April Not Fiction Book Discussions

In 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann, we read a panoramic description of the rise of globalism and the First World and its environmental, economic, political, and ethical consequences. In Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis, we read about the current global financial crisis, especially as it is playing out in the First World of Europe and the United States, and the possible Third World conditions that may result.  In Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo, we will read a dramatic and intimate narrative of three years in Annawadi slum as people work to create a better life in one of the 21st century's fastest-growing, most unequal cities, Mumbai, India. "As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi" (jacket copy).

Boo, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her journalism about poverty in America, married a man from India and found herself considering similar questions to those she confronted in America, what it takes to get out of poverty in an unequal society and how market forces and government policies either help or hinder people in their effort to do so. In an interview with Charles McGrath in the New York Times, Boo says, "I think I grew up with a healthy respect for volatility, all the things you can't control. . . . And I became aware of the ways in which people who write about the disadvantaged often underestimate its psychological contours, the uncertainty--economic or whatever." In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Boo asks us to witness and experience the daily lives of people with both strengths and weaknesses as they face the challenge of surviving in a volatile society: Abdul, a teenager who supports his family of 11 by collecting, sorting, and selling garbage, and who is falsely accused of a terrible crime, placing his family in danger of going hungry if he is arrested; Fatima, a woman whose disability and desire to be loved makes her the object of derision; Asha, a woman who pursues her fierce hope to send her daughter to college through political corruption; and others in this vibrant community. Boo says in her Author's Note, "It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in under-cities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many people try to be--all those invisible individuals who every day find themselves faced with dilemmas . . . " In an interview with her editor on her website, Boo discusses her purpose in writing this book: "My hope, at the keyboard, is to portray these individuals in their complexity--allow them not to be Representative Poor Persons--so that readers might find some other point of emotional purchase, a connection more blooded than pity. Maybe somewhere in the book they might even start asking, What would I do, under these circumstances . . . But I'm interested in structures as well as stories, and as I report, I'm sometimes asking myself a set of questions inspired by the philosopher John Rawls: How would I design a society if I didn't know where in its hierarchy I would be placed--if I didn't know whether I would be a person of wealth and power, or a poor and vulnerable person? What system would I create that would be fair? I would be elated if a few readers of Behind the Beautiful Forevers were inclined to ask themselves similar questions" (www.behindthebeautifulforevers.com/qa-with-katherine).

How does constant exposure to volatility, inequality, and corruption change people's interpretation of right and wrong, as well as how they view their neighbors? Can hope for a better life have a dark side as well as a bright side? Does economic volatility affect relationships in the community where you live? What is the connection between suffering and redemption in this book and in the world?(www.behindthebeautifulforevers.com/discussion-guide)

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, April 2, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, April 25, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

March Not Fiction Book Discussions

We continue our consideration of the effects of globalization with Boomerang: Travels in the Third World by Michael Lewis. In The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Lewis introduced readers to the few farsighted if ethically questionable financial professionals who saw that the American subprime mortgage industry was poised to fall and made their fortune betting, against the market, that the housing bubble would burst. In Boomerang, Lewis broadens his view to the effects of what he calls "the tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2007." Originally written as a series of articles for Vanity Fair magazine, these essays are travel writing of a sort, as Lewis calls his visits to Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, and California "financial-disaster tourism." As T.J. Stiles notes in The First Tycoon, the Gilded Age saw the rise of the abstraction of the global financial system. One of the great tycoons of that era, Cornelius Vanderbilt, saw the dangers of the system, even as he sought to profit from it. Stiles quotes him as saying, "I'll tell you what's the matter--people undertake to do about four times as much business as they can legitimately undertake. . . . 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" (536-37). However, Lewis' provocative thesis is that what is causing the global financial crisis is not just simple greed, but greed combined with the particular national character of each country involved: "The credit wasn't just money, it was temptation. It offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Entire countries were told, 'The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.' What they wanted to do with money in the dark varied" (42).

What do you think? Does Lewis make the case that national character explains as much as or more than simple human nature?

