The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors
Dan Jones, 2014
Penguin Group (USA)
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670026678
Summary
The author of The Plantagenets chronicles the next chapter in British history—the historical backdrop for Game of Thrones.
The crown of England changed hands five times over the course of the fifteenth century, as two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty fought to the death for the right to rule. In this riveting follow-up to The Plantagenets, celebrated historian Dan Jones describes how the longest-reigning British royal family tore itself apart until it was finally replaced by the Tudors.
Some of the greatest heroes and villains of history were thrown together in these turbulent times, from Joan of Arc to Henry V, whose victory at Agincourt marked the high point of the medieval monarchy, and Richard III, who murdered his own nephews in a desperate bid to secure his stolen crown. This was a period when headstrong queens and consorts seized power and bent men to their will.
With vivid descriptions of the battles of Towton and Bosworth, where the last Plantagenet king was slain, this dramatic narrative history revels in bedlam and intrigue. It also offers a long-overdue corrective to Tudor propaganda, dismantling their self-serving account of what they called the Wars of the Roses. (From the publisher.)
The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England (2012) is Jones's prequel to The Wars of Roses and was adapted as a BBC documentary series in 2014.
Author Bio
• Birth—July 27, 1981
• Where— Reading, England, UK
• Education—B.A., University of Cambridge
• Currently—lives in London, England
Dan Gwynne Jones is a British writer, historian, and journalist. He was born in Reading, England, to Welsh parents and attended The Royal Latin School, a state grammar school in Buckingham. In 2002, he took a first in history at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. Currently, he lives in Battersea, London, with his wife and children.
Historian
Jones's first history book was Summer of Blood, a popular narrative history of the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. It was published in 2009.
His second book, The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made England, was published in 2012 in the UK and a year later in the US, where it became a New York Times bestseller. The book is a family portrait of the Plantagenet kings from Henry II to Richard II. In 2014, the BBC adapted the book into a documentary series.
The Wars of the Roses, Jones's third book was published in 2014. It picks up where The Plantagenets leaves off—the death of Henry V to the arrival of the Tudors (1420-1541).
Journalist
Jones is also a columnist at the London Evening Standard, where he writes regularly about sports. He has written for The Times (London) Sunday Times (London), Telegraph, Spectator, Daily Beast, Newsweek, Literary Review, New Statesman, GQ, BBC History Magazine, and History Today. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/20/14.)
Book Reviews
Jones tells a good story. That is a good thing, since storytelling has gone out of favor among so many historians.... He admits that the era is at times incomprehensible, yet he manages to impose upon it sufficient order to render this book both edifying and utterly entertaining. His delightful wit is as ferocious as the dreadful violence he describes.
The Times (UK)
Jones is a born storyteller, peopling the terrifying uncertainties of each moment with a superbly drawn cast of characters and powerfully evoking the brutal realities of civil war. With gripping urgency he shows this calamitous conflict unfold.
Evening Standard (UK)
Exhilarating, epic, blood-and-roses history. There are battles fought in snowstorms, beheadings, jousts, clandestine marriages, spurious genealogies, flashes of chivalry and streaks of pure malevolence.... Jones’s material is thrilling, but it is quite a task to sift, select, structure, and contextualize the information. There is fine scholarly intuition on display here and a mastery of the grand narrative; it is a supremely skilful piece of storytelling.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
Jones’s greatest skill as a historical writer is to somehow render sprawling, messy epochs such as this one into manageable, easily digestible matter; he is keenly tuned to what should be served up and what should be omitted. And he still finds rooms for the telling anecdote and vivid descriptive passage. It makes for an engrossing read and a thoroughly enjoyable introduction to the Lancastrian-Yorkist struggle.
Spectator (UK)
A fine new history.... Tautly structured, elegantly written, and finely attuned to the values and sensibilities of the age, The Wars of the Roses is probably the best introduction to the conflict currently in print.
Mail on Sunday (UK)
(Starred review.) It’s not often that a book manages to be both scholarly and a page-turner, but British historian Jones succeeds on both counts in this entertaining follow-up to his bestselling The Plantagenets.... Jones sets a new high-water mark in the current revisionism of the Tudor era.
