July Not Fiction Book Discussions

In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides is another thrilling story of men and boats, this one a cool read set in Arctic ice for one of Charleston's warmest months.

Our central protagonist, Navy lieutenant George Washington De Long, captain of the Jeannette, warned, "Wintering in the pack may be a thrilling thing to read about alongside a warm fire, but the actual thing is sufficient to make any man prematurely old." In July 1879, De Long and his crew of 32 men set sail from San Francisco on the USS Jeannette in search of a passage to the North Pole. Their voyage was funded and promoted by New York Herald publisher and eccentric Gilded Age baron James Gordon Bennett, Jr., and based, disastrously, upon incorrect speculation that at the North Pole was an open, warm water sea. Just two months into the journey, the ship was trapped in pack ice, where it drifted for two years. Then, just hours after breaking free of the ice, it sank, leaving the crew nearly 1,000 miles from the nearest land, the Arctic coast of Siberia. Three boats set out to reach land . . . To say more about what happened would spoil a long, hot summer day's read.

Sides notes that Bennett and De Long were well-matched "co-conspirators in a quest." Bennett was "a brilliant publisher with electric sensibilities and a profound intuition for what moved and mesmerized the American public" and had "a bottomless appetite for a story that could usher in the modern world." He understood the fascination that the North Pole held for the world in the late 1800s as one of the last unexplored, unconquered places on earth and that "the fur-cloaked men who ventured into the Arctic had become national idols--the aviators, the astronauts, the knights-errant of their day. . . . their quest informed by a kind of dark romance and a desperate chivalry." De Long had grown up an over-protected and bookish boy reading and dreaming of naval adventure. He would become the hero of Bennett's tale. He was "a determined, straight-ahead sort of man, efficient and thorough, and he burned with ambition." His motto was "Do it now." Bennett and De Long each saw the potential for himself in the story of this expedition.

What, in your opinion, is the legacy of "the grand and terrible polar voyage of the USS Jeannette"? Did it contribute to the scientific understanding of Arctic, or was it merely a publicity stunt pulled off at great cost to the men who suffered through it? Why are we, as readers, hungry for stories of adventure in unexplored places, of striving and suffering? And what do you make of the great irony that, as Sides notes, by 2050 climate change, one of the stories most resisted and denied by the general public in the last few decades, will have rendered the North Pole an Open Polar Sea during much of the year after all?

We hope you will join us: Tuesday, July 7, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, July 23, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you enjoyed The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown, then you might also like the Best Sports History Books as rated by Goodreads.com members. You might also like The Greatest Generation, The Greatest Generation Speaks: Letters and Reflections, and An Album of Memories: Personal Histories from the Greatest Generation, all by Tom Brokaw.

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

If you enjoyed Factory Man by Beth Macy, then you might also like these books and films suggested by other discussion group members. Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang; The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn; Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus; Elsewhere: A Memoir by Richard Russo; Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee; Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward; Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life by Robert Reich; The Globalization Paradox by Dani Rodrik; W. Edward Deming's philosophy; and the film Norma Rae with Sally Field.

June Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown is a classic tale of the hero on a journey, complete with mentor figures, allies and enemies, and, of course, an ultimate quest. Joe Rantz, who had been abandoned by his family, and eight other working-class young men from the Pacific Northwest worked together at the University of Washington during the Great Depression to become one of the greatest crew teams of all time, winning the gold medal at the 1936 Olympics against Adolf Hitler's team.

The Boys in the Boat has been on bestseller lists since publication, perhaps because it shares the fundamental appeal and structure of what Joseph Campbell calls the monomyth in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces: "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." What do you think Joe Rantz' true quest is, and what knowledge and powers does he acquire on his journey?What significance does his point of view have for the unfolding of Brown's narrative that another point of view might not have? What was so special about Joe that he became the element that finally brought the boys of the Husky Clipper together?

The Boys in the Boat is also the story of a generation of young men and women, what Tom Brokaw calls "the Greatest Generation," during one of the most difficult times in American and world history. What are the special qualities of this generation, and how did their experiences with the Great Depression and World War II influence their development? What do you think Americans today can learn from this generation?

Author David Laskin calls The Boys in the Boat "Chariots of Fire with oars." To get a feel for the drama of the 1936 Olympics and the great athleticism of crew teams, watch this trailer from the publisher, Viking/Penguin, for The Boys in the Boat:

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

May Not Fiction Book Discussions

What is it about an underdog that makes for a good story? In Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local--and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy, we have two underdogs, John D. Bassett III, the factory man of the title, and American industry itself.

