December Not Fiction Book Discussions

 We conclude our 2013 discussions with The Dangerous Animals Club by Stephen Tobolowsky, which the author says in the publisher's promotional video below "is a book about the beginning of things." Tobolowsky is a character actor who has appeared in more than 100 movies and more than 200 television shows, including Mississippi Burning, Memento, Groundhog Day, CSI Miami, Deadwood, and Glee. In The Dangerous Animals Club, he shares hilarious, touching stories from his childhood, his career, and his relationships with family and friends in a manner that film critic Leonard Maltin compares to Garrison Keillor's. Tobolowsky says, "A question I frequently ask myself: why do I tell these stories? My answer: The mystery. It is a mystery as to what makes us do what we do. It is the other side of the mystery as to what makes us who we are. . . . Telling a story . . . is the only way I know to make sense of the unpredictable" (p. 24-25). This is why we read as well.

Enjoy Tobolowsky's storytelling timing and energy and learn more about the origin and themes of The Dangerous Animals Club in this video from Simon and Schuster:



We hope you will join the discussions of what Library Journal calls "that most magical of memoirs--one that illuminates the reader's life as much as the author's": Tuesday, December 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, December 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

November Not Fiction Book Discussions

The theme of this year's discussions can be summed up in a phrase from Cheryl Strayed's memoir Wild: "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. Elsewhere: A Memoir by Richard Russo explores what Russo calls "the mechanism of human destiny" in his own life, inextricably intertwined with that of his mother, a bright and determined woman who was thwarted as much by her historical time and place as she was by her own mental illness, most likely an obsessive compulsive disorder. Russo, a devoted son, reflects on their life together and realizes that out of a sincere desire to support his mother, he unwittingly enabled her worst behavior, and, in spite of sharing many of her traits, became a successful and respected author while she restlessly looked for a better life "elsewhere."

Russo realizes after his mother dies that "Somehow, without ever intending to, I'd discovered how to turn obsession and what my grandmother used to call sheer cussedness--character traits that had dogged both my parents, causing them no end of difficulty--to my advantage. The same qualities that over a lifetime had contracted my mother's world had somehow expanded mine. How and by what mechanism? Dumb Luck? Grace? I honestly have no idea. Call it whatever you want--except virtue" (166). With great humility--and burdened by what one of our discussion members recognized as survivor's guilt--Russo refuses to take credit for his successes, while he is all too willing to shoulder responsibility for enabling his mother. Russo's conclusion is one that could offer real solace to any reader who takes responsibility for an aging parent or disabled family member or questions their own life's trajectory: "The mechanism of human destiny--that intricate weave of chance and fate and free will, as distinctly individual as a fingerprint--is surely meant to remain life's central mystery, to resist transparency, to make blame a dangerous and unsatisfactory exercise" (204).

Russo ends this double narrative of his own and his mother's life with an honest if not, for some readers in our discussion group, quite satisfying assessment of his efforts to understand and convey their connection: "Had I understood [his mother's great fear of poverty and abandonment and how it fueled her disorder] in time, had my moral imagination--any writer's most valuable gift, perhaps everyone's--not failed me, I could at least have . . . Could have what? The story ends here because I don't know how to complete that sentence. My family assures me I did everything that could've been done, and I don't know why it should seem so important that I resist the very conclusion that would let me off the hook. Maybe it's because I've never been a fan of grim, scientific determinism, or perhaps it's a writer's nature (or at least mine) to gnaw and worry and bury and unearth anything that resists comprehension. But who knows? Maybe it's just hubris, a stubborn insistence that if we keep trying one thing after another, we can coerce the ineffable into finally expressing itself. How tantalizingly close it seems even now, right there on the tip of my tongue before slipping away. But no doubt I'm misjudging the distance, being my mother's son" (242-43). If nothing else, Russo asks his readers to always consciously exercise their moral imagination.    

The Wild Effect

According to a recent New York Times article, The Call of the 'Wild' on the Pacific Crest Trail (October 18, 2013), the Pacific Crest Trail saw a record number of hikers this past year, due, at least in part, to the popularity of Cheryl Strayed's memoir Wild. Strayed told the New York Times that “'maybe approaching 1,000 people' have e-mailed her and said, 'I have read ‘Wild’ and you have inspired me to do a hike.'” And the film with Reese Witherspoon as Strayed is not even out yet . . .

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.