Notes from August's Not Fiction Book Discussion

In an interesting follow-up to our July discussion of Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, one of our discussion members brought in a newspaper article about the erosion and loss of top soil caused by the flooding in the Midwest this summer. The article notes that, just as with the Dust Bowl, farmers and environmentalists disagree about what to do with erosion-prone land: farm it in hopes of good yields and high prices to make up for crops lost in the floods, or plant it with native grasses, ground cover, and trees to prevent further erosion. We agreed that the Dust Bowl offered a very clear lesson in the best way to proceed.


A central topic of our discussion of One Drop by Bliss Broyard was whether Anatole and Sandy Broyard should have concealed Anatole's identity as a person of mixed race from his children until his death. All of us felt that he should have shared this information earlier in their lives, yet we did question whether we have a right to know everything about our families and what information ought to be shared and what kept private. This question begs another about Anatole Broyard: To what extent were his decisions regarding his identity related to his desire to preserve his own self-image, and to what extent were they the result of his concern for his family? We agreed that Bliss Broyard does a remarkable job of portraying her father's complex motivations, motivations that he may not have been entirely aware of himself, and that she does so in a manner that is both candid and forgiving. Bliss Broyard is also honest about her own motivations in researching her father's family history: "I hoped to discover that I was a complicated person, and since I was too young to feel I'd earned my own complications, I'd happily take some from my father."

An important theme of Bliss Broyard's book is the authenticity of one's identity. In one important scene, Bliss Broyard takes a personality test four different times, only to have it reveal each time that she is an imposter, that, as the administrator tells her, she is "not living in a way that's true to who you are." In a later scene, Bliss imagines the thoughts that must have gone through her father's mind when he was faced with a decision about which race/ethnicity box to check on his application for a social security card. She tells us that "the occasion has become the repository for all my imaginings about the different moments over the years when he had to make a calculation about how to describe his race." We discussed whether Anatole Broyard was an imposter, and decided that to some degree he was. One group member suggested that Anatole was unable to complete his novel because he would not follow the advice to "write what you know." Another member pointed out the anger that some of his relatives felt about his insistence that race was not important to his identity--because he looked white, he could choose to pass and claim it was not as important to him as it actually was. However, we decided that Bliss Broyard has come to an understanding of both herself and her father that offers all of us a useful way of thinking about race and identity in the United States today: "From my own father, I inherited a legacy that connected me to the worst and best American traditions: from the racial oppression spawned by slavery to the opportunities created through becoming self-made. Recognizing my forebears' place in the continuum of history has made me appreciate my own responsibilities as a citizen--of my community, my country, and the world--in a way that simply paying my taxes or casting a vote never did. . . . I may never be able to answer the question What am I? yet the fault lies not in me but with the question itself."

How important do you believe being "true to who you are" is? If you have read One Drop, has it influenced that opinion in any way? We hope you will join our discussion of this multilayered book and the many important questions it raises.

August Not Fiction Book Discussion

We hope you will join us August 5 at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library on Calhoun Street for our discussion of Bliss Broyard's memoir One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets. With this memoir, the Not Fiction Book Discussion group begins an exploration of identity that we will continue with each book through December. Broyard's father, influential New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard, concealed from his children until his death the fact that he was of mixed race ancestry, that he was black. Broyard examines not only her own response to her father's choice, but also what his choice could have meant to him, and she provides a social and historical view of her family's 250-year history in America. While intensely personal, Broyard's narrative is also a broader consideration of racial identity in America and the basic human urge to "know" who we are.

