Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
William Finnegan, 2015
Penguin
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594203473
Summary
Winner, 2016 Pulitizer Prize - Biography
A deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer by the acclaimed New Yorker writer.
Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.
Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter.
Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves.
Finnegan shares stories of life in a whitesonly gang in a tough school in Honolulu even while his closest friend was a Hawaiian surfer. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor.
He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the world’s greatest waves. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he becomes an improbable anthropologist: unpicking the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissecting the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, navigating the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria.
Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.
Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little understood art. Today, Finnegan’s surfing life is undiminished. Frantically juggling work and family, he chases his enchantment Long Island ice storms and obscure corners of Madagascar. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1952
• Raised—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California-Santa Cruz; M.F.A. University of Montana
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
William Finnegan is a staff writer at The New Yorker and well-known author of works of international journalism. He has specially addressed issues of racism and conflict in Southern Africa and politics in Mexico and South America, as well as poverty among youth in the United States, and is well known for his writing on surfing.
Finnegan currently resides in New York.
Early years
Finnegan was born in New York City in 1952. He was raised in Los Angeles and Hawaii. He graduated from William Howard Taft High School in Woodland Hills, California and received his B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1974 with a degree in Literature.
During his youth he took up surfing, which became a lifelong passion he still practices off Long Island when at home. Finnegan spent the next four years taking seasonal jobs and working on an MFA in creative writing at the University of Montana.
Finnegan then spent four years abroad, traveling in Asia, Australia, and Africa. He supported himself with freelance travel writing and other odd jobs, but upon reaching Cape Town, South Africa, Finnegan was in need of a job. He found a position as an English teacher at Grassy Park High School, a school for "coloured" students.
Finnegan’s teaching experience coincided with a nationwide school boycott, giving him fodder for his first book, Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid, which was published in 1986 and was selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best nonfiction books of the year.
Journalism career
Finnegan’s experience in South Africa transformed him from a novelist to a political journalist. His first short piece, about his experience living in Sri Lanka, was published in Mother Jones in 1979. Finnegan began contributing to The New Yorker in 1984 and has been a staff writer there since 1987. He has also contributed to Harper's and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.
Finnegan contributed a two-part series for The New Yorker in 1992 entitled "Playing Doc's Games." A surfer himself, Finnegan writes about the local surf scene in San Francisco revolving around Ocean Beach and Dr. Mark Renneker ("Doc") as well as Finnegan's own personal experiences. A remarkable piece of writing, it is widely considered to be one of the best pieces of journalism on surfing.
Finnegan’s next two books grew out of assignments for The New Yorker. In 1986, he was sent to Johannesburg, where he followed black reporters who gathered information for white reporters during Apartheid. This led to the 1988 publication of Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South African Reporters.
A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique, published in 1992, grew out of a series of correspondences about the war-torn nation for the magazine, and Finnegan's own travels throughout that war-torn nation. 1998 saw the publication of Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country, which deals with the bleak lives of American teenagers in spite of the United States’ economic affluence. It was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism in 1999.
In the July 20th, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, Finnegan profiled Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona and his role in the conflict over immigration in that border state. In the May 31st, 2010 issue, he reported from Michoacan state in Mexico on the rise of the "La Familia" drug gang and the increasing social and political instability in Mexico. His "Talk of the Town" comment on "Borderlines," which addresses the U.S. political stalemate over immigration reform, appeared in the magazine's issue for July 26, 2010.
Awards
Finnegan has twice received the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, given by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, in 1994 and 1996. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist, in 1990 and 1995. In 1994, his article “Deep East Texas” won the Edward M. Brecher Award for Achievement in the Field of Journalism from the Drug Policy Foundation.
His article “The Unwanted” won the Sidney Hillman Award for Magazine Reporting in 1998. His report from Sudan, “The Invisible War,” won a Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club in 2000. In 2002, Hunter College, City University of New York, honored him with the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for his article "Leasing the Rain" on the fight to control fresh water. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/23/2015.)
