King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
Adam Hochschild, 1998
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780618001903


Summary
In the 1880's, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and largely unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River.

Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed the population by ten million—all while shrewdly cultivating his international reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose this secret crime finally led to the first great international human rights movement of the 20th century in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated.

King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting portrait of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply involving story of those who fought Leopold and of the explorers, missionaries, and rubber workers who witnessed the horror.

With a cast of characters richer than any novelist could invent, this book will permanently inscribe these too long forgotten events on the conscience of the West. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—October 5, 1942
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—A.B., Harvard College
• Awards—J. Anthony Lukas Prize; Mark Lynton History Award;
   Lionel Gelber Prize (Canada); Duff Cooper Prize (Britain)
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California

Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. As a college student, he spent a summer working on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa and subsequently worked briefly as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1964. Both were politically pivotal experiences about which he would later write in his book Finding the Trapdoor. He later was part of the movement against the Vietnam War, and, after several years as a daily newspaper reporter, worked as a writer and editor for the leftwing Ramparts magazine. In the mid-1970s, he was one of the co-founders of Mother Jones.

His first book, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey (1990) and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994). Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels won the 1998 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay.

Hochschild's books have been translated into five languages and have won prizes from the Overseas Press Club of America, the World Affairs Council, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation, and the Society of American Travel Writers. Three of his books—including King Leopold's Ghost—have been named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and Library Journal. King Leopold's Ghost was also awarded the 1998 California Book Awards gold medal for nonfiction.

Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's magazine, New York Review of Books, New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Nation, and many other magazines and newspapers. A former commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," he teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1997-98 he was a Fulbright Lecturer in India.

He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Arlie, the sociologist and author. They have two sons. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
A vivid, novelistic narrative that makes the reader acutely aware of the magnitude of the horror perpetrated by King Leopold and his minions.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


This true story of the Congo is full of fascinating characters, intense drama, high adventure, courageous truth-telling, and splendid moral fervor.... A work of history that reads like a novel.... An enthralling story.
Christian Science Monitor


To an already long list of tyrants which includes Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin, a late addition is required. 'Late' only because King Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909) should always have been there. As 'owner' of the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908 he was responsible for what Joseph Conrad once called "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." It is indeed a ghastly story of greed, lies and murder. And Adam Hochschild retells it well. King Leopold's Ghost last week beat several excellent books to win the Lionel Gelber prize...now the world's most important award for non-fiction.... Around the turn of this century in the depths of the Congo the bonds of humanity were unbound and the trappings of civilisation cast aside, releasing something diabolical which exists within us all. Mr. Hochschild conveys this particularly well.
Economist


This book provides a wonderfully vivid account of an episode in the modern history of Africa that was tragic and terrible.... King Leopold's Ghost is an exemplary piece of history-writing: urgent, vivid and compelling.
Robin Blackburn - Literary Review


Hochschild's superb, engrossing chronicle focuses on one of the great, horrifying and nearly forgotten crimes of the century: greedy Belgian King Leopold II's rape of the Congo, the vast colony he seized as his private fiefdom in 1885. Until 1909, he used his mercenary army to force slaves into mines and rubber plantations, burn villages, mete out sadistic punishments, including dismemberment, and committ mass murder. The hero of Hochschild's highly personal, even gossipy narrative is Liverpool shipping agent Edmund Morel, who, having stumbled on evidence of Leopold's atrocities, became an investigative journalist and launched an international Congo reform movement with support from Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and Arthur Conan Doyle. Other pivotal figures include Joseph Conrad, whose disgust with Leopold's "civilizing mission" led to Heart of Darkness; and black American journalist George Washington Williams, who wrote the first systematic indictment of Leopold's colonial regime in 1890. Hochschild (The Unquiet Ghost) documents the machinations of Leopold, who won over President Chester A. Arthur and bribed a U.S. senator to derail Congo protest resolutions. He also draws provocative parallels between Leopold's predatory one-man rule and the strongarm tactics of Mobuto Sese Seko, who ruled the successor state of Zaire. But most of all it is a story of the bestiality of one challenged by the heroism of many in an increasingly democratic world. 30 illustrations.
Publishers Weekly


