Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth
Hilary Spurling, 2010
Simon & Schuster
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416540434
Summary
She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in The Good Earth, an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she foresaw China’s future as a superpower, and she recognized the crucial importance for both countries of China’s building a relationship with the United States. As a teenager she had witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution, and as a young woman she narrowly escaped being killed in the deadly struggle between Chinese Nationalists and the newly formed Communist Party.
Pearl grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of years. She was the child of American missionaries, but she spoke Chinese before she learned English, and her friends were the children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted that she was Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the terrorist uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion forced her family to flee for their lives. It was the first of many desperate flights. Flood, famine, drought, bandits, and war formed the background of Pearl’s life in China. "Asia was the real, the actual world," she said, "and my own country became the dreamworld."
Pearl wrote about the realities of the only world she knew in The Good Earth. It was one of the last things she did before being finally forced out of China to settle for the first time in the United States. She was unknown and penniless with a failed marriage behind her, a disabled child to support, no prospects, and no way of telling that The Good Earth would sell tens of millions of copies. It transfixed a whole generation of readers just as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans would do more than half a century later. No Westerner had ever written anything like this before, and no Chinese had either.
Buck was the forerunner of a wave of Chinese Americans from Maxine Hong Kingston to Amy Tan. Until their books began coming out in the last few decades, her novels were unique in that they spoke for ordinary Asian people— "translating my parents to me," said Hong Kingston, "and giving me our ancestry and our habitation." As a phenomenally successful writer and civil-rights campaigner, Buck did more than anyone else in her lifetime to change Western perceptions of China. In a world with its eyes trained on China today, she has much to tell us about what lies behind its astonishing reawakening. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 25, 1940
• Raised—Clifton, Bristol, UK
• Education—University of Oxford
• Awards—Whitbread Book of the Year; Duff
Cooper Prize; Rose Mary Crawshay Prize
• Currently—lives in North London, England
Hilary Spurling, CBE, FRSL* is a British writer, known as a journalist and biographer. She won the Whitbread Prize for the second volume of her biography of Henri Matisse in January 2006. Pearl Buck in China was published in March 2010. (From Wikipedia.)
More
Born in 1940, Spurling spent her childhood years in Clifton, Bristol—a port city heavily bombed during World War II. "I loved the bangs and flashes," she says. "Children ran free, in packs and alone, in the streets and in the woods. And bombsites were wonderful playgrounds—ruined houses, façades ripped away."
Later, she attended University of Oxford, and while there married John Spurling (playwright, critic, novelist) in 1961.
After Oxford, the couple moved to Ladbroke Grove, where Hilary became the theater critic for Spectator magazine, a post she held until 1969. She herself claims to have been "the most dreadful, scathing, swingeing, destructive critic, a battleaxe." Her notorious reviews got her banned from various venues, including the Royal Court theater. Other reviewers, however, pledged to stay away in solidarity with Spurling, and the ban was eventually lifted.
In 1974 Spurling published her first biography—on Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose unconventional novels about the Edwardian gentry had been long-time favorites of Spurling. The first volume, Ivy When Young, was considered a stunning debut.
The second Compton-Burnett volume wasn't published till 1984; in the 10 intervening years, Spurling had three children and wrote the well-received A Handbook to Anthony Powell's Mustic of Time (a detailed guide and index to Powell's 12-volume work...see the LitLovers Reading Guide). She was also chosen to write Powell's official biography after his death in 2000, which she is still working on.
Her next big book was published in 1990—Paul Scott, a biography of the author of the Raj Quartet (which includes The Jewel in the Crown; see the LitLovers Reading Guide). Spurling considers Soctt's Quartet an "extraordinarily vivid description of the end of the empire, the cracking apart of India."
It was with her biography of Henri Matisse, however, that Spurling achieved greatest acclaim. The first volume, The Unknown Matisse, came out in 1998; the second volume, Matisse the Master, issued in 2005, won the Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year. (The two volumes took Spurling 15 years to complete.)
In 2010 Spurling published her biography of the first half of Pearl S. Buck's life—Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China (the US title is Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth).
When not under the pressure of publishing, the Spurlings spend time in the Greek mountain village of Arcadia where they have a house. There's is, according the Hilary's long-time publisher, "a good, generous marriage." (Author bio adapted from The Guardian, April 17, 2010.)
