Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed, 2012
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307476074
Summary
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.
Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 17, 1968
• Where—Spangler, Pennsylvania, uSA
• Education—B.A., University of Minnesota; M.F.A,
Syracuse University
• Awards—Pushcart Prize
• Currently—Portland, Oregan
Cheryl Strayed is a New York Times bestselling author, who lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children. Her autobiographical debut novel, Torch, was published 2006. In 2012 she published another bestseller, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, the true account of her trek along the Pacific Crest Trail. Strayed also writes the online advice column "Dear Sugar."
Strayed was born in Pennsylvania and raised in Minnesota, where she graduated from McGregor High School in Aitkin County, a place upon which the fictional Coltrap County in Torch is based. She received her B.A. from the University of Minnesota and her M.F.A in fiction writing from Syracuse University, where she was mentored by writers George Saunders and Mary Gaitskill among others. She is married to filmmaker Brian Lindstrom.
Published works
Strayed's essays have been published in the Washington Post Magazine, New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Allure and other imprints. Her work has been selected twice for inclusion in The Best American Essays ("Heroin/e" in the 2000 edition, and "The Love of My Life" in the 2003 edition). Torch, a story based on Strayed's mother's death from cancer at age 45, was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and was selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books of 2006 by writers living in the Pacific Northwest.
Her memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which details her 1,100-mile hike up the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to northernmost Oregon has since been optioned by actress Reese Witherspoon. Wild was also excerpted in Vogue.
On February 14, 2012, Strayed came forward as the formerly anonymous author of the "Dear Sugar" advice column at The Rumpus online literary magazine. Strayed took over the column from originator Steve Almond. On July 10, 2012 her new book Tiny Beautiful Things, a compilation of her best and new "Dear Sugar" columns, will be released by Vintage Books.
Awards
Strayed's essay "Munro County", about a letter from Alice Munro, was published in the Missouri Review and won a Pushcart Prize in 2010.
Wild was chosen in June, 2012, as the inaugural selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0, a re-launch of the famous Oprah's Book Club which ended in 2011. Oprah's Book Club 2.0 uses online social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and e-readers, so that participants can cut and paste passages from books and communicate online. Oprah discussed Wild in her video announcement of the new Club (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
It’s not very manly, the topic of weeping while reading. Yet for a book critic tears are an occupational hazard. Luckily, perhaps, books don’t make me cry very often. Turning pages, I’m practically Steve McQueen. Strayed’s memoir, Wild, however, pretty much obliterated me. I was reduced, during her book’s final third, to puddle-eyed cretinism. I like to read in coffee shops, and I began to receive concerned glances from matronly women, the kind of looks that said, ‘Oh, honey.’ To mention all this does Strayed a bit of a disservice, because there’s nothing cloying about Wild. It’s uplifting, but not in the way of many memoirs, where the uplift makes you feel that you’re committing mental suicide. This book is as loose and sexy and dark as an early Lucinda Williams song. It’s got a punk spirit and makes an earthy and American sound.... Wild recounts the months Strayed spent when she was 26, hiking alone on the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State. There were very frightening moments, but the author was not chewed on by bears, plucked dangling from the edge of a pit, buried by an avalanche or made witness to the rapture. No dingo ate anyone’s baby. Yet everything happened. The clarity of Ms. Strayed’s prose, and thus of her person, makes her story, in its quiet way, nearly as riveting an adventure narrative as Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Into Thin Air.... Her grief, early in this book, is as palpable as her confusion. Her portrait of her mother, who died of cancer at 45, is raw and bitter and reverent all at once.... Wild is thus the story of an unfolding. She got tougher, mentally as well as physically [and she] tells good, scary stories about nearly running out of water, encountering leering men and dangerous animals.... The lack of ease in her life made her fierce and funny; she hammers home her hard-won sentences like a box of nails. The cumulative welling up I experienced during Wild was partly a response to that too infrequent sight: that of a writer finding her voice, and sustaining it, right in front of your eyes.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Strayed comes off as a total screw-up and a wise person at the same time, perhaps because she has the ineffable gift every writer longs for of saying exactly what she means in lines that are both succinct and poetic... Some memoirs make the steps between grief and healing so clear that the path seems easy for readers to follow. Strayed, on the contrary, respects mystery.... No epiphanies here, no signs from the gods. Just a healthy respect for the uncertainty we all live with, and an inborn talent for articulating angst and the gratefulness that comes when we overcome it.