Bassett, Chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company in Galax, Virginia, is a complicated hero. Macy says,

Once in a reporter's career, if one is very lucky, a person like John D. Bassett III comes along. JBIII is inspirational. He's brash. He's a sawdust-covered good old boy from rural Virginia, a larger-than-life rule breaker who for more than a decade has stood almost single-handedly against the outflow of furniture jobs from America. "He's an asshole!" more than one of his competitors barked when they heard I was writing a book about globalization with JBIII as a main character. Over the course of researching this book, over the course of hearing his many lectures and listening to him evade my questions by telling me the same stories over and over, there were times that I agreed.

Bassett fought against family intrigue to take charge of Vaughan-Bassett, and then he fought against the offshoring of American furniture manufacturing to Asia, to save 700 American factory jobs. As Shawn Donnan notes in a review of Factory Man in the Financial Times, "There is an element of Don Quixote about it."

Bassett's family built their furniture dynasty in the early 20th century through exploitation of American labor and the manufacture of an inferior product, and Asian manufacturers used those same business ethics and techniques to shift the profits of the furniture industry overseas. Bassett successfully fought this trend, but can American industry fight globalization? Macy said in an interview with Talking Biz News,

I hope the reader will come away from Factory Man with a deep understanding of why their furniture and other Asia-manufactured products cost a little bit less than they once did--and what that means for the 5 million Americans who used to make those products. I hope they're entertained and inspired by my main character, an iconoclast multimillionaire who cares enough for the generations of workers who made his family rich that when others in his industry were closing their factories, he dug in his heels and said, Oh hell no. I hope the families impacted by all the job losses take some small comfort in seeing the full story of globalization told: That work meant something to them. I hope policy makers and business leaders reading it are inspired to compete in the global economy based on more than just the quick-hit bottom line.

What do you think of JBIII and his company?  Is his example feasible for all of American industry? Or is his populist and Quixotic quest dependent upon his unique personality and circumstances? Is globalization really the villain? Or is it the American shareholder system, as Ethan Rouen suggests in his review in Fortune? Could American industry somehow turn globalization to its advantage?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, May 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, May 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you enjoyed The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, then you might also like these books and films suggested by our discussion group members:

• Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux by John Neihardt
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown
• The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick
• Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne
• The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity by Jill Lepore
• 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History winner Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People by Elizabeth A. Fenn
• The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America by Timothy Egan
• Lonesome Dove both the novel by Larry McMurtry and the television miniseries
• the film Dances With Wolves starring Kevin Costner
• the film Red River starring John Wayne

April Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin illustrates the idea that, as the authors state in their Notes and Bibliography, " . . . history is fable agreed on." We think we know a story. In the old Westerns, the good guys defeated the bad guys, cowboys defeated the Indians. Then, in the last few decades, historians reconsidered the story, the bad guys defeated the good guys, cowboys defeated the Indians. And then a book like this complicates the story. Who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys? Who defeated whom? And for what purpose? Did their ends justify their means?

Drury and Clavin tell the story of Red Cloud, the Oglala Sioux warrior who was the only warrior in the 300-year-long war between Euro-Americans and Native Americans to defeat the United States government and force it to sue for peace on his terms--even though the U. S. eventually won the war. It is often said that the victor gets to tell the story, so that is at least part of the reason Red Cloud's had been largely forgotten. Drury and Clavin draw upon Red Cloud's own autobiography, along with other primary documents, to bring it back to common knowledge. But it is also a complicated story full of violence on all sides, and lies and trickery, especially on the part of the United States government. Red Cloud emerges as a brutal warrior and shrewd political strategist fighting to preserve the Plains Indians' way of life. Drury and Clavin point out that the relentless advance of white settlement for land, buffalo hides, and gold along the pioneer trails and rail lines would turn out to be more effective than any act of war on the part of the United States government at defeating the Indians, a fact that Red Cloud admitted on his first visit to Washington in 1870. As he told Secretary of the Interior Joseph P. Cox, "Now we are melting like snow on the hillside, while you are growing like spring grass." When asked why the United States fought Red Cloud, General Bisbee replied, "My only answer could be we did it for Civilization."

What do you think? What is your interpretation of Bisbee's answer? Do you think this is what most of the United States' soldiers and citizens believed? What kind of place would the United States be now if we had learned to accept different interpretations of the word "civilized"? And what do you think of Red Cloud? How did his childhood determine the man and leader he grew up to be? Do you feel Drury and Clavin's portrayal of Red Cloud and his cause was fair and impartial? Did you find that you were sympathetic to Red Cloud and the Sioux, or was it difficult for you to reconcile the brutality of the Indian battle ethic with the justness of their cause? And finally, although Drury and Clavin drew upon primary sources to write this book, we see how various participants in the events depicted strove to portray their involvement in the best possible light while blaming and even demonizing others. Given that human error and emotion play a large part in how we recall and record events, how accurate do you feel our understanding of any historical event can be?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, April 7, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, April 23, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.