No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
Glenn Greenwald, 2014
Henry Holt & Company
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781627790734
Summary
In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald set out for Hong Kong to meet an anonymous source who claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels.
That source turned out to be the 29-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency’s widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a fierce debate over national security and information privacy. As the arguments rage on and the government considers various proposals for reform, it is clear that we have yet to see the full impact of Snowden’s disclosures.
Now for the first time, Greenwald fits all the pieces together, recounting his high-intensity eleven-day trip to Hong Kong, examining the broader implications of the surveillance detailed in his reporting for The Guardian, and revealing fresh information on the NSA’s unprecedented abuse of power with never-before-seen documents entrusted to him by Snowden himself.
Going beyond NSA specifics, Greenwald also takes on the establishment media, excoriating their habitual avoidance of adversarial reporting on the government and their failure to serve the interests of the people. Finally, he asks what it means both for individuals and for a nation’s political health when a government pries so invasively into the private lives of its citizens—and considers what safeguards and forms of oversight are necessary to protect democracy in the digital age.
Coming at a landmark moment in American history, No Place to Hide is a fearless, incisive, and essential contribution to our understanding of the U.S. surveillance state. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 6, 1967
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Raised—Lauderdale Lakes, Florida
• Education—B.A., George Washington University; J.D., New York
University
• Awards—Izzy Award; Pulitzer Prize for Public Service
• Currently—lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Glenn Greenwald is an American political journalist, lawyer, columnist, blogger, and author. He was born in New York City to Arlene and Daniel Greenwald; shortly after his birth, his family to moved Lauderdale Lakes, Florida. While a senior in high school, at 17, he ran unsuccessfully for the city council. He earned a B.A. at George Washington University in 1990 and a J.D. at New York University School of Law in 1994.
Litigation attorney
Greenwald practiced law in the Litigation Department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz (1994–1995); in 1996 he co-founded his own litigation firm, called Greenwald Christoph & Holland (later renamed Greenwald Christoph PC), where he litigated cases concerning issues of U.S. constitutional law and civil rights. One of his higher-profile cases was the pro bono representation of white supremacist Matthew F. Hale, in a series of First Amendment speech cases. About that work, Greenwald told Rolling Stone...
To me, it's a heroic attribute to be so committed to a principle that you apply it not when it's easy...not when it supports your position, not when it protects people you like, but when it defends and protects people that you hate.
Later, according to Greenwald,
I decided voluntarily to wind down my practice in 2005 because I could, and because, after ten years, I was bored with litigating full-time and wanted to do other things which I thought were more engaging and could make more of an impact, including political writing.
Journalism
He was a columnist for Guardian US from August 2012 to October 2013. He was a columnist for Salon.com from 2007 to 2012, and an occasional contributor to The Guardian. Greenwald worked as a constitutional and civil rights litigator. At Salon he contributed as a columnist and blogger, focusing on political and legal topics. He has also contributed to other newspapers and political news magazines, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, American Conservative, National Interest, and In These Times.
Greenwald was named by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013. Three of the four books he authored have been New York Times bestsellers. Greenwald is a frequent speaker on college campuses, including Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, UCLA School of Law, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Maryland. He frequently appears on various radio and television programs.
Books
• 2014 - No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
• 2011 - With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful
• 2008 - Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics
• 2007 - A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency
• 2006 - How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From A President Run Amok
Awards
He has won numerous awards for his NSA reporting, including the 2013 Polk Award for national security reporting, the top 2013 investigative journalism award from the Online News Association, the Esso Award for Excellence in Reporting (the Brazilian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), and the 2013 Pioneer Award from Electronic Frontier Foundation. He also received the first annual I. F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2009 and a 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the arrest and detention of Chelsea Manning. In 2013, Greenwald led the Guardian reporting that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Personal
Greenwald lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the hometown of his partner, David Michael Miranda. Greenwald has said his residence in Brazil is the result of an American law, the Defense of Marriage Act, barring federal recognition of same-sex marriages, which prevented his partner from receiving a visa to reside in the United States with him. The pertinent section of the law was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013, in U.S. v. Windsor. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/06/2014.)
Book Reviews
The author of three New York Times best sellers, winner of the 2009 I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and among 25 journalists cited as the most influential by the Atlantic, Guardian columnist Greenwald expands on his coverage of the NSA surveillance scandal, a story he broke. More documentation here from whistle-blower Edward Snowden
Library Journal
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.)