* Commander of the Order of the British Empire; Fellow of the Royal Literary Society
Book Reviews
Penetrating.... Ms. Spurling’s book isn’t a full-dress biography. (For that, there’s Peter Conn’s sturdy Pearl S. Buck: a Cultural Biography, published in 1996.) It focuses instead on Buck’s first four decades, her formative years as a woman and as a writer. It’s a good story, easily as curious as any Buck herself put to paper. Ms. Spurling writes well, and with real feeling.... The resulting portrait is a complicated one, but it has an absorbing glow.... It's a good story, easily as curious as any Buck herself put to paper.
Dwight Garner - New York Times Book Review
This elegant, richly researched work is at once a portrait of a remarkable woman ahead of her time, an evocation of China between the wars, and a meditation on how the secrets and griefs of childhood can shape a writer…Spurling's biography is a compelling tribute to the woman who first focused American attention on [China].
Leslie T. Chang - Washington Post
Pearl Buck in China is one of those exceedingly rare biographies where the reader senses the most powerful connection between author and subject, enabling remarkably sensitive understanding and insight.
San Francisco Chronicle
From its wonderful opening sentence to its poignant close, this is a superb biography. Spurling has brought her characters to robust life. Readers will learn what they need to know about China in that tumultuous time and place at the beginning of the 20th century.
Peter Conn - Professor, University of Pennsylvania
(Starred review.) Weaving a colorful tapestry of Pearl Buck's life (1892–1973) with strands of Chinese history and literature, Spurling, winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize for Matisse the Master—vividly correlates Buck's experiences of China's turbulent times to her novels. Growing up in a missionary family in China, Buck lived through the upheavals of the Boxer Rebellion and China's civil war, two marriages, and a daughter with a degenerative disease; her closeup view of the horrors of China's extreme rural poverty made her an American literary celebrity as well as a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize winner when she enshrined her observations of China in the Good Earth trilogy. Back in the United States, having opened America's eyes to China, Buck worked to repeal America's discriminatory laws against the Chinese and established an adoption agency for minority and mixed race children. For her support of racial equality, Buck was blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer even as her books were banned in Communist China for spreading reactionary, imperialist lies; Spurling'sfast-paced and compassionate portrait of a writer who described the truth before her eyes without ideological bias, whose personal life was as tumultuous as the times she lived in, will grip readers who, unlike Spurling, didn't grow up reading Buck's work.
Publishers Weekly
[C]ritics reading Pearl Buck in Chinamostly used their articles as occasions to celebrate the subject rather than the biography.... Still, if reviewers were not effusive in their praise, they had few complaints about Spurling's book and clearly admired her thorough research and elegant prose.
Bookmarks Magazine
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 Pearl Buck in China:
1. What do you think of Pearl Buck's parents? How was it, for instance, that women had no souls, according to his beliefs?
2. Why, emerging from childhood, had Pearl developed such an abiding faith in the power of fiction? How might her childhood experiences have drawn her to read—and re-read—Charles Dickens. What would she have found so appealing in Dickens?
3. Why was Buck critical of the missionary zeal of the Christians who, like her father, worked in China? What did she observe in their treatment of the Chinese?
4. Buck's light-colored hair and gray-green eyes made her a stand-out in China. Her appearance was shocking to Chinese. How would you react to the constant stares—always made to feel different, even freakish? Nonetheless, despite the fact that she was caucasian, she still felt more comfortable in China than in the U.S. Why?
5. Talk about Pearl's marriage to John Lossing Buck. What was the initial attraction and what were the stress points? What were the reasons for its ultimate failure?
6. What do you make of Buck's decision to take her daughter to New Jersey—and leave her there while she returned to Nanjing?
7. In what way do Pearl Buck's experiences of China correlate to her novels?
8. What are the qualities, according to Spurling, that make Pearl Buck such a stirring writer? If you have read works by Buck, how would you describe her qualities as a writer?
9. Talk about the descriptions of Chinese rural poverty. What observations struck you most powerfullly?
10. What was America's racial attitudes toward the Chinese, and how were those attitudes put into practice in the U.S.? What was Buck's role in challenging a discriminatory legal system?
11. Describe China's patriarchal culture, especially how wives were treated, as well as the attitudes regarding female babies. Does that cultural bent exist today?
12. What happened to Buck's career, and life, after she moved back to the U.S., especially her involvement with Theodore Harris? What does Spurling mean when she says that Buck began writing on an "industrial scale"?
13. How was Buck's treated in the U.S. at the height of the anti-communist scare? How did the Chinese also feel about Buck? What's the irony here?
