January Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese by Michael Paterniti is a meditation on the act of storytelling in both content and form.

Paterniti set out to tell the idyllic tale of an artisanal cheese from Spain, Páramo de Guzmán, "made with love" from an old family recipe. But what started out as a simple foodie travelogue became a memoir of Paterniti's decade-long quixotic search for Truth as he found himself enamored with its maker, Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, and entangled in a blood feud between two old friends, even moving his young family to Spain and missing deadlines with his publisher. The Telling Room could be said to be a book about itself and how it was in danger of not being written. In an interview with his editor, Andy Ward, at longform.org, Paterniti explained the paralyzing significance that this cheese and its maker took on for him:

"The cheese symbolized the past, and the past's place in the present. And more. The deeper I fell into Ambrosio's story, the more I found myself in emotional and meta tangles. There was a betrayal, and a murder plot. Would Ambrosio kill his betrayer? Suddenly, the cheese stood in for love, but also for hate. It was mystical, and then became soul-less. It was about the promise of fame and riches, and then bankruptcy. It seemed to carry so much metaphoric weight it couldn't stand up under its own legend. . . . I went looking for an ideal that I thought existed, as if I were searching for the Fountain of Youth or something. . . . But then maybe I went looking for people a little like me, too, those who become lost, and then found again, in the most unexpected ways." 

While Paterniti could have saved himself a lot of grief if he had maintained a professional journalistic distance from his subject, the resulting book would have been very different. How would a more objective book about Ambrosio be different from the one Paterniti actually wrote? Have you ever started something dispassionately, perhaps as a job, that ultimately became very personal--and very complicated? Where you became part of the story?

The Telling Room mirrors in form Paterniti's experience of being "in emotional and meta tangles," lost and then found, through the inclusion of many footnotes, including one that reads, "I would soon find out that digression was a national pastime in Castile, that to get to the crux of any matter you had to listen for hours, weeks, months, years." How does the book recreate Paterniti's time in Ambrosio's telling room? And how does it embody Ambrosio's  concept of the "disability of memory," which he defines by saying "Everything is rushing forward, so I must go back"? What is the relationship between storytelling and memory?

Mike Paterniti, his wife, Sara Corbett, and Susan Conley, all writers, created a nonprofit in 2004 in Portland, Maine, called The Telling Room "dedicated to the idea that children and young adults are natural storytellers." Visit their website, www.tellingroom.org, to learn more about their programs and publications.

And join our discussion: Tuesday, January 6, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, January 22, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

Not Fiction Book Discussion Titles for 2015

As we look forward to a new year of nonfiction reading, it is helpful to remember Mark Twain's explanation for why "true" stories can be so compelling: "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." In 2015, we will read strange and wonderful stories about heroes and underdogs, adventures and misadventures, tales and their tellers. What is our relationship to the stories we are drawn to listen to and believe and to the stories we enact and tell? And what is our relationship to the shared act of listening and telling itself?

We hope you will join us--see the dates and titles posted on the right side of this page.

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

If you enjoyed The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America from Key West to the Arctic Ocean by Philip Caputo, then you might also like these great classic road books suggested by our discussion group members: Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck; On the Road by Jack Kerouac; and Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon.

In a conversation between Caputo and Leat Heat-Moon about travel and the genre of the road book published in the New York Times (July 11, 2013), Caputo said, "The road book is a peculiarly American genre. I don’t know of any Italian road books or British road books or French road books or Spanish road books. Maybe “Don Quixote” would qualify as a Spanish road book. Why do you think that is?" Least Heat-Moon replied, "My theory is it comes from the historic fact we are all from the other side of the planet. I know there are American Indian tribes that deny that, but I think archaeology and anthropology show that all of the so-called Native American tribes did indeed come from the Eastern Hemisphere. We’re all the descendants of travelers. And with the exception of people of African descent, virtually all of our ancestors came here wanting to find better territory. I think it’s genetic memory functioning — when life gets this way or that way, and we’re not really happy with it, what do we do? Put a kit bag over one shoulder and head out for the road because that’s where solutions might lie. Somewhere out there is an answer to why a life is as it is."