Fiona Zublin - Washington Post
[A] vivid, touching and ultimately inspiring account of a life unraveling, and of the journey that put it back together. . . . The darkness is relieved by self-deprecating humor as [Strayed] chronicles her hiking expedition and the rebirth it helped to inspire. . . . Wild easily transcends the hiking genre, though it presents plenty of details about equipment ordeals and physical challenges. Anyone with some backpacking experience will find Strayed's chronicle especially amusing. Her boots prove too small. The trail destroys her feet. Then there is the possibility of real mortality: She repeatedly finds herself just barely avoiding rattlesnakes. Strayed is honest about the tedium of hiking but also alert to the self-discovery that can be stirred by solitude and self-reliance. . . . Pathos and humor are her main companions on the trail, although she writes vividly about the cast of other pilgrims she encounters. Finding out ‘what it was like to walk for miles,’ Strayed writes, was ‘a powerful and fundamental experience.’ And knowing that feeling has a way of taming the challenges thrown up by modern life.
Michael J. Ybarra - Wall Street Journal
Brilliant...pointedly honest.... Part adventure narrative, part deeply personal reflection, Wild chronicles an adventure born of heartbreak. . . . While it is certain that the obvious dangers of the trail are real — the cliffs are high, the path narrow, the ice slick, and the animal life wild — the book’s greatest achievement lies in its exploration of the author’s emotional landscape. With flashbacks as organic and natural as memory itself, Strayed mines the bedrock of her past to reveal what rests beneath her compulsion to hike alone across more than one thousand primitive miles: her biological father’s abuse and abandonment, her mother’s diagnosis and death, and her family’s unraveling. Strayed emerges from her grief-stricken journey as a practitioner of a rare and vital vocation. She has become an intrepid cartographer of the human heart.
Bruce Machart - Houston Chronicle
Strayed writes a crisp scene; her sentences hum with energy. She can describe a trail-parched yearning for Snapple like no writer I know. She moves us briskly along the route, making discrete rest stops to parcel out her backstory. It becomes impossible not to root for her.
Karen R. Long - Cleveland Plain Dealer
One of the most original, heartbreaking and beautiful American memoirs in years.... The unlikely journey is awe-inspiring, but it's one of the least remarkable things about the book. Strayed, who was recently revealed as the anonymous author of the ‘Dear Sugar’ advice column of the literary website The Rumpus, writes with stunningly authentic emotional resonance—Wild is brutal and touching in equal measures, but there's nothing forced about it. She chronicles sorrow and loss with unflinching honesty, but without artifice or self-pity. There are no easy answers in life, she seems to be telling the reader. Maybe there are no answers at all. It's fitting, perhaps, that the writer chose to end her long pilgrimage at the Bridge of the Gods, a majestic structure that stretches a third of a mile across the Columbia, the largest river in the Pacific Northwest. We think of bridges as separating destinations, just as we think of long journeys as the price we have to pay to get from one place to another. Sometimes, though, the journey is the destination, and the bridge connects more than just dots on a map—it joins reality with the dream world, the living with the dead, the tame with the wild.
Michael Schaub - NPR Books
A rich, riveting true story.... During her grueling three-month journey, Strayed circled around black bears and rattlesnakes, fought extreme dehydration by drinking oily gray pond water, and hiked in boots made entirely of duct tape. Reading her matter-of-fact take on love and grief and the soul-saving quality of a Snapple lemonade, you can understand why Strayed has earned a cult following as the author of Dear Sugar, a popular advice column on therumpus.net.... With its vivid descriptions of beautiful but unforgiving terrain, Wild is a cinematic story, but Strayed’s book isn’t really about big, cathartic moments. The author never "finds herself" or gets healed. When she reaches the trail’s end, she buys a cheap ice cream cone and continues down the road. . . . It’s hard to imagine anything more important than taking one step at a time. That’s endurance, and that’s what Strayed understands, almost 20 years later. As she writes, "There was only one [option], I knew. To keep walking." Our verdict: A.
Melissa Maerz - Entertainment Weekly
Strayed’s journey is the focal point of Wild, in which she interweaves suspenseful accounts of her most harrowing crises with imagistic moments of reflection. Her profound grief over her mother’s death, her emotional abandonment by her siblings and stepfather, and her personal shortcomings and misadventures are all conveyed with a consistently grounded, quietly pained self-awareness. On the trail, she fends of everything from loneliness to black bears; we groan when her boots go tumbling off a cliff and we rejoice as she transforms from a terrified amateur hiker into the ‘Queen of the PCT.’ In a style that embodies her wanderlust, Strayed transports us with this gripping, ultimately uplifting tale.
