The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Bill Bryson, 2006
Random House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780767919371
Summary
Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century—1951—in the middle of the United States—Des Moines, Iowa—in the middle of the largest generation in American history—the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)—in his head—as "The Thunderbolt Kid."
Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality—a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and of his mother,whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home. The many readers of Bill Bryson’s earlier classic, A Walk in the Woods, will greet the reappearance in these pages of the immortal Stephen Katz, seen hijacking literally boxcar loads of beer. He is joined in the Bryson gallery of immortal characters by the demonically clever Willoughby brothers, who apply their scientific skills and can-do attitude to gleefully destructive ends.
Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect observations, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is as wondrous a book as Bill Bryson has ever written. It will enchant anyone who has ever been young. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 8 1951
• Where—Des Moines, Iowa
• Education—B.A., Drake University
• Awards—Order of the British Empire, 2006; James Joyce
Award of the Literary and Historical Society of University
College of Dublin, 2007
• Currently—lives in England
William McGuire "Bill" Bryson is a best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and on science. Born an American, he was a resident of North Yorkshire, UK, for most of his professional life before moving back to the US in 1995. In 2003 Bryson moved back to the UK, living in Norfolk, and was appointed Chancellor of Durham University.
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Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, the son of William and Mary Bryson. He has an older brother, Michael, and a sister, Mary Jane Elizabeth.
He was educated at Drake University but dropped out in 1972, deciding to instead backpack around Europe for four months. He returned to Europe the following year with a high school friend, the pseudonymous Stephen Katz. Some of his experiences from this trip are relived as flashbacks in Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe, which documents a similar journey Bryson made twenty years later.
Move to UK
Bryson decided to stay in England after landing a job working in a psychiatric hospital—the now defunct Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water, Surrey. He met a nurse there named Cynthia, whom he married, and they moved to the USA in 1975 so Bryson could complete his college degree. In 1977, they settled in the UK, where they remained until 1995.
Living in North Yorkshire and mainly working as a journalist, Bryson eventually became chief copy editor of the business section of The Times, and then deputy national news editor of the business section of The Independent. He left journalism in 1987, three years after the birth of his third child. Still living in Kirkby Malham, North Yorkshire, Bryson started writing independently and in 1990 their fourth and final child, Sam, was born.
Writings
In 1995, Bryson returned to the United States to live in Hanover, New Hampshire, for some years, the stories of which feature in his book I'm A Stranger Here Myself, alternatively titled Notes from a Big Country in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. During his time in the United States, Bryson decided to walk the Appalachian Trail with his friend Stephen Katz (a pseudonym), about which he wrote the book A Walk in the Woods. In 2003 the Brysons and their four children returned to the UK, and now live in Norfolk.
Also in 2003, in conjunction with World Book Day, voters in the United Kingdom chose Bryson's book Notes from a Small Island as that which best sums up British identity and the state of the nation. In the same year, he was appointed a Commissioner for English Heritage.
In 2004, Bryson won the prestigious Aventis Prize for best general science book with A Short History of Nearly Everything. This 500-page popular literature piece explores not only the histories and current statuses of the sciences, but also reveals their humble and often humorous beginnings. Although one "top scientist" is alleged to have jokingly described the book as "annoyingly free of mistakes", Bryson himself makes no such claim, and a list of nine reported errors in the book is available online, identifying the chapter in which each appears but with no page or line references. In 2005, the book won the EU Descartes Prize for science communication.
Bryson has also written two popular works on the history of the English language — Mother Tongue and Made in America — and, more recently, an update of his guide to usage, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words (published in its first edition as The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words in 1983). These books were popularly acclaimed and well-reviewed, though they received some criticism claiming that they contained factual errors, urban myths and folk etymologies.
Honors
In 2005, Bryson was appointed Chancellor of Durham University, succeeding the late Sir Peter Ustinov, and has been particularly active with student activities, even appearing in a Durham student film (the sequel to The Assassinator) and promoting litter picks in the city. He had praised Durham as "a perfect little city" in Notes from a Small Island. He has also been awarded honorary degrees by numerous universities, including Bournemouth University and in April 2002 the Open University.
In 2006, Frank Cownie, the mayor of Des Moines, awarded Bryson the key to the city and announced that 21 October 2006 would be known as "Bill Bryson, The Thunderbolt Kid, Day."
In November 2006, Bryson interviewed the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair on the state of science and education.