Book Reviews
No pretension or flab here. Just sturdy verbs, a casual flowing power, tantric masculine reticence, a melancholy sense of a sidewise-drifting life….The star is the surfing, and the waves, which the author studies all over the world, from a hundred different angles…one takes away from Barbarian Days a sense of a big, wind-chapped, well-lived life. Mr. Finnegan has moved about the earth like a man in a ballad, testing himself at every opportunity, always willing to obey "dog-whistle orders from the collective surf unconscious."
Dwight Garner - New York Times
[An] extraordinary book…. It is in many ways, and for the first time, a surfer in full. And it is cause for throwing your wet-suit hoods in the air…if the book has a flaw, it lies in the envy helplessly induced in the armchair surf-traveler by so many lusty affairs with waves that are the supermodels of the surf world. Still, Finnegan considerately shows himself paying the price of admission in a few near drownings, and these are among the most electrifying moments in the book.
Thad Ziolkowski - New York Times Book Review
Terrific… Elegantly written and structured, it’s a riveting adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, and a restless, searching meditation on love, friendship and family…. A writer of rare subtlety and observational gifts, Finnegan explores every aspect of the sport—its mechanics and intoxicating thrills, its culture and arcane tribal codes—in a way that should resonate with surfers and non-surfers alike. His descriptions of some of the world’s most powerful and unforgiving waves are hauntingly beautiful…Finnegan displays an honesty that is evident throughout the book, parts of which have a searing, unvarnished intensity that reminded me of Stop Time, the classic coming-of-age memoir by Frank Conroy.
Washington Post
Gorgeously written and intensely felt…With Mr. Finnegan’s bravura memoir, the surfing bookshelf is dramatically enriched. It’s not only a volume for followers of the sport. Non-surfers, too, will be treated to a travelogue head-scratchingly rich in obscure, sharply observed destinations…. Dare I say that we all need Mr. Finnegan…as a role model for a life fully, thrillingly, lived.
Wall Street Journal
Finnegan writes so engagingly that you paddle alongside, eager for him to take you to the next wave…It is a wet and wild run. He makes surfing seem as foreign and simultaneously as intimate a sport as possible…Surfing is the backbone of the book, but Finnegan’s relationships to people, not waves, form its flesh…[A] deep blue story of one man’s lifelong enchantment.
Boston Globe
A demonstration of gratitude and mastery. [Finnegan] uses these words to describe the wave, but they might as well apply to the book. In a sense, Barbarian Days functions as a 450-page thank you letter, masterfully crafted, to his parents, friends, wife, enemies, ex-girlfriends, townsfolk, daughter—everyone who tolerated and even encouraged his lifelong obsession. It’s a way to help them—and us—understand what drives him to keep paddling out half a century after first picking up a board.
NPR.org
An evocative, profound and deeply moving memoir…The proof is in the sentences. Were I given unlimited space to review this book, I would simply reproduce it here, with a quotation mark at the beginning and another at the end. While surfers have a reputation for being inarticulate, there is actually a fair amount of overlap between what makes a good surfer and a good writer. A smooth style, an ability to stay close to the source of the energy, humility before the task, and, once you’re done, not claiming your ride. In other words, making something exceedingly difficult look easy. The gift for writing a clean line is rare, and the gift for riding one even rarer. Finnegan possesses both.
San Francisco Chronicle
[A] sweeping, glorious memoir…Oh, the rides, they are incandescent…I’d sooner press this book upon on a nonsurfer, in part because nothing I’ve read so accurately describes the feeling of being stoked or the despair of being held under. But also because while it is a book about ‘A Surfing Life’…it’s also about a writer’s life and, even more generally, a quester’s life, more carefully observed and precisely rendered than any I’ve read in a long time.
Los Angeles Times
Vivid and propulsive…. Finnegan…has seen things from the tops of ocean peaks that would disturb most surfers’ dreams for weeks. (I happily include myself among that number.)…. A lyrical and enormously rewarding read…Finnegan’s enchantment takes us to some luminous and unsettling places—on both the edge of the ocean, and the frontiers of the surfing life.