Catherine Straut - ELLE
In the summer of 1995, at age 26 and feeling at the end of her rope emotionally, Strayed resolved to hike solo the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,663-mile wilderness route stretching from the Mexican border to the Canadian and traversing nine mountain ranges and three states. In this detailed, in-the-moment re-enactment, she delineates the travails and triumphs of those three grueling months. Living in Minneapolis, on the verge of divorcing her husband, Strayed was still reeling from the sudden death four years before of her mother from cancer; the ensuing years formed an erratic, confused time “like a crackling Fourth of July sparkler.” Hiking the trail helped decide what direction her life would take, even though she had never seriously hiked or carried a pack before. Starting from Mojave, Calif., hauling a pack she called the Monster because it was so huge and heavy, she had to perform a dead lift to stand, and then could barely make a mile an hour. Eventually she began to experience “a kind of strange, abstract, retrospective fun,” meeting the few other hikers along the way, all male; jettisoning some of the weight from her pack and burning books she had read; and encountering all manner of creature and acts of nature from rock slides to snow. Her account forms a charming, intrepid trial by fire, as she emerges from the ordeal bruised but not beaten, changed, a lone survivor.
Publishers Weekly
Strayed delves into memoir after her fiction debut, Torch. She here recounts her experience hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) in 1995 after her mother's death and her own subsequent divorce. Designated a National Scenic Trail in 1968 but not completed until 1993, the PCT runs from Mexico to Canada, and Strayed hiked sections of it two summers after it was officially declared finished. She takes readers with her on the trail, and the transformation she experiences on its course is significant: she goes from feeling out of her element with a too-big backpack and too-small boots to finding a sense of home in the wilderness and with the allies she meets along the way. Readers will appreciate her vivid descriptions of the natural wonders near the PCT, particularly Mount Hood, Crater Lake, and the Sierras—what John Muir proclaimed the "Range of Light." Verdict: This book is less about the PCT and more about Strayed's own personal journey, which makes the story's scope a bit unclear. However, fans of her novel will likely enjoy this new book. —Karen McCoy, Northern Arizona Univ. Lib., Flagstaff
Library Journal
Unsentimental memoir of the author's three-month solo hike from California to Washington along the Pacific Crest Trail.... Along the way she suffered aches, pains, loneliness, blistered, bloody feet and persistent hunger. Yet the author also discovered a newfound sense of awe; for her, hiking the PCT was "powerful and fundamental" and "truly hard and glorious." Strayed was stunned by how the trail both shattered and sheltered her.... A candid, inspiring narrative of the author's brutal physical and psychological journey through a wilderness of despair to a renewed sense of self.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. “The Pacific Crest Trail wasn’t a world to me then. It was an idea, vague and outlandish, full of promise and mystery. Something bloomed inside me as I traced its jagged line with my finger on a map” (p. 4). Why did the PCT capture Strayed’s imagination at that point in her life?
2. Each section of the book opens with a literary quote or two. What do they tell you about what’s to come in the pages that follow? How does Strayed’s pairing of, say, Adrienne Rich and Joni Mitchell (p. 45) provide insight into her way of thinking?
3. Strayed is quite forthright in her description of her own transgressions, and while she’s remorseful, she never seems ashamed. Is this a sign of strength or a character flaw?
4. “I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told” (p. 51). Fear is a major theme in the book. Do you think Strayed was too afraid, or not afraid enough? When were you most afraid for her?
5. Strayed chose her own last name: “Nothing fit until one day when the word strayed came into my mind. Immediately, I looked it up in the dictionary and knew it was mine...: to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress” (p. 96). Did she choose well? What did you think when you learned she had assigned this word to herself—that it was no coincidence?
6. On the trail, Strayed encounters mostly men. How does this work in her favor? What role does gender play when removed from the usual structure of society?
7. What does the reader learn from the horrific episode in which Strayed and her brother put down their mother’s horse?
8. Strayed writes that the point of the PCT “had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets” (p. 207). How does this sensation help Strayed to find her way back into the world beyond the wilderness?
9. On her journey, Strayed carries several totems. What does the black feather mean to her? And the POW bracelet? Why does she find its loss (p. 238) symbolic?
10. Does the hike help Strayed to get over Paul? If so, how? And if not, why?
11. Strayed says her mother’s death “had obliterated me.... I was trapped by her but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could fill” (p 267). How did being on the PCT on her mother’s fiftieth birthday help Strayed to heal this wound?
12. What was it about Strayed that inspired the generosity of so many strangers on the PCT?
13. “There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another.... But I was pretty certain as I sat there that night that if it hadn’t been for Eddie, I wouldn’t have found myself on the PCT” (p. 304). How does this realization change Strayed’s attitude towards her stepfather?
14. To lighten her load, Strayed burns each book as she reads it. Why doesn’t she burn the Adrienne Rich collection?
15. What role do books and reading play in this often solitary journey?
(Questions by publisher.)
Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker in Training
Tom Jokinen, 2010
De Capo Press
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780306818912
Summary
At forty-four, Tom Jokinen decided to quit his job in order to become an apprentice undertaker, setting out to ask the questions: What is the right thing to do when someone dies?
With the marketplace offering new options (go green, go anti-corporate, go Disney, be packed into an artificial reef and dropped in the Atlantic...), is there still room for tradition? In a year of adventures both hair-raising and hilarious, Jokinen finds a world that is radically changed since Jessica Mitford revised The American Way of Death, more surprising than Six Feet Under, and even funnier and more illuminating than Stiff.
If Bill Bryson were to apprentice at a funeral home, searching for the meaning of life and death, you’d have Curtains. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Tom Jokinen is a radio producer and video-journalist who has worked on Morningside, Counterspin with Avi Lewis and Definitely Not the Opera as well as many other CBC shows. In 2006 he took a job as an apprentice undertaker at a Winnipeg funeral home. He has also worked as a railroad operator, an editorial cartoonist and spent two years in medical school at the University of Toronto. He dropped out, but not before dissecting two human cadavers. He and his wife live in Ottawa, Canada. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
A CBC journalist in Winnepeg taking "a month's leave to dabble in deathcare" reveals the changing face of the funeral industry in this informative but rote tour of duty, an update of sorts on Jessica Mitford's 1963 The American Way of Death. On his first day as an intern at the Winnepeg crematorium run by Neil Bardal, the undertaker tells him that "the traditional funeral is gone and it's never coming back"; the bereft world has embraced cremation, with specific impact on a number of industry segments, from vehicles and florists to tombstones and caskets. Jokinen is nonchalantly graphic when getting into the day-to-day of cremation ("I dump the pan of bones onto the steel table and crunch through it with the heavy magnet"), touching on juvenile at times, but makes the point in many ways that, eventually, we'll all be paying for this industry's changes. The industry's big bet is that 75 million North American baby boomers, afraid of death, will want unprecedented control over their funerals, illustrated in examples like a successful Milwaukee funeral home owner who calls Ritz-Carlton and Disney his models. Readers who understand that Jokinen took on the role of apprentice undertaker for one reason (they're reading it) will find an interesting glimpse into an almost-invisible industry, and the forces pushing it in strange new directions.
Publishers Weekly
Jokinen gathered material for this by taking a month off his Winnipeg journalist job (go Blue Bombers!!) to intern as an undertaker. Though it shares similarities with Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, this also details what it's like to be on the other end of the business. The result is a readable, dare I say enjoyable, behind-the-scenes look at what actually happens to your body at the end.... I found the educative streak here exemplary of the best kinds of DIY materials and was surprised to find out that a cremation is significantly cheaper than a funeral.... Thus, the dickering scene in The Big Lebowski where Walter is haggling over the cost of the receptacle isn't tacky, it's a harbinger. A great read. —Douglas Lord, "Books for Dudes", Booksmack!
Library Journal
Jokinen’s wry observations on and revelations about mortality and the industry it has engendered evoke a youthful adventure into the unknown—not only the philosophical mystery of death but also the “black hole” between the last breath and the reappearance at funeral or cemetery.... Recounting his experiences, he delivers ironic dialogue with stand-up skill and smoothly integrates technical information...and market data...without hindering the flow of readable insights. —Whitney Scott
Booklist
In this report on the modern funeral industry, Jokinen updates The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford’s classic 1963 treatise on the subject…An astute, measured look at the modern death-care industry.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Curtains:
1. Talk about Tom Jokinen's decision to take a break from his full-time job and become an apprentice in undertaking. What possessed to him to do so...and why that specific field? What do you think of the decision? Had it had been your spouse, would you have supported the move?
2. Do you find the book's specific descriptions of preparing the body—including cremation and embalming, as well as makeup and dressing—grisly, interesting, humorous?
3. Speaking of humor, locate some of the book's funnier passages. What makes them funny? Do you find the humor disrespectful toward a serious, often tragic subject? Is it macabre? Or do you find it refreshingly irreverent?
4. Jokinen says at one point. "We're all roughly equal...200 cubic inches, or 5 pounds, of mineral powder, mostly calcium phosphate...." How does that statement make you feel? In what way does it reflect a deeper philosophical view about the meaning of life? Are we all the same? Is that what our lives ultimately boil down to (excuse the metaphor)?
5. Talk about the differences Jokinen finds between the undertaking profession...and the funeral industry. Why the disconnect? Were you outraged by some of the industry practices Jokinen wrote about? If so, what in particular?
6. Neil Bardal tells the author that "the traditional funeral is gone, and it's never coming back." How are cremation and other practices changing the industry? What are some of the newer trends? How do Jokinen and others see the grief business in the future, especially as baby-boomers age?