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

February Not Fiction Book Discussion

1493: Discovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann describes how the world we take for granted--"the single, turbulent exchange of goods and services that today engulfs the entire habitable world"--came to be. While 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus serves as a prequel to Columbus' arrival on Hispaniola in 1492, this work serves as a sequel. Continuing the work of geographer and historian Alfred W. Crosby, Mann describes the economic and environmental effects of what Crosby calls the Columbian Exchange. Christopher Columbus and other Europeans traveling the globe in search of economic advantage sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently carried with them plants, animals, and microorganisms that, Crosby and Mann argue, "reknit the seams of Pangaea," the original single landmass that comprised the world 250 million years ago. Through storytelling rich in detail yet grand in scope, Mann helps us understand how we came to live in the current era, the Homogenocene, in which, for example, tomatoes that originally only grew wild in Peru came to be a staple of Italian cuisine and people of European descent form the majority of the population on at least three other continents. While economists and environmentalists debate the ultimate value of this exchange, Mann takes a broader, less polemical view: " . . . as I learned more I came to suspect that both sides may be correct. From the outset globalization brought both enormous economic gains and ecological and social tumult that threatened to offset those gains." He helps us see that many of our most fervent current debates, such as those over global warming, immigration, and trade policy, have their roots in this original connection, or re-connection, of the disparate parts of the earth. This is history as we should have learned it and perhaps even suspected as we read simplistic narratives in school about the Europeans' divinely destined "discovery" of a naive and untouched world: "In some respects this image of the past--a cosmopolitan place, driven by ecology and economics--is startling to people who, like me, were brought up on accounts of heroic navigators, brilliant inventors, and empires acquired by dint of technological and institutional superiority. It is strange, too, to realize that globalization has been enriching the world for nigh on five centuries. And it is unsettling to think of globalization's equally long record of ecological convulsion, and the suffering and political mayhem caused by that convulsion. But there is grandeur, too, in this view of our past; it reminds us that every place has played a part in the human story, and that all are embedded in the larger, inconceivably complex progress of life on this planet."

Do you share Mann's equanimity about the effects of globalization? What are the implications of this more complex world view--economically, environmentally, politically, and ethically--as the future inevitably becomes the present?

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

January Not Fiction Book Discussions

 The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt is a book about the power of books to touch us personally and, by that means, to change the world. In 1417, Poggio Bracciolini, an unemployed papal secretary and avid rare manuscript hunter, discovered a copy of Lucretius's poem On the Nature of Things, known at that time only by references in other ancient works, in a remote German monastery. Lucretius' ideas about the nature of the physical universe and how we should conduct our lives in it, themselves influenced by the philosopher Epicurus, directly influenced many other great minds in turn, including Galileo, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, and many modern and contemporary scientists. Greenblatt argues through entertaining anecdotes that this poem caused a swerve away from the Christian world view of the Middle Ages towards the secular and humanist world view of the Renaissance and beyond. He emphasizes how much knowledge, how many books, have been lost to the changing tastes of various cultures and ages, to bookworms and fires, as well as the fortuitous nature of this one book's rediscovery.

Greenblatt himself discovered Lucretius' poem by chance, as a student at the Yale Co-op looking for affordable summer reading. Drawn by the cover, a detail from a Max Ernst painting, he paid ten cents for it and was immediately drawn in by the intense opening of the poem. In an interview with Full Stop, Greenblatt says he was first drawn to write about Lucretius and Poggio many years later at a book conference: "I began to think about things in movement: what if you imagined culture not as something rooted deeply in the ground, occasionally disrupted, but as being constantly in movement? That the normal state was mobility, and that every once in a while things quieted down for a while and stayed where they were? That the normal condition was becoming and not being?" His theory of culture mirrors Lucretius' theory of the random movement, or "swerving," of the atoms that compose our physical universe. In the same interview, he also describes the feeling that unites book lovers across time, the power of books from other times and places to touch us immediately and personally: "Ever since I was quite young I've been fascinated by the idea that something would hit you--not just that you would find something, but that something would find you. My whole experience of what matters in literature, why it's worth spending grown-up time on, is that you can feel that even though you know that this thing was written long before you existed by someone who couldn't possibly have imagined your existence (let alone know you), that nonetheless it was written for you. If a work of literature works, it works that way, in my opinion."

What do you think? Can a poem change the world? Did this one? And will this kind of chance rediscovery of lost ideas still be possible as we move from print to digital media?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, January 8, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, January 17, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

December Not Fiction Book Discussions

"He believed the dog was immortal. 'There will always be a Rin Tin Tin,' Lee Duncan said, time and time again, to reporters, to visitors, to fan magazines, to neighbors, to family, to friends. At first this must have sounded absurd--just wishful thinking about the creature that had eased his loneliness and made him famous around the world. And yet, just as Lee believed, there has always been a Rin Tin Tin." So begins Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean, our last book for 2012, and the last in our series of discussions about biographies and memoirs that offer us ideas for how to live. What if we could live forever? What would that really mean? And why would we want it?

On her website, Orlean describes the kind of writer she always dreamed of being: "someone who wrote long stories about interesting things, rather than news stories about short-lived events." Her deep curiosity and compassion for her subjects are evident in every piece she writes. Her subjects are often people with a similar deep connection to something. In an interview with Oprah.com, Orlean said, "I think I'm often drawn, whether I realize it or not, to the idea of what drives people. What do we love?" In Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, Orlean tells us that her fascination with her subject began with a figurine of the hero dog that her grandfather clearly felt was special and would not let his grandchildren play with. In her research for the book, she discovered many other people who were invested in Rin Tin Tin. The original animal died, but his memory lived on in his offspring and in other movie and television productions. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Orlean said, "The power of memory is one of the important themes in the book. My memory of Rin Tin Tin, and in particular my memory of that figurine, and the persistence of those memories, were essential to my interest in the subject. As I learned more about Rin Tin Tin's history, the mystery of my grandfather's attachment to that figurine suddenly seemed to reveal itself, and since it tracked such an important part of history, it became a natural theme for the book." To Orlean, then, living forever means living on in someone's memory.

