February Not Fiction Book Discussions

In our last book, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth and the Epic Story of the Map that Gave America Its Name, we read about the Waldseemüller map, which author Toby Lester says is "the backdrop for something new: a modern epic of Western discovery and manifest destiny in which European explorers, like Odysseus and Alexander and Aeneas before them, wander the known world, roam the high seas, and arrive at unknown shores." In this month's book, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles, we will read about America's own age of discovery and world view of Manifest Destiny as embodied by Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Vanderbilt was born to a humble farming and trading family during George Washington's presidency, when America was still in its infancy, and he died in 1877 as one of the richest men in the nation's history, having through his genius and force of will helped to create the world we live in today. As Stiles notes, Vanderbilt "was an early example of that most modern of characters: the economic man." He helped to create modern capitalism and the corporation through his participation in a revolution in transportation. He rose from ferryman on a wooden ship, to steamboat and transoceanic steamship entrepreneur, to the ruler of a transcontinental railroad empire. This transportation revolution ultimately changed the very landscape of America as people headed West for the Gold Rush. If Vanderbilt's assets had been sold on the day of his death, it would have taken $1 out of every $20 in circulation, including cash and bank deposits--an almost unimaginable wealth.

Stiles has written the first full, authoritative biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt. He argues that previous historical and biographical writing about Vanderbilt was based on dubious testimony given at the trial over his will. Stiles says, "I try to write the kind of book I like to read. My ideal work of nonfiction follows a classic formula: It both informs and entertains. As a historian, I try to draw out the larger meanings. I am drawn to topics that speak to the creation of modern America, that highlight the major themes of the nation's history. I also hope to say something new about them. As a writer, I look for interesting characters, dramatic lives, complicated human relationships. I try to give the reader a reason to turn the page--every page. In short, I like big questions and good stories. In the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt . . . I found a larger-than-life subject badly in need of a new biography. . . . The questions that drove me in writing The First Tycoon go to the heart of American culture, politics, and identity. How have the people of the United States grappled with the collision between opportunity, liberty, and equality? . . . Too often, books that address business figures tend to moralize on one side or the other. Depending on which polemic you pick up, you will read that Vanderbilt was either a merciless, manipulative robber baron or a heroic captain of industry. By contrast, I hope to provide an honest assessment that examines him in the full context of his times. That context was so different from our own that the results are sometimes surprising. When the robber-baron metaphor was invented (specifically for Vanderbilt), it was part of a political framework that simply makes no sense in the twenty-first century. Readers can (and should) draw their own conclusions about whether Vanderbilt was admirable or the opposite, but I hope they will agree, after reading my book, that he was truly significant" (http://www.tjstiles.com/). Critics agree that The First Tycoon is a significant portrait of both Vanderbilt and our culture: it won both the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and it was selected as one of the best books of the year by many book reviews.

In our discussions, we will consider how Cornelius Vanderbilt helped to create our understanding of our world and our place in it today, especially the complicated roles of business and government in our culture and the essentially urban and suburban landscape we live in.

We hope you will join us: Tuesday, February 1, at 6:00 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, February 17, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; or here on the blog.

Visit Stiles' website at http://www.tjstiles.com/ to read his take on previous biographies of Cornelius Vanderbilt, lists of discoveries first published in The First Tycoon and myths debunked by it, and the Vanderblog, a companion blog to the book.

January Not Fiction Book Discussions

We begin our discussions for 2011 with The Fourth Part of the World: The Race for the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map that Gave America Its Name by Toby Lester. In 2003, the Library of Congress bought the only surviving copy of the Waldseemüller world map of 1507, the map that gave America its name, for the unprecedented sum of $10 million. This thrilling historical adventure story provides a microhistory of the making of the map itself and a macrohistory of the Age of Discovery and the evolution of our own contemporary world view.