On 13 December 2006, Bryson was awarded an honorary OBE for his contribution to literature. The following year, he was awarded the James Joyce Award of the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin.
In January 2007, Bryson was the Schwartz Visiting Fellow of the Pomfret School in Connecticut.
In May 2007, he became the President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. His first area focus in this role was the establishment of an anti-littering campaign across England. He discussed the future of the countryside with Richard Mabey, Sue Clifford, Nicholas Crane and Richard Girling at CPRE's Volunteer Conference in November 2007. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
As a humorist, Bryson falls somewhere between the one-liner genius of Dave Barry and the narrative brilliance of David Sedaris.... At his best he spools out operatically funny vignettes of sustained absurdity that nevertheless remain grounded in universal experience. These accounts, like the description of the bumper-car ride at a run-down amusement park or the tale of a friend's father's descent from the high dive at a local lake, defy excerpting; when taken whole, they will leave many readers de-couched.
Occasionally in the course of his reminiscences, Bryson abandons punch lines and demonstrates a lyrical gift for the tactile and noisome nature of childhood…that elevates the work to the level of classics in the genre like Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie.
Jay Jennings - New York Times
Bill Bryson is erudite, irreverent, funny and exuberant, making the temptation to quote endlessly from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid hard to resist. Bryson interweaves childhood reminiscences seamlessly with observations about 1950s America, evoking a zeitgeist that will be familiar to almost everyone past middle age. Though his memories are for the most part pleasurable, he doesn't evade the darker side of the times.
Juliet Wittman - Washington Post
For most of his adult life, Bryson has made his home in the U.K, yet he actually entered the world in 1951 as part of America's postwar baby boom and spent his formative years in Des Moines, Iowa. Bryson wistfully recounts a childhood of innocence and optimism, a magical point in time when a distinct sense of regional and community identity briefly—but blissfully—coexisted with fledgling technology and modern convenience. Narrating, Bryson skillfully wields his amorphous accent—somehow neither fully British nor Midwestern—to project a genial and entertaining tour guide of lost Americana. In portraying the boyish exploits of his "Thunderbolt Kid" superhero alter ego, he convincingly evokes both the unadulterated joys and everyday battles of childhood.
Publishers Weekly
A noted travel humorist and the author of several books on the English language, Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) here offers a departure-a memoir about growing up in Des Moines in the 1950s. The title is taken from his childhood fantasy life where he existed as a superhero. Bryson effortlessly weaves together the national themes of the 1950s-civil defense drills and bland foods-with the Norman Rockwell world found in most small towns. Charming features long since gone include a downtown department store with a tea room (where children could select a toy from the toy chest), a cafeteria where you turned on a light for service, and a supermarket with a Kiddie Corral filled with comic books where children stayed while their mothers shopped. It's almost impossible to imagine anyone other than Bryson reading his words; his narration adds a special quality to the experience. Regardless of one's age, location, or gender, this book will fondly evoke memories of childhood. Alternately wildly entertaining and innocently nostalgic, this is a book not to be missed. Highly recommended for all public libraries.
Gloria Maxwell - Library Journal
I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s," writes Bryson (A Walk in the Woods), and his wryly amusing stories of his childhood in Des Moines almost convince the reader this is true. Bryson recounts the world of his younger self, buried in comic books in the Kiddie Corral at the local supermarket, resisting civil defense drills at school, and fruitlessly trying to unravel the mysteries of sex. His alter ego, the Thunderbolt Kid, born of his love for comic-book superheroes and the need to vaporize irritating people, serves as an astute outside observer of life around him. His family's foibles are humorously presented, from his mother's burnt, bland cooking to his father's epic cheapness. The larger world of 1950s America emerges through the lens of "Billy's" world, including the dark underbelly of racism, the fight against communism, and the advent of the nuclear age. Recommended for public libraries.
