How it All Began by Penelope Lively

Monday November 12 at 1:00 PM
Discussion Leader: Candace Plotsker-Herman

When Charlotte Rainsford is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike....Through a richly conceived and colorful cast of characters, Penelope Lively explores the powerful role of chance in people's lives and deftly illustrates how our paths can be altered irrevocably by someone we will never even meet. (Penguin Group USA)

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Reviews

BookList:

/* Starred Review */ The ruling vision of master British novelist Lively’s latest delectably tart and agile novel is the Butterfly Effect, which stipulates that “a very small perturbation” can radically alter the course of events. The catalyst here is a London mugging that leaves Charlotte, a passionate reader and former English teacher become adult literacy tutor, with a broken hip. She moves in with her married daughter, Rose, to recuperate. Rose works for Henry, a lord and once-prominent historian, whose ego is as robust as ever but whose mind is faltering as he attempts to launch a BBC documentary to hilarious effect. With Rose out helping her mother, Henry prevails upon his daughter, Marion, an interior designer, to accompany him out of town, where she meets a too-good-to-be-true client. When she texts her lover, who deals in architectural salvage (tangible history), to postpone a rendezvous, his wife intercepts the message. Charlotte begins tutoring Anton, a smart and soulful East European, who affirms her ardor for language and story and awakens Rose out of her smothering stoicism. Throughout this brilliantly choreographed and surreptitiously poignant chain-reaction comedy of chance and change, Lively (Family Album, 2009) shrewdly elucidates the nature of history, the tunnel-visioning of pain and age, and the abiding illumination of reading, which so profoundly nourishes the mind and spirit. -- Seaman, Donna (Reviewed 12-15-2011) (Booklist, vol 108, number 8, p23)

Publishers Weekly:

Charlotte, who is in her 70s, is mugged, leaving her injured and without her handbag. This delightful, absorbing novel relies on a sophisticated and skillfully realized structure to introduce and then follow its endearingly ordinary characters. Though Charlotte’s incident proves to be the first domino to fall, she herself recedes into the background as her daughter, her middle-aged ESL student, her boss, and her boss’s niece come to the fore, going about the business of their daily lives and loves, all on a somewhat different path than they would have, had not Charlotte broken her hip. The interdependency of the characters’ lives, which they remain largely unaware of, builds intriguing momentum, and the pace quickens as the novel develops. Throughout, prolific Booker Prize–winning author Lively (for Moon Tiger) illustrates her knack for charming familiarity and just the right dash of surprise. (Jan.) --Staff (Reviewed November 7, 2011) (Publishers Weekly, vol 258, issue 45, p)

Library Journal:

/* Starred Review */ In her latest title, the Booker Prize-winning author of Moon Tiger explores the far-reaching effect of happenstance, as individual circumstances shift, lives change, and the known is perceived in an altogether new light. The novel opens with the mugging of retired schoolteacher Charlotte Rainsford on a London street. Subsequently, a diverse cast of richly embroidered acquaintances and strangers find their lives irrevocably altered by this event, which many of them haven't even heard about. We see how the mugging affects Charlotte's daughter Rose, who works for a historian desperate to return to the limelight, and the spillover to his niece Marion, a cash-poor interior designer hunting for a business partner while carrying on an affair eventually revealed through a stray cell-phone call. Lively delivers her story about these intertwined lives with faultless dexterity, sly humor, keen insight, and deft economy. VERDICT Lively's 12th novel is a feel-good masterpiece that will delight faithful fans as well as those new to the work of this consummate storyteller. [See Prepub Alert, 8/1/11.]— Joyce Townsend, Pittsburg, CA --Joyce Townsend (Reviewed December 1, 2011) (Library Journal, vol 136, issue 20, p115) 

Visit Penelope Lively's official website             

 Read Michiko Kakutani's Review in The New York Times

   Read Susann Cokal's Review in The New York Times Book Review

Read a review on NPR 

Read a Review from The Guardian 

View the Reading Guide from Penguingroup.com 

 

The List by Martin Fletcher

Monday October 15, at 1:00 PM

Discussion Leader: Edna Ritzenberg



"London, October 1945. Austrian refugees Georg and Edith await the birth of their first child. Yet how can they celebrate when almost every day brings news of another relative or friend murdered in the Holocaust? Their struggle to rebuild their lives is further threatened by growing anti-Semitism in London's streets; Englishmen want to take homes and jobs from Jewish refugees and give them to returning servicemen....
In The List, [NBC News correspondent ]Fletcher investigates an ignored and painful chapter in London’s history. The novel is both a breathless thriller of postwar sabotage and a heartrending and historically accurate portrait of an almost forgotten era...."                                                           (us.macmillan.com)

