The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power
Deirdre Mask, 2020
St. Martin's Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250134769
Summary
An exuberant and insightful work of popular history of how streets got their names, houses their numbers, and what it reveals about class, race, power, and identity.
When most people think about street addresses, if they think of them at all, it is in their capacity to ensure that the postman can deliver mail or a traveler won’t get lost.
But street addresses were not invented to help you find your way; they were created to find you. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class.
In this wide-ranging and remarkable book, Deirdre Mask looks at the fate of streets named after Martin Luther King Jr., the wayfinding means of ancient Romans, and how Nazis haunt the streets of modern Germany.
The flipside of having an address is not having one, and we also see what that means for millions of people today, including those who live in the slums of Kolkata and on the streets of London.
Filled with fascinating people and histories, The Address Book illuminates the complex and sometimes hidden stories behind street names and their power to name, to hide, to decide who counts, who doesn’t—and why. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1980 (?)
• Where—Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., J.D., Harvard University; M.F.A., National University of Ireland
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK
Deirdre Mask graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude, and attended University of Oxford before returning to Harvard for law school, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She completed a master’s in writing at the National University of Ireland.
The author of The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power (2020), Deirdre's writing has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, and The Guardian.
Originally from North Carolina, she has taught at Harvard and the London School of Economics. She lives with her husband and daughters in London. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Read Deirdre Mask’s fascinating deep dive into the world of Mill Lane and Martin Luther King Street and you will begin to realise just how important these geographical markers are, how pregnant with meaning, and what a difference they make to everything from the proper functioning of society to questions of wealth, poverty and democracy.… Highly entertaining.
Sunday Times (UK)
(Starred review) [E]ntertaining…. [F]luid narration and impressive research…. [Mask] profiles a remarkable array of activists, historians, and artists…. This evocative history casts its subject in a whole new light.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Engaging, illuminating, and with highly relevant current subject matter, this book is recommended for all readers, especially fans of popular history and politics. —Margaret Heller, Loyola Univ. Chicago Libs.
Library Journal
(Starred review) [I]mpressive…. Mask combines deep research with skillfully written, memorable anecdotes to illuminate the vast influence of street addresses…. A standout book of sociological history and current affairs.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, 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)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992
Tina Brown, 2017
Henry, Holt & Company
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781627791366
Summary
Tina Brown kept delicious daily diaries throughout her eight spectacular years as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. Today they provide an incendiary portrait of the flash and dash and power brokering of the Excessive Eighties in New York and Hollywood.
The Vanity Fair Diaries is the story of an Englishwoman barely out of her twenties who arrives in New York City with a dream.
Summoned from London in hopes that she can save Conde Nast's troubled new flagship Vanity Fair, Tina Brown is immediately plunged into the maelstrom of the competitive New York media world and the backstabbing rivalries at the court of the planet's slickest, most glamour-focused magazine company.
She survives the politics, the intrigue, and the attempts to derail her by a simple stratagem: succeeding. In the face of rampant skepticism, she triumphantly reinvents a failing magazine.
Here are the inside stories of Vanity Fair scoops and covers that sold millions — the Reagan kiss, the meltdown of Princess Diana's marriage to Prince Charles, the sensational Annie Leibovitz cover of a gloriously pregnant, naked Demi Moore.
In the diary's cinematic pages, the drama, the comedy, and the struggle of running an "it" magazine come to life. Brown's Vanity Fair Diaries is also a woman's journey, of making a home in a new country and of the deep bonds with her husband, their prematurely born son, and their daughter.
Astute, open-hearted, often riotously funny, Tina Brown's The Vanity Fair Diaries is a compulsively fascinating and intimate chronicle of a woman's life in a glittering era. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 21. 1953
• Where—Maidenhead, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Tina Brown CBE (Christina Hambley Brown) is a journalist, magazine editor, columnist, talk-show host and author. Born a British citizen, she took United States citizenship in 2005 after emigrating in 1984 to edit Vanity Fair. She is legally titled Lady Evans.