Alison Lewis - Library Journal
A charming, funny recounting of growing up in Des Moines during the sleepy 1950s. Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003, etc.) combines nostalgia, sharp wit and a dash of hyperbole to recreate his childhood in the rural Midwest. Using a homespun, idiosyncratic voice reminiscent of Jean Shepherd, he tells of a generally happy youth as the son of a loving but often absent sportswriter father and a dizzyingly absentminded mother, a "home furnishings" reporter at the Des Moines Register who once sent him to school wearing her own peddle-pushers. The journey includes visits to stately downtown Des Moines, where Younkers, the preeminent local department store, offered free gifts to patrons of its "elegant" Tea Room; the annual Iowa State Fair, where Bryson tried desperately to gain access to the notorious "strippers' tent"; and the bacchanalia of Saturday matinees at the local movie theater, where candy and popcorn flew through the darkened theater like confetti. We also meet some of Bryson's colorful comrades, like George Willoughby, an adept vending-machine thief who also placed bugs in his soup in order to get free ice-cream sundaes from the stricken restaurant manager; and the troubled Stephen Katz, a prodigious substance-abuser who organized the theft of an entire boxcar of Old Milwaukee beer. Eventually, progress caught up with Des Moines, and even young Bryson's imagined superpowers can't stop it. Holiday Inns and Travelodges replaced the town's stately Victorian homes, and the family-owned downtown stores, movie palaces and restaurants were undone by shopping malls and multiplexes. In that sense, the decline of downtown Des Moines mirrors that of hundreds of small and midsized towns across the country. But in Bryson's bittersweet memoir, he reminds readers of the joys many people forgot to even miss. A great, fun read, especially for Baby Boomers nostalgic for the good old days.
Kirkus Review
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 Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid:
1. Bryson paints the 50's as an innocent, almost idyllic time. Was it?
2. Does the childhood Bryson describes take place in a lost America? He paints a rich portrait of community ties and identity. To what degree do those ties still exist? What has been lost? Consider the effects of TV and the computer.
3. Discuss Bryson's mother, a professional woman, and his father, who was also absent a good deal of the time. How did their manner of parenting strike you? Do we have a different concept of parenting today?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Trail of Crumbs
Kim Sunee, 2008
Grand Central Publishing
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446697903
Summary
Already hailed as "brave, emotional, and gorgeously written" by Frances Mayes and "like a piece of dark chocolate—bittersweet, satisfying, and finished all too soon" by Laura Fraser, author of An Italian Affair, this is a unique memoir about the search for identity through love, hunger, and food.
Jim Harrison says, Trail of Crumbs reminds me of what heavily costumed and concealed waifs we all are. Kim Sunee tells us so much about the French that I never learned in 25 trips to Paris, but mostly about the terrors and pleasure of that infinite octopus, love. A fine book."
When Kim Sunee was three years old, her mother took her to a marketplace, deposited her on a bench with a fistful of food, and promised she'd be right back. Three days later a policeman took the little girl, clutching what was now only a fistful of crumbs, to a police station and told her that she'd been abandoned by her mother.
Fast-forward almost 20 years and Kim's life is unrecognizable. Adopted by a young New Orleans couple, she spends her youth as one of only two Asian children in her entire community. At the age of 21, she becomes involved with a famous French businessman and suddenly finds herself living in France, mistress over his houses in Provence and Paris, and stepmother to his eight year-old daughter.
Kim takes readers on a lyrical journey from Korea to New Orleans to Paris and Provence, along the way serving forth her favorite recipes. A love story at heart, this memoir is about the search for identity and a book that will appeal to anyone who is passionate about love, food, travel, and the ultimate search for self. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1970 or 1971
• Where—South Korea
• Reared—New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
• Currently—lives in Birmingham, Alabama
Kim Sunee is the founding food editor of Cottage Living. She was born in South Korea and adopted and raised in New Orleans, and lived in Europe for ten years. She now resides in Birmingham, Alabama. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Ms. Sunee’s memoir chronicles her life so far—its physical and emotional hungers and the rapturous meals she has eaten or cooked while searching the world for love, a convincing identity and a sense, still elusive, of being at home.... Most chapters of Trail of Crumbs end with evocative recipes gleaned from places she has traveled or lived, including Korea, Sweden, Louisiana and France. "The French food in her book is so distinctive and sensuous that the recipes seem like sonnets or odes,” said Frances Mayes, a friend of Ms. Sunee and the author of Under the Tuscan Sun.
Mimi Read - New York Times
A satisfying blend of travelog and cookbook.... Her introspective prose conveys the uneasy limbo of a journey that is arduous and ongoing—but always delicious.