Reviews

Booklist Reviews

NBC special correspondent Fletcher (Walking Israel, 2010) makes his fiction debut with a moving novel based on his parents' lives. In London at the end of WWII, the Jewish refugees who settled there to escape Hitler are facing anti-Semitism in their new home. Edith and Georg, who are expecting their first child, spend their days looking for work and trying to learn the fates of the family members left behind in Vienna. Edith mends nylon stockings, while Georg, a lawyer, tries to find a suitable position. Battling the prevailing attitude that Jews are occupying real estate and filling jobs that should belong to returning British soldiers, they often wonder why they left Europe. Still, visits to the refugee center to check the lists of the dead and the missing remind them of their luck. A long-lost cousin, Anna, who survived the camps, finds them and moves in among the eccentric occupants of their boardinghouse. She befriends Ismail, an Arab from Cairo who is involved in mysterious business. The British occupation of Palestine and the Zionist efforts—including terrorism—to create a Jewish homeland are cause for both hope and feat. Fletcher has written a touching story that brings a little-known aspect of Jewish history to life. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

Kirkus Reviews

Having fled the Nazis, a young Austrian couple in 1945 London discovers that for Jews like them, the war did not end with VE Day. While they desperately seek word on the possible survival or whereabouts of family members sent to concentration camps, petitions are being signed by anti-Semitics in their neighborhood of Hampstead to "send the aliens home"—ostensibly to clear space and jobs for returning British soldiers.Veteran NBC correspondent Fletcher's engrossing first novel, loosely based on his parents' story, captures a neglected piece of postwar history through the plight of the spirited Edith, who is seven months pregnant with her first child following a miscarriage, and Georg, a reserved lawyer reduced to making buttons for a living. When Edith's first cousin Anna unexpectedly arrives, traumatized by her time in Auschwitz, she raises hope, however dim, that other relatives will follow, maybe even Edith's father. It's a time when the horrific truths of the camps are not yet widely known or understood—and when lies about Jews, including the notion they have any "home" to return to—are passed off as truth. Drawn to Ismael, an Egyptian Arab who despite his seeming antagonism toward Jews has a habit of coming to their rescue, Anna slowly emerges from her personal darkness. The lightly veiled truth is that Ismael is actually Israel, part of a secret plot to assassinate British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin for his part in the blockade to limit the number of Jews allowed into Palestine. Fletcher (Walking Israel, 2010, etc.) is more convincing as a domestic observer than a spy/political-thriller writer. As fact-based as this book may be, the narrative is a bit too neatly tied up and cozy with coincidence for the novel to gain as much traction as it could have. But this is still a powerful, affecting work. A post-Holocaust novel that should be required reading wherever lessons about the plight of modern-day European Jews are taught. Copyright Kirkus 2011 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

In NBC special correspondent Fletcher's satisfactory first novel, Viennese Jewish refugees Edith and Georg Fleischer build their new life in 1945 London while Zionist revolutionaries plot an assassination that could jeopardize all asylum seekers in Britain. Living in a Hampstead boarding house, the Fleischers are expecting their first child while waiting to hear news of their relatives (most of whom perished in concentration or death camps) and find out whether they can stay in Britain. Edith's cousin Anna arrives, but her time at Auschwitz has changed her almost beyond recognition. After Edith makes a speech at a meeting about repatriation petitions, Georg becomes a target for retribution. The mysterious Ismael, an Egyptian Arab living at the boarding house, steps in to protect Georg, beginning an unlikely alliance. Meanwhile, in Palestine, the Lehi—a group considered to be freedom fighters, or terrorists, take your pick—plot to force out the British and open the border to any Jews who wish to enter. There are jarring shifts in point of view and shallow descriptions, but the novel's warmth and humor will have readers rooting for the Fleischers and the neighbors who, in the wake of horror, become their new family. (Oct.) [Page ]. Copyright 2011 PWxyz LLC Reserve your copy of The List Read a review from thejewishweek.com Read a review from JewishJournal.com Read an interview with Martin Fletcher on jspace.com



Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

Monday, September 10, 1 p.m.

Discussion leader:  Ellen Getreu

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, longtime New Orleans residents Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun are cast into an unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water. In the days after the storm, Abdulrahman traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared-- arrested and accused of being an agent of al Qaeda.

Reviews:

Booklist Reviews *Starred Review* Eggers burst onto the scene in 2000 with his hugely successful memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Unlike many memoirists, he has resisted the temptation to parcel out the unpublished parts of his life into yet more memoirs. Instead, in his most compelling works since his debut, he has told the stories of others. What Is the What (2006) explored, in novel form, the ordeals of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese "lost boy," and now Eggers chronicles, as nonfiction, the tribulations of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian American painting contractor who decides to ride out Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Although his wife, Kathy, leaves town with their four children, Abdulrahman (known as Zeitoun because few locals can pronounce his first name) stays behind, hoping to protect their home, their job sites, and their rental properties. After the storm, he paddles the flooded streets in a canoe, rescuing stranded people, feeding trapped dogs, and marveling at the sometimes surreal beauty of the devastation. Was it God's plan that he help others? he wonders. Then people in uniforms take him at gunpoint and incarcerate him. There are no charges, only the guards' insistence that he is "al Qaeda" and "Taliban." Zeitoun's odyssey—23 days of grueling imprisonment, held incommunicado and deprived of all due process—is but one nightmare of many lived after Katrina. But it is exceptionally well told: here, as in What Is the What, Eggers employs a poetic, declarative style, shaping the narrative with subtlety and grace. More importantly, it is exceptionally well chosen. In the wake of disaster, we often cling to stories reassuring us that we respond to trials heroically. But Zeitoun reminds us that we are just as capable of responding to fear fearfully, forgetting the very things we claim to value most. Heartbreaking and haunting. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