In 2000 Brown was appointed a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for her services to overseas journalism, and in 2007 was inducted into the Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame. As an editor, she has also been honored with four George Polk Awards, five Overseas Press Club awards, and ten National Magazine Awards.
Family
Tina Brown was born in Maidenhead, England, and she and her elder brother, Christopher Hambley Brown (who became a movie producer) grew up in Little Marlow, in Buckinghamshire, a Thames village in the countryside west of London. Her father, George Hambley Brown, was active in the British film industry producing the early Miss Marple films in the series starring Margaret Rutherford, based on the character created by Agatha Christie.
Her mother, Bettina Iris Mary (Kohr), was an assistant to Laurence Olivier. Brown's mother was of part Iraqi descent. As Brown recounted, “She was dark and I never knew why.” In her later years, Bettina wrote for an English-language magazine for expatriates in Spain where she and her husband lived in retirement until moving to New York in the early 1980s to be with their daughter and grandchildren.
Education
In Brown's own words she was considered "an extremely subversive influence" as a child, which resulted in her expulsion from three boarding schools. Offenses included organizing a demonstration to protest against the school's policy of allowing a change of underwear only three times a week, referring to her headmistress' bosoms as "unidentified flying objects" in a journal entry, and writing a play about her school being blown up and a public lavatory being erected in its place.
When she was 17, Brown entered St. Anne's College at the University of Oxford. Studying English literature, she also wrote for Isis, the university's literary magazine, contributing interviews with the journalist Auberon Waugh and the actor Dudley Moore. Her sharp, witty prose led to her some of her work being published by the New Statesman while still an undergraduate.
Her friendship with Waugh served as a boost to her writing career, and he used his influence to draw attention to her talent. Later, she went on to date the writer Martin Amis. Still at Oxford, she won the Sunday Times National Student Drama Award for her one-act play "Under the Bamboo Tree." A subsequent play, Happy Yellow, in 1977 was mounted at the London fringe Bush Theatre and later performed at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Personal life
In 1973, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh introduced Brown's writings to Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times, and in 1974 she was given freelance assignments in both the UK and US. When a relationship developed between Brown and Evans (who was married at the time), she resigned to write for a rival newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph.
Evans divorced his first wife in 1978, and in 1981 he and Brown married at Grey Gardens, the East Hampton, New York, home of then the Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. Brown lives in New York City with Sir Harold Evans (knighted in 2004) and their two children, a son, George, born in 1986 and a daughter, Isabel, born in 1990.
Career - Tatler
While doing freelance reporting after graduation, Brown was invited to write a weekly column by the literary humor magazine, Punch. These articles and her freelance contributions to the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph earned her the Catherine Pakenham Award for the best journalist under 25. Some of the writings from this era formed part of her first collection Loose Talk, published in 1979.
Also in 1979, when she was 25, Brown was invited by the Australian real estate millionaire Gary Bogard to edit his newly purchased magazine, Tatler. Brown transformed what was then a tiny, almost extinct, society magazine into a modern glossy magazine featuring covers by celebrated photographers. Tatler pulled in top writers from Brown's eclectic circle including Julian Barnes, Dennis Potter, Auberon Waugh, Brian Sewell, Georgina Howell, and Nicholas Coleridge (later President of Conde Nast International).
Brown herself wrote content for every issue, contributing irreverent surveys of the upper classes. She traveled through Scotland to portray the owners' stately homes. She also wrote short satirical profiles of eligible London bachelors under the pen-name Rosie Boot. Tatler covered the emergence of Lady Diana Spencer, soon to become known as Diana, Princess of Wales. On July 29, 1981, the day of the royal wedding, Brown joined NBC's Tom Brokaw in running commentary for The Today Show. Tatler sales jumped from 10,000 to 40,000.
In 1982 when S. I. Newhouse Jr., owner of Conde Nast Publications, bought Tatler, Brown resigned to become a full-time writer again. The break didn't last long, and Brown was lured back to Conde Nast. That year she also hosted several editions of the long running television series Film82 for BBC1 as a guest presenter.