People
On making Sunee's acquaintance in the introduction to this charming memoir, it's hard not to envy the young woman swimming laps in the pool overlooking the orchard of her petit ami's vast compound in the High Alps of Provence, but below the surface of this portrait is a turbulent quest for identity. Abandoned at age three in a Korean marketplace, Sunee is adopted by an American couple who raise her in New Orleans. In the 1990s she settles, after a fashion, in France with Olivier Baussan, a multimillionaire of epicurean tastes and—at least in her depiction—controlling disposition. She struggles to create a home for herself in the kitchen, cooking gargantuan meals for their large circle of friends, until her restive nature and Baussan's impatience with her literary ambitions compel her to move on. The gutsy Cajun and ethereal French recipes that serve as chapter codas are matched by engaging storytelling. Alas, for all Sunée's preoccupation with the geography of home, her insights on the topic are disappointingly slight, and the facile wrapup offered in the form of resolution seems a shortcut in a book that traverses so much rocky terrain
Publishers Weekly
Sunee serves up mouthwatering descriptions of food and a generous helping of recipes. But her narrative, attempting to mix personal memoir and foodie lit, lacks the subtlety and sophistication of M. F. K. Fisher and Frances Mayes, both masters of the form. —Allison Block
Booklist
A restless young woman's poignant search for identity, accompanied by dozens of recipes. The founding food editor of Cottage Living magazine, Sunee was abandoned in a South Korean market at age three, adopted by a young American couple and raised in New Orleans. Uncertain of her exact age and ethnicity, she describes herself as a fish swimming upstream, someone who has been lost her whole life. She moved to Europe in her early 20s and met a wealthy French businessman, Olivier, who took over her life. He was older, not quite divorced and-though Sunee doesn't use the words—clearly a control freak. As Olivier's mistress, she wanted for nothing—except independence and her own identity. He planned all the details of their lives, arranged their travels and chose their friends. She tried to mother his young daughter and prepared sumptuous meals for his frequent guests. Almost every chapter ends with at least one and sometimes three or four recipes: crab, crawfish and po-boy sandwiches she learned to make from her New Orleans grandfather; directions for kimchi, a Korean salad; and many French dishes, including gratin de salsify, creme caramel and figs roasted in red wine with cream and honey. (Recipes may or may not be linked to the chapter that precedes them.) Sunee eventually left Olivier, lived alone and supported herself in Paris. She made her own friends and had an unhappy love affair, again with a married man. The mouthwatering recipes taper off at this point in her memoir, but there is still much about food and drink. The author closely observes and skillfully records all the nuances of texture, color, aroma and taste. From the crumbs in the fist of an abandoned three-year-old to bowls of richly sauced pasta, her text chronicles the entwining of food with security and love. At the end, Sunee is still restless, still seeking, still hungry. Vivid writing-and an inspiration to head to the kitchen.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In what ways is this a universal story, despite its unique circumstances?
2. "My early memories are always related to hunger," Kim says early in her story. Discuss the metaphorical hunger that is at the heart of her memoir.
3. One of the first identities given Kim in her adopted life is that of "official taster" by her beloved Poppy. What impact do you see on her subsequent understanding of self?
4. What is the importance of recipes throughout the book? What do they reveal about the author's journey of discovery?
5. How does geography affect Kim's developing identity? Why does she feel she belongs in some places and not in others?
6. What do Kim and Olivier offer each other? What can they never give each other? Why must Kim ultimately leave him?
7. Madame Song tells Kim that she's not abandoned but "very, very lost." What does she mean, and what is the distinction? How does Kim's sense of being lost manifest itself?
8. Is it true, as one of Kim's friends asserts, that "you can't be from nowhere"? Where, in the end, does Kim find "home"?
9. Was there any point during the book at which you wanted to tell Kim something? Words of advice, warning, or reassurance, for example? When?
10. What did you expect to come out of Kim's trip to Korea? Were you surprised? Disappointed?
11. Throughout the book, Kim's writing engages and involves all five senses. Which of these was most compelling for you? Why?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less
Terry Ryan, 2002
Simon & Schuster
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743273930
Summary
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio introduces Evelyn Ryan, an enterprising woman who kept poverty at bay with wit, poetry, and perfect prose during the "contest era" of the 1950s and 1960s.
Standing up to the church, her alcoholic husband, and antiquated ideas about women, Evelyn turned every financial challenge into an opportunity for innovation, all the while raising her six sons and four daughters with the belief that miracles are an everyday occurrence. The inspiration for a major motion picture, Evelyn Ryan's story is told by her daughter Terry with an infectious joy that shows how a winning spirit and sense of humor can triumph over adversity every time. (From the publisher.)
Prize Winner was adapted into a 2005 film with Julianne Moore and Woody Harrelson.
