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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The Hiding Place
Corrie ten Boom (with John Sherrill), 1971
Random House
242 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553256697


Summary  
Holland is under Nazi control.... Thousands of Jewish refugees.... One extraordinary family.

An old watchmaker in Holland. His two daughters, Corrie and Betsie. Simple, ordinary people. Yet these three unlikely heroes became the center of a major underground operation: To hide Jewish refugees from the occupying Germans.

These kindly, law abiding people broke every rule in the book to save the lives of the men, women and children being hunted by the Nazis. Their home became a hiding place, but the cost of their bravery was betrayal and in the dreaded Ravensbruck concentration camp, they had to create another hiding place for those around them. (From the publisher.)

 Author Bio 
• Birth—April 15, 1892
• Where—Haarlem, The Netherlands
• Death—April 15, 1983
• Where—Southern California, USA

In the years since the closing chapter of this book, Corrie ten Boom has traveled ceaselessly, carrying her message of triumphant living all over the world, especially behind the Iron Curtain. The author of devotional books treasured by millions, she is also a colorful, amusing speaker with a hold on young audiences that is but one of her many intriguing personal mysteries. This is the full story behind the faith that has touched and stirred and changed so many lives everywhere. (From the publisher.)

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Cornelia Johanna Arnolda ten Boom, generally known as Corrie ten Boom, was a Dutch Christian Holocaust survivor who helped many Jews escape the Nazis during World War II. Ten Boom co-wrote her autobiography, The Hiding Place, which was later made into a movie of the same name. In December, 1967, ten Boom was honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel.

Corrie ten Boom was born in the Netherlands, as the youngest of four children. Her mother died of a stroke at the age of 63. Her father Casper ten Boom was a well-liked watch repairman, and often referred to as "Haarlem's Grand Old Man." Her older sister, Elisabeth (Betsie), was born with pernicious anemia. They had two siblings—a sister, Nollie, and a brother, Willem. They lived in a house on Barteljorisstraat 19 with three of her mother's sisters. Her brother Willem graduated from a theology school and warned the Dutch that unless they took action, they would fall to the Nazis. He wrote a dissertation on racial anti-Semitism at theological college in 1927 in preparation for his ordination.

Corrie began training as a watchmaker in 1920 and in 1922 became the first female watchmaker licensed in the Netherlands. She was a devout Christian and an active member of the Dutch Reformed church. In 1923, she helped organize girls' clubs, and in the 1930s these clubs grew to become the very large Triangle club.

In 1940, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and banned Corrie ten Boom's club. In May 1942, a well dressed woman came to the ten Boom door with a suitcase in hand. She told the ten Booms that she was a Jew and that her husband had been arrested several months before, and her son had gone into hiding. Occupation authorities had recently visited her, and she was too fearful to return home. After hearing about how the ten Booms had helped their Jewish neighbors, the Weils, she asked if she might stay with them, and Corrie ten Boom's father readily agreed.

A devoted reader of the Old Testament, Casper ten Boom believed Jews were indeed "the chosen," and told the woman, "In this household, God's people are always welcome." Thus began "the hiding place", or "de schuilplaats", as it was known in Dutch (also known as "de Beje", with Beje being derived from the name of the street the house was in, the Barteljorisstraat).

Ten Boom and her sister began taking in refugees, some of whom were Jews, others members of the resistance movement sought by the Gestapo and its Dutch counterpart. There were several extra rooms in their house, but food was scarce due to wartime shortages. Every non-Jewish Dutch person had received a ration card with which they could procure weekly coupons to buy food.

The Jews hid in a room that the ten Boom family had built in Corrie's bedroom for them by an architect belonging to the Dutch Resistance. The room was the size of a medium wardrobe, 75 cm (30") deep, with an air vent on the outside wall. The Nazis never found this room because the only entrance was a small hatch which slid open to let the Jews in and out. Also, the room was built in a special way that could make it seem like no one was in there when the Nazi officials would bang on the walls. They would bang on the walls to find out if there were any hollow spaces that could have held Jews.

The Germans arrested the entire ten Boom family on February 28, 1944 at around 12:30 with the help of a Dutch informant. They were sent first to Scheveningen prison (where her father died ten days after his capture). Corrie's sister Nollie, brother Willem, and nephew Peter were all released. Later, Corrie and Betsie were sent to the Vught political concentration camp (both in the Netherlands), and finally to the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany on December 16, 1944, where Corrie's sister Betsie died. Before she died she told Corrie, "There is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still." Corrie was released on New Year's Eve of December 1944. In the movie The Hiding Place, ten Boom narrates the section on her release from camp, saying that she later learned that her release had been a clerical error. The women prisoners her age in the camp were killed the week following her release. She said, "God does not have problems. Only plans."

