The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Isabel Wilkerson, 2010
Random House
640 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679444329
Summary
Winner, 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner, 2010 Pulitizer Prize
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.
From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.
Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals:
—Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat;
—George Starling, sharp and quick-tempered, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God;
—Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard wor
Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land.
Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.A., Howard University
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize (twice); National Book Critics Circle Award; George S. Polk Award; Journalist of the Year Award from The National Association of Black Journalists.
• Currently—lives in in Boston, Massachusetts
Isabel Wilkerson is a journalist and the author, in 2010, of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, which won the Pulitizer Prize, as well as the Book Critics Circle Award. In 2020, she published Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, a book that also received wide critical acclaim..
Born in Washington D.C., Wilkerson studied journalism at Howard University, becoming editor-in-chief of the college newspaper The Hilltop. During college, Wilkerson interned at many publications, including the The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.
In 1994, while Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism, winning the feature writing award for her coverage of the 1993 midwestern floods and her profile of a 10-year-old boy who was responsible for his four siblings. Several of Wilkerson's articles are included in the book Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing, 1979 - 2003, edited by David Garlock.
Wilkerson has also won a George S. Polk Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Journalist of the Year award from the National Association of Black Journalists.
She has also held the positions of James M. Cox Professor of Journalism at Emory University, Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and the Kreeger-Wolf endowed lecturer at Northwestern University. She also served as a board member of the National Arts in Journalism Program at Columbia University.
Wilkerson is now a Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction in the College of Communications at Boston University.
After fourteen years of research, she has just released a book called The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, which examines the three geographic routes that were commonly used by African Americans leaving the southern states between 1915 and the 1970s, illustrated through the personal stories of people who took those routes.
During her research for the book, Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,000 people who made the migration from the South to Northern and Western cities. The book almost instantly hit number 11 on the NYT Bestseller list for nonfiction and has since been included in lists of best books of 2010 by many reviewers, including Salon.com, Atlanta Magazine, New Yorker, Washington Post, Economist, and The Daily Beast. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[A] landmark piece of nonfiction.... [Wilkerson] works on a grand, panoramic scale but also on a very intimate one, since this work of living history boils down to the tenderly told stories of three rural Southerners who immigrated to big cities from their hometowns. She winds up with a mesmerizing book that warrants comparison to The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann's study of the Great Migration's early phase, and Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas's great, close-range look at racial strife in Boston.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
[A] massive and masterly account of the Great Migration.... Based on more than a thousand interviews, written in broad imaginative strokes, this book, at 622 pages, is something of an anomaly in today's shrinking world of nonfiction publishing: a narrative epic rigorous enough to impress all but the crankiest of scholars, yet so immensely readable as to land the author a future place on Oprah's couch.
David Oshinsky - New York Times Book Review
A brilliant and stirring epic, the first book to cover the full half-century of the Great Migration.... Wilkerson combines impressive research…with great narrative and literary power. Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.
John Stauffer - Wall Street Journal
[Its] power arises from its close attention to intimate details in the lives of regular people...if you want to learn about what being a migrant felt like, read Wilkerson. Her intimate portraits convey as no book prior ever has what the migration meant to those who were a part of it. The Warmth of Other Suns stands as a vital contribution to our understanding of the black American experience and of the unstoppable social movement that shaped modern America.
Atlanta Journal Constitution
[Black Southerners] did not cross the turnstiles of customs at Ellis Island. They were already citizens. But where they came from, they were not treated as such,'' writes Isabel Wilkerson in The Warmth of Other Suns, her sprawling and stunning account of the Great Migration, the 55-year stretch (1915 70) during which 6 million black Americans fled the Jim Crow South. Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, uses the journeys of three of them a Mississippi sharecropper, a Louisiana doctor, and a Florida laborer to etch an indelible and compulsively readable portrait of race, class, and politics in 20th-century America. History is rarely distilled so finely.
Entertainment Weekly
(Starred review.) Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man's turkeys and was almost beaten to death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to California in 1953, embittered by "the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn't operate in his own home town." Anchored to these three stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively researched study of the "great migration," the exodus of six million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an "uncertain existence" in the North and Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling, and Pershing settling in new lands, building anew, and often finding that they have not left racism behind. The drama, poignancy, and romance of a classic immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp, and resonate long after the reading is done.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. The Warmth of Other Suns combines a sweeping historical perspective with vivid intimate portraits of three individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster. What is the value of this dual focus, of shifting between the panoramic and the close-up? In what ways are Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster representative of the millions of other migrants who journeyed from South to North?
2. In many ways The Warmth of Other Suns seeks to tell a new story—about the Great Migration of southern blacks to the north—and to set the record straight about the true significance of that migration. What are the most surprising revelations in the book? What misconceptions does Wilkerson dispel?
3. What were the major economic, social, and historical forces that sparked the Great Migration? Why did blacks leave in such great numbers from 1915 to 1970?
4. What were the most horrifying conditions of Jim Crow South? What instances of racial terrorism stand out most strongly in the book? What daily injustices and humiliations did blacks have to face there?
5. In what ways was the Great Migration of southern blacks similar to other historical migrations? In what important ways was it unique?
6. After being viciously attacked by a mob in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today” (p. 389). Why were northern working-class whites so hostile to black migrants?