Author Bio
• Birth—July 14, 1946
• Where—Defiance, Ohio, USA
• Death—May 16, 2007
• Where—San Francisco, CA
• Education—B.A., Bowling Green State University (Ohio)
After a long bout with cancer, Terry Ryan died peacefully at home on May 16, 2007. She had been buoyed throughout her illness by notes and calls from readers who had just finished reading the book or watching the movie, and couldn't wait to tell her how much they enjoyed it. More than anything, Tuffy Ryan loved to hear people's comments about her prize-winning mother, Evelyn, whose sense of humor and indomitable spirit surfaced so often in Terry's own response to life. After the shock of hearing her diagnosis in November of 2004, for example, Tuff said pensively, "Well, my old life is over, and my new life is just beginning." This is a legacy her fans have the privilege of carrying on every day. (From the book's official website.)
More
Terry "Tuff" Ryan was originally from Defiance, Ohio, resided in San Francisco for most of her adult life. She was best known for her memoir The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio.
She was born to Leo (nicknamed Kelly) and Evelyn Ryan, and was the sixth of ten children. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio was a memoir of her life and that of her family, especially her mother, a 1950s housewife with 10 children who provided for the family by winning contests. The book was released as a theatrical film in November 2005. It stars Julianne Moore as Evelyn Ryan and Woody Harrelson as Kelly Ryan. Terry Ryan was a consultant on the film.
Ryan was also the creator of the long running cartoon T.O. Sylvester in the San Francisco Chronicle. She was married to her long-time partner, Pat Holt, on St Valentine's Day 2004. Her account of her wedding, titled We Do! was published by Chronicle Books.
In 2004, when the movie The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio was being filmed, Terry discovered that she had Stage IV brain cancer. On May 16, 2007, Terry died of cancer at her San Francisco, California home. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
This plucky middle American chronicle, starring an unsinkable, relentlessly resourceful mother and her Madison Avenue-style magic, succeeds on many levels—as a tale of family spirit triumphing over penury, as a history of mid-century American consumerism, and as a memoir about a woman who was both ahead of her time and unable to escape it.
The New Yorker
A good-natured memoir as compelling as a commercial jingle.
O, The Oprah Magazine
In the 1950s, the Ryan family struggled to make ends meet. Ten kids and a father who spent most of his paycheck on booze drained the family's meager finances. But mom Evelyn Ryan, a former journalist, found an ingenious way to bring in extra income: entering contests on the backs of cereal boxes and the like. The author, Evelyn's daughter, tells the entertaining story of her childhood and her mother's contest career with humor and affection. She is not a professional narrator, but her love and admiration for her mother come through in every sentence. Evelyn won supermarket shopping sprees that put much-needed food on the table, provided washing machines and other appliances the family couldn't afford, and delivered cash to pay the mounting pile of bills. This well-told, suspenseful tale is peppered with examples of Evelyn's winning poems and slogans, taken from the years of notebooks that she saved and passed on to her daughter, and has a fiction-worthy climax that will keep listeners laughing even as they're glued to Ryan's tale.
Publishers Weekly
Evelyn Ryan, wife of an alcoholic husband and mother of ten children, lived in a small town in a time and place when women did not seek "jobs." When finances ran low, feeling desperate, she turned to her parish priest who suggested she "take in laundry." Ryan had to laugh at the advice because she could barely keep up with her own family's washing and ironing. A lesser woman might have succumbed to poverty, but she was determined to keep her family financially afloat and to teach her children that the life of the mind was important. In the early 1950s, Ryan started entering contests, composing her jingles, poems, and essays at the ironing board. She won household appliances, bikes, watches, clocks, and, occasionally, cash. She won a freezer, and several weeks later, she won a supermarket shopping-spree. When the family was faced with eviction, she received a $5000 first place check from the regional Western Auto Store. Ryan's unconventionality and sense of humor triumphed over poverty, and her persistence makes the listener cheer her on. Read by the author, this story is delightful. Recommended for all public libraries. —Pam Kingsbury, Florence, AL
Library Journal
(Adult/High School) While her sometimes abusive husband drank away a third of his weekly take-home pay, Evelyn Ryan kept her ever-growing family afloat by entering every contest she came across, beginning with Burma Shave roadside-sign jingles. In post-World War II America, money, appliances, food, excursions—anything you could think of-were routinely offered to the person who sent in the best jingle, essay, or poem, accompanied, of course, by the company's box-top or other product identification. Although she more often won prizes of products, such as a case of Almond Joy candy bars, Mrs. Ryan once won enough for a down payment on a house just as her family was being turned out of their two-bedroom rental house. That contest also won her a bicycle for her son. She entered so many contests, often several times under different forms of her name, that hardly a week went by without some prize being delivered by the postman. Charmingly written by one of her 10 children, this story is not only a chronicle of contesting, but also of her mother's irrepressible spirit. With a sense of humor that wouldn't quit, she found fun in whatever life sent her way, and passed that on to all her children who, despite the poverty they grew up in, lived and still live happy, useful lives. YAs who like family stories should love this winning account. —Sydney Hausrath, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA
School Library Journal>
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio:
1. How would you describe Terry Ryan's mother Evelyn and the challenges she faced as wife, mother, and family breadwinner.
