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

If you liked Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward, then you might also like these titles suggested by Ward's publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing: Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones and Where the Line Bleeds; Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying; Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother; Maya Angelou, Mom & Me & Mom and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Mitchell S. Jackson, The Residue Years; John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers; David Berg, Run, Brother, Run; Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World; Margaret Wrinkle, Wash; Toni Morrison, Home; Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi; Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie; Mary Williams, The Lost Daughter.

And our discussion group members recommend the book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson and the film: Beasts of the Southern Wild directed by Benh Zeitlin and adapted by Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar from Alibar's one-act play Juicy and Delicious.

September Not Fiction Book Discussions

Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward explores the legacy of systemic racism in American culture. In just four years, Ward lost five young men among her family and friends to seemingly random and unrelated causes: her brother Joshua to a car accident, her friend Ronald to suicide, her cousin C. J. to another car accident, her friend Demond to murder, and her friend Roger to a drug overdose. In trying to come to terms with these great losses, Ward discovers a unifying condition--all were poor, Black, and male in the South. In writing her memoir, she says, "My hope is that . . . I'll understand a bit better why this epidemic happened, about how the history of racism and economic inequality and lapsed public and personal responsibility festered and turned sour and spread here."

The essence of what she comes to understand is society's devaluation of Blacks, and, most insidious of all, Blacks' devaluation of themselves: "My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn't trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us we were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within."

An interviewer for Vogue asked Ward how she would like to see her memoir received, and she replied, “Ideally, I’d like readers to see the young men and women I write about as human beings: complicated and alive and unique. And I hope that the experience of seeing my characters as real, of sympathizing with them, would change the reader so that the next time another young black man or woman is killed, someone will be held accountable. Perhaps, in addition to the person who commits the crime, even the culture that engenders the phenomena as well? But that’s the optimist in me. The pessimist simply wants readers to find something that speaks to them, that makes them feel, that takes them outside of their experience and makes them live another reality.” Ward's loving yet honest descriptions of her family, friends, and community revalue them, revealing the complex interworkings of societal and individual responsibility. We come to know these people, and as we do, their stories embody the statistics about race and poverty in a way we can no longer avoid feeling connected to in a deeply personal way. As author Robert Olen Butler says, "The tears we weep with Jesmyn Ward are for all of us, are about all of us."

How do Ward's complex narrative structure, setting, and characterization affect your feelings about the larger cultural and political issues she illustrates? How does Men We Reaped help you understand recent stories about race and violence in the news? We will consider these questions and more.

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

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

If you liked Son of a Gun: A Memoir by Justin St. Germain, then you might also enjoy these books suggested by the author as inspirational to his writing process and by our discussion group members as informative or just plain good.

An interviewer for Barnes and Noble notes that “The New York Times Book Review . . . compared your memoir to The Tender Bar by J.R, Moehringer and Another Bull—Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn. Were these books touchstones for you? What books helped you chart a path to writing a memoir?” St. Germain said, “They were. I have well-thumbed copies of both. I like and admire The Tender Bar — I can't drive by Camelback Mountain in Phoenix without thinking of a particularly great passage from it, which I won't spoil for those who haven't read it — but Nick Flynn's book was probably more of a touchstone, because I first read it before I'd set out to write a memoir, and it helped me understand the possibilities of the form. There were so many others: I must have read a hundred memoirs while I was writing mine. Some memoirs or memoir-ish books that come to mind as particularly influential: Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and In Pharoah's Army, Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, all of Didion's nonfiction, Richard Wright's Black Boy, Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller, John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers, and, for obvious reasons, James Ellroy's memoir of his mother's murder, My Dark Places. But maybe the biggest single influence was In Cold Blood, a book you have to reckon with somehow if you're going to write about murder in America.”

Our readers suggested Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture by Michael A. Bellesiles and Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III.

And we suggest the September title, Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward, another memoir of young men lost to violence and the grief of the loved ones they leave behind, because of an interesting connection between the two books and authors. In a Publishers Weekly feature article in which PW’s top 10 authors picked their favorite books of 2013, Jesmyn Ward chose Son of a Gun. She said, “I remember that time [just after 9/11] clearly: the whole nation was grieving. I had recently lost my brother, so I spent those days doubly reeling, as did Justin. I know this because Justin and I have talked about our respective experiences. We are bonded in our grief—and in our need to understand it more clearly through our writing. We are both novelists at heart, but we found ourselves compelled to tell these stories.”

August Not Fiction Book Discussions

Son of a Gun: A Memoir by Justin St. Germain takes on large subjects in American culture: gun violence, domestic violence, and the class divide.

St. Germain's mother Debbie was shot to death by her fifth husband, Ray, a former law enforcement officer, while the two were living, out of work and off the grid, in the desert outside of Tombstone, Arizona. Starting with these facts straight from a lurid but all-too-common headline, St. Germain introduces the reader to the independent, competent, complex woman who raised him. Debbie was a former Army paratrooper and small business owner who raised two sons as a single mother. St. Germain says, "She liked horses and men, but's that's not who she was." By telling the story of his life growing up with Debbie, his investigation into her murder, and his own journey through the stages of grief, St. Germain offers a moving tribute to his mother.

In addition to his personal story, St. Germain also tells the story of Tombstone and the mythic gunfight at the OK Corral, deflating the myth and showing how Wyatt Earp's "legacy leads straight to Ray, right down to the mustache and the badge and the belief that a man solves problems with violence." In her New York Times review of the book, Alexandra Fuller says that "St. Germain's bigger story, the one amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation, is about a place awash with guns and paranoia, where men and women toil at grueling, thankless jobs and make misguided alliances in a desperate attempt to defend against loneliness." In an interview with Barnes and Noble, St. Germain said, "I set out to tell my mother's story, but along the way I kept running into the unavoidable reality of how common stories like hers are in contemporary America. Which forced me to consider possible reasons for that . . . : our love affair with guns, the egregious and destabilizing class divide, and our acceptance of violence against women and violence more generally, especially as it relates to our ideas about masculinity. On one hand, I didn't feel qualified to tackle those issues directly, and was afraid that approach might overshadow the particular story I was trying t tell. On the other, I do hope her story sheds light on them, because while the blame falls properly on her murderer, those issues certainly contributed to her death, just like they contribute to so many other acts of violence."

Near the end of the book, St. Germain writes, "There are no clues left, no mystery to solve. I know what happened. I just don't know why." Do you think St. Germain has found closure even without full understanding? Does it surprise you that he owns guns in his present life? What does the book's title say about masculinity in American culture? Is there a solution to gun violence and domestic violence in our country? We will consider these questions and more.

We hope you will join the discussion of this Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award Winner: Tuesday, August 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, August 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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.