San Diego Union-Tribune
Finnegan’s epic adventure, beautifully told, is much more than the story of a boy and his wave, even if surfing serves as the thumping heartbeat of his life.
Dallas Morning News
Fans of [Finnegan’s] writing have been waiting eagerly for his surfing memoir…Well, Barbarian Days is here. And it’s even better than one could have imagined…This is Finnegan’s gift. He’s observant and expressive but shows careful restraint in his zeal. He says only what needs to be said, enough to create a vivid picture for the reader while masterfully giving that picture a kind of movement.
Honolulu Star-Advertiser
That surfing life is [Finnegan’s], and it’s a remarkably adventurous one sure to induce wanderlust in anyone who follows along, surfer or not…. Lyrical but not overbaked, exciting but always self-effacing. It captures the moments of joy and terror Finnegan’s lifelong passion has brought him, as well as his occasional ambivalence about the tenacious hold it has on him. It’s easily the best book ever written about surfing. It’s not even close.b
Florida Times-Union
The kind of book that makes you squirm in your seat on the subway, gaze out the window at work, and Google Map the quickest route to the beach. In other words, it is, like Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, a semi-dangerous book, one that persuades young men…to trade in their office jobs in order to roam the world, to feel the ocean’s power, and chase the waves.
Paris Review Daily
An engrossing read, part treatise on wave physics, part thrill ride, part cultural study, with a soupçon of near-death events. Even for those who’ve never paddled out, Finnegan’s imagery is as vividly rendered as a film, his explanation of wave mastery a triumph of language. For surfers, the book is The Endless Summer writ smarter and larger, touching down at every iconic break.
Los Angeles Magazine
Barbarian Days gleams with precise, often lyrical recollections of the most memorable waves [Finnegan has] encountered…He carefully mines his surfing exploits for broader, hard-won insights on his childhood, his most intense friendships and romances, his political education, his career. He’s always attuned to his surroundings, and his reflections are often tinged with self-effacing wit.
Chicago Reader
Which is precisely what makes the propulsive precision of Finnegan’s writing so surprising and revelatory… Finnegan’s treatment of surfing never feels like performance. Through the sheer intensity of his descriptive powers and the undeniable ways in which surfing has shaped his life, Barbarian Days is an utterly convincing study in the joy of treating seriously an unserious thing…As Finnegan demonstrates, surfing, like good writing, is an act of vigilant noticing.
New York Review of Books
Finnegan is an excellent surfer; at some point he became an even better writer. That pairing makes Barbarian Days exceptional in the notoriously foamy genre of surf lit: a hefty, heavyweight tour de force, overbrimming with sublime lyrical passages that Finnegan drops as effortlessly as he executed his signature ‘drop-knee cutback’ in the breaks off Waikiki…Reading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting; William Burroughs on controlled substances; Updike on adultery…Finnegan is a virtuoso wordsmith, but the juice propelling this memoir is wrung from the quest that shaped him…A piscine, picaresque coming-of-age story, seen through the gloss resin coat of a surfboard.
Sports Illustrated
Overflowing with vivid descriptions of waves caught and waves missed, of disappointments and ecstasies and gargantuan curling tubes that encircle riders like cathedrals of pure stained glass…These paragraphs, with their mix of personal remembrance and subcultural taxonomies, tend to be as elegant and pellucid as the breakers they immortalize…This memoir is one you can ride all the way to shore.
Entertainment Weekly
That’s always Finnegan’s M.O.: examining the ways in which surfing intertwines with anthropology, economics, politics, and, of course, writing. Finnegan is a sober, straightforward author, but the level of detail, emotion, and insight he achieves is unparalleled…. A must-read for all surfers—not just because of its unblinking prose and subtle wit, but because it’s the only book that properly details what it’s like to cultivate both an award-winning career and a dedicated surfing life.