Vanity Fair
In 1983, Brown was brought to New York by Newhouse to advise on Vanity Fair, the fabled style magazine that had ceased publication in 1936. Newhouse had resurrected it earlier that year, but it was failing — with its anemic circulation of only 200,000 and a mere 12 pages of advertising. Brown stayed on as a contributing editor and then was named editor-in-chief in January, 1984. Her words on taking it over? — "Pretentious, humorless. It wasn't too clever, it was just dull."
The first contract writer she hired was not a writer but a movie producer whom she met at a dinner party hosted by the writer Marie Brenner. The producer told her he was going to California for the trial of the strangler of his daughter. To aid him through his grief, Brown suggested that he keep a diary. The result became a report published in Vanity Fair under the headline "Justice." The article launched the long, and luminous, magazine career of Dominick Dunne.
Early stories like "Justice," as well as the magazine's new, livelier covers, brightened the prospects of Vanity Fair. Brown signed up other top writers, and the magazine became a mix of celebrity and serious foreign and domestic reporting.
Brown persuaded the novelist William Styron to write about his depression under the title "Darkness Visible," which subsequently became a best-selling nonfiction book. At the same time she formed fruitful relationships with photographer Annie Leibovitz, whose portrayals of Jerry Hall, Diane Keaton, Whoopi Goldberg and others came to define Vanity Fair. Its most famous cover was August 1991's of a naked and pregnant Demi Moore.
Three stories appeared in Vanity Fair: Harry Benson's cover shoot of Ronald and Nancy Reagan dancing in the White House; Helmut Newton's notorious portrait of accused murderer Claus von Bulow in his leathers with his mistress Andrea Reynolds (reported by Dominick Dunne), and Brown's own cover story on Princess Diana in October 1985 titled, "The Mouse that Roared," which broke the news of the fracture in the royal marriage. Those three stories from June to October, 1985, saved the magazine at end of a year rife with rumor that it would be folded into The New Yorker, another recent acquisition by Newhouse.
Sales of Vanity Fair rose from 200,000 to 1.2 million. Advertising topped 1,440 pages in 1991 with circulation revenues at $20 million. The magazine sold some 55 percent of its (highly profitable) newsstand issues, well above the industry average. Under Brown's editorship Vanity Fair won four National Magazine Awards, including a 1989 award for General Excellence. In 1988, Brown herself was named Magazine Editor of the Year by Advertising Age magazine.
The New Yorker
In 1992, Brown accepted the Newhouse company's invitation to become editor of The New Yorker, only the fourth editor in its entire 73-year history — succeeding legends Harold Ross, William Shawn and Robert Gottlieband. She was, of course, the first female to hold the position. Before taking the helm, Brown said she immersed herself in vintage editions, especially those issued under founding editor Harold Ross:
There was an irreverence, a lightness of touch, as well as a literary voice, that had been obscured in later years when the magazine became more celebrated and stuffy.… Rekindling that DNA became my passion.
Anxieties that Brown might change the identity of The New Yorker as a cultural institution prompted a number of resignations. George Trow, who had been with the magazine for almost three decades, accused Brown of "kissing the ass of celebrity" in his resignation letter. (To which Brown reportedly replied, "I am distraught at your defection but since you never actually write anything I should say I am notionally distraught.") The departing Jamaica Kincaid described Brown as "a bully" and "Stalin in high heels."
But Brown had the support of some New Yorker stalwarts, including John Updike, Roger Angell, Brendan Gill, Lillian Ross, Calvin Tomkins, Janet Malcolm, Harold Brodkey and Philip Hamburger, as well as newer staffers like Adam Gopnik and Nancy Franklin. During her editorship she let 79 staffers go and engaged 50 new writers and editors, most of whom remain to this day, including David Remnick (whom she nominated as her successor), Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane, Jane Mayer, Jeffrey Toobin, Hendrik Hertzberg. Brown introduced the concept of special double issues such as the annual fiction issue and the Holiday Season cartoon issue. She also cooperated with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates to devote a whole issue to the theme Black in America.