7. Speaking of cremation, why are more people choosing it over the traditional casket? What about you—what are your desires?
8. Overall, as he came away from his time in the funeral business, what was Jokinen's attitude? What is yours...after having read his book?
9. What (if any) are your own personal experiences in organizing a funeral and making the choices one has to make at a very difficult time?
10. What functions do funerals serve? Why do we have them? Are they purely religious sacraments...or something more?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession
Mark Obmascik,
Simon & Schuster
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451648607
Summary
Every January 1, a quirky crowd storms out across North America for a spectacularly competitive event called a Big Year—a grand, expensive, and occasionally vicious 365-day marathon of birdwatching. For three men in particular, 1998 would become a grueling battle for a new North American birding record.
Bouncing from coast to coast on frenetic pilgrimages for once-in-a-lifetime rarities, they brave broiling deserts, bug-infested swamps, and some of the lumpiest motel mattresses known to man. This unprecedented year of beat-the-clock adventures ultimately leads one man to a record so gigantic that it is unlikely ever to be bested.
Here, prizewinning journalist Mark Obmascik creates a dazzling, fun narrative of the 275,000-mile odyssey of these three obsessives as they fight to win the greatest—or maybe worst—birding contest of all time. (From the publisher.)
More
Now reissued to tie in to the 2011 major motion picture release from 20th Century Fox starring Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson, the critically heralded book by award-winning journalist Mark Obmascik—“a feathered version of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World ” ( Outside ).
With engaging, unflappably wry humor, The Big Year re-creates the grand, grueling, expensive, and occasionally vicious, “extreme” 365-day contest for a new North American birdwatching record. In this thrilling real-life adventure, three men battle the daunting forces of nature—and each other—in their whirlwind 275,000-mile odyssey from Texas to British Columbia, Cape May to Alaska. One of them achieves an astonishing record unlikely ever to be bested.
A captivating tour of human and avian nature, passion and paranoia, honor and deceit, fear and loathing, The Big Year shows the lengths to which people will go to pursue their dreams, to conquer and categorize—no matter how low the stakes. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Mark Obmascik is the bestselling author of Halfway to Heaven: My White-knuckled—and Knuckleheaded—Quest for the Rocky Mountain High, winner of the 2009 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Literature, and The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession, which received five Best of 2004 citations by major media. The Big Year movie, with Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson, was released in 2011. Obmascik was lead writer for the Denver Post team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the 2003 National Press Club award for environmental journalism. He lives in Denver with his wife, Merrill Schwerin, and their three sons, Cass, Max, and Wesley. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
In one of the wackiest competitions around, every year hundreds of obsessed bird watchers participate in a contest known as the North American Big Year. Hoping to be the one to spot the most species during the course of the year, each birder spends 365 days racing around the continental U.S. and Canada compiling lists of birds, all for the glory of being recognized by the American Birding Association as the Big Year birding champion of North America. In this entertaining book, Obmascik, a journalist with the Denver Post, tells the stories of the three top contenders in the 1998 American Big Year: a wisecracking industrial roofing contractor from New Jersey who aims to break his previous record and win for a second time; a suave corporate chief executive from Colorado; and a 225-pound nuclear power plant software engineer from Maryland. Obmascik bases his story on post-competition interviews but writes so well that it sounds as if he had been there every step of the way. In a freewheeling style that moves around as fast as his subjects, the author follows each of the three birding fanatics as they travel thousands of miles in search of such hard-to-find species as the crested myna, the pink-footed goose and the fork-tailed flycatcher, spending thousands of dollars and braving rain, sleet, snowstorms, swamps, deserts, mosquitoes and garbage dumps in their attempts to outdo each other. By not revealing the outcome until the end of the book, Obmascik keeps the reader guessing in this fun account of a whirlwind pursuit of birding fame.
Publishers Weekly
Environmental journalist Obmascik follows the 1998 Big Year's three main competitors.... Their drive to win propelled all three past the rarified count of 700 species seen, and the winner saw an extraordinary 745 species—a number that will probably never be equaled.... With a blend of humor and awe, Obmascik takes the reader into the heart of competitive birding, and in the process turns everyone into birders. Nancy Bent
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Big Year:
1. Talk about the personalities of the three characters—Sandy Komita, Al Levantin, and Greg Miller. What is it that drives each man to attempt The Big Year competition...and why their fierce desire to win it? Do you admire these men for their passion or raise your eyebrows at their fanaticism?
2. Talk about the physical dangers the men undergo, as well as the damage to their bodies ("warbler" and "binocular" neck)...even their poor dietary habits. Would you call this an "unhealthy" possession (physically or mentally)?
