The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful and (HIV) Postive
Marvelyn Brown, Courtney Martin, 2008
HarperCollins
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061562396
Summsry
The surprisingly hopeful story of how a straight, nonpromiscuous, everyday girl contracted HIV and how she manages to stay upbeat, inspired, and more positive about life than ever before
At nineteen years of age, Marvelyn Brown was lying in a stark white hospital bed at Tennessee Christian Medical Center, feeling hopeless. A former top track and basketball athlete, she was in the best shape of her life, but she was battling a sudden illness in the intensive care unit. Doctors had no idea what was going on. It never occurred to Brown that she might be HIV positive.
Having unprotected sex with her Prince Charming had set into swift motion a set of circumstances that not only landed her in the fight of her life, but also alienated her from her community. Rather than give up, however, Brown found a reason to fight and a reason to live.
The Naked Truth is an inspirational memoir that shares how an everyday teen refused to give up on herself, even as others would forsake her. More, it's a cautionary tale that every parent, guidance counselor, and young adult should read. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 7, 1984
• Where—Nashville, Tennessee, USA
• Awards—Emmy Award
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, New York
More
Marvelyn Brown is an African American author and AIDS activist whose autobiographical book (The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful and (HIV) Positive) tells her story as a young heterosexual women contracting HIV/AIDS at the young age of 19. A former top track and basketball athlete, she was in the best shape of her life, but found herself suddenly battling an unknown illness in an intensive care unit. Doctors had no idea what was going on, and it never occurred to Brown that she might be HIV positive.
Brown’s tale has had quite an impact on the AIDS community, and the world, as she travels telling her story trying to make more people aware of the continuing growth of the AIDS pandemic.
Her book and work as an HIV/AIDS activist has resulted in Brown having had extensive radio and television appearances. Marvelyn Brown has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, America's Next Top Model, CNN, MTV, BET, and The Tavis Smiley Show. She has also appeared in Newsweek, Ebony Magazine, and Real Health magazines. Her public-service announcement for Think MTV won an Emmy Award. Marvelyn Brown continues to write and has dedicated her life to HIV/AIDS awareness. Brown was names one of the Top 25 Heroes of the past twenty-five years of the AIDS epidemic (other noted AIDS activist included on this list are Alicia Keys, Magic Johnson and Phill Wilson). (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Some books have few mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Make a note to add The Naked Truth; Young, Beautiful, and (HIV) Positive by Marvelyn Brown to your bookshelf. In this poignant account, Brown 24, provides a cautionary tale about how she became HIV-positive at 19.
Essence
Be inspired by this true story of a 19-year old who contracted the HIV virus from her longtime monogamous boyfriend and became an Emmy Award winning advocate for HIV awareness.
Upscale
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 Naked Truth:
1. Should this book be required reading for teens?
2. Do you think there is still a lot of misinformation in this country—ignorance, superstition or naivete—when it comes to AIDS? Are there things you learned about AIDS from reading Brown's book? Did anything in this book surprise you?
3. Did this book inspire you to become involved the fight against the spread of AIDS. What can you, or any individual, do—on a large or small scale?
4. What is the impact that Brown says her father's suicide has had on her life? We talk a great deal about the absence of a father figure for young males, but what about young females? What light does Brown's book shed on losing a father for a young girl?
5. What ultimate message about being HIV-positive does Brown convey in her both her book and her many public appearances?
6. What kind of a person is Marvelyn Brown?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson, 2003
Random House
560 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780767908184
Summary
This brand-new edition of the colossal bestseller is lavishly illustrated to convey, in pictures as in words, Bill Bryson's exciting, informative journey into the world of science.
In this acclaimed bestseller, beloved author Bill Bryson confronts his greatest challenge yet: to understand—and, if possible, answer—the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves.
Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. The result is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it.
Now, in this handsome new edition, Bill Bryson's words are supplemented by full-colour artwork that explains in visual terms the concepts and wonder of science, at the same time giving face to the major players in the world of scientific study. Eloquently and entertainingly described, as well as lavishly illustrated, science has never been more involving or entertaining. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 8 1951
• Where—Des Moines, Iowa, USA
• Education—B.A., Drake University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Norfolk, England, UK
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.
Early years
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 (who later appears in Bryson's A Walk in the Woods). Some of Bryson's experiences from this European trip are included as flashbacks in a book about a similar excursion written 20 years later, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe.
Staying in the UK, Bryson landed a job working in a psychiatric hospital—the now defunct Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water in Surrey. There he met his wife Cynthia, a nurse. After marring, the couple moved to the US, in 1975, so Bryson could complete his college degree. In 1977 they moved back to the UK where they remained until 1995.
Living in North Yorkshire and working primarily 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.
Books
Bryson came to prominence in the UK with his 1995 publication of Notes from a Small Island, an exploration of Britain. Eight years later, as part of the 2003 World Book Day, Notes was voted by UK readers as the best summing up of British identity and the state of the nation. (The same year, 2003, saw Bryson appointed a Commissioner for English Heritage.)