In 1992, Brown broke the magazine's longstanding taboo against serious photography by inviting Richard Avedon to be its first staff photographer. She also approved controversial covers from a new crop of artists, including Edward Sorel's October, 1992, cover that had people buzzing about the meaning of a punk rock passenger sprawled in the backseat of an elegant horse-drawn carriage: was it Brown's self-mocking riposte to fears she would downgrade the magazine?
A year later a national controversy was provoked by Brown's publication of Art Spiegelman's Valentine's Day cover of a Jewish man and a black woman in an embracing kiss, a comment on the mounting racial tensions between blacks and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York.
During Brown's tenure, the magazine was honored with 4 George Polk Awards, 5 Overseas Press Club Awards, and 10 National Magazine Awards, including a 1995 award for General Excellence, the first in the magazine's history. Newsstand sales rose 145 percent, and its circulation increased to 807,935 for the second half of 1997, up from 658,916 during the corresponding period in 1992. Critics maintained it was hemorrhaging money, but Newhouse remained supportive, viewing the magazine under Brown as a start-up (which routinely lose money):
It was practically a new magazine. She added topicality, photography, color. She did what we would have done if we invented The New Yorker from scratch. To do all that was costly. We knew it would be.
Under Brown's leadership, its economic fortunes improved every year: in 1995 losses were about $17 million, in 1996 $14 million, and in 1997 $11 million.
In 1998, Brown resigned from The New Yorker following an invitation from Harvey and Bob Weinstein of Miramax Films (then owned by the Disney Company) to be the chairman of a new multi-media company they intended to start with a new magazine, a book company and a television show. The Hearst company came in as partners with Miramax.
The verdicts following Brown's New Yorker departure included:
She had to move fast. She was decisive … went against the tradition of popular culture unfriendly to the written word. And what was she doing? She was pumping energy and life into a magazine devoted to publishing aesthetically and intellectually demanding writing. She saved The New Yorker. – Hendrik Hertzberg (editorial director)
The magazine will remain smarter and braver — more open to argument, and incomparably less timid — for her presence here. – Adam Gopnik (writer)
I assume we can now look forward to Miramax becoming a shallow, celebrity obsessed money loser she made The New Yorker. – Randy Cohen (writer)
She is the best magazine editor alive. What more can I say? – Michael Kinsley (writer)
The most important thing, I think, has been [Brown's] effort to bring together the intellectual material and the streets. When she was in charge, despite all the complaints from the old New Yorker crowd, one got a much stronger sense of the variousness of American society than one did under the editorship of perhaps the rightfully sainted Mr. Shawn. – Stanley Crouch (writer)
Talk and The Daily Beast
After Talk magazine and Talk Media and a stint at CNBC, Brown partnered with Barry Diller, chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, in October, 2008, to found and edit the online site, The Daily Beast. Two years later, in November 2010, The Daily Beast merged with the American weekly news magazine Newsweek in a joint venture to form The Newsweek Daily Beast Company. In September 2013, Brown announced she would be leaving her position as editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast to launch Tina Brown Media.
Books
Brown published The Diana Chronicles in 2007, a decade after the Princess's death. The Vanity Fair Diaries came out in 2017. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/11/2017.)
Book Reviews
A mile a minute memoir I read like a parrot with my nails embedded in Pirate Tina’s shoulder — yelling "what??!!’ ‘What!?!! WOWZA!" as she swashbuckles through the eighties, her sword slicing up the staid shibboleths of NY society. I remembered why I was afraid of her in those days. And why that energy & imagination, turned to making the world better, has galvanized so many of us now. A cultural catalyst — she makes things happen. Thank god she wrote it all down. Hang on. A wild ride.
Meryl Streep
Full of creative glee, passion and excitement, The Vanity Fair Diaries features a cast of characters like Mad Men (and women) on speed; an epic of a legendary magazine’s dazzling re-creation; moments of laugh-out-loud comic asides, juicy gossip and sketches of Austen-like sharpness, all put together by an editor of high octane genius who pauses only to reflect that however good she might be, it’s never quite good enough. Oh yes, it is. Read the diaries and feel better about everything. The word lives!