2. Could Evelyn survive, even triumph as she did, in today's world? Or is ours a different time with its own set of circumstances?
3. You might read and discuss this work in tandem with Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle: both books are memoirs about parenting and growing up in difficult circumstances.
4. Have some fun...set up a display of several personal or household items and devise clever prize-winning jingo entries for each, like Evelyn did. Not easy!
5. Watch the movie version, in part or full, and compare it to the book. How closely does the film follow the book, especially in its characters? Does Julianne Moore capture your idea of what Evelyn was like?
(From LitLovers. Please feel free to use these ideas/questions, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Travels with Charley: In Search of America
John Steinbeck, 1962
Penguin Group USA
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780140053203
Summary
To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, in September 1960, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years.
With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives through scenic backroads and speeds along anonymous super high-ways. This chronicle of their trip, a picaresque tale, follows the two as they meander from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases.
Travels with Charley is animated by Steinbeck’s attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature—to weather, geography, the cycle of the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way. He dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. And he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, on a particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and on the unexpected kindness of strangers that is also a very real part of our national identity.
Originally published in 1962, Travels provides an intimate and personal look at one of America’s most beloved writers in the later years of his life—a self-portrait of a man who never wrote an explicit autobiography. It was written during a time of upheaval and racial tension in the South—which Steinbeck witnessed firsthand—and is a stunning evocation of America on the eve of a tumultuous decade. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 27, 1902
• Where—Salinas, California USA
• Death—December 20, 1968
• Where—New York, NY
• Education—Studied marine biology at Stanford University,
1919-25
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, 1940;
Nobel Prize, 1962.
John Ernst Steinbeck, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner, was born in Salinas, California February 27, 1902. His father, John Steinbeck, served as Monterey County Treasurer for many years. His mother, Olive Hamilton, was a former schoolteacher who developed in him a love of literature. Young Steinbeck came to know the Salinas Valley well, working as a hired hand on nearby ranches in Monterey County.
In 1919, he graduated from Salinas High School as president of his class and entered Stanford University majoring in English. Stanford did not claim his undivided attention. During this time he attended only sporadically while working at a variety jobs including on with the Big Sur highway project, and one at Spreckels Sugar Company near Salinas.
Steinbeck left Stanford permanently in 1925 to pursue a career in writing in New York City. He was unsuccessful and returned, disappointed, to California the following year. Though his first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929, it attracted little literary attention. Two subsequent novels, The Pastures of Heaven and To A God Unknown, met the same fate.
After moving to the Monterey Peninsula in 1930, Steinbeck and his new wife, Carol Henning, made their home in Pacific Grove. Here, not far from famed Cannery Row, heart of the California sardine industry, Steinbeck found material he would later use for two more works, Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row.
With Tortilla Flat (1935), Steinbeck's career took a decidedly positive turn, receiving the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. He felt encouraged to continue writing, relying on extensive research and personal observation of the human drama for his stories. In 1937, Of Mice and Men was published. Two years later, the novel was produced on Broadway and made into a movie. In 1940, Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Grapes of Wrath, bringing to public attention the plight of dispossessed farmers.
After Steinbeck and Henning divorced in 1942, he married Gwyndolyn Conger. The couple moved to New York City and had two sons, Thomas and two years later, John. During the war years, Steinbeck served as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Some of his dispatches reappeared in Once There Was A War. In 1945, Steinbeck published Cannery Row and continued to write prolifically, producing plays, short stories and film scripts. In 1950, he married Elaine Anderson Scott and they remained together until his death.
Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 "for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and keen social perception." In his acceptance speech, Steinbeck summarized what he sought to achieve through his works:
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.... Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity of greatness of heart and spirit—gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature...
