May Not Fiction Book Discussions

Henry Ford's nostalgic vision of small American towns populated by people who work at local factories where they earn enough money to purchase the products they create and enough leisure time to enjoy a pastoral life has given way to the sad reality of contemporary American life depicted in Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding. Yet it is a reality we as a nation are either unaware of or unwilling to face.

Journalist and native Midwesterner Reding spent four years in the small town of Oelwein, Ohio, learning how the illegal production of methamphetamine has become one of the town's principal businesses. He notes that "The idea that a drug could take root in Oelwein . . . was . . . counterintuitive, challenging notions central to the American sense of identity." With compelling and compassionate reporting, Reding shows the devastating effects of meth production, distribution, and consumption on individuals and the community. He makes a strong argument for the case that the meth epidemic is the direct result of the industrial capitalism Henry Ford helped to create. The consolidation of the agricultural industry, the movement offshore of manufacturing, the out-migration of people from small towns, the growth of the powerful pharmaceutical lobby--all are part of the story of meth, and "the real story is as much about the death of a way of life as it is about the birth of a drug. If ever there was a chance to see the place of the small American town in the era of the global economy, the meth epidemic is it." Just like Henry Ford, we as a culture still harbor a nostalgic world view of American pastoralism and the Puritan work ethic, even as our world is rapidly changing.

While Methland is sobering, it is also hopeful. Reding introduces his readers to the mayor, Larry Murphy; the doctor, Clay Hallberg; and the county prosecutor, Nathan Lein, who fight to save their town--with surprising success. Reding visited the town in 2009, shortly after Methland's publication, to address a large crowd of Oelwein's citizens at the public library. Many of them were uphappy with the way Reding portrayed their town, refusing to believe the meth problem in Oelwein was as bad as he had made it out to be. Reding ends his book with a cautionary question that stands in response: " . . . what Oelwein's very exceptionalism makes clear is how badly rural America continues to hurt, and that we seem to have no plan for reversing--or even slowing the fundamental changes that have gripped small-town life for nearly four decades. How long can we ask Murphy, Clay, and Nathan to fight if we insist on overlooking both their difficulties and their triumphs?"

We hope you will join our discussion of this powerful work of eye-opening journalism, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism: Tuesday, May 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, May 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

April Not Fiction Book Discussions

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin explores what happens when one person or society attempts to impose its world view on another society. In 1927, automobile magnate Henry Ford bought 2.5 million acres in the Brazilian Amazon with the intention to grow rubber trees to supply his factories with latex and to establish a settlement to manage the plantation, called Fordlandia, that would replicate the small-town American culture his automobiles were effectively destroying in the United States. Grandin suggests that Fordlandia was "quintessentially American" because "frustrated idealism was built into its conception" (15). He notes that "Ford's frustrations with domestic politics and culture were legion: war, unions, Wall Street, energy monopolies, Jews, modern dance, cow's milk, the Roosevelts, cigarettes, alcohol, and creeping government intervention. Yet churning beheath all these annoyances was the fact that the force of industrial capitalism he helped unleash was undermining the world he hoped to restore" (16). Ford hoped to bring a nostalgic version of small-town American life to the Amazon, including the streets and houses, the movie theaters and ice cream parlors, and, of course, the values, especially the value placed on working in order to purchase goods.

Ford's belief in the value of paying workers high wages so that they could, in turn, become consumers of the products they created came to be known as "Fordism," and by the 1920s, "Fordism" and "Americanism" became interchangeable terms. Grandin notes that the Washington Post cynically but presciently defined the term in 1922 as "Ford efforts conceived in disregard or ignorance of Ford limitations" (73n). Grandin animates what Time calls a "quintessentially American fable" with colorful characters and well-paced misadventures, ultimately offering readers a comparison between the ruins of Fordlandia in the heart of the Amazonian jungle and the ruins of Iron Mountain and Detroit in the heart of the American Midwest to highlight the complexities of industrialism, consumerism, environmentalism, and globalism we still face today.

Fordlandia was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was chosen by multiple media sources for their "best of" lists in 2009. We hope you will join our conversation: Tuesday, April 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, April 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

March Not Fiction Book Discussions

In The First Tycoon, T.J. Stiles notes that Cornelius Vanderbilt's great career as head of steamship and railroad corporations was an "act of the imagination": "In this age of the corporation's infancy, [Vanderbilt and his] conspiritors created a world of the mind, a world that would last into the twenty-first century. At a time when even many businessmen could not see beyond the physical, the tangible, they embraced abstractions never known before in daily life. They saw that a group of men sitting around a table could conjure 'an artificial being, invisible, intangible,' that could outlive them all. They saw how stocks could be driven up or dropped in value, how they could be played like a flute to command more capital than the incorporators could muster on their own. They saw that everything in the economy could be further abstracted into a substanceless something that might be bought or sold, that a banknote or promissory note or the right to buy a share of stock at a certain price could all be traded at prices that varied from day to day" (168-69). The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis explores a similar act of the imagination, one that predicted and contributed to the economic crisis of 2008. In this humorous, character-driven narrative, Lewis introduces readers to the few farsighted if ethically questionable financial professionals who saw that the subprime mortgage industry, securities based on repackaged home loans, was poised to fall, and made their fortune betting, against the market, that the housing bubble would burst.


Cornelius Vanderbilt's comments about the younger generation of stock market speculators active during the late 1800s seem also to apply to 2008's subprime mortgage crisis, to both those homebuyers who bought houses beyond their means on credit, and to those financial professionals who could not see that the speculation based on the loans would surely aggravate the coming crisis: "I'll tell you what's the matter--people undertake to do about four times as much business as they can legitimately undertake. . . . There are a great many worthless railroads started in this country without any means to carry them through. Respectable banking houses in New York, so called, make themselves agents for sale of the bonds of the railroads in question and give a kind of moral guarantee of their genuineness. The bonds soon reach Europe and the markets of their commercial centres, from the character of the endorsers, are soon flooded with them. . . . When I have some money I buy railroad stock or something else, but I don't buy on credit. I pay for what I get. People who live too much on credit generally get brought up with a round turn in the long run. The Wall street averages ruin many a man there, and is like faro" (Stiles 536-37). In The Big Short, Lewis reveals how comfortable we are today with financial abstraction as well as person, corporate, and national debt. He notes that one of the most important consequences of turning Wall Street partnerships, based on the model of real value products and responsibility to a customer base, into public corporations, in which the stock holders bear the risk, is that "[it] turned them into objects of speculation. It was no longer the social and economic relevance of a bank that rendered it too big to fail, but the number of side bets that had been made upon it" (263).


Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post says, "If you read only one book about the cause of the recent financial crisis, let it be . . . Michael Lewis' The Big Short . . . [which] manages to give us the truest picture yet of what went wrong on Wall Street--and why." We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, March 1, at 7:00 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, March 17, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; or here on the blog.

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.