You Shall Know Our Velocity!
Dave Eggers, 2002
Knopf Doubleday
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400033546
Summary
Will has surprisingly come into a large amount of money. His photograph screwing in a lightbulb has been made a silhouette and is being used as a picture for the company's lightbulb boxes.
Will with his friend, Hand, buy plane tickets to the most obscure countries possible, wherein they will give the money away, bit by bit, to people whom they arbitrarily decide are most deserving. According to Hand, they gave to people for the benefit of both parties—as a sacrament with the purpose of restoring a faith in humanity.
Without a solid set of criteria, or a definitive direction in their plan, this proves surprisingly difficult, and they experience much awkward confusion and moral uncertainty. Barely able to achieve their goal of giving away their money, the two are reduced to pretending to ask for directions, and taping money to barn animals. The plot is both a log of the journey, as well as a look into the mind of the narrator, Will, who often feels isolated, confused, and shy. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 12, 1970
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Reared—Lake Forest, Illinois
• Education—University of Illinois
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California
Dave Eggers is the author of four books, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, How We Are Hungry, and What Is the What. He is the editor of McSweeney’s, a quarterly magazine and book-publishing company, and is cofounder of 826 Valencia, a network of nonprofit writing and tutoring centers for young people.
His interest in oral history led to his 2004 cofounding of Voice of Witness, a nonprofit series of books that use oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. As a journalist, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Believer. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and daughter. (From the publisher.)
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Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, grew up in suburban Lake Forest (where he was a high-school classmate of the actor Vince Vaughn), and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He lives in San Francisco and is married to the writer Vendela Vida. In October 2005, Vendela gave birth to a daughter, October Adelaide Eggers Vida.
Eggers's brother Bill is a researcher who has worked for several conservative think tanks, doing research on privatization. His sister, Beth, claimed that Eggers grossly understated her role in raising their brother Toph and made use of her journals in writing A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius without compensating her. She later recanted her claims in a posting on her brother's own website McSweeney's Internet Tendency, referring to the incident as "a really terrible LaToya Jackson moment". On March 1, 2002, the New York Post reported that Beth, then a lawyer in Modesto, California, had committed suicide. Eggers briefly spoke about his sister's death during a 2002 fan interview for McSweeney's.
Eggers was one of three 2008 TED Prize recipients. His TED Prize wish: for community members to personally engage with local public schools.
Eggers began writing as a Salon.com editor and founded Might magazine, while also writing a comic strip called Smarter Feller (originally Swell, then Smart Feller) for SF Weekly. His first book was a memoir (with fictional elements), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). It focuses on the author's struggle to raise his younger brother in San Francisco following the sudden deaths of their parents. The book quickly became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The memoir was praised for its originality, idiosyncratic self-referencing, and for several innovative stylistic elements. Early printings of the 2001 trade-paperback edition were published with a lengthy, apologetic postscript entitled "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making."
In 2002, Eggers published his first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, a story about a frustrating attempt to give away money to deserving people while haphazardly traveling the globe. An expanded and revised version was released as Sacrament in 2003 and retitled You Shall Know Our Velocity! for its Vintage imprint distribution. He has since published a collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry, and three politically-themed serials for Salon.com. In November 2005, Eggers published Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, compiling the book of interviews with exonerees once sentenced to death. The book was compiled with Lola Vollen, "a physician specializing in the aftermath of large-scale human rights abuses" and "a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of International Studies and a practicing clinician." Novelist Scott Turow wrote the introduction to Surviving Justice. Eggers's most recent novel, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (McSweeney's, 2006), was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Eggers is also the editor of the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, an annual anthology of short stories, essays, journalism, satire, and alternative comics.
Eggers is the founder of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house. McSweeney's produces a quarterly literary journal, McSweeney's, first published in 1998; a monthly journal, The Believer, which debuted in 2003 and is edited by wife Vida; and, beginning in 2005, a quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin. Other works include The Future Dictionary of America, Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, and the "Dr. and Mr. Haggis-On-Whey" children's books of literary nonsense, which Eggers writes with his younger brother. Ahead of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Eggers wrote an essay about the US national team and soccer in the United States for The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, a book published with aid of the journal Granta, that contained essays about each competing team in the tournament.
