Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman
Robert K. Massie, 2011
Random House
656 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679456728


Summary
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and The Romanovs returns with another masterpiece of narrative biography, the extraordinary story of an obscure young German princess who traveled to Russia at fourteen and rose to become one of the most remarkable, powerful, and captivating women in history.

Born into a minor noble family, Catherine transformed herself into Empress of Russia by sheer determination. Possessing a brilliant mind and an insatiable curiosity as a young woman, she devoured the works of Enlightenment philosophers and, when she reached the throne, attempted to use their principles to guide her rule of the vast and backward Russian empire. She knew or corresponded with the preeminent historical figures of her time: Voltaire, Diderot, Frederick the Great, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, Marie Antoinette, and, surprisingly, the American naval hero, John Paul Jones.

Reaching the throne fired by Enlightenment philosophy and determined to become the embodiment of the “benevolent despot” idealized by Montesquieu, she found herself always contending with the deeply ingrained realities of Russian life, including serfdom. She persevered, and for thirty-four years the government, foreign policy, cultural development, and welfare of the Russian people were in her hands. She dealt with domestic rebellion, foreign wars, and the tidal wave of political change and violence churned up by the French Revolution that swept across Europe. Her reputation depended entirely on the perspective of the speaker. She was praised by Voltaire as the equal of the greatest of classical philosophers; she was condemned by her enemies, mostly foreign, as “the Messalina of the north.”

Catherine’s family, friends, ministers, generals, lovers, and enemies—all are here, vividly described. These included her ambitious, perpetually scheming mother; her weak, bullying husband, Peter (who left her lying untouched beside him for nine years after their marriage); her unhappy son and heir, Paul; her beloved grandchildren; and her “favorites”—the parade of young men from whom she sought companionship and the recapture of youth as well as sex. Here, too, is the giant figure of Gregory Potemkin, her most significant lover and possible husband, with whom she shared a passionate correspondence of love and separation, followed by seventeen years of unparalleled mutual achievement.

The story is superbly told. All the special qualities that Robert K. Massie brought to Nicholas and Alexandra and Peter the Great are present here: historical accuracy, depth of understanding, felicity of style, mastery of detail, ability to shatter myth, and a rare genius for finding and expressing the human drama in extraordinary lives.

History offers few stories richer in drama than that of Catherine the Great. In this book, this eternally fascinating woman is returned to life. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1929
• Where—Lexington, Kentucky, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; Oxford
   University (as a Rhodes Scholar)
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—lives in Irvington, New York


Robert Kinloch Massie III is an American historian, author, Pulitzer Prize recipient. He has devoted much of his career to studying the House of Romanov, Russia's royal family from 1613-1917.

Born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1929, Massie spent much of his youth in Nashville, Tennessee and currently resides in the village of Irvington, New York. He studied United States and modern European history at Yale and Oxford University, respectively, on a Rhodes Scholarship. Massie went to work as a journalist for Newsweek from 1959 to 1962 and then took a position at the Saturday Evening Post.

In 1969—before he and his family moved to France—Massie wrote and published his breakthrough book, Nicholas and Alexandra, a biography of the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra of Hesse. Massie's interest in the Imperial family was triggered by the birth of his son, Reverend and politician Robert Kinloch Massie IV, who was born with hemophilia—a hereditary disease that also afflicted Nicholas's son, Alexei. In 1971, the book was the basis of an Academy Award winning film of the same title. In 1995, in his book The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, Massie updated Nicholas and Alexandra with much newly-discovered information.

In 1975 Robert Massie and his then-wife Suzanne Massie chronicled their experiences as the parents of a hemophiliac child and the significant differences between the American and French health-care systems in their jointly-written book, Journey. Massie won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Peter the Great: His Life and World. This book inspired a 1986 NBC miniseries that won three Emmy Awards and starred Maximilian Schell, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave. In 2011 Massie published his biography, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (2011).