14. What did you learn from this book about Chinese culture and about Pearl S. Buck? Does this biography inspire you to read any..or more...of her books?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
A Place to Stand
Jimmy Santiago Baca, 2001
Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802139085
Summary
Jimmy Santiago Baca's harrowing, brilliant memoir of his life before, during, and immediately after the years he spent in a maximum-security prison garnered tremendous critical acclaim and went on to win the prestigious 2001 International Prize. Long considered one of the best poets in America today, Baca was illiterate at the age of twenty-one and facing five to ten years behind bars for selling drugs.
A Place to Stand is the remarkable tale of how he emerged after his years in the penitentiary—much of it spent in isolation—with the ability to read and a passion for writing poetry. A vivid portrait of life inside a maximum-security prison and an affirmation of one man's spirit in overcoming the most brutal adversity, A Place to Stand offers proof that hope exists even in the most desperate of lives. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 2, 1952
• Where—Sante Fe, New Mexico, USA
• Education—B.A., Ph.D., University of New Mexico
• Awards—American Book Award, Pushcart Prize, International
Hispanic Heritage Award, International Award.
• Currently—lives in southwestern USA
Born in New Mexico of Indio-Mexican descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was raised first by his grandmother and later sent to an orphanage. A runaway at age 13, it was after Baca was sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison that he began to turn his life around: he learned to read and write and unearthed a voracious passion for poetry.
During a fateful conflict with another inmate, Jimmy was shaken by the voices of poets Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca, and made a choice that would alter his destiny. Instead of becoming a hardened criminal, he emerged from prison a writer. Baca sent three of his poems to Denise Levertov, the poetry editor of Mother Jones. The poems were published and became part of Immigrants in Our Own Land, published in 1979, the year he was released from prison.
He earned his GED later that same year. He is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award and for his memoir, A Place to Stand, the prestigious International Award. In 2006 he won the Cornelius P. Turner Award. The national award recognizes one GED graduate a year who has made outstanding contributions to society in education, justice, health, public service and social welfare.
Baca has devoted his post-prison life to writing and teaching others who are overcoming hardship. His themes include American Southwest barrios, addiction, injustice, education, community, love and beyond. He has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries, and universities throughout the country.
In 2005 he created Cedar Tree Inc., a nonprofit foundation that works to give people of all walks of life the opportunity to become educated and improve their lives. Cedar Tree provides free instruction, books, writing material and scholarships. Cedar Tree has an ongoing writing workshop in the Albuquerque Women's Prison and at the South Valley Community Center. Cedar Tree also has an Internship program that provides live-in writing scholarships at Wind River Ranch, and in the south valley of Albuquerque. The program allows students, writers and poets the opportunity to write, attend poetry readings, conduct writing workshops, and work on documentary film production.
Radio/TV Appearances
National Public Radio, Good Morning America, National Discovery Channel, PBS Language of Life with Bill Moyers, CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood.
Special Projects
Founded Black Mesa Enterprises, a grassroots entertainment cooperative that modeled constructive patterns of living to troubled and at-risk teenagers and focused on respect of self and others. Members abided by strict rules regarding responsible behavior and avoidance of drugs, alcohol and violence, while participating in the business by writing, performing and recording rap and poetry, designing and selling T-shirts, promoting literacy with free books.
Facilitated an intensive writing workshop for unemployed steelworkers in Chicago, and the compilation of In the Heat, an anthology of their poetry, which was published by Cedar Hill Publications to acclaim.
Provided free readings and workshops at countless elementary, junior high and high schools, colleges, universities, reservations, barrio community centers, white ghettos and housing projects from coast to coast. Tutored many kids in reading and writing, arranged readings for them at local bookstores, mentored and motivated children and young adults in writing, publishing and constructive living. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Elegant and gripping.... The velocity of Baca's transformation through literature is breathtaking.
Los Angeles Times
A wild ride through poverty and alcoholism, abandonment, and orphanage scenes from Dickens.... A Place to Stand is a hell of a book, quite literally. You won't soon forget it.
San Diego Union-Tribune
A Place to Stand is an astonishing narrative that affirms the triumph of the human spirit.... A benchmark of Southwestern prose.
Arizona Daily Star
At once brave and heartbreaking.... A thunderous artifact...by a poet whose voice, brutal and tender, is unique in America.