Maps reflect the world view of the people who create them, and they also serve to shape the world view of those who later use them. Lester says the Waldseemüller map is "the backdrop for something new: a modern epic of Western discovery and manifest destiny in which European explorers, like Odysseus and Alexander and Aeneas before them, wander the known world, roam the high seas, and arrive at unknown shores." However, he says, the map also represents an ancient tradition in which "geography is philosophy--and in which the appearance on a map of the fourth part of the world is a humbling reminder of all that still remains unknown. What the map ultimately charts, in other words, is nothing less than the contours of the human experience itself: the never-ending attempt to imagine a place for ourselves in the world." What can we understand about ourselves as Westerners, as Americans, from learning about this revolutionary map? Can we see its influence in our history? How do we view our world and our place in it today? Is this view changing?

If you are reading the hardcover edition of the book, you can find a select chronology of people, events, and maps in The Fourth Part of the World at the author's website, http://www.tobylester.com/. (The paperback edition includes these references.) You can also view an interactive version of the Waldseemüller map, listen to Lester discuss his book and the images in it, and find a link to a podcast of Lester talking about how America got its name on Public Radio International's This American Life.

According to Chris Anderson, editor in chief of WIRED, "Toby Lester has written a page-turning story of the creation of what amounts to a sixteenth-century Google Earth, a revolutionary way to see the world. It inspired generations of explorers then and will inspire readers now." We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, January 4 at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, January 20 at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; or here on the blog.

Not Fiction Book Discussions List for 2011

We are already looking forward to next year's Not Fiction Book Discussions! We will begin with The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map that Gave America It's Name by Toby Lester, which will set the theme for the 2011 discussions: our understanding of our world, the uses we make of it, our wanderings across it, our settlements on it, our confrontations with the elements and the animals that inhabit it, and our confrontations with each other. You can find the other titles for 2011 on the right side of this page.

And don't forget December's discussions of My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor: Tuesday, December 7, at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library and Thursday, December 16, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library.

Happy reading and happy holidays!

December Not Fiction Book Discussions

We end our discussions for 2010 with My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor, who was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2008.

On December 10, 1996, Taylor, a 37-year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist, experienced a massive stroke in the logical left hemisphere of her brain that, while she watched and understood what was happening, shut down over the course of four hours, leaving her unable to walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. However, she found herself immersed in the boundless, empathic, euphoric experience of her right brain. After eight years of recovery, Taylor regained her left-brain abilities, but she also learned that she could maintain access to her right-brain abilities.

In this passionate and personal memoir, Taylor explains clearly and scientifically, from the point of view of a neuroanatomist, what it felt like to experience the loss of her left-brain abilities and then recover them, as well as why an immersion in the world of the right brain feels as it does. She also provides a recovery guide for people who have experienced brain injury and their caregivers, including a chapter on What I Needed the Most and a list of Recommendations for Recovery. And for all readers, she offers ways we might "step to the right" to access the sense of well-being provided by right-brain awareness.

Taylor, in her particular kind of stroke and recovery, is truly what Malcolm Gladwell calls an outlier, a person who has succeeded beyond what others have achieved. Regarding her extraordinary experience, she says,

"I have learned so much from this experience with stroke that I actually feel fortunate to have taken this journey. Thanks to this trauma, I have had the chance to witness first-hand a few things about my brain that otherwise I would never have imagined to be true. For these simple insights, I will always be grateful--not just for myself but for the hope these possibilities may bring to how we, as a people, choose to view and nurture our brains and consequently
behave on this planet."

She also offers inspiration for all of us that we might achieve true well-being and happiness similar to hers, confirming Gladwell's thesis that success is a matter of practice and opportunity:

"I believe [Einstein] got it right when he said, 'I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.' I learned the hard way that my
ability to be in the world is completely dependent on the integrity of my neurocircuitry. Cell by beautiful cell, circuit by neurocircuit, the consciousness I experience with my brain is the collective awareness established by those marvelous little entities as they weave together the web I call my mind. Thanks to their neural plasticity, their ability to shift and change their connections with other cells, you and I walk the earth with the ability to be flexible in our thinking, adaptable to our environment, and capable of choosing who and how we want to be in the world. Fortunately, how we choose to be today is not predetermined by how we were yesterday."