Notes from July's Not Fiction Book Discussion

Timothy Egan's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, asked him in an interview, "Why a book on the Dust Bowl now?" He responded, " To me, there was an urgency to get this story now because the last of the people who lived through those dark years are in their final days. It's their story, and I didn't want them to take this narrative of horror and persistence to the grave. At the same time, this part of America--the rural counties of the Great Plains--looks like it's dying. Our rural past seems so distant, like Dorothy's Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. Yet it was within the lifetime of people living today that nearly one in three Americans worked on a farm. Now, the site of the old Dust Bowl--which covers parts of five states--is largely devoid of young families and emptying out by the day. It's flyover country to most Americans. But it holds this remarkable tale that should be a larger part of our shared national story." Indeed, none of us who attended the discussion of The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl were fully aware of the causes, extent, and results of the Dust Bowl until we read Egan's book. And reading it in the context of what we learned about the connection between agricultural policies and the fundamental health of our environment from both Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe, we wondered how it can be that this event seems to have slipped from common memory and why we just cannot seem to learn from history.

We marveled at the tenacity of those who remained in the Dust Bowl in spite of the poverty, desolation, and death they faced. They seemed to have felt a strong sense of place, even when that place changed beyond recognition into a desert of dust. We agreed that Egan does a good job of conveying their stories and describing the power of the dust storms. One of the most poignant passages in Egan's book, however, one that illustrates this love of place, is from the diary of Don Hartwell: " . . . this year gives us one more day to hold to the place which has meant so much to me in life and tradition in the last 35 years, from the scent of the wild plum bush and the violets and the blue grass in April, to the little dry thunder showers in June which break away late in the afternoon, with the meadow larks singing and the wild roses which seem to be brighter and smell sweeter when wet with rain than any other time." We also gained a great appreciation for the insight and foresight of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Hugh Bennett, the head of the soil conservation effort Operation Dust Bowl, whose policies helped to begin the healing of the country and the land of the Dust Bowl.

Although we enjoyed the drama and immediacy of Egan's narrative, we wish he had spent more time describing the aftermath of the decade of the Dust Bowl, how the land was slowly but only partially restored and what life is like there today. Several of us also felt oppressed by the accumulation of negative description and event in Egan's narrative, but we agreed that this sense of loss and also of foreboding was Egan's purpose, to sober us and to provoke us to avoid similar mistakes in the future. In fact, in the interview with Houghton Mifflin, he notes that "[t]he Dust Bowl story is a parable, in a way, about what happens when people push the limits of the land."

To see some images of the Great Plains and the Dust Bowl, you can visit the Library of Congress's American Memory collection online. To view part of the film The Plow That Broke The Plains, created in 1936 by Pare Lorentz, visit the Internet Archive online.

We hope you will add your comments about Egan's book to our discussion. And we hope that you will join us for our next discussion, either Tuesday, August 5, at Main Library or here on the blog, of Bliss Broyard's memoir One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Hidden Secrets, as we move on to a consideration of identity.

July Not Fiction Book Discussion

At our July Not Fiction Book Discussion, we will explore the connections we see between the last several books we have read and Timothy Egan's National Book Award-winning The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. During the 1930's, America's High Plains were swept by terrible dust storms that were the result of irresponsible agricultural practices combined with drought. The Dust Bowl is our nation's greatest environmental disaster--to date. We will read about and discuss this event from America's history in an attempt to understand how it happened and perhaps also how to be better stewards of our land and the food it provides in the future. Egan brings to life the Dust Bowl and the families and communities it affected through vivid historical reportage that, as a reviewer from the Cleveland Plain Dealer notes, "haunts a reader from the first pages." We invite you to join our discussion Tuesday, July 1 at 7:00 p.m. in the Main Library's Meeting Room A or here on the blog.

Notes from June's Not Fiction Book Discussion

Do you recall when you first heard about global warming and climate change? For some of us attending last Tuesday's discussion of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert, it was as long ago as the 1970s, when the first official reports were released on human impact on climate change, and some of us also recalled Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring that exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT and questioned the concept of benign technological progress.

So why has it taken so long for politicians and the general public to become alarmed about human impact on climate change? We noted that the issue seemed to drop out of general public consciousness during the 1980s and and early 1990s. Kolbert even-handedly and succinctly outlines what happened during those years--environmentally, scientifically, and politically--while we were not paying attention.

