March Notfiction Book Discussions

How does one write a biography of a woman from whom, at best, only one written word survives? Whose story we know from sources who never knew her? Whose political rivals shaped her story for their own benefit? A woman whom we think we know today from salacious depictions in film and literature?

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff acknowledges that Cleopatra "seems the joint creation of Roman propagandists and Hollywood directors," yet Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Schiff takes on the daunting task of discovering who she really was. Schiff notes that "[t]o restore Cleopatra is as much to salvage the few facts as to peel away the encrusted myth and the hoary propaganda." Schiff returns to the classical sources, carefully separating fact from fiction, helping us understand the varied perspectives of Cleopatra's biographers over the centuries, emancipating the Egyptian queen from the stereotype of seductress and restoring the true story of her political acumen in the glittering and treacherous world of Ptolemaic Egypt.

According to biographer Joseph J. Ellis, "It is a beautiful pairing--the most alluring and elusive woman in recorded history, and one of the most gifted biographers of our time. Style, like leadership, is difficult to define, but we know it when we see it. We see it here on every page."

To view images of Cleopatra as she has been imagined through the ages, read Goddess, Queen, Celebrity: 11 Iconic Images of Cleopatra and Why They're Wrong, an essay with photographs by Stacy Schiff in Huffington Post (2010) and All Hail Cleopatra !, a review with photographs by Michael Korda in The Daily Beast (2010).

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, March 6, at Main Library at 6:30 p.m.; Thursday, March 22, at West Ashley Branch Library at 11:00 a.m.; and here on the blog.

February Not Fiction Book Discussions

Last month, we read a biography of Michel de Montaigne, who created the genre of writing we know as the personal essay. Montaigne wrote as an attempt to discover what he thought and felt about the world around him. This month, we will discuss Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan, which continues, over 400 years later, in the spirit of that tradition.

Sullivan, a writer for GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, and others, has been called by his peers one of the best essayists of his generation, a "writer's-writer's writer." In Pulphead, Sullivan gathers together deeply researched and reported essays on American culture, "popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten" (book jacket)--think Axl Rose and Michael Jackson, but also think Andrew Lytle, last of the Southern Agrarians, and Constantine Rafinesque, 19th century naturalist. Inserting himself as a character in most of the essays, Sullivan writes with humor, curiosity, and, most of all, empathy for his subjects' personal sense of purpose and dignity. Through this character's great interest in the world around him, especially those people and events we think we understand but do not, or those people and events that might otherwise be forgotten, we as readers are drawn to consider his subjects with fresh eyes and an open mind. What picture of us as culture do the essays present? And what purpose does Sullivan's persona serve in guiding us on this tour?

Watch a CBS News Author Talk interview with Sullivan in which he talks about the effects of his recent success on his writing, David Foster Wallace, Faulkner, and what he's working on now.

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

January Not Fiction Book Discussions

We begin a new year of discussions with a book likely to make you question the tradition of making New Year's resolutions: Sarah Bakewell's How to Live--Or--A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a Renaissance nobleman, public official, and winegrower, wondered about such things as how to get along with people and how to adjust to the loss of someone you love--essentially, how to live. He explored these questions in a new form of writing for the time that he called essays, meaning attempts at understanding. He gave these digressive and personal essays titles like Of Friendship, How We Laugh and Cry for the Same Thing, Of Thumbs, How Our Mind Hinders Itself, Of Experience.

Sarah Bakewell discovered Montaigne serendipitously, as the only book available in English to while away the time on a train ride in Budapest. Her biography conveys her great affection and admiration for Montaigne, telling the story of his colorful life through the questions he posed and the answers he and his readers over the past four centuries have found in his companionable, witty, and wise writing.

Bakewell says in her Acknowledgements that discovering Montaigne's essays taught her "the Montaignean truth that the best things in life happen when you don't get what you think you want." If this is true, then what does this mean for those often guilt-inducing New Year's resolutions and the bigger question, always hovering over all we do, of how to live? In an article Bakewell wrote for The Independent that was published January 1, 2010, she suggests that Montaigne would tell us not to make resolutions. "He did think, though, that valuable lessons could be learned from looking over a life and taking a longer perspective. Instead of clean breaks and new intentions, what Montaigne sought in his past experience was greater self-understanding. There would always be puzzling areas, but he tried to become familiar with his weaknesses so as to work around them. . . . . This is very different from making resolutions. It does not mean rejecting past actions, but accepting and even embracing them in order to become what Montaigne calls 'wise at our own expense.'"