Simon Schama
High, low, smart, sexy, Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries is like the magazine she re-invented, a must read for anyone interested in Hollywood, high-society, and the movers and shakers of pop culture.
Anderson Cooper
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please 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)
(We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available.)
Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
Ronan Farrow, 2019
Little Brown & Company
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316486637
Summary
In a dramatic account of violence and espionage, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Ronan Farrow exposes serial abusers and a cabal of powerful interests hell-bent on covering up the truth, at any cost.
In 2017, a routine network television investigation led Ronan Farrow to a story only whispered about: one of Hollywood's most powerful producers was a predator, protected by fear, wealth, and a conspiracy of silence.
As Farrow drew closer to the truth, shadowy operatives, from high-priced lawyers to elite war-hardened spies, mounted a secret campaign of intimidation, threatening his career, following his every move, and weaponizing an account of abuse in his own family.
All the while, Farrow and his producer faced a degree of resistance they could not explain -- until now. And a trail of clues revealed corruption and cover-ups from Hollywood to Washington and beyond.
This is the untold story of the exotic tactics of surveillance and intimidation deployed by wealthy and connected men to threaten journalists, evade accountability, and silence victims of abuse. And it's the story of the women who risked everything to expose the truth and spark a global movement.
Both a spy thriller and a meticulous work of investigative journalism, Catch and Kill breaks devastating new stories about the rampant abuse of power and sheds far-reaching light on investigations that shook our culture. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 19, 1987
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Bard College, J.D., Yale University, Ph.D., Oxford University
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize
• Currently—lives in New York City
Ronan Farrow is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, where his investigative reporting has won the Pulitzer Prize for public service, the National Magazine Award, and the George Polk Award, among other honors.
He previously worked as an anchor and investigative reporter at MSNBC and NBC News, with his print commentary and reporting appearing in publications including the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post.
Before his career in journalism, he served as a State Department official in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is also the author of War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence (2018) and most recently of Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (2019).
The basis for Catch and Kill, Farrow's article published in The New Yorker, won him a Pulitizer for Public Service. He shared the prize with Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey for their coverage of the same topic in the New York Times.
Farrow has been named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People and one of GQ's Men of the Year. He is a graduate of Yale Law School and a member of the New York Bar. He recently completed a Ph.D. in political science at Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He lives in New York. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Absorbing.… The behavior documented in Catch and Kill is obviously and profoundly distressing.… But there are some hopeful threads, too.
Jennifer Szalai - New York Times
At the heart of every great noir is a conspiracy of evil that imbues the initial crime uncovered by the hero with a weightier resonance than was immediately obvious. So it goes with Catch and Kill.
Washington Post
Darkly funny and poignant.… [A] winning account of how it feels to be at the centre of the biggest story in the world. It is also, of course, a breathtakingly dogged piece of reporting, in the face of extraordinary opposition.
Guardian (UK)
Must read: Catch and Kill, by Ronan Farrow. How #sexualabuse stories got suppressed, and how deep-diving, fact-gathering reporting blew the lid off, despite threats, intimidation, and cronymongering at the top. Chilling!
Margaret Atwood - author, Handmaid's Tale
The connections between presidents, media moguls, and spies described in Catch and Kill are stranger than fiction. As a novel, it would be a page-turner. As a reported piece of nonfiction, it's terrifying.
Time
The year's best spy thriller is stranger—and more horrifying—than fiction.… [Ronan] weaves a breathless narrative as compelling as it is disturbing.… [Catch and Kill] bracingly exposes the rot that's persisted across elite American institutions for decades.
Entertainment Weekly
Catch and Kill is an important, frightening book.… [I]t's also a propulsive, cinematic page-turner
Salon
A groundbreaking #MeToo journalist finds his own news organization to be the greatest obstacle to the truth in this vivid, labyrinthine memoir.… [Reveals] troubling collusion between the media and the powerful interests they cover. This is a crackerjack journalistic thriller.
