Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas, and Found Happiness
Dominique Browning
Atlas & Co.
271 pp.
ISBN-13:

Summary
In November 2007, former editor in chief of House & Garden magazine Dominique Browning experienced what thousands have since experienced. She lost her job.

Overnight, her driven, purpose-filled days vanished. With her children leaving home and a long relationship ending, the structure of her days disappeared. She fell into a panic of loss but found humor despite everything, discovering a deeper joy than any she had ever known. It was a life she had not sought, but one that offered pleasures and surprises she didn’t know she lacked.

Slow Love is about wearing your pajamas to the farmers’ market, packing up a beloved home and moving to a more rural setting, making time to play the piano and go kayaking, reinventing yourself, and not cutting corners when it comes to love, muffins, or gardening. This elegant, graceful—and yet funny—book inspires us to dance in the kitchen and seize new directions. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Dominique Browning was the last editor-in-chief of the shelter magazine House & Garden (from 1995 to 2007) published by Conde Nast. Currently, she contributes to various newspapers and magazines and writes a monthly column for the Environmental Defense Fund website.

As an author, Browning has written books related to her work: Around the House and In the Garden: a Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing, and Home Improvement and Paths of Desire: the Passion of a Suburban Gardener. Her third book, Slow Love: How I Lost my Job, Put on My Pajamas, and Found Happiness was published in 2010.

Apart from these three books, Browning also wrote books under the House & Garden brand: The House & Garden Book of Style, The Well-Lived Life, Gardens of Paradise and House of Worship. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Losing a job without just reason can cause the victim to become very angry. And wrath provides the one ingredient that had previously been absent from Browning’s writing. Fueled by rage, she has become not only an elegant and meditative writer but a pungently witty one, spinning out one-liners with throwaway ease. (“I began to knit him a scarf,” she discloses of a certain recalcitrant man. “Yes, I wanted to strangle him.”)....The most sensitive parts of Slow Love describe the triumph of spirit over circumstance.
Miranda Seymour - New York Times Book Review

Browning's 13-year-job as editor-in-chief of House & Garden fulfillingly defined her days and her identity; when the magazine folded two years ago, she was shaken to the core of her being. Having maintained her Westchester house, family of two grown sons, extensive garden, and frequent dining out, her life and general sense of self was radically shaken over the next year, and in this enchanting, funny, deeply gracious memoir, Browning, many years divorced, recounts how she found enlightenment at the other end. Writing was one way to absorb the panic; she went on a muffin-baking binge and gained 15 pounds; lost track of days, remaining comfortingly in her pjs and yearning perilously to reconnect to a former lover she calls Stroller, who was deemed wrong for her by everyone she knew. A few small decisions had enormous impact, such as when insomnia compelled her to tackle Bach's Goldberg Variations on the piano, and poignantly she refocused on her artistic nature. There is such feeling and care on each page of Browning's well-honed memoir—her rediscovery of nature, her avowal to let love find her rather than seek it, tapping satisfying work at her own keyboard—that the reader is swept along in a pleasant mood of transcendence.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
1. How does Dominique ultimately define slow love? What does “slow love” mean to you, and how can you maintain it throughout all walks of life, regardless of employment?

2. Have you or a loved one lost a job? How did you get or give support? How did you adapt your lifestyle as a consequence? How does the structure of the work day shape the way you live your life?

3. While at Condé Nast, Dominique often spent more time with her “office family” than her own. How do you reconcile your work life and your home life? Does one role overwhelm the other? How do you shift between the two?

4. After House & Garden folded, Dominique discovers that some friends are much less friendly once she loses her powerful status. How have you dealt with fair-weather friends? How can we cultivate enduring friendships?

5. Dominique calls her house a Museum of Happiest Memories: so much of her family life revolves around the house. How does a family change when the house that unifies it is no longer present? What makes a house a home, and how can you carry your“happiest memories” with you when it’s gone?

6. Dominique often turns to food for comfort, especially eggs, cookies, and the deluge of muffins. What are your comfort foods, and why is food so comforting for us? How does your relationship with food change based on your daily routine?

7. Dr. Pat recommended a strict diet for Dominique, complete with a daily meal schedule. How does the structure of this diet reflect the structure of a work day? How can we balance our need for structure with the idea of slow love?