Publishers Weekly
[H]istorian Jones traces the British crown from the fall of Henry V in 1422 to the rise of the Tudor dynasty in the early 1500s.... [T]he author's painstaking attention to detail is the same as in his previous work.... This excellent and fairly accessible contribution to the history of the Wars of the Roses serves as a helpful corrective to previous mythologized versions. —Ben Neal, Richland Lib., Columbia, SC
Library Journal
In a follow-up to The Plantagenets...British historian Jones authoritatively sets the scene for the next brutal act: the 15th-century succession crises.... Henry V's widow, Catherine of Valois, ... remarried in some obscurity in 1431 a charming Welsh squire named Oweyn Tidr, aka Owen Tudor. Their grandson in exile, Henry Tudor, would emerge gloriously to...become King Henry VII.
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.)
The Meaning of Human Existence
Edward O. Wilson, 2014
Liveright Publishing
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780871401007
Summary
How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? ... Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? ... Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?"
In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species.
Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence—from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends.
Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way.
Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an over-reliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web.
Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe.
The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 10, 1929
• Where—Birmingham, Alabama, USA
• Education—B.S., M.S., University of Alabama; Ph.D. Harvard University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize (twice)
• Currently—lives in Lexington, Massachusetts
Edward Osborne Wilson is an American biologist, researcher, theorist, conservationist, and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants, on which he is considered to be the world's leading expert.
He is known for his scientific career, his role as the "father" of both sociobiology and biodiversity," his environmental advocacy, and his secular-humanist and deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters.
He is currently Professor Emeritus in Entomology at Harvard University, a lecturer at Duke University, and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize (for General Non-Fiction), and a New York Times bestseller for The Social Conquest of Earth and Letters to a Young Scientist.
Early life
Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama. According to his autobiography Naturalist, he moved around with his father and his stepmother, growing up in several cities and towns, mostly around Washington, D.C. and Mobile, Alabama. From an early age, he was interested in natural history.
As a boy, he blinded himself in his right eye in a fishing accident, eventually undergoing surgery, which left him with full sight in only his left eye. In his autobiography, Naturalist, he recalls that, even though he had lost his stereoscopy, he could see fine print and the hairs on the bodies of small insects. His reduced ability to observe mammals and birds prompted him to concentrate on insects: "I noticed butterflies and ants more than other kids did, and took an interest in them automatically."
At the age of 18, intent on becoming an entomologist, he began by collecting flies, but the shortage of insect pins caused by World War II caused him to switch to ants, which could be stored in vials. With the encouragement of Marion R. Smith, a myrmecologist from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, Wilson began a survey of all the ants of Alabama. This study led him to report the first colony of fire ants in the US, near the port of Mobile.
Wilson earned an B.S. and M.S. degrees in biology from the University of Alabama and, in 1955, a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He remained at Harvard, first as a Fellow then associate professor and eventually full professor. In 1996 he officially retired from teaching at Harvard though continues to hold the positions of Professor Emeritus and Honorary Curator in Entomology.
He and his wife Irene now reside in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Theories and beliefs
"The evolutionary epic," Wilson wrote in his book On Human Nature (1978), "is probably the best myth we will ever have." Wilson's use of "myth" means not a falsehood but a narrative that provides people with extraordinary moments of shared heritage. For Wilson his use of the word epic, "retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic."
Human beings must have an epic, a sublime account of how the world was created and how humanity became part of it.... Religious epics satisfy another primal need. They confirm we are part of something greater than ourselves.... The way to achieve our epic that unites human spirituality, instead of cleaves it, it is to compose it from the best empirical knowledge that science and history can provide.
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/19/2014.)
Book Reviews
The sections about ants remind you what a lively writer Mr. Wilson can be. This two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction stands above the crowd of biology writers the way John le Carre stands above spy writers. He's wise, learned, wicked, vivid, oracular…Mr. Wilson remains a warmly skeptical and provocative figure on the page.... The Meaning of Human Existence is not always this good. At times, it sounds like a commencement speech or a lesser Bill Moyers special. (“In this part of our journey, I propose to come full circle....”) Mr. Wilson’s prose has, over time, lost a bit of its elastic snap.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
In his typically elegant style, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Wilson...probes the nature of human existence.... Wilson pleads that we show tolerance to our fellow humans and mercy to the world around us:... “We alone have measured the quality of mercy among our own kind. Might we now extend the same concern to the living world that gave us birth?”