Reserve a copy of Zeitoun
View the Readers' Packet prepared by our Staff

• Visit the website of The Zeitoun Foundation
• 
  
• Timothy Egan's Review in The New York Times Book Review
• 
  
• Alexandra Alter's Review in the Wall Street Journal 

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

 Tuesday, August 7, 2012 at   11 a.m.


Discussion leader: Candace Plotsker-Herman


In the 1970's, a group of idealists set out to live off the land.  They find themselves living in a decrepit mansion called Arcadia House and the land surrounding it.  Handy, a musician and the group's leader; Astrid, a midwife; Abe, a master carpenter; Hannah, a baker and historian; and Abe and Hannah's only child Bit, who is born soon after the commune is created are the main characters in the book.  While Arcadia rises and falls, Bit, too, ages and changes.  Can he remain connected to the peaceful homestead life of Arcadia and its inhabitants and yet become his own man, venturing out into the world he must learn to live in?

          Reserve your copy of Arcadia on ALISCat
          View the Readers Guide prepared by our staff

BookList:

/* Starred Review */ This beautifully crafted novel follows Bit Stone, the first child to be born in the late 1960s on an upstate New York commune called Arcadia, from childhood through the year 2018. An introspective youngster who can often go months without speaking, Bit “watches life from a distance.” He can see how hard his parents work to make Arcadia successful, but he can also see that the self-indulgent commune leader frequently fails to live up to his own ideals. As the backbreaking work, continual poverty, and near-constant hunger work to undermine the once-flourishing sense of community, Bit’s family leaves the commune to make their way in the outside world. Bit becomes a photographer and teacher but is always anchored to the place of his childhood, even marrying the emotionally damaged daughter of Arcadia’s guru, but happiness proves elusive, both for him and for the greater world, as a flu pandemic sweeps the globe. Groff’s second novel, after the well-received The Monsters of Templeton (2008), gives full rein to her formidable descriptive powers, as she summons both the beauty of striving for perfection and the inevitable devastation of failing so miserably to achieve it. -- Wilkinson, Joanne (Reviewed 01-01-2012) (Booklist, vol 108, number 9, p35)

Publishers Weekly:

/* Starred Review */ Groff’s dark, lyrical examination of life on a commune follows Bit, aka Little Bit, aka Ridley Sorrel Stone, born in the late ’60s in a spot that will become Arcadia, a utopian community his parents help to form. Despite their idealistic goals, the family’s attempts at sustainability bring hunger, cold, illness, and injury. Bit’s vibrant mother retreats into herself each winter; caring for the community literally breaks his father’s back. The small, sensitive child whose purposeful lack of speech is sometimes mistaken for slowness finds comfort in Grimms’ fairy tales and is lost in the outside world once Arcadia’s increasingly entitled spiritual leader falls from grace and the community crumbles. Split between utopia and its aftermath, the book’s second half tracks the ways in which Bit, now an adult (he’s 50 when this all ends, in 2018), has been shaped by Arcadia; a career in photography was the perfect choice for a man who “watches life from a good distance.” Bit’s painful experiences as a husband, father, and son grow more harrowing as humanity becomes increasingly imperiled. The effective juxtaposition of past and future and Groff’s (Delicate Edible Birds) beautiful prose make this an unforgettable read. Agent: William Morris Endeavor. (Mar.) --Staff (Reviewed November 21, 2011) (Publishers Weekly, vol 258, issue 47, p)

Library Journal:

/* Starred Review */ Bit Stone was born in the early 1960s to a devoted couple living in a secluded hippie commune in western New York. He was a mostly happy boy, if quietly unnerved (his mother struggles with seasonal depression), who loves Arcadia and his parents and all the people there who lead hard, pure lives, living off the land. His parents, Hannah and Adam, are at the center of the loose Arcadia administration whose acknowledged leader, Handy, increasingly butts heads with Adam. It is no surprise that as the population of Arcadia grows and drugs become more prevalent, the community, set upon by political events that move the narrative into the near future, falls apart. Bit and the other core members go out into the real world with a wildly fluctuating level of success. VERDICT Groff, author of 2008's magnificent The Monsters of Templeton , eschews counterculture stereotypes to bring Bit's interior and exterior worlds to life. Her exquisite writing makes the reader question whether to hurry up to read the next beautiful sentence or slow down and savor each passage. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 9/19/11.]— Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI --Beth E. Andersen (Reviewed December 1, 2011) (Library Journal, vol 136, issue 20, p114)