3. Mascik provides detailed explanations about birds, birding and the Big Year competition. Does his information enhance the book for you...is it interesting and informative? Or is it overly detailed...a distraction from an otherwise fast-paced narrative?
4. Is there a particular species—its habits and habitat—that caught your interest? Perhaps the ruby-throated hummingbird, the Baird sparrow, or Colima Warbler?
5. Talk about the different locales the men traveled to for their various bird sitings. Which would you have found the most difficult to endure...or which the most intriguing? Would you ever want to make any one of those treks?
6. What did you think of the"hokey pokey" (p. 151) or reference to the "Dukes of Hurl"? Did those bring a laugh? What other parts of the book did you find humorous?
7. Talk about the competition's ethical code, particularly the rarity of cheating. What impressed you the most about how the competitors adhered to the code of honor?
8. Were you a birder before you read this book? If so, what have you learned? If you weren't a birder before, does the book inspire you to take up the hobby?
9. Of the three characters, whom were you rooting for most? Did you have a premonition as to who would win...or did the author keep you guessing?
10. Have you seen the movie adaptation of The Big Year? If so, how does it compare with the book?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War
Tony Horwitz, 2011
Henry Holt & Co.
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780805091533
Summary
Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South.
Now, Midnight Rising portrays Brown's uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict.Brown, the descendant of New England Puritans, saw slavery as a sin against America's founding principles. Unlike most abolitionists, he was willing to take up arms, and in 1859 he prepared for battle at a hideout in Maryland, joined by his teenage daughter, three of his sons, and a guerrilla band that included former slaves and a dashing spy.
On October 17, the raiders seized Harpers Ferry, stunning the nation and prompting a counterattack led by Robert E. Lee. After Brown's capture, his defiant eloquence galvanized the North and appalled the South, which considered Brown a terrorist. The raid also helped elect Abraham Lincoln, who later began to fulfill Brown's dream with the Emancipation Proclamation, a measure he called "a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale."
Tony Horwitz's riveting book travels antebellum America to deliver both a taut historical drama and a telling portrait of a nation divided—a time that still resonates in ours. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 9, 1958
• Where—Washington, DC, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; M.A.
Columbia University
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize (Reporting); James
Aronson Award
• Currently—lives in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts
Tony Horwitz is an American journalist and writer. His works include Blue Latitudes (also titled Into the Blue), One for the Road, Confederates In The Attic, Baghdad Without A Map, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War.
Horwitz was born Anthony Lander Horwitz in Washington, DC, the son of Norman Harold Horwitz and Elinor Lander Horwitz, a writer of young adult and adult books. Horwitz is an alumnus of Sidwell Friends School, in Washington, DC, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa as a history major from Brown University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
He won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and 1994 James Aronson Award, for his stories about working conditions in low-wage America published in the Wall Street Journal, where he also worked as a foreign correspondent covering conflicts in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. He also worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker.
Horwitz married the Australian writer and fellow Pulitzer recipient Geraldine Brooks in France in 1984. After formerly dividing their time between homes in Waterford, Virginia and Sydney, Australia, they now live with their sons Nathaniel and Bizu in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Horwitz has given us a hard-driving narrative of one of America's most troubling historical figures: the fearsome John Brown, whose blood-soaked raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Va., in October 1859…helped to push the nation into the most devastating war it would ever endure.
Kevin Boyle - New York Times
Horwitz, an exceptionally skilled and accomplished journalist…here turns his hand to pure history with admirable results. Midnight Rising is smoothly written, thoroughly researched, places Brown within the context of his time and place, and treats him sensitively but scarcely adoringly…Without sentimentalizing him, Tony Horwitz has given [Brown] his due.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post
Horwitz’s skills are a good match for this enormously compelling character, and his well-paced narrative incorporates masterful sketches of Brown’s family, foot soldiers, financial backers, admirers and prosecutors.… The result is both page-turning and heartbreaking—a book to engage mind and soul.
Boston Globe
What do you call John Brown? Is he a terrorist or a freedom fighter?... Tony Horwitz settles upon the word insurgent—and the label seems just right, as does Horwitz’s book as a whole… Midnight Rising rolls through a series of indelible scenes… The book becomes a graceful narrative, ever engaging, with the reader allowed to connect Brown and his contemporaries to conflicts that continue to our day.
Seattle Times
Horwitz’s description of the little band of idealists and adventurers who signed on for Brown’s offensive—including five black men and two of Brown’s own sons—is both fascinating and touching. His careful recreation of the bloody events of October 16, 1859, the day of Brown’s disastrous raid on Harpers Ferry, is both suspenseful and heartwrenching.
