The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
Robert M. Edsel, Bret Witter, 2009
Little, Brown and Co.
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781599951492
Summary
At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised.
In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Momuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.
Focusing on the eleven-month period between D-Day and V-E Day, this fascinating account follows six Monuments Men and their impossible mission to save the world's great art from the Nazis. (From the publisher.)
The 2014 movie stars George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchette, Bill Murray, John Goodman, among others.
Author Bios
• Birth—December 28, 1956
• Where—Oak Park, Illinois, USA
• Raised—Dallas, Texas
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in Dallas, Texas
Robert Morse Edsel is an American writer and businessman. He is the author of the non-fiction books Rescuing Da Vinci, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History and Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis, about art treasures preserved during and after World War II and the heroes who saved them. Edsel is the founder and president of the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art which received the 2007 National Humanities Medal under President George W. Bush and has donated two albums of photographic evidence of the Third Reich's theft of art treasures to the United States National Archives.
Background
Edsel was born in Oak Park, Illinois and raised in Dallas, Texas. He is the son of Norma Louise (nee Morse), a housewife, and Alpha Ray Edsel, a stockbroker. Edsel was formerly a nationally ranked tennis player. In 1981, he began his business career in oil and gas exploration. His company, Gemini Exploration, pioneered the use of horizontal drilling technology throughout the early 1990s. Gemini Exploration grew from a company with eight employees to almost 100. By 1995, Gemini had become the second most active driller of horizontal wells in the United States and Robert Edsel sold the company’s assets to Union Pacific Resources Company. The following year he moved to Europe with his family.
The Monuments Men
In the late 1990s, while living in Florence, Edsel began to think about the methods and planning used to keep art out of the hands of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Following a divorce in 2000, Edsel moved to New York City, where he began a serious effort to learn about and understand the issue. By 2004, those efforts had become a full time career, and he established a research office in Dallas, his hometown. By 2005, he had gathered thousands of photographs and other documents, and began writing the manuscript for Rescuing Da Vinci. The book was published in 2006 and received wide attention.
In September 2009, Edsel’s second book, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, a narrative telling of the story of the Monuments Men, was released by Center Street, a division of Hachette Book Group. Current plans include publication of the book in seventeen languages. George Clooney wrote, directed and starred in the movie, The Monuments Men.
In May 2013, Edsel's sequel to The Monuments Men, entitled Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis, was published by W. W. Norton.
Edsel co-produced a documentary film, The Rape of Europa, based on the book by Lynn Nicholas. Narrated by Joan Allen with extensive commentary by looted art specialist Jonathan Petropoulos, the film was well received by critics and began a theatrical run in September 2007 at the Paris Theatre in New York City. In addition, Mr. Edsel has created The Greatest Theft in History educational program, which includes the two-hour documentary film and seven hours of additional clips, as well as a companion website featuring lesson plans, glossaries, timelines and other resources which allows teachers to easily utilize this material for classroom use.
In 2007, Edsel created the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art. The foundation's mission is ...
to preserve the legacy of the unprecedented and heroic work of the men and women who served in the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (“MFAA”) section, known as "Monuments Men," during World War II, by raising public awareness of the importance of protecting and safeguarding civilization’s most important artistic and cultural treasures from armed conflict, but incorporating these expressions of man's greatest creative achievements into our daily lives.
He announced the foundation's creation during a ceremony on June 6, 2007, the 63rd anniversary of D-Day, to celebrate Senate and House concurrent resolutions honoring the Monuments Men.
The Monuments Men Foundation was one of ten recipients of the 2007 National Humanities Medal, an honor which was presented by President Bush during a ceremony held in the East Room of The White House on November 15, 2007. The National Humanities Medal is the highest honor given for excellence in the Humanities field, and honors individuals and groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities.
Nazi albums
During the course of his research into the whereabouts of lost art and efforts both to save and profit from knowledge of the crime, Edsel discovered the existence of two large, leather-bound photograph albums which documented portions of the European art looted by the Nazis. The two photographic albums were in the possession of heirs to an American soldier stationed in the Berchtesgaden area of Germany in the closing days of World War II.
