September Not Fiction Book Discussions

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy is a perfect example of how narrative nonfiction can help us to better understand current events by providing the in-depth stories necessary for us to identify with the people behind the headlines.

Just this week, Purdue Pharma filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in an effort to shield itself and its owners, the Sackler family, one of the richest families in America, from over 2,600 federal and state lawsuits concerning their role in America's opioid addiction epidemic. It is estimated that at its peak, over 100 people died every day of opioid drug overdoses, and Macy describes the devastating effects of addiction on these individuals, their families, and their communities. In fact, Beth Macy's clear-eyed and compassionate reporting may be in part responsible for a growing awareness of the extent and causes of the crisis. Although it is a sobering, infuriating, and heartbreaking read, Dopesick is also inspiring because Macy profiles individuals who have devoted their lives to raising awareness about and combating the epidemic, and she provides an overview of the different treatment protocols and of different models of community response.

What do you think? Before reading Dopesick, were you aware of the extent to which the opioid addiction epidemic had spread in America? Do you know someone actively experiencing or recovering from addiction? How does Dopesick help you to understand what they and their families are going through? To what degree do you think Purdue Pharma, Johnson & Johnson, and other pharmaceutical companies should be held responsible for the opioid addiction epidemic? To what degree should the Sackler family be held responsible? Within the addiction treatment community, there are two very different approaches to treatment, abstinence and medicine-assisted therapy, and, in general, effective and affordable treatment is difficult to find. What were your thoughts about the nature of addiction and its treatment before reading Dopesick? Have they changed? What strategies--legal, medical, cultural--would you suggest? Macy profiles a large number of people touched either personally or professionally by the opioid addiction epidemic. Which stories of loss and grief, of personal and professional responsibility or irresponsibility, of self-sacrifice or greed most moved you? Why? Macy both profiles specific individuals and provides an overview of the crisis. Does she manage to integrate both the intimate and the broad view successfully? Does Dopesick end on a note of hope or of despair? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about our collective will to find solutions?

We hope you will join the discussion: Thursday, September 19 at 11:00 a.m. and here on the blog.

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

If you enjoyed How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan, then you might also enjoy these books suggested by our discussion group members:

Outside Looking In: A Novel by T. C. Boyle
Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality by Barbara Bradley Hagerty
The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life by Ayelet Waldman

And check out this fabulous list of resources, including further reading and viewing, on Michael Pollan's website: https://michaelpollan.com/resources/psychedelics-resources/.

August Not Fiction Book Discussions

With How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, Food Rules, and Cooked, shifts his focus from how we might best feed our bodies to how we could, to paraphrase Jefferson Airplane, feed our heads.

Pollan admits that he is a philosophical materialist and "less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked," yet he was intrigued by research that shows these substances can aid those experiencing addiction, depression, trauma, chronic pain, and the existential fear of dying. He blends incisive journalism and candid memoir to explore the history, politics, science, and potential medical uses of psychedelics as well as his own "ineffable" personal experience of psilocybin, LSD, and 5-MeO-DMT. He discovers that, in a carefully controlled environment, with the aid of psychedelics, we can temporarily experience life without the filter of the default mode network of our brain, which relies on habit to help us efficiently navigate the world. Without this filter, we can literally expand our consciousness, cultivating what Pollan thinks of as neural diversity.

What do you think? What were your thoughts and feelings about psychedelics, Timothy Leary, and the 1960s "turn on, tune in, drop out" culture before reading Pollan's book? Have you changed your mind? How? Considering their potential benefits and risks, should psychedelics be regulated for medical use? Should they be available for recreational use? Pollan includes his thoughts and feelings about psychedelics and his own experience with them in his narrative. How did this affect your understanding of the topic? Did he adequately explain both the scientific technicalities and the "ineffable" quality of the experience itself? Pollan notes that there is "a universal desire to change consciousness" and that "[o]ne of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful--wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing to which the adult brain has closed itself." Meditation and prayer can also offer access to this wonder-filled state. Have you ever had an experience of expanded consciousness, of wonder? How would you describe it?

We hope you will 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.

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

If you enjoyed American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic by Victoria Johnson, then you might also like these books recommended by our discussion group members:

• Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species by Sean B. Carroll.
• Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
• The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
• The Collector: David Douglas and the Natural History of the Northwest by Jack Nisbet
• Hamilton : The Revolution : Being the Complete Libretto of the Broadway Musical, with a True Account of Its Creation, and Concise Remarks on Hip-Hop, the Power of Stories, and the New America  by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter.
• Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf
• The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf

July Not Fiction Book Discussions

In The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson, we read about the obsessive and even selfish aspects of a deep interest in natural history, and in American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic by Victoria Johnson, we read about the more generous and civic-minded.