7. Wilkerson quotes Black Boy in which Richard Wright wrote, on arriving in the North: “I had fled one insecurity and embraced another” (p. 242). What unique challenges did black migrants face in the North? How did these challenges affect the lives of Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster?
8. Wilkerson points out that the three most influential figures in jazz were all children of the Great Migration: Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane. What would American culture look like today if the Great Migration hadn’t happened?
9. What motivated Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster to leave the South? What circumstances and inner drives prompted them to undertake such a difficult and dangerous journey? What would likely have been their fates if they had remained in the South? In what ways did living in the North free them?
10. Near the end of the book, Wilkerson asks: “With all that grew out of the mass movement of people, did the Great Migration achieve the aim of those who willed it? Were the people who left the South—and their families—better off for having done so? Was the loss of what they left behind worth what confronted them in the anonymous cities they fled to?” (p. 528). How does Wilkerson answer these questions?
11. How did the Great Migration change not only the North but also the South? How did the South respond to the mass exodus of cheap black labor?
12. In what ways are current attitudes toward Mexican Americans similar to attitudes toward African Americans expressed by Northerners in The Warmth of Other Suns? For example, the ways working-class Northerners felt that Southern blacks were stealing their jobs.
13. At a neighborhood watch meeting in Chicago’s South Shore, Ida Mae listens to a young state senator named Barack Obama. In what ways is Obama’s presidency a indirect result of the Great Migration?
14. What is the value of Wilkerson basing her research primarily on firsthand, eyewitness accounts, gathered through extensive interviews, of this historical period?
15. Wilkerson writes of her three subjects that “Ida Mae Gladney had the humblest trappings but was perhaps the richest of them all. She had lived the hardest life, been given the least education, seen the worst the South could hurl at her people, and did not let it break her.... Her success was spiritual, perhaps the hardest of all to achieve. And because of that, she was the happiest and lived the longest of them all” (p. 532). What attributes allowed Ida Mae Gladney to achieve this happiness and longevity? In what sense might her life, and the lives of George Starling and Robert Foster as well, serve as models for how to persevere and overcome tremendous difficulties?
(Discussion Questions issued by publisher.)
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Mao's Last Dancer
Li Cunxin, 2003
Penguin Group USA
451 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425240304
Summary
From a desperately poor village in northeast China, at age eleven, Li Cunxin was chosen by Madame Mao's cultural delegates to be taken from his rural home and brought to Beijing, where he would study ballet. In 1979, the young dancer arrived in Texas as part of a cultural exchange, only to fall in love with America—and with an American woman. Two years later, through a series of events worthy of the most exciting cloak-and-dagger fiction, he defected to the United States, where he quickly became known as one of the greatest ballet dancers in the world. This is his story, told in his own inimitable voice. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1961
• Where—Qingdao, Shandong Province, China
• Education—Beijing Dance Academy
• Currently—Melbourne, Australia
Li Cunxin was born in a village near the city of Qingdao, in northern China. At the age of eleven, he was selected by Madame Mao's cultural advisers to become a student at the Beijing Dance Academy. When he was eighteen, he was chosen to perform with the Houston Ballet, leading to his dramatic defection to the United States. Li performed as a principal dancer with the Houston Ballet for 16 years, becoming one of the world's top male ballet dancers. In 1995 he moved to Melbourne Australia, where he became principal artist with the Australian Ballet, He lives in Australia with his wife, ballet dancer Mary McKendry, and their three children. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia.)
More
At age thirty-four, Li started to plan his next career after dancing. He enrolled in accounting and financial courses. In 1997 he began his study at the Australian Securities Institute by correspondence with a view to becoming a stockbroker. For his final two years with the Australian Ballet, he rose at 5am to start ballet training, then racing to the stock exchange by 8am to work as a stockbroker until noon. By the time he joined the rest of the Australian Ballet dancers for rehearsals, he had already put in a full day's work (Li is now a senior manager at one of the biggest stockbroking firms in Australia).
Mao's Last Dancer, published in 2003, immediately hit the top of Australia’s best sellers list—eventually taking the #1 slot for non-fiction and winning Australia's Book of the Year Award and the US's Christopher Award. It was also short-listed for the National Biography Award. With over 30 printings, Mao's Last Dancer remained on the top-10 bestseller List for over 18 months, was sold in over 20 countries, and in 2009 became the basis for a feature film. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
This is the heartening rags-to-riches story of Li, who achieved prominence on the international ballet stage. Born in 1961, just before the Cultural Revolution, Li was raised in extreme rural poverty and witnessed Communist brutality, yet he imbibed a reverence for Mao and his programs. In a twist of fate worthy of a fairy tale (or a ballet), Li, at age 11, was selected by delegates from Madame Mao's arts programs to join the Beijing Dance Academy. In 1979, through the largesse of choreographer and artistic director Ben Stevenson, he was selected to spend a summer with the Houston Ballet—the first official exchange of artists between China and America since 1949. Li's visit, with its taste of freedom, made an enormous impression on his perceptions of both ballet and of politics, and once back in China, Li lobbied persistently and shrewdly to be allowed to return to America. Miraculously, he prevailed in getting permission for a one-year return. In an April 1981 spectacle that received national media attention, Li defected in a showdown at the Chinese consulate in Houston. He married fellow dancer Mary McKendry and gained international renown as a principal dancer with the Houston Ballet and later with the Australian Ballet; eventually, he retired from dance to work in finance. Despite Li's tendency toward the cloying and sentimental, his story will appeal to an audience beyond Sinophiles and ballet aficionados-it provides a fascinating glimpse of the history of Chinese-U.S. relations and the dissolution of the Communist ideal in the life of one fortunate individual.