Eastern Surf Magazine
Finnegan describes, with shimmering detail, his adventures riding waves on five continents. Surfing has taken him places he'd never otherwise have thought to go, but it also buoyed him through a career reporting on the politics of intense scarcity, limitless cruelty, and unimaginable suffering. It's a book about travel and growing up, and the power of a pastime when it becomes an obsession.
Men's Journal
(Starred review.) [P]anoramic and fascinating memoir.... [Finnegan] set out in pursuit of a perfect wave, and spent five years circumnavigating the globe with long stops in Polynesia, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, and South Africa.... [H]e has written a revealing and magisterial account of a beautiful addiction.
Publishers Weekly
[A]n up-close and personal homage to the surfing lifestyle through the author's journey as a lifelong surfer. Finnegan's writing is polished and bold, but the lengthy descriptions of individual waves and their personalities may be daunting to the average reader.... [H]igh-caliber memoir.... —Stacy Shaw, Orange, CA
Library Journal
As brilliant and lucid as some of [Finnegan's] descriptions are, they sometimes overwhelm the rest of the narrative.... [N]evertheless...a fascinating look inside the mind of a man terminally in love with a magnificent obsession. A lyrical and intense memoir.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey
Rinker Buck, 2015
Simon & Schuster
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451659160
Summary
An epic account of traveling the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way—in a covered wagon with a team of mules, an audacious journey that hasn’t been attempted in a century—which also chronicles the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country.
Spanning two thousand miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific coast, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America. In the fifteen years before the Civil War, when 400,000 pioneers used the trail to emigrate West—scholars still regard this as the largest land migration in history—it united the coasts, doubled the size of the country, and laid the groundwork for the railroads. Today, amazingly, the trail is all but forgotten.
Rinker Buck is no stranger to grand adventures. His first travel narrative, Flight of Passage, was hailed by The New Yorker as “a funny, cocky gem of a book,” and with The Oregon Trail he brings the most important route in American history back to glorious and vibrant life.
Traveling from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Baker City, Oregon, over the course of four months, Buck is accompanied by three cantankerous mules, his boisterous brother, Nick, and an “incurably filthy” Jack Russell terrier named Olive Oyl. Along the way, they dodge thunderstorms in Nebraska, chase runaway mules across the Wyoming plains, scout more than five hundred miles of nearly vanished trail on foot, cross the Rockies, and make desperate fifty-mile forced marches for water.
The Buck brothers repair so many broken wheels and axels that they nearly reinvent the art of wagon travel itself. They also must reckon with the ghost of their father, an eccentric yet loveable dreamer whose memory inspired their journey across the plains and whose premature death, many years earlier, has haunted them both ever since.
But The Oregon Trail is much more than an epic adventure. It is also a lively and essential work of history that shatters the comforting myths about the trail years passed down by generations of Americans. Buck introduces readers to the largely forgotten roles played by trailblazing evangelists, friendly Indian tribes, female pioneers, bumbling U.S. Army cavalrymen, and the scam artists who flocked to the frontier to fleece the overland emigrants.
Generous portions of the book are devoted to the history of old and appealing things like the mule and the wagon. We also learn how the trail accelerated American economic development. Most arresting, perhaps, are the stories of the pioneers themselves—ordinary families whose extraordinary courage and sacrifice made this country what it became.
At once a majestic journey across the West, a significant work of history, and a moving personal saga, The Oregon Trail draws readers into the journey of a lifetime. It is a wildly ambitious work of nonfiction from a true American original. It is a book with a heart as big as the country it crosses. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 29, 1950
• Where—Morristown, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Bowdoin College
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in northwest Connecticut
Rinker Buck is an award-winning American author who first became known as the author of a 1997 memoir Flight of Passage. His second book, The Oregan Trail, based on his trip with is brother in a covered wagon along the famous trail, was released in 2015.
Early life
Rinker Buck was born and raised in Morristown, New Jersey, the fourth child of Mary Patricia Buck (nee Kernahan) and political activist and Look Magazine publisher Thomas Francis Buck. He has five brothers and five sisters.
