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2004 - 2005
This is Not Civilization
by Robert Rosenberg
Rosenberg’s first novel spans the globe. Jeff Hartig is a classic “do gooder”, a Peace Corps worker who tries with mixed results to help people on an Indian reservation in Arizona, in a village in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, and in Istanbul. In Arizona, Jeff encounters hostility and racism. In the forgotten village of Kyzyl Adyr-Kirovka he meets big-hearted Anarbek, manager of a cheese factory that makes no cheese. Anarbek’s family and the other villagers overwhelm Jeff with their enthusiastic hospitality. In Istanbul, he moves in a social circle that includes Turks and American expatriates. When individuals from his past join him in Istanbul, each of them wanting something from him, he must grapple with the past. And then the earthquake hits . . ..
Sweet and comic, compassionate and melancholy, this is a novel about cultural alienation, responsibility and good intentions gone awry.
Questions
Related Websites
Becoming Woman
Country Profile: Kyrgyzstan
Analysis: Why Kyrgyzstan Matters
The Quakes that Shook Turkey
Tsunami and Earthquake Facts
Return to Paris
by Colette Rossant
Colette Rossant, the daughter of an Egyptian father and a French mother, spent her early years in France. When her father became ill, the family moved to Cairo. After her father’s death, she and her mother returned to Paris, so that Colette could receive “a proper French education”. Neglected by her self-involved mother, raised mainly by her harsh and judgmental grandmother, Colette’s adolescence was a melancholy one. In time, however, she learned to enjoy fine food and found friends and romance in the City of Light.
A Thousand Days in Venice
by Marlena de Blasi
Marlena De Blasi grew up Schenectady, N.Y., and became a food writer. On a trip to Venice, an Italian man who looked remarkably like Peter Sellers approached her and, improbably, told her he had fallen in love with her profile. Even more improbably, she sold her house in the U.S. and moved to Venice to be with “the stranger”, as she calls him. De Blasi’s incredibly romantic true story will make you believe in the possibility of change, adventure and love. Her memoir will infect you with her exuberant love for Venice, the Venetians, and their incredible food. Savor this adventure! Potluck supper at 6:30 before the book discussion!
Questions
Related Websites
Ask Colette!
Colette's Place
French Cuisine
Venice Tourist Board
Love and Hate in Jamestown
by David A. Price
In the early 1600’s, the Spanish were the lords of the New World. Their ships crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic loaded with gold, silver and jewels for the Spanish monarchy. The English were late in their attempts to establish outposts in the Americas. The expeditions were inadequately supplied, some of the gentlemen among the colonists were unsuited to hardship, the settlement effort was dangerous, and many died from starvation, disease and Indian attacks. Rivalries among the leaders of the ruling council caused instability, and some of the colonists bolted for home when they had a chance. How did the struggling Jamestown colony survive? Price’s account makes the reader aware of how much of our history we take for granted, and allows us to imagine how easily things could have turned out differently.
Questions
Related Websites
Historic Jamestowne: National Park Service
Jamestown Historic Briefs Topic Index: National Parks Service
Virtual Jamestown
Roanoke Revisited: Heritage Education Program
Pocahontas
History of Jamestown
Captain John Smith
Excerpts
How to Read History
Why Read History?
The Sixth Lamentation
by William Brodrick
Who betrayed The Round Table, a group of resisters in German-occupied France who transported Jewish children to a Catholic monastery so they could be smuggled across the border?
Agnes Aubret, a member of The Round Table, believes she knows who the traitor was. Agnes, who saw her own son deported to Auschwitz, is dying of a degenerative neurological disease. Before she dies, she wants to tell her granddaughter Lucy details about her wartime experiences that she has kept hidden since the war.
Eduard Schwermann was a young officer in the German army posted to occupied France. One of his duties was to assist with the round up and deportation of that country’s Jewish population. Fifty years later, Schwermann believes he is living safely in England under an alias. When his identity and whereabouts are made public, he seeks sanctuary in Larkwood Priory, hoping to avoid arrest and trial.
The events and participants in the two stories come together in Brodrick’s novel, as the characters struggle with revelations of what really happened in that turbulent period.
Questions
Related Websites
The Vichy Policy on Jewish Deportation
Holocaust Memorial Opens in Paris
World 'must learn from Holocaust'
Milosevic on Trial: The Dilemmas of Political Justice
True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall
by Mark Salzman
Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles houses teenagers awaiting trial for violent crimes. Many of these young men will be convicted and sentenced to serve terms (some of them very lengthy terms) in adult prisons. They are profane, scheming, and full of hatred. As writer Mark Salzman discovers, after a friend recruits him to teach a writing class to the inmates, they also love their mothers, miss their families, and are honest about their crimes and their futures. Salzman, who is initially edgy about meeting kids who are criminals, finds them at times exasperating, unruly and uncooperative, and at other times funny, articulate and endearing. As he gets to know them and they learn to trust him, the class jells, and Mark is drawn into their lives beyond the class. He finds they are capable of distilling thoughtful and at times poetic expression from the experiences of their wrecked young lives. Dale, one of Mark’s students, describes them best in one of his essays. They are “brokenheart juveniles…locked up behind no mercy walls.”