In 1995, Bryson and his family returned to the US, living in Hanover, New Hampshire for the next eight years. His time there is recounted in the 1999 story collection, I'm A Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to American After 20 Years Away (known as Notes from a Big Country in the UK, Canada and Australia).
It was during this time that Bryson decided to walk the Appalachian Trail with his friend Stephen Katz. The resulting book is the 1998 A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. The book became one of Bryson's all-time bestsellers and was adapted to film in 2015, starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte.
In 2003, the Brysons and their four children returned to the UK. They now live in Norfolk.
That same year, Bryson published A Short History of Nearly Everything, a 500-page exploration, in nonscientific terms, of the history of some of our scientific knowledge. The book reveals the often humble, even humorous, beginnings of some of the discoveries which we now take for granted.
The book won Bryson the prestigious 2004 Aventis Prize for best general science book and the 2005 EU Descartes Prize for science communication. Although one scientist is alleged to have jokingly described A Brief History as "annoyingly free of mistakes," Bryson himself makes no such claim, and a list of nine reported errors in the book is available online.
Bryson has also written two popular works on the history of the English language—Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way (1990) and Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States (1994). He also updated of his 1983 guide to usage, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. These books were popularly acclaimed and well-reviewed, despite occasional criticism of factual errors, urban myths, and folk etymologies.
In 2016, Bryson published The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in England, a sequel to his Notes from a Small Island.
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. Adapted 2/1/2016.)
Book Reviews
The more I read of A Short History of Nearly Everything, the more I was convinced that Bryson had achieved exactly what he'd set out to do, and, moreover, that he'd done it in stylish, efficient, colloquial and stunningly accurate prose. We learn what the material world is like from the smallest quark to the largest galaxy and at all the levels in between. The basic facts of physics, chemistry, biology, botany, climatology, geology — all these and many more are presented with exceptional clarity and skill.
Ed Regis - The New York Times
Bryson relies on some of the best material in the history of science to have come out in recent years.... [T]o read Bryson is to travel with a memoirist gifted with wry observation and keen insight that shed new light on things we mistake for commonplace.... [A] trip worth taking for most readers.
Publishers Weekly
Writing with wit and charm, Bryson...takes us on a scientific odyssey from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. Reflecting his gift for making science comprehensible yet fun, he tells the story of the discoveries and the people that have shaped our understanding of the universe. —James Olson, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib, Chicago
Library Journal
Bryson...asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.... Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. This book presents science as a series of questions—mostly unanswered. Is this surprising to you? How was science presented to you when you were in school?
2. Bryson mentions that, several times in the past, scientists thought that all the big questions were answered. Some even believe we have reached that point today. Still others wonder if we might soon reach the limits of our intellectual ability to understand the strangeness of atomic particles or explore multiple universes. Any thoughts?
3. A major theme of the book is resistance to new scientific ideas despite solid evidence for them. Bryson gives a number of examples—the Big Bang and plate tectonics are two. What other theories faced initial rejection?
4. Follow-up to Question 3: At the same time, Bryson addresses the idea of scientists clinging to widely accepted but disproven ideas—a young earth and Ether are two that come to mind. What are some of the others in the book?
• Why do you think scientists are resistant to change?
• Are scientists any different from lay people in their resistance to change?
• What current widely held idea do you think might be disproven in the future?
5. Bryson often cites examples of global crises that may have influenced the Earth in the past—meteor strikes, salinity crisis, volcanoes, changes in solar output. How does this relate to the current consideration of global warming?
6. Follow-up to Question 5: Considering the Bryson's examples of powerful global forces beyond human control—including hurricanes, plate tectonics, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and ice ages—do you think differently about human ability to control what happens on earth? To what extent are we "masters" of the earth?
7. What is the connection between human beings and extinction of other species? Consider, for instance, how the dodos and passenger pigeons became extinct? Bryson makes a number of statements on the subject. What do you think?
• Over the last 50,000 years or so, wherever we have gone, animals have tended to vanish, in often astonishingly large numbers.
• The people who were most intensely interested in the world’s living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them.
• It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and it’s worst nightmare simultaneously.
• We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even to make it better.
8. How has this book affected your thinking about evolution? Do you agree that evolution may be "a lottery" or that, as human beings, "we are not the culmination of anything”?
9. Do a little research into Drake’s equation for the possibility of life on other worlds. Do you think life in the universe is inevitable or rare? Why? How about other complex (multi-cellular) life? How about intelligent life?
10. Bryson presents scientists as human beings with very human stories. Many died unhappy receiving no recognition or credit for their work. How would you feel if this happened to you? Which story touches you the most?
11. Consider the common question: “Why are there so few women scientists?” Does this book agree there is a shortage, or does it tell us why we don't hear about female scientists? Consider doing some research on Mme Lavoisier, Curie, or Franklin.
(Questions adapted from the Penguin Random House Teachers Guide.)
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Zeitoun
Dave Eggers, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307387943
Summary
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared.
Eggers’s riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy—an American who converted to Islam—and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible.
Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research—in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 12, 1970
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Reared—Lake Forest, Illinois
• Education—University of Illinois
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California
Dave Eggers is the author of four books, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, How We Are Hungry, and What Is the What. He is the editor of McSweeney’s, a quarterly magazine and book-publishing company, and is cofounder of 826 Valencia, a network of nonprofit writing and tutoring centers for young people.
His interest in oral history led to his 2004 cofounding of Voice of Witness, a nonprofit series of books that use oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. As a journalist, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Believer. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and daughter. (From the publisher.)
More
Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, grew up in suburban Lake Forest (where he was a high-school classmate of the actor Vince Vaughn), and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He lives in San Francisco and is married to the writer Vendela Vida. In October 2005, Vendela gave birth to a daughter, October Adelaide Eggers Vida.
Eggers's brother Bill is a researcher who has worked for several conservative think tanks, doing research on privatization. His sister, Beth, claimed that Eggers grossly understated her role in raising their brother Toph and made use of her journals in writing A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius without compensating her. She later recanted her claims in a posting on her brother's own website McSweeney's Internet Tendency, referring to the incident as "a really terrible LaToya Jackson moment". On March 1, 2002, the New York Post reported that Beth, then a lawyer in Modesto, California, had committed suicide. Eggers briefly spoke about his sister's death during a 2002 fan interview for McSweeney's.
Eggers was one of three 2008 TED Prize recipients. His TED Prize wish: for community members to personally engage with local public schools.
Eggers began writing as a Salon.com editor and founded Might magazine, while also writing a comic strip called Smarter Feller (originally Swell, then Smart Feller) for SF Weekly. His first book was a memoir (with fictional elements), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). It focuses on the author's struggle to raise his younger brother in San Francisco following the sudden deaths of their parents. The book quickly became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The memoir was praised for its originality, idiosyncratic self-referencing, and for several innovative stylistic elements. Early printings of the 2001 trade-paperback edition were published with a lengthy, apologetic postscript entitled "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making."
In 2002, Eggers published his first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, a story about a frustrating attempt to give away money to deserving people while haphazardly traveling the globe. An expanded and revised version was released as Sacrament in 2003 and retitled You Shall Know Our Velocity! for its Vintage imprint distribution. He has since published a collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry, and three politically-themed serials for Salon.com. In November 2005, Eggers published Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, compiling the book of interviews with exonerees once sentenced to death. The book was compiled with Lola Vollen, "a physician specializing in the aftermath of large-scale human rights abuses" and "a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of International Studies and a practicing clinician." Novelist Scott Turow wrote the introduction to Surviving Justice. Eggers's most recent novel, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (McSweeney's, 2006), was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Eggers is also the editor of the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, an annual anthology of short stories, essays, journalism, satire, and alternative comics.
Eggers is the founder of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house. McSweeney's produces a quarterly literary journal, McSweeney's, first published in 1998; a monthly journal, The Believer, which debuted in 2003 and is edited by wife Vida; and, beginning in 2005, a quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin. Other works include The Future Dictionary of America, Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, and the "Dr. and Mr. Haggis-On-Whey" children's books of literary nonsense, which Eggers writes with his younger brother. Ahead of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Eggers wrote an essay about the US national team and soccer in the United States for The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, a book published with aid of the journal Granta, that contained essays about each competing team in the tournament.
Eggers currently teaches writing in San Francisco at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit tutoring center and writing school for children that he cofounded in 2002. Eggers has recruited volunteers to operate similar programs in Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, Chicago, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, all under the auspices of the nonprofit organization 826 National. In 2006, he appeared at a series of fundraising events, dubbed the Revenge of the Book–Eaters tour, to support these programs. The Chicago show, at the Park West theatre, featured Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Other performers on the tour included Sufjan Stevens, Jon Stewart and David Byrne. In September 2007, the Heinz Foundations awarded Eggers a $250,000 Heinz award given to recognize "extraordinary achievements by individuals". The award will be used to fund some of the 826 Valencia writing centers. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
In Zeitoun, what Dave Eggers has found in the Katrina mud is the full-fleshed story of a single family, and in telling that story he hits larger targets with more punch than those who have already attacked the thematic and historic giants of this disaster. It's the stuff of great narrative nonfiction. Eggers...has given us 21st-century Dickensian storytelling—which is to say, a character-driven potboiler with a point. But here's the real trick: He does it without any writerly triple-lutzes or winks of postmodern irony. There are no rants against President Bush, no cheap shots at the authorities who let this city drown. He does it the old-fashioned way: with show-not-tell prose, in the most restrained of voices.
Timothy Egan - New York Times Book Review
Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) chronicles the tribulations of Syrian-born painting contractor Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who, while aiding in rescue efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, was inexplicably arrested by military personnel and swept into a bureaucratic maelstrom of civil injustices. This Kafkaesque story is sure to shock, horrify, and outrage listeners and will especially appeal to those who enjoy nonfiction survival stories. It should be required reading to ensure that nothing like the events described here will ever be repeated. —Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. “Notes About This Book” (xv) gives a sense of how the book was written, whose point of view it reflects, and Eggers’s efforts at accuracy and truth in his depiction of events. By choosing to portray the response to the hurricane through its effects on one family, what kind of story (or history) does he achieve?