Eggers currently teaches writing in San Francisco at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit tutoring center and writing school for children that he cofounded in 2002. Eggers has recruited volunteers to operate similar programs in Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, Chicago, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, all under the auspices of the nonprofit organization 826 National. In 2006, he appeared at a series of fundraising events, dubbed the Revenge of the Book–Eaters tour, to support these programs. The Chicago show, at the Park West theatre, featured Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Other performers on the tour included Sufjan Stevens, Jon Stewart and David Byrne. In September 2007, the Heinz Foundations awarded Eggers a $250,000 Heinz award given to recognize "extraordinary achievements by individuals". The award will be used to fund some of the 826 Valencia writing centers. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Headlong, heartsick and footsore....Frisbee sentences that sail, spin, hover, circle and come back to the reader like gifts of gravity and grace....Nobody writes better than Dave Eggers about young men who aspire to be, at the same time, authentic and sincere.
New York Times Book Review
You Shall Know Our Velocity! is the work of a wildly talented writer... Like Kerouac's book, Eggers's could inspire a generation as much as it documents it.
Los Angeles Times
There are some wonderful set-pieces here, and memorable phrases tossed on the ground like unwanted pennies from the guy who runs the mint.
Washington Post
The bottom line that matters is this: Eggers has written a terrific novel, an entertaining and imaginative tale
Boston Globe
Eggers ’s writing really takes off—his forte is the messy, funny tirade, stuffed with convincing pain and wry observations.
Newsday
Powerful.... Eggers’s strengths as a writer are real: his funny pitch-perfect dialog; the way his prose delicately captures the bumblebee blundering of Will’s thoughts; ... and the stream-water clarity of his descriptions.... There is genius here.... Who is doing more, single-handedly and single-mindedly, for American writing?
Time
Discussion Questions
1. You Shall Know Our Velocity! contains drawings, photographs, and reproductions of notes and maps that Will and Hand create in the story. How surprising is it to come upon such visual elements in a literary text? What do they add to the novel? In what ways do they challenge the conventions of the novel form?
2. Do Will and Hand decide to take their trip in order to escape their grief over Jack's death, or to confront that grief and possibly transform it? Is their trip an act of penance? What guilt do they feel in relation to Jack?
3. Will received his money for allowing an advertising company to use his silhouette, a shadow image of him screwing in a light bulb. In what ways is this circumstance both meaningful and absurd? What other absurd elements appear in the novel? Does the book's humor diminish or deepen its more serious concerns?
4. Will carries on internal conversations and arguments in his head, with Hand, with strangers, with Jack. But he's tired of them. "I wanted the voices silenced and I wanted less of my head generally" [p. 27]. Why is he so tormented by these voices? What does he want instead of the constant arguing? Does he find it by the end of the story?
5. In Estonia, Will questions why he is giving away his money: "Was the point to give it to people who needed it, orjust to get rid of it? I knew the answer, of course, but had to remind Hand" [p. 239]. What is the point of giving the money away? Why does Hand need to be reminded?
6. Hand describes at length the nomadic tribe of "Jumping People" in South America. These people believed in "the impermanence of place" [p. 376] and felt that they carried the souls of their dead loved ones on their backs like mountains. In what ways is their story relevant to Will and Hand's story? In what instances is jumping, or leaping over, important in the novel? Why has Eggers used the message the Jumping People carved into the cliff above their village, "YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY," as his title?
7. Will winces at Hand's awkwardness when he spills his soda while giving money to a Moroccan family. "What kind of person brings his soda? You're giving $300 to people in a shack and you bring your soda? Nothing we did ever resembled in any way what we'd envisioned" [p. 226]. Why is it so hard to give the money to people gracefully? What are some of their more fanciful ideas about how to deliver the money? Why is the way they give it so important to them?
8. In what sense can the novel be read as an elegy to childhood, or to the lost innocence of childhood? What childhood experiences do Will and Hand remember most vividly? In what ways is their behavior still childlike?
9. Will describes a swarm of birds as "swinging to and fro, overlapping, like a group of sixth graders riding bikes home from school" [p. 101]; and of the smoothness of a Moroccan woman's skin, he says: "Next to skin like that, ours seemed so rough, like burlap woven with straw" [p. 220]. Where else does this kind of metaphorical language appear? What does it add to the novel?
10. Near the end of the novel, as they prepare to part, Hand asks Will when he will return from Mexico. Will says he doesn't know but thinks to himself "I'm going to keep going" [p. 389]. What does he mean by this? Is he suggesting suicide, the death by drowning referred to in the novel's opening sentence?
