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.