8. Dominique makes multiple attempts to integrate herself into Stroller’s life, from bringing her clothes into his closet to planting mint in his yard. How do you share a life with someone? When those efforts are thwarted, what keeps you in a relationship past its expiration date?

9. One of Dominique’s preferred ways to slow down is by gardening and communing with nature. Where do you find natural beauty? How do you bring that outdoor serenity into your home?

10. Dominique calls the period of mid-life her “intertidal years.” How are transitional states featured throughout the book? What distinguishes this time of life from that which precedes it?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood
Helene Cooper, 2008
Simon & Schuster
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743266253


Summary  
Helene Cooper is "Congo," a descendant of two Liberian dynasties — traced back to the first ship of freemen that set sail from New York in 1820 to found Monrovia. Helene grew up at Sugar Beach, a twenty-two-room mansion by the sea. Her childhood was filled with servants, flashy cars, a villa in Spain, and a farmhouse up-country. It was also an African childhood, filled with knock foot games and hot pepper soup, heartmen and neegee. When Helene was eight, the Coopers took in a foster child — a common custom among the Liberian elite. Eunice, a Bassa girl, suddenly became known as "Mrs. Cooper's daughter."

For years the Cooper daughters—Helene, her sister Marlene, and Eunice — blissfully enjoyed the trappings of wealth and advantage. But Liberia was like an unwatched pot of water left boiling on the stove. And on April 12, 1980, a group of soldiers staged a coup d'etat, assassinating President William Tolbert and executing his cabinet. The Coopers and the entire Congo class were now the hunted, being imprisoned, shot, tortured, and raped. After a brutal daylight attack by a ragtag crew of soldiers, Helene, Marlene, and their mother fled Sugar Beach, and then Liberia, for America. They left Eunice behind.

A world away, Helene tried to assimilate as an American teenager. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill she found her passion in journalism, eventually becoming a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. She reported from every part of the globe—except Africa—as Liberia descended into war-torn, third-world hell.

In 2003, a near-death experience in Iraq convinced Helene that Liberia — and Eunice — could wait no longer. At once a deeply personal memoir and an examination of a violent and stratified country, The House at Sugar Beach tells of tragedy, forgiveness, and transcendence with unflinching honesty and a survivor's gentle humor. And at its heart, it is a story of Helene Cooper's long voyage home. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1966
• Where—Monrovia, Liberia
• Education—University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Currently—lives in the Washington, D.C., area

Helene Cooper is the diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times. Prior to that assignment, she was the assistant editorial page editor of the New York Times, after twelve years as a reporter and foreign correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. She was born in Monrovia, Liberia, and lives in the Washington, D.C., area. (From the publisher.)

More
Helene Cooper was born in Liberia, the descendant of Elijah Johnson and Randolph Cooper—freed American slaves who were early settlers of Liberia. She is now an American journalist who has been the diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, based in Washington, D.C., since 2006. She joined the Times in 2004 as assistant editorial page editor.

At the Wall Street Journal, Cooper wrote about trade, politics, race and foreign policy at the Washington and Atlanta bureaus from 1992 to 1997. From 1997 to 1999, she reported on the European Monetary Union from the London bureau. From 1999 to 2002, she was a reporter focusing on international economics; then Washington bureau chief from 2002 to 2004.

Her 2008 memoir, The House at Sugar Beach, largely concerns the Liberian coup of 1980 and its effect on Cooper's family, socially and politically-elite descendants of American freed slaves who colonized the country in the 19th century. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
At its heart, The House at Sugar Beach is a coming-of-age story told with unremitting honesty. With her pedigree and her freedom from internalized racism, Cooper is liberated to enjoy a social universe that is a fluid mix of all things American and African…While Cooper's memoir is mesmerizing in its portrayal of a Liberia rarely witnessed, its description of the psychological devastation—and coping mechanisms—brought on by profound loss is equally captivating.
Caroline Elkins - New York Times


The House at Sugar Beach is her dramatic memoir of Liberia in the years preceding and after its savage revolution in 1980…a brilliant spotlight on a land too long forgotten. Through Cooper, we breathe Liberia's coal smoke and fish-tangy air; we taste its luscious palm butter on rice and hear the charming patter of Liberian English. We trot to church, to the family plantation and to Grandma's house.
Wendy Kann - Washington Post


