Readalikes: If you enjoyed July's selection . . .

If you liked The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon, then you might enjoy these books and film suggested by our discussion group members: Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder and Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat, both nonfiction works that portray the precariousness of the immigrant experience; A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, a novel by Anthony Marra that explores the difficult decisions people must make when caught up in war and the unexpected ways in which we are all connected; and Ida, a film directed by Pawel Pawlikowski that portrays two women's search for identity and their efforts to reconcile with the past.

July Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon offers us insight into the experience of being an immigrant in the United States, of remembering one's previous life and finding a place and a voice in a new country, a new language, a new but unsought life. Hemon was born in 1964 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then Yugoslavia. He studied literature in college there, and he was a published writer by the age of 26. He was visiting the United States on a month-long journalist exchange program in 1992 when war erupted in Bosnia. He sought political asylum and did not return to Sarajevo until 1997. His parents and sister barely managed to immigrate to Canada, but his friends and their families suffered through imprisonment, extortion, and torture, while his mentor, a literature professor at the University of Sarajevo, was revealed to be a member of the nationalist Serbian Democratic Party and a collaborator with the war criminal Radovan Karadzic. Meanwhile, in Chicago, Hemon worked variously as a kitchen worker, bicycle messenger, Greenpeace canvasser, bookstore clerk, and ESL instructor. He found community in chess cafes and soccer fields. He learned English by reading literature in English and within two years was published in the United States. His first marriage failed, and he and his second wife endured the devastating loss of their second child to cancer. These essays were originally written as independent pieces, and collectively they present a whole story of Hemon's life--or lives: in socialist Yugoslavia, in wartime Sarajevo, and in Chicago; as a child, a young adult, a married man, and a father. Yet these pieces serve as more than memoir; they are essays in the true sense, an attempt to understand being itself, how we come to be the people we are, how we define ourselves in relationship to others, how we integrate our interior and exterior experience of the world.

In our discussions we explored the motifs Hemon uses to integrate the essays and the evolution of his relationship to himself and to the world. We were deeply moved by his descriptions of life in a socialist country, of war, of the vibrant international immigrant communities of Chicago, of great personal disillusionment and loss. We also noted, however, that he pointedly refuses to give readers a comfortable resolution to the stories of his lives, insisting on the irreducible nature of his own experience. And yet, at the same time, by the very fact that he has written and published these stories, he insists that we try to understand. He says, " . . . the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination . . . is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves."

If you were unable to join our discussions on Tuesday, July 1, at Main Library at 6:30 p.m. and Thursday, July 17, at West Ashley Branch Library at 11:00 a.m., we hope you will do so here on the blog.

Readalikes: If you liked June's selection . . .

If you liked Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee and Walker Evans, then you might enjoy these books suggested by our discussion group members: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book that grew out of Agee and Evans' trip to Alabama and the article that Fortune never published; and Ava's Man and All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg, who grew up poor in northeastern Alabama.

June Not Fiction Book Discussions

Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee and Walker Evans is an interesting historical document for many reasons. Not only is an early example of experimental long-form reporting that was "new" well before New Journalism became a popular style in the 1960s; it also offers a contemporary portrait of the effects of the bust cycle that followed the boom of the 1920s we read about in last month's book, One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson.

Agee and Walker were sent by Fortune to Alabama in 1936 to write an article about tenant farmers for the magazine. Evans was at the time employed by the Farm Security Administration and took special leave to work with Agee. They spent a month in Hale County, living and working closely with the families whose lives they document. The article was never published, possibly because the section for which it was written, Life and Circumstance, was discontinued, or because the article would be financially and politically challenging for Fortune and its readers, although a definite reason has never been determined. The article was found in 2010 among his personal papers from his home in New York, which were donated by the James Agee Trust to the University of Tennessee Special Collections Library. Baffler Magazine, edited by John Summers, published a portion of the article in 2012, and Melville House published it in its entirety in 2013.

In his preface, Adam Haslett describes Cotton Tenants as " . . . a kind of morally indignant anthropology. An ethnography delivered from the pulpit." How would you describe the book? What is its genre? What role do Evans' photographs serve in Cotton Tenants? Is their message and purpose the same as Agee's text--in other words, do they merely illustrate his text? Or do they make an argument in and of themselves? Do you feel that Cotton Tenants is a good document of the tenant farming system? Although Agee and Evans' purpose was to call attention to their readers' blind spots and prejudices about the socioeconomic and cultural reality of the extreme poverty inherent in the tenant farming system, are they guilty of their own blind spots and prejudices, especially by today's standards? What connections, both in subject and in form, do you see between other books we have read in our discussions, such as The Unwinding by George Packer, Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, and Boomerrang by Michael Lewis? We will consider these questions and more . . .

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, June 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, June 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

Readalikes: If you liked May's selection . . .

If you liked Bill Bryson's One Summer: America 1927, then you might also enjoy these books and documentaries suggested by our discussion group members: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerarld; the recent film version of the novel directed by Baz Luhrmann and with Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby; Ken Burns' documentaries Prohibition and Baseball; and the American Experience documentary Lindbergh.

May Not Fiction Book Discussions

The jacket copy for One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson asks, "What happened in America in the summer of 1927? What didn't happen?" Bryson recounts the events of this giddy yet dark season just before everything changed with Black Tuesday in 1929 and The Great Depression of the 1930s. Among the many events of that summer, Charles Lindbergh made the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight and became a cult hero; Babe Ruth set a home run record; the Dempsey-Tunney boxing match drew over 150,000 spectators, Al Jolson filmed The Jazz Singer, the first "talking film"; Al Capone challenged Prohibition and the IRS challenged him; the Mississippi River basin flooded, leaving thousands of people homeless; anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed; the world's four most powerful bankers made a fateful decision that resulted in Black Tuesday and the Great Depression; and President Calvin Coolidge enjoyed a long vacation in South Dakota.

Bryson notes that "It is hard to imagine now, but Americans in the 1920s had grown up in a world in which most of the most important things happened in Europe. Now suddenly America was dominant in nearly every field--in popular culture, finance and banking, military might, invention and technology. The center of gravity for the planet was moving to the other side of the world . . . " Is there anything about the people and events Bryson describes that marks them as especially American? Is there something that links them together politically or culturally? And what comparisons and contrasts can you make between the 1920s and today in America politically, economically, and culturally? We began our discussions this year with George Packer's idea that "There have been unwindings every generation or two . . . Each decline brought renewal, each implosion released energy, out of each unwinding came a new cohesion." Did One Summer leave you optimistic or pessimistic about our future as a nation?

A number of critics have said that One Summer is merely a collection of disparate anecdotes whose purpose is to amuse and that it lacks any real thesis or analysis. Do you agree? And even if this is an accurate assessment of the book, is it necessarily a problem?

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

Readalikes: If you liked April's selection . . .

If you enjoyed Simon Winchester's The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible, then you might also like these books suggested by our discussion group members: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann, The Fourth Part of the World: An Astonishing Epic of Global Discovery, Imperial Ambition, and the Birth of America by Toby Lester, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick, and The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell All present American history from an in-depth and eye-opening point of view you most likely didn't get from your high school history textbook.