Publishers Weekly
The life of a poverty-stricken 11-year-old Chinese boy was changed forever when he was selected to attend the dance academy of Madame Mao in Beijing. One of a few youngsters chosen, based upon a suitable physique, he did not even know the meaning of the word ballet. Yet a decade later, Li Cunxin (as former principal dancer of the Houston Ballet and now a stockbroker in Melbourne) would begin his rise to international fame as a ballet star. Li endured seven years of often harsh training as well as academics grounded in Chairman Mao's Communist philosophy, gradually adapting to the regimen and setting the goal of becoming the best dancer possible. He is an expert storyteller, and his memoir-which includes his struggles to perfect his art in the tense political framework, the complex events surrounding his defection, and the heartbreaks and joys of his professional and personal lives makes for fascinating reading. The portions dealing with his childhood and loving family in Quingdao are especially poignant, and the work as a whole unfolds with honesty, humor, and a quiet dignity. This book has wide appeal, for it concerns not only a dancer's coming of age in a turbulent time but also individual strength, self-discovery, and the triumph of the human spirit. For circulating libraries. —Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ
Library Journal
A prominent ballet dancer revisits the strange course that led him from a Chinese hamlet to the world stage. Mix Billy Elliott with Torn Curtain and you'll have some of the tale in very broad outline. Born in 1961, Li lived his early years under the shadow of Mao's Great Leap Forward, which had impoverished the already poor countryside to an almost unbelievable extent. "Dried yams were our basic food for most of the year," Li writes. "We occasionally had flour and corn bread for a treat, but those were my [mother's] special reserves for relatives or important visitors.... Dried yams were the most hated food in my family, but there were others in the commune that could not even afford dried yams. We were luckier than most." Luck came in another form when Madame Mao decided that recruiting ballet dancers from the provinces would prove to the world that Chinese Communism was truly egalitarian, whereupon Li was packed off to dance school. "The officials mentioned ballet," he writes, "but all I knew about ballet was what I'd seen in the movie The Red Detachment of Women." Willing but slow to learn ("I was considered a laggard by most of my teachers," he writes with characteristic modesty), Li eventually found his feet, at the same time finding a purpose: "to serve glorious communism." One exchange trip to Texas, though, and Li, now in his late teens, was ready for something else. Li's well-paced account of the ensuing cloak-and-dagger episodes that led to his defection to the West adds suspense to a tale already full of adventures, but there are no conventional bad guys to be found in it. Indeed, he writes with fine compassion for the Chinese consul who attempts to dissuade him from becoming an outcast; "unlike me, he had to go back and would probably never manage to get out again." Nicely written and humane: for anyone interested in modern Chinese history or for fans of dance.
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 Mao's Last Dancer:
1. Discuss Li's decision to defect to the US: his motivations (falling in love, exposure to freedom). What personal price was paid, and what was gained? Also, whoever leads the book discussion might dig up information on another famous ballet defection: Rudolph Nureyev, who defected from the former Soviet Union in 1961—ironically, the same year that Li was born.
2. Did Li marry Elizabeth Mackey out of love...or out of a desire to stay in the US? Why did the marriage end?
3. An interesting discussion might consider the roles of talent vs. discipline and perseverence. What about the role of an inspiring teacher?
4. You might also talk about the vast cultural differences Li had to surmount—language, the fact that ballet is not a Chinese art form, and the values of individuality and self-fulfillment vs. collectivity.
5. In a New York Times interview (9/26/04), Li says that in returning to teach at the Beijing Academy he has found "people have a lot more opportunities. So if it gets too hard they just back off." He also says that had he grown up elsewhere and been presented with the West's "enormous opportunities," he "certainly would not volunteer to do a ballet class." I'm not sure what the question is...but it's an interesting observation.
6. If you've seen the 2009 film version, how does it compare with the book? Is the movie well casted?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present
Gail Collins, 2009
Little, Brown & Co.
471 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316014045
Summary
Picking up where her previous successful and highly lauded book America's Women left off, Gail Collins recounts the sea change women have experienced since 1960. A comprehen-sive mix of oral history and Collins's keen research, this is the definitive book about five crucial decades of progress, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone this beloved New York Times columnist is known for. The interviews with women who have lived through these transformative years include an advertising executive in the 60s who was not allowed to attend board meetings that took place in the all-male dining room; and an airline stewardess who remembered being required to bend over to light her passengers' cigars on the men-only 'Executive Flight' from New York to Chicago.
