May Not Fiction Book Discussions

What is it about an underdog that makes for a good story? In Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local--and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy, we have two underdogs, John D. Bassett III, the factory man of the title, and American industry itself.

Bassett, Chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company in Galax, Virginia, is a complicated hero. Macy says,

Once in a reporter's career, if one is very lucky, a person like John D. Bassett III comes along. JBIII is inspirational. He's brash. He's a sawdust-covered good old boy from rural Virginia, a larger-than-life rule breaker who for more than a decade has stood almost single-handedly against the outflow of furniture jobs from America. "He's an asshole!" more than one of his competitors barked when they heard I was writing a book about globalization with JBIII as a main character. Over the course of researching this book, over the course of hearing his many lectures and listening to him evade my questions by telling me the same stories over and over, there were times that I agreed.

Bassett fought against family intrigue to take charge of Vaughan-Bassett, and then he fought against the offshoring of American furniture manufacturing to Asia, to save 700 American factory jobs. As Shawn Donnan notes in a review of Factory Man in the Financial Times, "There is an element of Don Quixote about it."

Bassett's family built their furniture dynasty in the early 20th century through exploitation of American labor and the manufacture of an inferior product, and Asian manufacturers used those same business ethics and techniques to shift the profits of the furniture industry overseas. Bassett successfully fought this trend, but can American industry fight globalization? Macy said in an interview with Talking Biz News,

I hope the reader will come away from Factory Man with a deep understanding of why their furniture and other Asia-manufactured products cost a little bit less than they once did--and what that means for the 5 million Americans who used to make those products. I hope they're entertained and inspired by my main character, an iconoclast multimillionaire who cares enough for the generations of workers who made his family rich that when others in his industry were closing their factories, he dug in his heels and said, Oh hell no. I hope the families impacted by all the job losses take some small comfort in seeing the full story of globalization told: That work meant something to them. I hope policy makers and business leaders reading it are inspired to compete in the global economy based on more than just the quick-hit bottom line.

What do you think of JBIII and his company?  Is his example feasible for all of American industry? Or is his populist and Quixotic quest dependent upon his unique personality and circumstances? Is globalization really the villain? Or is it the American shareholder system, as Ethan Rouen suggests in his review in Fortune? Could American industry somehow turn globalization to its advantage?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, May 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, May 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.

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

If you enjoyed The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, then you might also like these books and films suggested by our discussion group members:

• Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux by John Neihardt
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown
• The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick
• Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne
• The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity by Jill Lepore
• 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History winner Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People by Elizabeth A. Fenn
• The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America by Timothy Egan
• Lonesome Dove both the novel by Larry McMurtry and the television miniseries
• the film Dances With Wolves starring Kevin Costner
• the film Red River starring John Wayne

April Not Fiction Book Discussions

The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin illustrates the idea that, as the authors state in their Notes and Bibliography, " . . . history is fable agreed on." We think we know a story. In the old Westerns, the good guys defeated the bad guys, cowboys defeated the Indians. Then, in the last few decades, historians reconsidered the story, the bad guys defeated the good guys, cowboys defeated the Indians. And then a book like this complicates the story. Who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys? Who defeated whom? And for what purpose? Did their ends justify their means?

Drury and Clavin tell the story of Red Cloud, the Oglala Sioux warrior who was the only warrior in the 300-year-long war between Euro-Americans and Native Americans to defeat the United States government and force it to sue for peace on his terms--even though the U. S. eventually won the war. It is often said that the victor gets to tell the story, so that is at least part of the reason Red Cloud's had been largely forgotten. Drury and Clavin draw upon Red Cloud's own autobiography, along with other primary documents, to bring it back to common knowledge. But it is also a complicated story full of violence on all sides, and lies and trickery, especially on the part of the United States government. Red Cloud emerges as a brutal warrior and shrewd political strategist fighting to preserve the Plains Indians' way of life. Drury and Clavin point out that the relentless advance of white settlement for land, buffalo hides, and gold along the pioneer trails and rail lines would turn out to be more effective than any act of war on the part of the United States government at defeating the Indians, a fact that Red Cloud admitted on his first visit to Washington in 1870. As he told Secretary of the Interior Joseph P. Cox, "Now we are melting like snow on the hillside, while you are growing like spring grass." When asked why the United States fought Red Cloud, General Bisbee replied, "My only answer could be we did it for Civilization."

What do you think? What is your interpretation of Bisbee's answer? Do you think this is what most of the United States' soldiers and citizens believed? What kind of place would the United States be now if we had learned to accept different interpretations of the word "civilized"? And what do you think of Red Cloud? How did his childhood determine the man and leader he grew up to be? Do you feel Drury and Clavin's portrayal of Red Cloud and his cause was fair and impartial? Did you find that you were sympathetic to Red Cloud and the Sioux, or was it difficult for you to reconcile the brutality of the Indian battle ethic with the justness of their cause? And finally, although Drury and Clavin drew upon primary sources to write this book, we see how various participants in the events depicted strove to portray their involvement in the best possible light while blaming and even demonizing others. Given that human error and emotion play a large part in how we recall and record events, how accurate do you feel our understanding of any historical event can be?

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

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.