2. The book opens with “Friday, August 26,” an expository chapter that introduces us to Zeitoun’s family life and his business life, the two very interconnected. What are some of the ways in which the descriptions here draw you in as a reader, and make these people and their situation real? Why is the timeline a good structural choice for this story?
3. Kathy has grown up as a Southern Baptist. Drawn to Islam through her childhood friend Yuko, she decides to convert. Why, when she comes to visit wearing her hijab, does her mother tell her, “Now you can take that thing off” (57)? Why does the prayer from the Qur’an quoted on page 51 have a strong effect on her? What does her reaction to the evangelical preacher who mocks Islam and says that Kathy’s temptation to convert was the work of the devil (65–66), say about Kathy’s character and intelligence?
4. Do Abdulrahman, Kathy and their children make up an unusual American family, or not? How would you describe the relationship between Zeitoun and Kathy, in marriage and in business? What effect does their religion have on the way others in the community see them?
5. Why has Eggers woven into the story accounts of Zeitoun’s past in Syria, his upbringing, his brother Mohammed, the champion swimmer, his brother Ahmad, and their close bond? What effect does this framework of family have on your perception of Zeitoun’s character, his ethics, his behavior?
6. The plight of the neighborhood’s abandoned dogs comes to Zeitoun’s attention as “a bewilderment, an anger in their cries that cut the night into shards” (93). The next day, he sets out in the canoe and tries to do what he can for animals and people trapped by the flood. How does Zeitoun feel about what he is doing? How does he think about these days after he has been imprisoned (262–64)?
7. Discuss what happens when Zeitoun and the others are forced to get into the boat and are taken into custody. Is it clear why they are being arrested? What assumptions are made about Zeitoun and the other three men (275–87)?
8. Part IV (203–90) tells the story of Zeitoun’s imprisonment. Here we learn in great detail how Zeitoun is denied the right to call Kathy, how his injured foot is not attended to, how the other men are beaten, stripped, and starved, how he prays constantly, yet loses hope. What is the impact, as you read, of this narrative?
9. “Zeitoun is a more powerful indictment of America’s dystopia in the Bush era than any number of well-written polemics” (Timothy Egan, New York Times, August 13, 2009). Would you agree with this statement? Can Zeitoun be read as a contribution to the history of hurricane Katrina and the failure of government to handle the disaster effectively?
10. Discuss Kathy’s situation, and her actions once she learns where Zeitoun is. The aftermath is more difficult, and she still suffers from physical and psychological problems that seem to be the result of post-traumatic stress. What was the most traumatic part of her experience, and why (319)?
11. Given that the other men who were imprisoned with Zeitoun were held much longer than he was, and that Nasser lost his life savings, is it surprising that these men were not compensated in any way for their time in prison (320–21)?
12. What is Zeitoun’s feeling now about what happened? How does he move forward into the future, as expressed in the book’s closing pages (322-25)?
13. If you have read What is the What, Eggers’ novel about Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, how does Zeitoun compare? Discuss Eggers’ approach to writing about traumatic regional and political events through the lives of individuals impacted by them.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Orchard: A Memoir
Theresa Weir, 2011
Grand Central Publishing
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446584692
Summary
The Orchard is the story of a street-smart city girl who must adapt to a new life on an apple farm after she falls in love with Adrian Curtis, the golden boy of a prominent local family whose lives and orchards seem to be cursed.
Married after only three months, young Theresa finds life with Adrian on the farm far more difficult and dangerous than she expected. Rejected by her husband's family as an outsider, she slowly learns for herself about the isolated world of farming, pesticides, environmental destruction, and death, even as she falls more deeply in love with her husband, a man she at first hardly knew and the land that has been in his family for generations.
Theresa becomes a reluctant player in their attempt to keep the codling moth from destroying the orchard. Yet she and Adrian eventually come to know that their efforts will not only fail but will ultimately take an irreparable toll. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Anne Frasier
• Birth—ca. 1950s
• Where—Burlington, Iowa, USA
• Education—Artesia High School, Artesia, New Mexico
• Awards—Romantic Times Best Romantic-Adventure
Writer Award; Romance Writers of America Award
(RITA); Daphne du Maurier Award; Romantic Times
Career Achievement Award.
• Currently—lives in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota
Theresa Weir is the real name of Anne Frasier, a USA Today bestselling author of nineteen novels that have spanned the genres of suspense, mystery, thriller, romantic suspense, paranormal, and memoir. Her books have been translated into twenty languages.
Weir’s debut title was the cult phenomenon Amazon Lily, initially published by Pocket Books and later reissued by Bantam Books. Writing as Theresa Weir, she won a RITA for romantic suspense (Cool Shade), and a year later the Daphne du Maurier for paranormal romance (Bad Karma).
