The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
Michael Lewis, 2016
W.W. Northon
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393634372
Summary
How a Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.
Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process.
Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments in uncertain situations. As a result, they created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible.
Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.
The Undoing Project is about a compelling collaboration between two men who have the dimensions of great literary figures. They became heroes in the university and on the battlefield—both had important careers in the Israeli military—and their research was deeply linked to their extraordinary life experiences.
Amos Tversky was a brilliant, self-confident warrior and extrovert, the center of rapt attention in any room; Kahneman, a fugitive from the Nazis in his childhood, was an introvert whose questing self-doubt was the seedbed of his ideas.
They became one of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, working together so closely that they couldn’t remember whose brain originated which ideas, or who should claim credit. They flipped a coin to decide the lead authorship on the first paper they wrote, and simply alternated thereafter.
This story about the workings of the human mind is explored through the personalities of two fascinating individuals so fundamentally different from each other that they seem unlikely friends or colleagues. In the process they may well have changed, for good, mankind’s view of its own mind. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 15, 1960
• Where—New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton; M.B.A., London School of Economics
• Currently—Currently—lives in Berkeley, California
Michael Lewis is an American contemporary non-fiction author and financial journalist. His bestselling books include Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (2014); The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2010); The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (2006); Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003); and Liar's Poker (1989).
Background
Lewis was born in New Orleans to corporate lawyer J. Thomas Lewis and community activist Diana Monroe Lewis. He attended the private, nondenominational, co-educational college preparatory Isidore Newman School in New Orleans. Later, he attended Princeton University where he received a BA in art history in 1982 and was a member of the Ivy Club.
After graduating from Princeton, he went on to work with New York art dealer Daniel Wildenstein. Despite his degree in art history, he nonetheless wanted to break into Wall Street to make money. After leaving Princeton, he tried to find a finance job, only to be roundly rejected by every firm to which he applied. He then enrolled in the London School of Economics to pursue a Master's degree in economics.
While still in England, Lewis was invited to a banquet hosted by the Queen Mother at St. James's Palace. His cousin, Baroness Linda Monroe von Stauffenberg, one of the organizers of the banquet, purposely seated him next to the wife of the London Managing Partner of Salomon Brothers. The hope was that Lewis, just having obtained his master's degree, might impress her enough for her to suggest to her husband that Lewis be given a job with Salomon Bros.—which had previously turned him down. The strategy worked: Lewis was granted an interview and landed a job.
As a result of the job offer, Lewis moved to New York City for Salomon's training program. There, he was appalled at the sheer bravado of most of his fellow trainees and indoctrinated into the money culture of Salomon and Wall Street in general.
After New York, Lewis was shipped to the London office of Salomon Brothers as a bond salesman. Despite his lack of knowledge, he was soon handling millions of dollars in investment accounts. In 1987, he witnessed a near-hostile takeover of Salomon Brothers but survived with his job. However, growing disillusioned with his work, he eventually quit to write Liar's Poker and become a financial journalist.
Writing
Lewis described his experiences at Salomon and the evolution of the mortgage-backed bond in Liar's Poker (1989). In The New New Thing (1999), he investigated the then-booming Silicon Valley and discussed obsession with innovation.
Four years later, Lewis wrote Moneyball (2003), in which he investigated the success of Billy Beane and the Oakland A's. In August 2007, he wrote an article about catastrophe bonds entitled "In Nature's Casino" that appeared in the New York Times Magazine.
The Big Short, about a handful of scrappy investors who foresaw the 2007-08 subprime mortgage debacle, came out in 2010. Flash Boys, detailing high-speed trading in stock and other markets, was published in 2014. Like both The Big Short and Moneyball, the book features an underdog type who is ahead of the pack in understanding his industry.
Lewis has worked for The Spectator, New York Times Magazine, as a columnist for Bloomberg, as a senior editor and campaign correspondent to The New Republic, and a visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote the "Dad Again" column for Slate. Lewis worked for Conde Nast Portfolio but in February 2009 left to join Vanity Fair, where he became a contributing editor.
Film
The film version of Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, was successfully released in 2011. The Big Short, with its all-star cast—Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gossling, and Brad Pitt—came out in 2015 to top reviews.
Personal life
Lewis married Diane de Cordova Lewis, his girlfriend prior to his Salomon days. After several years, he was briefly married to former CNBC correspondent Kate Bohner, before marrying the former MTV reporter Tabitha Soren in 1997. Lewis lives with Tabitha, two daughters, and one son (Quinn, Dixie, and Walker) in Berkeley, California. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/11/2016.)