Flight
In the winter of 1965/1966, Rinker, then only15, and his older brother Kernahan, 17, a licensed pilot, devised a plan to rebuild their father's 1948 Piper PA-11 and fly it from Somerset Hills Airport (N64) in Basking Ridge, NJ to Capistrano Airport (L38) in San Juan Capistrano, CA. Their journey took six days and was completed in July 1966. The flight is the subject of Buck's 1997 memoir Flight of Passage.
Journalism
Buck began his career in journalism shortly after graduating from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. His first job was writing for the Berkshire Eagle in 1973. He then served as reporter for New York, Life, Hartford Courant, Adweek and several other national publications.
Awards
Buck is the recipient of three awards: Eugene S. Pulliam Journalism Writing Award; Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award; and the Max Kurant Award for Excellence in Aviation Coverage (AOPA). (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/20/2015.)
Book Reviews
Absorbing.... The many layers in The Oregon Trail are linked by Mr. Buck’s voice, which is alert and unpretentious in a manner that put me in mind of Bill Bryson’s comic tone in A Walk in the Woods.... He’s good company on the page, and you root for him.... He’s particularly winning on how, as he puts it, "the vaudeville of American life was acted out on the trail." ... This shaggy pilgrimage describes a form of happiness sought, and happiness found.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Enchanting.... Interspersed with the story of his westward journey, Mr. Buck entertains and enlightens with discourses on American history and culture.... He has delivered us a book filled with so much love—for mules, for his brother, for America itself.... Long before Oregon, Rinker Buck has convinced us that the best way to see America is from the seat of a covered wagon.
Gregory Crouch - Wall Street Journal
Awe-inspiring.... Charming, big-hearted, impassioned, and a lot of fun to read.... If Buck doesn’t quite make you want to hitch up your own wagon, his rapturous account will still leave you daydreaming and hungry to see this land.
Boston Globe
Interwoven in Buck’s adventure tale is a fascinating history of the development of the trail, its heyday, and the colorful characters that made the journey.... Whether their primary interest is American history, adventure travel or a captivating memoir, readers are sure to be delighted by this humorous and entertaining story that allows us to believe that Walter Mitty–like fantasies can indeed come true.
Associated Press
A quintessential American story.... The Oregon Trail attains its considerable narrative power by interweaving pioneer history with Rinker-and-Nick-and-mules interpersonal strife with poignant memories of the author’s father, who took his own family on a covered wagon journey through New Jersey and Pennsylvania in 1958.... This makes The Oregon Trail a rare and effective work of history—the trail stories of the Buck brothers bring humor and drama, and the pioneer biographies supply a context that makes every other aspect of the book snap into sharp relief.... The experience of The Oregon Trail stands squarely opposite much of what is modern—it’s slow travel with poor communication, it places struggle before comfort, and it represents a connection with history rather than a search for the newest of the new. In that sense, you’d think the book would be slow-paced and fusty, but it’s really something else: raw, visceral, and often laugh-out-loud funny. For anyone who has ever dreamed of seeing America slowly from the back of a wagon, The Oregon Trail is a vicarious thrill.
James Norton - Christian Science Monitor
A trip back in time.... Buck brings the land to life in a richly researched book that draws heavily from journals kept by the pioneers and their memoirs.... His exploration of America and himself is a joy to read. (4 out of 4 stars)
USA Today
What a way to spend a summer! Rinker Buck lived the dream of countless red-blooded Americans.... The Oregon Trail is must reading for anyone in love with the West.”
Jules Wagman - Cleveland Plain Dealer
This book is a keeper.... The straight-ahead title scarcely does justice to this rollicking good read, a book that’s as much fun as the Brothers Buck seem to be as they travel from Missouri to Oregon by covered wagon.... Observant, conversational, and often funny, The Oregon Trail makes for a satisfying trip.
