Notes from July's Not Fiction Book Discussion

Timothy Egan's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, asked him in an interview, "Why a book on the Dust Bowl now?" He responded, " To me, there was an urgency to get this story now because the last of the people who lived through those dark years are in their final days. It's their story, and I didn't want them to take this narrative of horror and persistence to the grave. At the same time, this part of America--the rural counties of the Great Plains--looks like it's dying. Our rural past seems so distant, like Dorothy's Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. Yet it was within the lifetime of people living today that nearly one in three Americans worked on a farm. Now, the site of the old Dust Bowl--which covers parts of five states--is largely devoid of young families and emptying out by the day. It's flyover country to most Americans. But it holds this remarkable tale that should be a larger part of our shared national story." Indeed, none of us who attended the discussion of The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl were fully aware of the causes, extent, and results of the Dust Bowl until we read Egan's book. And reading it in the context of what we learned about the connection between agricultural policies and the fundamental health of our environment from both Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe, we wondered how it can be that this event seems to have slipped from common memory and why we just cannot seem to learn from history.

We marveled at the tenacity of those who remained in the Dust Bowl in spite of the poverty, desolation, and death they faced. They seemed to have felt a strong sense of place, even when that place changed beyond recognition into a desert of dust. We agreed that Egan does a good job of conveying their stories and describing the power of the dust storms. One of the most poignant passages in Egan's book, however, one that illustrates this love of place, is from the diary of Don Hartwell: " . . . this year gives us one more day to hold to the place which has meant so much to me in life and tradition in the last 35 years, from the scent of the wild plum bush and the violets and the blue grass in April, to the little dry thunder showers in June which break away late in the afternoon, with the meadow larks singing and the wild roses which seem to be brighter and smell sweeter when wet with rain than any other time." We also gained a great appreciation for the insight and foresight of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Hugh Bennett, the head of the soil conservation effort Operation Dust Bowl, whose policies helped to begin the healing of the country and the land of the Dust Bowl.

Although we enjoyed the drama and immediacy of Egan's narrative, we wish he had spent more time describing the aftermath of the decade of the Dust Bowl, how the land was slowly but only partially restored and what life is like there today. Several of us also felt oppressed by the accumulation of negative description and event in Egan's narrative, but we agreed that this sense of loss and also of foreboding was Egan's purpose, to sober us and to provoke us to avoid similar mistakes in the future. In fact, in the interview with Houghton Mifflin, he notes that "[t]he Dust Bowl story is a parable, in a way, about what happens when people push the limits of the land."

To see some images of the Great Plains and the Dust Bowl, you can visit the Library of Congress's American Memory collection online. To view part of the film The Plow That Broke The Plains, created in 1936 by Pare Lorentz, visit the Internet Archive online.

We hope you will add your comments about Egan's book to our discussion. And we hope that you will join us for our next discussion, either Tuesday, August 5, at Main Library or here on the blog, of Bliss Broyard's memoir One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Hidden Secrets, as we move on to a consideration of identity.

July Not Fiction Book Discussion

At our July Not Fiction Book Discussion, we will explore the connections we see between the last several books we have read and Timothy Egan's National Book Award-winning The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. During the 1930's, America's High Plains were swept by terrible dust storms that were the result of irresponsible agricultural practices combined with drought. The Dust Bowl is our nation's greatest environmental disaster--to date. We will read about and discuss this event from America's history in an attempt to understand how it happened and perhaps also how to be better stewards of our land and the food it provides in the future. Egan brings to life the Dust Bowl and the families and communities it affected through vivid historical reportage that, as a reviewer from the Cleveland Plain Dealer notes, "haunts a reader from the first pages." We invite you to join our discussion Tuesday, July 1 at 7:00 p.m. in the Main Library's Meeting Room A or here on the blog.

Notes from June's Not Fiction Book Discussion

Do you recall when you first heard about global warming and climate change? For some of us attending last Tuesday's discussion of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert, it was as long ago as the 1970s, when the first official reports were released on human impact on climate change, and some of us also recalled Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring that exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT and questioned the concept of benign technological progress.

So why has it taken so long for politicians and the general public to become alarmed about human impact on climate change? We noted that the issue seemed to drop out of general public consciousness during the 1980s and and early 1990s. Kolbert even-handedly and succinctly outlines what happened during those years--environmentally, scientifically, and politically--while we were not paying attention.

We acknowledged that global warming could become more than a media buzz word for those of us here in Charleston, SC who own or rent houses at or below sea level. Our discussion revealed that we are ambivalent about whether man or nature will prove more powerful--whether we will cooperate and use technology or find other solutions to potentially catastrophic climate change, or whether we will continue to put personal comfort and corporate profit before the collective good. However, we did agree that there seem to be many grass roots movements to offer hope, such as The Compact, which encourages people not to buy anything except essentials such as food and medicine for a period of time, and the local food movement. We shared the small ways we as individuals try to make a difference, such as using refillable water bottles rather than disposable plastic ones, carpooling, shopping at the local farmers market, reducing or eliminating meat from our diets, taking reusable shopping bags to the grocery store, replacing incandescent bulbs with fluorescent ones, and using heat and air conditioning moderately. And we are encouraged that grade school, high school, and college students are much more aware of the immediacy and importance of the issue of global warming than we were at their age.

Here is a brief list of resources Kolbert presents for learning more about climate change and how we as individuals can reduce our "carbon footprints." For others, see the Resources section at the end of her book.