Book Reviews
[The Undoing Project,] which focuses on the enchanted collaboration between Dr. Kahneman and Amos Tversky, leaves a lovely afterimage. At its peak, the book combines intellectual rigor with complex portraiture. (Mr. Lewis keeps a number of single-haired paintbrushes on hand for when fine detail is required.) During its final pages, I was blinking back tears, hardly your typical reaction to a book about a pair of academic psychologists. The reason is simple. Mr. Lewis has written one hell of a love story.
Jennifer Senior - New York Times
Lewis is the ideal teller of [Tversky and Kahneman’s] story…. You see his protagonists in three dimensions―deeply likable, but also flawed, just like most of your friends and family.
David Leonhardt - New York Times Book Review
Brilliant.... Lewis has given us a spectacular account of two great men who faced up to uncertainty and the limits of human reason.
William Easterly - Wall Street Journal
Compelling… The Undoing Project is a history of the birth of behavioral economics, but it’s also Lewis’s testament to the power of collaboration.
Peter Coy - Bloomberg Businessweek
Intellectually mesmerizing and inspiring.
Harper's Bazaar
Mind-blowing…. [The Undoing Project] will raise doubts about how you personally perceive reality.
Don Oldenburg - USA Today
A fantastic read.
Jesse Singal - New York Magazine
Lewis deftly explores a timeless and fascinating subject—human decision-making.... [A] joy to read, packed with "aha!" moments, telling and at times hilarious details, and elegant explanations of complex experiments and theories.
Publishers Weekly
As always, Lewis’ writing style is engaging and mostly irresistible.... [A]fter Lewis eases into the main subjects, he ably captures their outsized personalities.... At times, [the] details about the unlikely coupling overwhelm the larger narrative, but that is a minor complaint in another solid book from this gifted author
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Undoing Project...then take off on your own:
1. Talk about the two men at the center of Michael Lewis's book: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. How alike were they and how different—in temperament, personality, and background? What effect did their past(s) have on their work together? Consider, for example, their service in the Israeli military.
2. Follow-up to Question 1: Consider the unusually close collaboration between the two men—how it worked and what made it possible. What does it mean, as one of them said, "we were sharing a mind"?
3. What happened to dislodge their trust in and cooperation with one another? Given their differences, was their breakup inevitable? Is one more at fault than the other?
4. In what way do our minds constantly fool us? What are the rules of thumb that often lead us astray? What, for instance, is the "halo effect"? What is "representativeness"? Can you think of instances in your own life when your mind fooled you?
5. Talk about the spillover that the psychologist's work has had into ... economics ... medical diagnostics ... eating habits ... even cellphone use by drivers.
6. Can you identify examples in your own life of Tversky's theory of socializing? Because, say, behaving generously makes us happier, we should, therefore, surround ourselves with generous people.
7. How has Kahneman and Tversky's work affected team sports? Talk about Theo Epstein and the Boston Red Sox or Chicago Cubs.
8. How does this book controvert most of our longest held beliefs regarding data and observation? In reading The Undoing Project, what surprised you most? Are you skeptical of some of the findings Lewis writes about? Do you see the effects of our knew understanding in your own life?
9. Have you read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)? Have you read other books by Michael Lewis? If so, how does this compare?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars
Dava Sobel, 2016
Penguin Books
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670016952
Summary
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or "human computers," to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night.
At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women's colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates.
The "glass universe" of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight.
Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair.
Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe is the hidden history of the women whose contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 15, 1947
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York-Binghamton
• Awards—National Science Board's Individual Public Service Award (more below)
• Currently—lives in East Hampton, Long Island, New York
Dava Sobel is an American author of popular books that explore scientific discoveries and the way they transform humanity's worldview. Her books include Longitude (1995), Galileo's Daughter (2000), The Planets (2005), A More Perfect Heaven (2011), and The Glass Universe (2016).
Sobel was raised in New York City, close enough to walk to the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden—which she did frequently at an early age. Both of her parents were readers, and her mother had trained as a chemist, so no one in her family considered it odd for a young girl to be drawn to the sciences.
Following her nose for science, Sobel attended and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science—considering it, as she says on her website, her most impressive credential. She completed her formal education at the State University of New York at Binghamton where she received her Bachelor's degree.
Sobel spent the next 20-some years of her career as a writer, first with a brief stint at IBM as a technical writer, then as a freelance journalist. She wrote for the Cornell University News Bureau, New York Times, Harvard Magazine, Science Digest, Omni, Discover, Audubon, Life, and The New Yorker.
