May Not Fiction Book Discussions

What is it about an underdog that makes for a good story? In Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local--and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy, we have two underdogs, John D. Bassett III, the factory man of the title, and American industry itself.

Bassett, Chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company in Galax, Virginia, is a complicated hero. Macy says,

Once in a reporter's career, if one is very lucky, a person like John D. Bassett III comes along. JBIII is inspirational. He's brash. He's a sawdust-covered good old boy from rural Virginia, a larger-than-life rule breaker who for more than a decade has stood almost single-handedly against the outflow of furniture jobs from America. "He's an asshole!" more than one of his competitors barked when they heard I was writing a book about globalization with JBIII as a main character. Over the course of researching this book, over the course of hearing his many lectures and listening to him evade my questions by telling me the same stories over and over, there were times that I agreed.

Bassett fought against family intrigue to take charge of Vaughan-Bassett, and then he fought against the offshoring of American furniture manufacturing to Asia, to save 700 American factory jobs. As Shawn Donnan notes in a review of Factory Man in the Financial Times, "There is an element of Don Quixote about it."

Bassett's family built their furniture dynasty in the early 20th century through exploitation of American labor and the manufacture of an inferior product, and Asian manufacturers used those same business ethics and techniques to shift the profits of the furniture industry overseas. Bassett successfully fought this trend, but can American industry fight globalization? Macy said in an interview with Talking Biz News,

I hope the reader will come away from Factory Man with a deep understanding of why their furniture and other Asia-manufactured products cost a little bit less than they once did--and what that means for the 5 million Americans who used to make those products. I hope they're entertained and inspired by my main character, an iconoclast multimillionaire who cares enough for the generations of workers who made his family rich that when others in his industry were closing their factories, he dug in his heels and said, Oh hell no. I hope the families impacted by all the job losses take some small comfort in seeing the full story of globalization told: That work meant something to them. I hope policy makers and business leaders reading it are inspired to compete in the global economy based on more than just the quick-hit bottom line.

What do you think of JBIII and his company?  Is his example feasible for all of American industry? Or is his populist and Quixotic quest dependent upon his unique personality and circumstances? Is globalization really the villain? Or is it the American shareholder system, as Ethan Rouen suggests in his review in Fortune? Could American industry somehow turn globalization to its advantage?

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

Readalikes: If you enjoyed April's selection...

If you enjoyed The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, then you might also like these books and films suggested by our discussion group members:

• Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux by John Neihardt
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown
• The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick
• Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne
• The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity by Jill Lepore
• 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History winner Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People by Elizabeth A. Fenn
• The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America by Timothy Egan
• Lonesome Dove both the novel by Larry McMurtry and the television miniseries
• the film Dances With Wolves starring Kevin Costner
• the film Red River starring John Wayne

April Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin illustrates the idea that, as the authors state in their Notes and Bibliography, " . . . history is fable agreed on." We think we know a story. In the old Westerns, the good guys defeated the bad guys, cowboys defeated the Indians. Then, in the last few decades, historians reconsidered the story, the bad guys defeated the good guys, cowboys defeated the Indians. And then a book like this complicates the story. Who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys? Who defeated whom? And for what purpose? Did their ends justify their means?

Drury and Clavin tell the story of Red Cloud, the Oglala Sioux warrior who was the only warrior in the 300-year-long war between Euro-Americans and Native Americans to defeat the United States government and force it to sue for peace on his terms--even though the U. S. eventually won the war. It is often said that the victor gets to tell the story, so that is at least part of the reason Red Cloud's had been largely forgotten. Drury and Clavin draw upon Red Cloud's own autobiography, along with other primary documents, to bring it back to common knowledge. But it is also a complicated story full of violence on all sides, and lies and trickery, especially on the part of the United States government. Red Cloud emerges as a brutal warrior and shrewd political strategist fighting to preserve the Plains Indians' way of life. Drury and Clavin point out that the relentless advance of white settlement for land, buffalo hides, and gold along the pioneer trails and rail lines would turn out to be more effective than any act of war on the part of the United States government at defeating the Indians, a fact that Red Cloud admitted on his first visit to Washington in 1870. As he told Secretary of the Interior Joseph P. Cox, "Now we are melting like snow on the hillside, while you are growing like spring grass." When asked why the United States fought Red Cloud, General Bisbee replied, "My only answer could be we did it for Civilization."

What do you think? What is your interpretation of Bisbee's answer? Do you think this is what most of the United States' soldiers and citizens believed? What kind of place would the United States be now if we had learned to accept different interpretations of the word "civilized"? And what do you think of Red Cloud? How did his childhood determine the man and leader he grew up to be? Do you feel Drury and Clavin's portrayal of Red Cloud and his cause was fair and impartial? Did you find that you were sympathetic to Red Cloud and the Sioux, or was it difficult for you to reconcile the brutality of the Indian battle ethic with the justness of their cause? And finally, although Drury and Clavin drew upon primary sources to write this book, we see how various participants in the events depicted strove to portray their involvement in the best possible light while blaming and even demonizing others. Given that human error and emotion play a large part in how we recall and record events, how accurate do you feel our understanding of any historical event can be?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, April 7, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, April 23, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.