We hope you will join the discussion as we take Montaigne as our guide: Tuesday, January 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, January 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

Not Fiction Book Discussions List for 2012

We are excited to post the list of titles for 2012, a selection of recent memoirs and biographies!

Why do we love to read about the lives of others? Is it idle curiosity? Wishful thinking? Envy? Schadenfreude? Or are we hoping for ideas for how--or not--to live our own lives?

Sarah Bakewell, the author of our January book, How to Live--Or--A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, notes that Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in France in the 1500s, invented the memoir as we know it and laid the groundwork for blogging, Facebooking, Twittering, talk shows and reality TV, celebrity biopics, and all of the other ways we satisfy the urge to talk about ourselves and satisfy our curiosity about others. Montaigne believed that "each man bears the entire form of the human condition," and that we can understand more about ourselves by contemplating the lives of others. So that will be our task in 2012.

For the complete list of titles, see the right side of this page.

And don't forget the December 2011 discussions of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben: Tonight, Tuesday, December 6, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library and Thursday, December 22, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library.

December Not Fiction Book Discussions

In this year's discussions, we have explored our understanding of our world--our world view--and how it affects the uses we make of the earth, our wanderings across it, our settlements on it, our confrontations with the elements and animals that inhabit it, and our confrontations with each other. For our final book of 2011, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben, we will take a wide-angle view of the entire planet and consider McKibben's argument that what we do locally really does matter globally.

In 1989, McKibben wrote The End of Nature, widely regarded as the first book for a general audience to address the possible effects of global warming. In Eaarth--note the extra "a"--he argues that we have waited too long to address climate change, that we have created a new planet that is fundamentally different from the one we have known. Many of his predictions are now a reality, as he summarizes on his website on the page titled From the End of Nature to the Beginning of Eaarth.

While McKibben intends for his book to be sobering, he also hopes to rally readers with practical suggestions for how to build civil and sustainable societies and economies. His most world-view-challenging argument is that endless economic growth is not only unsustainable but also unnecessary to our well being and happiness. And he believes passionately in the value of individual effort. He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009 with the goal of creating awareness of the need to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from its current level of 392 parts per million (ppm) to 350 ppm.

What do you think? We didn't pay attention 20 years ago, and we are all too willing to consider the arguments of those who claim climate change is not driven by human behavior. Why is it so difficult to shift our understanding on this issue to the point that we take action? Will our individual and communal actions be enough? Can we ethically require the same actions from developing countries that have not had the chance to create a materially more comfortable life through economic growth? As Paul Greenberg, writing for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, notes, "in the absence of some overarching authority, a kind of ecologically minded Lenin, [these solutions] will remain hipster lifestyle choices rather than global game changers. Which I suppose in the end is part of McKibben's point. Eaarth itself will be that ecological Lenin, a harsh environmental dictator that will force us to bend to new rules. The question is whether we will be smart enough to bend ourselves first."

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, December 6, at 6:30 at Main Library; Thursday, December 22, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

November Not Fiction Book Discussions

We continue our consideration of our conflicts with each other with Eliza Griswold's The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. Griswold traveled for seven years along the tenth parallel, the line of latitude 700 miles north of the equator, along which half of the world's Christians and Muslims live--and compete for new converts and scarce natural resources, as we see daily in international news.

She decided to write the book after she traveled with Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's son, in 2003 to visit with Sudan's President Omar al Bashir. Franklin had recently called Islam "a very wicked and evil religion" just after 9/11, and Griswold was curious to see their interaction. With vivid stories of her travels and interviews, Griswold helps readers understand the way religion and the struggle to survive are intertwined in Africa and Asia. She says that all of the conflicts she reported on had a secular trigger, such as a dispute over land rights and control of a natural resource such as water, oil, or chocolate, yet because the state is no longer a strong unifying factor in people's lives, the conflicts are framed by religious differences. Surprisingly, based on her observations over these seven years, she argues that the greatest upheavals are within these religions, not between them, as the understanding of faith and nationhood evolves.