Journalist-memoirist Hochschild (Finding the Trapdoor) recounts the crimes against humanity of Belgium's King Leopold II, whose brutal imperialist regime sparked the creation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the first major human-rights protest movement of this century. Hell-bent on building grandiose state monuments and palaces and on swelling royal coffers, Leopold sought to carve out of central Africa a fiefdom 76 times the size of Belgium. Cagily inveighing against local slave traders and inviting Christian missionaries to spread the Gospel, he transformed a philanthropic organization temporarily under his aegis into the Congo, his own personal colony. He plundered the Congo's bounty of rubber, instituted forced labor, and reduced the population by half (an estimated 10 million deaths from 1880 to 1920). To achieve compliance with rubber-gathering quotas, soldiers in the Force Publique, Leopold's colonial army, committed mass murder, cut off hands, severed heads, took hostages, and burnt villages. His misrule remained undetected for more than a decade because he won U.S. recognition of his claim to the Congo, used explorer Henry Morton Stanley to swindle chiefs out of land, and concealed the colony's budget. If Hochschild depicts Leopold not as a Hitleresque madman but as a liberal bogeyman ready to sacrifice all for the bottom line, he profiles the monarch's opponents in all their complicated humanity. These include George Washington William, an African-American journalist prone to exaggerating his own credentials but not Leopold's atrocities; Roger Casement, a British consul knighted for a damning Congo report, then later executed for participating in Ireland's 1916 rebellion, and exposed as a homosexual; and E.D. Morel, a journalist who, though committed to imperialism, led a decade-long campaign that succeeded in forcing Leopold to turn the Congo over to the citizens of Belgium. A searing history of evil and the heroes who exposed it.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
1. Between 1880 and 1920, the population of the Congo was slashed in half: some ten million people were victims of murder, starvation, exhaustion, exposure, disease and a plummeting birth rate. Why do you think this massive carnage has remained virtually unknown in the United States and Europe?

2. Hochschild writes of Joseph Conrad that he “was so horrified by the greed and brutality among white men he saw in the Congo that his view of human nature was permanently changed.” Judging from Hochschild’s account and from Heart of Darkness, in whatway was Conrad’s view changed? How is this true of other individuals about whom Hochschild writes? In what way has this book affected your view of human nature?

3. The death toll in King Leopold’s Congo was on a scale comparable to the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges. Can Leopold II be viewed as a precursor to the masterminds behind the Nazi death camps and the Gulag? Did these three and other twentiethcentury mass killings arise from similar psychological, social, political, economic, and cultural sources?

4. Those who plundered the Congo and other parts of Africa (and Asia) did so in the name of progress, civilization, and Christianity. Was this hypocritical and if so, how? What justifications for colonial imperialism and exploitation have been put forward over the past five centuries?

5. Morel, Sheppard, Williams, Casement, and others boldly spoke out against the Congo atrocities, often at great danger to themselves. Many others rationalized those same atrocities or said nothing. How do you account for Leopold’s, Stanley’s, and others’ murderous rapaciousness, on the one hand, and Morel’s, Casement’s, and others’ outrage and committed activism, on the other?

6. The European conquest and plunder of the Congo and the rest of Africa was brutal, but so was the European settlement of North America and, long before that, the conquest of most of Europe by the Romans. Hasn’t history always proceeded in this way?

7. Hochschild begins his book with what he calls Edmund Morel’s “flash of moral recognition” on the Antwerp docks. What other flashes of moral recognition does Hochschild identify, and what were their consequences? In what ways may Hochschild’s book itself be seen as a flash of moral recognition? What more recent flashes of moral recognition and indignation can you identify?

8. Hochschild quotes the Swedish missionary, C. N. Börrisson: “It is strange that people who claim to be civilized think they can treat their fellow man—even though he is of a different color—any which way.” How may we explain the disregard of “civilized” individuals and groups for the humanity and life of others because of skin color, nationality, religion, ethnic background, or other factors? Why do this disregard and resulting cruelties persist?

9. What are the similarities between the colonial and imperial aspirations of pre- and early twentieth-century nations and the corporate and market aspirations of today’s multinational companies? Whether rapacious or beneficent, most actors in the Congo, and in Africa at large, seem to have been motivated principally by profit. In what ways do business objectives continue to shape the policies and actions of national governments and international organizations?

10. Hochschild writes that Leopold “found a number of tools at his disposal that had not been available to empire builders of earlier times.” What new technologies and technological advances contributed to Leopold’s exploitation of the Congo? What impact have these tools had on both the advancement and degradation of colonial or subject peoples?

11. The “burgeoning hierarchy of imperial rule” in the Congo Free State was, Hochschild writes, reflected in “the plethora of medals” and attendant grades and ranks. What were the reasons for this extensive hierarchy and for the bureaucracy it reflected and maintained? Are there any contemporary parallels? Of what historical examples can we say that the more heinous the political or governmental crimes, the larger and more frequently rewarded the bureaucracy?

12. How does Hochschild answer his own question, “What made it possible for the functionaries in the Congo to so blithely watch the chicotte in action and...to deal out pain and death in other ways as well”? How would you answer this question, in regard to Leopold’s Congo and to other officially sanctioned atrocities?

13. Hochschild quotes Roger Casement as insisting to Edmund Morel, “I do not agree with you that England and America are the two great humanitarian powers.... [They are] materialistic first and humanitarian only a century after.” What evidence supports or refutes Casement’s judgment? Would Casement be justified in making the same statement today?