Letters from Wankie: A Place in Colonial Africa
Patricia Friedberg, 2013
Rainbow Books
260 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781568251653
Summary
Letters from Wankie is a unique true story based on the collection of some 500 air letters the author, British-born Patricia Friedberg, wrote home to England in the mid-1950s during the first two years of her marriage to her South African physician husband. Together the newlyweds moved to the remote mining town of Wankie in the far northwest corner of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where he was employed as a colliery doctor.
More than 50 years later, after her mother passed away, Patricia found among her mother's papers the bundle of air letters she had written home, neatly tied and safely stored. Reading through the collection it was evident the letters contained an incredible historical account if life during the colonial years as seen through the eyes and writings of a young woman twenty years of age who was unbelievably even to herself, employed as Clerk of Court at the Native Commissioners Office.
Despite the enormous cultural differences the young Londoner faced, the challenging and often shocking exposure to tribal practices and native law, she carried on overcoming obstacles with spunk and grit and a saving sense of humor. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 4, 1934
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—London School of Journalism; Marquette University (USA)
• Currently—lives in Bradenton, Flordia, USA, and London, England
Patricia Fridberg was born in London, attended The Henrietta Barnett School and continued her studies at The London School of Journalism. At nineteen she married a South African doctor furthering his studies in London and immediately following the wedding, the young couple left for Southern Africa and the then, Rhodesias, both North and South, first to Wankie, renamed Hwange and later in Salisbury, renamed aafter independence Harare, Zimbabwe.
While living in Wankie, Rhodesia she worked as Clerk of the Court in the Office of the Native Commissioner where she dealt with tribal and European law. The Friedbergs briefly returned to England where their first child was born, before relocating in Africa in the city of Salisbury (Harare) in Rhodesia where Patricia wrote for the local newspaper and joined the newly formed TV station RTV (Rhodesian Television).
Her experiences as Clerk of the Court in Hwange allowed her to travel freely into the rural/bush taking along a photographer. From those interviews she produced a number of Tribal Documentaries and wrote articles for the Rhodesian Herald.
Political unrest intensified in Rhodesia and for the safety of their children the family reluctantly left to settle in the United States, first in Baltimore, and then in Milwaukee. In the years that followed she travelled extensively with her husband, a Professor of Cardiology, who lectured in major cities in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa.
Patricia attended a playwriting course at Marquette University where her first play, "Masquerade" won the playwriter’s award.
She was moderator at WMTJ TV (NBC affiliate) Milwaukee’s, then weekly show, "People of the Book” and interviewed major celebrities, politicians, including the Israeli ambassador, Golda Meir, U.N. representatives and various personalities in the fields of art and music.
In Florida Patricia wrote for the Longboat Observer, became a collector of art and held monthly Salons for writers and artists. Her thoughts often returning to the African years, she wrote the film script "Journey from the Jacarandas" a feature film which began filming in Zimbabwe but was interrupted and unfinished due to civil disobedience and government sanctions.
Beginning with her novel 21 Aldgate and the recently released memoir Letters from Wankie, she is now completing the trilogy with Journey From the Jacarandas.
Book Reviews
A gorgeous, touching, tragic tale of a lost—but now, thanks to Patricia Friedberg—never forgotten time in a remote corner of colonial Africa.
Douglas Rogers - New York Times journalist and author, The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe.
[A] delightful account of a plucky young woman who takes things as they come and makes the best of them. She effectively uses the device of letters to home.... Patricia's "voice" made me smile all through her account...like listening to a charming tale told by a good friend...a friend you have known forever. Well done!
Georgia Court -owner, Bookstore 1 (Sarasota, Florida)
What an adventure! I loved this book! I could not stop reading this honestly portrayed, exhilarating account...filled with humour and astute wry observations, this is a delightful trip into the past. A valuable slice of history that documents an era now washed away, an insight into a country which once was the jewel of Africa, and is now in ruins.
Paul Williams, Ph.D. - author of Soldier Blue
An inspiring—and most satisfying read.
Joan Kufrin - author, Uncommon Women and Leo Burnett, Star-Reacher
[M]ental scenery that is thought-provoking, instructs and entertains. Exceedingly well done and a pleasure to read.