Publishers Weekly
Wilson...asks the question that is the logical extension of his life's work: What does it mean to be human?... [He cautions] us against engineering the planet exclusively to serve human needs, a gloomy dystopia he refers to as the "Age of Loneliness." This book will be of interest to the general reader. —Jeffrey J. Dickens, Southern Connecticut State Univ.
Library Journal
According to Wilson our species was created not by a supernatural intelligence but by chance and necessity.... For readers wondering where religion fits into this, the author....[concedes] that a religious instinct does exist...[but] tribalism is far stronger. A little book with a big message, bound to produce discussion among scientists and discomfort in devout churchgoers.
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 LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Meaning of Human Existence:
1. For Wilson, science and evolution are the bedrocks for understanding "the meaning of human existence"—this is the book's basic premise. Does Wilson make his case? How so...or why not?
2. According to Wilson, our propensity for social integration—"to communicate, recognize, evaluate, bond, cooperate, compete, and from all these the deep warm pleasure of belonging to [our] own special group”—is hard-wired within us. How have those tendencies given us dominance over earth's other creatures?
3. Wilson writes that "the great religions are sources of ceaseless and unnecessary suffering. They are impediments to the grasp of reality needed to solve most social problems in the real world." How do you take Wilson's assertion? Do you agree with him...or disagree? Do you see a more positive role for religion?
4. Critics have called Wilson a genetic determinist, a view of human life as mechanistic with little room for free will. After reading The Meaning of Human Existence, do see him as such? Or would you describe his views as more complicated and nuanced? Where would you place yourself on the spectrum of genetic vs. environmental determinism (i.e., nature vs. nurture)?
5. Talk about the role Wilson sees for the humanities and their relationship to science.
6. We are "the mind of the planet," Wilson posits. What does he mean by that statement...and what does he see as the responsibilities that follow from that position?
7. Where does Wilson stand on the possibility of "life" (in some form) on other planets or in other galaxies? What threat would earth face from aliens?
8. Is this book pessimistic...or realistic? What vision of hope, if any, does it offer for the future?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Walter Isaacson, 2014
Simon & Schuster
560 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476708690
Summary
Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens.
What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?
In his masterly saga, Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page.
This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It’s also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative.
For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, The Innovators shows how they happen. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 20, 1952
• Where—New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; M.A., Oxford University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—Washington, D.C. area
Walter Isaacson is an American writer and journalist. He was the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C. He has been the chairman and CEO of Cable News Network (CNN) and the Managing Editor of Time. He has written biographies of Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Early life and education
Isaacson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Irwin and Betty Lee (Seff) Isaacson. His father was a "kindly Jewish distracted humanist engineer with a reverence for science," and his mother was a real estate broker.
Isaacson graduated from Harvard University in 1974, where he earned an A.B. cum laude in history and literature. He later attended the Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, where he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) and graduated with first-class honors.
Journalism
Isaacson began his career in journalism at The Sunday Times of London, followed by a position with the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He joined Time magazine in 1978, serving as the magazine's political correspondent, national editor, and editor of new media before becoming the magazine's 14th editor in 1996.
Isaacson became chairman and CEO of CNN in July 2001, two months later guided CNN through the events of 9/11. Shortly after his appointment at CNN, Isaacson attracted attention for seeking the views of Republican Party leaders on Capitol Hill regarding criticisms that CNN broadcast content that was unfair to Republicans or conservatives.
He was quoted in Roll Call magazine as saying: "I was trying to reach out to a lot of Republicans who feel that CNN has not been as open to covering Republicans, and I wanted to hear their concerns." The CEO's conduct was criticized by the left-leaning Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) organization, which said that Isaacson's "pandering" behavior was endowing conservative politicians with power over CNN.
In 2003, Isaacson stepped down as president at CNN to become president of the Aspen Institute. Isaacson served as the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute from 2003 until 2017, when he announced that he would leave to become a professor of history at Tulane University and an advisory partner at the New York City financial services firm Perella Weinberg Partners.
Writing
Isaacson is the co-author, with Evan Thomas, of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986). He is the author of Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), and American Sketches (2009).
In 2011, Steve Jobs, Isaacson's authorized biography was published, becoming an international best-seller and breaking all sales records for a biography. The book was based on over forty interviews with Jobs over a two-year period up until shortly before his death, and on conversations with friends, family members, and business rivals of the entrepreneur.
