entered on an orgy of war, murder, torture, and self-destruction unparalleled in history?

Why is the good life which men have achieved in the twentieth century so bad that only news of world catastrophes, assassinations, plane crashes, mass murders can divert one from the sadness of ordinary mornings? --Walker Percy (1916-1990) The Message in the Bottle

I'd say that the quantity of boredom, if boredom is measurable, is much greater today than it once was. Because the old occupations, at least most of them, were unthinkable without a passionate involvement: the peasants in love with their land . . . the shoemakers who knew every villager's feet by heart; the woodsmen; the gardeners . . . The meaning of life wasn't an issue, it was there with them, quite naturally, in their workshops, in their fields. . . . Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy . . . [which] has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time. --Milan Kundera (b. 1929) Identity

Just as the excellence of an individual life depends to a large extent on how free time is used, so the quality of a society hinges on what its members do in their leisure time. . . . We have seen that at the social as well as the individual level habits of leisure act as both effects and . . . causes. . . . When work turns into a boring routine and community responsibilities lose their meaning, it is likely that leisure will become increasingly more important. And if a society becomes too dependent on entertainment, it is likely that there will be less psychic energy left to cope creatively with the technological and economic challenges that will inevitably arise. --Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (b. 1934) Finding Flow

West Ashley Branch Library September Book Discussion Date Changed

Please note that the date for the September Not Fiction Book Discussion of Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg at West Ashley Branch Library has been changed to Thursday, September 10, at 11:00 a.m. It was originally scheduled for Thursday, September 17.

September Not Fiction Book Discussions

As summer comes to a close, we will consider mental illness and the way it can throw a family into crisis with Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg, the story of the summer that Greenberg's fifteen-year-old daughter Sally was diagnosed with bipolar mania, "struck mad," as Greenberg says in the first line of this personal yet philosophical memoir.

In addition to the searingly honest portrayal of his own family's response to Sally's illness, including his experience taking a dose of Sally's medication so that he could better understand what she might be experiencing, Greenberg also describes the rich cast of characters at the Manhattan psychiatric ward where Sally spent much of that summer, including other patients and their families and the hospital doctors and staff. On his website, http://www.michaelgreenberg.org/, Greenberg describes his motivations for writing the book, suggesting that he felt it important to share the point of view of the family of a person who suffers from mental illness. He says, "I remembered the trepidation with which I started the book several years ago. I wrote about 60 pages and decided not to go on: it seemed gauche to reveal our lives in such a public manner. I put the pages away, but a year later removed them from their drawer and continued writing. It struck me that this book was missing from the rich literature of madness--a literature that begins with Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy back in the early 17th century, and trots forward to Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, William Styron's Darkness Visible, Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind . . . Every one of these writers was describing his or her own experience of being psychotic. But apart from clinicians and specialists, very few have written about it from the other shore. There was a conspicuous gap in the literature, which I realized needed to be filled. For better or for worse, this is what I set out to do with Hurry Down Sunshine."

Greenberg also explores mental illness from a philosophical point of view, that of the self in crisis, the line between personality and pathology, inspiration and illness, and he raises questions about the way we as a culture view and respond to mental illness.

We hope you will join one of our discussions: Tuesday, September 1, at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, September 10, at 11:00 a.m. at the West Ashley Branch Library (please note the date change--this discussion was originally scheduled for September 17); or here on the blog.

August Not Fiction Book Discussions

Last month, we discussed the life and "ordeal" of Elizabeth Marsh and what her experience revealed about the expanding world of the late 1700s; this month, we will consider the life of two late 20th century Haitian immigrants and their family and what their experience can tell us about our world today with the memoir Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat.

Danticat tells the story of her father, Mira, who immigrated with his wife to America, and her uncle, Joseph, who remained in Haiti until political unrest caused him to seek asylum in the United States. Danticat lived the first twelve years of her life with her uncle and then joined her father, mother, and siblings in America, so she sees both of these men as fathers. Unfortunately, she lost both of them in one year, Mira to pulmonary fibrosis and Joseph to ill health that was aggravated by improper treatment by American immigration authorities, the same year she became pregnant with her own daughter.

In an interview with Democracy Now, Danticat said that in Brother, I'm Dying she wants to present "a picture of my uncle, of what he meant to us, but also to link his cause to the greater cause of mistreatment and lack of medical care of immigrants in detention." Lyrical, clear, and restrained, Danticat's story gives us a picture of both global issues and personal grief. An interviewer for the Philadelphia Inquirer said of this book, "If Brother, I'm Dying does not break your heart, you don't have one." We hope you will join our discussion, Tuesday, August 4, at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library, Thursday, August 20, at 11:00 a.m. at the West Ashley Branch Library, or here on the blog.