Marilyn Pincus - author, ghostwriter and member of the Authors Guild
To a Wankie Lass from a Wankie Lass... I was so excited when James Archibald, a Wankie lad who introduced me to your book. He told me he had been in touch with you and that you are keen to hear from other Wankie folk about their thoughts on your book.... well here are mine.... I ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT!!!!
Franky Rumbold - editor, Wankie Friends Newletter
As a traveller myself, seeing what the world has to offer, your trip to Wankie, a million miles from London's East End, and 21 Aldgate, must have made you feel like Livingstone himself: the flies, mosquitos, the chickens, snakes, elephants and (my favourite) the warthogs, what an adventure. When we are young we do not know what life will throw at us, we do not know the journeys we will take. Take this road or that road and who knows how things will be and what effect it has on us, the Egyptians say "your life is written in the sand" so as we watch the sands of time flow through the egg timer of life we can only think of the paths and roads we take. Thank you for taking me on your journey through Letters From Wankie. Mick Blunt - Maltby, South Yorkshire, England
Patricia Friedberg lived through World War II and the war in Rhodesia, and strongly believes we should think before deciding war is the only answer to far-off conflicts. Friedberg has recently completed a memoir titled Letters from Wankie: A Place in Colonial Africa. Based on letters she’d written to her parents, the book chronicles Friedberg’s experiences while living in Rhodesia.... History can come alive when viewed through the eyes of people who experienced it. Patricia Friedberg’s books are proof of this, helping readers to relive the past and, hopefully, learn from it.
Jackie Minetti - St. Pete Beach Island Reporter (Florida)
Letters From Wankie is the charming and insightful true story of a young London bride's first two years of marriage in the mid-50's, spent as Clerk of the Court in the colonial town of Wankie, Rhodesia,
Patricia Kawaja - editor, Florida Page
Discussion Questions
1. As a young Londoner in a foreign country what aspect of her new environment does the author first find most intriguing? difficult? surprising?
2. How does the author examine the economics, culture, traditions, politics, language and customs of the inhabitants of the region?
3. What is risked in her admiring and/or her criticism of the people in this region of Africa?
4. What is it about the author that allows her to assimilate? What does she gain?
5. What did you find most intriguing about the native culture? the colonial culture?
6. What evidence does the author use to support the books ideas? What did you find most surprising, intriguing or difficult to understand?
7. What are the implications for the future regarding the issues raised? Are they positive or negative? Affirming or frightening?
8. How controversial are the issues raised? Who is aligned on which sides of the issues? Where do you fall in the line-up?
9. What solution does the author propose? Who would implement the solutions? How probable is success?
10. What specific passage in the book struck you as most significant, or interesting, profound, amusing, illuminating, disturbing, sad? What was most memorable?
(Questions adapted from LitLovers' Generic Questions...and issued by publisher.)
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The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World
Lucette Lagnado, 2007
HarperCollins
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060822187
Summary
In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagando recreates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years between WWII and Nasser's rise to power.
Her father, Leon, was a boulevardier who bore a striking resemblance to Carry Grant and conducted his business in the elaborate lobby of the Nile Hilton, dressed in his signature white sharkskin suit. Lagnado brings to life the color and culture of Cairo's sidewalk cafes and nightclubs, the markets and the quiet Jewish homes of the ancient city.
But with Nasser's nationalization of Egyptian industry, Leon and his family lose everything. As streets are renamed and neighborhoods of their fellow Jews are disbanded, they, too, must make their escape. Packed into 26 suitcases, their jewels hidden in sealed tins of anchovies, Leon and his family depart for any land that will take them.
From Cairo to Paris to New York, the poverty and hardships they encounter make a striking contrast to the beauty and comfort of old Cairo. As their lives become an inversion of the American dream, though, "The resilient dignity of Lucette's family transcends the fiercest of obstacles," writes the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Set against the stunning portraits of three world cities, this memoir offers a grand and sweeping story of family, tradition, tragedy and triumph in their epic exodus from paradise. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 1, 1958
• Where—Cairo, Egypt
• Education—B.A., Vassar College
• Awards—Sami Rohr Prize
• Currently—New York City, and Sag Harbor, New York
Lucette Lagnado is an Egyptian-born American journalist and memoirist. She is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
Lagnado attended P.S. 205 in Bensonhurst Brooklyn, New York City, and is a graduate of Vassar College. She is married to journalist Douglas Feiden, and lives in New York City and Sag Harbor on the East End of Long Island.