We, too, may have forgotten the enormous strides made by women since 1960—and the rare setbacks. "Hell yes, we have a quota [7%]" said a medical school dean in 1961. "We do keep women out, when we can." At a pre-graduation party at BarnardCollege, "they handed corsages to the girls who were engaged and lemons to those who weren't." In 1960, two-thirds of women 18-60 surveyed by Gallup didn't approve of the idea of a female president. Until 1972, no woman ran in the Boston Marathon, the year when Title IX passed, requiring parity for boys and girls in school athletic programs (and also the year after Nixon vetoed the childcare legislation passed by congress).
What happened during the past fifty years—a period that led to the first woman's winning a Presidential Primary—and why? The cataclysmic change in the lives of American women is a story Gail Collins seems to have been born totell. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 25, 1945
• Where—Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Marquette University; M.A., University of
Massachusetts
Gail Collins was the editorial page editor of the New York Times from 2001 to January 1, 2007. She was the first female Editorial Page Editor at the Times. Prior to that, she was an editorial board member and an op-ed columnist. In January 2007 Collins stepped down as Editor to write a book; she returned to the Times to reprise her role as columnist six months later. Her column presently runs every Thursday and Saturday and usually covers contemporary American politics and other current events in a humorous or satirical light.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, as Gail Gleason, Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to the New York Times, Collins wrote for the New York Daily News, Newsday, Connecticut Business Journal, United Press International, and the Associated Press in New York City.
Collins also founded the Connecticut State News Bureau which operated from 1972 to 1977 and provided coverage of the state capital and Connecticut politics. When it was sold, the company served more than thirty weekly and daily newspaper clients.
Beyond her work as a journalist, Collins has published several books; Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics; America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines; The Millennium Book which she co-authored with her husband, CBS News producer Dan Collins; and most recently When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.
She also has been a journalism instructor at Southern Connecticut State University. (From Wikipedia.)
Critics Say . . .
Did feminism fail? Gail Collins's smart, thorough, often droll and extremely readable account of women's recent history in America not only answers this question brilliantly, but also poses new ones about the past and the present, as she explicates moments that were widely recorded and illuminates scenes that were barely remarked upon at the time.
Amy Bloom - New York Times Book Review
'The past is a foreign country' is the kind of hallowed quotation that's resolutely opaque until you stumble on something that drives home its emotional truth. The uncanny feeling it references is one that recurs frequently as you read When Everything Changed, the absorbing history of feminism and American women's lives by Gail Collins, the resident editorial fount of wry Midwestern common sense at the New York Times.... Ho-hum, you think-been there, done that, or Mom told me about it, and at rather tiresome length. Except that what Collins does, which so pitiably few pop-history writers do, is bring the stories, the anecdotes that come to life and pull you in.
Ben Dickinson - Elle
You've come a long way, baby: that's Collins's conclusion about American women, who once lacked the right to publicly wear pants and now take their place on the presidential campaign trail and the battlefield. New York Times columnist Collins attempts a comprehensive account of the last 50 years of women's history in this sequel to America's Women, primarily focusing on the 1960s. Giving relatively short shrift to the current generation of young women, Collins centers the bulk of her attention on the baby boom generation (to which she belongs) and leaders like NOW founder Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, as well as dozens of ordinary struggling women. The book's stronger parts include highlighting pioneers like Congresswoman Martha Griffiths, who began her political career in the 1940s and stories of laughably shortsighted sexism against Sandra Day O'Connor. Collins captures the conundrums of feminism's success (does a see-through blouse make a woman liberated or a sex object?), but the book will probably resonate most for her generational peers.
Publishers Weekly
The impressive sequel to America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines (2003). Collins-the first-ever female editor of the New York Times, and currently an op-ed contributor-offers an enormously entertaining cultural and social history. Her extensive research weaves the compelling stories of more than 100 women, ranging in age from 20 to 80, into a larger narrative of politics, economics and sexual mores. The author chronicles the story of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the women's-liberation movement and its forerunner, the civil-rights movement, the failed struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment and the impact of Roe v. Wade and Title IX. She populates her account with dozens of well- and lesser-known female leaders, including Sherri Finkbine, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Alice Paul, Margaret Chase Smith, Phyllis Schlafly, Helen Gurley Brown and Billy Jean King. Collins paints a vivid picture of the world as it was, and as it has so radically altered life for American girls and women. Fashions, hairstyles, dating, birth control-all are grist for her mill. Without preaching, she shows the sexism that women (and men) once accepted as the norm, and she backs up her often eye-opening stories with hard facts and solid statistics. From the opening anecdote of a woman expelled from traffic court in 1960 for appearing in slacks, to the closing one of a woman fired from her job as a bus driver in 2007 for refusing to wear slacks, this an engrossing account of how not just the daily lives, but the assumptions and expectations of women have changed so much in so short a time. Collins can be deadly serious and great fun to read at the same time. A revelatory book for readers of both sexes, and sure to become required reading for any American women's-studies course.
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 When Everything Changed:
1. Point out some of the most egregious episodes that Collins recounts of female discrimination in the 1960's. What was most surprising to you...or most infuriating?
2. What led to—or precipitated—that moment in time "when everything changed"? Was there a single event or an accumulation of events? How do we account for it?
3. Talk about women's fashions and the degree to which they have reflected changing attitudes toward women's role in culture? What statement does today's fashion make about women?