July Not Fiction Book Discussions

Last month we discussed Fareed Zakaria's vision of a "post-American world"; this month we will discuss Linda Colley's The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, a portrait of a pre-American, proto-global world and a remarkable woman whose life provides a view into that world. Colley, the Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University, says "this book charts a world in a life and a life in the world. It is also an argument for re-casting and re-evaluating biography as a way of deepening our understanding of the global past." During the 50 years of her life, 1735-1785, at a time when most women of her social and economic circumstances rarely left the parlor, Marsh lived in Jamaica, London, Gibraltar, and Menorca and visited the Cape of Africa, Rio de Janeiro, and India; she was caught up in three different slave systems, including being captured by Barbary pirates and held captive by the sultan of Morocco; and she was involved in land speculation in Florida and in international smuggling. Her extraordinary mobility was made possible by larger forces connecting the world by way of the sea, such as naval warfare, international trade, and print. Does Colley manage to give us a compelling narrative of Marsh's life and present her as more than just a sketchy figure on the background of world events? Does she also manage to provide insight into world history? What can Marsh's life help us understand about our own rapidly "flattening" world"? We invite you to join our discussions: Tuesday, July 7, at 7:00 p.m. at the Main Library; Thursday, July 23, at 11:00 at the West Ashley Branch; and here on the blog.

Notes from April and May Not Fiction Book Discussions

We have spent the Spring months considering Barbara Kingsolver and Bill McKibben's arguments for what McKibben calls "the economics of neighborliness," the feasibility and the benefits of participating in economies that are local in scale.


Everyone who attended the discussions of Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life unreservedly enjoyed her narrative of her family's year of eating locally, finding it both personable and informative. We were especially impressed with her daughter Camille's menus and recipes at the end of each chapter. Many of us reported being inspired by her family's example to make changes in our food life, such as joining community supported agriculture projects, visiting the local farmer's market, planting a few herbs and vegetables in our yards, and even making our own cheese. Although some critics felt that her project amounted to "stunt eating" (New York Times), an experiment that most of us could not hope to duplicate, we agreed that we could all try buying more fruits and vegetables locally and in-season even if we weren't prepared to put by a year's worth of tomato sauce or butcher our own meat.


Those of us who attended the discussions of Bill McKibben's Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future agreed that we were glad we had read his book even though we might not otherwise have considered reading a book about sociology and economics without the discussions to motivate us. We were persuaded by his clear, emphatic, reasonable arguments that local economies might be workable on some scale. Several of us described our experiences of belonging to food co-ops, bartering one service for another, sharing ownership of infrequently used but necessary tools such as a snow blowers, using town-issued currency for purchases, and participating in New England town hall meetings. However, we all agreed that in this "flat" world, as Thomas Friedman calls it, some centralization of government, economy, and services is unavoidable and even necessary, for example, in the case of curtailing the spread of an epidemic or controlling the effects of climate change.


We also discussed the changes, not often for the better, in cultural attitudes about material possessions versus community that have occured even in our lifetimes. Most of us live in larger homes filled with more stuff, but we spend less time with family and friends and often do not know our neighbors. Both Kingsolver and McKibben ask us to consider essential questions: Is more better? What does richer mean? (McKibben) What is your answer to these questions?


For a virtual seasonal tour of the Kingsolvers' farm, visit http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/. To learn more about Bill McKibben's international campaign to build a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis, visit http://www.350.org/. And to learn more about participating in the Lowcountry's local economy, visit http://www.lowcountrylocalfirst.org/.

June Not Fiction Book Discussion

In June, we will move from a local to a global perspective with Fareed Zakaria's best-selling book The Post-American World. Zakaria, host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS and the editor of Newsweek International, says, "This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else. It is about the great transformation taking place around the world, a transformation that, though often discussed, remains poorly understood. This is natural. Changes, even sea changes, take place gradually. Though we talk about a new era, the world seems to be one with which we are familiar. But in fact, it is very different." Zakaria describes the economic and political ascendance of countries such as China and India and offers his optimistic view of the role the United States can play in this new post-American world of diffuse power. How does Zakaria's view compare with that of Bill McKibben, who asserts in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future that growth and globalism is not the only or the most desirable model for economic, political, social, and environmental well-being? Do you share Zakaria's optimism that the United States can not only survive but also thrive? Join the discussion Tuesday, June 2 at Main Library at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, June 18 at the West Ashley Branch at 11:00 a.m., or here on the blog.