In 1995, she published her first book—Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. The book became an unexpected success and launched Sobel's career as a full-time author.
More
That first book, Longitude, was adapted as a four-hour television film in 1999 starring Jeremy Irons. It was shown in the U.S. on the A&E channel. In addition, PBS's NOVA produced a science documentary, Lost At Sea—The Search for Longitude, based on the book.
Sorbel's fourth book, A More Perfect Heaven, had a different provenance than any of her other books: it started out as a stage play, a dialogue between Nicolaus Copernicus and his collaborator Georg Joachim Rheticus. From there it grew into a book recounting the tension between the Copernican heliocentric theory and the religious and political backdrop of the era.
Sobel has taught science writing at the University of Chicago, Mary Baldwin College (Staunton, VA), and Smith College (Northampton, MA).
Honors
1999 - Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award, American Academy of Arts & Sciences
2001 - Individual Public Service Award, National Science Board
2001 - Bradford Washburn Award, Boston Museum of Science
2002 - Honorary Doctorates: Middlebury College, University of Bath (UK)
2004 - Harrison Medal, Worshipful Company of Clockmakers (UK)
2008 - Klumpke-Roberts Award, Astronomical Society of the Pacific
2014 - Cultural Award, Eduard Rhein Foundation (Germany)
2015 - Honorary Doctorate: University of Bern (Switzerland)
(Author bio compiled by LitLovers, including the author's website.)
Book Reviews
It takes a talented writer to interweave professional achievement with personal insight. By the time I finished The Glass Universe, Dava Sobel's wonderful, meticulous account, it had moved me to tears.... Unforgettable.
Sue Nelson - Nature
Sobel shines a light on seven 19th- and 20th-century women astronomers who began as 'human computers,' interpreting data at Harvard Observatory, then went on to dazzle.... An inspiring look at celestial pioneers.
People
An astronomically large topic generously explored.
Oprah Magazine
(Starred review.) Sobel knows how to tell an engaging story, and this one flows smoothly, with just enough explication of the science.... With grace, clarity, and a flair for characterization, Sobel places these early women astronomers in the wider historical context of their field for the very first time.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [Sobel] soars higher than ever before...[continuing] her streak of luminous science writing with this fascinating, witty, and most elegant history...The Glass Universe is a feast for those eager to absorb forgotten stories of resolute American women who expanded human knowledge. —Colleen Mondor
Booklist
Though this title isn't intended as a discipline-specific monograph, at times, it bogs readers down in scientific minutiae.... [Still,] a terrific catalog to match the exceptional work these women created in the course of their careers. —Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis
Library Journal
[A] recounting and celebrating the lives and work of these distinguished and decidedly unsung women....though, even after World War II and their contributions to it, women found it as difficult as ever to find scientific work. A welcome and engaging work that does honor to Sobel’s subjects.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, feel free to use these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Glass Universe...and then take off on your own:
1. Sobel is known for her ability as a writer to take hard science, reduce it into manageable bits of information, and then combine it with human interest stories. Does she achieve that goal here? Or was the pace of your reading bogged down with scientific minutae?
2. Talk about the women at the observatory? Consider, say, Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, What were they like and how did they fit—or not fit—within the confines or expectations of their times?
3.Consider, too, the two directors for whom the women worked—Edward Pickering and Harlow Shapley. How supportive were they to the women under them?
4. What was Williamina Flemming's response when she found that, even when appointed as the Curator of Astronomical Photographs, her salary fell far short of a man's?
5. How would you cast Harvard's track record concerning women in science over the years? Consider, in particular, Annie Jump Cannon and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.
6. Can you point to one achievement that especially stunned you? Perhaps Nettie Farrar's calculation (to two decimal places) of the relative-brightness values of stars?
7. Perhaps you might talk about Anna Palmer Draper, who realized the value of telescopic photography with respect to the telescopic view.
8. Talk about the way in which the women worked in collaboration with one another—how their cooperative relationships furthered scientific understanding.
9. How would you describe the women's relationships with their male colleagues? Would you consider them maternal or nurturing or intellectually dominant? What about Annie Jump Cannon's oatmeal cookies?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
Margot Lee Shetterly, 2016
HarperCollins
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062363602
Summary
The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space.
Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.
Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South’s segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America’s aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff.
Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam’s call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.
Even as Virginia’s Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley’s all-black “West Computing” group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens.
Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes.
It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future. (From the publisher.)
See the 2017 film with Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae.
Listen to our Movies Meet Book Club Podcast—as Hollister and O'Toole discuss the book and movie.
Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—Hampton, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Virginia
• Currently— Charlottesville, Virginia
Margot Lee Shetterly was born in Hampton, Virginia, in 1969 where she knew many of the women she later wrote about in her debut Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race.
Shetterly's father worked as a research scientist at NASA-Langley Research Center, and her mother was an English professor at Hampton University. She attended Phoebus High School and graduated from the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce.
After college, she moved to New York and worked several years in investment banking, first on the Foreign Exchange trading desk at J.P. Morgan, then on Merrill Lynch's Fixed Income Capital Markets desk. She then made the transition to the media industry, working at a variety of startup ventures including the HBO-funded website Volume.com.
In 2005, she and her husband, the writer Aran Shetterly, moved to Mexico to found an English-language magazine called Inside Mexico, for expats. The magazine operated until 2009.
From 2010 through 2013, they worked as content marketing and editorial consultants to the Mexican tourism industry.
Shetterly began researching and writing Hidden Figures in 2010. The book was published in 2016, and its 2017 film version stars Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, and Kevin Costner.
In 2013, Shetterly founded The Human Computer Project, an organization whose mission is to archive the work of all of the women who worked as computers and mathematicians in the early days of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 12/6/2016.)
Book Reviews
Much as Tom Wolfe did in The Right Stuff, Shetterly moves gracefully between the women’s lives and the broader sweep of history.... Shetterly, who grew up in Hampton, blends impressive research with an enormous amount of heart in telling these stories.
Boston Globe
Meticulous…. [T]he depth and detail that are the book’s strength make it an effective, fact-based rudder with which would-be scientists and their allies can stabilize their flights of fancy. This hardworking, earnest book is the perfect foil for the glamour still to come.
Seattle Times
Restoring the truth about individuals who were at once black, women and astounding mathematicians, in a world that was constructed to stymie them at every step, is no easy task. Shetterly does it with the depth and detail of a skilled historian and the narrative aplomb of a masterful storyteller.
Bookreporter.com
(Starred review.) Exploring the intimate relationships among blackness, womanhood, and 20th-century American technological development, Shetterly crafts a narrative that is crucial to understanding subsequent movements for civil rights.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Readers will learn how integral these women were to American aeronautics and be saddened by the racism and sexism that kept them from deserved recognition. Verdict: Shetterly's highly recommended work offers up a crucial history that had previously and unforgivably been lost. —Kate DiGirolomo, Library Journal
Library Journal
[A]mazing...because the women...fought for and won recognition and devotedly supported each other’s work.... They were there from the beginning, perfecting World War II planes and proving to be invaluable to the nascent space program. Much of the work will be confusing to the mathematically disinclined, but their story is inspiring and enlightening.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1.In what ways does the race for space parallel the civil rights movement? What kinds of freedoms are being explored in each?
2. In Chapter 23 we learn that some people thought that spending money on space exploration was wasteful when there were so many other problems in the United States. Do you think the U.S. achieved a balance between innovation in space exploration and advancing the civil rights of all its citizens during this time period? Would you have done things differently?
3. Would you consider NACA and NASA socially progressive institutions for their time? Why or why not?
4. In advocating for herself to work on the Mercury capsule launch, Katherine says to her bosses, “Tell me where you want the man to land, and I’ll tell you where to send him up.” How are the women in Hidden Figures able to express confidence in their work and abilities? In what ways is that confidence validated by their coworkers? Why is this emotional experience such an important part of their story?
(Questions from a teaching guide issued by the publisher.)
The Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe
Sarah Gristwood, 2016
Basic Books
392 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780465096787
Summary
Sixteenth-century Europe saw an explosion of female rule.
From Isabella of Castile and her granddaughter Mary Tudor, to Catherine de Medici, Anne Boleyn, and Elizabeth Tudor, women wielded enormous power over their territories for more than a hundred years.
In the sixteenth century, as in our own, the phenomenon of the powerful woman offered challenges and opportunities. Opportunities, as when in 1529 Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy negotiated the "Ladies’ peace" of Cambrai.
Challenges, as when both Mary Queen of Scots and her kinswoman Elizabeth I came close to being destroyed by sexual scandal.
A fascinating group biography of some of the most beloved (and reviled) queens in history, Game of Queens tells the story of the powerful women who drove European history. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1956 (?)