She was born to a Jewish family in Cairo, Egypt, and wrote a prize-winning memoir about her childhood, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World. The book was awarded the 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
In September, 2011, she published a companion volume to Sharkskin that tells the story of Lagnado's mother, Edith. The Arrogant Years: One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn juxtaposes the author's own coming of age in New York with that of her mother in Cairo, revealing how the choices she made meant both a liberation from Old World traditions and the loss of a comforting and familiar community. Described by the publisher as an epic family saga of faith and fragility, the book was published in 2011. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/27/2014.)
Book Reviews
In The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit Ms. Lagnado—an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal—gives us a deeply affecting portrait of her family and its journey from wartime Cairo to the New World. Like Andre Aciman in his now classic memoir, Out of Egypt (1994), she conjures a vanished world with elegiac ardor and uncommon grace, and like Mr. Aciman she calculates the emotional costs of exile with an unsentimental but forgiving eye. This is not simply the story of a well-to-do family’s loss of its home, its privileges and its identity. It is a story about how exile indelibly shapes people’s views of the world, a story about the mathematics of familial love and the wages of memory and time.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
[T]he reality of the Lagnados' fate is so far from the triumphalism that Americans have come to expect from immigrant narratives—is one of many reasons to read this crushing, brilliant book.... In this book, she so effortlessly captures the characters in her family, and the Egyptian metropolis around them, that the reader may fail to notice the overwhelming research buttressing this story. But then you stumble upon a wonderfully vivid detail: the kind of stove used by her grandmother, what her mother was drinking when she met Leon, the exact menu of the elaborate meals served to a relative struck with pleurisy.
Alana Newhouse - New York Times Sunday Book Review
Lagnado, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, wrote eloquently about her family's exodus from Cairo to New York, exposing an untold story of almost a million Jewish refugees forced to leave their homes and striking a chord with readers across the world.
Connie Ogle - Miami Herald
This memoir of an Egyptian Jewish family’s gradual ruin is told without melodrama by its youngest survivor, now a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Lagnado’s story hinges on her father, "the Captain," who cut a dashing figure in mid-century Cairo.... [When] the family escapes to Paris and then Brooklyn... Lagnado’s father fades, but he never loses his air of chivalry.
New Yorker
The strength of this memoir is in the writer's prose, at once graceful and powerful. Reporting on her father with the awe of a child and the wisdom of a grown-up, she manages to make the reader understand his charm and foibles and her love for him, and to feel his loss deeply. She also captures her extended family and the complexities of their lives and longings with depth and compassion. She joins memoirists Andre Aciman (Out of Egypt) and Gini Alhadeff (The Sun at Midday) in writing lyrical, personal books that are important documents of communities that have been extinguished.
Sandee Brawarksy - Jewish Week
We have a writer who looks at old Egypt from a unique point of view that combines the insiderishness and deeply felt insights of the native with the hard-edged realism of the probing, intelligent outsider...It is the splendid achievement of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit that it does not stop at being the loving evocation of a family that it indubitably is. Ms. Lagnado has also given us a timely and important reminder about the unwillingness of Arab nationalism to tolerate non-Arab communities.
Washington Times
Lagnado's captivating account of her family's life in cosmopolitan Cairo and painful relocation to America centers on her beloved father.... In Lagnado's accomplished hands, this personal account illuminates its places and times, providing indelible individual portraits and illustrating the difficulty of assimilation. An exceptional memoir. —Leber, Michel
Boolist
Bittersweet memoir unveils a nearly forgotten era of Jewish-Muslim affinity in the streets of Egypt's capital.... The author documents her almost fairy-tale upbringing in a Syrian family that fled to Egypt at the turn of the 20th century.... Nostalgic but objectively tempered portrait of a family at the heart of social and cultural upheaval.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Author Lagnado dedicates her book in part to the memory of her parents yet does Leon emerge as a sympathetic character at the end—in spite of his flaws—or are his trespasses and libertine ways—not to mention his ill-treatment of his wife—simply unforgivable to any enlightened reader? Is it clear how the author feels about her father and in particular his womanizing ways? If you do find Leon to be likable, how come? How does the author make you appreciate Leon even as you become painfully aware of his shortcomings?