Among Cooper's aims in becoming a journalist were to reveal the atrocities committed in her native country. With amazing forthrightness, she has done so, delivering an eloquent, if painful, history of the African migratory experience.
Ms. Magazine


This stunning memoir by journalist Helene Cooper relates her early years living at the Sugar Beach estate in Liberia until a coup d'état drove her mother, sister and her to America, where they attempted to fit in. The story is a sprawling, epic tale of struggle and survival in the face of adversity, and Cooper relates it with a genuine and emotional voice. As Cooper's tale unfolds, her intimate reading draws listeners into the family as their journey begins. Cooper may not read with a lot of frills and thrills in her somber voice, but the experience is affecting and indelible.
Publishers Weekly


Cooper, a New York Times diplomatic correspondent, writes of her life as a privileged Liberian ultimately forced to emigrate to the United States. Sometimes humorous, at other times shocking, she is always engaging and informative although not highly reflective. Cooper describes her comfortable life in an elite Liberian family, introducing her relatives, the family servants, and Liberian language, culture, and society. In 1980, when she was a teenager, Samuel Kanyon Doe's coup d'état ended it all. The horrors of those times-the televised executions (whose victims included friends and relatives), the rapes (of her mother and schoolmates), and the recruitment of children as soldiers-are all clearly rendered. The most compelling chapters in Cooper's memoir, which goes up to her revisiting Liberia in 2003, profile a Liberian named Eunice whose tribe was living in the country when Cooper's American ancestors arrived. Her parents took in Eunice as a companion for Helene, and they became lifelong friends. Eunice's life swung from poverty to wealth (with the Coopers) and back to poverty (when the Coopers moved to America); why she did not go with them is not clear. A great book discussion selection; recommended for academic and public libraries.
Tonya Briggs - Library Journal


In her warm, conversational tone, Helene Cooper vividly evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of Liberia for readers as she describes the customs, history, and culture of her native land.... Like the best nonfiction—and journalism—Cooper’s gripping coming-of-age story enlightens and inspires, often reading like a novel. In sum, it is a very personal and honest memoir from a gifted writer.
Bookmarks Magazine


A contemplative memoir of a privileged life in a poor place. The house of the title stood, and perhaps still stands, 11 miles from Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Born there in 1966, New York Times special correspondent Cooper (whose beat is now Condoleezza Rice) had the run of that "perfect and perfectly grand paradise," with its five bedrooms and three bathrooms and baby grand piano, all "protected from the ravages of West African squalor and poverty by central air-conditioning, strategically placed coconut trees, and a private water well." Yet, though perched on a hill above the rest, the house was no fortress. As Cooper writes, it was a magnet for rogues-burglars, that is, as distinct from thieves, who "worked for the government and stole money from the public treasury." Lighter-skinned than many of her compatriots, Cooper was also an "Honorable," one of the ethnic and social elite who lorded it over the poorer "Country" people of Liberia. A Country man with a Harvard doctorate, notes the author, would still rank below an Honorable "with a two-bit degree from some community college in Memphis, Tennessee." In childhood games, it was the Honorables who got to shoot the Country people, and the Country people who got to play dead. Such are the perfect ingredients for a civil war, and civil war is what came. When it did, led by Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe, members of Cooper's family were killed, her mother raped, an adopted sister lost, her family scattered and sent into exile in America. These terrible events occur at the book's midpoint. What remains-rendered with aching nostalgia and wonderful language ("Wartime come, when they be evacuating people, you will be glad I not try into get on no helicopter in heels")—is a voyage of return, through which the author seeks to recover the past and to find that missing sister, even as the war deepens over the years to come. Elegant and eloquent, and full of news from places about which we know too little.
Kirkus Reviews

Book Club Discussion Questions
1. The first sentence of Helene Cooper's memoir is, "This is a story about rogues." Did you find this statement to be true? What sort of rogues did Helene fear she would encounter in Liberia?

2. Why do you think Helene chose to title her memoir The House at Sugar Beach even though she spent only seven years of her life there? What about the house is metaphorical for her entire childhood? Her entire life?

3. Discuss the role of religion in Helene's childhood. When did she pray? For what did she pray?

4. Throughout her childhood in Liberia Helene wishes to become a "been-to." When she moved to Knoxville in 1980 it "seemed like a place where [she] was trapped, prison far from home." How does she eventually make the States seem more like home?