After the war, Corrie ten Boom returned to the Netherlands to set up rehabilitation centres. This refuge house consisted of concentration camp surivors and sheltered the jobless Dutch who previously collaborated with Germans during the occupation. She returned to Germany in 1946, and traveled the world as a public speaker, appearing in over sixty countries, during which time she wrote many books.

Ten Boom told the story of her family and their work during World War II in her most famous book, The Hiding Place (1971), which was made into a film by World Wide Pictures in 1975.

In 1977, Corrie ten Boom, then 85 years old, moved to Orange, California. Successive strokes in 1978 took away her powers of speech and communication and left her an invalid for the last five years of her life. She died on her birthday, April 15, 1983, at the age of 91.

Extras
• The State of Israel honored ten Boom by naming her Righteous Among the Nations.

• Ten Boom was knighted by the Queen of the Netherlands in recognition of her work during the war, and a museum in the Dutch city of Haarlem is dedicated to her and her family.

• Her teaching focused on the Christian Gospel, with emphasis on forgiveness. In her book Tramp for the Lord (1974), she tells the story of how, after she had been teaching in Germany in 1947, she was approached by one of the cruelest former Ravensbrück camp guards. She was reluctant to forgive him, but prayed that she would be able to. She wrote that, "For a long moment we grasped each other's hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God's love so intensely as I did then."

• She also wrote (in the same passage) that in her post-war experience with other victims of Nazi brutality, it was those who were able to forgive who were best able to rebuild their lives.

• She was known for her rejection of the Pre-Tribulation Rapture doctrine. Her writings claim that it is without Biblical foundation, and she has claimed that the doctrine left the Christian Church ill-prepared in times of great persecution, such as in China under Mao Zedong. She appeared on many Christian television programs discussing her ordeal during the Holocaust, and the concepts of forgiveness and God's love. (From Wikipedia.)

 Book Reviews
(Excerpts below refer to the audio version. There are no mainstream press reviews online for the print version.)

A story of hope and faith. Its conversational style makes it especially effective in audio.
Indianapolis Star

Narrator Nadia May provides an authentic and engaging vocal presentation of this fine work.
Library Journal

Nadia May does great credit to the writers of this true story.... Her emotional control makes the tension and horror of the family's plight more real and hideous.... The listener is left with a story of extraordinary humanity, goodness and overwhelming love.
AudioFile

Reader May has the right tone and accent to convey Corrie's middle-aged presentation. The soul searching and questioning that Corrie expresses comes out clearly through the reader.
KLIATT

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 Hiding Place:

1. Corrie's father tells her that he pities the Nazi's: "They have touched the apple of God's eye." What does he mean by that statement. Consider the strength of character it takes to feel pity for a people and a system that means to do harm to fellow beings.

2. What are the various hiding places, real and symbolic, to which the title of this book refers? How, for instance, do fleas help lead to a "hiding place" for Corrie and Betsie while they are imprisoned?

3. In addition to the extraordinary kindess and courage of the ten Boom family, what are some of the smaller acts of kindness shown by others in this memoir? Are people inspired to greater compassion, or less, in dire situations? What motivates acts of kindness—in other words, what makes people kind? What makes some people kinder than others?

4. Talk about the kind of woman Corrire ten Boom and her sister Betsie were. What sustained them during their ordeal in the concentration camps? To what do you attribute Corrie's courage and survival in the face of so much death and hardship?

5. Stories like Corrie's always beg comparison to ourselves and our own lives. We wonder how each of us would behave under similar horrific circumstances? How would you? What inner strengths and courage and compassion would you draw on? Would you have risked your life and the lives of your family (especially, if you have children) to help the Jews or any others subjected to brutal persecution? We know what we are called upon to do, but would many of us find the courage needed to do what is right?

6. Comment on what Betsie said to Corrie: "I pray every day that we be allowed to do this! To show [the Nazis] that love is greater!" What do you find extraordinary in that statement?

7. Talk about the incident after the war in which Corrie comes across one of the former SS men at Ravensbruck. How did she respond to him at first...and how did she change? What does this say about the principle of forgiveness—its difficulty and its healing power?

8. What do you find most surprising...or inspiring in this account of the Nazi era? Did this book change you in any way? Did you come away having learned something...about history...about faith...or about yourself?

9. Watch clips from the 1975 film version with Julie Harris and compare it to the book.

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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