11. Will is beaten when Hand disappears. Later, in one of his interior dialogues, Will says "Most of being a man is being there, Hand" [p. 347]. Why is "being there" so important for Will? What other absences haunt him? Is Will able to be fully "there" for others?
12. Apart from disencumbering them of Will's money, how does this journey affect Will and Hand? Does it affect them differently? What do they discover about themselves and each other, about the world and their place in it, during the course of their travels?
13. In what ways does Eggers speak for or represent not only his own experience but the sensibility of his generation? How does that sensibility differ from previous generations?
14. Will's mother thinks it is "condescending" to swoop in and give poor people cash, while Will considers that attitude illogical, a defense for her own "inaction" [p. 123]. Is Will right? Is his way of giving better than his mother's support of charities? What is the essential difference between giving something to someone face to face as opposed to giving through a charitable institution? In what sense is the novel, as a whole, an act of giving?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions
The Great Night
Chris Adrian, 2011
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374166410
In Brief
Chris Adrian’s fiction has been hailed for its startling originality and provocative meditations on life and mortality. Inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Great Night infuses Adrian’s storytelling with new levels of creative genius, bringing the imaginary kingdom of Titania and Oberon to San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park.
Midsummer’s Eve, 2008. Molly, Henry, and Will, each of them reeling from the loss of a love, set out for a party but become trapped in the park, which has become the home in exile for a madcap faerie court. Like the three mortals who are ensnared in her world that night, Queen Titania is mourning too: her adopted son has died of leukemia, a disease that defied the most potent magic. The queen’s grief has turned to rage, and on this night she unleashes an ancient beast, along with the fearsome might of her tiny Puckish followers.
As their stories unfold, the cast of characters proves to have surprising shared histories, blurring the line between memory and hope at every turn. For some, retracing the past becomes a way of flirting with immortality. For others, it’s only a reminder of how dark the mortal world can be. Culminating in a staging of the 1970s cult classic Soylent Green—indirectly produced by Titania via a homeless man who wants to bring down a seemingly sinister mayor—the novel unfolds as an unforgettable homage to the power of the imagination. (From the publisher.)
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About the Author
• Birth—1970
• Where—N/A
• Education—B. A., University of Florida; M.D., Eastern
Virginia Medical School; Iowa Writer's Workshop;
Harvard Divinity School
• Awards—Guggenheim Fellowship
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California
Chris Adrian is an American author. Adrian's writing styles in short stories vary a great deal, from modernist realism to pronounced lyrical allegory. His novels both tend toward surrealism, having mostly realistic characters experience fantastic circumstances.
He has written three novels: Gob's Grief, The Children's Hospital, and The Great Night, an updated take on Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night Dream. In 2008, he published A Better Angel, a collection of short stories.
His short fiction has also appeared in the Paris Review, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and Story. He was one of 11 fiction writers to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009.
Adrian completed his Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Florida in 1993. He received his M.D. from Eastern Virginia Medical School in 2001. He completed a pediatric residency at the University of California, San Francisco, was a student at Harvard Divinity School, and is currently in the pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at UCSF. He is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. (From Wikipedia.)
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Critics Say . . .
Adrian follows his masterful The Children's Hospital with a disappointing and decidedly less ambitious effort, a flabby retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream that finds a heartbroken Titania loosening a demonic Puck on San Francisco's Buena Vista Park. Caught up in the mayhem are Henry, a neurotic gay man whose affair has just ended; Molly, a young woman turned inward after the suicide of her boyfriend; Will, a lovelorn tree doctor trying to get his lady back; and a group staging a musical remake of Soylent Green to explain the decline of San Francisco's homeless population. Adrian liberally applies surreal sex jokes and populates his adventure with bizarre fairies, impossible events, and extensive backstories, but this investigation into love's labors never ignites. Adrian occasionally channels the wayward, winsome feel of millennial San Francisco, but his characters remains wispy and his plot fails to develop satisfying turns. The book contains flashes of what makes this writer great, but he has better work in him.
