April Not Fiction Book Discussions

In 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann, we read a panoramic description of the rise of globalism and the First World and its environmental, economic, political, and ethical consequences. In Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis, we read about the current global financial crisis, especially as it is playing out in the First World of Europe and the United States, and the possible Third World conditions that may result.  In Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo, we will read a dramatic and intimate narrative of three years in Annawadi slum as people work to create a better life in one of the 21st century's fastest-growing, most unequal cities, Mumbai, India. "As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi" (jacket copy).

Boo, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her journalism about poverty in America, married a man from India and found herself considering similar questions to those she confronted in America, what it takes to get out of poverty in an unequal society and how market forces and government policies either help or hinder people in their effort to do so. In an interview with Charles McGrath in the New York Times, Boo says, "I think I grew up with a healthy respect for volatility, all the things you can't control. . . . And I became aware of the ways in which people who write about the disadvantaged often underestimate its psychological contours, the uncertainty--economic or whatever." In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Boo asks us to witness and experience the daily lives of people with both strengths and weaknesses as they face the challenge of surviving in a volatile society: Abdul, a teenager who supports his family of 11 by collecting, sorting, and selling garbage, and who is falsely accused of a terrible crime, placing his family in danger of going hungry if he is arrested; Fatima, a woman whose disability and desire to be loved makes her the object of derision; Asha, a woman who pursues her fierce hope to send her daughter to college through political corruption; and others in this vibrant community. Boo says in her Author's Note, "It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in under-cities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many people try to be--all those invisible individuals who every day find themselves faced with dilemmas . . . " In an interview with her editor on her website, Boo discusses her purpose in writing this book: "My hope, at the keyboard, is to portray these individuals in their complexity--allow them not to be Representative Poor Persons--so that readers might find some other point of emotional purchase, a connection more blooded than pity. Maybe somewhere in the book they might even start asking, What would I do, under these circumstances . . . But I'm interested in structures as well as stories, and as I report, I'm sometimes asking myself a set of questions inspired by the philosopher John Rawls: How would I design a society if I didn't know where in its hierarchy I would be placed--if I didn't know whether I would be a person of wealth and power, or a poor and vulnerable person? What system would I create that would be fair? I would be elated if a few readers of Behind the Beautiful Forevers were inclined to ask themselves similar questions" (www.behindthebeautifulforevers.com/qa-with-katherine).

How does constant exposure to volatility, inequality, and corruption change people's interpretation of right and wrong, as well as how they view their neighbors? Can hope for a better life have a dark side as well as a bright side? Does economic volatility affect relationships in the community where you live? What is the connection between suffering and redemption in this book and in the world?(www.behindthebeautifulforevers.com/discussion-guide)

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, April 2, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, April 25, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

March Not Fiction Book Discussions

We continue our consideration of the effects of globalization with Boomerang: Travels in the Third World by Michael Lewis. In The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Lewis introduced readers to the few farsighted if ethically questionable financial professionals who saw that the American subprime mortgage industry was poised to fall and made their fortune betting, against the market, that the housing bubble would burst. In Boomerang, Lewis broadens his view to the effects of what he calls "the tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2007." Originally written as a series of articles for Vanity Fair magazine, these essays are travel writing of a sort, as Lewis calls his visits to Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, and California "financial-disaster tourism." As T.J. Stiles notes in The First Tycoon, the Gilded Age saw the rise of the abstraction of the global financial system. One of the great tycoons of that era, Cornelius Vanderbilt, saw the dangers of the system, even as he sought to profit from it. Stiles quotes him as saying, "I'll tell you what's the matter--people undertake to do about four times as much business as they can legitimately undertake. . . . When I have some money I buy railroad stock or something else, but I don't buy on credit. I pay for what I get. People who live too much on credit generally get brought up with a round turn in the long run" (536-37). However, Lewis' provocative thesis is that what is causing the global financial crisis is not just simple greed, but greed combined with the particular national character of each country involved: "The credit wasn't just money, it was temptation. It offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Entire countries were told, 'The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.' What they wanted to do with money in the dark varied" (42).

What do you think? Does Lewis make the case that national character explains as much as or more than simple human nature?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, March 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, March 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.