Seattle Times
An incredible true story.... Weaving a tale somewhere between a travelogue and a history lesson, Buck traces the iconic path literally and figuratively as he re-creates the great migration with his brother and a Jack Russell terrier.
Entertainment Weekly
Laugh-out-loud masterpiece.... Alternately harrowing and exhilarating.... The book is an unremitting delight.
Willamette Week
An entertaining and enlightening account of one of America’s most legendary migrations. Even readers who don’t know a horse from a mule will find themselves swept up in this inspiring and masterful tale of perseverance and the pioneer spirit.
Publishers Weekly
Romantic.... Compelling.... The Oregon trip is fraught with mishaps, near-death experiences, and plain bad luck. But there were also angels along the way helping them get through.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Astonishing.... By turns frankly hilarious, historically elucidating, emotionally touching, and deeply informative.... A crazy whim of a trip on a covered wagon turns into an inspired exploration of American identity.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
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Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins
Susan Casey, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385537308
Summary
A breathtaking journey through the extraordinary world of dolphins.
Since the dawn of recorded history, humans have felt a kinship with the sleek and beautiful dolphin, an animal whose playfulness, sociability, and intelligence seem like an aquatic mirror of mankind.
In recent decades, we have learned that dolphins recognize themselves in reflections, count, grieve, adorn themselves, feel despondent, rescue one another (and humans), deduce, infer, seduce, form cliques, throw tantrums, and call themselves by name. Scientists still don’t completely understand their incredibly sophisticated navigation and communication abilities, or their immensely complicated brains.
While swimming off the coast of Maui, Susan Casey was surrounded by a pod of spinner dolphins. It was a profoundly transporting experience, and it inspired her to embark on a two-year global adventure to explore the nature of these remarkable beings and their complex relationship to humanity.
Casey examines the career of the controversial John Lilly, the pioneer of modern dolphin studies whose work eventually led him down some very strange paths. She visits a community in Hawaii whose adherents believe dolphins are the key to spiritual enlightenment, travels to Ireland, where a dolphin named as “the world’s most loyal animal” has delighted tourists and locals for decades with his friendly antics, and consults with the world’s leading marine researchers, whose sense of wonder inspired by the dolphins they study increases the more they discover.
Yet there is a dark side to our relationship with dolphins. They are the stars of a global multibillion-dollar captivity industry, whose money has fueled a sinister and lucrative trade in which dolphins are captured violently, then shipped and kept in brutal conditions. Casey’s investigation into this cruel underground takes her to the harrowing epicenter of the trade in the Solomon Islands, and to the Japanese town of Taiji, made famous by the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, where she chronicles the annual slaughter and sale of dolphins in its narrow bay.
Casey ends her narrative on the island of Crete, where millennia-old frescoes and artwork document the great Minoan civilization, a culture which lived in harmony with dolphins, and whose example shows the way to a more enlightened coexistence with the natural world.
No writer is better positioned to portray these magical creatures than Susan Casey, whose combination of personal reporting, intense scientific research, and evocative prose made The Wave and The Devil’s Teeth contemporary classics of writing about the sea. In Voices in the Ocean, she has written a thrilling book about the other intelligent life on the planet. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Susan Casey is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (2005),
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean (2010), and Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins (2015).
In addition to authoring books, she served as creative director of Outside Magazine, where she was part of the editorial team that developed the stories behind the bestselling books Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm, as well as the 2002 movie Blue Crush.
The Toronto-born Casey has been Editor-in-Chief of O, The Oprah Magazine since 2009. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A] meticulously reported global odyssey.... Fans of Casey's writing know that she has an inexhastible curiosity and a knack for fully embracing her subject.... We're never quite sure where Casey's investigation will take us.... Casey isn't afraid.
Outside
Casey...embarks an investigation into the world of dolphins, impressing the reader with her curiosity and thrilling sense of discovery as she travels the world to learn about these unique creatures.... Casey’s book comes as a welcome addition on a topic also explored in the recent documentaries The Cove and Blackfish.