Publishers Weekly
William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream deals with illusion—in particular, the illusion that things can be set aright, as if by magic. This riff by New Yorker 20 Under 40 author Adrian (A Better Angel) is a whole lot darker, declaring that no magic can take away the memory of suffering and that in our self-serving scramble we disdain the pain (and indeed the goodness) of others. On the summer solstice in San Francisco, the fairies come out from under their hill in Buena Vista Park to celebrate Great Night. But this year there will be no celebration, for Oberon has vanished and Titania is thoroughly undone by the death of her Boy, one of the many changelings brought to her by Puck—no mischievous sprite but a malevolent spirit. Even as a rowdy bunch rehearse a play aimed at exposing the mayor's crimes against the homeless, three people are trapped in the park by the fairies' madness: uptight Molly, lovesick Will, and gentle, obsessed Henry, who still misses decamped lover Bobby and whose tragic past and connections to other characters unfold tantalizingly. Verdict: Inventive and scarily beautiful, this could wipe out casual readers, but it is an extraordinary novel. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
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Book Club Discussion Questions
1. The book’s epigraph is taken from lines spoken by Shakespeare’s Titania to the laborer Nick Bottom, who has been magically transformed into an ass. Under a spell, Titania has fallen in love with the donkey-headed Bottom. Is fairy life as comfortable as she says it is? Is mortal love a kind of spell, too, as Molly, Henry, and Will experience it?
2. The grim reality of the pediatric oncology ward illuminates the splendor of Titania and Oberon’s world. What does their experience with the Boy demonstrate about parenting, and about the limits of a parent who seems to have unlimited resources? What is good and bad about Titania and Oberon’s parenting? In what way do Beadle and Blork become like parents to the parents?
3. If you’re familiar with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, compare it to The Great Night. How do real and imaginary realms influence each other in both works? Do the authors have the same approach to despondent lovers?
4. As Molly mourns for Ryan, is her family’s religious history, along with her botched chaplain internship, a help or a hindrance?
5. How does Henry’s abduction affect his relationship with Bobby? What is left of Henry’s identity after Bobby leaves? How did you react to the crossroads between Henry’s and Ryan’s youth?
6. What do Will’s parents teach him about relationships and love? Which of their lessons does he unlearn with Carolina?
7. How might the novel have unfolded if it had been told from the other lovers’ points of view: Bobby, Carolina, and (from the grave) Ryan?
8. Do the mayor and Titania have similar problems as rulers?
9. Just as Shakespeare presents a play within a play, staged by Bottom, Adrian imagines a homeless performance of the 1973 cult classic Soylent Green, which is set in a dismal 2022, featuring a world consumed by overpopulation, the greenhouse effect, and a reliance on processed food rations (Soylent Green). How does it affect your reading to watch fiction unfold inside fiction?
10. How did you picture the frightening, unleashed beast? How did you feel when the fear was resolved, and Henry and Titania came to their resolution? What do you suppose the squirrel will tell Bobby?
11. Enchanting, liberating, yet gritty, how do San Francisco and Buena Vista Park mirror the characters in The Great Night?
12. How do love and longing manifest themselves differently in the novel’s two worlds? Whether the characters are mortal or not, what are the greatest sources of oppression and freedom in their lives?
13. Chris Adrian has compared The Great Night to a mixture of “odd-tasting foreign candies.” Which of the many tiny feasts in this novel was the most appealing to you?
14. What aspects of The Great Night echo the struggles captured in Adrian’s previous fiction (Gob’s Grief, featuring Walt Whitman and Victoria Woodhull; The Children’s Hospital, invoking Noah’s Ark; and A Better Angel, a story collection in which the characters contemplate the metaphysical)? Which aspects of The Great Night are unlike anything you have read before?
15. If your world were inhabited by fairies, what would they want from you? How would they manifest themselves in your workplace, your neighborhood, and your love life?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Christmas Wedding
James Patterson, Richard DiLallo, 2011
Little, Brown & Co.
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316097390
Summary
The tree is decorated, the cookies are baked, and the packages are wrapped, but the biggest celebration this Christmas is Gaby Summerhill's wedding.
Since her husband died three years ago, Gaby's four children have drifted apart, each consumed by the turbulence of their own lives. They haven't celebrated Christmas together since their father's death, but when Gaby announces that she's getting married—and that the groom will remain a secret until the wedding day—she may finally be able to bring them home for the holidays.
But the wedding isn't Gaby's only surprise—she has one more gift for her children, and it could change all their lives forever. With deeply affecting characters and the emotional twists of a James Patterson thriller, The Christmas Wedding is a fresh look at family and the magic of the season. (From the publisher.)