• Cities for Climate Protection Campaign http://www.iclei.org/


• Southern Alliance for Clean Energy http://www.cleanenergy.org/


• RealClimate http://www.realclimate.org/


• Goddard Institute for Space Studies/National Aeronautics and Space Administration http://www.giss.nasa.gov/


• National Environmental Trust http://www.net.org/


• American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy http://www.aceee.org/ and http://www.greencars.com/


• Natural Resources Defense Council http://www.nrdc.org/


• Union of Concerned Scientists http://www.ucsusa.org/

We hope you will add your thoughts to our discussion and consider joining our next discussion, about Timothy Egan's book The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, either Tuesday, July 1, at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library on Calhoun Street, or here on the blog.

June Not Fiction Book Discussion

For our June Not Fiction Book Discussion, we will be reading Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert. The book began as a three-part series for The New Yorker, for which she won a National Magazine Award in 2006. Kolbert's title suggests her approach to the overwhelming topic of global warming--she provides a concise written record of her observations, interactions, and conversations from her travels around the world investigating her topic. We hope you will join our conversation, either on Tuesday, June 3, 2008, at 7:00 p.m. at the Main Library on Calhoun Street in Meeting Room A or here on the blog, about this brief but powerful book that many reviewers have called the Silent Spring (by Rachel Carson) for our time.

Notes from May's Not Fiction Book Discussion

We began our discussion of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by comparing our own shopping and eating habits to Pollan's four meals and how the book had impacted these habits. Many of us said we were more conscious of the health, economic, environmental, and cultural implications of our shopping and eating choices. Some of us have already made small changes in our shopping and eating habits, such as visiting our local farmers' market more often and reading labels to look for hidden corn ingredients and other signs of highly processed food. However, all of us were left perplexed by how best to incorporate the information in Pollan's book into our lives. We thought we were doing ourselves and the environment a favor by buying organic products at our local alternative commercial markets; we thought we were upholding our intention to support businesses that treat animals humanely by buying dairy and meat products sold in these stores. We now realize that industrial organic has complicated our choices. Rather than answering questions for us, The Omnivore's Dilemma left us with more. Thus Pollan has accomplished for us as readers what he intended, for the theme of his book is the importance of knowing how our eating links us to the world around us. He asks us, "But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found it's way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. . . . For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world."

To read an exchange between Michael Pollan and John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, regarding that company's efforts to offer consumers products that are ethically and environmentally sound, visit The CEO's Blog at http://www.wholefoods.com/. To read more articles by Michael Pollan about food, visit his website at http://www.michaelpollan.com/ and look under Writing.

We will continue our conversation about our relationship with our environment in the next two Not Fiction Book Discussions. For June we will read Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert, and for July we will read The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan. We hope you will join us, either at Main Library or here on the blog.

Notes from April's Not Fiction Book Discussion

In his preface to The United States of Arugula, David Kamp says, "This is a book about how we got to this point--how food in America got better, and how it hopped the fence from the ghettos of home economics and snobby gourmandism to the expansive realm of popular culture." Our discussion of his book on April 1 focused largely on whether he accomplished this goal for us as readers. We decided that perhaps his background as a writer of short profile pieces for Vanity Fair and GQ influenced his style and content--a tendency toward name-dropping and sharing gossipy bits about the personal lives of the many chefs he names. We agreed that we had expected more of a social and cultural history of the ordinary eaters who had participated in this food revolution, although we understand after reading his book that television programs, restaurant reviews, and cook books by celebrity chefs certainly ignited the revolution. Our favorite chapters were "Righteous and Crunchy" and "The New Sun-Dried Lifestyle"--both move beyond a mere timeline of events into a more in-depth presentation of the characters and trends they present, and the trends involved the world outside the walls of a five-star restaurant.

Kamp's book did spark a fun discussion of our own childhood memories of food and the transformations described in the book that have been most relevant in our lifetime. For example, one of our group was planning a dinner of penne with arugula, roma tomatoes, pine nuts, extra virgin olive oil, and parmigiano reggiano . . . a dish her mother certainly never made for the family back in the 1960s! And as soon as I finish this post, I will head out for a latte break . . .

Kamp's book will provide an interesting comparison for our next book, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. While Kamp is unreservedly optimistic about our culture's current abundance of ingredients and culinary sophistication, Pollan points out the many dilemmas involved in that plastic box of arugula from California, those tomatoes in early April . . .

We hope you will join our conversation!

Celebrate National Poetry Month!

April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate it, the Academy of American Poets is encouraging poetry lovers to participate in the first national Poem in Your Pocket Day on April 17. Simply choose a poem you love and carry it with you to share with family, friends, and coworkers on April 17 and throughout the month. Visit poets.org, the official website of the Academy of American Poets, for more information and to find poems to download!

You can also celebrate by participating in an online event hosted by the Library of Congress through the Online Programming for All Libraries Online Auditorium: "On April 17, join with the Library of Congress in an online celebration of the first national Poem In Your Pocket Day. Select a favorite published poem (not your own) in advance to share with others. Participants will present their poem in the order in which they log in to the OPAL Auditorium, the online venue for this program. Those who have a microphone have the option of reading their poem aloud, and to share a URL (if available) at which the poem can be found online. Participants without microphones may provide a link to their poem; Library of Congress employees will take turns reading these poems." For more information about OPAL, visit http://www.opal-online.org/progschrono.htm and to go to the Online Auditorium, visit http://www.conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs1641902f62b4.

And you can celebrate here on the Not Fiction blog--tell us about your favorite poem(s) and/or any favorite memories about poems or poetry.

"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?" ~Emily Dickinson