Massie was the president of the Authors Guild from 1987 to 1991, and he still serves as an ex officio council member. While president of the Guild, he famously called on authors to boycott any store refusing to carry Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. He is currently married to Deborah Karl. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
[Massie] has always been a biographer with the instincts of a novelist. He understands plot—fate—as a function of character. The narrative perspective he establishes and maintains, a vision tightly aligned with that of his subject, convinces a reader he’s not so much looking at Catherine the Great as he is out of her eyes.... One of the unexpected pleasures of “Catherine the Great” is that the degree to which Massie invites us to identify with his subject as she grows and changes in a role she began cultivating herself to attain at the age of 14.
Kathryn Harris - New York Times Book Review


This is indeed a "Portrait of a Woman," as the subtitle declares, with plenty of attention paid to Catherine's emotions and psychology. It is also an adept portrait of a ruler, sympathetically assessing Catherine as a worthy successor to Peter the Great in the effort to modernize and westernize the vast Russian empire. Historians may wish Massie had devoted more time to underlying forces in Russian society that defined the limits of Catherine's achievements, but general readers will find this an absorbing, satisfying biography of the old school.
Wendy Smith - Los Angeles Times


As he did in Nicholas and Alexandra and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Peter the Great, Massie immerses the reader in Russian history and culture. The author, 82, is clearly enraptured by his extraordinary heroine and by the end, so is the reader. Even bone-deep anti-monarchists will find themselves cheering on this absolute despot.What a woman, what a world, what a biography.
USA Today


Massie writes a lively account of Catherine's life and her reign. His clearly drawn depictions of the schemes, jealousies and maneuvers of the court, and of Catherine, bring the era and the woman to life. The book is big. It has to be to cover the scope of Catherine's life. But it is so engrossing, it's a quick read.
Mary Foster - Associated Press for Denver Post


In Catherine the Great, Massie has created a sensitive and compelling portrait not just of a Russian titan, but also of a flesh-and-blood woman.
Newsweek


(Starred review.) The Pulitzer-winning biographer of Nicholas and Alexandra and of Peter the Great, Massie now relates the life of a minor German princess, Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, who became Empress Catherine II of Russia (1729–1796). She was related through her ambitious mother to notable European royalty; her husband-to-be, the Russian grand duke Peter, was the only living grandson of Peter the Great. As Massie relates, during her disastrous marriage to Peter, Catherine bore three children by three different lovers, and she and Peter were controlled by Peter’s all-powerful aunt, Empress Elizabeth, who took physical possession of Catherine’s firstborn, Paul. Six months into her husband’s incompetent reign as Peter III, Catherine, 33, who had always believed herself superior to her husband, dethroned him, but probably did not plan his subsequent murder, though, Massie writes, a shadow of suspicion hung over her. Confident, cultured, and witty, Catherine avoided excesses of personal power and ruled as a benevolent despot. Magnifying the towering achievements of Peter the Great, she imported European culture into Russia, from philosophy to medicine, education, architecture, and art. Effectively utilizing Catherine’s own memoirs, Massie once again delivers a masterful, intimate, and tantalizing portrait of a majestic monarch.
Publishers Weekly

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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 Catherine the Great:

1. The subtitle of Robert Massie's biography is "Portrait of a Woman." Is the author's attempt to fashion his portrait successful? Does he imbue Catherine with enough color—complexity and depth—to bring her to life?

2. Follow-up to Question 1: What kind of a woman was Catherine? How did her upbringing shape the woman she would later become?  Consider, in particular, Catherine's mother, Johanna, and her influence over her daughter, known then as Sophia Augusta Fredericka?

3. How did Johanna, married to a minor German prince, manage to jostle her daughter to the forefront of European princesses in order to catch the eye of the Russian empress? Talk about Johanna's stratagems.

4. Follow-up to Question 3: What was it about Sophia that made the empress take note? Which of sophia's virtues impressed Elizabeth and inspired her to consider Sophia a suitable match for her nephew?

5. Massie says that Sophia understood early on that people preferred "to talk about themselves rather than anything else." How did Catherine use that insight to benefit herself—and ultimately to gain and maintain power over others? Was Catherine's use of this basic human trait cold and calculated? Or was it a result of her own sympathetic personality which she simply put to use? Or...something else?

6. Discuss young Peter and his ineffectual qualities—both as husband and czar? What mistakes did he make in his short reign? Consider, especially his desire to remake both the Russian church and army.