14. After stating that several other mass murders “went largely unnoticed,” Hochschild asks, “why, in England and the United States, was there such a storm of righteous protest about the Congo?” Do you find his explanation sufficient? Why do some atrocities (the mass murders in Rwanda, for example) prompt little response from the United States and other western nations, while others (the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo, for example) prompt military action against the perpetrators?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
Erik Larson, 2011
Crown Publishing
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307408846


Summary 
Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, the bestselling author of Devil in the White City turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power.
 
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
 
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels.

But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance—and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition.
 
Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Göring and the expectedly charming—yet wholly sinister—Goebbels, In the Garden of Beastslends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—January 3, 1954
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Raised—Freeport (Long Island), New York
• Education—B.A., University of Pennsylvania; M.S., Columbia University
• Awards—Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime, 2004
• Currently—lives in New York City and Seattle, Washington

Erik Larson is an American journalist and nonfiction author. Although he has written several books, he is particularly well-know for three: The Devil in the White City (2003), a history of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and serial killer H. H. Holmes, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and An American Family in Hitler's Berlin (2011), a portrayal of William E. Dodd, the first American ambassador to Nazi Germany, and his daughter Martha, and Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (2015).

Early life
Born in Brooklyn, Larson grew up in Freeport, Long Island, New York. He studied Russian history at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated summa cum laude in 1976. After a year off, he attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, graduating in 1978.

Journalism
Larson's first newspaper job was with the Bucks County Courier Times in Levittown, Pennsylvania, where he wrote about murder, witches, environmental poisons, and other "equally pleasant" things. He later became a features writer for the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, where he is still a contributing writer. His magazine stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and other publications.

Books
Larson has also written a number of books, beginning with The Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities (1992), followed by Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun (1995). Larson's next books were Isaac's Storm (1999), about the experiences of Isaac Cline during the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, and The Devil in the White City (2003), about the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and a series of murders by H. H. Holmes that were committed in the city around the time of the Fair.

The Devil in the White City won the 2004 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category. Next, Larson published Thunderstruck (2006), which intersperses the story of Hawley Harvey Crippen with that of Guglielmo Marconi and the invention of radio. His next book, In the Garden of Beasts (2011), concerns William E. Dodd, the first American ambassador to Nazi Germany and his daughter. Dead Wake, published in 2015, is an account of the sinking of the Lusitania, which led to America's intervention in World War I.

Teaching and public speaking
Larson has taught non-fiction writing at San Francisco State University, the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and the University of Oregon, and he has spoken to audiences from coast to coast.

Personal
Larson and his wife have three daughters. They reside in New York City, but maintain a home in Seattle, Washington.  (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/17/2015.)

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Book Reviews
In this mesmerizing portrait of the Nazi capital, Larson plumbs a far more diabolical urban cauldron than in his bestselling The Devil in the White City. He surveys Berlin, circa 1933 1934, from the perspective of two American naïfs: Roosevelt's ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, an academic historian and Jeffersonian liberal who hoped Nazism would de-fang itself (he urged Hitler to adopt America's milder conventions of anti-Jewish discrimination), and Dodd's daughter Martha, a sexual free spirit who loved Nazism's vigor and ebullience. At first dazzled by the glamorous world of the Nazi ruling elite, they soon started noticing signs of its true nature: the beatings meted out to Americans who failed to salute passing storm troopers; the oppressive surveillance; the incessant propaganda; the intimidation and persecution of friends; the fanaticism lurking beneath the surface charm of its officialdom. Although the narrative sometimes bogs down in Dodd's wranglings with the State Department and Martha's soap opera, Larson offers a vivid, atmospheric panorama of the Third Reich and its leaders, including murderous Nazi factional infighting, through the accretion of small crimes and petty thuggery. Photos.
Publishers Weekly

Best-selling author Larson (The Devil in the White City) turns his considerable literary nonfiction skills to the experiences of U.S. ambassador to Germany William E. Dodd and his family in Berlin in the early years of Hitler's rule. Dodd had been teaching history at the University of Chicago when he was summoned by FDR to the German ambassadorship. Larson, using lots of archival as well as secondary-source research, focuses on Dodd's first year in Berlin and, using Dodd's diary, chillingly portrays the terror and oppression that slowly settled over Germany in 1933. Dodd quickly realized the Nazis' evil intentions; his daughter Martha, in her mid-20s, was initially smitten by the courteous SS soldiers surrounding her family, but over time she, too, became disenchanted with the brutality of the regime. Along the way Larson provides portraits based on primary-source impressions of Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Hitler himself. He also traces the Dodds' lives after their time in Germany. Verdict: Larson captures the nuances of this terrible period. This is a grim read but a necessary one for the present generation. Those who wish to study Dodd further can read Robert Dallek's Democrat & Diplomat. —Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Library Journal

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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 In the Garden of Beasts:

1. William Dodd went to Germany believing that Hitler would have a positive influence on Germany. Why were so many at first enamored of Nazism and willing "to give Hitler everything he wants"?

2. How would you describe German society at the time of the Dodd Family's arrival in Berlin? Talk about the ways in which Germany appeared to be a modern, civilized society...and, of course, the way in which that appearance was at odds with reality.