In her more recent Anne Frasier career, her thriller and suspense titles hit the USA Today list (Hush, Sleep Tight, Play Dead) and were featured in Mystery Guild, Literary Guild, and Book of the Month Club. Hush was both a RITA and Daphne du Maurier finalist. Well-known and respected in the mystery community, she served as hardcover judge for the Thriller presented by International Thriller Writers, and was guest of honor at the Diversicon 16 mystery/science fiction conference held in Minneapolis in 2008. Frasier books have received high praise from print publications and online review sites. Her short stories and poetry can be found in Discount Noir, Once Upon a Crime, and The Lineup, Poems on Crime. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, and Crimespace.
Life
Theresa Weir was born in Burlington, Iowa, a river town settled by German, Irish, and Dutch immigrants. Her blue-collar parents divorced when she was six, and the next twelve years were spent in poverty, moving to and from Florida, Iowa, California, Illinois, and New Mexico. She graduated from Artesia High School, Artesia, New Mexico.
After high school she worked as a waitress, a factory worker at Albuquerque’s Levi Strauss (where she sewed the Levi’s logo on the back pocket of jeans), followed by a secretarial position at Wally's LP Gas in Santa Fe, New Mexico. At age nineteen, she joined her uncle at his bar in rural Illinois across the Mississippi River from her birthplace of Burlington, Iowa. While tending bar at the Pilot House, she met an apple farmer and the two married three months later.
Shortly after moving to the farm, in the mid-1980s, Weir began writing. Her first manuscript, Amazon Lily (under Theresa Weir) was rejected by multiple agents and publishers because they believed that her hero was unlikable. Four years later, in 1988, she was offered a contract with Pocket Books—and her ground breaking, multi-award winning Amazon Lily was published.
The novel finally sold and went on to win the Romantic Times Best Romantic Adventure Writer Award, but Frasier continued to encounter editors who disliked her characters. In Frasier's words, her characters are "imperfect people who had problems, who didn't always make the right choices, but in the end triumphed." The characters have real, interesting problems, including a hero with agoraphobia and a heroine with an eating disorder.
Her work has continued to be popular with readers and fellow romance writers, however, and in 1999 she was awarded a Romance Writers of America RITA Award for Best Romantic Suspense for her novel Cool Shade. She has also been awarded the Daphne du Maurier award for romantic suspense, and she has been awarded Romantic Times Career Achievement Award and been nominated for a Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award for Long Night Moon.
During her years of writing romance novels, Frasier's editors often asked her "to remove the blood and bodies" from her plots. She decided that instead it would be easier for her to remove the romance and focus more completely on the mystery of the story. After several years, she found a publisher willing to allow her to move her writing into this new direction. Although she has now stopped releasing new romance novels, her thrillers do contain elements of romance. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[S]earing...the past is artfully juxtaposed with the present in this finely wrought work. Its haunting passages will linger long after the last page is turned.
Boston Globe
What do those perfectly round, shiny red apples really cost? This poignant memoir of love, labor, and dangerous pesticides reveals the terrible true price.
Karen Holt - O Magazine
Equal parts moving love story and environmental warning.
Entertainment Weekly
The use of heavy pesticides over decades on Midwestern farms forms the dark, moody leitmotiv of this affecting memoir set largely around a 1970s orchard by thriller writer Weir (aka Anne Frasier). As a 21-year-old from a divorced home who grew up in Miami and Albuquerque, with a talent for art but little prospects to educate herself, Weir gravitated toward the Midwest, where she worked as a waitress in her uncle’s bar in Henderson County, Ill., just off the Iowa border; farmers dropped in for beer and a secret stash of porn her uncle kept in the back, their arms dusted with the herbicide they used in the fields. Smitten with young, handsome Adrian Curtis, the scion of a large apple orchard that seemed to be under a curse of bad luck, Weir soon married the serious, reticent young farmer and lived with him in a small cabin on his parents’ farm, although she hadn’t a clue about being a farm wife; moreover, her in-laws despised her as an outsider (“white trash”) and nobody expected her to last long. Nonetheless, the marriage endured happily, two healthy children were born, and Weir improbably managed to start a career as a writer. But then both Adrian and his father were diagnosed with and died from cancer. Afraid of further contaminating themselves, Weir and her two children eventually moved out of the county. Weir, now living in Minneapolis, narrates a truly disquieting tale of familial dislocation and rupture.
Publishers Weekly
A foreboding memoir of the author's early marriage into an agricultural family, and her emotional navigation between rootlessness and heritage.... The strongest feature of the book is the determined loyalty that allows Weir to discover beauty amid strife, as well as the touching conclusion.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The author’s decision to move to Illinois and help her uncle with his bar was made on a whim. Have you ever made a decision that seemed small and insignificant at the time, but in the end redesigned your life?
2. How might the lack of adult guidance in the author’s childhood have laid the groundwork for her decision to get married so quickly?
3. Why did the author stay on the farm, especially in the beginning? Could her unconventional upbringing have led to an acceptance of a situation many women wouldn’t have tolerated? How did her mother’s rocky relationships play into Theresa’s unclear view of marriage?