Next came another bestseller, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), which explores the history of key technological innovations — notably the parallel developments of the computer and the Internet.
Isaacson's biography, Leonardo da Vinci, came out in 2017 to great fanfare and, even before it's actual publication, became the object of a Hollywood bidding war. Leonardo DiCaprio's production company won the film rights with DiCaprio planning to play the title role of da Vinci.
Government positions
In 2005, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco appointed Isaacson vice chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority to oversee spending on the recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
In 2007, President George W. Bush appointed him as chairman of the U.S.-Palestinian Partnership, which seeks to create economic and educational opportunities in the Palestinian territories.
He also served as the co-chair of the U.S.-Vietnamese Dialogue on Agent Orange, which in January 2008 announced completion of a project to contain the dioxin left behind by the U.S. at the Da Nang air base and plans to build health centers and a dioxin laboratory in the affected regions.
During the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed him vice-chair of the Partners for a New Beginning, which encourages private-sector investments and partnerships in the Muslim world.
In 2009, President Obama appointed him as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and the other international broadcasts of the U.S. government; he served until January 2012.
In 2014, he was appointed by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu to be the co-chair of the New Orleans Tricentennial Commission, charged with planning the city's 300th-anniversary commemoration in 2018.
In 2015, he was appointed to the board of My Brother's Keeper Alliance, which seeks to carry out President Obama's anti-poverty and youth opportunity initiatives.
Isaacson is the chairman emeritus of the board of Teach for America.
Honors
Time magazine selected Isaacson in 2012 to be on its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Isaacson is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was awarded its 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.
In 2014, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Isaacson for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. The title of Isaacson's lecture was "The Intersection of the Humanities and the Sciences." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/3/2017.)
Book Reviews
Mr. Isaacson's gifts as an enthusiast and explicator remain impressive…As this book so clearly demonstrates, he is a kindred spirit to the visionaries and enthusiasts who speed us so thrillingly into the technological future.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
[A] sweeping and surprisingly tenderhearted history of the digital age…[The Innovators] is…absorbing and valuable, and Isaacson's outsize narrative talents are on full display. Few authors are more adept at translating technical jargon into graceful prose, or at illustrating how hubris and greed can cause geniuses to lose their way.
Brendan I. Koerner - New York Times Book Review
A sprawling companion to his best-selling Steve Jobs...this kaleidoscopic narrative serves to explain the stepwise development of 10 core innovations of the digital age—from mathematical logic to transistors, video games and the Web—as well as to illustrate the exemplary traits of their makers.... Isaacson unequivocally demonstrates the power of collaborative labor and the interplay between companies and their broader ecosystems.... The Innovators is the most accessible and comprehensive history of its kind.
Matthew Wisnioski - Washington Post
Isaacson provides a sweeping and scintillating narrative of the inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs who have given the world computers and the Internet. . . . a near-perfect marriage of author and subject . . . an informative and accessible account of the translation of computers, programming, transistors, micro-processors, the Internet, software, PCs, the World Wide Web and search engines from idea into reality.... [A] masterful book.
San Francisco Chronicle
(Starred review.) The history of the computer as told through this fascinating book is not the story of great leaps forward but rather one of halting progress.... Isaacson examines [numerous] figures in lucid, detailed narratives, recreating marathon sessions of lab research, garage tinkering, and all-night coding in which they struggled to translate concepts into working machinery.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Isaacson is a storyteller of the kind he admires among the people who made the bits and pieces that would become computers,... describing these individuals vividly and succinctly.... [The book] should be on the reading lists of book discussion groups and high school and college courses across the curriculum. —Linda Loos Scarth, Cedar Rapids, IA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A remarkable overview of the history of computers from the man who brought us biographies of Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Henry Kissinger . . . Isaacson manages to bring together the entire universe of computing, from the first digitized loom to the web, presented in a very accessible manner that often reads like a thriller.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Throughout his action-packed story, Isaacson reiterates one theme: Innovation results from both "creative inventors" and "an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies, and engineering methods ripen together."... [A] vigorous, gripping narrative.
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.)
Not My Father's Son: A Memoir
Alan Cumming, 2014
HarperCollins
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062225061
Summary
In his unique and engaging voice, the acclaimed actor of stage and screen shares the emotional story of his complicated relationship with his father and the deeply buried family secrets that shaped his life and career.