The albums were created by the staff of the Third Reich’s Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), a special unit that found and confiscated the best material in Nazi-occupied countries, to use for exploitation. In France, the ERR engaged in an extensive and elaborate art looting operation, part of Hitler’s much larger premeditated scheme to steal art treasures from conquered nations.
The albums were created for Hitler and high-level Nazi officials as a catalogue and, more importantly, to give Hitler a way to choose the art for his art museum in Austria. A group of these photograph albums was presented to Hitler on his birthday in 1943, to "send a ray of beauty and joy into [his] revered life." ERR staff stated that nearly 100 such volumes were created during the years of their art looting operation.
Edsel worked with the owners of the albums to acquire them for preservation. In November 2007, at a ceremony with Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein, Edsel announced the existence of these photograph albums to the public and, separately, donated the albums to the National Archives. Weinstein, called the discovery "one of the most significant finds related to Hitler’s premeditated theft of art and other cultural treasures to be found since the Nuremberg trials." (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/10/2014.)
Bret Witter
Bret Witter cowrote the bestseller Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World (2008). He lives in Louisville, KY.
Book Reviews
Were the Allied (mostly American) soldiers who rescued works of art stolen by the Nazis before and during World War II really heroes, as Robert M. Edsel claims in The Monuments Men, or were they good men—aided by one resourceful, determined French woman—who were simply, in the best sense of the phrase, just doing their jobs? My vote is for the latter…Still, for the most part they have receded into the fog of history…and that is a pity, so it is good to have them given recognition in The Monuments Men. It's a somewhat problematical boo…But it's a terrific story, and it certainly is good to give these men (and that one remarkable woman) their due.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post
WWII was the most destructive war in history and caused the greatest dislocation of cultural artifacts. Hundreds of thousands of items remain missing. The main burden fell to a few hundred men and women, curators and archivists, artists and art historians from 13 nations. Their task was to save and preserve what they could of Europe's great art.... The story is both engaging and inspiring. In the midst of a total war, armies systematically sought to mitigate cultural loss.
Publishers Weekly
Adolf Hitler's plan for the subjugation of the world included its culture and treasures. Art was to be taken from conquered countries and stored in Germany until Hitler could build the world's largest museum complex in his hometown of Linz, Austria. It was the job of the Monuments Men (as they came to be called) to track down these missing treasures during the latter years of the war.... [W]ill appeal to many general and military history readers.
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)
Also, consider using these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Monuments Men:
1. "It was a good group, he had to admit. A group [Stout] himself might have chosen, if given the chance." Talk about the original group of 11 men put together to salvage the world's artwork. What made George Stoat believe that it was the right team for the job? What were the men's individual qualifications, both personal and professional?
2. What kind of man was George Stout? How would you describe James Rorimer? Why was his service so invaluable to the mission? Who else stood out among the Monuments Men?
3. What role did Rose Valland play? How critical was she to the success of the Monuments Men mission?
4. Why were the pieces of art so important to Hitler? Why was he so intent on creating his "Führermuseum...the largest, most imposing, most spectacular art museum in the world"?
5. Should the team who rescued the stolen art be elevated to the level of heroism as Robert M. Edsel indicates? Or should we consider them as good men doing a hard job very effectively—and extend our gratitude and respect?
6. Another question that must be asked is the degree of importance accorded to the mission. Is protecting art worth the price of a human life—or diverting resources otherwise used to protect lives? What do you think? What does Edsel suggest?
7. If you have seen the George Clooney directed movie, how does it compare to the book? What do you think of the film...it's music (especially), visuals, and actors. If you haven't yet seen the film, do you intend to after reading and discussing the book?
8. What have you learned from reading The Monuments Men—about the war, the Nazis, and most of all about art?
The Milk of Female Kindness: An Anthology of Honest Motherhood
Kasia James et al, 2014
223 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780992389116
Summary
"Mother" is a word heavy with associations.
Becoming a mother is surely one of the biggest changes and challenges in a woman's life. It is at once an absolutely unique experience, and yet one which is so common that it is often overlooked. Motherhood is intense, relentless and absorbing, in all senses of the word.
Popular culture seems to have a split personality when it comes to motherhood - at once holding it up as a sacred ideal, and yet being a little dismissive of women as mothers.