• Where—Kent, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Currently—lives in London and Kent (in England)
Sarah Gristwood is a British author and journalist. She is the author of several historical biographies, most recently The Game of Queens about the 16th century's rule by a number of powerful women.
Gristwood was born in Kent, England, and read English literature at Oxford University, graduating in 1978. After leaving Oxford, she began a career as a journalist, eventually finding her niche in film journalism. She interviewed celebrities ranging from Johnny Depp and Robert DeNiro to Paul McCartney. Her stories have appeared in the UK's leading newspapers: The Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, as well as in magazines like Cosmopolitan and Country Living.
Books
Turning to historical biographies, Gristwood published her first book, Arbella: England's Lost Queen, in 2005. Next, in 2007, came Bird of Paradise: The Colourful Career of the First Mrs Robinson, followed that same year by Elizabeth and Leicester: Power Passion and Politics.
Then came The Ring and the Crown: A History of Royal Weddings 1066–2011, co-authored with Allison Weir in 2011. The same year, Gristwood also published her first historical novel, The Girl in the Mirror. Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses came out in 2014, followed two years later by The Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe in 2016.
Miscellany
n 2011, Gristwood published the 50th anniversary edition of The Breakfast at Tiffany's Companion. In 2013 she co-wrote Fabulous Frocks with Jane Eastoe, and in 2016 she released The Story of Beatrix Potter under the UK's National Trust imprint.
In addition to her writing, Gristwood has become a regular commentator on royal affairs, working with the team that provided live coverage on Radio for the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. She has since spoken on the Queen’s Jubilee, the royal baby, and other royal stories for Sky News, Woman’s Hour, Radio 5 Live, and CBC.
Personal
Gristwood is married to film critic Derek Malcolm, and the two split their time between London and Kent. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Gristwood successfully demonstrates how mentors...and power wielders...helped influence generations of ambitious, high-ranking women through networking and clever manipulation…. [A] fresh take on...some of Europe’s most powerful players.... [I]ntriguing, cohesive, and accessible.
Publishers Weekly
Gristwood chronicles the unusual happenstance of the 16th century whereby most of Europe was under a female ruler's control.... While the analysis isn't groundbreaking, it casts a well-researched time period in an intriguing light. —Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO
Library Journal
[I]ntriguing collective biography about overlooked women of historical significance.... Gristwood interweaves their respective accomplishments and failures, placing the group dynamic firmly into historical and social context.... A fascinating work of world and women's history.
Booklist
Sarah Gristwood’s sweeping survey of the careers of numerous royal women in 16th-century Europe amply justifies the nod to Game of Thrones in the title: it features enough dynastic conflict, violence and sexual intrigue to satisfy the most hardened addicts of the series…. Gristwood handles multiple narrative strands with tremendous finesse, dexterously synthesising the stories of women who, in many cases, never met but whose lives intertwined in manifold ways…. Densely packed with fascinating material, this immensely ambitious undertaking succeeds triumphantly.
Literary Review (UK)
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.)
Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta
Richard Grant, 2015
Simon & Schuster
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476709642
Summary
Richard Grant and his girlfriend were living in a shoebox apartment in New York City when they decided on a whim to buy an old plantation house in the Mississippi Delta.
Dispatches from Pluto is their journey of discovery into this strange and wonderful American place. Imagine A Year In Provence with alligators and assassins, or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with hunting scenes and swamp-to-table dining.
On a remote, isolated strip of land, three miles beyond the tiny community of Pluto, Richard and his girlfriend, Mariah, embark on a new life. They learn to hunt, grow their own food, and fend off alligators, snakes, and varmints galore. They befriend an array of unforgettable local characters—blues legend T-Model Ford, cookbook maven Martha Foose, catfish farmers, eccentric millionaires, and the actor Morgan Freeman.
Grant brings an adept, empathetic eye to the fascinating people he meets, capturing the rich, extraordinary culture of the Delta, while tracking its utterly bizarre and criminal extremes. Reporting from all angles as only an outsider can, Grant also delves deeply into the Delta’s lingering racial tensions. He finds that de facto segregation continues.
Yet even as he observes major structural problems, he encounters many close, loving, and interdependent relationships between black and white families—and good reasons for hope.
Dispatches from Pluto is a book as unique as the Delta itself. It’s lively, entertaining, and funny, containing a travel writer’s flair for in-depth reporting alongside insightful reflections on poverty, community, and race.