Nation
Worth reading from both a literary and a social perspective, this book is recommended for all public and academic libraries. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
While readers may find Baca's poetry more dazzling than this prose memoir about how he became a poet, the author still manages to capture both the reader's interest and sympathies. Baca traverses his life, starting with his childhood in rural New Mexico where both parents essentially abandoned him his adolescence in "juvee" halls and his days as a drug dealer. The story leads up to an account of five years in a maximum-security prison in Arizona, and the unusual personal transformation that occurs there through his learning to read and write; eventually, he discovers his poetic voice. The text is structured like a conversion narrative in which Baca's past symbolizes all that is unhealthy and his poetry-oriented future is filled with the hope and optimism that come from discovering something divine in the midst of darkness. The darkness is often literal, as when Baca is describing his lengthy solitary confinements. He also recounts the intricacies of prison politics, in which failure to gain respect and alliances forged with the wrong people can mean death. Oddly, certain story lines are simply dropped along the way, such as his charge that the prison was lacing his food with strong psychoactive drugs. It is too bad that Baca's prose is frequently flat ("Poetry enhanced my self-respect. It provided me with a path for exploring possibilities for life's enrichment that I follow to this day"), especially when reflecting upon abstract topics, since the content of his story is so interesting and his poetry simply shines. Forecast: Baca has won a Pushcart Prize, among other awards, including his title as a one-time champion of the International Poetry Slam.
Publishers Weekly
Poetry seems antithetical to the poverty, racism, and violence that wracked Baca's tragic youth, but the power of language is what kept him alive and sane while he served hard time in a hellish federal prison. Now a prizewinning poet and screenwriter, Baca, born in New Mexico in 1952, was abandoned by his parents and put in an orphanage at age seven. He learned to fight but not to read and, in spite of good intentions, ran into nothing but trouble. Baca chronicles his brutal experiences with riveting exactitude and remarkable evenhandedness. An unwilling participant in the horrific warfare that rages within prison walls and a rebel who refused to be broken by a vicious and corrupt system, Baca taught himself to read and write, awoke to the voice of the soul, and converted "doing time" into a profoundly spiritual pursuit. Poetry became a lifeline, and Baca's harrowing story will stand among the world's most moving testimonies to the profound value of literature.
Library Journal
A mercifully brief memoir of the Pushcart Prize—and American Book Award-winning Hispanic poet's criminal past, and his agonizingly slow discovery of the redemptive power of writing while serving a prison term. Born in New Mexico as the third child of an alcoholic father and philandering mother, Baca (Black Mesa Poems) was handed off at seven to his grandparents when his father disappeared and his mother ran off with another man-only to find himself in an orphanage when his grandfather died shortly thereafter. Early efforts at schooling failed, and the marginally literate Baca ran away and experimented with criminal behavior. Without any strong role models, fruitful employment, or defenses against anti-Hispanic bigotry, Baca, unusually strong for his youth, developed a vicious proficiency at streetfighting and deliberately resisted attempts by occasional benefactors to set him straight. When he discovered that his first lover was unfaithful to him, Baca drifted to California, where he was fired from his job as an unlicensed plumber after he refused the sexual advances of a housewife. In Arizona, a life as a drug dealer soon landed him a five-year sentence in Florence State Prison—an overcrowded, maximum-security facility where Baca turned to books as an escape and began writing angry, bitterly ironic poetry to purge himself of emotional turmoil. "I am Healing Earthquakes," he writes in one of his early poems, "a man awakening to the day with a place to stand / And ground to defend." After he was released, his attempts at reaching a reconciliation with surviving family members ended in horror when a brother died from alcoholism and his stepfather murdered his mother and then killed himself. Baca finally married, clinging to the love of his wife and his poetry "to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the hopeless, of which I am one." A brutally unflinching look back at a dead-end youth that became a crucible for vivid and vital art.
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 A Place to Stand:
1. To what extent was Jimmy Santiago Baca's youth and young adulthood a result of a broken family? What kind of example does Jimmy's story offer for the nurture vs. nature argument?
2. How did the childcare and legal system fail Jimmy? To what degree was he...or was he not...responsible for his actions?
3. When he headed to prison at the age of 21, was there any reason to think he would become anything other than a hardened criminal? Were there hints that there might be another outcome for Jimmy?
4. Talk about Jimmy's steps toward redemption? What was the turning point or points? Who helped him along the way? What kind of qualities within Jimmy himself made the difference?
5. Jimmy pulls himself back from killing an inmate when he hears "the voices of Neruda and Lorca...praising life as sacred and challenging me: How can you kill and still be a poet?" Comment on that passage.
5. In what way did reading literature help Jimmy begin to heal? Same question for Jimmy's writing—how did it help him?
6. Talk about one of Jimmy's early poems: "I am Healing Earthquakes," in which he writes, "a man awakening to the day with a place to stand / And ground to defend." What is the significance of those lines?