A diverse international group of women have been brave enough to share their stories, poetry and artwork to encourage you to think and feel about this most influential of relationships in a new and enlightened way. (From the publisher.)
Learn more on Facebook.
Author Bio
This international collection of creative works, covers diverse topics including loss and changes to identity, mental health, disability, managing the work/life balance, birthing practices, adoption, schools of thought on parenting, and aging. There are valuable historical, feminist and medical perspectives.
The anthology features the work of award winning poets and writers from Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US—including Angelique Jamail, Marie Marshall, Christa Forster and Sandra Danby, and renowned professionals including Dr. Carla Pascoe, Professor Alison Bartlett, and Heather Sadiechild Harris.
Full list of contributing authors and artists (alphabetical order):
Professor Alison Bartlett, Maureen Bowden, Kitty Brody, Sarah Cass, Tara Chevrestt, Sandra Danby, Judith Dickerman-Nelson, Laura Evans, Judith Field, Christa Forster, Sabrina Garie, Heather Sadiechild Harris, Jennifer James, Kasia James, Angelique Jamail, Mary Jeavons, Judith Logan-Farias, Jessica Kennedy, Judy McKinty, Ceridwen Masiulanis, Marie Marshall, Betty Ming Liu, Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, Tram Nguyen, Carla Pascoe, Cheri Roman, Valerie Walawender, Gemma Wright, Rhyannon Yates. (From the editor.)
Discussion Questions
1. Birth
Pregnancy and the birth of a baby change a woman’s world fundamentally. There is no going back. The experience itself is an integral part of the becoming a parent.
1a. Was your birth experience what you expected? Explain.
1b. What did your experience with pregnancy and birth tell you about the mother you are becoming?
1c. How has your infant surprised you? What personality traits is she or he already manifesting?
2. Life lessons on being a mother
Once you find your bearing, motherhood evolves into not only a physical redesign of your world, but a mental and psychological one, with assumptions, world views and expectations about life being continuously reshaped.
2a. How has having a child changed your life? Discuss it through all lenses—gain and loss.
2b. What family rituals have you established as part of the parenting role? Do rules and rituals matter and why?
2c. How does parenting differ between mother and father, and what impact does that have on family dynamics?
2d. How do you balance work, motherhood and other family/community obligations? What toll does that balance take on you?
3. Identity Challenges
Having children can fundamentally alter how we see ourselves and our place in the world and how others see us. It can layer on duties and responsibilities that have to be balanced with our own, often volatile egos and sense of self.
3a. How do you feel your identity has changed since having children?
3b. How has that identify altered as your children have grown?
3c. What do we owe to our children? Is there a limit?
4. External Pressures on Mothers
Women face a lot of external pressures—from books, media, family and friends, community groups, politicians—that is always telling them how to be a mother, and by definition how not be one. Those pressures often dig deep, undermining our confidence, and overwhelming us with conflicting information.
4a. How do you think society sees motherhood?
4b. To what degree do you agree with that perception?
4c. How have these external perceptions affected your own experience?
4d. How do you feel society has put limits on your parenting and how have you dealt (or not dealt with it).
4e. How do you keep negative pressures at bay?
4f. Which influences have been positive and useful?
5. Adapting and Accepting Change
Often, our child(ren) surprise us, challenge us, and defy the expectations we constructed when we contemplated childbirth. Sometimes, our experience with parenting looks nothing like we had been taught to expect.
5a. What do you find most difficult about being a mother, and how do you handle it?
5b. Is "normal" a realistic or even desirable goal for our children?
5c. How do the expectations and dreams for the children/family we expected to have impact the reality of our mothering? Discuss your experience juggling expectations and your child’s reality.
5d. What do you dream for your child(ren)? How much of those dreams stem from your own dreams for the world?
5e. Are your hopes for your children shaped by your own successes and failures in life?
5f. How has parenting changed you? In what ways has it not changed you enough?
6. Through the Generations
The experience of becoming a mother not only changes our relationship with our own parents but it has us seeing our own mothers through very different eyes.
6a. What did you learn about being a mother from your own mother? How did that learning occur?
6b. What has changed in the way you view and understand your own parents?