7. How do you view Catherine's coup d'etat and arrest of her husband? Were her actions justified? Regarding Peter's death, what do you make of Massie's assertion that "the circumstances and cause of death, and the intentions and degree of responsibility of those involved, can never be known.” Is Massie exculpating Catherine and her involvement because, as a biographer, he has lost objectivity for his subject? Or is his assessment correct?

8. Catherine made it her practice to appear in uniform at military parades, to wear plain apparel in public, to mingle with her subjects in the park, and to inoculate herself with a new, untried small pox vaccine. Talk about how she used those actionas as symbols in order to secure her position as "the mother of all Russia." Were her actions born of manipulation...or of a genuine understanding of the needs of her subject?

9. Massie writes that Catherine's need for adulation from her subjects grew out of a "permanent wound" as a result of her mother's rejection. Do you agree? Or is it an oversimplification?

10. Talk about the Pugachev revolt and its outcome. What effect did the rebellion have on Catherine's idealism, her desire to end serfdom and relax her hold over her subjects.

11. Overall, how would you describe Catherine's reign as Czarina of the Russian people? What were her greatest accomplishments...and her failures?

12. What did you know about Catherine the Great before you began this biography? Were your views of her altered by the end? If so, in what way?

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

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The City of Falling Angels 
John Berendt, 2005
Penguin Group USA
414 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143036937


Summary
The author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil returns after more than a decade to give us an intimate look at the "magic, mystery, and decadence" of the city of Venice and its inhabitants.

It was seven years ago that Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil achieved a record-breaking four-year run on the New York Times bestseller list. John Berendt's inimitable brand of nonfiction brought the dark mystique of Savannah so startlingly to life for millions of people that tourism to Savannah increased by 46 percent.

It is Berendt and only Berendt who can capture Venice—a city of masks, a city of riddles, where the narrow, meandering passageways form a giant maze, confounding all who have not grown up wandering into its depths. Venice, a city steeped in a thousand years of history, art and architecture, teeters in precarious balance between endurance and decay. Its architectural treasures crumble—foundations shift, marble ornaments fall—even as efforts to preserve them are underway.

The City of Falling Angels opens on the evening of January 29, 1996, when a dramatic fire destroys the historic Fenice opera house. The loss of the Fenice, where five of Verdi's operas premiered, is a catastrophe for Venetians. Arriving in Venice three days after the fire, Berendt becomes a kind of detective-inquiring into the nature of life in this remarkable museum-city—while gradually revealing the truth about the fire.

In the course of his investigations, Berendt introduces us to a rich cast of characters: a prominent Venetian poet whose shocking "suicide" prompts his skeptical friends to pursue a murder suspect on their own; the first family of American expatriates that loses possession of the family palace after four generations of ownership; an organization of high-society, partygoing Americans who raise money to preserve the art and architecture of Venice, while quarreling in public among themselves, questioning one another's motives and drawing startled Venetians into the fray; a contemporary Venetian surrealist painter and outrageous provocateur; the master glassblower of Venice; and numerous others-stool pigeons, scapegoats, hustlers, sleepwalkers, believers in Martians, the Plant Man, the Rat Man, and Henry James. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—December 5, 1939
• Where—Syracuse, New York, USA
• Education—A.B., Harvard
• Awards—Southern Book Award for General Nonfiction, 1994;
   Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, 1995
• Currently—lives in New York, New York


"I like crazy people," John Berendt once told an interviewer for The Independent. "I encourage them, they make good copy."

They do indeed, if Berendt is writing about them. His first book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which Berendt has called "a nonfiction novel," could be classified as a true crime story, or a travelogue, but it's also an absorbing collection of crazy people, cranks, eccentrics and oddballs, whose lives Berendt chronicles with as much detail as he devotes to murder suspect Jim Williams, ostensibly his main character.

As readers and critics have noted, the true "main character" of Midnight in the Garden is the city of Savannah, Ga., which enjoyed a tremendous boost in tourism as a result of what Savannahians now refer to simply as "the book."

