July Not Fiction Book Discussions

Often a coincidence of individual character and historical moment explains "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" (Cheryl Strayed).

In The Black Count: Glory Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss we will rediscover General Alex Dumas, the son of a black slave, who rose on the egalitarian tide of the French Revolution to command armies--and great love and respect--before a backlash of racist sentiment and an implacable foe, Napoleon, consigned him to prison and historical obscurity.

His essential character was preserved, however, by his son, Alexandre Dumas, in his adventure novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Reiss told the personal story behind his passion for biography to Interview Magazine:

"Remembering people is the most fundamental gesture of love and respect. For me, there are people in my life who are no longer with me, who have died, who are with me as much as any living person because I remember everything about them. My great-uncle, who I got a lot of guidance in life from, meant so much to me. A lot of my interests came out of time I spent with him. The first time I dedicated myself to resurrecting and preserving somebody's memories was with my great-uncle.  I knew he was going to die in the next few years, and I had grown up listening to all his stories about people who had been trapped or chased by the Nazis. I began to record them. The way lives intersect with history has always been my central obsession. And whenever I go on the road to hunt down one of these characters, I wear this very old London Fog raincoat from my great-uncle."

 Along with Dumas' story, Reiss tells readers about his own heroic efforts to restore him to common and historical memory. Over nearly a decade, he visited archives, libraries, and museums on several continents, and he even persuaded the town of Villers-Cotterets and the Alexandre Dumas Museum to allow him to crack the safe where Dumas' personal papers were stored.

What aspects of Dumas' character does Reiss emphasize? How does his personal character interact with the character of his times? And what can we learn about the power of memory from Dumas' story?

In her appreciation of The Black Count for the National Book Critics Circle finalists announcement, Marcela Valdes acknowledges the importance of biography as a genre:

"Reiss's account of Dumas's betrayal reminds us that racism means not only discrimination, but erasure. And that, at its finest, biography can be a kind of resurrection."

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

June Not Fiction Book Discussions

Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World by Maya Jasanoff "recovers the stories of ordinary people whose lives were overturned by extraordinary events," the losers of the American Revolution.

Jasanoff, in a groundbreaking study, charts the exodus of over 60,000 British subjects living in America who were loyal to the British empire. She describes what she calls the "spirit of 1783," a commitment on the part of Loyalist refugees to "authority, liberty, and global reach" in the British empire. Yet these refugees were not a homogenous group racially, ethnically, socially, or even politically. And their experiences as they ranged as far as Canada, the Caribbean, and Sierra Leone, were just as varied.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Jasanoff explains why many historians, and Americans in general, are unaware of the Loyalists' remarkable story: "Everybody knows that winners write the history. The problems start when we read that history and forget how it is slanted." Jasanoff combines analysis with narration to create an illuminating and entertaining reading experience that complicates what most of learned in high school history class. She begins her book with a cast of characters whom we follow on their journeys out of America and into the world beyond, expanding the British empire as they went. Jasanoff notes that "there is something bittersweet about many of these people's stories." We will consider the question with which she ends her book: "So what did all those losses, displacements, and overturned lives amount to in the end? Was it fair to see the loyalists' trauma, like the empire's (with the loss of the thirteen colonies), ending a generation later in a kind of triumph?

Liberty's Exiles won numerous distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the George Washington Book Prize, and a Recognition of Excellence from the Cundill Prize in History. Amanda Foreman, writing for The Times (London), says "Liberty's Exiles is not only a masterful historical study, it is also a jolly good read."

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

May Not Fiction Book Discussions

As Cheryl Strayed says of her own life 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 it seems to be the nonfiction writer's, especially the biographer's, desire to understand how people make their way in the world.

In Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie, we will read the story of how a minor German princess became one of the most powerful women in history by embracing her new Russian culture, by educating herself through deep and voracious reading, and by carefully observing human nature. This is biography in the grand, old-fashioned, great-person style, but Massie gives it a personal, approachable, feminist twist--the subtitle, after all, is "Portrait of a Woman" rather than "Portrait of a Ruler." In fact, half of this biography is devoted to the years before Catherine became empress. Massie said in an interview with Charles McGrath in the New York Times, "The story of how she got there is just as interesting if not as historically relevant as what she accomplished on the throne. . . . Four of my children are daughters, and I've watched them devote themselves to reading books about how little girls learn to become women--how they learn to deal with boys and men, and the different hurdles females have to go over. So it's the pre-imperial Catherine who keeps putting herself in front of me." How did Catherine change from the docile girl Sophia to the powerful Empress Catherine the Great? What role did chance and coincidence play, and what role did her own character play? As Kathryn Harrison notes in her New York Times review, Massie "has always been a biographer with the instincts of a novelist. He understands plot--fate--as a function of character, and the narrative perspective he establishes and maintains, a vision tightly aligned with that of his subject, convinces a reader he's not so much looking at Catherine the Great as he is out of her eyes." Is Massie successful in bringing Catherine to life for his readers? Do you understand her decisions both personal and political? And do you enjoy this immersive reading experience? Or do you feel, as the reviewer for Kirkus Reviews does, that Massie manipulates us with "these lowbrow historical techniques"?

We hope you will join us: Tuesday, May 7, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, May 16, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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.