7. Pain
Not all families start in a traditional or even joyful way. But even with difficult beginnings, rich, loving families can still blossom.
7a. Has there been anything particularly difficult in your parenting experience? How did you cope? Was there sufficient support or did you have concoct your own?
7b. If you have a non-traditional family, how has that impacted your parenting style and your ability to be the parent you think you should be?
7c. How have the challenges changed as your children grow?
(Questions courtesy of Kasia James, ed./author.)
My Life in Middlemarch
Rebecca Mead, 2014
Crown Publisher
578 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307984760
Summary
A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth—Middlemarch— and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories.
Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.
In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece—the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure—and brings them into our world.
Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1974 (?)
• Where—London, England, UK
• Raised—Southwest England
• Education—Oxford University; New York University
• Curently—lives in New York, New York, USA
Rebecca Mead has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1997. Born in England, she migrated to New York in her twenties where she attended New York University. She began her career as a fact-checker at New York Magazine and later became a contributing editor.
She has also contributed to many newspapers and magazines, including the Sunday Times of London, New York Times Book Review, and London Review of Books. In 2007 she published her first took, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding (2007), and in 2014 came out with her second, My Life in Middlemarch (2014). Mead lives in Brooklyn, New York City. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Rarely attempted, and still more rarely successful, is the bibliomemoir—a subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate, confessional tone of autobiography.... My Life in Middlemarch is a poignant testimony to the abiding power of fiction.... [Yet] admirable and endearing as [it] is, there are virtually no surprises here that have not been uncovered by Eliot biographers.
Joyce Carol Oates - New York Times Book Review
Mead explores how the broad themes of George Eliot’s Middlemarch—the quest for meaning, the nature of love, the power of home, and how to square great ambition with the realities of being a woman—resonate in her own life and remain relevant for modern readers.... [Mead] invites readers to consider this imperative through their relationships with influential books and in their own lives. In this way, she invites empathy, an exercise of which George Eliot would be unmistakably proud.
Emily Rapp - Boston Globe
Mead’s middle-aged rediscovery of Middlemarch—and her insights into Eliot’s rich middle age—is not to be missed.
Atlantic
(Starred review.) [D]eeply satisfying hybrid work of literary criticism, biography, and memoir.... [Mead] brings to vivid life the profound engagement that she and all devoted readers experience with a favorite novel over a lifetime.... As Mead writes: “There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them… books that grow with the reader as the reader grows.”
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Mead demonstrates through her own story how literature can change and transform lives. For this reason, even the reader who has never heard of George Eliot will find Mead's crisp, exacting prose absorbing and thought-provoking.
Library Journal
Mead beautifully conveys the excitement of living in a novel, of knowing its characters as if they breathed, of revisiting them over time and seeing them differently. She conveys, too, not at all heavy-handedly, the particular relationship one develops with an author whose work one loves….There is a meticulous underlying order to the book, structured to mirror Middlemarch itself, but as in a letter, the effect is of spontaneous movement, the particular thrill of following a mind untrammeled.
Clair Messud - Bookforum
(Starred review.) [Mead] performs an exhilarating, often surprising close reading of the novel, which Eliot began writing at age 51 in 1870. And she....injects just enough of her own life story to take measure of the profound resonance of Eliot’s progressive, humanistic viewpoint, recognition of the heroism of ordinary lives, and crucial central theme, a young woman’s desire for a substantial, rewarding, meaningful life.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Mead was wise not to omit herself from this story, as her feelings about the great work and its themes of women's roles, relationships and self-delusion are far more insightful than a barrage of facts would have bee ... A rare and remarkable fusion of techniques that draws two women together across time and space.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Explore the parallels between George Eliot’s life and Rebecca Mead’s. In their relationships and in their careers as writers, do they share a common approach to the human experience? Did the social constraints of Eliot’s gender put her at a disadvantage compared to contemporary writers, or did the constraints enhance her imaginative powers?
2. Discuss your own experience with Middlemarch, whether you’ve been a lifelong devotee or have only glimpsed it through Mead’s lens. Which storylines and relationships resonate the most with you? Which characters are the most intriguing to you?