4. Would you have stayed given similar circumstances?
5. The author is never quite sure why Adrian married her. Was it passive aggressive behavior on his part? Did he want to annoy his mother? Was he attracted to someone who represented the freedom he could never have? Or was it something else?
6. Did the author’s ambivalence toward her mother-in-law antagonize the situation? Should the author have tried harder to fit in?
7. A scion is a rogue branch that is unlike the rest of the tree. How were the author and her husband both scions? Was one more of a scion than the other?
8. Some cultures believe that no one can really own the land. Should farmers be monitored more closely and held accountable for farming practices? Do they have a responsibility that extends beyond themselves? Or should they be able to do whatever they want with the land they own?
9. The Orchard reads a little like a dark fairy tale. What are some similarities between The Orchard and a fairy tale?
10. In one scene, we’re given insight into what drives Ruth. In many ways she’s a product of her time, her generation, her childhood, and her environment. Her behavior would have been considered acceptable in certain circles, and her battle was not only for the farm, but for her newly found identity. Did you ever feel sympathy for her as the life she’d worked so hard to build collapsed?
11. We know that salesmen once drank the herbicide they were selling as a way of demonstrating the product’s “safety”, but do you think Lily really existed?
12. What scene impacted you the most?
I3. In the final scene, do the roses have significance beyond a simple gift of flowers?
14. Did you learn anything new about apples? If so, what? Will you ever look at an apple the same way again?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
John Berendt, 1994
Knopf Doubleday
386 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679751526
Summary
Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty,early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction. Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case.
It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman's Card Club; the turbulent young redneck gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the "soul of pampered self-absorption"; the uproariously funny black drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young blacks dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a sublime and seductive reading experience. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, this enormously engaging portrait of a most beguiling Southern city is certain to become a modern classic. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 5, 1939
• Where—Syracuse, New York, USA
• Education—A.B., Harvard
• Awards—Southern Book Award for General Nonfiction, 1994;
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, 1995
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
"I like crazy people," John Berendt once told an interviewer for The Independent. "I encourage them, they make good copy."
They do indeed, if Berendt is writing about them. His first book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which Berendt has called "a nonfiction novel," could be classified as a true crime story, or a travelogue, but it's also an absorbing collection of crazy people, cranks, eccentrics and oddballs, whose lives Berendt chronicles with as much detail as he devotes to murder suspect Jim Williams, ostensibly his main character.
As readers and critics have noted, the true "main character" of Midnight in the Garden is the city of Savannah, Ga., which enjoyed a tremendous boost in tourism as a result of what Savannahians now refer to simply as "the book."
Berendt started visiting Savannah in the early 1980s, flying in from New York, where he worked as a writer at Esquire. "All I did the first year," he later said in the London Daily Telegraph, "was take notes and interview, because I knew, the longer I was there, the less strange the whole thing would seem."
For Berendt, who once edited New York magazine, Savannah may have seemed strange at first, but in a fascinating way. As he explained in an Entertainment Weekly interview, "People in Savannah don't say, 'Before leaving the room, Mrs. Jones put on her coat.' Instead, they say, 'Before leaving the room, Mrs. Jones put on the coat that her third husband gave her before he shot himself in the head.'"
After gathering facts, gossiping with the locals and getting to know the city, Berendt shaped his experiences into a work Kirkus Reviews called "stylish, brilliant, hilarious, and coolhearted." Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil spent a record-setting four years on the New York Times bestseller list and sold 2.7 million copies in hardcover.
Not everyone adored it, however. In a controversy that perhaps anticipated author James Frey's troubles in the publishing world, some journalists wondered whether Berendt's embellishments were too numerous and substantial for the book to hold up as nonfiction. The book included an author's note explaining that Berendt changed the sequence of some events in the narrative.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil became a fixture on bestseller lists and was made into a movie directed by Clint Eastwood. Some of the real people profiled in the book became minor celebrities in their own right—most notably Berendt's drag-queen friend Lady Chablis, who played herself in the movie and later published an autobiography.
Readers wondered what Berendt would do for an encore, but the author was relatively slow to oblige them. It wasn't until more than ten years after the publication of his first book that Berendt released The City of Falling Angels, a portrait of Venice as experienced not by tourists, but by its year-round residents, who turn out to be as eccentric and weirdly compelling as the Savannahians of Midnight in the Garden. ("The man whose palazzo features three space suits and a stuffed monkey is par for the course," noted Janet Maslin in the New York Times Book Review.)
Though some critics thought Berendt's second book lacked the narrative pull of his first, many agreed that, as Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley put it, "The story of the Fenice fire and its aftermath is exceptionally interesting, the cast of characters is suitably various and flamboyant, and Berendt's prose, now as then, is precise, evocative and witty."
As Ann Godoff, Berendt's editor (first at Random House and now at Penguin Press), explained it, "By no means is this the same book. But nobody else could have written them both."
Extras
From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview:
• I never use an alarm clock. I have an internal mechanism that wakes me up when I want to wake up. I'm not sure how I developed this ability, or what its significance is. Anyhow, I always fall asleep secure in the knowledge that I will wake up within ten minutes of the desired time. And I always do.