6. In a larger sense, how does the written word have the power to remake the personal world? In your own experience, have you ever been moved deeply by reading poetry or prose—or by the process of your own writing—to rethink the way you live your life?
7. To what extent has this memoir opened your eyes to life in prison? What kind of life do prisoners endure? Is there a better system? If so, what would it be?
8. After his release, Jimmy attempted to reconcile with his family, only to witness more horror. How much can one individual endure? (This may or may not be a rhetorical question...it's up to you.)
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Andrea Goldsmith, 2002
Allen & Unwin Publishers
300 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781741144697
Summary
There are thieves who prosper. But are there thefts which can never be forgiven?
The Prosperous Thief covers the turbulent sweep of the twentieth century. Rich in ideas and emotions, it is an epic story of the entwined lives of two vastly different families spanning three continents.
Alice Lewin survived the war as a young child. After decades of burying her past she decides to visit the Kindertransport archive, where she learns of the existence of a possible relative, Henry Lewin. She travels to Australia to hear his story, but it's a story that she's in no way prepared to hear.
The truth has profound ramifications and both Alice's son, Raphe, and Henry's daughter, Laura, struggle to deal with their connected lives. But just as the thefts of the Second World War define their past, so deception threatens their future.
From the horrors of war to the fiery landscape of one of the world's most active volcanoes, this compelling novel generates its own unsettling shadows. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 24, 1950
• Where—Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
• Currently—lives in Melbourne
Andrea Goldsmith born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, was trained as a speech pathologist and spent several years working with children. From 1987, she has taught creative writing at Deakin University. The Prosperous Thief, short-listed for the 2003 Miles Franklin award, is Goldsmith's 5th novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
With the sensuous pace of a poet, she unravels an epic tale of two families, spanning the world of pre-war Berlin to late-20th century Melbourne, and counting the cost of the horror from both sides of the moral fence. It is a rare novel; endowed with intelligence and beauty. Canberra Times, Ian McFarlane 'this is a novel that seeks to provoke questions rather than provide answers; a novel about theft and appropriation in myriad disguises as much as it is an attempt to understand the Holocaust's dark shadow.
Bron Sibree - Brisbane Courier Mail (Australia)
An epic tale.... A rare novel; endowed with intelligence and beauty.
Canberra Times (Australia)
Goldsmith's gripping Holocaust epic begins with two German children: Heinrik Heck, born poor in 1910, and Alice Lewin, who is six when Kristallnacht shatters her elegant secular Jewish family. As an army deserter in 1945, Heinrick comes across Martin, a typhoid-stricken concentration camp survivor, and makes a desperate choice. "There's his own future to consider, he tells himself as he squats down and lays his hands one each side of Martin's head. He twists." Martin is Alice's father; Heinrik, having killed Martin, takes part of Martin's identity and reinvents himself as Henry Lewin, a Jew, and starts a new life in Australia. Alice, saved by the Kindertransport, lands in California, marries a non-Jew and erases the un-American lilt in her voice. But her son, Raphe, is obsessed with the Jewish grandfather with whom he shares a passion for volcanoes. His urging sends Alice to Australia, where she confronts Henry Lewin. Henry dies; Alice dies. Raphe, guardian of the truth, goes to Australia with such rage inside him, it seems he might murder Henry's daughter. Despite a melodramatic ending on the rim of a volcano and a few lapses in craft and language ("loathe" for "loath"), Australian Goldsmith's fifth novel has undeniable power.
Publishers Weekly
A riveting tale that takes on every piety about the Holocaust and holds it up to heartbreaking and unflinching scrutiny. It may technically be about the Holocaust, but at its heart, this is about what happens when a cataclysmic event has been too often narrated and too often dramatized on television and in films. Can an individual feel the burden of history? Should history be reduced to memory? At the center of this story is Henry, an impoverished, disenfranchised German thief, for whom the war is a godsend, and the Lewin family, cultured, educated and Jewish, and unlike Henry, unable to believe that Germany would turn its back on its most accomplished citizens. The German thief steals the identity of the Jewish family, and after the war, he builds a full, happy life in Australia—his son is an observant Jew, his daughter a worker for human rights. When members of the Lewin family come to Australia to confront the thief and his children, everyone is made to consider what good knowledge actually does in the world—how does knowing the truth of anyone's experience change one's own? Any account of the plot cannot give a sense of the story's beauty. Goldsmith's feeling for the subtleties and contradictions of individual characters evoke the stylized, layered sentences of Henry James, even Tolstoy. This is all compulsively readable, almost hypnotic in its ability to draw the reader in. A superbly crafted novel that's less interested in the historical events of the Holocaust than the ways in which the late-20th century inherited and struggled with its multiple legacies.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Prosperous Thief:
1. Heini does what he must to survive. Under such duress, how forgivable is his crime? Does the fact that he loves his wife and children—and saves them—absolve him of guilt? Is he a bad person?