Berendt started visiting Savannah in the early 1980s, flying in from New York, where he worked as a writer at Esquire. "All I did the first year," he later said in the London Daily Telegraph, "was take notes and interview, because I knew, the longer I was there, the less strange the whole thing would seem."

For Berendt, who once edited New York magazine, Savannah may have seemed strange at first, but in a fascinating way. As he explained in an Entertainment Weekly interview, "People in Savannah don't say, 'Before leaving the room, Mrs. Jones put on her coat.' Instead, they say, 'Before leaving the room, Mrs. Jones put on the coat that her third husband gave her before he shot himself in the head.'"

After gathering facts, gossiping with the locals and getting to know the city, Berendt shaped his experiences into a work Kirkus Reviews called "stylish, brilliant, hilarious, and coolhearted." Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil spent a record-setting four years on the New York Times bestseller list and sold 2.7 million copies in hardcover.

Not everyone adored it, however. In a controversy that perhaps anticipated author James Frey's troubles in the publishing world, some journalists wondered whether Berendt's embellishments were too numerous and substantial for the book to hold up as nonfiction. The book included an author's note explaining that Berendt changed the sequence of some events in the narrative.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil became a fixture on bestseller lists and was made into a movie directed by Clint Eastwood. Some of the real people profiled in the book became minor celebrities in their own right—most notably Berendt's drag-queen friend Lady Chablis, who played herself in the movie and later published an autobiography.

Readers wondered what Berendt would do for an encore, but the author was relatively slow to oblige them. It wasn't until more than ten years after the publication of his first book that Berendt released The City of Falling Angels, a portrait of Venice as experienced not by tourists, but by its year-round residents, who turn out to be as eccentric and weirdly compelling as the Savannahians of Midnight in the Garden. ("The man whose palazzo features three space suits and a stuffed monkey is par for the course," noted Janet Maslin in the New York Times Book Review.)

Though some critics thought Berendt's second book lacked the narrative pull of his first, many agreed that, as Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley put it, "The story of the Fenice fire and its aftermath is exceptionally interesting, the cast of characters is suitably various and flamboyant, and Berendt's prose, now as then, is precise, evocative and witty."

As Ann Godoff, Berendt's editor (first at Random House and now at Penguin Press), explained it, "By no means is this the same book. But nobody else could have written them both."

Extras
From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview:

• I never use an alarm clock. I have an internal mechanism that wakes me up when I want to wake up. I'm not sure how I developed this ability, or what its significance is. Anyhow, I always fall asleep secure in the knowledge that I will wake up within ten minutes of the desired time. And I always do.

• When I'm writing, I like to gain distance from my work so I can tell how it will strike a reader who is seeing it for the first time. I do this through a trick I devised while I was living in Savannah writing Midnight—I would call my apartment in New York, the answering machine would pick up, I'd read the page of text I'd just written, then I'd hang up. A minute later, I'd call my apartment again and listen to the "message." Hearing my own voice reading the page over the phone—my voice having traveled 1800 miles (900 each way )—gave me just the detached perspective I needed.

• On occasion, while I was working on Falling Angels, I used the same technique, ridiculous though it may sound; in this case the calls were from Venice to New York rather than from Savannah. Gay Talese says he achieves a similar detachment by tacking pages to the opposite wall and then reading them through binoculars. Whatever works."

• I had an early start in the world of books. I was hired at the age of fourteen as a stock boy at the Economy Book Store in downtown Syracuse. It was my first job. I worked after school every day for four hours and made ten dollars a week."

• I stay fit by exercising daily on a treadmill or a stationary bicycle for close to an hour. I'd be bored out of my mind doing this if it weren't for the fact that I watch movies at the same time. That way, time flies. I call it my Treadmill and Bicycle Film Festival. I've found that if I'm watching a thriller, my pace ratchets up a notch."

• My number-one hobby, my preferred means of unwinding, and my most often-used route of escape are all the same: reading. Nothing takes me out of myself faster or more completely than a good read. It relieves stress, lifts me out of a funk, and makes me feel I'm doing something worthwhile.

• When asked what book most influenced his life as a writer, he answered:

I could cite any number of great classics that, when I first read them, introduced me to the excitement of books, but the book that meant the most to me is not at all well known and is now out of print.