A beloved star of stage, television, and film—“one of the most fun people in show business” (Time magazine)—Alan Cumming is a successful artist whose diversity and fearlessness is unparalleled. His success masks a painful childhood growing up under the heavy rule of an emotionally and physically abusive father—a relationship that tormented him long into adulthood.
When television producers in the UK approached him to appear on a popular celebrity genealogy show in 2010, Alan enthusiastically agreed. He hoped the show would solve a family mystery involving his maternal grandfather, a celebrated WWII hero who disappeared in the Far East. But as the truth of his family ancestors revealed itself, Alan learned far more than he bargained for about himself, his past, and his own father.
With ribald humor, wit, and incredible insight, Alan seamlessly moves back and forth in time, integrating stories from his childhood in Scotland and his experiences today as a film, television, and theater star. At times suspenseful, deeply moving, and wickedly funny, Not My Father’s Son will make readers laugh even as it breaks their hearts. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January, 27 1965
• Where—Aberfeldy, Perthshire, Scotland, UK
• Education—Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama
• Awards—numerous for stage acting
• Currently—lives in Manhanttan
Alan Cumming is a Scottish-born American actor who has appeared in numerous films, television shows and plays.
His London stage appearances include Hamlet, the Maniac in Accidental Death of an Anarchist (for which he received an Olivier Award), the lead in Bent, and the National Theatre of Scotland's The Bacchae.
On Broadway he has appeared in The Threepenny Opera, as the master of ceremonies in Cabaret (for which he won a Tony Award), and Design for Living. His best-known film roles include his performances in GoldenEye, Spy Kids, and X2. Cumming also introduces Masterpiece Mystery! for PBS and appears on The Good Wife, for which he has been nominated for two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Satellite Award.
He has also written a novel, Tommy's Tale and a memoir, Not My Father's Child, hosted a cable talk show called Eavesdropping with Alan Cumming, and produced a line of perfumed products labelled "Cumming". He has contributed opinion pieces to many publications and performed a cabaret show, I Bought A Blue Car Today. In 2008, still retaining his British citizenship, Cumming became a naturalised U.S. citizen.
Early life
Cumming was born in Aberfeldy, Perthshire, Scotland, the son of Mary (nee Darling), an insurance company secretary, and Alex Cumming, a forester. He has stated that his father was physically and emotionally abusive, a topic he explores in his 2014 memoir, Not My Father's Son.
After his graduation from high school, he spent a year and a half as an editor and columnist for the pop and TV magazine TOPS before entering the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. On graduation he married fellow student Hilary Lyon; they divorced eight years later and had no children.
Personal life
Cumming lives in Manhattan with his husband, graphic artist Grant Shaffer, and their dogs, Honey and Leon.[18] The couple dated for two years before entering into a civil partnership at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, London in 2007; they remarried in New York in 2012, the fifth anniversary of their London union.
Once described as "a frolicky pansexual sex symbol for the new millennium," Cumming said he considers himself bisexual, "although the pendulum has obviously swung." Previous relationships include an eight-year marriage to actress Hilary Lyon, a two-year relationship with actress Saffron Burrows, and a six-year relationship with theater director Nick Philippou. After his civil partnership with Shaffer, when asked if he was monogamous, he stated "I don't believe that monogamy is feasible." In 2006, Cumming stated that he "would dearly like to adopt a child," but that his life was "too hectic" for children.
Cumming used to be a member of the Church of Scotland, until his mother received a letter from them saying they had "read something about me being an atheist and would I like to leave." He said he had attended out of tradition, but realised being a part of it was "only condoning and validating lots of things I disapprove of: oppression, guilt, shame, etc." Adapted from a much longer version on Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/15/2014.)
Book Reviews
Scottish actor Cumming struggles to reconcile with his troubled past in this moving, if oddly structured, memoir. Alternating between three time periods—"Then," "Now," and a span of several months in 2010—Cumming recounts his life...under the brutal reign of his abusive father.... [This is] a case where the journey is more important than the destination.
Publishers Weekly
[A]n insightful, relentless examination of Cumming's hardships, alongside keen observations about the continuing effect of abuse on his life. A moving read that fans of the man and of memoirs won't want to put down. —Ashleigh Williams, School Library Journal
Library Journal
Instead of writing a showbiz memoir with stories of his eclectic career, Cumming...anchors his book with his discovery of the truth about his grandfather's premature death (at age 35) and a recognition of the "dual family narrative" of shame and secrecy..... A raw, revealing memoir from a courageous actor and writer.