May Not Fiction Book Discussions

In May we will continue our conversation about the possibility of reconnecting with our local resources as a way to minimize our global impact on the planet and of finding a greater sense of happiness and community with our discussion of Bill McKibben's Deep Economy: The Weath of Communities and the Durable Future. In Deep Economy, McKibben argues that "growth" is neither the only nor the most sound economic ideal. He offers examples of alternatives, including local food, energy, and even culture and entertainment production, that would preserve the humanity of our economy. Do his suggestions seem reasonable? Possible? Join us to share your opinion Tuesday, May 5 at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library, Thursday, May 21 at 11:00 a.m. at the West Ashley Branch, or here on the blog.

April is 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 second national Poem in Your Pocket Day on April 30. Simply choose a poem you love and carry it with you to share with family, friends, and coworkers on April 30 and throughout the month. Visit poets.org, the official website of the Academy of American Poets, for more information. You can also sign up to receive a poem each day of National Poetry Month in your email, view a National Poetry Map to locate poetry events in your area, view or enter the Free Verse Photo Project, and find other ways to bring poetry into your life.

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.

Notes from March Not Fiction Book Discussion

Mildred Kalish originally planned to title her memoir about growing up on an Iowa farm during the Great Depression Grandma, Tell Me a Farm Story and to self-publish it for family and friends (http://www.little-heathens.com/). Fortunately for us, family members encouraged her to share her life story with a wider audience.

In our discussions of Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, we considered how Kalish's book differs from many contemporary memoirs. It is less confessional, less concerned with the psychological inner drama of the narrator; it is true instead in style, tone, and content to its original title, giving readers the feeling that they are listening to the anecdotes of an older relative. Kalish shares stories about the daily life of hard work and thrift and the culture of close family and community ties of a time now past and almost unimaginable to those of us born after World War II. Kalish reflects on the difficulties and also the great joys of that life with a resolute, positive attitude that seems to be as much her message--and her gift--to readers as the stories she tells.

In a statement about why she decided to share the book with a wider audience, Kalish says, "I have noticed a resurgence of public interest in the rural matters where people yearn to engage in satisfying activities that have direct meaning in their lives. Perhaps this is because our current national and international challenges result in individuals feeling helpless and disconnected. My book tells of a life of total involvement. I thought readers would enjoy reading about that experience" (http://www.little-heathens.com/). A reviewer for Booklist calls Kalish's memoir "deeply intelligent," and perhaps it is resoluteness, positivity, and total involvement in such ordinary issues as where our food comes from, how directly meaningful our work is to our daily lives, and how we spend time with our families and friends that will help us out of our current recession and provide a path to a more sustainable, connected future. We will continue to consider these issues in our discussions of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life and Bill McKibben's Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.

Meanwhile, for more stories about the Great Depression from those who lived through it and their perspective on how it relates to this recession, visit The New York Times online's video feature The New Hard Times. You can watch interviews or submit your own.

April Not Fiction Book Discussion

Spring has sprung, and our local farmers market will be up and running soon. It is a perfect time of year to read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver says, "This is the story . . . of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air." Kingsolver, her husband, Steven L. Hopp, a professor of environmental studies, and her daughter, Camille, a student at Duke University, all contribute to this narrative of how the family committed to eating only what they could grow on, or buy from neighbors of, their rural Virginia farm. Combining family anecdotes, discussion of agricultural practices and food culture, and seasonal recipes and nutritional information, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle approaches what Michael Pollan calls our national eating disorder with both intellect and heart. Join our discussion April 7 at Main Library at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A, April 23 at West Ashley Branch at 11:00 a.m., or here on the blog to share your reactions to this popular book as well as your own tips and recipes for how to eat locally to act globally.

Notes from January and February Not Fiction Book Discussions

Henry David Thoreau says of his time at Walden Pond, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

Chris McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, conducted a similar experiment when he left home and family completely behind, ultimately dying, perhaps needlessly, of starvation in Alaska. In a pre-publication review of Into the Wild that appeared in Library Journal, the reviewer suggests that Krakauer "never satisfactorily answers the question of whether McCandless was a noble, if misguided, idealist or a reckless narcissist who brought pain to his family." Most people in our discussion group agreed that Krakauer's portrait of McCandless was complex, leaving McCandless an enigma, but they did not expect Krakauer to solve the puzzle. They recognized that McCandless' story derives its interest from the fact that life "proved to be mean" for him, that his story shares many of the elements of classical tragedy. Yet in their own evaluation of McCandless, most discussion members decided that he was not "noble," that he was a "reckless narcissist who brought pain to his family." Therefore, it was inconceivable to many in the discussion group that McCandless has become a cult figure for hundreds of people, mostly young men, many of whom have made a pilgrimmage to the abandoned bus where McCandless lived during the months of his Alaska adventure and where he died. What are these pilgrims looking for? Perhaps a way to "live deliberately"? What do they see in McCandless? And what does it say about our culture that they are looking and that McCandless is the example of what they are looking for? These are questions we never satisfactorily answered in our discussion.