Kirkus:

/* Starred Review */ An astonishing novel, both in ambition and achievement, filled with revelations that appear inevitable in retrospect, amid the cycle of life and death. As a follow-up to Groff's well-received debut (The Monsters of Templeton, 2008), this novel is a structural conundrum, ending in a very different place than it begins while returning full circle. At the outset, it appears to be a novel of the Utopian, communal 1960s, of a charismatic leader, possibly a charlatan, and an Arcadia that grows according to his belief that "the Universe will provide." It concludes a half-century later in a futuristic apocalypse of worldwide plague and quarantine. To reveal too much of what transpires in between would undermine the reader's rich experience of discovery: "The page of a book can stay cohesive in the eyes: one sentence can lead to the next. He can crack a paragraph and eat it. Now a story. Now a novel, one full life enclosed in covers." The "he" is Bit Stone, introduced as a 5-year-old child of that commune, and it is his life that is enclosed in these covers. Following a brief prologue, representing a pre-natal memory, the novel comprises four parts, with leaps of a decade or more between them, leaving memory and conjecture to fill in the blanks. At an exhibition of Bit's photography, a passion since his childhood (documented in some shots), those who had known him all his life realized, "What they found most moving, they told him later, were the blanks between the frames, the leaps that happened invisibly between the then and the now." The cumulative impact of this novel is similar, as the boy leaps from the commune and subsequently his parents, becomes a parent himself, deals with the decline of his parents and finds his perspective both constant and constantly changing: "He can't understand what the once-upon-a-time Bit is saying to the current version of himself or to the one who will stand here in the future...worn a little more by time and loss." A novel of "the invisible tissue of civilization," of "community or freedom," and of the precious fragility of lives in the balance.(Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2012)

Biography of Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia

Lauren Groff was born in 1978 in Cooperstown, N.Y. She graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Her short stories have appeared in a number of journals, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly,  Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Subtropics, and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories 2007 and Best American Short Stories 2010, Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best New American Voices 2008. A story will be included in the 2012 edition of PEN/ O. Henry Prize Stories.

She was awarded the Axton Fellowship in Fiction at the University of Louisville, and has had residencies and fellowships at Yaddo, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Vermont Studio Center and Ragdale.

Lauren's first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, published in February 2008, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and bestseller and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. Her second book, Delicate Edible Birds, is a collection of stories. Her second novel, Arcadia, was published in March 2012.

She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband and two sons.

Further Reading:

• Janet Maslin's Review in The New York Times
  
• Jenny Hendrix's review in The Boston Globe
• Ron Charles's review in The Washington Post
  
• John Wilwol's review in The New York Times Book Review
  
• Visit the Hippie Museum website
•  Visit Lauren Groff's homepage
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

The Submission by Amy Waldman

Edna Ritzenberg, Discussion leader

• Tuesday, July 10, 2012, 11 a.m. 

Selected for a jury that must choose an appropriate memorial for September 11 victims, Claire Burwell struggles to navigate a media firestorm when the winning designer is revealed as an enigmatic Muslim-American.




Amy Waldman was a reporter for The New York Times for eight years, including three as co-chief of the New Delhi bureau. She was also a national correspondent for the Atlantic.  The Submission  is her debut novel and was named a New York Times Notable Book for 2011, one of NPR's Ten Best Novels, Esquire's Book of the Year, Entertainment Weekly's #1 Novel for the Year, a Washington Post Notable Fiction Book, and one of Amazon's Top 100 Books and top ten debut fiction. It was a finalist for the Guardian (UK) First Book Award. Waldman's fiction has appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Review and the Financial Times, and was anthologized in "The Best American Non-Required Reading 2010."

Waldman graduated from Yale University and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and at the American Academy in Berlin. She lives with her family in Brooklyn.

• Reserve your copy of The Submission on ALISCat
• View the Readers' Packet prepared by our staff 

Booklist:

/* Starred Review */ After venomous deliberations over anonymous design submissions for a 9/11 memorial at ground zero, the jury selects an elegant garden as the ideal embodiment of remembrance and rebirth. But when the identity of the architect is revealed—Mohammad Khan, the American son of Muslim immigrants from India—the dream of national healing warps into a hysterical nightmare. As public outrage ignites, entangled characters struggle with anger, fear, conscience, and ambition. Mohammad, called Mo, is stubborn and aloof. Journalist Alyssa is desperate to capitalize on the excoriating scandal. Down-and-out Sean, who lost his firefighter brother, flounders as spokesperson for the victims’ families, while two young 9/11 widows—Claire, wealthy and glamorous, and Asma, an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh—push through grief to try to do the right thing. In her magnetizing first novel, replete with searing insights and exquisite metaphors, Waldman, formerly a New York Times reporter and co-chief of the South Asia bureau, maps shadowy psychological terrain and a vast social minefield as conflicted men and women confront life-and-death moral quandaries within the glare and din of a media carnival. Waldman brilliantly delineates the legacy of 9/11; the confluence of art, religion, and politics; the plexus between the individual and the group; and the glory of transcendent empathy in The Bonfire of the Vanities for our time. -- Seaman, Donna (Reviewed 07-01-2011) (Booklist /* Starred Review */ After venomous deliberations over anonymous design submissions for a 9/11 memorial at ground zero, the jury selects an elegant garden as the ideal embodiment of remembrance and rebirth. But when the identity of the architect is revealed—Mohammad Khan, the American son of Muslim immigrants from India—the dream of national healing warps into a hysterical nightmare. As public outrage ignites, entangled characters struggle with anger, fear, conscience, and ambition. Mohammad, called Mo, is stubborn and aloof. Journalist Alyssa is desperate to capitalize on the excoriating scandal. Down-and-out Sean, who lost his firefighter brother, flounders as spokesperson for the victims’ families, while two young 9/11 widows—Claire, wealthy and glamorous, and Asma, an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh—push through grief to try to do the right thing. In her magnetizing first novel, replete with searing insights and exquisite metaphors, Waldman, formerly a New York Times reporter and co-chief of the South Asia bureau, maps shadowy psychological terrain and a vast social minefield as conflicted men and women confront life-and-death moral quandaries within the glare and din of a media carnival. Waldman brilliantly delineates the legacy of 9/11; the confluence of art, religion, and politics; the plexus between the individual and the group; and the glory of transcendent empathy in The Bonfire of the Vanities for our time. -- Seaman, Donna (Reviewed 07-01-2011) (Booklist, vol 107, number 21, p28) 

Publishers Weekly:

/* Starred Review */ Waldman imagines a toxic brew of bigotry in conflict with idealism in this frighteningly plausible and tightly wound account of what might happen if a Muslim architect had won a contest to design a memorial at the World Trade Center site. Jury member and 9/11 widow Claire Burwell presses for the winning garden design both before and after its creator is revealed as Mohammed "Mo" Khan, an American-born and raised architect who becomes embroiled in the growing furor between those who see the garden as a symbol of tolerance and peace, and various activists who claim patriotism as they spew anti-Islamic diatribes. Waldman keenly focuses on political and social variables, including an opportunistic governor who abets the outbreak of xenophobia; the wealthy chairman of the contest, maneuvering for social cachet; a group of zealots whose obsession with radical Islam foments violence; a beautiful Iranian-American lawyer who becomes Mo's lover until he refuses to become a mouthpiece; and a trouble-sowing tabloid reporter. Meanwhile, Mo refuses to demean himself by explaining the source of his design, seen by some as an Islamic martyr's paradise. As misguided outrage flows from all corners, Waldman addresses with a refreshing frankness thorny moral questions and ethical ironies without resorting to breathless hyperbole. True, there are more blowhards than heroes, but that just makes it all the more real. (Aug.) --Staff (Reviewed May 23, 2011) (Publishers Weekly, vol 258, issue 21, p)

Library Journal:

/* Starred Review */ After four months of wrangling, the jury commissioned to choose from the 5000 anonymous submissions for New York City's 9/11 memorial acceded to the affecting widow's steely determination. The Garden, entry #4879, would be a place, Claire opined, where families could "stumble on joy." But jury chair Paul Rubin sees his ambitious plans for elite fund-raising soirees evaporate when the architect's name is revealed. Mohammed Khan's Muslim moniker hits the news like an explosion, reopening still raw wounds. The volatile Sean Gallagher of the Memorial Support Committee is apoplectic, politicians pander to their constituents, lawyers salivate at perceived opportunities, and the Muslim American Coordinating Council sees the besieged Mo Khan as a tool to advance its own agenda. Can he be pressured into walking away from his finest artistic achievement? From this cacophony of intolerance, the single voice calling for reason emanates from Asma Anwar, a non-English speaking Bangladeshi widow whose husband also perished in the burning towers. VERDICT Waldman fluidly blends her reporter's skill (New York Times ) at rapid-fire storytelling with a novelist's gift for nuanced characterization. She dares readers to confront their own complicated prejudices steeped in faith, culture, and class. This is an insightful, courageous, heartbreaking work that should be read, discussed, then read again. [See Prepub Alert, 2/7/11.]— Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL --Sally Bissell (Reviewed July 1, 2011) (Library Journal, vol 136, issue 12, p75) 