You can see Taylor speak about her stroke and recovery in a video of her powerful speech (over 1 million views on YouTube!) at a 2008 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference:

We hope you will join our conversation: Tuesday, December 7, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, December 16, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; or here on the blog.

November Not Fiction Book Discussions

With November's book, The Florist's Daughter: A Memoir by Patricia Hampl, we move from a wide-angle cultural consideration of extraordinary success to an intimate portrait of Hampl's parents and an illumination of her assertion that "[n]othing is harder to grasp than a relentlessly modest life."

As Hampl's memoir opens, she is holding her dying mother's hand and at the same time writing her obituary. From this endpoint, Hampl circles back through her childhood in the "blameless middle" of America, St. Paul, Minnesota. She describes her "eternal daughterdom" to her Czech-American father, a florist for the St. Paul elite, and to her Irish-American mother, a library file clerk who loved to tell a tale, revealing her own conflict with the role of daughter and her development as a writer. Hampl asks, "These apparently ordinary people in our ordinary town, living faultlessly ordinary lives, and believing themselves to be ordinary, why do I persist in thinking--knowing--they weren't ordinary at all?" Her honest, tender picture offers an exquisite answer.

We hope you will join the conversation about this "memoir for memoirists to admire" (Kirkus): Tuesday, November 9, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, November 18, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; or here on the blog.

October Not Fiction Book Discussions

Our book for the October discussions, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, (also available as a downloadable book) provides an interesting comparison to last month's book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins. When we consider how powerful the combination of the right cultural moment, inherited cultural legacies, and the dedicated efforts of individuals was to create greater political and economic equality for American women in the 1960s, we naturally question whether this success might be possible for women elsewhere in the world.

In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell argues, "Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play--and by "we" I mean society--in determining who makes it and who doesn't." In Half the Sky, Kristof and WuDunn issue a passionate call to readers to acknowledge that "in this century, the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world" and to learn what they can do to help. They document the enormity of the problems facing women living in poverty and oppression in Africa and Asia, many of them the result of the beliefs their cultures hold about women, focusing on sex trafficking and forced prostitution, gender-based violence such as honor killings and mass rape, and maternal mortality. They honestly explore the complexities of solving these problems. Yet they ask readers to keep in mind that "Women aren't the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity." With stories of extraordinary people--both the women living in poverty and oppression and those who would like to help them--they illustrate the great potential in empowering women politically and economically.

The title of the book comes from a Chinese proverb: "Women hold up half the sky." Kristof and WuDunn, like Gladwell, believe that we must hold up women so that they can fully inhabit this role. They say, "let us be clear about this up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women's power as economic catalysts." In a final chapter they outline what readers can do--right now--to improve the lives of women, and they offer an appendix of organizations through which we can become involved in supporting women. So while this is a difficult book to read, it is also meant to be a practical and an inspiring one. In our discussions, we will consider how hopeful we feel about the initiatives Kristof and WuDunn describe and share stories of the ways we have become--or would like to become--involved.

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

September Not Fiction Book Discussions

We continue our consideration of the theme of outliers, those people whose achievements exceed those of their peers, with When Everything Changed:The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins.

Collins is herself an outlier--she was the first woman to hold the position of editorial page editor for the New York Times from 2001-2007. In the clear, humorous style with which she writes her current column for the Times' op-ed page, Collins describes the radical change in the lives of American women between 1960, when female doctors, lawyers, and engineers were rare and women needed their fathers' or husbands' permission to sign a lease or obtain credit, and Hillary Clinton's historic 2008 presidential campaign.

Using both statistics and oral history, Collins vividly depicts a rapidly changing world that young women today would not recognize. Malcolm Gladwell argues in Outliers: The Story of Success that outliers "are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine." In our discussions, we will talk about what these advantages and opportunities were for American women, and what was fortuitous about the particular cultural moment of the 1960s.

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

And take a look at our book for October, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (also available as a downloadable audio book), an inspiring companion read to When Everything Changed. Kristof and WuDunn explore how we can help women in African and Asia rise out of poverty and oppression to make remarkable contributions to their communities.