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

If you enjoyed Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson, then you might also like these books, articles, and films suggested by our discussion members:

Books--Nonfiction 
Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph by T. E. Lawrence; Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan; No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes by Anand Gopal, and Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, especially the chapters on imperialism.

Books--Fiction
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje; The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell; and The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott

Articles
The Atlantic March 2015 article What ISIS Really Wants by Graeme Wood and The New Yorker January 5, 2015 article A Century of Silence about the Armenian genocide.

Films
The 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia directed by David Lean and starring Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness, and Anthony Quinn; the 1981 film Gallipoli directed by Peter Weir and starring Mel Gibson and Mark Lee; and the 1984 British television mini-series The Jewel in the Crown.

March Not Fiction Book Discussions

As its title indicates, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson tells the origin story of today's Middle East. As Melik Kaylan points out in a review in The Daily Beast, Anderson uses the storytelling genre of history writing, with colorful protagonists, narrative momentum, shocking facts, and an us-and-them divide between the West and the East. He uses these storytelling devices to good effect to show us how a handful of adventurers and bureaucrats were instrumental in ending the Ottoman Empire and dividing up the spoils into the Middle East that is the site and source of so much conflict today.


Our enigmatic hero is T. E. Lawrence, who led the Arab Revolt of 1916-18 during World War I. Anderson characterizes Lawrence as almost a mythological trickster:

A supremely private and hidden man, he seemed intent on baffling all those who would try to know him. A natural leader of men, or a charlatan? A man without fear, or both a moral and physical coward? Long before any of his biographers, it was Lawrence who first attached these contradictory characteristics--and many others--to himself. Joined to this was a mischievous streak, a storyteller's delight in twitting those who believed in and insisted on 'facts.' . . . Earlier than most, Lawrence seemed to embrace the modern concept that history was malleable, that truth was what people were willing to believe.

Anderson asks readers to consider,

How did [Lawrence] do it? How did a painfully shy Oxford archaeologist without a single day of military training become the battlefield commander of a foreign revolutionary army, the political master strategist who foretold so many of the Middle Eastern calamities to come?

Also in the cast of characters are three other men with double lives and complicated motives: Curt Prufer, a German spy in Arab disguise who hoped to incite jihad against Britain; William Yale, an employee of American Standard Oil searching for new oil supplies while pretending to be on a Grand Tour of the Holy Lands; and Aaron Aaronsohn, a Jewish agronomist, Zionist, and head of a Jewish spy ring hoping to secure Palestine for a new Jewish homeland. Lawrence himself called the Middle East during World War I "a sideshow of a sideshow." How did these four men and their personal agendas, in a secondary arena of the war, set the stage for the modern Middle East, for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for the Arab Spring, and for the terrible bully powers of ISIS, that is in many ways the central world conflict of our times? While Anderson focuses primarily on the events in the early 1900s, he does help readers understand the causes and conditions that led to the modern Middle East. As Kaylan notes in his review in The Daily Beast,

[Anderson] doesn't set out systematically to explicate the post-Ottoman origination of the region's enduring woes, a primary attraction for any potential reader. And yet we learn all we need to know and more without any of it being telegraphed as the narrative bowls along. Anderson carries his erudition lightly, but there's enough scholarship there to make an academic proud. As with the best kind of yarns, you don't realize what you've learned until the narrator goes silent.

Part of the interest of any good story is wondering what might have happened if things had gone otherwise. Anderson says,

Part of the enduring fascination with T. E. Lawrence's story is the series of painful 'what if?' questions it raises, a pondering over what the world lost when he lost.

What do you think of Anderson's tale? After reading it, do you understand Lawrence and his motivations? Do you think he is a hero? And what about the Middle East? Do you have a better grasp of the daily news coming from the modern Middle East? Does Anderson provide a balanced portrayal of all the political and cultural groups involved, or does he sacrifice objectivity for the sake of a good story? Was it a good read?


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

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

Our discussions of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert were animated and far-ranging, generating lots of suggestions for further reading and viewing!

If you enjoyed The Sixth Extinction, then you might also like these books recommended by our discussion members: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, the classic that launched the environmental movement; 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann about how the Columbian Exchange changed the world; Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari about the cognitive revolution and how the ability to tell fictions changed the world; The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Faultline between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold, in which she reveals that many religious disputes have a secular trigger, such as scarcity of resources and control over natural resources; Cod: A biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky about a species of fish that has helped to further the growth and spread of our species and that we have fished to near-depletion; Hooked: Pirates, Poaching, and the Perfect Fish by G. Bruce Knecht about another species of fish, the Patagonian Toothfish, or Chilean Sea Bass, that is valuable enough to become the loot of real-life pirates; A Feathered River Across the Sky:The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction by Joel Greenberg about the extinction in just a 50-year time span of a bird that once comprised forty percent of our continent's birds; The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant about the pressures placed on the Amur tiger by consumer desire for exotic products made from this endangered animal; The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World by Shelley Emling about one of the first female scientists and first scientists to study extinction; Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species by Sean B. Carroll about the scientists who first studied the origins of our remarkable species; and Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey, a behind-the-scenes tour of London's Natural History Museum.

And you might also enjoy watching these films: Winged Migration by Jacques Perrin, a visually stunning documentary about the migration of birds around the world; and PBS's Earth: A New Wild series about our species' relationship with the planet and its wild places and diverse species.

This list should keep you busy inside during this cold weather, but don't forget our next book for discussion, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson, a book about how the Middle East as we know and experience it today was made by an improbable handful of adventurers and low-level officers during World War I . . . another almost unbelievable story!

February Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert tells perhaps the most important--and the most difficult to believe--story of our time. Over the last half-billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on planet Earth was suddenly and dramatically reduced. A sixth extinction is currently in progress, and we human beings are the agents of change. Moreover, we are causing change at a rate much faster than evolution, determining not only the fate of the planet and our fellow travelers on it, but also, of course, our own. In her Prologue, Kolbert says,

If extinction is a morbid topic, mass extinction is, well, massively so. It's also a fascinating one. In the pages that follow, I try to convey both sides: the excitement of what's being learned as well as the horror of it. My hope is that readers of this book will come away with an appreciation of the truly extraordinary moment in which we live.

Kolbert combines vivid descriptions of the natural wonders she visits, such as the Great Barrier Reef and tropical rain forests, with clear, detailed summaries of the findings of the scientists studying evolution and extinction. Her tone is resolute and understated, never shrill. Her narrative makes her sobering argument through showing, rather than telling. In an interview with the editors of Publishers Weekly, Kolbert said of her role in writing the book,

In many ways I see myself as a translator. I got a lot of knowledgeable people to explain their work to me, often multiple times. Almost all of the scientists I dealt with were incredibly generous. They put up with my questions for months, in some cases years. . . . They really want people to understand the enormity of what's going on.

 One of Kolbert's most unsettling points is that our effect on the planet is not a matter of good or bad intentions; it is a simple matter of the fact of our existence on the planet and of some of our unique qualities as a species--our creativity, our ability to collaborate, our ability to pass information from generation to generation, our mobility, our ability to transform our environment. Kolbert notes that "To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn't much matter whether people care or don't care. What matters is that people change the world."

An interviewer for the New York Times asked Kolbert whether she finds writing about extinction depressing. She replied,

I've tried to transcend my own feelings. Yes, it's depressing, but you have to look it in the face. That's true of a lot of topics. . . . The other side of it was that in writing a book about extinction, I went to some of the most amazing places on Earth. . . . Spending time with [scientists working to preserve species] showed me the amazing lengths people are willing to go through to preserve species. That's the other side of the extinction story.

How do you feel after reading The Sixth Extinction? If people change the world, can we decide to change it enough to avoid the worst consequences of the climate change and extinction event we have set in motion? If not, is change simply an inevitable and unavoidable fact of the universe, not worth despairing about? Or do you feel depressed? Why would we want to read a book about something that, individually, we have little control over? And why do some people resist this true story even in the face of persuasive evidence? Why is it so incredible?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, February 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Mail Library; Thursday, February 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you enjoyed The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese by Michael Paterniti, then you might also like these books and films recommended by our discussion members: In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust; Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes; Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis; the Noriko Trilogy of films directed by Yasujiro Ozu; The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell and Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers; and the essay The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin.

January Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese by Michael Paterniti is a meditation on the act of storytelling in both content and form.

Paterniti set out to tell the idyllic tale of an artisanal cheese from Spain, Páramo de Guzmán, "made with love" from an old family recipe. But what started out as a simple foodie travelogue became a memoir of Paterniti's decade-long quixotic search for Truth as he found himself enamored with its maker, Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, and entangled in a blood feud between two old friends, even moving his young family to Spain and missing deadlines with his publisher. The Telling Room could be said to be a book about itself and how it was in danger of not being written. In an interview with his editor, Andy Ward, at longform.org, Paterniti explained the paralyzing significance that this cheese and its maker took on for him:

"The cheese symbolized the past, and the past's place in the present. And more. The deeper I fell into Ambrosio's story, the more I found myself in emotional and meta tangles. There was a betrayal, and a murder plot. Would Ambrosio kill his betrayer? Suddenly, the cheese stood in for love, but also for hate. It was mystical, and then became soul-less. It was about the promise of fame and riches, and then bankruptcy. It seemed to carry so much metaphoric weight it couldn't stand up under its own legend. . . . I went looking for an ideal that I thought existed, as if I were searching for the Fountain of Youth or something. . . . But then maybe I went looking for people a little like me, too, those who become lost, and then found again, in the most unexpected ways." 

While Paterniti could have saved himself a lot of grief if he had maintained a professional journalistic distance from his subject, the resulting book would have been very different. How would a more objective book about Ambrosio be different from the one Paterniti actually wrote? Have you ever started something dispassionately, perhaps as a job, that ultimately became very personal--and very complicated? Where you became part of the story?

The Telling Room mirrors in form Paterniti's experience of being "in emotional and meta tangles," lost and then found, through the inclusion of many footnotes, including one that reads, "I would soon find out that digression was a national pastime in Castile, that to get to the crux of any matter you had to listen for hours, weeks, months, years." How does the book recreate Paterniti's time in Ambrosio's telling room? And how does it embody Ambrosio's  concept of the "disability of memory," which he defines by saying "Everything is rushing forward, so I must go back"? What is the relationship between storytelling and memory?

Mike Paterniti, his wife, Sara Corbett, and Susan Conley, all writers, created a nonprofit in 2004 in Portland, Maine, called The Telling Room "dedicated to the idea that children and young adults are natural storytellers." Visit their website, www.tellingroom.org, to learn more about their programs and publications.

And join our discussion: Tuesday, January 6, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, January 22, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

Not Fiction Book Discussion Titles for 2015

As we look forward to a new year of nonfiction reading, it is helpful to remember Mark Twain's explanation for why "true" stories can be so compelling: "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." In 2015, we will read strange and wonderful stories about heroes and underdogs, adventures and misadventures, tales and their tellers. What is our relationship to the stories we are drawn to listen to and believe and to the stories we enact and tell? And what is our relationship to the shared act of listening and telling itself?

We hope you will join us--see the dates and titles posted on the right side of this page.