• When I'm writing, I like to gain distance from my work so I can tell how it will strike a reader who is seeing it for the first time. I do this through a trick I devised while I was living in Savannah writing Midnight—I would call my apartment in New York, the answering machine would pick up, I'd read the page of text I'd just written, then I'd hang up. A minute later, I'd call my apartment again and listen to the "message." Hearing my own voice reading the page over the phone—my voice having traveled 1800 miles (900 each way )—gave me just the detached perspective I needed.
• On occasion, while I was working on Falling Angels, I used the same technique, ridiculous though it may sound; in this case the calls were from Venice to New York rather than from Savannah. Gay Talese says he achieves a similar detachment by tacking pages to the opposite wall and then reading them through binoculars. Whatever works."
• I had an early start in the world of books. I was hired at the age of fourteen as a stock boy at the Economy Book Store in downtown Syracuse. It was my first job. I worked after school every day for four hours and made ten dollars a week."
• I stay fit by exercising daily on a treadmill or a stationary bicycle for close to an hour. I'd be bored out of my mind doing this if it weren't for the fact that I watch movies at the same time. That way, time flies. I call it my Treadmill and Bicycle Film Festival. I've found that if I'm watching a thriller, my pace ratchets up a notch."
• My number-one hobby, my preferred means of unwinding, and my most often-used route of escape are all the same: reading. Nothing takes me out of myself faster or more completely than a good read. It relieves stress, lifts me out of a funk, and makes me feel I'm doing something worthwhile.
• When asked what book most influenced his life as a writer, he answered:
I could cite any number of great classics that, when I first read them, introduced me to the excitement of books, but the book that meant the most to me is not at all well known and is now out of print.
It's Small World a novel published in 1951 by Simon & Schuster. The story concerns a family of four living in upstate New York. It's charming and beautifully written. Carol Deschere, the athor, happens to be my mother, and the family depicted in her novel closely resembles our own. The book sold about 2,000 copies and, although my mother never wrote another book, Small World was a life-changing experience for me, because in addition to making me enormously proud of her, it showed me for the first time how real life could be transformed into words and stories and published in a book for all to read. It also planted the first seed in my mind that I might become a writer one day. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Mr. Berendt's writing is elegant and wickedly funny, and his eye for telling details is superb.... Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil might be the first true-crime book that makes the reader want to call a travel agent and book a bed and breakfast for an extended weekend at the scene of the crime.
Glenna Whitley - New York Times
After discovering in the early 1980s that a super-saver fare to Savannah, Ga., cost the same as an entree in a nouvelle Manhattan restaurant, Esquire columnist Berendt spent the next eight years flitting between Savannah and New York City. The result is this collection of smart, sympathetic observations about his colorful Southern neighbors, including a jazz-playing real estate shark; a sexually adventurous art student; the Lady Chablis (' "What was your name before that?" I asked. "Frank," she said.' "); the gossipy Married Woman's Card Club; and an assortment of aging Southern belles. The book is also about the wealthy international antiques dealer Jim Williams, who played an active role in the historic city's restoration—and would also be tried four times for the 1981 shooting death of 21-year-old Danny Handsford, his high-energy, self-destructive house helper. The Williams trials—he died in 1990 of a heart attack at age 59—are lively matches between dueling attorneys fought with shifting evidence, and they serve as both theme and anchor to Berendt's illuminating and captivating travelogue.
Publishers Weekly
It's difficult to categorize this book. On one level, it is a travelogue, recounting former New York magazine editor Berendt's eight years in Savannah, Georgia, that beautifully preserved hothouse of the South where eccentric characters like black drag queen Lady Chablis and charming con man Joe Odom blossom in rich profusion. It is also a true-crime tale, the saga of antiques dealer Jim Williams whose 1981 shooting of his sometime lover Danny Hansford in the historic Mercer House obsesses Savannah denizens; they watch as Williams endures four trials and is eventually acquitted, only to die of a heart attack a few months later, haunted (some say) by Hansford's vengeful ghost. Although non-fiction, Berendt's book reads like a novel (he admits he has taken 'certain storytelling liberties'), and this reviewer sometimes wondered where the truth ends and the fiction begins. Still, this entertaining book will appeal to many readers. —Wilda Williams
Library Journal
Perhaps one of the things that make this nonfiction work unique is that its plot centers on a murder, but Berendt takes his sweet time getting around to that fact, allowing the reader to be as surprised as he must have been watching the events unfold. Midnight is a solidly rewarding read. —Martha Schoolman
Booklist
Steamy Savannah—and the almost unbelievable assortment of colorful eccentrics that the city seems to nurture—are minutely and wittily observed here. In the early 1980's, Berendt (former editor of New York magazine) realized that for the price of a nouvelle cuisine meal, he could fly to just about any city in the U.S. that intrigued him. In the course of these travels, he fell under the spell of Savannah, and moved there for eight years. Central to his story here is his acquaintance with Jim Williams, a Gatsby-like, newly moneyed antiques dealer, and Williams's sometime lover Danny Hansford, a 'walking streak of sex'—a volatile, dangerous young hustler whose fatal shooting by Williams obsesses the city.