Dr. David Hosack was a contemporary of America's founding generation, and he is perhaps most famous for his role as the attending physician at the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. More importantly, he was also a contemporary of the great explorers and naturalists of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Joseph A. Banks, John and William Bartram, and Alexander von Humboldt. Hosack extended his commitment to medicine and building civic organizations to a deep passion in botany and establishing a botanical garden that would be an educational and research center for the new nation. His Elgin Botanical Garden, created at great personal cost, became the model for the New York Botanical Garden and the more than four hundred botanical gardens and arboreta in the United States today. But as Johnson notes,

. . . Hosack's greatest legacy is perhaps the one that is the hardest to see. He showed his fellow citizens how to build institutions. Over and over, in the face of criticism and misfortune, he rallied people around him to create the charitable, medical, and cultural institutions that make cities worth inhabiting and that educate a nation for generations to come. Philanthropic work is hard and complex. The daily lives of civic organizations--full of meetings, bylaws, elections, and the like--strike many people as dull and unheroic. Because this work and its results are collective, we can't easily single out one hero to celebrate. Yet they take just as much patience, ingenuity, and money as any discovery or invention. Perhaps today more than ever, Hosack's quieter sort of heroism deserves emulation. He dreamed from boyhood about what his generation could do to improve the lives of others.

What do you think? Johnson notes, "We like our heroes to stand alone, so we can easily discern and celebrate their achievements." What are the qualities and achievements we usually celebrate in American heroes? Were you familiar with David Hosack before reading American Eden? If so, was it for his role in the Hamilton/Burr duel, or for his more significant contributions? How would you describe Hosack? We also tend to like our heroes to be uncomplicated, entirely good, but as with many of the founding generation of America, Hosack not only did not take a stand against slavery, his household included enslaved people. How can we make sense of the contradictory aspects of Hosack's character and behavior? As Johnson points out, civic organizations make a city, state, or country worth inhabiting. What kinds of organizations do you feel improve the life of your city, state, or country? Hosack had difficulty securing government support for Elgin Botanical Garden. Should government or individual citizens support these organizations? Looking ahead to the subject of our next two books, what role should government play in research, provision, and regulation of health care and pharmaceuticals?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, July 2, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, July 18, 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 Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, then you might also enjoy these books recommended by our discussion group members:

• Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South by Christopher Dickey
• Charleston's Avery Center: From Education and Civil Rights to Preserving the African American Experience by Edmund L. Drago with Marvin Dulaney
• Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston
• America's Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March towards Civil War by Joseph Kelly
• The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison, with a forward by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Black Charlestonians: A Social History 1822-1885 by Bernard E. Powers

June Not Fiction Book Discussions

Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts asks us to consider how communal memory is constructed and how that memory affects our relationships within our communities. Kytle and Roberts, historians at California State University, Fresno, explore in depth how Charleston, South Carolina, remembers--or rather, misremembers, or even forgets--its central role in slavery, and how this communal act of misremembering and forgetting affects race relations in the United States today.

Kytle and Blain document in nuanced detail the systematic and institutionalized whitewashing and outright suppression of the truth about slavery in historical tourism beginning as soon as the 1860s, bolstered by Jim Crow violence into the 1960s, and continuing even today by examining how national holidays are celebrated, how historical figures are monumentalized, and how black culture is interpreted and often appropriated. Kytle and Blain help us see that the romantic, moonlight-and-magnolia version of the South and of Charleston in particular that draws thousands of tourists each year rests on fundamental misconceptions. As Kytle and Blain were completing work on Denmark Vesey's Garden in 2015, Dylann Roof visited Charleston, stoking his racial hatred at cultural and historical sites, and ultimately shooting nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. church, the congregation of Denmark Vesey, the black revolutionary who plotted a failed slave insurrection in 1822. Kytle and Blain connect the national communal narrative about slavery to America's current racial divide:

It is hardly a coincidence that whitewashed memories of slavery, the Confederacy, and the Civil War find more fertile ground on the political right than on the left. These ideas, after all, have long reinforced reactionary positions. A century ago, the Lost Cause provided the intellectual and emotional foundation for segregationist laws and customs. Today, the enduring misunderstanding born from Lost Cause mythology make it easier to oppose policies and programs that would redress the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow--from affirmative action and more progressive taxation to criminal justice reform and reparations.

What do you think? If you grew up in Charleston, how does Denmark Vesey's Garden compare with your understanding of the history and culture of your hometown? If you were a tourist in Charleston before moving here, what narrative, explicit or implicit, were you offered by the tours and programs in which you participated? How does Denmark Vesey's Garden challenge this narrative? In your opinion, is Charleston and the United States making progress in having an honest conversation about slavery and its historical legacy? Does it adequately acknowledge black experience and culture? In addition to appropriately interpreting our communal history, what can we do to facilitate this crucial conversation?

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