2. Is Edith given her due or is she given short-shrift? Should we know about her much much more than we do...why, for example, does she turn down the publishing job at Grolier, a position that would have given the family needed income and given her a sense of self-worth, an identity beyond that of wife and mother? Is she a shadowy figure, at the end? Is Edith ultimately sacrificed—as she was in the marriage to some degree—to the more charismatic Leon, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit?
3. What became of the Wayward Daughter, Suzette, and of the two brothers; should there have been a postscript to tell us how each ended up? Are readers cheated in a way because they don't know their fates and are forced to speculate in effect on what happened to them?
4. Loulou seems wistful about the life she left behind, and she casts a sentimental eye on the relations between Jews and Moslems in this corner of the Arab world, certainly as they co-existed in her parents' era; and even when she returns, while she notes the physical decay in Egypt, she sees only love and sweetness in the Egyptians that she meets. Is this a credible portrait of Arab-Jewish relations in post-9/11 world and also why is she not acknowledging the bitterness and anger that her family almost surely felt and continued to feel after being pushed to leave Egypt?
5. Illness is the running subtext of this book—as is the search for the miraculous, the supernatural. What is the role of superstition for Loulou and her family and do they ever shed their superstitious ways when they come to this country?
6. Lagnado casts a cold eye on the American Dream—perhaps her least sympathetic figure in the book is the social worker, Silvia Kirschner, who is trying to urge the family to assimilate. Yet in the eyes of the author, her family's experience is an unremitting nightmare. Does Kirschner have redemptive qualities that ought to have been underscored? Is this a fair portrayal of the shattered hopes of an immigrant family, and is it fair on Lagnado's part to dismiss what America has given her and her family.
7. Similarly, she is not especially kind to the feminist movement, either—at one point she lovingly recalls her father suggesting she become a flower-vendor...and at another she remarks on how self-absorbed she and her siblings became in their work, to the detriment of Leon and Edith—is this a fair indictment of the movement? Or is it ironic for her to condemn it even as she has clearly profited from the movement which enabled her to pursue her professional goals to become a journalist and ultimately the author of Sharkskin.
8. Lagnado casts a ruthless eye on the American health system, its hospitals and in particular its nursing homes. The Jewish Home and Hospital is seen as a cruel uncaring facility that devotes more love on its fish than its patients; Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York is seen as inferior to the Demerdash Hospital in Cairo. How do the author's experiences and her ordeal navigating these facilities compare with yours? Could you identify with her struggles or did you find the world as she portrayed it as foreign as WW2 Cairo?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act
Clay Risen, 2014
Bloomsbury USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781608198245
Summary
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the single most important piece of legislation passed by Congress in American history.
This one law so dramatically altered American society that, looking back, it seems preordained—as Everett Dirksen, the GOP leader in the Senate and a key supporter of the bill, said, "no force is more powerful than an idea whose time has come." But there was nothing predestined about the victory: a phalanx of powerful senators, pledging to "fight to the death" for segregation, launched the longest filibuster in American history to defeat it.
The bill's passage has often been credited to the political leadership of President Lyndon Johnson, or the moral force of Martin Luther King. Yet as Clay Risen shows, the battle for the Civil Rights Act was a story much bigger than those two men. It was a broad, epic struggle, a sweeping tale of unceasing grassroots activism, ringing speeches, backroom deal-making and finally, hand-to-hand legislative combat.
The larger-than-life cast of characters ranges from Senate lions like Mike Mansfield and Strom Thurmond to NAACP lobbyist Charles Mitchell, called "the 101st senator" for his Capitol Hill clout, and industrialist J. Irwin Miller, who helped mobilize a powerful religious coalition for the bill. The "idea whose time had come" would never have arrived without pressure from the streets and shrewd leadership in Congress—all captured in Risen's vivid narrative.
This critical turning point in American history has never been thoroughly explored in a full-length account. Now, New York Times editor and acclaimed author Clay Risen delivers the full story, in all its complexity and drama. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1979
• Where—Nasville, Tennessee, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Chicago
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn (New York City), New York
Clay Risen is an editor at The New York Times op-ed section. Before that, he was an assistant editor at The New Republic and the founding managing editor of the noted quarterly Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. His recent freelance work has appeared in such journals as The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and The Washington Post.