Publishers Weekly
This chilling narrative reveals the unequal power dynamic between aspiring actors… and the dominant powerbrokers in Hollywood.… [A] complement to Kantor and Twohey's She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. —Karl Helicher, formerly with Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA
Library Journal
At times, the book is difficult to read, mainly because Weinstein, Trump, Lauer, and other powerful men victimized so many women while those who knew about the assaults stayed quiet.… A meticulously documented, essential work.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for CATCH AND KILL … then take off on your own:
1. Author Margaret Atwood called Catch and Release "chilling," while Kirkus Reviews said, "at times the book is difficult to read." What was your experience reading Ronan Farrow's account of sexual assault in high places?
2. (Follow-up to Question 1) What revelations in Ronan Farrow's account shocked you … angered you … or pained you most?
3. How did Harvey Weinstein get away with his sexual predation for so long? Who, or more important, what protected him?
4. Talk about the term "catch and kill"—and the ethics, or lack of ethics, reflected in that journalistic practice? Although catch and kill is typically deployed by tabloids, to what extent were the same, or similar, tactics practiced by NBC, Farrow's own employer?
5. In addition to the scare tactics (threats, lawyers, firing) what were some of the hurdles Farrow and Rich McHugh faced in actually reporting. Why, for instance, was it so difficult to get women to talk on the record? Would you have had the courage to open up?
6. A number of the women Farrow spoke to continued to have sexual encounters with the men who assaulted them. How can you explain that? Does that lessen the guilt of the men? Does that make the women complicit? Or is it part and parcel of the coercive powers of high-placed men?
7. Then there is Black Cube. Want to talk about that episode in Farrow's life? What was the purpose of hiring the intelligence firm? What about the other methods of intimidation leveled at Farrow?
8. Farrow's reportage was personalized for Farrow by his sister, Rose McGowan. What is the background of her story, how it has affected her life, and why for so long had Farrow dismissed the truth and seriousness of her claims. Woody Allen, anyone? Thoughts?
9. Talk about one of the most stunning revelations toward the end of the book: Matt Lauer. What is it with powerful men? Tackle that one.
10. Ultimately, will this book, and all the other coverage of sexual harassment, make a difference? Has it already? What about #MeToo? Has it made a lasting difference? In other words, do you foresee effective change—in both male behavior and society's attitude toward female abuse?
11. This question is a late addition the reading guide: In 2020 Weinstein was tried in a court of law and, in late February, found guilty. A month later, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison. A fair sentence? Too harsh? Not harsh enough?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Will My Cat Eay My Eyeballs?: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals about Death
Caitlin Doughty, 2019
W.W. Norton & Co.
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393652703
Summary
Best-selling author and mortician Caitlin Doughty answers real questions from kids about death, dead bodies, and decomposition.
Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. The best questions come from kids.
What would happen to an astronaut’s body if it were pushed out of a space shuttle? Do people poop when they die? Can Grandma have a Viking funeral?
In Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, Doughty blends her mortician’s knowledge of the body and the intriguing history behind common misconceptions about corpses to offer factual, hilarious, and candid answers to thirty-five distinctive questions posed by her youngest fans.
In her inimitable voice, Doughty details lore and science of what happens to, and inside, our bodies after we die. Why do corpses groan? What causes bodies to turn colors during decomposition? And why do hair and nails appear longer after death?
Readers will learn the best soil for mummifying your body, whether you can preserve your best friend’s skull as a keepsake, and what happens when you die on a plane.
Beautifully illustrated by Dianne Ruz, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? shows us that death is science and art, and only by asking questions can we begin to embrace it. 36 illustrations (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 19, 1984
• Raised—Oahu, Hawaii, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Chicago; B.S., Cypress College
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and the of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (2014), From Here to Eternity (2017), and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? (2019). She is the creator of the web series "Ask a Mortician." She lives in Los Angeles, California, where she owns and runs a funeral home. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? is funny, dark, and at times stunningly existential, revealing not only how little we understand about death, but also how much kids can handle.