/* Starred Review */ The selection of a Muslim architect for a 9/11 memorial stirs a media circus in Waldman's poised and commanding debut novel.The jury assembled to select a design for a memorial in Manhattan represented every important interest group: a 9/11 widow, an art critic, a governor's representative and other major stakeholders. They considered blind submissions before arriving at a garden-themed design. The one contingency they didn't plan for was that the winner would be a Muslim, Mohammad Khan. Though he's not especially religious and his bona fides as an architect are impeccable, Khan still becomes a target for anti-Islam firebrands, and even his defenders are left wringing their hands. Waldman skillfully presents the perspectives of a handful of major characters, including Claire, a 9/11 widow; Sean, a pugnacious victims' activist who lost his brother in the attacks; and Mohammad, who vacillates between gloomy isolation and outspoken defiance at attempts to reject or tweak his design. Waldman shrewdly, subtly reveals the class and race divisions that spark arguments about who "owns" the design; it's no accident that wealthy Claire played a leading role on the jury while Asma, a working-class Bangladeshi woman who lost her husband in the attacks as well, is all but unheard. Waldman, a former  New York Times  reporter, discusses 9/11 victims, memorial gardens and Muslim-American life, but her keenest observations are of the media. She has a canny understanding of how a New York Post front page can stoke right-wing rage, or how a New York Times article can muddy the waters. There's a slight cartoonishness to her characterizations of cub reporters and radio hosts, but overall this is a remarkably assured portrait of how a populace grows maddened and confused when ideology trumps empathy.A stellar debut. Waldman's book reflects a much-needed understanding of American paranoia in the post-9/11 world. (Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2011) 

Further reading:

• Interview with Amy Waldman on Book Browse
• Michiko Kakatani's review in The New York Times (8/15/2011)
• Kamila Shamsie's review in The Guardian (8/24/2011)
• Chris Cleve's review in The Washington Post ( 8/15/2011)
• Bob Minzesheimer's review in USA Today (8/16/2011)

Nemesis by Philip Roth

June 11, 2012    1 p.m.

Discussion Leader: Jane Shapiro

View the Readers' Packet prepared by H-WPL's Staff


Reserve your copy of Nemesis by Philip Roth on the ALISCat website.

BookList:

/* Starred Review */ The fourth in the great and undiminished Roth’s recent cycle of short novels follows Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), and The Humbug (2009), and as exceptional as those novels are, this latest in the series far exceeds its predecessors in both emotion and intellect. In general terms, the novel is a staggering visit to a time and place when a monumental health crisis dominated the way people led their day-to-day lives. Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1940s (a common setting for this author) experienced, as the war in Europe was looking better for the Allies, a scare as deadly as warfare. The city has been hit by an epidemic of polio. Of course, at that time, how the disease spread and its cure were unknown. The city is in a panic, with residents so suspicious of other individuals and ethnic groups that emotions quickly escalate into hostility and even rage. Our hero, and he proves truly heroic, is Bucky Canter, playground director in the Jewish neighborhood of Newark. As the summer progresses, Bucky sees more and more of his teenage charges succumb to the disease. When an opportunity presents itself to leave the city for work in a Catskills summer camp, Bucky is torn between personal safety and personal duty. What happens is heartbreaking, but the joy of having met Bucky redeems any residual sadness. -- Hooper, Brad (Reviewed 07-01-2010) (Booklist, vol 106, number 21, p8)

Publishers Weekly:

Roth continues his string of small, anti–Horatio Alger novels (The Humbling; etc.) with this underwhelming account of Bucky Cantor, the young playground director of the Chancellor Avenue playground in 1944 Newark. When a polio outbreak ravages the kids at the playground, Bucky, a hero to the boys, becomes spooked and gives in to the wishes of his fiancée, who wants him to take a job at the Pocono summer camp where she works. But this being a Roth novel, Bucky can't hide from his fate. Fast-forward to 1971, when Arnie Mesnikoff, the subtle narrator and one of the boys from Chancellor, runs into Bucky, now a shambles, and hears the rest of his story of piercing if needless guilt, bad luck, and poor decisions. Unfortunately, Bucky's too simple a character to drive the novel, and the traits that make him a good playground director--not very bright, quite polite, beloved, straight thinking--make him a lackluster protagonist. For Roth, it's surprisingly timid. (Oct.) --Staff (Reviewed August 2, 2010) (Publishers Weekly, vol 257, issue 30, p)

Library Journal:

/* Starred Review */ During the summer of 1944, young men like Bucky Cantor needed good reason not to be fighting overseas. Though he had bad eyesight, was the sole support of his grandmother, and was the best phys ed teacher Newark's Chancellor Avenue School ever saw, Bucky's guilt informed his life that long, hot summer and forever changed its trajectory. With an incredible eye for historical detail, Roth paints a vivid picture of the polio epidemic that hit the Jewish neighborhood of Weequahic on the Fourth of July weekend, pitting ignorance against science, neighbor against neighbor, and fear against common sense. Bucky excels at his job, keeping the kids active and naively believing that he can personally hold the disease at bay. But as one child after another falls ill, he loses faith in God even as he obsesses over the chance to join his girlfriend, Marcia, in the Poconos. VERDICT Roth, one of our greatest American writers, is unrivaled in his mastery at evoking mid-20th-century New Jersey, but it's the thoughtful examination of the toll guilt takes on the psyche, the futility of raging against God or Fate, and the danger of turning blame inward that give this short novel its power. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/10.]— Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib., Ft. Myers, FL --Sally Bissell (Reviewed August 1, 2010) (Library Journal, vol 135, issue 13, p74) 

