September Not Fiction Book Discussions

With our next three books, we will explore our complicated relationship with the idea of home, family, and self, with great loss and the bittersweet compensation of self-knowledge that sometimes follows.

House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid is the story of the author's quest to rebuild his great-grandfather's home in Marjayoun, Lebanon, devastated by war and abandoned by generations who have emigrated to America, and to rebuild his sense of self, also devastated by what he has witnessed as a foreign correspondent reporting on war in the Middle East and the pain of a divorce and estrangement from his daughter precipitated by his work.

This home is both literal and metaphorical. Shadid tells us at the beginning of his narrative that the Arabic word bayt "literally translates as house, but its connotations resonate beyond rooms and walls, summoning longings gathered about family and home. In the Middle East, bayt is sacred. Empires fall. Nations topple. Borders may shift or be realigned. Old loyalties may dissolve or, without warning, be altered. Home, whether it be structure or familiar ground, is, finally, the identity that does not fade." Shadid blends political and cultural history of the Levant, the story of his family's resettlement in America, humorous anecdotes of his efforts to be integrated into the fabric of Marjayouni life and find reliable, competent construction labor, and occasional, searing recollections of the dangers of his reporting work and the pain of his nuclear family's disintegration. The complex narrative moves back and forth in time, and, as Kathryn Schultz notes in her New York Magazine review, "The effect is that of a film simultaneously projected forward and backward: the house falls apart and comes together at the same time." So, too, does Shadid, in the familiar but compelling arc of the memoir of personal recovery.

Tragically, Shadid died on February 16, 2012, while on assignment in Syria, just a month before the scheduled release of House of Stone. In April 2011, Shadid was featured on the NPR talk show On Point. A caller questioned why Shadid kept taking personal risks to cover conflicts in the Middle East: "I kind of wonder if it's irresponsible of you. Why would someone put themselves in such a situation?" Shadid agreed that this was "a perfectly legitimate question. I felt that if I wasn't there, the story wouldn't be told." An interviewer for World Literature Today asked Shadid a similar question: "Is your biggest personal conflict celebrating creation amid reporting destruction? Because that's sort of the premise of the book, that you're building this home, something of a monument to creation, in a place so full of conflict." Shadid replied, "What I saw the house as, and I say this to my wife when she asks why the house is so meaningful to me: It's the only thing I've created in this world. And because there's so much death, so much destruction, so much carnage, I have to ask: Is there a way to stop loss? Is there a way to reclaim what was lost? I still don't know the answer. We have to think of it in a different way, and I think that's where imagination comes in. It's the question that haunted me going into this experience, and still sticks with me. How do we stand loss? Maybe it doesn't really matter? I don't know. If we can imagine identities that are transcendent, or imagine communities that are transcendent, I wonder if loss even matters. I'm not sure if that's the case or not, but that's kind of how I came to it in the end. I think this matters not just for Marjayoun, or my life, or this house. I think that matters to the Arab world."

What do you think of Shadid's quixotic quest to rebuild his great-grandfather's house in a dying town in the heart of a war zone? To find a sense of family and community even though his dangerous work as a foreign correspondent caused his own to disintegrate? Would your response to his book be different if he were still alive and actively reporting?

We hope you'll join the discussion: Tuesday, September 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, September 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Library; or here on the blog.

August Not Fiction Book Discussions

With Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan, we will consider how complicated it can be to determine "[w]hat causes what to flourish or die or take another course" (Cheryl Strayed).

Society photographer Edward Curtis, the Annie Leibovitz of his day, left the comfort and stability of his portrait studio business to pursue his "Great Idea": to preserve in photographs, sound recordings, and extensive field notes the cultures of over 80 Native American tribes. He spent three decades at the beginning of the 20th century crisscrossing the country, patiently learning the ways of the many people he met and waiting to be invited into their lives. He took over 40,000 photographs and preserved over 10,000 audio recordings, and created the first narrative documentary film in the process. He not only did not earn an income from this project, he sacrificed his own financial security, his marriage, and his health for his project. His stated goal? "I want to make them live forever." Curtis' photographs, audio recordings, film, and extensive field notes, although they cost him everything, preserved in living memory the traditions and languages of tribes that today often use his work to recover and restore their history. Egan suggests that he helped to eventually broaden and improve Americans' attitudes toward Native Americans as well.

However, some critics argue that Curtis' "photographs were of a piece with early 20th century assimilation campaigns and official termination of Indian tribes" (Jon Christensen at sfgate.com) and that "Curtis' pictures actually supported the idea that Indians must inevitably melt away in the heat of modernity" (Josh Garrett-Davis at nytimes.com). And some contemporary photojournalists feel that work by Curtis and other photographers of his day, such as Civil War photographer Matthew Brady, provides an inauthentic record because it altered the reality of the time. Curtis did not always photograph Native American life as it was being lived under the pressures of government suppression, but rather Native American life he felt was disappearing, often asking tribes to reenact ceremonies they were forbidden to perform and wear clothes they were forbidden to wear, just as Brady arranged his scenes of battlefield death and destruction. In addition to the criticism of Curtis' work, some critics also fault Egan's portrayal of Curtis the man, insisting that " . . . Egan seems to want to put Curtis and his opus, The North American Indian, close to the center of the story of the great American Indian revivals of the last century. This takes Curtis out of his own historical context--enmeshed in a story of Indian decline--and plants him in a completely different historical context. In the process it also robs the great story of the revival of Indian people, tribes and cultures of its own powerful center--their own agency" (Jon Christensen at sfgate.com). All of these arguments, Curtis', Egan's, and their critics', revolve around the concept of presentism, using present-day concepts and values to interpret, portray, and judge the past.

What do you think? Who is most guilty of presentism is this debate: Curtis and Egan or the critics?Whose opinion do you think carries the most weight: Curtis', Egan's, the critics, the American Indian tribes of Curtis's day and of today, or you, the reader?

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

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.