December Not Fiction Book Discussions

We began our virtual road trip through American history and culture this year with The Unwinding by George Packer, a montage of biographical sketches and cultural memes that Packer uses to describe the "unwinding" over the last three decades of the America most of us take for granted, "when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way." We will end our journey with The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean by Philip Caputo,  in which Caputo recounts his epic journey across the United States, with his wife, two dogs, and an Airstream trailer in tow, asking Americans "What holds us together?"

Over the years of his journalism career, Caputo has visited Barter Island off the coast of Alaska and has lived in Key West, Florida, and he says, "My thinking ran something like this: The Inupiat schoolkids here [in Alaska] pledge allegiance to the same flag as the children and grandchildren of Cuban immigrants on Key West, six thousand miles away. Native Americans and Cuban Americans on two islands as far apart as New York is from Moscow, yet in the same country. How remarkable. I felt then a heightened awareness of America's vastness and diversity. And a renewed appreciation for its cohesiveness. In an itinerant life, I'd traveled through more than fifty foreign countries. A lot of them, riven by centuries-old hatreds, all too often delaminated into ghastly ethnic and sectarian wars . . . .What a marvel that the huge United States, peopled by every race on Earth, remained united. What held it together?" In the course of his journey across America, Caputo sees evidence of the same unwindings that Packer describes. Yet at the end of it, he is more optimistic about our future than Packer seems to be, finding hope in what he calls our "dynamic disequilibrium," the tension of conflict between community and individualism.

What do you think? After our reading and discussion this year, what do you think unites us as a nation and a culture? What do you think threatens to tear us apart? In his Prologue, Packer suggests that unwindings of political, social, and cultural structures in our country are nothing new, that "Each decline brought renewal, each implosion released energy, out of each unwinding came a new cohesion." Yet in an interview with NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, Packer says of this particular devolution, "What I see happening is not just cyclical, though, it feels like a real cultural shift where the value of the community, of what makes this a coherent society, has really been submerged." Do you agree with Packer that we have undergone an irreversible shift away from community? Or does community ultimately hold us together in spite of other changes in our legislative and cultural makeup? What, exactly, is community in a nation as diverse as ours?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, December 2, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, December 18, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.