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.)
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Atul Gawande, 2014
Henry Holt & Co.
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250081247
Summary
Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending.
Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit.
Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.
Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession’s ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.
Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 5, 1965
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Rasied—Athens, Ohio
• Education—B.S., Stanford University ; M.A. Oxford Universty; M.D., M.P.H., Harvard University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Newton, Massachusetts
Atul Gawande is an American surgeon, author, and public health researcher. He is a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, professor in both the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In his work in public health, he is Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation and also chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit reducing deaths in surgery globally.
Early years
Gawande was born in Brooklyn, New York to Indian Maharashtrian immigrants to the United States, both doctors. The family soon moved to Athens, Ohio, where he and his sister grew up. He obtained an undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1987. He was a Rhodes scholar, earning a degree in Philosophy, Politics & Economics from Balliol College, Oxford in 1989. Gawande graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1995. He also has a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health, earned in 1999.
Political career and medical school
As a student, Gawande was a volunteer for Gary Hart's campaign. As a Rhodes Scholar, he spent one year at Oxford University. After graduation, he joined Al Gore's 1988 presidential campaign. He worked as a health-care researcher for Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN), who was author of a "managed competition" health care proposal for the Conservative Democratic Forum. After two years he left medical school to become Bill Clinton's health care lieutenant during the 1992 campaign and became a senior adviser in the Department of Health and Human Services after Clinton's inauguration. He directed one of the three committees of the Clinton Health Care Task Force, supervising 75 people and defined the benefits packages for Americans and subsidies and requirements for employers.
He returned to medical school in 1993 and earned a medical degree in 1994.
Journalism
Soon after he began his residency, his friend Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate, asked him to contribute to the online magazine. His pieces on the life of a surgical resident caught the eye of The New Yorker which published several pieces by him before making him a staff writer in 1998.
A June 2009 New Yorker essay by Gawande compared the health care of two towns in Texas to show why health care was more expensive in one town compared to the other. Using the town of McAllen, Texas, as an example, it argued that a revenue-maximizing businessman-like culture (which can provide substantial amounts of unnecessary care) was an important factor in driving up costs, unlike a culture of low-cost high-quality care as provided by the Mayo Clinic and other efficient health systems.
Ezra Klein of the Washington Post called it "the best article you'll see this year on American health care—why it's so expensive, why it's so poor, [and] what can be done." The article was cited by President Barack Obama during Obama's attempt to get health care reform legislation passed by the United States Congress. The article, according to Senator Ron Wyden, "affected [Obama's] thinking dramatically" and who later said to a group of Senators, "This is what we’ve got to fix." After reading the New Yorker article, Warren Buffett's long-time business partner Charlie Munger mailed a check to Gawande in the amount of $20,000 as a thank you to Dr. Gawande for providing something so socially useful. Gawande donated the money to the Brigham and Women's Hospital Center for Surgery and Public Health.
In addition to his popular writing, Gawande has published studies on topics including military surgery techniques and error in medicine, included in the New England Journal of Medicine. He is also the director of the World Health Organization's Global Patient Safety Challenge. His essays have appeared in The Best American Essays 2003, The Best American Science Writing 2002, and The Best American Science Writing 2009.
Books
In 2002 Gawande published his first book, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science. It was a National Book Award finalist and has been published in over one hundred countries.
His second book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, was released in 2007. It discusses three virtues that Gawande considers to be most important for success in medicine: diligence, doing right, and ingenuity. Gawande offers examples in the book of people who have embodied these virtues. The book strives to present multiple sides of contentious medical issues, such as malpractice law in the US, physicians' role in capital punishment, and treatment variation between hospitals.
Gawande's third book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, came out in 2009. It discusses the importance of organization and pre-planning (such as thorough checklists) in both medicine and the larger world. The Checklist Manifesto reached the New York Times Hardcover nonfiction bestseller list in 2010.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End was in October 2014.
Awards and recognition
In 2006, Gawande was named a MacArthur Fellow for his work investigating and articulating modern surgical practices and medical ethics. In 2007, he became director of the World Health Organization's effort to reduce surgical deaths, and in 2009 he was elected a Hastings Center Fellow.