A "preacher's kid" herself, Griswold is the daughter of liberal Episcopalian Bishop Frank Griswold. In an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, she describes how her background influenced the writing of the book: "I grew up in a household where questions of faith and intellect were raised on a daily basis, so I definitely have always wondered, how do smart people believe--and there are many [believers] among conservatives and liberals alike--how do they take these stories to be true? So I certainly came from that background of these two intertwined threads and that's how I came to wonder about the question of whether all fundamentalism leads to violence. I thought that I would find among the fundamentalists--whether they were Christian or Muslim--that their beliefs would be entirely different and entirely incomprehensible [to me]. But that is not what I found. What I found was that I had more sympathy and more ability to understand their different points of view than I had imagined. And I think that that had something to do with my upbringing."

Griswold notes that since the first lines of latitude were drawn in the third century B.C.E., the regions they define "have carried social and moral connotations, and cartographers have used them to separate one 'type' of human from another." The tenth parallel falls within what was called the "Torrid Zone," thought by Aristotle and philosophers who followed him to be home to a race of strange and violent peoples but containing rich resources. We saw the roots of the geographical and religious competition for converts and resources in our first book this year, The Fourth Part of the World by Toby Lester. After reading The Tenth Parallel, what do you predict for the future of this region of the world? Is religion interfering with peace, or is it the best hope for peace?

Archbishop Desmond Tutu says of Griswold's book, which won the 2011 Anthony J. Lukas prize, "She returns us to the most basic truth of human existence: that the world and its people are interconnected." We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, November 1, at 6:00 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, November 17, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

October Not Fiction Book Discussions

Our next two titles for discussion explore our confrontations with each other, particularly those in which religion seems to be the point of conflict but in reality has come to represent many other, more basic disparities, such as those involving sovereignty, security, land ownership, and control of natural resources.

In Zeitoun, Dave Eggers tells the true story of a New Orleans family--Abdulrahman Zeitoun, his wife, Kathy, and their children--caught up in both the war on terror and Hurricane Katrina. With compassionate, straightforward prose, Eggers tells how, as Hurrican Katrina approached, Zeitoun stayed in New Orleans to watch over his home and painting business while Kathy took the children out of town to safety. In the first few days after the storm, Zeitoun paddled about in a canoe feeding abandonned dogs and rescuing people. But when the National Guard arrived, Zeitoun was arrested on his own property, he was held without due process, and he and other prisoners experienced abuse. Because he grew up in Syria, his captors assumed he must have terrorist connections, and they accused him and his fellow detainees of being al Qaeda and Taliban. After nearly a month of captivity, during which he was unable to make a phone call, he was released on a charge of looting, which was later dropped. Meanwhile his family, both Kathy in Arizona and his extended family in Syria, try frantically to find him and secure his release.

A uniquely American tragedy, Zeitoun also manages to offer a hopeful view forward, in the faith Zeitoun shows in his God, his family, his city, and his work. After he is released, he returns to work to help rebuild the city. Eggers writes, "More than anything else, Zeitoun is simply happy to be free and in his city. It's the place of his dreams, the place where he was married, where his children were born, where he was given the trust of his neighbors. So every day he gets in his white van, still with its rainbow logo, and makes his way through the city, watching it rise again. . . . As he drives through the city during the day and dreams of it at night, his mind vaults into glorious reveries--he envisions this city and this country not just as it was, but better, far better. It can be. Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light."

The Zeitoun Foundation, created in 2009 to aid in the rebuilding of and ongoing health of the city of New Orleans, and to help ensure the human rights of all Americans, has distributed over $200,000 in grants to nonprofits, funded by the sale of the book. Zeitoun is also a recipient of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the first and only annual U.S. literary award recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace by leading readers to a better understanding of other cultures, peoples, religions, and political points of view.

Timothy Egan, writing for the New York Times Book Review, says, "Fifty years from now, when people want to know what happened to this once-great city during a shameful episode of our history, they will still be talking about a family named Zeitoun." We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, October 4, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, October 20, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.