Read- and watch-alikes: If you enjoyed November's selection . . .

If you enjoyed reading about the political-media complex in our nation's capital in This Town by Mark Leibovich, then you might also like these books and television shows about politics and the fourth estate suggested by our discussion group members: All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren, which won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, and the 1949 and 2006 film adaptations, about the rise of Louisiana governor Willie Stark told from the point of view of Jack Burden, a political reporter who becomes his right-hand man; The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse, a non-fiction book about pack journalism during the 1972 United States Presidential campaign; and House of Cards, a contemporary Netflix television series about a ruthless politician who manipulates a young, equally conniving reporter to further his own political agenda and rise to power.

November Not Fiction Book Discussions

As we approach election day, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral--Plus Plenty of Valet Parking!--in America's Gilded Capital by Mark Leibovich could demoralize you about the state of our nation's capital and the people who congregate there to run our government and report on those running our government. Or it could make you mad enough to go out and vote for change in your local and national referendums and races.

Leibovich is chief national correspondent for the New York Times Magazine, based in Washington, D.C., and has been a national political correspondent in the paper's Washington bureau and a writer for the Washington Post and the San Jose Mercury News. In This Town, he covers four years in the life of the political-media complex in Washington, D.C., from 2008 to 2012, "a time of alleged correction." Called "a modern-day Balzac" by Richard McGregor of the Financial Times, Leibovich shows us through cynically humorous vignettes of shameless networking at an endless cycle of media events, parties, and funerals how Washington has become "a crucible of easy wealth, fame, forgiveness, and next acts. Punditry has replaced reporting as journalism''s highest calling, accompanied by a mad dash of 'self-branding,' to borrow a term that had now fully infested the city . . . the most compelling part of the Washington story, whether now or before: it is a spinning stew of human need." Leibovich readily admits that he is a part of This Town, but he says he pleads optimism for Washington and the nation, maybe not at this particular political and cultural moment, but as an ideal. In the Afterward to the paperback edition, Leibovich describes the reaction to his portrayal of This Town both inside and outside Washington. While most Washington insiders were more interested in finding out whether they were mentioned in the book than in denying or defending the culture Leibovich describes, outside of Washington, "[a]ctual readers of the book got the point that the systemic dysfunction of Washington has in fact sustained a vast, decadent, and self-obsessed political class. . . . 'What can be done?' was the single most common question I received outside Washington." Leibovich points out that his book is a work of journalism, which "requires a certain amount of dispassion and cynicism," so he does not offer solutions. But he observes that "[c]ynicism is idealism turned inside out. It stems from an expectation unrealized and a promise perverted. That is so much of Washington today in a nutshell. I want the capital to do better. It should do better. The country deserves better."

What do you think? Is This Town an accurate portrayal of Washington today? If so, is the political-media complex giving the American public what it wants and deserves, or has it underestimated its civic intelligence and desire for real political engagement? Do you agree with George Packer that the recent shift away from a cohesive web of public and private institutions that offered a sense of national identity and security and towards a loose association of organized money and the cult of celebrity represents a true cultural change more than just a cycle in the life of the nation? If so, what can be done?

We hope you will join the discussions: Tuesday, November 4, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, November 20, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you liked The Good Soldiers and Thank You for Your Service by David Finkel, then you might also enjoy these books and films recommended by our discussion members: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, a collection of semi-autobiographical and interrelated short stories inspired by O'Brien's experiences in the Vietnam War; Jarhead, both the book by Anthony Swofford and the film written by William Broyles, Jr. and directed by Sam Mendes, based on Swofford's experiences as a Marine during Operation Desert Storm; The Hurt Locker, a film written by Mark Boal and produced and directed by Kathryn Bigelow about an Explosive Ordinance Disposal team during the Iraq War; Generation Kill, both the book by Evan Wright and the HBO miniseries, about the 23 Marines of the First Recon Battalion, the first generation dispatched into open-ed combat since Vietnam; and Restrepo, a documentary directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington that follows the 2nd Platoon of Battle Company on a 15-month deployment in the Korangal Valley of northeast Afghanistan.

October Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Good Soldiers by David Finkel is the College of Charleston's 2014-2015 The College Reads! book selection. Between January 2007 and June 2008, Finkel spent eight months with the United States Army soldiers of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion in Iraq as they took part in the campaign know as "the surge." What is the true story of the surge? And was it really a success? These are the questions Finkel's unflinching third-person narrative poses to its readers as it follows Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich and the men and women in his charge through the violence, tension, and loss of armed conflict and its aftermath. Finkel writes, "my intent was to document their corner of the war, without agenda. This book, then, is that corner, unshaded." Finkel will speak on the College of Charleston's campus on Tuesday, October 14, 2014. There will be a public lecture at 7:00pm in Sottile Theatre. For more information, visit The College Reads! website. We hope you will take advantage of this wonderful opportunity to hear him speak about his work.