Christian Science Monitor
In this engrossing history of John Brown’s 1859 slave-liberation raid on the Harper’s Ferry, Va., arsenal, bestselling author Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic) concentrates on action set against deftly sketched historical background and compelling characters rendered without overdone psychologizing. His vivid biographical portrait of Brown gives us an American original: a failed businessman and harsh Calvinist with a soft spot for the oppressed and a murderous animus against oppressors (even if sometimes, as at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas, his victims were unarmed). Brown’s raiders—a motley crew of his sons and various idealists, adventurers, freedmen, and fugitive slaves—come alive as a romantic, appealing bunch; their agonizing deaths give Horwitz’s excellent narrative of the raid and shootout a deep pathos. The author’s shrewd interpretation of Brown (similar to that of other scholars) makes him America’s great propagandist of his deed; after the raid ended in fiasco, he used his eloquent trial statements to transform himself in the public eye from madman and desperado to martyr and prophet—and a symbol who hardened both Northern and Southern militancy. But Horwitz smartly gives priority to the deeds themselves in this dramatic saga of an American white man who acted, rather than just talked, as if ending slavery mattered. 35 illus.; 2 maps.
Publishers Weekly
Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author, presents a gripping narrative of Brown and the raid on Harpers Ferry that in many ways set the stage for Southern secession and civil war. Horwitz brings all his gifts of character building and storytelling to Brown's rise and self-promotion as an instrument of a supposed God-ordained command to purge with blood the land of the sin of slavery.... Verdict: Horwitz's Brown did not die in vain. By recalling the drama that fired the imagination and fears of Brown's time, Midnight Rising calls readers to account for complacency about social injustices today. This is a book for our time. —Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
Library Journal
Horwitz’s potent prose delivers the facts of this bellwether incident in riveting fashion… It is an absorbing portrait of the often frustrated but passionately driven firebrand who successfully convinced a country of the shame of slavery and, to the South’s great regret, earned martyr status in the aftermath of his execution. Brown qualifies as America’s first important post-revolution terrorist… Horwitz brings events to life with almost cinematic clarity, and for American history and Civil War aficionados, Midnight Rising is required reading.
Bookpage
A crisply written but not entirely original retelling of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and historian Horwitz returns to the Civil War era...and John Brown's infamous raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia. The author depicts a morally upright abolitionist deeply committed to his cause but also well known for his "fixedness," a rigid stubbornness that could be a source of strength but was equally a source of weakness....Though the author's archival sleuthing pays off with a rich narrative,...[it] lacks deep historical analysis. Lucid and compelling but hardly groundbreaking.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Midnight Rising:
1. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called John Brown's raid a "misguided, wild and apparently insane" act. How was the raid viewed, initially, by Northerners and Southerners? How and why did the views of the Northerners' change? How does author Tony Horwitz view the raid?
2. How should we look at John Brown, today—as hero, provocateur, or terrorist? How does Tony Horwitz present him? How do you see him? Was he insane as many historians have claimed? Or was he sane, as many other historians have claimed?
3. Talk about the way in which Brown's parents and Calvinist upbringing shaped his views as an adult.
4. How would you describe Brown's temperament as portrayed in Midnight Rising? How did it affect his role as provider and father? What role did his temperament play during the three phases of the Harpers Ferry raid—planning, conduct, and outcome?
5. William Lloyd Garrison (see Question 1), a pacifist, believed that moral suasion could turn the South away from slavery. What was Brown's belief? What do you think? Was war inevitable, a necessary evil? Or could it (should it) have been avoided?
6. Prior to Harpers Ferry, Brown envisioned conducting raids to free slaves, retreating to the mountains, then conducting more raids to free more slaves. What was his intended goal? Why didn't he carry out those earlier raids?
7. In 1856, after a particularly murderous raid at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas, Brown rationalized his brutality by exclaiming, "God is my judge." He also said he and his sons "were justified under the circumstance." What do you think?
8. What mistakes were made before and during the Harpers Ferry raid that doomed its outcome? What do you think might have happened had Brown made it to the mountains instead of being captured?
9. After Brown was captured and hanged, Ralph Waldo Emerson called his death "as glorious as the Cross." Louisa May Alcott said that his "dying made death divine." Horwitz wonders whether Brown's intention all along was to die as a martyr. What do you think? If it had been his intention, were the 29 other deaths, during the raid or by hanging afterward, worth the price?
10. Horwitz is concerned that, "through the lens of 9/11," we might be tempted to view John Brown as a "long-bearded fundamentalist" and Harpers Ferry as an "al-Qaeda prequel." Is he right to worry? Can a link be made between the 19th-century actions of John Brown and 21st-century events?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Peter the Great: His Life and World
Robert K. Massie, 1980
Random House
928 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679645603
Summary
Winner, 1981 Pulitizer Prize
Against the monumental canvas of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and Russia unfolds the magnificent story of Peter the Great, crowned co-tsar at the age of ten.
