October Not Fiction Book Discussions

How do we deal with loss? Is there a way to reclaim what was lost? How does loss change us?

These are the essential questions in our next book, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed. When Strayed was 22, her mother died of advanced lung cancer. After her death, Strayed’s stepfather and siblings withdrew from the family, and Strayed withdrew from her marriage to a kind, supportive man, becoming involved in serial affairs and heroin use. More significantly, she withdrew from a sense of herself as the person she wanted to be. Impulsively, and with no previous experience, Strayed decided that the way to mend her life was to walk, alone, into the wilderness of the Pacific Crest Trail, which stretches over 2,000 miles of challenging terrain from California to Oregon,  and into a life-and-death struggle with the wildness of her own grief and regret.

What do you think? Strayed is candid in her description of her own choices and mistakes, and while she seems remorseful, she never seems ashamed. Is this a sign of strength or a character flaw? Strayed is also forthright about her lack of wilderness survival skills, and some readers might feel that she placed herself in foolish and unnecessary danger and suffered needless physical hardships. What does this naive walk into the wilderness represent for her, how does her physical suffering help her cope with her emotional pain, and how does the experience change her? What does it mean to be wild, and can it be a sane and rational choice to go wild?

Wild has remained on the New York Times bestseller list since publication and has been translated into over 20 languages. In it, we recognize the wise and kind voice of the popular advice column Dear Sugar, which Strayed wrote for The Rumpus, which has also appeared on the bestseller list as Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar. In an interview with Kirkus Reviews, Strayed says about her success, "I didn't try to write a bestseller. I had no idea that this story about my hike and my grief would resonate with so many people. When people talk to me about my book, they say, 'I loved Wild and here's why,' and they go on about their own lives, and what's happening is that they're recognizing themselves in my work, in my life. So many people have said, 'We have so much in common.' They say, 'We have parallel lives.' How can that be? And maybe the answer to that is, we're all human, and there's a universal experience, and the writer's role and task here is to be the truth-teller, the storyteller."

With unflinching honesty and earthy humor, and with absolutely no sentimentality or self-pity, Strayed recounts her parallel journey, forward on the trail and back into the life experiences that led her there, to her ultimate realization: “It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn't have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I'd done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was . . . It was my life - like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.” We are invited by this compassionate self-assessment to trust in the wisdom of our own life’s path.

Wish you could see photographs of Strayed's life and hike? View a slideshow of her journey in photos on Oprah's website.

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

Videos of Anthony Shadid, as he completed the renovations of his ancestral home.

Enjoy this series of ten YouTube videos posted by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the publisher of House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid.

See the stone, the tile, the ironwork, and the garden described in loving detail in the book, and listen to Shadid talk about the theme of identity that is embodied in the house and in his memoir.

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.