2. Andrea Goldsmith has said in an interview that she sees Alice as the "fulcrum of the novel." In other words, the novel revolves around her character. Do you agree? If so, in what ways. Or do see another character as the fulcrum?
3. Goldsmith has also said that Heini is not the only thief in the novel. She points to Raphe, who appropriates his grandfather's life to fill the gaps in his own life. She also mentions Nell, a film maker, as a very modern "opportunistic thief." Do you agree with her assessments.
4. What do you make of Raphe's fascination with volcanoes? Metaphorically, volcanoes possess dangerous, undpredictable undercurrents, like like itself.
5. Talk about the irony of Laura's politics, championing the cause of oppressed people. Do her actions atone for her father's crimes—even without her full knowledge of what his sins were? Should Laura ever be told the truth? What do you make of Laura's brother, Daniel?
6. The Prosperous Thief contemplates philosophical yet deeply personal issues—all of which can make for excellent discussions: does the long arm of guilt extend from one generation to another? Is the modern concept of victimhood justified? Does the pursuit of revenge yield justice? How does the novel present those ideas—and how do you respond to them?
7. Some believe the novel falls a little flat when moving to modern times; in particular, the characters seem less well-developed or convincing. Do you agree or disagree?
8. Would you say the ending is happy or tragic? For whom?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Conversation: How Black Men and Women Can Build Loving, Trusting Relationships
Harper Hill, 2009
Penguin USA
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781592405787
Summary
Only 34 percent of African-American children today are raised in two-parent households, a sharp contrast to 1966, when 85 percent of black children were raised by two parents.
In provocative but heartfelt words, Hill Harper takes on these urgent challenges, bringing a variety of issues out of the shadows. In The Conversation, Harper speaks to women and men with clear-eyed perspective, covering topics such as:
- The roots of the breakdown in the black family
- The myth that there are no mature, single, black male professionals
- What women can do to alleviate the "heaviness" they sometimes attach to dating
- What men can do to break the cycle of being a player
- The difference between sex and intimacy
- Bridging the communication gap
- Self-worth and net worth, and why you should never settle for an unworthy partner
Capturing the conversations Harper and his friends frequently have, this book is destined to be one of Harper's most healing contributions. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Francis Harper
• Birth—May 17, 1966
• Where—Iowa City, Iowa, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; J.D. and M.P.A., Harvard
University
• Currently—N/A
Hill Harper is an American film, television and stage actor, as well as bestselling author.
Harper was born in Iowa City, Iowa, the son of Harry Harper, a psychiatrist, and Marilyn Hill, one of the first black practicing anesthesiologists in the United States. Acting since the age of 7, Harper has told of stories in which his mother had to pour water on him just to wake him up. He said he was and still is a hard sleeper.
Harper graduated from Brown University and also graduated with a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a Master of Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Govern-ment at Harvard University. During his years at Harvard, he was a full-time member of Boston's Black Folks Theater Company, one of the oldest and most acclaimed black theater troupes in the country.
He moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting, adopting the name "Hill" as tribute to both his maternal and paternal ancestors. He broke into both film and television in 1993, doing recurring work on the Fox series Married...with Children and making his film debut in the short Confessions of a Dog. His best-known role to date is that of coroner-turned-crime-scene-investigator Sheldon Hawkes on the American TV show CSI: NY.
Harper endorsed the 10,000 Bookbags back to school backpack campaign to help local disadvantaged children with Urban Change Ministries founder Pastor Jay Cameron of the Life Center and R&B singer Ginuwine.
He is also the bestselling author of Letters to a Young Brother (2006) Letters to a Young Sister (2008), and The Conversation (2009). (Bio adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Hill Harper trades solving crimes on-screen for a new mission: fixing relationship drama.