December Not Fiction Book Discussions

We began our virtual road trip through American history and culture this year with The Unwinding by George Packer, a montage of biographical sketches and cultural memes that Packer uses to describe the "unwinding" over the last three decades of the America most of us take for granted, "when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way." We will end our journey with The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean by Philip Caputo,  in which Caputo recounts his epic journey across the United States, with his wife, two dogs, and an Airstream trailer in tow, asking Americans "What holds us together?"

Over the years of his journalism career, Caputo has visited Barter Island off the coast of Alaska and has lived in Key West, Florida, and he says, "My thinking ran something like this: The Inupiat schoolkids here [in Alaska] pledge allegiance to the same flag as the children and grandchildren of Cuban immigrants on Key West, six thousand miles away. Native Americans and Cuban Americans on two islands as far apart as New York is from Moscow, yet in the same country. How remarkable. I felt then a heightened awareness of America's vastness and diversity. And a renewed appreciation for its cohesiveness. In an itinerant life, I'd traveled through more than fifty foreign countries. A lot of them, riven by centuries-old hatreds, all too often delaminated into ghastly ethnic and sectarian wars . . . .What a marvel that the huge United States, peopled by every race on Earth, remained united. What held it together?" In the course of his journey across America, Caputo sees evidence of the same unwindings that Packer describes. Yet at the end of it, he is more optimistic about our future than Packer seems to be, finding hope in what he calls our "dynamic disequilibrium," the tension of conflict between community and individualism.

What do you think? After our reading and discussion this year, what do you think unites us as a nation and a culture? What do you think threatens to tear us apart? In his Prologue, Packer suggests that unwindings of political, social, and cultural structures in our country are nothing new, that "Each decline brought renewal, each implosion released energy, out of each unwinding came a new cohesion." Yet in an interview with NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, Packer says of this particular devolution, "What I see happening is not just cyclical, though, it feels like a real cultural shift where the value of the community, of what makes this a coherent society, has really been submerged." Do you agree with Packer that we have undergone an irreversible shift away from community? Or does community ultimately hold us together in spite of other changes in our legislative and cultural makeup? What, exactly, is community in a nation as diverse as ours?

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

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.”

August Not Fiction Book Discussions

Son of a Gun: A Memoir by Justin St. Germain takes on large subjects in American culture: gun violence, domestic violence, and the class divide.

St. Germain's mother Debbie was shot to death by her fifth husband, Ray, a former law enforcement officer, while the two were living, out of work and off the grid, in the desert outside of Tombstone, Arizona. Starting with these facts straight from a lurid but all-too-common headline, St. Germain introduces the reader to the independent, competent, complex woman who raised him. Debbie was a former Army paratrooper and small business owner who raised two sons as a single mother. St. Germain says, "She liked horses and men, but's that's not who she was." By telling the story of his life growing up with Debbie, his investigation into her murder, and his own journey through the stages of grief, St. Germain offers a moving tribute to his mother.

In addition to his personal story, St. Germain also tells the story of Tombstone and the mythic gunfight at the OK Corral, deflating the myth and showing how Wyatt Earp's "legacy leads straight to Ray, right down to the mustache and the badge and the belief that a man solves problems with violence." In her New York Times review of the book, Alexandra Fuller says that "St. Germain's bigger story, the one amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation, is about a place awash with guns and paranoia, where men and women toil at grueling, thankless jobs and make misguided alliances in a desperate attempt to defend against loneliness." In an interview with Barnes and Noble, St. Germain said, "I set out to tell my mother's story, but along the way I kept running into the unavoidable reality of how common stories like hers are in contemporary America. Which forced me to consider possible reasons for that . . . : our love affair with guns, the egregious and destabilizing class divide, and our acceptance of violence against women and violence more generally, especially as it relates to our ideas about masculinity. On one hand, I didn't feel qualified to tackle those issues directly, and was afraid that approach might overshadow the particular story I was trying t tell. On the other, I do hope her story sheds light on them, because while the blame falls properly on her murderer, those issues certainly contributed to her death, just like they contribute to so many other acts of violence."

Near the end of the book, St. Germain writes, "There are no clues left, no mystery to solve. I know what happened. I just don't know why." Do you think St. Germain has found closure even without full understanding? Does it surprise you that he owns guns in his present life? What does the book's title say about masculinity in American culture? Is there a solution to gun violence and domestic violence in our country? We will consider these questions and more.