4. What role has birth control played in the feminist movement?
5. Where does Collins see failures in feminism's ability to achieve change? Do you agree with her assessment?
6. Talk about the overall impact on society-at-large that has come about through the gains in female equality. In your opinion, what is beneficial...and what is problematic?
6. Discuss some of the follow-up interviews and epilogues at the end of the book. Which strike you most? Which do you find most enlightening?
7. In terms of freedom of opportunity, how does your life differ from your grandmother's or mother's life...or your daughter's (-in-law) life? Looking ahead, what do you see as the future of feminism?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Over the Edge of the Edge: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
Laurence Bergreen, 2004
HarperCollins
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060936389
Summary
Ferdinand Magellan's daring circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century was a three-year odyssey filled with sex, violence, and amazing adventure. Now in Over the Edge of the World, acclaimed author Laurence Bergreen, interweaving a variety of candid, first-person accounts, some previously unavailable in English, brings to life this groundbreaking and majestic tale of discovery that changed many long-held views about the world and the way explorers would henceforth navigate its oceans.
In 1519 Magellan and his fleet set sail from Seville, Spain, to find a water route to the Spice Islands in Indonesia, where the most sought-after commodities—cloves, pepper, and nutmeg—flourished. Most important, they were looking for a passageway, a strait, through the great landmass of the Americas that would lead them to these fabled islands. Laurence Bergreen takes readers on board with Magellan and his crew as they explore, navigate, mutiny, suffer, and die across the seas. He also recounts the many unusual sexual practices the crew experienced, from orgies in Brazil to bizarre customs in the South Pacific. With a fleet of five ships and more than two hundred men, they had set out in search of the Spice Islands. Three years later they returned with an abundance of spices from their intended destination, but with just one ship carrying eighteen emaciated men. They suffered starvation, disease, and torture, and many died, including Magellan, who was killed in a fierce battle.
A man of great tenacity, cunning, and courage, Magellan was full of contradictions. He was both heroic and foolish, insightful yet blind, a visionary whose instincts outran his ideals. Ambitious to a fault and not above using torture and murder to maintain control of his ships and sailors, he survived innumerable natural hazards in addition to several violent mutinies aboard his own fleet—and it took no less than the massed forces of fifteen hundred men to kill him.
This is the first time in nearly half a century that anyone has attempted to narrate the complete story of Magellan's unprecedented circumnavigation of the globe—to tell this truly gripping and profoundly important story of heroism, discovery, and disaster. A voyage into history, a tour of the world emerging from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, an anthropological account of tribes, languages, and customs unknown to Europeans, and a chronicle of a desperate grab for commercial and political power, Over the Edge of the World is a captivating tale that rivals the most exciting thriller fiction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 4, 1950
• Where—N/A
• Education—Harvard University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Laurence Bergreen is a historian and biographer who lives in New York City.
A Harvard graduate, he worked in journalism, academia and broadcasting before publishing his first biography, James Agee: A Life. He has also written biographies of Irving Berlin, Al Capone, and Louis Armstrong.
Bergreen has also written on historical subjects, including Voyage to Mars: NASA's Search for Life Beyond Earth, a narrative of NASA's exploration of Mars; Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe; Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu; and Columbus: The Four Voyages.
Bergreen has also written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek and Esquire. He taught at The New School in New York, and served as Assistant to the President of The Paley Center for Media. Bergreen frequently lectures at major universities and symposia, and is a Featured Historian for The History Channel.
In 2007, Bergreen was asked by NASA to name some geological features surrounding the Victoria crater on Mars, based on places Ferdinand Magellan visited. In 2008, Bergreen was a keynote speaker at NASA's 50th anniversary event in Washington, D.C. (From Widipedia.)
Book Reviews
Prodigious research, sure-footed prose and vivid depictions make for a thoroughly satisfying account of the age in which Iberian seafarers groped their way around the world. Binding it all together is the psychology of Magellan's flawed leadership, the source of constant tension in his fleet. Driven by a fanatical dream to find the Spice Islands, Magellan was a frustrated Portuguese nobleman sailing for the king of Spain and a complicated man with absolute power of life and death over his crew. Almost five centuries after embarking on his world-changing voyage, he emerges here in the hands of a capable biographer who is simultaneously attracted and repelled by his excesses.
W. Jeffrey Bolster - Wall Street Journal
In Bergreen's hands, however, [Over the Edge of the World is] a great adventure story, complete with enough plot elements—political intrigue, sexual adventurism, travelogue—to keep anyone happy, even those of us with no interest in navigation.
Alan Greenblatt - National Public Radio
Journalist Bergreen, who has penned biographies of James Agee, Louis Armstrong, Irving Berlin and Al Capone, superbly recreates Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan's obsessive 16th-century quest, an ill-fated journey that altered Europe's perception of the planet: "It was a dream as old as the imagination: a voyage to the ends of the earth.... Mariners feared they could literally sail over the edge of the world." In 2001, Bergreen traveled the South American strait that bears Magellan's name, and he adds to that firsthand knowledge satellite images of Magellan's route plus international archival research. His day-by-day account incorporates the testimony of sailors, Francisco Albo's pilot's log and the eyewitness accounts of Venetian scholar Antonio Pigafetta, who was on the journey. Magellan's mission for Spain was to find a water route to the fabled Spice Islands, and in 1519, the Armada de Molucca (five ships and some 260 sailors) sailed into the pages of history. Many misfortunes befell the expedition, including the brutal killing of Magellan in the Philippines. Three years later, one weather-beaten ship, "a vessel of desolation and anguish," returned to Spain with a skeleton crew of 18, yet "what a story those few survivors had to tell—a tale of mutiny, of orgies on distant shores, and of the exploration of the entire globe," providing proof that the world was round. Illuminating the Age of Discovery, Bergreen writes this powerful tale of adventure with a strong presence and rich detail. Maps, 16-page color photo insert.