Publishers Weekly
This book does not provide scientific background as does Justin Gregg's Are Dolphins Really that Smart? but will interest general and YA readers, as well as nature lovers, who will lose their eagerness to visit dolphin shows and may be motivated toward further reading on the subject. —Judith B. Barnett, Univ. of Rhode Island Lib., Kingston
Library Journal
Casey takes the measure of the human-dolphin dance.... The most moving section of the book follows the author's visit to Crete...demonstrating their significance across ages. "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine," said astrophysicist Arthur Eddington. "It is stranger than we can imagine." That sublime wildness is exactly what Casey, ever the adventurer, reveals in this flawed but still entertaining book.
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)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
Marc Goodman, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385539005
Summary
One of the world’s leading authorities on global security, Marc Goodman takes readers deep into the digital underground to expose the alarming ways criminals, corporations, and even countries are using new and emerging technologies against you—and how this makes everyone more vulnerable than ever imagined.
Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways, but there is an ominous flip side: our technology can be turned against us. Hackers can activate baby monitors to spy on families, thieves are analyzing social media posts to plot home invasions, and stalkers are exploiting the GPS on smart phones to track their victims’ every move.
We all know today’s criminals can steal identities, drain online bank accounts, and wipe out computer servers, but that’s just the beginning. To date, no computer has been created that could not be hacked—a sobering fact given our radical dependence on these machines for everything from our nation’s power grid to air traffic control to financial services.
Yet, as ubiquitous as technology seems today, just over the horizon is a tidal wave of scientific progress that will leave our heads spinning. If today’s Internet is the size of a golf ball, tomorrow’s will be the size of the sun. Welcome to the Internet of Things, a living, breathing, global information grid where every physical object will be online.
But with greater connections come greater risks. Implantable medical devices such as pacemakers can be hacked to deliver a lethal jolt of electricity and a car’s brakes can be disabled at high speed from miles away. Meanwhile, 3-D printers can produce AK-47s, bioterrorists can download the recipe for Spanish flu, and cartels are using fleets of drones to ferry drugs across borders.
With explosive insights based upon a career in law enforcement and counterterrorism, Marc Goodman takes readers on a vivid journey through the darkest recesses of the Internet. Reading like science fiction, but based in science fact, Future Crimes explores how bad actors are primed to hijack the technologies of tomorrow, including robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.
These fields hold the power to create a world of unprecedented abundance and prosperity. But the technological bedrock upon which we are building our common future is deeply unstable and, like a house of cards, can come crashing down at any moment.
Future Crimes provides a mind-blowing glimpse into the dark side of technological innovation and the unintended consequences of our connected world. Goodman offers a way out with clear steps we must take to survive the progress unfolding before us.
Provocative, thrilling, and ultimately empowering, Future Crimes will serve as an urgent call to action that shows how we can take back control over our own devices and harness technology’s tremendous power for the betterment of humanity—before it’s too late. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Marc Goodman has spent a career in law enforcement, including work as Futurist with the FBI, Senior Advisor to Interpol and street police officer. As the founder of the Future Crimes Institute and chair for Policy, Law & Ethics at Singularity University, he has continued to investigate the intriguing, often terrifying intersection of science and crime, uncovering nascent threats and combating the darker side of technology. (From the publisher.)
Marc holds a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University and a Master of Science in the Management of Information Systems from the London School of Economics. In addition, he has serves as a Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Stanford’s MediaX Laboratory. Marc is frequently covered in the press, having been featured by CNN, ABC, NBC, BBC, Fox News, The Guardian, Le Monde and PBS, among others. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Rather than challenge us to reconsider our habits, [some technology books] are more likely to inspire a defeatist "everything is terrible, nothing matters" attitude. Future Crimes,” a new book from Marc Goodman, inadvertently falls into this...category, which is unfortunate, because its arrival couldn’t have come at a better time.... While Goodman intends to deliver a warning about the dangers and vulnerabilities of our techno-laden world, Future Crimes often sounds less like a manifesto and more like a Wikipedia entry about the recent history of cybercrimes, some real, many hypothetical.