Other notable characters include Chablis, a show-stealing black drag queen; Joe Odom, cheerfully amoral impresario and restaurateur; Luther Driggers, inventor of the flea collar, who likes it to be known that he has a supply of poison so lethal that he could wipe out every person in the city if he chose to slip it into the water supply; and Minerva, a black occultist who works with roots and whom Williams hires to help deal with what the antiques dealer believes to be Hansford's vengeful ghost.
Showing a talent for penetrating any social barrier, Berendt gets himself invited to the tony Married Women's Card Club; the rigidly proper Black Debutantes' Ball (which Chablis crashes); the inner sanctum of power-lawyer Sonny Seiler; and one of Williams' fabled Christmas parties (the one for a mixed group; the author opts out of the following evening's 'bachelors-only' feast). The imprisonment and trial of Williams, and his surprising fate, form the narrative thread that stitches together this crazy-quilt of oddballs, poseurs, snobs, sorceresses, and outlaws. Stylish, brilliant, hilarious, and coolhearted.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. John Berendt describes Savannah as inward-turning, a "semitropical terrarium" (p. 28). What effect does this characteristic have on the life of the city and of its inhabitants? In what ways does Savannah differ from other cities or communities you know?
2. Eccentrics thrive in Berendt's Savannah. Does this mean that the people of Savannah are unusually tolerant? In what ways are they tolerant, and in what instances do they prove to be intolerant? How tolerant are they when it comes to the crossing of sexual, racial, or class lines?
3. Do you think that people would put up with Joe Odom and his countless misdemeanors in a city with a different character from Savannah? Might he end up in jail if he lived somewhere else?
4. How would you describe Jim Williams's character? Do you find him amusing? Sinister? How much sympathy do you have for him? Reading the book, did you hope for him to be acquitted? Why, or why not?
5. Some of Jim Williams' acquaintances think that the Nazi flag episode was insignificant; others do not. "Nazi symbols are not totally bereft of meaning, " says one man. "They still carry a very clear message, even if they're displayed under the guise of `historic relics'" (p. 178). Do you believe that Williams was being deliberately offensive when he displayed this flag? If so, why?
6. There was a tacit acceptance in Savannah of Jim Williams's homosexuality before the murder. How would you describe the shift in climate after the murder? Were people really surprised to hear about Williams's sexual practices? How did they adjust their attitudes?
7. After everything you have heard about Lee Adler, do you goalong with the general opinion people have of him in Savannah? Do you think that the reservations so many people hold about him spring from the fact that he is Jewish? Would his actions and behavior be more good-humoredly accepted if he did not happen to be Jewish?
8. Do you think that Danny's actions and violent scenes indicate that he was following a suicidal course? What were his real feelings towards Jim Williams? What was he trying to get out of him?
9. Is Chablis as frivolous a person as she likes to present herself as being? What does her argument with Burt at the nightclub tell you about her character?
10. Talking about the Oglethorpe Club types, Jim Williams says "When people like that see somebody like me, who's never joined their silly pecking order and who's taken great risks and succeeded, they loathe that person. I have felt it many times" (p. 237). Do you think that Williams is correct?
11. Black and white people's lives "are more intermingled here than in New York, " Berendt has said (USA Today). "I love the banter back and forth among whites and blacks. They don't mix socially that much, but there's a civility that's remarkable" (Washington Post). Do you find that relations between the races in the Savannah that Berendt describes are healthier, or less healthy, than in other parts of America? What might the high black crime rate indicate about the city?
12. What does the black debutante ball tell you about the black community—or at least that part of the black community—in Savannah? Why is Chablis so scornful of the ball and the people there? Do you sympathize with her feelings?
13. At the St. Patrick's Day parade, the narrator observes that the wagon following the Confederate marchers contained "a blue-clad Union soldier sprawled motionless on the floor of the wagon. It was a chilling tableau, the more so because it was meant to be surreptitious" (p. 257). What does this say about attitudes in Savannah? Does the scene indicate that the passions roused by the Civil War are still alive there? Why did the marchers keep the tableau surreptitious?
14. What do you think the narrator's attitude is toward the voodoo that is practiced on Williams's behalf? Does he imply that it is of any value? How would you describe Minerva? Is she the sort of person you would expect to be practicing voodoo?
15. After the trial, Minerva says "I saw it all: The boy fussed at him that night. Mr. Jim got angry and shot him. He lied to me, and he lied to the court" (p. 380). Do you concur with Minerva's scenario?
16. How would you describe Savannah's feelings to tradition and to the past? Are these feelings characteristic of the South in general? How do they differ from those in other parts of the country?
17. One reader from Georgia has said of Berendt, "I think he captured what it is to be Southern. He captured the not-talked-about way of life" (USA Today). If this is true, what would you say it is to be Southern? What does the South Berendt describes represent? Does it differ from stereotypes about the South?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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