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

If you enjoyed The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore, then you might also enjoy these books suggested by our discussion group members: Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics by Noah Berlatsky; Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World's Most Famous Heroine by Tim Hanley; When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins; Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore; Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World by Linda Hirshman (just published this month); and My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem (to be published in October).

October Not Fiction Book Discussions

Our October book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson, is an inspiring memoir by a real-life hero. Stevenson is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and a professor of law at New York University Law School. He and EJI challenge bias against the poor and people of color and have won relief for dozens of prisoners who have been wrongly imprisoned and condemned. John Grisham says of Stevenson, "Not since Atticus Finch has a fearless and committed lawyer made such a difference in the American South. Though larger than life, Atticus exists only in fiction. Bryan Stevenson, however, is very much alive and doing God's work fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those with no hope. Just Mercy is his inspiring and powerful story."

We thought you might like to know that Starbucks is partnering with Stevenson by making his book available at their coffee shops nationwide at the great price of $10.40, and they are donating 100% of profits from the sale of the book to EJI. You can purchase a copy online or at your favorite neighborhood shop.

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, Esquire, and Time, Just Mercy is also the winner of the Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction, the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction, the Books for a Better Life Award, a Finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize, a Finalist for the Kirkus Reviews Prize, and an American Library Association Notable Book.

We hope you will buy a copy at Starbucks to support EJI or check out a copy from your public library and join the discussion: Tuesday, October 6, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, October 22, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

Watch Bryan Stevenson's inspiring TED talk:

Learn more about Equal Justice Initiative at www.eji.org.

And check back for some questions to consider as you are reading the book!

September Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore is another story of secret identities hidden in plain sight, illustrating the trope that things are not always what they seem. The most popular female superhero of all time, Wonder Woman, was created by a man, William Moulton Marston, who "braided together more than a century of women's rights rhetoric, his own very odd brand of psychology, and, inevitably, his peerless hucksterism."

As well as his complicated family life--an advocate of free love and "love bonds," he lived with two and sometimes three women at once, who became the inspiration for the character, yet kept their relationships a secret. What did you make of William Moulton Marston, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, Olive Byrne, and Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, as individuals and in their relationships with one another? Why do you think they kept their life together a secret even though they advocated for free love?

Marston proclaimed, "Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world." He was inspired by the women's suffrage movement and the birth control movement, yet Wonder Woman's appearance was influenced by erotic pin-up art, and she was frequently depicted in bondage that went beyond the allegorical bonds of oppression of women. What did you make of Marston's feminism? Did he have an enlightened view of women, or was it, as portrayed in both his life and his art, "feminism as fetish"? What complexities of gender perception, gender equality, sexuality, and feminism does Wonder Woman embody? What if Holloway and Byrne had taken over the writing of Wonder Woman after Marston died? What kind of story lines do you think they would have written?

Lepore's central historical argument is that "The fight for women's rights hasn't come in waves. Wonder Woman was a product of the suffragist, feminist, and birth control movements of the 1900s and 1910s and became  a source of the women's liberation and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The fight for women's rights has been a river, wending." What do you think of this argument? Is it accurate? Overstated?

Is it any easier today than in the early days of the women's movement to "have it all"?

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

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

If you enjoyed A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre, then you might also like these books and films suggested by our discussion group members:

• The novels of Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and John Le Carré, especially Le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which is based on the events that exposed the Cambridge Five traitors.
• The nonfiction books A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS by Jennet Conant; Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case by Allen Weinstein; and Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, and Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory by Ben Macintyre.
• The James Bond movies; the movie version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; the movie The Imitation Game; the television series The Bletchley Circle; and the television series MI-5.

You might also want to visit the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., which features the largest collection of international espionage artifacts ever placed on public display. You can learn more at www.spymuseum.org.

August Not Fiction Book Discussions

What stories do we tell about ourselves? What stories do we want to believe about others? And how do these stories affect and even form the foundation of our relationships with others? A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre addresses these questions with one of the most famous spy stories of all time, told "through the prism of personal friendship."

Kim Philby, a British citizen, rose to the upper levels of Britain's counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. For decades, no one detected that he was also a Soviet spy. His deception was made possible by his talent for cultivating friendships within the British and American intelligence agencies. The most important of these friends were Nicholas Elliott, also an agent in MI6, and James Jesus Angleton, head of counterintelligence for the CIA. Because Philby and Elliott were of the same social class, had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same clubs, Elliott was unable to see past his own preconceptions to the fact of Philby's betrayal. Angleton had also gone to public school in Britain, and Philby exemplified for him certain British qualities and values he admired. Over drinks and dinners through the years, Elliott and Angleton passed on information to Philby that allowed him to effectively shut down British and American counterintelligence in the Soviet Union and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of operatives and their families.

Some readers will already be familiar with these events from John Le Carré's novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which is based on the event that exposed the Cambridge Five traitors, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross, as KGB moles in the British intelligence service. In an interview with Kirkus Reviews, Macintyre says, "I don't think it's an accident that some of the greatest novelists have been spies--Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming,  or John Le Carré. In some ways, what spies do is a form of fiction. They create an alternative reality and try to lure people into it. Philby in some ways was a kind of frustrated novelist, and a man of great theater. Never was a man more acutely aware of his role in his own drama."

What do you think? Why did Kim Philby betray his country and the people closest to him? Was it a matter of ideology and personal conviction? Or was it, as Macintyre suggests, that Philby was "addicted to infidelity"? If not, what do you believe motivated him? What kind of personality does it take to be a spy? And how was he able to deceive Elliott and Angleton, two of the most experienced spies in the world as well as his two closest friends? What role did assumptions about social class, education, and profession play in the success of his deception?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, August 4, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, August 20, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you enjoyed In the Kingdom of Ice by Hampton Sides, then you might also like these books suggested by our discussion group members: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert; Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer; Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand; and Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales.

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.