5. Discuss Helene's relationship with Eunice in the house at Sugar Beach. What were some of the experiences they shared that made it clear that Eunice was more than a "live-in playmate"? How does the relationship evolve over the course of their lives?

6. Why do you think Helene and her sisters played, "when war time come"? Did Helene paint anything about the national unrest going on in Liberia? Did circumstances or events she experienced in her early life portend war?

7. Helene spends her childhood fearing seemingly harmless entities like negee and heartmen. Then we learn that her classmate Richard was indeed chased by a heartman, and only narrowly escaped. How did it change your understanding of the young Helene to learn that her fears were not unfounded? What forms have the imaginary boogiemen of your youth taken in adulthood?

8. Discuss the distinction between the native Liberiansand the "Congo people." How did you react to Helene's cousin CeRue saying, "don't call me Congo, my grandma da Vai woman"? What does the national observance of Matilda Newport Day say about the relationship between native Liberians and Congo people? When war hit Liberia how did the distinctions become even more evident? Contrarily, how were the lines further blurred?

9. How did the mixing in of Liberian history help you to contextualize Helene's story? What about her story and the way she told it was universal?

10. Discuss Lah's rape. Do you admire her for what she did to protect the girls? She reports that the last thing the soldiers said to her before they raped her was, "You think the Americans are going to come and help you? Well, they back us." As an American, how did you react to this accusation?

11. Why do you think Helene decided to intersperse her articles with those being written about Liberia in Chapter 23? What effect did this have? Do you think she felt burdened by her homeland? Or guilty about her life as a journalist in the States?

12. Discuss the role of men in Helene's life. How did the Liberian cultural view of marriage affect the Cooper family? In what ways was Helene's father an ideal father figure? How did he let her down?

13. How does Helene's reunion with Eunice in the final chapter put her life in the States into perspective? How do you think Helene might have fared had she not left Liberia when the war began?

14. How does Helene's memoir differ from others you have read? Which stories will stay with you? What do you wish she had expanded on?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family
Lisa See, 1995
Knopf Doubleday
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679768524


Summary
When she was a girl, Lisa See spent summers in the cool, dark recesses of her family's antiques store in Los Angeles Chinatown. There, her grandmother and great-aunt told her intriguing, colorful stories about their family's past stories of missionaries, concubines, tong wars, glamorous nightclubs, and the determined struggle to triumph over racist laws and discrimination.

They spoke of how Lisa's great-great-grandfather emigrated from his Chinese village to the United States to work on the building of the transcontinental railroad as an herbalist; how his son followed him, married a Caucasian woman, and despite great odds, went on to become one of the most prominent Chinese on "Gold Mountain" (the Chinese name for the United States).

As an adult, See spent five years collecting the details of her family's remarkable history. She interviewed nearly one hundred relatives—both Chinese and Caucasian, rich and poor—and pored over documents at the National Archives and several historical societies, and searched in countless attics, basements, and closets for the intimate nuances of her ancestors' lives.

The result is a vivid, sweeping family portrait in the tradition of Alex Haley's Roots that is at once particular and universal, telling the story not only of one family, but of the Chinese people in America itself, a country that both welcomes and reviles immigrants like no other culture in the world.

On Gold Mountain was a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book. It was the inspiration for an exhibition at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in 2000. Lisa also wrote a libretto based on the book for a 2000 production by the Los Angeles Opera. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 18, 1955
• Where—Paris, France
• Education—B.A., Loyola Marymount University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California


Lisa See is an American writer and novelist. Her Chinese-American family (See has one Chinese great-grandparent) has had a great impact on her life and work. Her books include On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1995) and the novels Flower Net (1997), The Interior (1999), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), Shanghai Girls (2009), which made it to the 2010 New York Times bestseller list, and China Dolls (2014).

Flower Net, The Interior, and Dragon Bones make up the Red Princess mystery series. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love focus on the lives of Chinese women in the 19th and 17th centuries respectively. Shanghai Girls chronicles the lives of two sisters who come to Los Angeles in arranged marriages and face, among other things, the pressures put on Chinese-Americans during the anti-Communist mania of the 1950s. See published a sequel titled Dreams of Joy.

Writing under the pen name Monica Highland, See, her mother Carolyn See, and John Espey, published three novels: Lotus Land (1983), 110 Shanghai Road (1986), and Greetings from Southern California (1988).