We hope you will join the discussion of this Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award Winner: Tuesday, August 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, August 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you liked The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon, then you might enjoy these books and film suggested by our discussion group members: Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder and Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat, both nonfiction works that portray the precariousness of the immigrant experience; A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, a novel by Anthony Marra that explores the difficult decisions people must make when caught up in war and the unexpected ways in which we are all connected; and Ida, a film directed by Pawel Pawlikowski that portrays two women's search for identity and their efforts to reconcile with the past.

July Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon offers us insight into the experience of being an immigrant in the United States, of remembering one's previous life and finding a place and a voice in a new country, a new language, a new but unsought life. Hemon was born in 1964 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then Yugoslavia. He studied literature in college there, and he was a published writer by the age of 26. He was visiting the United States on a month-long journalist exchange program in 1992 when war erupted in Bosnia. He sought political asylum and did not return to Sarajevo until 1997. His parents and sister barely managed to immigrate to Canada, but his friends and their families suffered through imprisonment, extortion, and torture, while his mentor, a literature professor at the University of Sarajevo, was revealed to be a member of the nationalist Serbian Democratic Party and a collaborator with the war criminal Radovan Karadzic. Meanwhile, in Chicago, Hemon worked variously as a kitchen worker, bicycle messenger, Greenpeace canvasser, bookstore clerk, and ESL instructor. He found community in chess cafes and soccer fields. He learned English by reading literature in English and within two years was published in the United States. His first marriage failed, and he and his second wife endured the devastating loss of their second child to cancer. These essays were originally written as independent pieces, and collectively they present a whole story of Hemon's life--or lives: in socialist Yugoslavia, in wartime Sarajevo, and in Chicago; as a child, a young adult, a married man, and a father. Yet these pieces serve as more than memoir; they are essays in the true sense, an attempt to understand being itself, how we come to be the people we are, how we define ourselves in relationship to others, how we integrate our interior and exterior experience of the world.

In our discussions we explored the motifs Hemon uses to integrate the essays and the evolution of his relationship to himself and to the world. We were deeply moved by his descriptions of life in a socialist country, of war, of the vibrant international immigrant communities of Chicago, of great personal disillusionment and loss. We also noted, however, that he pointedly refuses to give readers a comfortable resolution to the stories of his lives, insisting on the irreducible nature of his own experience. And yet, at the same time, by the very fact that he has written and published these stories, he insists that we try to understand. He says, " . . . the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination . . . is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves."

If you were unable to join our discussions on Tuesday, July 1, at Main Library at 6:30 p.m. and Thursday, July 17, at West Ashley Branch Library at 11:00 a.m., we hope you will do so here on the blog.

Readalikes: If you liked June's selection . . .

If you liked Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee and Walker Evans, then you might enjoy these books suggested by our discussion group members: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book that grew out of Agee and Evans' trip to Alabama and the article that Fortune never published; and Ava's Man and All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg, who grew up poor in northeastern Alabama.

June Not Fiction Book Discussions

Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee and Walker Evans is an interesting historical document for many reasons. Not only is an early example of experimental long-form reporting that was "new" well before New Journalism became a popular style in the 1960s; it also offers a contemporary portrait of the effects of the bust cycle that followed the boom of the 1920s we read about in last month's book, One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson.

Agee and Walker were sent by Fortune to Alabama in 1936 to write an article about tenant farmers for the magazine. Evans was at the time employed by the Farm Security Administration and took special leave to work with Agee. They spent a month in Hale County, living and working closely with the families whose lives they document. The article was never published, possibly because the section for which it was written, Life and Circumstance, was discontinued, or because the article would be financially and politically challenging for Fortune and its readers, although a definite reason has never been determined. The article was found in 2010 among his personal papers from his home in New York, which were donated by the James Agee Trust to the University of Tennessee Special Collections Library. Baffler Magazine, edited by John Summers, published a portion of the article in 2012, and Melville House published it in its entirety in 2013.