Steinbeck remained a private person, shunning publicity and moving frequently in his search for privacy. He died on December 20, 1968 in New York City, where he and his family made a home. But his final resting place was the valley he had written about with such passion. At his request, his ashes were interred in the Garden of Memories cemetery in Salinas. He is survived by his son, Thomas. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble, courtesy of the National Steinbeck Center.)
Book Reviews
(Older books have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer 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 Travels with Charley:
1. What anxieties do people express to Steinbeck, and how do those fears affect the political atmosphere? Are there similarities between that time and ours—the nuclear vs. terrorist threat?
2. Steinbeck considers that radio and teen popular music will minimize regional differences. Fifty years later, was he right? And is this good or badt?
3. Compare Steinbeck's assessment of technology in the 1960's with new technologies of today. What are the impacts, in his day and ours? Are they similar or different; good or harmful?
4. How has car travel changed over the past 50 years? (Think local vs. chain motels and restaurants, country roads v. the Interstate.)
5. To what extent does geography reflect (or cause?) Americans' attitudes then...and now. What regional attitudes did Steinbeck encounter? Are they different or similar today.
6. Talk about Lonesome Harry and what he represents.
7. What is Steinbeck's attitude toward immigration and idea of America as a "melting-pot"? What did it mean to be an American in the 1960's vs. today?
8. If you could change one thing in America, what would it be?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Post-American World
Fareed Zakaria, 2008
W.W. Norton & Co.
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393334807
Summary
One of our most distinguished thinkers argues that the "rise of the rest" is the great story of our time. "This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." So begins Fareed Zakaria’s important new work on the era we are now entering.
Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world.
The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems.
How should the United States understand and thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 20, 1964
• Where—Bombay, Maharashtra, India
• Education—B.A., Yale; Ph.D., Harvard (both USA)
• Awards—World Affairs Councils of America International
Journalist Award
• Currently—lives in New York City
Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International and writes a weekly column on international affairs. His previous book was the New York Times bestseller The Future of Freedom. He lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)
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Zakaria was born in India to a practicing Muslim family. His father, Rafiq Zakaria, was a former government minister, deputy leader of the Congress party and a respected scholar. His mother, Fatima Zakaria, was for a time the Sunday editor of the Times of India. His brother Arshad is a former head of investment banking at Merrill Lynch and is currently the head of New Vernon Capital, the largest hedge fund investing in India. His two other siblings, a brother Mansoor and a sister Tasneem, are from his father's first marriage.
Fareed attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai, India, where he was School Prefect and House Captain for Palmer, one of the four school Houses. After graduating from the Anglican school, Zakaria attended Yale University where he was a member of Berkeley college, Scroll and Key Society, President of the Yale Political Union, and a member of the Party of the Right. Zakaria received a B.A. from Yale and later graduated with a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, where he studied under Samuel P. Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann.
Before his current position with Newsweek, Zakaria was managing editor of the magazine Foreign Affairs, a journal of international politics and economics.
Prior to joining Foreign Affairs, Zakaria ran a research project on American foreign policy at Harvard University. He has taught courses in international relations and political philosophy at Harvard, Columbia and Case Western universities. He has written for such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and the New Republic, and has also worked as a wine columnist for the webzine Slate. His 2002 essay for The New Yorker on America's global role has been widely quoted, as have several of his Newsweek cover-essays.
He is the author of the 1998 book From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton University Press), his Ph.D. thesis, and co-editor of The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (Basic Books). His book The Future of Freedom was published in the spring of 2003 and became a New York Times bestseller, as well as a bestseller in several other countries. It has been translated into more than eighteen languages. His most recent book, published in 2008, is The Post-American World, an examination of America's role in a world where it is still the political-military superpower but where economic, industrial, financial, and cultural power is being dispersed around the world.
In April 2005, Zakaria premiered as host of a new foreign affairs program on PBS, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria.
During the December 28th, 2007 airing of his program Zakaria announced his retirement from Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria to pursue other broadcast opportunities. The new host is Daljit Dhaliwal.
Zakaria has won several awards for his Newsweek columns, including for his October 2001 cover story, "The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us". In 1999, he was named "one of the 21 most important people of the 21st Century" by Esquire. In 2005, he won the World Affairs Councils of America's International Journalist Award. In 2006, he was named one of the 100 most influential graduates of Harvard University. He currently serves on the boards of Yale University, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, New America Foundation and Columbia University's International House. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Make no mistake. This is a relentlessly intelligent book that eschews simple-minded projections from crisis to collapse. There is certainly plenty to bemoan—from the disappearing dollar to the subprime disaster, from rampant anti-Americanism to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that will take years to win. Yet Zakaria's is not another exercise in declinism. His point is not the demise of Gulliver, but the "rise of the rest."