Biography
Lisa See was born in Paris but has spent many years in Los Angeles, especially Los Angeles Chinatown. Her mother, Carolyn See, is also a writer and novelist. Her autobiography provides insight into her daughter's life. Lisa See graduated with a B.A. from Loyola Marymount University in 1979.

See was West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly (1983–1996); has written articles for Vogue, Self, and More; has written the libretto for the opera based on On Gold Mountain, and has helped develop the Family Discovery Gallery for the Autry Museum, which depicts 1930s Los Angeles from the perspective of her father as a seven-year-old boy. Her exhibition On Gold Mountain: A Chinese American Experience was featured in the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, and the Smithsonian. See is also a public speaker.

She has written for and led in many cultural events emphasizing the importance of Los Angeles and Chinatown. Among her awards and recognitions are the Organization of Chinese Americans Women's 2001 award as National Woman of the Year and the 2003 History Makers Award presented by the Chinese American Museum. See has served as a Los Angeles City Commissioner. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/21/2014.)

Book Reviews
"[See] proves to be a clever, conscientious, fair-minded biographer… [She] has done a gallant job of fashioning anecdote, fable and fact into an engaging read. Terrific stuff… The See family's adventures would be incredible if On Gold Mountain were fiction.
New York Times Book Review

Astonishing.... A comprehensive and exhaustively researched account of a Chinese-American family...that juggles such explosive elements as race, class, tradition, prejudice, poverty, and great wealth in new and relatively unexpected combinations.
Los Angeles Times

(Starred reveiw.) A matchless portrait not only of a remarkable family but of a century's changing attitudes.... The ambitions, fears, loves, and sorrows of See's huge cast are set forth with the storytelling skills of a novelist. Immediate and gripping.
Publishers Weekly

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 On Gold Mountain:

1. Discuss the obstacles that Fong See, Lisa's great grandfather, and Letticie Pruett, her caucasan great grandmother, were forced to overcome in order to marry. Also consider the hardships—the indignities and abuses—that each of them encountered in America, the land of equality and opportunity.

2. Lisa herself is only 1/8th Chinese. Do you feel she is qualified to tell the story of Chinese immigrants to this country?

3. How well does See deal with her mother Carolyn, who careened from one marriage to another? Carolyn, by the way, has also written a book; she and Lisa have worked together assisting one another on their separate family projects.

4. Discuss the roles that the women in Lisa's family play. How would you describe those women? What qualities do they exhibit?

5. How does the family's life in China, prior to emmigration, compare with their life in America? Better off? Worse off?

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

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Slave: My True Story
Mende Nazer, Damian Lewis, 2003
PublicAffairs
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 97815863180

Summary
Mende Nazer lost her childhood at age twelve, when she was sold into slavery. It all began one horrific night in 1993, when Arab raiders swept through her Nuba village, murdering the adults and rounding up thirty-one children, including Mende.

Mende was sold to a wealthy Arab family who lived in Sudan's capital city, Khartoum. So began her dark years of enslavement. Her Arab owners called her "Yebit," or "black slave." She called them "master." She was subjected to appalling physical, sexual, and mental abuse. She slept in a shed and ate the family leftovers like a dog. She had no rights, no freedom, and no life of her own.

Normally, Mende's story never would have come to light. But seven years after she was seized and sold into slavery, she was sent to work for another master—a diplomat working in the United Kingdom. In London, she managed to make contact with other Sudanese, who took pity on her. In September 2000, she made a dramatic break for freedom.

Slave is a story almost beyond belief. It depicts the strength and dignity of the Nuba tribe. It recounts the savage way in which the Nuba and their ancient culture are being destroyed by a secret modern-day trade in slaves. Most of all, it is a remarkable testimony to one young woman's unbreakable spirit and tremendous courage. (From the publisher.)

Author Bios
• Birth—ca. 1979 to 1982
• Where—Nuba Mountains, Sudan, Africa
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK

Mende Nazer [as of 2004, the time of the book's U.S. printing] was approximately twenty-five years old (the Nuba do not record exact dates of birth). She was granted political asylum by the British government in 2003. She currently lives in London.