In his preface, Adam Haslett describes Cotton Tenants as " . . . a kind of morally indignant anthropology. An ethnography delivered from the pulpit." How would you describe the book? What is its genre? What role do Evans' photographs serve in Cotton Tenants? Is their message and purpose the same as Agee's text--in other words, do they merely illustrate his text? Or do they make an argument in and of themselves? Do you feel that Cotton Tenants is a good document of the tenant farming system? Although Agee and Evans' purpose was to call attention to their readers' blind spots and prejudices about the socioeconomic and cultural reality of the extreme poverty inherent in the tenant farming system, are they guilty of their own blind spots and prejudices, especially by today's standards? What connections, both in subject and in form, do you see between other books we have read in our discussions, such as The Unwinding by George Packer, Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, and Boomerrang by Michael Lewis? We will consider these questions and more . . .

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, June 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, June 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

Readalikes: If you liked May's selection . . .

If you liked Bill Bryson's One Summer: America 1927, then you might also enjoy these books and documentaries suggested by our discussion group members: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerarld; the recent film version of the novel directed by Baz Luhrmann and with Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby; Ken Burns' documentaries Prohibition and Baseball; and the American Experience documentary Lindbergh.

May Not Fiction Book Discussions

The jacket copy for One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson asks, "What happened in America in the summer of 1927? What didn't happen?" Bryson recounts the events of this giddy yet dark season just before everything changed with Black Tuesday in 1929 and The Great Depression of the 1930s. Among the many events of that summer, Charles Lindbergh made the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight and became a cult hero; Babe Ruth set a home run record; the Dempsey-Tunney boxing match drew over 150,000 spectators, Al Jolson filmed The Jazz Singer, the first "talking film"; Al Capone challenged Prohibition and the IRS challenged him; the Mississippi River basin flooded, leaving thousands of people homeless; anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed; the world's four most powerful bankers made a fateful decision that resulted in Black Tuesday and the Great Depression; and President Calvin Coolidge enjoyed a long vacation in South Dakota.

Bryson notes that "It is hard to imagine now, but Americans in the 1920s had grown up in a world in which most of the most important things happened in Europe. Now suddenly America was dominant in nearly every field--in popular culture, finance and banking, military might, invention and technology. The center of gravity for the planet was moving to the other side of the world . . . " Is there anything about the people and events Bryson describes that marks them as especially American? Is there something that links them together politically or culturally? And what comparisons and contrasts can you make between the 1920s and today in America politically, economically, and culturally? We began our discussions this year with George Packer's idea that "There have been unwindings every generation or two . . . Each decline brought renewal, each implosion released energy, out of each unwinding came a new cohesion." Did One Summer leave you optimistic or pessimistic about our future as a nation?

A number of critics have said that One Summer is merely a collection of disparate anecdotes whose purpose is to amuse and that it lacks any real thesis or analysis. Do you agree? And even if this is an accurate assessment of the book, is it necessarily a problem?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, May 6, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, May 15, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you enjoyed Simon Winchester's The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible, then you might also like these books suggested by our discussion group members: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann, The Fourth Part of the World: An Astonishing Epic of Global Discovery, Imperial Ambition, and the Birth of America by Toby Lester, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick, and The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell All present American history from an in-depth and eye-opening point of view you most likely didn't get from your high school history textbook.

April Not Fiction Book Discussions

With The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester, we continue our discussion of what holds us together as a nation and what forces have the potential to tear us apart. In his Preface, Winchester tell the reader that his book is "a meditation on the nature of this American unity, a hymn to the creation of oneness, a parsing of the rich complexities that lie behind the country's so-simple-sounding motto: E pluribus unum" (xvi). Trained as a geologist, he focuses especially on "what might be called the physiology and the physics of the country, the strands of connective tissue that have allowed it to achieve all it has, and yet to keep itself together while doing so. For the ties that bind are most definitely, in their essence, practical and physical things" (xviii). He recounts the work of explorers, inventors, and businessmen who have linked the geographical United States by canal, rail, highway, telegraph, and Internet.