Questions
Related Websites
InsideOUT Writers
Teaching Young Toughs
Vintage: True Notebooks Written by Mark Salzman (Search by author's name, then title. When you get to the description of the book, click on "Author Q&A")
Homeboy Industries
Jesuit Greg Boyle, Gang Priest
The Photograph
by Penelope Lively
How well do we know the people we think are close to us, our parents, children, spouse? What would you do if, after the death of a loved one, you found a photograph sealed in an envelope on which the deceased had written DON’T OPEN—DESTROY? Would you honor the request, or yield to curiosity and open it? Glyn, husband of Kath, who is recently deceased, gives in to his curiosity and opens the envelope. His life and feelings about Kath are altered forever by the troubling image in the photograph. Obsessed with discovering the “true” Kath, Glyn confronts and questions her friends and family members. The more he delves into Kath’s emotional life and relationships, the more elusive and insubstantial she becomes.
Questions
Related Websites
Penelope Lively's Official Website
The Bookseller of Kabul
by Asne Seierstad
Sultan Khan became enchanted by books and stories at an early age. He loves to read them, collect them and sell them in his Kabul bookshop. His books were burned first by the Communists; his shop was then looted by the Mujahedeen. When the agents of the Taliban’s Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Extermination of Sin burn his books and arrest him, he defiantly tells his captors, “You can burn my books, you can embitter my life, you can even kill me, but you cannot wipe out Afghanistan’s history. “Khan, so gracious in his shop, so admirable in his devotion to the preservation of knowledge, is an unrelenting tyrant in his home, demanding respect and obedience from everyone. Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad was invited to live with Khan’s “most unusual Afghan family” shortly after the fall of the Taliban. Privileged to have an intimate view of the daily lives of the family members, she writes about the denigrating treatment of Afghan women by Afghan men, about people’s struggles to earn a living, cope with the aftermath of war, and deal with domestic disputes.
Questions
Related Websites
BBC News Country Profile: Afghanistan
Oxfam Cool Planet: Afghanistan
Selections from the Poetry of Rumi
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)
The Afghan Victim Memorial Project
Afghanistan Online: Photo Gallery
The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
It is rare, if not impossible, to find a family in which there are no conflicts or misunderstandings between parents and children. It's that generational divide. When the children are born and raised in a different culture and country from their parents, the differences can be even more perplexing. Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli, a young Bengali couple, immigrate to the United States so that Ashoke can attend MIT. Forced to give their first child, a son, a name so that he can be released from the hospital, they call him Gogol, after Ashoke's favorite author, Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol. The name is a mistake. The child should have had his "good name" chosen by Ashoke's grandmother. Gogol's self-consciousness about his name is the first source of friction and misunderstanding between him and his parents. American-born Gogol and his sister are often impatient and uncomprehending of their parents' attachment to Bengali culture and habits. This is a novel about culture clash, coming into one's own and reconciliation.
Questions
Related Websites
Bengal Online History
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol
Jhumpa Lahiri
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon
Fifteen-year-old Christopher finds his neighbor’s dog, Wellington, dead on her lawn, impaled on a garden fork. He sets out to solve the mystery of the dog’s murder, following the example of his favorite fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. Although Christopher has a logical mind that rivals Sherlock’s, knows the capital cities of all the countries of the world and every prime number up to 7,057, he doesn’t understand emotion, cannot relate to people, and has a fear of being touched. He also cannot eat foods that are yellow or brown. Christopher has Asperger syndrome, a form of autism. His investigation into Wellington’s death forces him to travel outside the boundaries of his carefully arranged life. Christopher is one of the most unusual and endearing narrators you will ever meet.
Questions
Related Websites
"The Curiously Irresistible Literary Debut of Mark Haddon"
by Dave Welch
"What Is Asperger Syndrome?" by Barbara L.Kirby
Math World website
The Known World
by Edward P. Jones
Henry Townsend owns a plantation and slaves in antebellum Manchester County, Virginia. Henry, himself a former slave, is black. When he dies at 31 and his wife Caldonia takes over the running of the farm, the once well-regulated plantation society becomes chaotic. Slaves escape at night, and family members turn on one another. Through its themes of betrayal, dishonesty, loyalty to kin and the will to survive, the novel
illuminates the price slavery exacted from every individual, white and black, in a society that allowed people in power to hold others as property. Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for literature, The Known World is an intricate, character-rich novel that weaves back and forth in time.
List of Characters
Questions
Related Websites
"We Tell Stories" by Edward P. Jones
Meet the Writers
Interview with Edward P. Jones on PBS
"Black Slaveowners"
Free Blacks in the Antebellum Period
Slavery in America: Narratives and Biographies
Titles Selected by Suzanne Fisher, Librarian
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