We acknowledged that global warming could become more than a media buzz word for those of us here in Charleston, SC who own or rent houses at or below sea level. Our discussion revealed that we are ambivalent about whether man or nature will prove more powerful--whether we will cooperate and use technology or find other solutions to potentially catastrophic climate change, or whether we will continue to put personal comfort and corporate profit before the collective good. However, we did agree that there seem to be many grass roots movements to offer hope, such as The Compact, which encourages people not to buy anything except essentials such as food and medicine for a period of time, and the local food movement. We shared the small ways we as individuals try to make a difference, such as using refillable water bottles rather than disposable plastic ones, carpooling, shopping at the local farmers market, reducing or eliminating meat from our diets, taking reusable shopping bags to the grocery store, replacing incandescent bulbs with fluorescent ones, and using heat and air conditioning moderately. And we are encouraged that grade school, high school, and college students are much more aware of the immediacy and importance of the issue of global warming than we were at their age.

Here is a brief list of resources Kolbert presents for learning more about climate change and how we as individuals can reduce our "carbon footprints." For others, see the Resources section at the end of her book.

• Cities for Climate Protection Campaign http://www.iclei.org/


• Southern Alliance for Clean Energy http://www.cleanenergy.org/


• RealClimate http://www.realclimate.org/


• Goddard Institute for Space Studies/National Aeronautics and Space Administration http://www.giss.nasa.gov/


• National Environmental Trust http://www.net.org/


• American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy http://www.aceee.org/ and http://www.greencars.com/


• Natural Resources Defense Council http://www.nrdc.org/


• Union of Concerned Scientists http://www.ucsusa.org/

We hope you will add your thoughts to our discussion and consider joining our next discussion, about Timothy Egan's book The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, either Tuesday, July 1, at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library on Calhoun Street, or here on the blog.

June Not Fiction Book Discussion

For our June Not Fiction Book Discussion, we will be reading Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert. The book began as a three-part series for The New Yorker, for which she won a National Magazine Award in 2006. Kolbert's title suggests her approach to the overwhelming topic of global warming--she provides a concise written record of her observations, interactions, and conversations from her travels around the world investigating her topic. We hope you will join our conversation, either on Tuesday, June 3, 2008, at 7:00 p.m. at the Main Library on Calhoun Street in Meeting Room A or here on the blog, about this brief but powerful book that many reviewers have called the Silent Spring (by Rachel Carson) for our time.

Notes from May's Not Fiction Book Discussion

We began our discussion of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by comparing our own shopping and eating habits to Pollan's four meals and how the book had impacted these habits. Many of us said we were more conscious of the health, economic, environmental, and cultural implications of our shopping and eating choices. Some of us have already made small changes in our shopping and eating habits, such as visiting our local farmers' market more often and reading labels to look for hidden corn ingredients and other signs of highly processed food. However, all of us were left perplexed by how best to incorporate the information in Pollan's book into our lives. We thought we were doing ourselves and the environment a favor by buying organic products at our local alternative commercial markets; we thought we were upholding our intention to support businesses that treat animals humanely by buying dairy and meat products sold in these stores. We now realize that industrial organic has complicated our choices. Rather than answering questions for us, The Omnivore's Dilemma left us with more. Thus Pollan has accomplished for us as readers what he intended, for the theme of his book is the importance of knowing how our eating links us to the world around us. He asks us, "But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found it's way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. . . . For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world."

To read an exchange between Michael Pollan and John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, regarding that company's efforts to offer consumers products that are ethically and environmentally sound, visit The CEO's Blog at http://www.wholefoods.com/. To read more articles by Michael Pollan about food, visit his website at http://www.michaelpollan.com/ and look under Writing.

We will continue our conversation about our relationship with our environment in the next two Not Fiction Book Discussions. For June we will read Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert, and for July we will read The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan. We hope you will join us, either at Main Library or here on the blog.