Robert K. Massie delves deep into the life of this captivating historical figure, chronicling the pivotal events that shaped a boy into a legend—including his “incognito” travels in Europe, his unquenchable curiosity about Western ways, his obsession with the sea and establishment of the stupendous Russian navy, his creation of an unbeatable army, his transformation of Russia, and his relationships with those he loved most: Catherine, the robust yet gentle peasant, his loving mistress, wife, and successor; and Menshikov, the charming, bold, unscrupulous prince who rose to wealth and power through Peter’s friendship.
Impetuous and stubborn, generous and cruel, tender and unforgiving, a man of enormous energy and complexity, Peter the Great is brought fully to life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1929
• Where—Lexington, Kentucky, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; Oxford
University (Rhodes Scholar)
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—lives in Irvington, New York
Robert Kinloch Massie III is an American historian, author, Pulitzer Prize recipient. He has devoted much of his career to studying the House of Romanov, Russia's royal family from 1613-1917.Born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1929, Massie spent much of his youth in Nashville, Tennessee and currently resides in the village of Irvington, New York. He studied United States and modern European history at Yale and Oxford University, respectively, on a Rhodes Scholarship. Massie went to work as a journalist for Newsweek from 1959 to 1962 and then took a position at the Saturday Evening Post.
In 1969—before he and his family moved to France—Massie wrote and published his breakthrough book, Nicholas and Alexandra, a biography of the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra of Hesse. Massie's interest in the Imperial family was triggered by the birth of his son, Reverend and politician Robert Kinloch Massie IV, who was born with hemophilia—a hereditary disease that also afflicted Nicholas's son, Alexei. In 1971, the book was the basis of an Academy Award winning film of the same title. In 1995, in his book The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, Massie updated Nicholas and Alexandra with much newly-discovered information.
In 1975 Robert Massie and his then-wife Suzanne Massie chronicled their experiences as the parents of a hemophiliac child and the significant differences between the American and French health-care systems in their jointly-written book, Journey. Massie won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Peter the Great: His Life and World. This book inspired a 1986 NBC miniseries that won three Emmy Awards and starred Maximilian Schell, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave. In 2011 Massie published his biography, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (2011).
Massie was the president of the Authors Guild from 1987 to 1991, and he still serves as an ex officio council member. While president of the Guild, he famously called on authors to boycott any store refusing to carry Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. He is currently married to Deborah Karl. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Enthralling...as fascinating as any novel and more so than most.
New York Times Book Review
Written in a style that combines vigor, clarity, and sensitivity...should be the envy of historians and novelists alike.
Chicago Sun-Times
Fascinating...an absorbing book.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Urgently readable...the work of a master of narrative history.
Newsweek
Exceptional.
The New Yorker
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Peter the Great:
1. Describe Peter the Great as he is presented in Robert K. Massie's biogaphy. What kind of a man, and what kind of a ruler, was he? What qualities in him do you find admirable, even likable? What qualities do you find repugnant? Overall, was he a ruler with a vision, a cruel and violent dictator, or a combination of both? Did his means justify the ends?
2. Peter tortured his enemies to achieve political ends. Massie indicates that torture was also used routinely throughout a more "enlightened" Europe. Given today's ethos, and our revulsion against torture, is it possible to view it in a historical context? Can torture be condoned if used in a different era under a different ethical system?
3. What do you consider Peter's greatest accomplishments?
4. How does Massie present the differences between Russia and post-Renaissance Western Europe? In what areas did Russia lag behind...and why?
5. Talk about Peter's experiences in Amsterdam and England...and how they inspired him to bring changes to his country.
6. When Peter returned to Russia from Europe, he prohibited the wearing of beards, heavy boots, and long robes. Massie observes these habits were based on common sense. What does he mean?
7. Massie gives mixed reviews to the Westernization of Russia. Why, to this day, do Peter's actions to modernize Russia remain controversial? What are the competing viewpoints?
8. Why was Peter so intent on gaining access to the sea for his country?
9. Talk about the differences, and similarities, between Peter and Charles II of Sweden? What strategies did Peter employ that resulted in the defeat of Charles, who was considered a military genius. Is all fair in love and war?
10. Massie has said elsewhere that he believes in the "great man" theory of history: that turning points in history occur as a result of individuals, their vision, strength, and talent. Other historians believe that powerful forces outside of individuals—mass movements of populations, the spread of ideas, geography, and a land's natural wealth—are responsible for history's forward movement. What do you think?
11. What struck you most in this book? What have you learned about the history of Russia that you didn't know beforehand?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)