Kirkus:

/* Starred Review */ For those who monitor the growing list of books by Philip Roth, his forthcoming, Nemesis, presents a revelation as startling as the discovery of a planet or the alignment of a new constellation.The top of the list remains reassuringly familiar: "Zuckerman Books" (those featuring Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego), "Roth Books" (another alter ego, "Philip Roth," in a category that includes fiction and nonfiction alike) and "Kepesh Books" (another serial protagonist who may or may not be an alter ego).But then there is an emergent category: "Nemeses: Short Fiction," which encompasses four recent novels, including the new one. What this means to the ardent Roth reader is that three works previously considered unrelated—Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008) and The Humbling (2009), formerly scattered at the list's bottom with some of his earliest efforts as "Other Books," are now connected. And Nemesis provides the key to that connection.A little longer than the other three, Nemesis could be the darkest novel Roth has written and ranks with the most provocative. It's a parable of innocence lost in the author's native Newark, where polio threatens a neighborhood that is already sacrificing young men to World War II. The protagonist is Bucky Cantor, a 23-year-old playground director, who has seen his best friends enlist in the war while he was rejected for poor eyesight.Instead, "Mr. Cantor" (as his charges call him) finds himself facing a more insidious enemy. "No medicine existed to treat the disease and no vaccine to produce immunity...(it) could befall anyone, for no apparent reason," writes Roth. It arrives without warning, and it changes everything. If anything, it was scarier than cancer or AIDS is now.Narrating the story is one of polio's victims, though he barely emerges as a character until the novel's epiphany. Until then, Roth lets the reader wonder how a narrator named only in passing could penetrate the protagonist's mind and relate a series of incidents that the narrator couldn't have witnessed.As Bucky's boys succumb to the disease, temptation lures him from the city to what appears to be a safe oasis, an idyllic summer camp where his girlfriend works. Yet his conscience (already plagued by his 4-F status) pays the price for his escape, an escape that might prove illusory.What is Bucky's nemesis? Maybe polio. Maybe God, "who made the virus," who kills children with "lunatic cruelty." Maybe mortality—death and the decay that precedes it, the ravages of time that distinguish man from God.But maybe Bucky's nemeses include Bucky himself—a layer of meaning that makes this novel something other than another retelling of Job and forces the reader to reconsider the previously published "Nemeses" in fresh light. For it is within these short novels that Roth tackles nothing less than the human condition, which finds its nemesis in the mirror.(Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2010)

Further Information

• Philip Roth looks back...., Newark Star Ledger, March 18, 2012.
• Philip Roth's interview with Esquire, October 7, 2010
• Benjamin Taylor interviewing Philip Roth, May 2011 (YouTube)
• Rita Braver interviews Philip Roth on CBS News, October 26, 2010
• Leah Hager Cohen's review in The New York Times, October 8, 2012
• Heller McAlpin's review on NPR, October 4, 2010
• Roxana Robinson's review in The Washington Post, October 5, 2010
• Morris Dickstein's review in The Daily Beast, October 2, 2010
• Philip Roth interviews, compiled on The Philip Roth Society web site
• Book Discussion questions: Yiddish Book Center
• Igor Webb: Four Questions about Nemesis answered (The Forward)
  

Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

• Monday, May 21
• 1 p.m.
• Discussion leader: Ellen Getreu

Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks came to live on Martha's Vineyard in 2006.  In her travels, she ran across a map by the island's native Wampanoag people that marked the birthplace of Caleb, the first Native American to graduate Harvard College in 1665.  Her interest piqued, she unearthed his thin history, immersing herself in the records of his tribe, of the white families that settled the island in the 1640's and the 17th-century Harvard.

Reserve your copy of Caleb's Crossing on ALISCat

Readers' Packet prepared by the HWPL Staff

Book Reviews from the NoveList Plus database:

BookList:

/* Starred Review */ Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her Civil War novel, March (2006), here imagines the life of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard. The story is told by Bethia Mayfield, the daughter of a preacher who traveled from England to Martha’s Vineyard to try and “bring Christ to the Indians.” In 1660, when Bethia is 12, the family takes Caleb, a Wampanoag Indian, into their home to prepare him for boarding school. Bethia is a bright scholar herself, and though education for women is discouraged, she absorbs the lessons taught to Caleb and her brother Makepeace like a sponge. She struggles through the deaths of her mother, a younger sister, another brother, and her father. When Caleb and Makepeace are sent to Cambridge, Bethia accompanies them as an indentured servant to a professor. She marries a Harvard scholar, journeys with him to Padua, and finally returns to her beloved island. In flashbacks, Brooks relates the woes of the Indian Wars, the smallpox epidemic, and Caleb’s untimely death shortly after his graduation with honors. Brooks has an uncanny ability to reconstruct each moment of the history she so thoroughly researched in stunningly lyrical prose, and her characters are to be cherished. -- Donovan, Deborah (Reviewed 03-15-2011) (Booklist, vol 107, number 14, p27)