Author Bios
• James Patterson has had more New York Times bestsellers than any other writer, ever, according to Guinness World Records. Since his first novel won the Edgar Award in 1977, James Patterson's books have sold more than 210 million copies. He is the author of the Alex Cross novels, the most popular detective series of the past twenty-five years, including Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider. Mr. Patterson also writes the bestselling Women's Murder Club novels, set in San Francisco, and the top-selling New York detective series of all time, featuring Detective Michael Bennett. He writes fulltime and lives in Florida with his family.
• Richard DiLallo is a former advertising creative director. He has had numerous articles published in major magazines. He lives in Manhattan with his wife. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
It's clever, light and as welcoming as an ocean breeze.
People
A lighthearted novel about a widow who suddenly decides to re-marry on Christmas Day.... A perfect plot for a Meryl Streep or Diane Lane happily-ever-after movie.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these questions for The Christmas Wedding—they were kindly submitted by Sylvie Barton, from Mesa, AZ. Sylvie is the organizer of The Mesa Thematic Book and Movie Club.
1. Was the story credible? The characters credible?
2. Claire’s been summoned by Hank, her husband, and she says, “She did not want a fight today. Or any day, really. She couldn’t stand his blow-ups, but she didn’t know what to do about them. The kids loved Hank. Keep the peace, Claire, she reminded herself.” What would be your suggestion for Claire?
3. On page 27, the author is writing about Claire and says, “Claire knew she was strong—she’d had the twins via natural childbirth (26 hours in labor), still ran three miles a day—but, shoot, she thought, you can be the strongest person in the world and still make bad decisions and have a pretty miserable life.” Are Claire’s attributes truly feats of strength? In what area, if any, is Claire lacking strength?
4. Did you find any similarity in all of the women characters in this book?
5. In the first video that Gaby sends to her children she states, “I needed a big change. Everybody needs a change. If you don’t change, you’re stuck in a rut.” Do agree or disagree with her statement and why or why not?
6. In Gaby’s second video she states: “I think that most people can lead very satisfying lives, as long as they don’t spend too much time staring at their own belly buttons and worrying about things that aren’t within their control." What do you think Gaby is trying to say through this message? Do agree or disagree?
10. What are your feelings or any insights about Jacob’s motto: “Seize what’s been handed you. Make smart decisions. Make decisions because—he said it again—life is a temporary situation.”
11.Marty imparts his wisdom to Gaby’s students on pages 119 and 120. Do you agree or disagree with this pep talk that he provides them. Is it true or false that the most interesting people are in books?
12. On page 121 Marty states: “You see, one of the best things about reading is that you’ll always have something to think about when you’re not reading.” Is reading the only source that provides this?
13. Claire asks for her mom’s approval or disapproval to end her marriage with Hank and Gaby states: “You don’t need me to approve or disapprove. A marriage is the most private thing in the world. Only the people in it know if it works for them or doesn’t.” Do you agree or disagree with Gaby? What are your thoughts on this statement?
19.What are your concerns about this book?
20.At the end of the book, do you feel hope for the characters?
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Captains and the Kings
Taylor Caldwell, 1973
Random House
816 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449205624
Summary
Captains and the Kings is the saga of young Joseph Armagh, recently of Ireland, who promised his dying mother to care for his younger siblings. Landing in Boston, Joseph's determination carries him through years shady-deal making and his gradual accumulation of wealth and power.
In this work, Caldwell takes on the global power brokers. Running through the story line is a description of the way the international financiers and industrialists (all private consortiums owned by an elite of the world's richest families and persons) hijack governments around the globe; instigating wars and gaining control over the warring countries through manipulation of the enormous debts incurred during a war.
While a disclaimer states that all persons portrayed in the book are fictional, many see the story as loosely based on the life of Joseph Kennedy, scion of President John F. Kennedy, Robert, Senators Robert F. and Teddy Kennedy. (From Wikipedia.)
Captains and the Kings was made into a 1976 TV mini-series.
Author Bio
• Birth—September 7, 1900
• Where—Manchester, England, UK
• Raised—in the US
• Death—August 30, 1985
• Where—Greenwich, Connecticut
• Education—University of Buffalo (New York)
• Awards—1948, National League of American Pen Women
Gold Medal; 1950, Grand Prix Chatvain
Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell was an Anglo-American novelist and prolific author of popular fiction, also known by the pen names Marcus Holland and Max Reiner, and by her married name of J. Miriam Reback.