His first book, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination (2009) was hailed as “compelling, original history” (Peniel Joseph) and “a crucial addition to civil rights history” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). He is also the author of American Whiskey, Bourbon and Rye: A Guide to the Nation’s Favorite Spirit (2013) and The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (2014). (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
[I't took just over a year of negotiations and compromises, both inside and outside of Congress, for the bill to become law. Risen does his best to infuse drama into a story that is already a matter of the historical record. Fortunately, Risen is adept at weaving in juicy snippets of conversation and his fluid prose mutes some of the wonkiness in the political-process narrative.
Publishers Weekly
Arguably, Risen's most important contribution is revealing that J. Irwin Miller and the National Council of Churches—tireless lay and ministerial advocates—served as the act's moral conscience, and that it likely would not have passed without the resulting groundswell of public support. Risen adds deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to the roster of unsung heroes. —Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA
Library Journal
A journalist's in-depth, behind-the-scenes account of the unsung congressional and White House heroes who helped the Civil Rights Act become the law of the land.... It makes for scrupulous accuracy but also slow, labyrinthine reading. Well-researched but sometimes tedious.
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.)
Eat Now; Talk Later: 52 True Tales of Family, Feasting, and the American Experience
James Vescovi, 2014
AuthorHouse
pp. 158
ISBN-13: 9781491831489
Summary
Unlike many memoirs, Eat Now; Talk Later doesn’t focus on a radically dysfunctional family; rather it celebrates the breadth of family life: struggle, humor, misunderstanding, and loyalty.
The book revolves around Desolina Vescovi, and her husband, Tony, who arrived in America in the 1920s—only to find they’d collided with the modern world. Born around 1900, on farms where little had changed for hundreds of years, the couple was stumped by telephones, banks, fast food, TV wrestling, and supermarkets.
It was up to their only child, a son, to serve as their shepherd, and it wasn’t easy. For example, how could he explain to his mother that his job was taking him and his family 700 miles away when, in her day, sons stayed put to work the family farm? Or that it wasn’t wise to hide $10,000 cash in the bedroom? How could he explain to his father that his grandson was attending graduate school, when Tony himself had quit school in the third grade to work in the fields?
It is not only the topic that’s original, but the way Tony and Desolina’s life is recounted: through fifty-two stories recalling incidents and ideas that reveal their character. Several of the stories previously appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Newsday, and Ancestry Magazine.
The book’s title comes from my grandmother, who disliked conversation during meals. To her, eating was sacred. Conversing while eating tortellini was like talking loudly during mass. You just didn’t do it. And you don’t have to be Italian to appreciate these stories, which have a universal quality about them because most of us have grandparents or aunts who are far behind the times
.
Prepare yourself for a feast consumed in delicious bites. Stories in this collection can be read before bed, on a lunch hour, or waiting in line. They can even be shared with friends who complain they have enough to read. And don’t miss the scrapbook of unusual family photos and recipes
Author Bio
• Birth—June 14, 1960
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Raised—Kalamazoo, Michigan
• Education—B.A., Miami University of Ohio; M.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in New York City
James Vescovi’s essays about his eccentric grandparents have appeared in The New York Times, Alimentum Journal: The Literature of Food, Creative Nonfiction, Newsday, Gazzetta Italiana, the anthology Our Roots Are Deep with Passion: New Essays by Italian-American Writers (Other Press), and other venues.
His fiction and essays been published in Midwestern Gothic, The New York Observer, the Georgetown Review, and Natural Bridge. He teaches high school English and lives in New York with his wife and three children. On warm Saturday afternoons, you can find him in his volunteer garden in Riverside Park trying desperately to make things grow. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Follow James on Facebook.
Discussion Questions
1. How do you think the author handled the portrayal of his grandparents? Was it honest? Patronizing? True to life?
2. Do you think the writer used the right structure in this memoir—telling about the lives of his grandparents through 52 stories, as opposed to a straight narrative. Why or why not?
3. Did any of these stories help you recall past, but important incidents involving your own family?
4. The author and his father do a great deal of caretaking of these elderly people? Is that a model we should aspire to, or do we simply live in a modern society where professionals must do this caretaking?
5. Immigration is a hot topic in the news today. Does this book—directly or indirectly—have anything to say about America’s immigration issues?
6. Did this book teach you anything about collecting your own family stories (even if not for publication)? If so, how?
7. If you could pick one story or passage that had a profound effect on you—was illuminating, significant, especially amusing—what would it be?
8. If there’s anything you could have added or subtracted from this book, what would it be?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)