Winchester chooses to emphasize what holds us together in his book, even though the events he describes are part of the somewhat discredited notion of American exceptionalism, the belief that it is America's Manifest Destiny to subdue the North American continent, a belief that continues to influence its foreign policy initiatives today. An interviewer for The Daily Beast asked him, "You became an American citizen two years ago. How did that influence your decision to write this book?" He replied, "I had long thought that America, on this particular part of its history, has been particularly hard on herself. As I was approaching the time to write the book, it was also the time of the financial meltdown, the Bush presidency--a number of things that made America, a large chunk of itself at least--feel disillusioned with itself and its standing in the world. I wanted essentially to say, I threw my lot in with this country because I believed in what it stands for. I wanted to write a book that, in essence, reminded everybody what a great experiment the United States is."

A critic for The New York Times notes that "When people are smitten, they are blind to flaws in their beloved. Winchester is no exception, and this book is less a history than a love letter," while a critic for the Globe and Mail says The Men Who United the States is a "foundation myth" about "the greatness of American enterprise, and the verve and dazzle of that nation's rise to power." What do you think? Should Winchester be more critical of America as a capitalist enterprise? Of the roll of big government in establishing and maintaining America's infrastructure? Should he devote more space to a consideration of the role of women and minorities in the development of the nation?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, April 1, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, April 17, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

Readalikes: If you liked March's selection . . .

If you enjoyed Junius and Albert's Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey by Peter Carlson, then you might these titles suggested by our discussion group members: Cold Mountain: A Novel by Charles Frazier in which a wounded Civil War soldier returns to his home in the mountains of North Carolina and is hunted by the Home Guard as a deserter; This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust, which explores the impact of the enormous death toll of the Civil War; and, of course, The Odyssey, the classic epic poem by Homer.

March Not Fiction Book Discussions

Junius Browne and Albert Richardson reported on the Civil War for the abolitionist New York Tribune. They were captured by Confederates and spent nearly two years in a series of brutal prisons before escaping and walking 300 miles through the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains in the dead of winter to Union lines. Along the way, they were aided by slaves and Union sympathizers and supported by their devoted friendship. In Junius and Albert's Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey, Peter Carlson has crafted a true epic, with nods to both the form and the content of Homer's Odyssey, from their harrowing adventure.

Carlson, himself a journalist who reported for The Washington Post for 22 years, is clearly fond of his two real-life protagonists. In Chapter 23, he comments wryly on the first newspaper articles to appear about Junius Browne's escape from Salisbury prison: "Those two short items in the Tribune provide a valuable lesson about the glamour and the glory of a career as a newspaper reporter: Junius Browne risked his life covering a war. He was captured by the enemy and imprisoned for 20 months. He escaped and trudged 300 miles over snow-covered mountains. And when he finally reached safety, his own newspaper misspelled his name. Several times. On several days. First name and last name" (222). Carlson also dedicates the book "To newspaper reporters, past and present, who went off on adventures and came back with stories." Junius and Albert's Adventures in the Confederacy asks us to consider the important role journalists have played in recording and even making American history. George Packer says of the many political, social, and cultural crises in our history, "The unwinding is nothing new. There have been unwindings every generation or two . . . Each decline brought renewal, each implosion released energy, out of each unwinding came a new cohesion. . . . In the unwinding, everything changes and nothing lasts, except for the voices, American voices . . . " (The Unwinding). Our journalists' voices and the principles of free speech and witnessing the truth have been a through line in the American story.

As James M. McPherson, author of the classic one-volume history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom, notes, "This absorbing story of two Northern war reporters who were captured by the Confederates at Vicksburg demonstrates that for the Civil War, truth is indeed more thrilling than fiction. The accounts of the essential help the escapees received from slaves and Southern white Unionists provide key insights on Southern society." How does Junius and Albert's story illustrate the political, social, and cultural challenges America faced at the time of the Civil War? After reading their story, what do you think held us together as a nation at that desperate moment when it seemed like we might come apart? Does their story make you optimistic about our future as a nation?

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

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

If you enjoyed Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore, then you might like this wide variety of titles suggested by our discussion group members: Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick for an idea of what Jane's life was like during the siege of Boston; Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World by Maya Jasanoff for an understanding of the issues that divided Ben Franklin and his son William, Patriot and Loyalist, during the Revolutionary War; George Washington's Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger for a portrait of other citizens who helped to shape the emerging nation, who might have faded out of the historical record if not for the work of historians studying the lives of ordinary people; The Invention of Wings: A Novel by Sue Monk Kidd about Charleston's Grimke sisters and their enslaved handmaid that brings to life the restrictions on the lives and aspirations of women and enslaved Africans even a century after the Revolution; Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn for an understanding of how issues like gender and literacy affect women's lives today; and Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff for another example of a biography written with very little source material to draw from that builds a portrait of a woman by coloring in her historical and cultural background.