Publishers Weekly
Bergreen (Voyage to Mars; Louis Armstrong) applies his successful writing skills to this inside story of what really happened during Magellan's epic, three-year circumnavigation of the globe. On September 6, 1522, of the five vessels that began the historic voyage, only one (the Victoria) sailed into the Spanish port of Sanlucar de Barrameda, holding a mere 18 survivors from the original crew of 260. Bergreen provides a gripping, first-rate story of the harrowing journey, the death of Magellan and nearly his entire crew, and the loss of three of the ships (one had already returned to Spain). Bergreen bases the text on exhaustive research into over 500-year-old original and secondary source documents from five languages, including the extensive eyewitness account by Antonio Pigafetta, the official chronicler of the voyage. Readers will be thrilled by Bergreen's superb, lively writing. The work nicely updates Tim Joyner's ten-year-old Magellan and provides a readily accessible, general history of this important event in world history that will also attract interest in academia. Highly recommended for all libraries. —Dale Farris, Groves, TX
Library Journal
Ferdinand Magellan's ship was the first to circumnavigate the globe. While the accomplishment is recognized as a historic milestone, less known are the details of that voyage around the world.... Fascinating reading for history buffs, and a great story that rivals any seagoing adventure. —Gavin Quinn
Booklist
A vivid account of Magellan's star-crossed voyage around the world nearly five centuries ago. Fond of epic adventures and odd ducks alike, Bergreen (Voyage to Mars, 2000, etc.) finds a nice blend of the two in Ferdinand Magellan's life and career. Considered a tyrant by some, a traitor by others, and often in trouble with one legal authority or another, Magellan seemed driven by a need both to serve the powerful and to make himself rich and/or famous in the bargain; he also had a habit of tripping himself up and making powerful enemies, racking up charges of selling provisions to the Arab enemy in one war and earning mistrust for abandoning his native Portugal for the chance to command an expedition for archrival Spain. Magellan's skills as a soldier and apparent lack of fear in promoting his aims—if matched by a deeply provisional knowledge of the world beyond Iberia—eventually won him the exclusive contract to find the fabled Spice Islands and claim the lands he found for Christianity and Spain. Thanks to bad luck, poor skills on the human-relations front, and some unfortunate missteps at sea, Magellan found himself confronting near-constant mutinies great and small; he survived them only to die, in 1521, in the Philippines after picking a fight with the natives in a misguided attempt to prove his omnipotence. Bergreen, citing Magellan's shipmate and chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, suggests that the Captain General's ever-quarrelsome crew deliberately failed to come to his aid—"or their officers ordered them to stay put," effecting an easily disguised mutiny by another name. Only one of the Magellan armada's ships made it back to Spain, and 200 sailors died on the voyage. Still, Bergreen writes, the expedition had an important effect not only in pointing the way to the Spice Island trade, but also in dispelling reigning myths about "mermaids, boiling water at the equator, and a magnetic island capable of pulling the nails from passing ships." Very nicely written through and through, and a pleasure for students of world exploration.
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 Over the Edge of the World:
1. How does Laurence Bergreen present Ferdinand Magellan to readers? What kind of man is Magellan? How would you describe him? Was he "the man for the job"? In other words, did Magellan's character traits and personality make him suitable for leading this voyage of discovery?
2. What were the political and economic justifications for the expedition? Why was even a small sack of spices valuable to a sailor?
3. Talk about the role of nationalism—between the Spaniards and Portuguese—and how it undermined the voyage? What about King Manuel of Portugal? Why was he so intent on interfering with Magellan?
4. Did you find helpful Bergreen's discussion of the Pope's demarcation of Spanish and Portuguese spheres of control? Were you able to follow the author's explanation?
5. Did Bergreen's use of primary sources enhance or detract from your reading experience? What do they bring, if anything, to the narrative? Did you at times wish for more maps to trace the route? Was the NASA photograph of the Magellan Strait helpful?
6. Bergreen's descriptive passages detail both the beauty and brutality of the natural world. What were some of the descriptions that most struck you? Perhaps the glaciers in the Strait of Magellan? What else?
7. Talk about the ordeal of living on a ship in the 16th century: everything from the lack of fresh water to violent weather and bedbugs? What would you have found most difficult?
8. Magellan's armada suffered multiple mutinies. What were the reasons for the rebellions? Do you find yourself in sympathy with the crew or with Magellan?
9. What role does religion play in the expedition. How was the crew, for instance, affected by the Inquisition? What about religion's role in the Philippines?
10. What happened on the Philippines that led to Magellan's death? For a man as prudent and disciplined as Magellan, how did he find himself embroiled in a contest between two tribes?