3. What was it that made Dodd begin to suspect the rumors he had been hearing about Nazi brutality were true?

4. Why did Dodd's—and numerous others'—warnings about Hitler fall on indifferent ears in the US? What was the primary concern of the US in its relationship with Germany? Was the US stance one of purposeful ignorance...or of sheer disbelief?

5. Did America's own anti-semitism play any role in dismissing the growing chorus of concern ?

6. What do you think of William Dodd? What about him do you find admirable? Were you mildly amused or impressed by his sense of frugality?

7. What was Dodd's reputation among the "old hands" at the State Department? What role does class play in how he was viewed by his diplomatic peers?

8. What about Martha? What do you find in her character to admire...or not? Did she purposely allow herself to be blinded by Udet and Rudolf Diels...or was she truly dazzled by their charms? Her promiscuity could have made her a serious liability. Were you surprised that her parents seemed untroubled by her multiple love affairs, or that they didn't try to reign in her behavior?

9. How does Erik Larson portray Hitler in his book? Does he humanize him...or present him as a monster? How does he depict Goebbels and Goering...and other higher-ups in the Nazi party?

10. How does the fact that you know the eventual outcome of Nazi Germany affect the way you experience the book? Does foreknowledge heighten...or lessen the story's suspense. Either way...why?

11. What were events/episodes you find most chilling in Larson's account of the rise of Nazism?

12. What have learned about the period leading up the World War II that you hadn't known? What surprised you? What confirmed things you already knew?

13. Is this a good read? If you've read other books by Larson, how does this compare?

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

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Girl Meets God: A Memoir
Lauren F. Winner, 2002
Random House
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812970807


Summary
Like most of us, Lauren Winner wants something to believe in. The child of a reform Jewish father and a lapsed Southern Baptist mother, she chose to become an Orthodox Jew. But as she faithfully observes the Sabbath rituals and studies Jewish laws, she finds herself increasingly drawn to Christianity. Taking a courageous step, she leaves behind what she loves and converts. Now the even harder part: How does one reinvent a religious self? How does one embrace the new without abandoning the old? How does a convert become spiritually whole.

In Girl Meets God, this appealingly honest young woman takes us through a year in her search for a religious identity. Despite her conversion, she finds that her world is still shaped by her Jewish experiences. Even as she rejoices in the holy days of the Christian calendar, she mourns the Jewish rituals she still holds dear. Attempting to reconcile the two sides of her religious self, Winner applies the lessons of Judaism to the teachings of the New Testament, hosts a Christian seder, and struggles to fit her Orthodox friends into her new religious life. Ultimately she learns that faith takes practice and belief is an ongoing challenge. Like Anne Lamott's, Winner's journey to Christendom is bumpy, but it is the rocky path itself that makes her a perfect guide to exploring spirituality in today's complicated world. Her engaging approach to religion in the twenty-first century is illuminating, thought-provoking, and most certainly controversial. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—October 13, 1976 
• Where—Asheville, North Carolina, USA 
• Education—B.A., Columbia University; M.A., Cambridge
   University
• Currently—lives in Charlottesville, Virginia

The child of a Jewish father and a lapsed Southern Baptist mother, Lauren F. Winner chose to become an Orthodox Jew. But even as she was observing Sabbath rituals and studying Jewish law, Lauren was increasingly drawn to Christianity. Courageously leaving what she loved, she eventually converted. (From the publisher.)

More
(From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview)

Q: What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer?

A: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. This had something of a cult following when I was in high school, and I read it at the urging of my then beau. It didn't lead me to take up gonzo journalism, but it was the book that taught me that being a writer didn't mean necessarily writing fiction. I'd heard of "creative non-fiction" before I read Thompson, but I didn't have a sense of what it was, or how it worked.

Q: What are your favorite books, and what makes them special to you?

A: Ashley Warlick's first novel The Distance from the Heart of Things—Gorgeous prose. Also, encouraging for young writers. Warlick wrote The Distance from the Heart of Things in her early 20s. And yet she is wise and believable and masterful.

• Kristen Lavransdatter by Sigird Undset—I didn't discover Kristen till last year. A lot of my friends read this as girls, when they were reading Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie. But they missed out! It is worth reading, or rereading, as an adult, not least so that you can read Tina Nunnally's marvelous new translation.

• Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor—She's known, of course, for her fiction, but this summer I reread the occasional essays in Mystery and Manners and thought—as brilliant as her fiction is, her prose is even more transparent; deadlier.

• Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson—This is no mere collection of household hints. I wish I could write like Mendelson. Her prose does not suffer fools.

• The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward—Not merely one of the most influential American history books of the twentieth century. Strange Career is also a lesson in why history matters in the present day. And, like Mendelson, Woodward suffers no fools.

• M.F.K Fisher's The Art of Eating and Supper of the Lamb by Robert Capon. What is there more pleasing to the senses than good food writing?