In her fiction, she often used real historical events or persons. Taylor Caldwell's best-known works include Dynasty of Death (1938), an epic story about intrigues and alliances of two Western Pennsylvania families involved in the manufacture of armaments, Dear and Glorious Physician (about St.Luke), and Captains and the Kings. Her last major novel, Answer as a Man, appeared in 1980.
Taylor Caldwell was born in Manchester, England, into a family of Scottish background. Her family descended from the Scottish clan of MacGregor of which the Taylors are a subsidiary clan. In 1907 she emigrated to the United States with her parents and younger brother. Her father died shortly after the move, and the family struggled. At the age of eight she started to write stories, and in fact wrote her first novel, The Romance of Atlantis, at the age of twelve (although it was to remain unpublished until 1975). In 1919 she married William F. Combs, had Peggy and divorced in 1931. Between the years 1918 and 1919 she served in the United States Navy Reserve. From 1923 to 1924 she was a court reporter in New York State Department of Labor in Buffalo, New York and from 1924 to 1931 a member of the Board of Special Inquiry at the Department of Justice in Buffalo.
In 1931 she graduated from the University at Buffalo, and in 1934 began a collaboration with her second husband, Marcus Reback, to write several bestsellers, the first of which was Dynasty of Death. During her career as a writer Caldwell's books sold over 30 million copies. She received several awards, among them the National League of American Pen Women Gold Medal (1948), Buffalo Evening News Award (1949), and Grand Prix Chatvain (1950).
Caldwell was married four times altogether—the third time to William Everett Stancell, and the fourth time to William Robert Prestie (who died in 2002). She had two daughters, Judith and Mary (Judith died in 1979).
Caldwell was an outspoken conservative and for a time wrote for the John Birch Society's monthly journal American Opinion and even associated with the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby. Her memoir, On Growing Up Tough, appeared in 1971, consisting of many edited-down articles from American Opinion. Caldwell continued writing until 1980, when a stroke left her deaf and unable to speak. She died of pulmonary failure in Greenwich, Connecticut on September 2, 1985. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Older books have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Amazon for helpful customer reviews.)
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get your discussion started for Captains and the Kings:
1. What drives Joseph Armagh—his promise to care for his siblings, his bitter experiences as an Irish immigrant, his own personal ambitions—or all three? Do you see him as an admirable character...or not?
2. Talk about life at the orphanage and how it affects Sean and Mary Regina.
3. What were the hardships faced by the newly arrived immigrants in America? How did their experiences mirror those of other newly arrived immigrants, perhaps your own ancestors?
4. Discuss the roles that the titans of industry play in this work. Do you feel Caldwell's writing is biased or objective? Are or were political systems dominated by major corporations; in other words, have governments, even democracies, had a history of doing the bidding of private consortiums, made up of powerful financiers and industrialists?
5. Can you see the historical parallels in this work to Joseph Kennedy and his sons, Jack, Bobby, and Teddy?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Heroic Measures
Jill Ciment, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307386786
Summary
From the author of Tattoo Artist, a new novel—taut, moving, accomplished—set in a fraught, post-9/11 New York...about real estate, dog love, and a city on alert.
A gasoline tanker truck is “stuck” in the Midtown Tunnel. New Yorkers are panicked. Is this the next big attack?
Alex, an artist, and Ruth, a former schoolteacher with an FBI file as thick as a dictionary, must get their beloved dachshund, whose back legs have suddenly become paralyzed, to the animal hospital sixty blocks north. But the streets of Manhattan are welded with traffic. Their dog, Dorothy, twelve-years-old and gray-faced, is the emotional center of Alex and Ruth's forty-five-year-long childless marriage. Using a cutting board as a stretcher, they ferry the dog uptown.
This is also the weekend that Alex and Ruth must sell their apartment. While house hunters traipse through it during their open house, husband and wife wait by the phone to hear from the animal hospital. During the course of forty-eight hours, as the missing truck driver terrorizes the city, the price of their apartment becomes a barometer for collective hope and despair, as the real estate market spikes and troughs with every breaking news story.