In interviews with Oprah.com and with her publisher, Simon & Schuster, Orlean mentioned that both her father and a loved dog died as she was writing Rin Tin Tin, making very real for her the consideration of loss and memory. She told the interview for Oprah.com, "What has always fascinated me and what's very emotional to me is the question of what lasts. People want to, if not live forever, have evidence of their existence live forever. And I think that part of what happened for me was that my dad died in the course of my writing this, and I started thinking about memory, the idea that things come and go and then they're gone and forgotten. But Rin Tin Tin, by being reinvented over and over in people's imaginations, became kind of a timeless model: He just keeps going and going; his story outlives everybody. I feel great tenderness toward the people who devoted themselves to Rin Tin Tin and his history because I think everybody wants to have had their existence noted by the universe." We want our lives to have mattered.

In writing about Rin Tin Tin's life and legend, Orlean learned a profound lesson about how to live. Writers write biographies and memoirs in order for the lives of their subjects and their own lives to have been noted by the universe. Orlean says near the end of Rin Tin Tin, "I, too, had set out to be remembered. I had wanted to create something permanent in my life--some proof that everything in its way mattered, that working hard mattered, that feeling things mattered, that even sadness and loss mattered, because it was all part of something that would live on. But I had also come to recognize that not everything needs to be so durable. The lesson we have yet to learn from dogs, that could sustain us, is that having no apprehension of the past or the future is not limiting but liberating. Rin Tin Tin did not need to be remembered in order to be happy; for him it was always enough to have that instant when the sun was soft, when the ball was tossed and caught, when the beloved rubber doll was squeaked. Such a moment was complete in itself, pure and sufficient."

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

Not Fiction Book Discussion Titles for 2013

We are already looking forward to 2013's list of great recent nonfiction!

As Cheryl Strayed says in her memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, "There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course." Yet that seems to be the nonfiction writer's task, to understand how the world came to be the way it is, how it is changing even as we observe it, and how people make their way in it, with curiosity, determination, courage, forbearance, forgiveness, humor, and not a little luck.

We hope you will join us in 2013 to read and discuss the titles posted on the right side of this page.

And don't forget our remaining 2012 discussions of Blue Nights by Joan Didion and Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean!

December Not Fiction Book Discussions

Within two years, author and critic Joan Didion lost her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael. Her husband died suddenly of a heart attack in December 2003 while her daughter was in the ICU with sepsis, just one of a string of mysterious illnesses leading to her death in August 2005. Didion describes her grief over her husband's death in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, which sold over a million copies, won a National Book Award, and was made into Broadway play starring Vanessa Redgrave. She shares details from their married and shared professional lives and honestly describes the madness brought on by grief that allows one to believe that the beloved is not truly gone--the "magical thinking" of the title. In Blue Nights, however, a companion of sorts to The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion does not offer us another memoir of grief. Instead, she explores a frequent and even darker companion to grief, regret.

Readers expecting to follow a linear narrative of Quintana Roo's charmed but emotionally troubled childhood, to learn specific details about her series of illnesses and death, and to find catharsis and learn to accept that death along with Didion may find themselves disappointed. Instead, they consider with Didion the very uncomfortable question of whether, and to what extent, she herself was responsible for Quintana's unhappiness. Meghan O'Rourke, in her review of Blue Nights at slate.com, says, "The regret memoir is another thing altogether, a stranger, patchwork beast. It is written by an author with no hope of recovery, who has let go of her magical thinking. It is pricklier, more nihilistic, composed knowing that the center hasn't held, rather than out of a fraught awareness that the 'center cannot hold.' . . . The book instead bears witness to the realization that the past can never be fixed (a realization many parents must at some point confront)." Didion also confesses her inability to rely on her famous elliptical style to write about Quintana and realizes that she has perhaps often chosen style over substance in her own life. As O'Rourke notes, "the story is about how style becomes a tactic that prevents you from being in the moment. . . . her writing taps into one of postwar life's most vital contradictions. It dismantles myths and self-mythologizes at the same time. It exposes a generation's narcissism while at times embodying it." And in facing the death of her child and the inadequacy of her writing to help her deal with it, Didion confronts the uncomfortable fact of her own mortality.

While readers might not get what they expected in Blue Nights, they must surely recognize Didion's courage to share with her readers the more difficult story. Sometimes we turn to writers to show us how not to live.

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, November 13, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, November 29, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.