• W H Auden's poetry. Yes, I admit it, I was turned on to Auden by the reading of "Funeral Blues" in Four Weddings and a Funeral, but I subsequently discovered the wide wonderful Auden world.

• Lately, I have been reading that wonderful sub-genre of mysteries, The Cozy— My favorites are Murder at the PTA Luncheon by Valerie Wolzien, and, most recently, the Hemlock Falls mysteries by Claudia Bishop.

Q: What are some of your favorite films, and what makes them unforgettable to you?

A: I am not a big film buff. I think this is a negative comment on me, not a comment on films! Somehow they don't hold my attention as books do. I could, however, happily watch a Maggie Smith film every day.

Q: What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you like to listen to when you're writing?

A: I'm pretty eclectic when it comes to music. I like ragtime, and folk, and choral music. If I were sent to a desert island with just one genre, though, it would be chamber music. Specifically string quartets.

Q: If you had a book club, what would it be reading—and why?

A: Sometimes I think I am the only woman in Charlottesville who is not in a book club. This is a very book club-ish town—I have often thought of starting a book club at my church. I'd like to read books that are not explicitly "Christian," and then discuss them through the lenses of Christianity. That might mean reading The Lobster Chronicles or Sophia Peabody Hawthorne's 19th-century travel writing, or...practically anything!

Q: What are your favorite kinds of books to give—and get—as gifts?

A: There is no more satisfying feeling than giving the perfect book to the perfect person. This Christmas, I'll be giving several people Vinita Hampton Wright's new novella, The Winter Seeking, and I'll also be giving several special folks Marguerite Yourcenar's novel Memoirs of Hadrian. I think I've given away more copies of Hadrian than any other single book.

Q: Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you're writing?

A: I am incredibly disorganized, so my computer just barely carves out space on my des—it keeps good company with heaps of papers and books. This fall, my mother was dying, so my writing schedule got fairly knocked out of whack, but in a good, theoretical universe, I start writing at 4 in the morning. Otherwise, I am too easily distracted by incoming email and ringing phones! Only folks on the other side of the world (and I don't know that many) email me at 4:00 a.m.

Q: Many writers in the Discover program are hardly "overnight success" stories. How long did it take for you to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes

A: My most thorough writing training came in academia. My dissertation advisor is one of the best writers going, and if I've learned 1/10 of what she knows about crafting prose, I'm doing well. But it still has been quite a process to turn away from the rules of academic prose and write more fun, more popular books (it's even harder to turn back and finish the aforementioned dissertation, but that's another story).

Q: If you could choose one new writer to be "discovered," who would it be—and why?

A: The novelist Nancy Lemann. I feel a little absurd saying that she needs to be "discovered," because she certainly has more acclaim than I. But I am always stunned when my friends let slip that they have not read her. She is a poet who writes in prose, and her prose sounds like what it describes— the decadence of New Orleans. Her first novel, The Lives of the Saints, is hard to beat. (From Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews
A passionate and thoroughly engaging account of a continuing spiritual journey within two profoundly different faiths.
New York Times Book Review

A charming, humorous, and sometimes abrasive recollection of a religious coming-of-age.... A compelling journey from Judaism to Christianity.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A book to savor.... Winner is an all-too-human believer, and the rest of us can see our own struggles, theological and otherwise, in hers.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Raised by a lapsed Baptist mother and secular Jewish father, Winner feels a drive toward God as powerful as her drives toward books and boys. Twice she has attempted to read her way into religion to Orthodox Judaism her freshman year at Columbia, and then four years later at Cambridge to Anglican Christianity. Twice she has discovered that a religion's actual practitioners may not measure up to its theoretical proponents. (Invariably the boyfriends or their mothers disappoint.) It is easier to say what this book is not than what it is. It is not a conversion memoir: Winner's movement in and out of religious frames, but does not tell, her tale. It is not a defense of either faith (there is something here to offend every reader); and Winner, a doctoral candidate in the history of religion, is in her 20s young for autobiography. Because most chapters, though loosely related to the Christian church year, could stand alone, it resembles a collection of essays; but the ensemble is far too unified to deserve that label. Clearly it is memoir, literary and spiritual, sharing Anne Lamott's self-deprecating intensity and Stephen J. Dubner's passion for authenticity. Though Winner does not often scrutinize her motives, she reveals herself through abundant, concrete and often funny descriptions of her life, inner and outer. Winner's record of her own experience so far is a page-turning debut by a young writer worth watching.
Publishers Weekly