11. Many of his crew watched Magellan from their ships as he was slaughtered in the surf in the Philippines. Antonio Pigafetta, the voyage's chief chronicler, implies that more might have been done to save Magellan's life. Why didn't the crew come to his rescue?
12. What affect did the expedition have on Europeans' perception of the world? How they view the world prior to the sail of the Molucca Armada...and after its return?
13. Despite the destruction of all but one ship, was the voyage "successful"? What impact did it have on Spain's economy? (Was it worth the heavy cost, in human terms, to bring a supply of spices to Europe? What, for instance, were cloves used for?)
14. You might say we, too, are in an "age of discovery"—voyaging into the unknown in spaceships rather than sea ships. In what way, if any, can the courage of astronauts be compared to that of 16th-century sea explorers? Are the two comparable?
15. Laurence Bergreen writes in the prologue, "They had survived an expedition to the ends of the earth, but more than that, they had endured a voyage into the darkest recesses of the human soul." What does Bergreen mean by that remark?
16. Follow-up to Question #15: Joseph Conrad wrote about that very theme 300 years later in The Heart of Darkness. Is it a universal human trait—that, once lost, alone, and "unanchored" from society, humans descend into the soul's dark recesses? Hypothetical question: would our behavior today be different from—or similar to—that of 16th-century explorers if we encountered beings on another planet?
17. What did you enjoy most about this historical biography? Did Bergreen's prose readily engage you? Did the author make the era come alive? Did you find the digressions and asides interesting? Of did you find the work bogged down by too much detail?
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The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine
Somaly Mam, 2005
Random House
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385526227
Summary
(A portion of the proceeds of this book will be donated to the Somaly Mam Foundation.)
A riveting, raw, and beautiful memoir of tragedy and hope.
Born in a village deep in the Cambodian forest, Somaly Mam was sold into sexual slavery by her grandfather when she was twelve years old. For the next decade she was shuttled through the brothels that make up the sprawling sex trade of Southeast Asia.
Trapped in this dangerous and desperate world, she suffered the brutality and horrors of human trafficking—rape, torture, deprivation—until she managed to escape with the help of a French aid worker. Emboldened by her newfound freedom, education, and security, Somaly blossomed but remained haunted by the girls in the brothels she left behind.
Written in exquisite, spare, unflinching prose, The Road of Lost Innocence recounts the experiences of her early life and tells the story of her awakening as an activist and her harrowing and brave fight against the powerful and corrupt forces that steal the lives of these girls.
She has orchestrated raids on brothels and rescued sex workers, some as young as five and six; she has built shelters, started schools, and founded an organization that has so far saved more than four thousand women and children in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos.
Her memoir will leave you awestruck by her tenacity and courage and will renew your faith in the power of an individual to bring about change. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1970-71
• Where—Mondulkiri, Cambodia
• Awards—World Children's Prize for The Rights of the Child,
Sweden, 2008; CNN Hero, USA; Glamour Woman of the
Year, 2006; Olympic flag bearer, Torino, 2006; Heroes of
Anti-Trafficking Award, US State Department; Mimosa d'Oro
Award; Festival du Scoop Prize, France; Excmo
Ayuntaniento de Galdar Concejalia de Servicio Sociale, and
Principe de Asturias for International Cooperation, 1998—
both of Spain; Regis University Honorary Doctorate of
Public Service, USA.
• Currently—lives in France and Cambodia
Somaly Mam is the cofounder of AFESIP (Acting for Women in Distressing Situations) in Cambodia and The Somaly Mam Foundation in the United States, whose goal is to save and socially reintegrate victims of sexual slavery in Southeast Asia. She was named Glamour's Woman of the Year in 2006. She lives in Cambodia and France. (From the publisher.)
More
Mam, born into a Cambodian family struggling through poverty, was sold into sexual slavery as a child by her grandfather. She was beaten, raped and tortured. One night she witnessed the murder by a pimp of close friend and, at this moment, made it her mission to escape and find a way to halt the practice of child sex slavery. By the age of 30 Somaly Mam had become an international spokesperson for women and children tortured in the brothels of Southeast Asia.
In 1997, along with her former French husband, Pierre Legros, Mam created the AFESIP (Agir pour les Femmes en Situation Précaire—Acting for Women in Distressing Circumstances) in Cambodia. Since then, her international foundation has worked in Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. Its goals are to save and socially reintegrate people who are victims of the sex slave trade. Despite threats against her life, Somaly Mam has helped thousands of young girls and teenagers who had been coerced into prostitution.
Mam has attained international recognition for her work. In 1998 she received the prestigious Prince of Asturias Awards for International Cooperation, in the presence of Queen Sofia of Spain. In 2006 she was one of the eight Olympic flag bearers at the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony in Torino, Italy. In October 2006 she was named a Glamour magazine WOMAN OF THE YEAR at a presentation at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Her award was presented by Mariane Pearl, the journalist, who had been present in Cambodia at the time of the kidnapping of Somaly's daughter, and who reported on the incident for an article that subsequently appeared in the August 1, 2006 issue of Glamour:
The following day, a social worker calls me to say that Somaly has been reunited with her daughter. The police found Ning, who had apparently been drugged, in a bar in Battambang. She said she had been raped by her three captors—the young man who the family knows, along with two others.