Jenna Wortham - New York Times Book Review
Addictive….[I]ntroduces readers to this brave new world of technology, where robbers have been replaced by hackers, and victims include nearly anyone on the Web… He presents his myriad hard-to-imagine cybercrime examples in the kind of matter-of-fact voice he probably perfected as an investigator. He clearly wants us never to look at our cellphones or Facebook pages in the same way again — and in this, Future Crimes succeeds marvelously.
Washington Post
Excellent and timely…Mr. Goodman is no neo-Luddite. He thinks innovations could ultimately lead to self-healing computer networks that detect hackers and automatically make repairs to shut them out. He rightly urges the private and public sectors to work more closely together, "crowdsourcing" ideas and know-how…The best time to start tackling future crimes is now.
Economist
This is a must-read!
Larry King
Future Crimes is a risk compendium for the Information Age…. Exhaustively researched…. Fascinating…. Thrilling to read.
San Francisco Chronicle
In Future Crimes, Goodman spills out story after story about how technology has been used for illegal ends...The author ends with a series of recommendations that, while ambitious, appear sensible and constructive...Goodman’s most promising idea is the creation of a “Manhattan Project” for cyber security...[Future Crimes is] a ride well worth taking if we are to prevent the worst of his predictions from taking shape.
Financial Times
Marc Goodman is a go-to guide for all who want a good scaring about the dark side of technology.
New Scientist
Utterly fascinating stuff... Goodman weds the joy of geeky technology with the tension of true crime. The future of crime prevention starts here.
NPR, San Francisco
A well-researched whirlwind tour of internet-based crime.
Science Magazine
By the middle of the first chapter you’ll be afraid to turn on your e-reader or laptop, and you’ll be looking with deep suspicion at your smartphone... [Goodman's] style is breezy but his approach is relentless, as he leads you from the guts of the Target data breach to the security vulnerabilities in social media...Mr. Goodman argues convincingly that we are addressing exponential growth in risky technologies with thinking that is, at best, incremental.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
[A] hair-raising exposé of cybercrime...Goodman’s breathless but lucid account is good at conveying the potential perils of emerging technologies in layman’s terms, and he sprinkles in deft narratives of the heists already enabled by them...A timely wake-up call.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) An alarming view of the burgeoning dark side of the Internet.... In this highly readable and exhaustive debut, [Goodman] details the many ways in which hackers, organized criminals, terrorists and rogue governments are exploiting the vulnerability of our increasingly connected society.... A powerful wake-up call.
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)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
Your BFF Really? : It Takes One to Have One
Linda K. Lee, 2015
CreateSpace
101 pp.
ISBN-13: 978151483293617
Summary
Are you dealing with the pleasures of friendships yet only to feel such pain at the same time?
Perhaps you're choosing the wrong friends or they are the perfect ones... Would you know the difference? Whether you're interested in learning how to keep your friendships healthy and thriving or you need to remove yourself from one that is draining you. Your BFF Really? Is for you.
Linda K Lee takes a practical yet spiritual look into a topic that is very important though immensely misunderstood. This book is written to give a better understanding of the pivotal yet purposeful platonic relationships in our lives.
Author Bio
• Birth—April 19, 1963
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Education—Atlanta Technical College; Columbia School of Broadcasting
• Currently—lives in Atlanta, Georgia
Linda K. Lee has been married to Antonio Lee for 29 years. They have 3 children, Edwin, Tony, and Sharenda. Linda is also a grandmother of four. She is a relationship mentor, a motivational speaker and a playwright as well.
Linda co wrote her first book three years ago with her husband. The book was entitled Flat Lined Love.
Linda loves to read mystery novels in her spare time. She is a Bible teacher and trains other Bible teachers.
Visit the author's website.
Follow Linda on Facebook.
Discussion Questions
1. Do you consider yourself to be a friend?
2. Have you ever had a friendship to end?
3. What do you and your friends have in common?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)