However, after reading Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, we were able to analyze McCandless' actions according to "The Rules of Adventure" Gonzales has distilled from his lifetime of personal interest in and study of survival. For example, some discussion members pointed out that McCandless was not informed about or prepared for the environment he entered, leading him to make any number of mistakes. He did not understand the dynamics of snow melt and the way it swelled the river he needed to cross to return to civilization, and he did not carry a map or compass that might have helped him find a new way across or discover some nearby cabins that might have provided food and shelter. Other discussion members pointed out that McCandless' lack of knowledge and preparation was indicative of his lack of humility--he did not know what he did not know or respect the power of the natural world. Regarding our own ability to have a successful adventure or to survive an adventure gone wrong, many discussion members could see that they had experienced some of the qualities of survivors Gonzales describes in moments of "meanness" in their own lives or could benefit from some of the suggestions he makes in future challenging situations. Yet many readers did not find Gonzales' book to be effectively, consistently written. Some found his tendency to take on a swaggering tone and to name-drop annoying, while others thought he might have better organized his points and the anecdotes that illustrate them.

Gonzales echoes Thoreau's wish that, when he "came to die," he not "discover that [he] had not lived" when he describes his daughter's "Gutter Theory of Life": "You don't want to be lying in the gutter, having been run down by a bus, the last bit of your life ebbing away, and be thinking, 'I should have taken that rafting trip . . . ' or 'I should have learned to surf . . . ' or 'I should have flown upside down--with smoke!'" What do you think? What does it mean to "live deliberately"? What does it mean to "survive"?

March Not Fiction Book Discussion

Miss the March discussion of Mildred Armstrong Kalish's memoir Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm Duing the Great Depression? Not on your tintype! You can join us Tuesday, March 3 at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library, Thursday, March 19 at 11:00 a.m. at the West Ashley Branch Library, or here on the blog to share your response to Kalish's story of "a time, a place, and a family" that was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times. In addition to sharing stories, recipes, home remedies, and how-tos, Kalish also offers a unique perspective on one of the most difficult periods in the history of the United States. Who knows? You just might walk away from the discussion with more than an idea of how to treat a boil with a beet, how to do a week's worth of laundry without a washing machine and dryer, or how to make marshmallows from scratch. You might come to appreciate what Kalish calls "the sheer joy and excitement of it all."

A new Maira Kalman blog!!!

Ahem . . . I mean . . . A new Maira Kalman ILLUSTRATED COLUMN, as Ms. Kalman would prefer to call it, And the Pursuit of Happiness about American democracy, will appear on the last Friday of each month in the New York Times' online edition. Those of you who enjoyed reading and discussing The Principles of Uncertainty, which began as a bl . . . illustrated column will be happy to know that the first installment about Barack Obama's inauguration includes some lovely hats and tassels!
Here is the link: http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/
Enjoy!

February Not Fiction Book Discussions

On Tuesday, February 6 at 7:00 p.m. at the Main Library and again on Thursday, February 19 at 11:00 a.m. at the West Ashley Branch, the Not Fiction Book Discussion groups will continue an exploration of questions inevitably evoked by January's book for discussion, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, with Deep Survival by National Geographic Adventure magazine contributing editor Laurence Gonzales. The subtitle of Gonzales' book neatly sums up the most pressing of these questions: "Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why" in a survival situation, whether it be an unexpected mountaineering accident, a routine yet high-pressure landing by a jet pilot on the deck of a military aircraft carrier, or perhaps some of the more common "survival" situations such as a divorce, the loss of a job, or an economic downturn. Gonzales shares some common traits of survivors and also some rules for adventure. He draws these traits and rules, as well as the harrowing stories he uses to illustrate them, from a variety of personal narratives, analyses of disasters, and scientific studies of how the human brain responds to stressful situations. After reading Gonzales' book, do you feel you are better prepared to survive? Share your thoughts--and survival stories--with us in person at one of our discussions or here on the blog.

New Online Book Clubs at CCPL

Charleston County Public Library has just launched an Online Book Clubs service that delivers books electronically. Each day, Monday through Friday, the library will email subscribers a portion of a book that takes about 5 minutes to read. You'll be able to read two or three chapters from a book during the week. If you like a book, you can check it out of the library. Each week the library will feature new books. With 7 book clubs to choose from, there's something for everyone: Fiction, Nonfiction, Science Fiction, Business, Inspirational, Teen, and Mystery.

Starting today, you can sign up for the service at our web site, http://www.ccpl.org/, and click on the Online Book Clubs logo on the left side of the page.