Publishers Weekly:

Pulitzer Prize–winner Brooks (for March) delivers a splendid historical inspired by Caleb Cheeshahteaumauck, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard. Brooks brings the 1660s to life with evocative period detail, intriguing characters, and a compelling story narrated by Bethia Mayfield, the outspoken daughter of a Calvinist preacher. While exploring the island now known as Martha's Vineyard, Bethia meets Caleb, a Wampanoag native to the island, and they become close, clandestine friends. After Caleb loses most of his family to smallpox, he begins to study under the tutelage of Bethia's father. Since Bethia isn't allowed to pursue education herself, she eavesdrops on Caleb's and her own brother's lessons. Caleb is a gifted scholar who eventually travels, along with Bethia's brother, to Cambridge to continue his education. Bethia tags along and her descriptions of 17th-century Cambridge and Harvard are as entertaining as they are enlightening (Harvard was founded by Puritans to educate the "English and Indian youth of this country," for instance). With Harvard expected to graduate a second Martha's Vineyard Wampanoag Indian this year, almost three and a half centuries after Caleb, the novel's publication is particularly timely. (May) --Staff (Reviewed March 14, 2011) (Publishers Weekly, vol 258, issue 11, p)

Library Journal:

/* Starred Review */ In 1965, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck of Martha's Vineyard graduated from Harvard, whose 1650 charter describes its mission as "the education of the English and Indian youth of this country." That much is fact. That Caleb befriended Bethia Mayfield, the free-spirited daughter of the island's preacher, is of course fiction—but it's luscious fiction in the capable hands of Pulitzer Prize winner Brooks (March ). As one might expect from Brooks, Bethia is a keen and rebellious lass, indignant that she should be kept from book learning when her slower brother gets the benefit of an education. She first encounters Caleb in the woods, learning his language and ways while stoutly arguing her Christian beliefs; later, Bethia's zealous father brings Caleb into the household to convert him. And so begins Caleb's crossing, first from Native to English Colonial culture and then from the island to Cambridge, where he studies at a preparatory school before entering Harvard. Bethia ends up at the school, too—but as an indentured servant. VERDICT Writing in Bethia's voice, Brooks offers a lyric and elevated narrative that effectively replicates the language of the era; she takes on the obvious issues of white arrogance, cultural difference, and the debased role of women without settling into jeremiad. The result is sweet and aching. Highly recommended. [Prepub Alert, 11/15/10.]— Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal --Barbara Hoffert (Reviewed March 15, 2011) (Library Journal, vol 136, issue 5, p106)

Kirkus:

(The following is a combined review for CALEB&#39 and S CROSSING)The NBA-winning Australian-born, now New England author (People of the Book, 2008,? etc.) moves ever deeper into the American past.Her fourth novel's announced subject is the eponymous Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, a member of the Wampanoag Indian tribe that inhabits Massachusetts's Great Harbor (a part of Martha's Vineyard), and the first Native American who will graduate from Harvard College (in 1665). Even as a boy, Caleb is a paragon of sharp intelligence, proud bearing and manly charm, as we learn from the somewhat breathless testimony of Bethia Mayfield, who grows up in Great Harbor where her father, a compassionate and unprejudiced preacher, oversees friendly relations between white settlers and the placid Wampanoag. The story Bethia unfolds is a compelling one, focused primarily on her own experiences as an indentured servant to a schoolmaster who prepares promising students for Harvard; a tense relationship with her priggish, inflexible elder brother Makepeace; and her emotional bond of friendship with the occasionally distant and suspicious Caleb, who, in this novel's most serious misstep, isn't really the subject of his own story. Fascinating period details and a steadily expanding plot, which eventually encompasses King Philip's War, inevitable tensions between Puritan whites and upwardly mobile "salvages," as well as the compromises unavoidably ahead for Bethia, help to modulate a narrative voice that sometimes teeters too uncomfortably close to romantic clich??. Both Bethia, whose womanhood precludes her right to seek formal education, and the stoical Caleb are very nearly too good to be true. However, Brooks' knowledgeable command of the energies and conflicts of the period, and particularly her descriptions of the reverence for learning that animates the little world of Harvard and attracts her characters' keenest longings, carries a persuasive and quite moving emotional charge.While no masterpiece, this work nevertheless contributes in good measure to the current and very welcome revitalization of the historical novel.(Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2011) 

Further reading:

• Author's biography from GeraldineBrooks.com
• Interview with Geraldine Brooks (authormagazine.org)
• Jane Smiley's review in The New York Times
• Alan Cheuse's review on NPR
• Paul Chaat Smith's review in The Washington Post
• Book Discussion Guide for Caleb's Crossing