Marianne Eloise - Guardian (UK)
There’s serious science here, but also cultural lessons in death and dying, a little history, and a touch of gruesomeness wrapped in that shroud of sharp, witty humor.
Terri Schlichenmeyer - Philadelphia Tribune
[E]very one of Doughty’s answers serves as a charming guide into something we take enormous pains to avoid.
B. David Zarley - Paste Magazine
With every ounce of straight-talking spunk one could muster for this topic, Doughty delivers a surprisingly heart-warming read.
Christy Lynch - BookPage
[Doughty] provides answers to questions both humorous and moving, bringing tiny and full-sized mortals alike to a greater comfort with and understanding of the one transition that will happen to us all.
Anna Spydell - BookPage
[A] delightful mixture of science and humor.
Library Journal
Doughty's writing is unusually conversational in tone for a book with subjects that can be considered taboo. Not only does she manage to make it extremely informative, throughout she includes her comments with sometimes profound thoughts, real humor and a significant dose of brilliant wit.
Pamela Kramer - BookReporter
Doughty's answers are as delightful and distinctive as the questions. She blends humor with respect for the dead…. Her investigations of ritual, custom, law and science are thorough, and she doesn't shy from naming the parts of Grandma's body that might leak after she is gone.
Julia Kastner - Shelf Awareness
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for WILL MY CAT EAT MY EYEBALLS?… then take off on your own:
1. Of the 35 questions asked in this book, which do you find most intriguing? Which are the funniest? What questions would you want to ask Caitlin Doughty?
2. What have you learned after reading Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?
3. Doughty compares the silence surrounding issues of death to the ways we deal with conversations around sex. Do you agree?
4. (Follow-up to Question 3) Adults tend to shut down children's questions about death. Is that wise? What about instituting "death education" classes in school or in church for children? At what age should young people learn about dying and death?
5. Doughty's mission, in her books, including this one, and on her YouTube series, "Ask a Mortician," is to dispel our fear of death, adults' as well as children's. Does this book help in achieving that goal? After reading Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, do you have a different attitude toward, or understanding of, death and dying?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA
Amaryllis Fox, 2019
Knopf Doubleday
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525654971
Summary
Amaryllis Fox's riveting memoir tells the story of her ten years in the most elite clandestine ops unit of the CIA, hunting the world's most dangerous terrorists in sixteen countries while marrying and giving birth to a daughter.
Amaryllis Fox was in her last year as an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded.
Galvanized by this brutality, Fox applied to a master's program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted, with uncanny certainty, the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world.
At twenty-one, she was recruited by the CIA. Her first assignment was reading and analyzing hundreds of classified cables a day from foreign governments and synthesizing them into daily briefs for the president. Her next assignment was at the Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism center.
At twenty-two, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations training, sent from Langley to "the Farm," where she lived for six months in a simulated world learning how to use a Glock, how to get out of flexicuffs while locked in the trunk of a car, how to withstand torture, and the best ways to commit suicide in case of captivity.
At the end of this training she was deployed as a spy under non-official cover—the most difficult and coveted job in the field as an art dealer specializing in tribal and indigenous art and sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia.
Life Undercover is exhilarating, intimate, fiercely intelligent—an impossible to put down record of an extraordinary life, and of Amaryllis Fox's astonishing courage and passion. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1980-81
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Oxford University; M.S. (?), Georgetown University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Amaryllis Fox was born in New York City to an English actress and American economist. Due to her father's work in the developing world, the family moved yearly to places in Africa, South East Asia, Europe, and the former Soviet Union. Those childhood experiences instilled in Fox both a calling and a feeling of being at home in far flung corners of the world.
Before heading to college, Fox volunteered in the Mai Laa refugee camp on the Thai-Burmese border; she ended up deferring her entrance to school, remaining in Burma to work with the Burmese democracy movement. A BBC interview she conducted with Burmese human rights activist (and 1991 Nobel laureate), Aung San Suu Kyi, landed her in prison at the age of 18.