Josef Joffe - New York Times Book Review
Many of this volume's more acute arguments echo those that have been made by other analysts and writers, most notably, the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman on globalization, and Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, on America's growing isolation in an increasingly adversarial world. But Mr. Zakaria uses his wide-ranging fluency in economics, foreign policy and cultural politics to give the lay reader a lucid picture of a globalized world (and America's role in it) that is changing at light speed, even as he provides a host of historical analogies to examine the possible fallout of these changes.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
When a book proclaims that it is not about the decline of America but "the rise of everyone else," readers might expect another diatribe about our dismal post-9/11 world. They are in for a pleasant surprise as Newsweekeditor and popular pundit Zakaria (The Future of Freedom) delivers a stimulating, largely optimistic forecast of where the 21st century is heading. We are living in a peaceful era, he maintains; world violence peaked around 1990 and has plummeted to a record low. Burgeoning prosperity has spread to the developing world, raising standards of living in Brazil, India, China and Indonesia. Twenty years ago China discarded Soviet economics but not its politics, leading to a wildly effective, top-down, scorched-earth boom. Its political antithesis, India, also prospers while remaining a chaotic, inefficient democracy, as Indian elected officials are (generally) loathe to use the brutally efficient tactics that are the staple of Chinese governance. Paradoxically, India's greatest asset is its relative stability in the region; its officials take an unruly population for granted, while dissent produces paranoia in Chinese leaders. Zakaria predicts that despite its record of recent blunders at home and abroad, America will stay strong, buoyed by a stellar educational system and the influx of young immigrants, who give the U.S. a more youthful demographic than Europe and much of Asia whose workers support an increasing population of unproductive elderly. A lucid, thought-provoking appraisal of world affairs, this book will engage readers on both sides of the political spectrum.
Publishers Weekly
According to Newsweek International editor Zakaria, the weakened global economic and political position of the United States results not from the waning of its own powers but from the rapid rise of many other global players. The optimistic tone of his previous book, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, permeates this work. After 500 years of world dominance and following the decline of great states in other parts of the world, the Western powers are seeing countries such as China and India emerge as new and formidable rivals. Zakaria is sharply critical of the current U.S. presidential administration, citing its dysfunctional political stalemate and foreign and military policies that hinder adaptation to the current realities. He argues that it is incumbent upon the Western powers to adapt if they want to thrive instead of trying to reverse these realities, and he remains optimistic that they can change, as they have historically shown themselves able to do so. Zakaria's arguments are accessible to general readers, and his supporting data are not overwhelming to digest. Most libraries will want this.
Library Journal
Pity the poor think-tanked neocons: Just a moment ago, the talk was of empire and the new world order, and now, it seems, America's day in the sun is about to grow cold. Newsweek International editor Zakaria (The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, 2003, etc.), born in India and a longtime resident of New York, seems unconcerned that his adopted country is sailing down the tubes: "This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else." He enumerates: Macao takes in more gambling revenue than Las Vegas, the biggest Ferris wheel in the world is in Singapore, Bollywood has surpassed Hollywood. Even as the global population grows, the number of those living in extreme poverty is falling, at least in three-quarters of the world's nations. Even after 9/11, the author notes, the world economy "grew at its fastest rate in nearly four decades." Inflation exceeds 15 percent only in a dozen-odd failed states such as Burma and Zimbabwe, and fewer and fewer people are dying in wars or spasms of political violence than ever. That all should be good news to globalists, and it's comforting to know, as Zakaria helpfully points out, that Iran spends less than a penny for every dollar we spend on the military. Yet the United States has dawdled, economically speaking, as China, India and other nations have skyrocketed. It helps, Indians note, that the Chinese government, the commander of that nation's command economy, hasn't really had to respond to public opinion, though even that is changing. The good news? By Zakaria's account, America's strength will lie in freedom and diversity—and the post-American era may not last all that long, since America's population is growing, and growing younger, while the demographics of Asia and Europe are largely pointing to older populations and, in time, fewer workers. A sharp, well-written work of political economy.
Kirkus Reviews
Book Club 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)
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