3. What motivates Mead to retrace Eliot’s life? How does her research reshape her view of Eliot’s imaginary communities?
4. Browse the memoir’s chapter titles (which mirror the titles of the eight books in Middlemarch) as well as the epigraphs. What makes these lines equally appropriate for Mead’s modern world? Which epigraph could make an apt motto for your life?
5. What came to mind when you read Virginia Woolf’s characterization of Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”? Are happy endings and the marriage plot the stuff of childish fantasy? How does Eliot rank against Jane Austen, the Brontes, and Woolf as English women writers who contributed to your growth?
6. How do the various locales featured in My Life in Middlemarch—from New Haven and New York to Coventry, Oxford, and London—reflect the inner worlds described in their corresponding scenes? For Eliot and Mead, where is home?
7. As you read Mead’s exploration of Dorothea Brooke Casaubon, who wrestles with the yearnings of youth and must eventually confront the passionless marriage that marks her adulthood, how did these scenes compare to your own transformation, during and well beyond adolescence? Which books helped you find your way?
8. What freedoms and limitations did Eliot experience because of her unconventional relationship with George Henry Lewes? In your opinion, how did he and his sons (biological or not) affect Eliot’s approach to writing about male characters? From the duped scientist Tertius Lydgate to the feckless Fred Vincy, what broad observations can we make about the men who populate Middlemarch?
9. What does Mead’s memoir help us understand about motherhood in its many forms (including Eliot’s experience as a quasi-stepmother)? Is Eliot’s portrayal of motherhood in Middlemarch realistic or overly pessimistic?
10. Mead describes her pilgrimages to the archives that hold Eliot’s journals, manuscripts, and other documents, including Yale’s Beinecke Library, the New York Public Library, and the British Library. In addition to fact-gathering, what does Mead gain by spending time with pages that were touched by Eliot’s own hand? Does the digital age spell the end of that experience?
11. Mead raises the question of Eliot’s spirituality after she left the church. If her characters are a guide to us, how does Eliot seem to have approached the role of fate versus free will in shaping our destinies?
12. The eight books of Middlemarch were released by Blackwood as a series. How does reading those elaborate plots compare to watching a wildly popular television series? What special benefits does the written word provide?
13. After her dashed hopes with Herbert Spencer and the impossibility of marrying Lewes, was Eliot’s marriage to John Walter Cross a sort of victory?
14. Consider Middlemarch’s renowned closing line, which appears in the first paragraph of “Finale.” Which unhistoric acts, hidden lives, and unvisited tombs did you think of as you read those words?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby
Sarah Churchwell, 2014
Penguin Group USA
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594204746
Summary
The autumn of 1922 found F. Scott Fitzgerald at the height of his fame, days from turning twenty-six years old, and returning to New York for the publication of his fourth book, Tales of the Jazz Age.
A spokesman for America’s carefree younger generation, Fitzgerald found a home in the glamorous and reckless streets of New York. Here, in the final incredible months of 1922, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald drank and quarreled and partied amid financial scandals, literary milestones, car crashes, and celebrity disgraces.
Yet the Fitzgeralds’ triumphant return to New York coincided with another event: the discovery of a brutal double murder in nearby New Jersey, a crime made all the more horrible by the farce of a police investigation—which failed to accomplish anything beyond generating enormous publicity for the newfound celebrity participants.
Proclaimed the “crime of the decade” even as its proceedings dragged on for years, the Mills-Hall murder has been wholly forgotten today. But the enormous impact of this bizarre crime can still be felt in The Great Gatsby, a novel Fitzgerald began planning that autumn of 1922 and whose plot he ultimately set within that fateful year.
Careless People is a unique literary investigation: a gripping double narrative that combines a forensic search for clues to an unsolved crime and a quest for the roots of America’s best loved novel. Overturning much of the received wisdom of the period, Careless People blends biography and history with lost newspaper accounts, letters, and newly discovered archival materials. With great wit and insight, acclaimed scholar of American literature Sarah Churchwell reconstructs the events of that pivotal autumn, revealing in the process new ways of thinking about Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.