Damien Lewis is a British journalist who helped Mende escape and transcribed her story. A Sudan expert, he is an anti-slavery activist. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews>
The Nuba Mountains of Sudan ... serve as the backdrop to the early chapters of Mende Nazer's harrowing tale, Slave. Nazer's book describes her oddly idyllic childhood; her subsequent capture and rape during an Arab raid on her village; her years of enslavement in the home of a well-to-do Arab family in the capital of Khartoum; and later, her life in London, where she served as the slave of a high-ranking Sudanese diplomat, also an Arab, before her ultimate escape, with the help of co-author Damien Lewis, a British journalist, in September 2000.

One of Britain's leading newspapers, the Sunday Telegraph, reported the story ... without speaking with Nazer. The former diplomat filed a libel suit against the paper, and even claimed to have letters written by Nazer to her family that refuted her story. The paper eventually paid damages and published an apology declaring Nazer's story false....

The Sudanese government has been extremely reluctant to investigate Nazer's claims, however, and given its obvious stake in wanting damning evidence of the country's slave trade refuted, this silence certainly lends credence to Nazer's story. If the experiences Nazer recounts here prove true, they will stand as an important reminder of the real, lived terrors of thousands of black southern Sudanese whose stories will never be told, and whose freedom may never be won.
Alex P. Kellogg - Washington Post

(Starred review.) The shock of this title is that it refers to what is happening right now, in Sudan, Africa, and also in the West.... The details are unforgettable, capturing both the innocence of the child and the world-weariness of one who has endured the worst.
Booklist

Born into the Karko tribe in the Nuba mountains of northern Sudan, Nazer has written a straightforward, harrowing memoir that's a sobering reminder that slavery still needs to be stamped out. The first, substantial section of the book concentrates on Nazer's idyllic childhood, made all the more poignant for the misery readers know is to come. Nazer is presented as intelligent and headstrong, and her people as peaceful, generous and kind. In 1994, around age 12 (the Nuba do not keep birth records), Nazer was snatched by Arab raiders, raped and shipped to the nation's capital, Khartoum, where she was installed as a maid for a wealthy suburban family. (For readers expecting her fate to include a grimy factory or barren field, the domesticity of her prison comes as a shock.) To Nazer, the modern landscape of Khartoum could not possibly have been more alien; after all, she had never seen even a spoon, a mirror or a sink, much less a telephone or television set. Nazer's urbane tormentors—mostly the pampered housewife—beat her frequently and dehumanized her in dozens of ways. They were affluent, petty and calculatedly cruel, all in the name of "keeping up appearances." The contrast between Nazer's pleasant but "primitive" early life and the horrors she experienced in Khartoum could hardly be more stark; it's an object lesson in the sometimes dehumanizing power of progress and creature comforts. After seven years, Nazer was sent to work in the U.K., where she contacted other Sudanese and eventually escaped to freedom. Her book is a profound meditation on the human ability to survive virtually any circumstances
Publishers Weekly

Nazer heart-wrenchingly describes the ragged unpredictability of beatings, the crowding thoughts of home, the repulsive food, and the drear of daily toil. Sent to London to work for her mistress's sister, the wife of a Sudanese diplomat, Nazer manages to contact a fellow Nuban who helps her to escape and gets her a lawyer.... Revelatory in the truest sense of the word told with a child-pure candor that comes like a bucket of cold water in the lap.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Slave: My True Story—

1. How does the controversy surrounding Nazer's accounts of her enslavement affect your view the book? (See the Washington Post review above.) Does her story, even if embellished or patently untrue, help focus attention on the practice of slavery in the Sudan and surrounding nations? Or does it weaken the cause for putting a halt to slavery?

2. Talk about the disparity of Nazer's idyllic childhood in a primative culture and the cruelty she experienced at the hands of her captors in the more affluent culture of Khartoum. In what way does her dehumanization call into question the idea of progress?

3. What are the ways in which Nazer coped with the inspeakable cruelty and beatings? To what degree did her personality or inner strength enable her to remain intact?

4. Also imagine what it would be like—how disorienting, bewildering, awe-inspiring—to be exposed for the first time, as Nazer was, to all the comforts and trappings of a modern society—plumbing, tv, phones, mirrors, even silverware.

5. Discuss Nazer's first-person-narrative voice in Slave. Do you find her open, almost childlike, candor appealing ... authentic ... or disingenuous? After all, the book was written by a man.

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

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