The Not Fiction Book Discussion read The Good Soldiers in 2010, and this month we are reading Thank You for Your Service, in which Finkel follows many of the men we met in The Good Soldiers home as they attempt to reintegrate into their families and into American society while struggling with Traumatic Brain Injury, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, survivor's guilt, and a profound sense of loneliness.  In this work, Finkel asks two essential questions: When we ask young men and women to go to war, what are we asking of them? And when they return, what are we thanking them for? Kirkus Reviews calls Thank You for Your Service "one of the most morally responsible works of journalism to emerge from the post-9/11 era." We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, October 7, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, October 16, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you liked Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward, then you might also like these titles suggested by Ward's publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing: Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones and Where the Line Bleeds; Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying; Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother; Maya Angelou, Mom & Me & Mom and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Mitchell S. Jackson, The Residue Years; John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers; David Berg, Run, Brother, Run; Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World; Margaret Wrinkle, Wash; Toni Morrison, Home; Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi; Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie; Mary Williams, The Lost Daughter.

And our discussion group members recommend the book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson and the film: Beasts of the Southern Wild directed by Benh Zeitlin and adapted by Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar from Alibar's one-act play Juicy and Delicious.

September Not Fiction Book Discussions

Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward explores the legacy of systemic racism in American culture. In just four years, Ward lost five young men among her family and friends to seemingly random and unrelated causes: her brother Joshua to a car accident, her friend Ronald to suicide, her cousin C. J. to another car accident, her friend Demond to murder, and her friend Roger to a drug overdose. In trying to come to terms with these great losses, Ward discovers a unifying condition--all were poor, Black, and male in the South. In writing her memoir, she says, "My hope is that . . . I'll understand a bit better why this epidemic happened, about how the history of racism and economic inequality and lapsed public and personal responsibility festered and turned sour and spread here."

The essence of what she comes to understand is society's devaluation of Blacks, and, most insidious of all, Blacks' devaluation of themselves: "My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn't trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us we were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within."

An interviewer for Vogue asked Ward how she would like to see her memoir received, and she replied, “Ideally, I’d like readers to see the young men and women I write about as human beings: complicated and alive and unique. And I hope that the experience of seeing my characters as real, of sympathizing with them, would change the reader so that the next time another young black man or woman is killed, someone will be held accountable. Perhaps, in addition to the person who commits the crime, even the culture that engenders the phenomena as well? But that’s the optimist in me. The pessimist simply wants readers to find something that speaks to them, that makes them feel, that takes them outside of their experience and makes them live another reality.” Ward's loving yet honest descriptions of her family, friends, and community revalue them, revealing the complex interworkings of societal and individual responsibility. We come to know these people, and as we do, their stories embody the statistics about race and poverty in a way we can no longer avoid feeling connected to in a deeply personal way. As author Robert Olen Butler says, "The tears we weep with Jesmyn Ward are for all of us, are about all of us."

How do Ward's complex narrative structure, setting, and characterization affect your feelings about the larger cultural and political issues she illustrates? How does Men We Reaped help you understand recent stories about race and violence in the news? We will consider these questions and more.

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

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

If you liked Son of a Gun: A Memoir by Justin St. Germain, then you might also enjoy these books suggested by the author as inspirational to his writing process and by our discussion group members as informative or just plain good.

An interviewer for Barnes and Noble notes that “The New York Times Book Review . . . compared your memoir to The Tender Bar by J.R, Moehringer and Another Bull—Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn. Were these books touchstones for you? What books helped you chart a path to writing a memoir?” St. Germain said, “They were. I have well-thumbed copies of both. I like and admire The Tender Bar — I can't drive by Camelback Mountain in Phoenix without thinking of a particularly great passage from it, which I won't spoil for those who haven't read it — but Nick Flynn's book was probably more of a touchstone, because I first read it before I'd set out to write a memoir, and it helped me understand the possibilities of the form. There were so many others: I must have read a hundred memoirs while I was writing mine. Some memoirs or memoir-ish books that come to mind as particularly influential: Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and In Pharoah's Army, Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, all of Didion's nonfiction, Richard Wright's Black Boy, Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller, John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers, and, for obvious reasons, James Ellroy's memoir of his mother's murder, My Dark Places. But maybe the biggest single influence was In Cold Blood, a book you have to reckon with somehow if you're going to write about murder in America.”

Our readers suggested Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture by Michael A. Bellesiles and Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III.

And we suggest the September title, Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward, another memoir of young men lost to violence and the grief of the loved ones they leave behind, because of an interesting connection between the two books and authors. In a Publishers Weekly feature article in which PW’s top 10 authors picked their favorite books of 2013, Jesmyn Ward chose Son of a Gun. She said, “I remember that time [just after 9/11] clearly: the whole nation was grieving. I had recently lost my brother, so I spent those days doubly reeling, as did Justin. I know this because Justin and I have talked about our respective experiences. We are bonded in our grief—and in our need to understand it more clearly through our writing. We are both novelists at heart, but we found ourselves compelled to tell these stories.”