In 2004, he was named one of the 20 Most Influential South Asians by Newsweek. In the 2010 Time 100, he was included (fifth place) in Thinkers Category. Also in 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.
Personal life
Gawande lives in Newton, Massachusetts with his wife, Kathleen Hobson, who is a Stanford graduate, and their three children: Walker, Hattie, and Hunter. He enjoys reading. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/12/2014.)
Book Reviews
"I never expected that among the most meaningful experiences I'd have as a doctor—and, really, as a human being—would come from helping others deal with what medicine cannot do as well as what it can," [Gawande] writes. Being Mortal uses a clear, illuminating style to describe the medical facts and cases that have brought him to that understanding.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Gawande writes that members of the medical profession, himself included, have been wrong about what their job is. Rather than ensuring health and survival, it is "to enable well-being." If that sounds vague, Gawande has plenty of engaging and nuanced stories to leave the reader with a good sense of what he means…Being Mortal is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on aging, death and dying. It contains unsparing descriptions of bodily aging and the way it often takes us by surprise. Gawande is a gifted storyteller, and there are some stirring, even tear-inducing passages here. The writing can be evocative…. The stories give a dignified voice to older people in the process of losing their independence. We see the world from their perspective, not just those of their physicians and worried family members.
Sheri Fink - New York Time Book Review
Dr. Gawande’s book is not of the kind that some doctors write, reminding us how grim the fact of death can be. Rather, he shows how patients in the terminal phase of their illness can maintain important qualities of life (Best Books of 2014).
Wall Street Journal
Atul Gawande’s wise and courageous book raises the questions that none of us wants to think about.... Remarkable.
John Carey - Sunday Times (UK)
Gawande’s book is so impressive that one can believe that it may well [change the medical profession].... May it be widely read and inwardly digested.
Diana Athill - Financial Times (UK)
Being Mortal, Atul Gawande’s masterful exploration of aging, death, and the medical profession’s mishandling of both, is his best and most personal book yet.
Boston Globe
Masterful.... Essential.... For more than a decade, Atul Gawande has explored the fault lines of medicine...combining his years of experience as a surgeon with his gift for fluid, seemingly effortless storytelling.... In Being Mortal, he turns his attention to his most important subject yet.
Chicago Tribune
A needed call to action, a cautionary tale of what can go wrong, and often does, when a society fails to engage in a sustained discussion about aging and dying.
San Francisco Chronicle
Beautifully crafted.... Being Mortal is a clear-eyed, informative exploration of what growing old means in the 21st century...a book I cannot recommend highly enough. This should be mandatory reading for every American.... [I]t provides a useful roadmap of what we can and should be doing to make the last years of life meaningful.
Time.com
Beautifully written.... In his newest and best book, Gawande...has provided us with a moving and clear-eyed look at aging and death in our society, and at the harms we do in turning it into a medical problem, rather than a human one.
New York Review of Books
Being Mortal left me tearful, angry, and unable to stop talking about it for a week.... A surgeon himself, Gawande is eloquent about the inadequacy of medical school in preparing doctors to confront the subject of death with their patients.... it is rare to read a book that sparks with so much hard thinking.
Nature
Eloquent, moving (Best Books of 2014).
Economist
A great read that leaves you better equipped to face the future, and without making you feel like you just took your medicine (Best Books of 2014).
Mother Jones
Leading surgeon, Harvard medical professor, and best-selling author, Gawande is also a staff writer at The New Yorker, which published the National Magazine Award-winning article that serves as the basis for this study of how contemporary medicine can do a better, more humane job of managing death and dying.
Library Journal
Gawande displays the precision of his surgical craft and the compassion of a humanist...in a narrative that often attains the force and beauty of a novel.... Only a precious few books have the power to open our eyes while they move us to tears. Atul Gawande has produced such a work. One hopes it is the spark that ignites some revolutionary changes in a field of medicine that ultimately touches each of us (Best Books of 2014).
Shelf Awareness
[A] cleareyed look at aging and death in 21st-century America.... Gawande offers a timely account of how modern Americans cope with decline and mortality. He points out that dying in America is a lonely, complex business.... A sensitive, intelligent and heartfelt examination of the processes of aging and dying.
Kirkus Reviews
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