Interweaving the biographical story of the Fitzgeralds with the unfolding investigation into the murder of Hall and Mills, Careless People is a thrilling combination of literary history and murder mystery, a mesmerizing journey into the dark heart of Jazz Age America. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Raised—Winnetka, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; M.A., Ph.D.,
Princeton University
• Currently—lives near London, England, UK
Sarah Bartlett Churchwell is an American-born academic who is the Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is a writer and literary critic and regularly appears on British television and radio in addition to writing reviews and other articles for many publications in the United Kingdom and United States.
She grew up in Winnetka, near Chicago, Illinois, and was awarded a BA in English Literature from Vassar College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English and American Literarure from Princeton University.
She then moved to England where she has lectured at the University of East Anglia since 1999. She has written for many publications including; The Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review, Spectator, New Statesman, Guardian and The Observer.
Her publications include a book about Marilyn Monroe entitled The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004) and one on Scott Fiztgerald, Careless People: Murder, Mayem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby (2014). Her television appearances include Newsnight, The Review Show, and The Sharp End with Clive Anderson.
Churchwell was appointed a member of the judging panel for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/14/2014.)
Book Reviews
Churchwell brings… a lively curiosity, a gift for making connections, and an infectious passion for Fitzgerald and his greatest novel…. A suggestive, almost musical evocation of the spirit of the time.
London Review of Books
The first readers of The Great Gatsby thought it was all about themselves, a book of the moment. Today, we tend to admire its enduring mythology of aspiration and undoing. Churchwell brilliantly brings these two perspectives together as she holds in counterpoint the sprawling stuff of Fitzgerald’s daily life and the gleamingly taut prose poem that emerged from it… Fitzgerald offered the year 1922 as the chief exhibit when he tried to explain the meaning of the jazz age. It is an exhibit worth looking at very carefully. Careless People does so with a mixture of patience and panache and it would take a long time to get bored of that particular cocktail.
New Statesman (UK)
The wonder of Careless People ... is that it rewinds the years and allows the reader to appreciate again just how well Fitzgerald reflected his times.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
A literary spree, bursting with recherché detail, high spirits and the desperate frisson of the jazz age.
Observer (UK)
A treasury of new material. Churchwell adds considerably to our understanding of the early 1920s, and how life for Fitzgerald played into the development of his art.
Literary Review (UK)
Churchwell evokes the Jazz Age in all its ephemeral glamour and recklessness in her latest book.... "a collage" of Scott and Zelda Fitzgeralds' world and a social history of the times.... Churchwell strains to establish a close connection between the [New Jersey] Mills-Hall murders and Fitzgerald’s work on [Gatsby].
Publishers Weekly
Churchwell [The Great Gatsy] genesis to the Hall-Mills murder case, a notorious 1920s double homicide that occurred in New Jersey. Since the novel is set in 1922, also the year Fitzgerald began plotting the story, Churchwell examines the events...that took place in that important year.... [W]ell-written and entertaining. —Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology, CUNY, Brooklyn
Library Journal
Churchwell... has written an excellent book.... [S]he even manages to find fresh facts that escaped previous scholars, including one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's own published comments about [The Great Gatsby], a book that, as Churchwell notes, neither sold well nor received uniformly favorable reviews.... Prodigious research and fierce affection illumine every remarkable page.
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 Spoon from Minkowitz: A Bittersweet Roots Journey to Ancestral Lands
Judith Fein, 2014
GlobalAdventure.us
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780988401938
Summary
Obsessed with her grandmother's mysterious village in Russia from the time she was a child, Judith Fein knew only six facts, and her life became a detective story as she tried to track those facts down.
An award-winning travel journalist with an insatiable curiosity, Judith Fein embarks on an “emotional genealogy quest” to connect to her ancestors in The Spoon from Minkowitz: A Bittersweet Roots Journey to Ancestral Lands. Like a latter-day Marco Polo, Judith follows “arrows” of opportunity in her search for the shtetl her Jewish grandmother left behind in what is now Ukraine. Accompanied by photojournalist husband, Paul Ross, whose roots also lie in Minkowitz, Fein not only solves the mystery of where she came from, but strengthens her marriage and her life.
A chronically “rootless” traveler, Judith Fein finds her roots in Minkowitz, and comes to realize how ancestors influence every aspect of our lives and how pain, rage and fear are passed down from generation to generation. Understanding the ancestors is a stepping stone to transformation.