A senior writer for Christianity Today and an essayist whose works have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Winner is a recently converted Episcopalian and former Orthodox Jew. The daughter of a lapsed Southern Baptist mother and secular Jewish father, this young writer offers a fresh perspective on the ways religion relates to the lives of Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1976). She has structured her spiritual autobiography as linked reflections based on annual religious festivals, beginning with a chapter titled "Sukkot" and followed by essays based on the names of Christian celebrations. The book is a humorous, sexually frank portrait of a deeply engaged faith shopper, "stumbling her way towards God." The memoir focuses on her undergraduate years (when she converted to Judaism and then to Christianity) and her life as a doctoral student in religious history at Columbia University. One has a sense that Winner's head is still spinning and that she is still catching up with her changes of heart. The turbulent narrative is at first hard to follow, but its disorder becomes a delight as the author's gentle, self-effacing humor emerges. Winner offers a rare perspective, connecting Christian and Jewish traditions in unexpected ways. Recommended for larger public libraries. —Joyce Smothers, M.L.S., Princeton Theological Seminary, NJ
Library Journal

I have spent my whole life since middle school, and actually even before that, seeking God. In this collection of biographical and theological musings, structured around Jewish festivals and the seasons of the Christian liturgical year, Winner considers her path from Reform Jew to Orthodoxy to self-described evangelical Episcopalian. Frank, often funny, sometimes sexy, and disarmingly honest, her story is far from the "how I found Jesus" tract one might expect. Sophisticated, well-educated with degrees from Columbia and Cambridge, and the child of a secular Jewish father and a lapsed Baptist mother, Winner at age twenty-something is very much a modern, worldly wise young woman. Her spiritual self-examination could almost be a caricature of the self-absorption sometimes considered characteristic of GenX'ers. Her writing what amounts to an autobiography while still in her twenties might be considered premature. How, the reader wonders, does one know that she will not go off to become a Buddhist next year, but she even addresses this question. The book's appeal lies in Winner's sincerity and her willingness to share her struggle to be honest and faithful to God. Many young seekers fumbling their way to faith will appreciate the example of someone who is not a stereotypical, good-girl Sunday schooler but whose belief is heartfelt and hard-won. Her well-written, absorbing account provides an important validation for those readers who may not be ready for Kathleen Norris or Anne Lamott, but who share their bumpy paths to spirituality. Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses.
Kathleen Beck - VOYA

In her debut memoir, Christianity Today senior writer Winner recounts her two religious conversions, first to Orthodox Judaism, then to Evangelical Christianity. The author's Southern Baptist mother and Jewish father agreed to raise their children within Judaism, although according to religious law the girls were not officially Jews. A bookworm who loved studying and practicing the ins and outs of tradition, Lauren decided to officially convert as soon as she began her undergraduate education at Columbia University. Despite her wholehearted efforts, however-6 a.m. study sessions, her commitment to observe the laws of kashrut-she couldn't ignore the fact that just two years after her conversion, Jesus seemed to be calling her. How? There was the dream about being captured by mermaids, Winner writes, and there was the undeniable appeal of the mass-market, Christian-themed Mitford novels by Jan Karon. As a child of divorce, she may have been seeking the most stable, familial religion, Winner acknowledges, although that argument ignores a central fact: "Conversion is complicated.... It is about family, and geography, and politics, and psychology, and economics. [But] it is also about God." When pondering the author's double conversion, one could also consider the fact that Winner was raised in the Christian South by a Christian mother. This is all secondary, however, to her narrative's real strength, which is its addictive readability combined with the author's deep knowledge of, delight in, and nuanced discussion of both Christian and Jewish teachings. Loosely structured around the progression of the Christian calendar, Winner's text weaves together meditations on the meanings of theholidays, different modes of observance, and the day-to-day difficulties of switching teams and convincing people that this time she means it. Intriguing, absorbing, puzzling, surprisingly sexy, and very smart.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1. A major theme in Girl Meets God is friendship. Who are some of Lauren's friends, and what role do they play in her spiritual journey? Do friends play a similarly important role in your own life?

2. Fidelity is a motif in Girl Meets God. How does Lauren respond to her friend Hannah's infidelity? Why is infidelity such a poignant and pointed topic for her?

3. Two different chapters in this book have the title "Conversion Stories." Why do they have the same title? Do they tell similar or different stories about religious conversion?

4. Lauren's book is structured according to the Jewish and Christian calendars–it is organized around liturgical seasons and holidays like Sukkot and Advent. Why is the book structured this way? What effect does it have on you, the reader?

5. Lauren suggests that "ruptures are the most interesting part of any text, that in the ruptures we learn something new." (p. 8) How is Lauren's story marked by ruptures, and what do we learn from them?

6. Upon converting to Christianity, Lauren gives up all things Jewish–she even says that "trading my Hebrew prayer book for an Episcopal Book of Common Prayer felt exactly like filing for divorce." (p. 9) Is divorce an apt metaphor for Lauren's relationship with Judaism? Does she eventually recover some of her Jewish practice?

7. What is the plot of Girl Meets God? Is it a coming-of-age story? A story of a quest? Does it present clear questions at the outset, and, if so, does it offer tidy answers to those questions at the end? When Lauren is a teenager, a woman from her synagogue gives her a poem that instructs "Return with us, return to us, /be always coming home." (p. 34) Is Girl Meets God a story of homecoming?