In shifting points of view—Alex’s, Ruth’s, and the little dog’s —man, woman, and one small tenacious beast try to make sense of the cacophony of rumors, opinions, and innuendos coming from news anchors, cable TV pundits, pollsters, bomb experts, hostages,witnesses, real estate agents, house hunters, bargain seekers, howling dogs, veterinarians, nurses, and cab drivers.
A moving, deftly told novel of ultrahigh-urban anxiety. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 20, 1955
• Where—Montreal, Canada
• Education—M.F.A., University of California, Irvine (USA)
• Awards—Two New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowships; National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship; Guggenheim Foundation grant; Janet Hiedinger Kafka Prize; NEA Japan Fellowship Prize.
• Currently—lives in Gainesville, Florida
Jill Ciment was born in Montreal, Canada. Her books include three novels, Tattoo Artist, Teeth of the Dog and The Law of Falling Bodies; a collection of short stories, Small Claims; and a memoir, Half a Life. She has been awarded two New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Ciment is a professor of English at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Yet the core of Heroic Measures is the patient, specific laying forth of the lives of this childless septuagenarian couple, these City College graduates with their little dog, their fluorescent light over the kitchen sink, their regular ethnic dinner with friends, their love for Chekhov and, yes, their Viagra-aided sex life. These quotidian but palpably truthful details add up to a story that doesn’t seem at all unconvincing. If that seems like faint praise, well, this isn’t a novel that goes for a big plot payoff (despite Pamir’s antics) or courts raves with ambitious prose. With this 48-hour portrait of a marriage in which troubles flare only briefly, Ciment seems to be aiming for something lighter and yet more real.
Caitlin Macy - New York Times
Read Jill Ciment’s Heroic Measures for its painterly depictions of a rattled city, its deliciously biting satire of media and real estate madness, its tender knowledge of the creaturely ties that bind.
O Magazine
Ciment's spare and surprisingly gripping novel details one long weekend in the life of Ruth and Alex Cohen, an elderly New York couple hoping to sell their East Village apartment of 45 years.... Ciment plays the veterinary, real estate and domestic details like elements of a thriller plot, while the couple's love of their dog provides heartrending texture.
Publishers Weekly
Three days of personal and public disasters form the scene of this latest from Ciment (The Tattoo Artist).... The story is touching, with more than a little wry humor aimed at the easily agitated media and the vagaries of real estate in New York. By the end of the first chapter, the reader feels at home with Ruth, Alex, and their little dog.
Amy Ford - Library Journal
Three disparate narrative elements—a possible terrorist attack, the real-estate market in New York City, a sick dachshund-somehow cohere into a blackly comic yet tenderly touching novel..... Could have been loopy in less deft hands, but Ciment keeps things lively and edgy throughout.
Kirkus Reviews
Book Club Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Heroic Measures:
1. How does Ciment treat the lives of Ruth and Alex as an aging couple? Does she emphasize their limitations, using them as a point of humor? Or does she present their aging as a normal phase of life? The couple have been together for 45 years; how would you describe their relationship?
2. Dorothy, of course, is almost more important a character than Alex—she's given her own "voice." How did you react to Dorothyt's narration? Is she "believable" as a character? What about her name: in what way might Dorothy allude to the heroine of The Wizard of Oz?
3. Many readers and critics say that the state of Dorothy's health worried them more than the terrorist's threat—that her out-come was more important than the city's. Was that your experience reading the book? Symbolically, how might the dog's illness reflect (or structurally parallel) what's happening in New York?
4. Talk about Abdul Pamir as a character. Do you find him sympathetic, pathetic...or what? Is there humor in his situation...or is it not particularly funny to you? What about the moment when the police bomb-sniffing German Shepherd approaches Pamir?
5. Ciment takes aim at Americans', in particular New Yorkers', high anxiety about terrorist attacks. On whom (or what) does she level her satiric eye? Who is most ridiculous in this story —and why? Is her humor fairly leveled, or does the public have reason to be frightened?
6. In what way does the real estate market track the city's level of anxiety?
7. Alex is creating a work based on Ruth's FBI file. What do we learn about Ruth's past? And how does that past, especially with regards to the House Un-American Activities Committee, connect thematically to the present?
8. What is the significance of the book's title, Heroic Measures?
9. Does this book deliver for you? Did you enjoy the dialogue, characters and fast-paced, thriller-like plot?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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