She leaves her grandmother’s homeland with a new goal: to encourage others to dig deep into family roots to find out who they are and where they came from—and take their own “roots journey.” This compelling historical and cultural travel memoir will provoke deep emotions and personal memories of family and ancestors. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Cornell University; graduate
work, City University of NewYork
• Currently—lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico
A communicator since birth, Judith Fein is a dynamic public speaker, workshop presenter, as well as author of the popular travel memoir, Life Is a Trip: The Transformative Magic of Travel, which focuses on encounters with different cultures and new ways of dealing with life issues. She specializes in off-the-beaten track, culturally-rich destinations and people. She is the co-founder and executive editor of the award-garnering experiential travel blog, Your Life Is a Trip. Fein was a contributor to Rudy Maxa's public radio show, “The Savvy Traveler," for six years. She has been a guest on public radio stations all over the U.S., talking on how to travel deeply, even if your trip is to the next town.
Fein has written for over 100 publications, including the L.A. Times, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Jerusalem Post, and National Geographic Traveler. She also blogs about travel for Psychology Today and the Huffington Post. She has swum with Beluga whales, consulted with a Zulu sangoma in South Africa, eaten porcupine in Vietnam (“not with relish”), and reported on which bugs to eat in Thailand.
Recently, Judith Fein won prestigious Society of American Travel Writers gold awards for the best magazine and newspaper articles of the year. Paul Ross won a Travel Classics award for best article written by a travel journalist. Judith and Paul give acclaimed, humorous, engaging multimedia talks, conduct workshops, and occasionally take the curious with them to exotic locales. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
As tense as a thriller and as tender as a love story, Judith Fein’s story of her quest to connect the dots of her life will have readers laughing, crying and, most of all, cheering her on.
Catharine Hamm - Los Angeles Times
It's as if Joseph Conrad took his journey up the river into deepest darkest Minkowitz. And the best part: for many of us, this is our story, too.
Danny Rubin, screenwriter, Groundhog Day
Unlike any other back-to-roots book…driven by the author's almost mystical quest to recover the past…Her curiosity, openness and passion take us along on a journey that turns out to be ours as well.
Zelda Shluker - Hadassah Magazine
This is a book for all cultures...Fein is a natural storyteller. There is mystery, history, revelation, laughter and tears in every chapter.
Charmaine Coinbra - Charmaine’s Muse Pallet Blog
A travel writer of the soul...Fein takes us on a journey that calls forth our own inner travels. In her intimate voice that challenges us to explore the hidden landscapes within, we hear how one’s story encourages all stories. Fasten your seatbelt and get ready to discover unexplored territory for her and for you.
Rabbi Malka Drucker, author (White Fire: A Portrait of Women Spiritual Leaders in America)
A primer for travelers on how to get beneath the surface of the place you are visiting. The lovely writing –moving and amusing by turn–pulled me through the story and I was sorry to see it end.
Vera Marie Badertscher - A Traveler's Library Blog
Judith Fein works tidbits of her life and the lives of her family into the larger history of the Jews in the Ukraine—not just the pain and devastation, but also the hope and joy in rebuilding and reconnecting in the now. By the end, she realizes it is not just about Minkowitz; it is about the total experience of the people from whom she came.
Bennett Greenspan, President, Family Tree DNA
Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think the author was so interested in Minkowitz when she was a child?
2. Was there something that intrigued you when you were young? If so, were you encouraged or discouraged from pursuing your interest?
3. Do you have a sense that you have a mission or destiny in life?
4. People seem to show up when the author needs them. How do you explain this?
5. Is there a particular ancestor to whom you feel drawn? Do you know why?
6. Do you think we owe anything to our ancestors?
7. What is your legacy as a future ancestor?
8. What are the different kinds of love explored in the book?
9. What behaviors or traits have been passed down in your family and how did they impact you?
10. Why do you think the author didn't give up her quest?
11. Have you ever been on a quest? Did you find what you were looking for?
12. Did you have the kinds of parents you needed?
13. If you could say one thing to your ancestors, what would it be?
14. Would you want to visit the place your ancestors came from?
15. Do you think it is possible to communicate with those who are deceased?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)