8. Lauren says that the "very first thing I liked about Christianity, long before it ever occurred to me to go to church or say the creed or call myself a Christian, was the Incarnation." (p. 51) What is appealing to Lauren about the Christian story of the Incarnation?

9. Lauren's story is one of spiritual change and conversion, or making and remaking her spiritual self. In what ways is the story of reinvention a distinctively American story? Have you experienced an analogous remaking or reinvention of self?

10. Geography and place play a central role in Lauren's narrative. To what extent do the landscapes of the American South and New York City shape her experiences?

11. Lauren readily admits to being a bookworm. What role do books and reading play in her spiritual development? How have books been important in your own life?

12. Memoir, as a genre, involves the author presenting a particular self to her audience. To what extent does Lauren suggest she has "arrived" as a Christian? Does she readily admit to spiritual failings, or is she eager to present herself as someone with all the answers?
(Questions from the publisher.)

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The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan, 2006
Penguin Group USA
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143038580


In Brief 
A New York Times bestseller that has changed the way readers view the ecology of eating, this revolutionary book by award winner Michael Pollan asks the seemingly simple question: What should we have for dinner?

Tracing from source to table each of the food chains that sustain us — whether industrial or organic, alternative or processed — he develops a portrait of the American way of eating. The result is a sweeping, surprising exploration of the hungers that have shaped our evolution, and of the profound implications our food choices have for the health of our species and the future of our planet. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—February 6, 1955
• Where—Raised in Long Island, New York, USA
• Education—N/A
• Awards—California Book Award; James Beard Award, 2000
  and 2006; Reuters-IUCN Global Award-Environmental 
  Journalism.
• Currently—lives in Berkeley, California

Few writers have done more to revitalize our national conversation about food and eating than Michael Pollan, an award-winning journalist and bestselling author whose witty, offbeat nonfiction shines an illuminating spotlight on various aspects of agriculture, the food chain, and man's place in the natural world

Pollan's first book, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education (1991), was selected by the American Horticultural Society as one of the 75 best books ever written about gardening. But it was Botany of Desire, published a full decade later, that put him on the map. A fascinating look at the interconnected evolution of plants and people, Botany... was one of the surprise bestsellers of 2001. Five years later, Pollan produced The Omnivore's Dilemma, a delightful, compulsively readable "ecology of eating" that was named one the ten best books of the year by the New York Times and Washington Post. And in 2008, came In Defense of Food.

A professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, Pollan is a former executive editor for Harper's and a contributing writer for the New York Times, where he continues to examine the fascinating intersections between science and culture. (From the publisher.)

 

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Book Reviews 
Every time you go into a grocery store you are voting with your dollars, and what goes into your cart has real repercussions on the future of the earth. But although we have choices, few of us are aware of exactly what they are. Michael Pollan's beautifully written book could change that. He tears down the walls that separate us from what we eat, and forces us to be more responsible eaters. Reading this book is a wonderful, life-changing experience.
Ruth Reichl - Gourmet Magazine

Thoughtful, engrossing ... You're not likely to get a better explanation of exactly where your food comes from.
New York Times

His book is an eater's manifesto, and he touches on a vast array of subjects, from food fads and taboos to our avoidance of not only our food's animality, but also our own. Along the way, he is alert to his own emotions and thoughts, to see how they affect what he does and what he eats, to learn more and to explain what he knows. His approach is steeped in honesty and self-awareness. His cause is just, his thinking is clear, and his writing is compelling.
Bunny Crumpacker - Washington Post

Michael Pollan has perfected a tone—one of gleeful irony and barely suppressed outrage—and a way of inserting himself into a narrative so that a subject comes alive through what he's feeling and thinking. He is a master at drawing back to reveal the greater issues.
Los Angeles Times

Pollan examines what he calls "our national eating disorder" (the Atkins craze, the precipitous rise in obesity) in this remarkably clearheaded book. It's a fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. You'll certainly never look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again. Pollan approaches his mission not as an activist but as a naturalist: "The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world." All food, he points out, originates with plants, animals and fungi. "[E]ven the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of... well, precisely what I don't know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living creature, i.e., a species. We haven't yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly." Pollan's narrative strategy is simple: he traces four meals back to their ur-species. He starts with a McDonald's lunch, which he and his family gobble up in their car. Surprise: the origin of this meal is a cornfield in Iowa. Corn feeds the steer that turns into the burgers, becomes the oil that cooks the fries and the syrup that sweetens the shakes and the sodas, and makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients (yikes) in the Chicken McNuggets. Indeed, one of the many eye-openers in the book is the prevalence of corn in the American diet; of the 45,000 items in a supermarket, more than a quarter contain corn. Pollan meditates on the freakishly protean nature of the corn plant and looks at how the food industry has exploited it, to the detriment of everyone from farmers to fat-and-getting-fatter Americans. Besides Stephen King, few other writers have made a corn field seem so sinister. Later, Pollan prepares a dinner with items from Whole Foods, investigating the flaws in the world of "big organic"; cooks a meal with ingredients from a small, utopian Virginia farm; and assembles a feast from things he's foraged and hunted. This may sound earnest, but Pollan isn't preachy: he's too thoughtful a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take over. He's also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a pasture from a cow's-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into the making of his meals. I'm not convinced I'd want to go hunting with Pollan, but I'm sure I'd enjoy having dinner with him. Just as long as we could eat at a table, not in a Toyota.
Publishers Weekly