February Not Fiction Book Discussions

In Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore, Lepore reminds us that Benjamin Franklin's autobiography serves as an "allegory about America: the story of a man as the story of a nation." Ben rose from poverty to become an educated, independent man of the world. One could argue that his gender was the essential element in his success. As a man, Ben had access to an education and to work that allowed him to continue his studies and to travel. His sister Jane, as a woman, did not have access to an education. She was expected to become a mother and a homemaker. Although Jane loved to read and learned to write, she did not leave an extensive written record of her life because, as a woman, she had little time to write, and, as a person of modest means, her few writings were not considered worth preserving. Jane did write a small book that recorded the major events of a mother's life, a Book of Ages that noted the births and deaths of her children and other family members. She also wrote years of letters to her brother recording her opinions about her life and times, but decades of these letters have been lost. Lepore suggests that Jane's life is also an allegory: "it explains what it means to write history not from what survives but from what is lost."

Jane Franklin's story helps us to understand the historical record in a new light. How we understand our nation's history depends upon whose history we are able to read and remember. And because that written and preserved history is largely that of our founding fathers, we could easily lose sight of the fact that our founding mothers, ordinary women like Jane Franklin, also helped to shape our values and traditions.

Because Jane did not leave many written remains, Lepore has created what New York Times critic Dwight Garner calls "an elegant write-around." Is she successful in bringing Jane and her times to life? Do you think, given other historical circumstances, Jane Franklin could have been as famous as her brother? How have women's lives and the value we place upon them changed since Jane's times? How would America's history be different if the lives and opinions of women like Jane had been considered valuable all along?

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

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

If you enjoyed The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer, then you might also like the books Packer reviews in A Critic at Large: Don't Look Down for The New Yorker (April 29, 2013), a look at the new Depression literature. These titles include Down the Up Escalator: How the 99% Live in the Great Recession by Barbara Garson; Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff; and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges with illustrations by Joe Sacco. You could also read the U. S. A. trilogy of novels by John Dos Passos, published in the 1930s, which Packer acknowledges influenced the subject, structure, and style of The Unwinding.

January Not Fiction Book Discussions

We begin our road trip through American history and culture with one of the most talked-about books of 2013: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer. Inspired by John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, Packer creates a montage of longer biographical narratives of ordinary Americans, shorter biographical sketches of celebrities of all kinds, and collages or mashups of cultural memes to illustrate the "unwinding" over the last three decades of the America most of us take for granted, "when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way." Packer is referring in particular to what he calls the "Roosevelt Republic," a cohesive national web of public and private institutions that offers a place and a sense of security for all citizens. He argues that what has taken its place is organized money and a cult of celebrity that has reached beyond entertainment into other areas of public life, including government.

Looking back over the last three decades, do you recall noticing signs of this unwinding as they were occurring? What were they? Or did they only become clear upon looking back, as through a rear view mirror? In his Prologue, Packer suggests that unwindings of political, social, and cultural structures in our country are nothing new, that "Each decline brought renewal, each implosion released energy, out of each unwinding came a new cohesion." Yet in an interview with NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, Packer says of this particular devolution, "What I see happening is not just cyclical, though, it feels like a real cultural shift where the value of the community, of what makes this a coherent society, has really been submerged." What do you think? Do you see the events of the last three decades in the same light as Packer does? Do you feel that they are cyclical or that they represent a true cultural shift? Does Packer offer any hope for our collective future? Do you see any? And finally, do you think future generations will read Packer's book as we do works like Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or do you think it is closer to a cry that the sky is falling that will appear alarmist to future readers?

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer includes collages, called Mashups, of headlines, slogans, and songs that capture the flow of events—the social and political undercurrents—in a given year. Did you find yourself wondering what sources Packer used? Click here for an interactive page on the publisher's website that provides source notes.

We hope you will join the discussion of this winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction: Tuesday, January 7, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, January 16, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.