Essence
Hill Harper, the author of this book, wrote the bestseller Letters to a Young Brother, which won two NAACP awards and was named a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. Now, in his book for adults, he addresses the growing crisis in African-American relationships. In 1966, 85 percent of black children were raised by two parents; today only 34 percent are raised in two-parent households. Harper does not wallow in the sobering ramifications of that statistic; he attacks the problems at its roots. He writes frankly about racial myths that reinforce cynical dating attitudes among black men and women, and explains in detail how they can be neutralized. The Conversation is no bland nostrum; Harper offers specific, real-world responses to problems that African-American couples experience all too often.
Barnes & Noble Reviews
Hill's work presents a light, insightful, and accessible user's manual for African American men and women to better understand that which keeps us apart (and hopefully what can bring us closer together).
Wearerespectablenegroes.blogspot.com
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 Conversation:
1. What does Harper Hill mean when he says that he views his book as a "dialogue across the barricades that men and women have erected to protect themselves from each other"? To what kind of barricades is he referring? Have you "erected barricades" in your own life...or know others who have?
2. With topics such as "Dating a divorcé" and "Dating with kids,"is this book simply another dating how-to book? If so, in what way...and if not, how is it different?
3. Reading it, did you have the sense that it was aimed more toward men ... or women? Or do you feel Hill directs his message equally to both genders?
4. Do you agree with Hill's assessment when he writes this, in the following passage, about relationships between men and women:
We are growing jaded, cynical, tired, and world-weary before our time. We are expecting less and demanding less, and those lower expectations are making us unfulfilled and taking us farther from each other.
5. Hill wonders if men and women consider themselves friends. He writes that...
despite all the emphatic "I love men" and "I love women" declarations—[I wonder] whether men and women really even liked each other at all.
What do you think—do men and women like each other? How does "liking" differ from "loving"? How important is it to "like" your partner?
6. Do you agree or disagree with Hill's assertion that, when Black men don't live up to their responsibilities in a relationship—with women or children, they are not held accountable? Is that a fair statement?
7. Where does Hill think the roots of the problems lie when it comes to creating and sustaining stable, loving relationships?
8. Overall, what do you think of The Conversation? Does Hill cover new ground or say things that have been said before? Does he offer new insights into issues? Does Hill offer viable solutions to the problems he considers...or is his book basically a "scold"? Is this book essential reading for men and women?
9. Does Hill's book speak to you, personally? Does it make you reflect on your own life experiences?
10. Do you notice any recent societal trends that might change—either by improving or exacerbating—the issues that concern Hill?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Ivan Doig, 1979
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780156899826
Summary
Memoir. This work introduced a major modern author to the reading public. Ivan Doig grew up along the rugged rims of the Rocky Mountains in Montana with his father, Charlie, and his grandmother, Bessie Ringer. His life was formed among the sheepherders and characters of small-town saloons and valley ranches as he wandered beside his restless father. The prose of this memoir is as resonant of the landscape of the American West as it is of those moments in memory which determine our lives.
What Doig deciphers from his past is not only a sense of the land and how it shapes us, but also of our inextricable connection to those who shape our values in the search for intimacy, independence, love and family. This magnificently told story is at once especially American and quietly universal in its ability to awaken a longing for an explicable past. (From the author's website.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 27, 1939
• Where—White Sulphur Springs, Montana, USA
• Death—April 9, 2015
• Where—Seattle, Washington
• Education—B.A., M.A., Northwestern University; Ph.D., University of Washington
Ivan Doig was born in Montana to a family of home-steaders and ranch hands. After the death of his mother Berneta, on his sixth birthday, he was raised by his father Charles "Charlie" Doig and his grandmother Elizabeth "Bessie" Ringer. After several stints on ranches, they moved to Dupuyer, Pondera County, Montana in the north to herd sheep close to the Rocky Mountain front.
After his graduation from Valier high school, Doig attended Northwestern University, where he received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in journalism. He later earned a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Washington, writing his dissertation about John J. McGilvra (1827-1903). He now lives with his wife Carol Doig, nee Muller, a university professor of English, in Seattle, Washington.
Before he became a novelist, Doig wrote for newspapers and magazines as a free-lancer and worked for the United States Forest Service. He has also published two memoirs—This House of Sky (1979) and Heart Earth (1993).
Much of his fiction (more than 10 novels) is set in the Montana country of his youth. His major theme is family life in the past, mixing personal memory and regional history. As the western landscape and people play an important role in his fiction, he has been hailed as the new dean of western literature, a worthy successor to Wallace Stegner. (From Wikipedia.)