Pollan defines the Omnivore's Dilemma as the confusing maze of choices facing Americans trying to eat healthfully in a society that he calls "notably unhealthy." He seeks answers to this dilemma by taking readers through the industrial, organic, and hunter-gatherer stages of the food chain. Focusing on corn as the keystone plant in the industrial stage, Pollan describes its role in feeding cattle and in food processing as well as its ultimate destination in the products we consume at fast-food restaurants. The organic, or pastoral, stage offers a pure and chemical-free eating environment for animals and humans. In the hunter-gatherer stage, omnivores hunt animals and gather the plant foods that comprise all or part of their diets. Pollan explains how a framework of environmental, biological, and cultural factors determines what and how we eat. Although a bit long and sometimes redundant, this folksy narrative provides a wealth of information about agriculture, the natural world, and human desires. Recommended for all omnivores. —Irwin Weintraub, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., New York
Library Journal

The dilemma—what to have for dinner when you are a creature with an open-ended appetite—leads Pollan (The Botany of Desire, 2001, etc.) to a fascinating examination of the myriad connections along the principal food chains that lead from earth to dinner table. The author identifies three: the one controlled by agribusiness; the pastoral, organic industry that has sprung up as an alternative to it; and the very short food chain Pollan calls "neo-Paleolithic," in which he assumes the role of modern-day hunter-gatherer. He demonstrates the dependence of the agribusiness system on a single grain, corn, as it passes from farm to feedlot and processing plant. The meal that concludes this section is takeout from McDonald's and includes among other foods a serving of Chicken McNuggets. Of the 38 ingredients that make up McNuggets, 13, he notes, are derived from corn. This fact bolsters an earlier, startling statistic: Each of us is personally responsible for consuming a ton of corn each year. Pollan's exploration of the pastoral food chain takes two roads. Investigating "industrial organic," he assembles a meal composed entirely of ingredients from a Whole Foods supermarket. But he also visits a single, relatively small farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, where grass, not corn, is the basis of production, and cattle, chickens and pigs are raised through management of the natural ecosystem. Pollan joins in the farm work and is clearly impressed by what he learns, observes and eats here. In the final section, he learns how to shoot a wild pig and how to scavenge for forest mushrooms. The author's extraordinarily labor-intensive final meal provides a perfect contrast to the fast-food takeout of Part I. Pollan combines ecology, biology, history and anthropology with personal experience to present fascinating multiple perspectives. Revelations about how the way we eat affects the world we live in, presented with wit and elegance.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1. Michael Pollan approaches eating as an activity filled with ethical issues. Do you agree that the act of eating is as morally weighty as he says it is? What questions concern you most about the way you eat or the way your food is created?

2. Some readers might argue that Pollan’s ethics do not go far enough, perhaps because he does not urge us all to become vegetarians or possibly because of the zeal with which he pursues the feral pig that he kills toward the end of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Did you find yourself quarreling with any of Pollan’s ethical positions, and why?

3. Pollan argues that capitalism is a poor economic model to apply to the problems of food production and consumption. Do you agree or disagree, and why?

4. Pollan also shows a number of instances in which government policies have apparently worsened the crisis in our food culture. What do you think should be the proper role of government in deciding how we grow, process, and eat our food?

5. How has Michael Pollan changed the way you think about food?

6. At the end of In Defense of Food, Pollan offers a series of recommendations for improved eating. Which, if any, do you intend to adopt in your own life?

7. Which of Pollan’s recommendations would you be least likely to accept, and why?

8. Do you think that the way Americans eat reveals anything about our national character and broader shared values? How is Pollan’s writing a statement not only about American eating, but about American culture and life?

9. In both The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, Pollan quotes the words of Wendell Berry: “Eating is an agricultural act.” What does Berry mean by this, and why is his message so important to Pollan’s writing?

10. In each part of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan has a particular friend to help him understand the food chain he is investigating: George Naylor in Iowa, Joel Salatin at Polyface, and Angelo Garro in northern California. Which of these men would you most like to know personally, and why?

11. What, in the course of his writing, does Michael Pollan reveal about his own personality? What do you like about him? What, if anything, rubs you the wrong way?

12. If Michael Pollan were coming to your place for dinner, what would you serve him and why? [Or would you finally come to your senses...and cancel? —ed., LitLovers]
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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