It’s also a love story, as the nomadic Grant learns to settle down. He falls not just for his girlfriend but for the beguiling place they now call home. Mississippi, Grant concludes, is the best-kept secret in America. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1963
• Where—Malaysia
• Raised—Kuwait; London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., University College, London
• Awards—Thomas Cook Travel Book Award
• Currently—lives in Jackson, Mississippi, USA
Richard Grant is a freelance British travel writer based in the U.S. Born in Malaysia, he lived in Kuwait as a boy and then moved to London. He went to school in Hammersmith and received a history degree from University College, London.
Following graduation Grant worked as a security guard, a janitor, a house painter and a club DJ before moving to America where he lived a nomadic life in the American West. Eventually, he settled in Tucson, Arizona, using it as a home base from which to travel.
He supported himself by writing articles for Men's Journal, Esquire and Details, among others. Grant and now wife, Mariah, moved to New York City, briefly, before relocating to Pluto, Mississippi. His experiences living along the Mississippi Delta is the subject of his 2015 book, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta.
Grant's first book American Nomads (2003) looks at nomadism and people who choose to live on the road in America. It won the 2004 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. Later, he wrote the 2011 script, based in part on his book, for the BBC documentary of the same name.
His next book God's Middle Finger (2008) is about the lawless region of the Sierra Madre mountains in northwestern Mexico in which Grant traveled. It was nominated for the 2009 Dolman Best Travel Book Award. Grant co-wrote a screenplay about the Mexican border with Johnny Ferguson and Ruben Ruiz entitled Tres Huevos/A Burning Thing.
His third book Crazy River: Exploration and Folly in East Africa (2011) is about Grant's travels in harrowing situations around East Africa, including an attempt at the first descent of the Malagarasi River in Tanzania.
Dispatches from Pluto (2015) describes his move to Pluto, Mississippi, with his now wife Mariah, and the couple's impressions about the Mississippi Delta Tom Zoellner in the New York Times observed "Grant’s British accent doubtlessly served him well, allowing him to move through the tradition-bound society of the Mississippi Delta like a neutron, without obvious allegiances or biases." (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/15/2016.)
Book Reviews
[Grant] succeeds, and with flair. His empathic manner, reportorial talent and eye for the unexpected detail make this a chigger-bitten trip that entertains as much as it informs.
New York Times Book Review
Readers with an appetite for a deep-fried version of A Year in Provence will find much to sate them here.... [Grant is] like a deeper and way funkier version of Peter Mayle...it’s the individual voices and anecdotes he records that give Dispatches from Pluto its dissonant lilt and outre charm.
Jonathan Miles - Garden & Gun
One of the best books to have been written about this part of Mississippi. Richard Grant has done something completely different from previous forays into this fascinating and frequently vilified part of America. … Grant’s book strikes a good balance between being partly A Year in Provence, Mississippi-style, and partly a searching investigation of the local culture. This is a man who has done his homework, asked hard questions, and made a point of getting to know everybody, white and black alike.
New Criterion
This book’s great virtue…is how it sets aside assumptions to look with clear, questioning eyes. Mississippi’s landscape, with its ‘crated little town(s)’ and ‘primordial interruptions in the empire of modern agriculture,’ is refreshed by Grant’s lovely prose.
Jackson Clarion-Ledger
Grant writes with an admiration and tenderness for his new home and neighbors. The book’s often riotously funny, particularly when describing real-life crime stories in Greenwood and elsewhere. But Grant’s also thoughtful and earnest in trying to understand race relations in modern-day Mississippi… Grant’s insights as an outsider trying to decipher a new world make this book compelling and also challenging. He’s confronting tough truths and asking hard questions, but from a place of genuine respect and love.
Mississippi Business Journal
Richard Grant gets it. Many authors that write about the Delta may come and stay a few months, then go back to their comfortable hometowns to burn or scathe the Delta’s mores, customs and culture. Richard bought an old plantation house here to become a part of the Delta and he writes about it in a way that brings laughter, astonishment, complexity and perplexity.
Hank Burdine - Delta Magazine
A likely hit with fans of memoirs or travel fiction as well as those who enjoy a well-told story, this is a surprisingly humorous yet insightful read. Grant's writing is relaxed and familiar in the way of great storytellers.—Stacy Shaw, Orange, CA
Library Journal
[Grant] takes us on hunting excursions, to dangerous taverns, a black church..., a school..., and a local political campaign.... But the issue that repeatedly emerges...is race.... An appealing stew of fecklessness and curiosity, social psychology and social dysfunction, hope and despair.
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.)