When I see mother and daughter again, both are deeply shaken. “I think they kidnapped Ning in retaliation for my work,” Somaly tells me. I see that this is another defining moment in her life. She is deeply hurt. But pausing in her work is not an option. She must keep going—for the sake of all the girls she is helping. For the sake of her daughter. She tells me how earlier, she took Ning’s beautiful, sad face in both of her hands. “You’ve suffered what you’ve suffered,” she told her. “Now you take that pain and you help others. —Glamour
In June 2007 Somaly created the US based Somaly Mam Foundation, and in 2008, she was awarded the World's Children's Prize for the Rights of the Child in Sweden for her "dangerous struggle" to defend the rights of children in Cambodia. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
In The Road of Lost Innocence, [Mam] writes of corrupt government officials and police who allow the illegal businesses to thrive. Her account inspires outrage.
Jane Ciabattari - Washington Post
An inspiring story from the front lines of a global tragedy. Somaly Mam’s courageous fight to save women and children reminds us that one person can stand up and change the fate of others for good.”
Mariane Pearl (author of A Mighty Heart)
The Road of Lost Innocence is unputdownable, and you read it with a lump in your throat. Somaly Mam’s story is an account of how humanity can sink to the lowest levels of depravity, but it is also a testimony of resistance and hope. She lifted herself out of a well of terror and found the determination and the resilience to save others. Somaly Mam is my candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (author of Infidel)
The horror and violence perpetrated on young girls to feed the sex trade industry in southeast Asia is personalized in this graphic story. Of "mixed race," Khmer and Phnong, Mam is living on her own in the forest in northern Cambodia around 1980 when a 55-year-old stranger claims he will take her to her missing family. "Grandfather" beats and abuses the nine-year-old Mam and sells her virginity to a Chinese merchant to cover a gambling debt. She is subsequently sold into a brothel in Phnom Penh, and the daily suffering and humiliation she endures is almost impossible to imagine or absorb ("I was dead. I had no affection for anyone"). She recounts recalcitrant girls being tortured and killed, and police collusion and government involvement in the sex trade; she manages to break the cycle only when she discovers the advantages of ferengi(foreign) clients and eventually marries a Frenchman. She comes back to Cambodia from France, now unafraid, and with her husband, Pierre; sets up a charity, AFESIP, "action for women in distressing circumstances"; and fearlessly devotes herself to helping prostitutes and exploited children. The statistics are shocking: one in every 40 Cambodian girls (some as young as five) will be sold into sex slavery. Mam brings to the fore the AIDS crisis, the belief that sex with a virgin will cure the disease and the Khmer tradition of women's obedience and servitude. This moving, disturbing tale is not one of redemption but a cry for justice and support for women's plight everywhere.
Publishers Weekly
Candid memoir of a woman trapped in the sex-slave trade, who is now an activist against it. "You shouldn't try and discover the past," Mam recalls her adoptive father telling her. "You shouldn't hurt yourself." Born in 1970 or 1971 and torn from her ethnic Phnong family during Cambodia's genocidal civil war, Mam suffered as a child in a Khmer village whose people saw her as "fatherless, black, and ugly," possibly even a cannibal. Her pederast grandfather sold her virginity to a Chinese merchant to whom he owed money, a prize in a culture where raping a virgin was believed to cure AIDS. He then sold her to a soldier who "beat me often, sometimes with the butt of his rifle on my back and sometimes with his hands." From there it was a short path to what Mam calls "ordinary prostitution," working for a madam who was quick to hit and slow to feed. In time, after a series of indignities that she recounts in painful detail, Mam extricated herself to live with a French humanitarian-aid worker. Married, she moved with him to France, where she discovered that "French people could be racist, just like the Khmers." Burdened with an unpleasant mother-in-law, she welcomed the chance to return to Cambodia, working in a Doctors Without Borders clinic and turning her home into a kind of halfway house for abused, drug-addicted and ill prostitutes, most of whom were very young. Mam recounts her battles against government officials, pimps, brothel keepers and other foes in a campaign that brought death threats against her, but that slowly gathered force as it gained funding from UNICEF and several European governments. That campaign is ongoing, and Mam concludes that there's plenty left to do, since Cambodiais "in a state of chaos where the only rule is every man for himself." An urgent, though depressing, document, worthy of a place alongside Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone, Rigoberto Menchu's autobiography, and other accounts of overcoming Third World hardship.
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 Road of Lost Innocence:
1. One of the primary questions, of course, concerns Somaly Mam's incredible courage. What inner strengths does she draw upon that enable her to overcome her own degradation and reach out to help others?
2. Were you surprised by Somaly Mam's book? If you were previously unaware of sex slave trafficking, what does that say about the level of awareness of others in the nation and around the world? What else have you heard, watched, or read about this issue? Has it received the attention it deserves in this country? If not, why?
3. What more should be done to increase awareness and to eventually halt the practice of sex slavery? Is Mam's crusade sufficient? What more needs to be done...or, realistically, can be done?
4. Is there one special incident or individual or moment in this book that moved you more than any other?
5. Does this book move you to become personally involved in this issue. What can you, or any one individual (or small group) do to ameliorate the problem of sex slave trafficking?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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