In 1991, Fox entered Oxford University where she studied international law. She spent much of the following three years in East Timor, helping to settle displaced persons in the world's newest country. She also worked in war-torn Bosnia, helping to rebuild community trust in the aftermath of the 1995 massacre.
In 2002, Fox began graduate work in international security at Georgetown University. There she developed an algorithm to predict terrorist activity. Learning of her work, the CIA asked her to share the algorithm with the Agency.
Soon after, Fox began work as a political and terrorism analyst for South East Asia, requiring her to commute between Langley and Georgetown to finish her degree. Following graduation (with honors) in 2004, she moved into the CIA's operational training program, eventually serving as a Clandestine Service officer overseas until 2009.
Her work with the CIA became the subject of her 2019 memoir, Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA.
Following her CIA career in the field, Amaryllis Fox has covered current events and offered analysis for CNN, National Geographic, Al Jazeera, the BBC, and other global news outlets. She speaks at events and universities around the world on the topic of peacemaking.
She is the co-host of History Channel's series American Ripper and lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter. And, yes, she married a Kennedy. (Adapted from the publisher and WME Speakers.)
Book Reviews
Genius…. Fascinating…. [A]long with the cloak-and-dagger action, Fox writes movingly of trying to reconcile a career in espionage with family life…. A look inside the CIA that the agency isn’t ready for you to see…. [A] great read.
Washington Post
A timely, compelling story. As fellow citizens, we’d all do well to better understand what that vital work entails.
LA Times
Gripping…reads like a true-life thriller.
San Francisco Chronicle
Gripping…. Life Undercover sets aside high-octane street chases and gunfights for an equally riveting narrative of compassion, revealing that the path to peace is through understanding the common humanity in us all.
Paste Magazine
A riveting account of the decade the author spent risking her life in the CIA’s most clandestine unit.
People
(Starred review) Fox delivers a gripping memoir about the near decade she spent working for the CIA to help stop terrorism.… [She] masterfully conveys the exhilaration and loneliness of life undercover, and her memoir reads like a great espionage novel.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) [R]riveting…. Fans of Showtime's Homeland and espionage novels will devour this highly recommended memoir, as will readers interested in counterterrorism, nonprofileration, and peacemaking. —Barrie Olmstead, Lewiston P.L., ID
Library Journal
(Starred review) With loads of suspense and adrenaline,… this insider’s view into how the CIA functions and what life is like for a covert agent will appeal to many, including readers who don’t normally stray from fiction thrillers.
Booklist
Fox [writes] engagingly—and transparently…. Throughout much of her remarkable life, secrecy was the norm, but by the time she left the agency, she'd had enough. A well-written account of a life lived under exceptional secrecy and pressure.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for LIFE UNDERDOVER … then take off on your own:
1. How did Amaryllis's childhood experiences and family life prepare her for life as a spy? Take into account the family's yearly moves, the secrets within her parents' marriage, and her genius, older brother—what role did each of those factors play?
2. Her best friends' death in the downing of the Pan Am flight had a powerful impact on Fox's life. Her father offered his eight-year-old daughter this response: "You have to understand the forces that took her. It will seem less scary if you do." What do you think of that advice? How would you have responded in his stead?
3. Even before she begins college, Fox strikes out on a mission, heading to Thailand and Burma to volunteer in a refugee camp and, later, to work for an underground newspaper. What enables someone so young—or a person of any age, really—to act with such idealism and courage? How do you account for such determination?
4. What were some of the greatest challenges in Fox's life as an undercover agent? Consider the physical danger inherent in covert operations, as well as the emotional toll it took on her.
5. (Follow-up to Question 4) Ultimately, what prompted her decision to leave the agency? What price did she realize she had paid after a decade of undercover work?
6. Finally, what lessons did Fox take away from her undercover work?
7. How does Amaryllis Fox's memoir compare with the HBO series Homeland?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)