Extras
His own words:
• Taking apart a career in such summary sentences always seems to me like dissecting a frog—some of the life inevitably goes out of it—and so I think the more pertinent Ivan Doig for you, Reader, is the red-headed only child, son of ranch hand Charlie Doig and ranch cook Berneta Ringer Doig (who died of her lifelong asthma on my sixth birthday), who in his junior year of high school (Valier, Montana; my class of 1957 had 21 members) made up his mind to be a writer of some kind.
• No one is likely to confuse my writing style with that of Charlotte Bronte, but when that impassioned parson’s daughter lifted her pen from Jane Eyre and bequeathed us the most intriguing of plot summaries—"Reader, I married him"—she also was subliminally saying what any novelist ... must croon to those of you with your eyes on our pages: "Reader, my story is flirting with you; please love it back."
• One last word about the setting of my work, the American West. I don’t think of myself as a "Western" writer. To me, language—the substance on the page, that poetry under the prose—is the ultimate "region," the true home, for a writer. Specific geographies, but galaxies of imaginative expression —we’ve seen them both exist in William Faulkner’s postage stamp-size Yoknapatawpha County, and in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s nowhere village of Macondo, dreaming in its hundred years of solitude. If I have any creed that I wish you as readers, necessary accomplices in this flirtatious ceremony of writing and reading, will take with you from my pages, it’d be this belief of mine that writers of caliber can ground their work in specific land and lingo and yet be writing of that larger country: life. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
(Preinternet books have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
(Audio version.) This is the endearing story of a Montana man's reflections of growing up during a tumultuous, yet enlightening, time in history when life was slower, the landscape was environmentally protected, neighbors more supportive, and a boy's imagination could flourish. Doig describes in detail his mother and father's devotion for him and each other, and paints vivid portraits of a tightly knit family living in a rugged terrain and struggling for survival. After his mother's death, times got tougher, and Doig's portrayal of his dad's difficulties are touching. Poetic interludes are charming and contrast interestingly with Doig's portrayal of a wild and rugged Montana and its curious inhabitants. This unusual and beautifully expressed autobiography is a stunning work of art.
AudioFile
Discussion Questions
1. Doig has criticized much of the fiction that has arisen from the cowboy myth. In most of these formulaic stories, the hero is strong and predictably invincible against the enemy, be they forces of nature or forces of evil. How does Charlie Doig defy our stereotypical notions about the Western hero? How do his struggles raise him above the standard masculinity of the common Western man?
2. Describe how Doig's realistic sense of place broadens when he describes town life in Montana and the characters he and his father encountered at the Stockman Bar. Why are these trips to the Stockman so important to Charlie?
3. Charlie once tells Ivan, "Scotchmen and coyotes was the only ones that could live in the Basin, and pretty damn soon the coyotes starved out." Do these words explain why Charlie is able to survive his tenuous existence? How does he cope with the death of his first wife and the divorce of his second?
4. The discord between Charlie and Ruth brings for Ivan a mix of "apprehension and interestedness." Contrast Ruth with Berneta, and explore why Ivan might view his second mother in the way that he does.
5. Why does Doig call the reunion of Charlie and Bessie Ringer a "truce" and their relationship an "alliance"? Trace the development of Charlie and Bessie's relationship from the time of Charlie's divorce up until Charlie's death. How does it change? How does it stay the same?
6. Discuss the scene in which Ivan tells his father he is going to leave Montana for good. What makes it so poignant? Does Charlie understand his son's ambitions, or does he merely accept them? Does Ivan's decision to leave simply reinforce the idea of "absence across distance" for Charlie, an absence he has reluctantly grown accustomed to?
7. Bessie Ringer emerges from a generation of women still reeling under the influence of what feminist critics call "The Cult of True Womanhood," whose values (purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity) were often misunderstood and thus misapplied. Does Bessie, in some sense, break free from the rigid expectations for women of her time? Describe her personality and compare it to some of our classical notions of women on the plains.
8. In "North," Charlie, Bessie, and Ivan fight to save their sheep from an attack of ticks and a subsequent storm, which sends the herd bawling toward a steep precipice. Discuss the artistic elements of this scene.
9. Study Bessie's language patterns. Find instances of the humorous, often proverbial words that add spice to the memoir, making her come alive as a character. Is she, in some simple way, a mentor to Ivan with regards to the "mystery and meaning in the world around him?" Contrast Ivan's book learning with her more practical wisdom.
10. The vaulted symmetry in the mountain peaks, the "walls of high country," and the windswept floor where shadows accent deep valleys, all these provide the dimensions in the "house of sky" which would become part of Doig's heart and soul. How does the landscape shape Doig's recollective voice?
(Questions courtesy of the author's website.)
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