It's Small World a novel published in 1951 by Simon & Schuster. The story concerns a family of four living in upstate New York. It's charming and beautifully written. Carol Deschere, the athor, happens to be my mother, and the family depicted in her novel closely resembles our own. The book sold about 2,000 copies and, although my mother never wrote another book, Small World was a life-changing experience for me, because in addition to making me enormously proud of her, it showed me for the first time how real life could be transformed into words and stories and published in a book for all to read. It also planted the first seed in my mind that I might become a writer one day. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews
Mr. Berendt fills his new book with wily figures like the pigeon hunters. But he much prefers the ones trying to bag bigger game. In an interlocking set of stories loosely gathered around the investigation of a spectacular fire, he describes all manner of bizarre patricians and clever parasites, real artists and con artists, annual Carnival participants and those who stay in costume all year round, all united in cherishing Venice's melancholy grandeur. He seeks out the ineffably, aristocratically strange. The man whose palazzo features three space suits and a stuffed monkey is par for the course.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


The City of Falling Angels, Berendt's inquiry into people, places and aspects of Venice that tourists almost never see, doesn't have as strong a narrative line as Midnight , and no one in it is quite so hilariously and engagingly outré as Lady Chablis, the Savannah drag queen, but the story of the Fenice fire and its aftermath is exceptionally interesting, the cast of characters is suitably various and flamboyant, and Berendt's prose, now as then, is precise, evocative and witty.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post


(Audio version.) Berendt reads his own nonfiction exploration of the seamy side of Venice with an insider's hushed tones, chronicling the life and times of the city's movers and shakers like a naughty child sharing an overheard secret. Following up his similar study of Savannah in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Berendt has cobbled together a series of entertaining tales of the legendary canal city, ranging from the squabbles of Venetian fund-raisers to the fire in the Venice Opera House. Like a cocktail-party raconteur with a particularly juicy story to tell, Berendt twists his listeners' ears with his book's seamless string of Venice-themed misbehavior and decadence. Only occasionally overemoting, Berendt mostly maintains the proper tone of high-society gossip delivered succinctly. Berendt's intimate voice helps to tie together the disparate strands of his sometimes-sprawling book.
Publishers Weekly


More than ten years after the publication of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Berendt returns with another nonfiction thriller, this one set in Venice. The victim here is the Fenice, Venice's spectacular opera house, which burned under mysterious circumstances three days before Berendt's arrival in early 1996. As the author settles in for an extended stay, the Venetians attempt to determine the cause of the fire and rebuild the opera house—a process that reveals much about the life of the city and its citizens. Berendt meets Venetians of all classes and occupations, as well as tourists and expatriates, and weaves their stories into his chronicle of the fire investigation and reconstruction process. The cast of distinctive characters includes a judge, a glassblower, artists and artisans, poets, scholars, contractors, socialites, and members of the aristocracy. Even the buildings of Venice are characters in this real-life drama; thankfully, appendixes listing main characters, places, and organizations help readers to keep track of everything. What emerges is an intimate portrait of a city that has survived floods, government corruption, decay, rising water levels, invasions, and attempts by international organizations to "save" it-all while remaining a bastion of art and a place of unique beauty. Essential. —Rita Simmons, Sterling Heights P.L., MI
Library Journal


An intriguing tour of mysterious Venice and its most fascinating residents, centered around a 1996 fire that destroyed the city's historic opera house. Venice may be sinking, but in Berendt's capable hands, the city has never seemed more colorful, perplexing and alluring. The story focuses on the destruction by fire in 1996 of the famed Fenice Opera House, where Verdi first unveiled Rigoletto and La Traviata. Berendt, best known for 1995's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, decides to take an apartment to record the drama that ensues. What follows is part police drama, part cultural tour, with many pauses for comic relief along the way. While visiting some of Venice's ornate palazzos and their aristrocratic inhabitants, we encounter characters like the chameleon-like Mario Moro, whose wardrobe includes a different official uniform for every day of the week, and Massimo Donadon, "The Rat King of Treviso." Eventually, two electricians are charged with torching the Fenice, but as is customary in Venice, the whole truth seems to lie hidden in the city's dimly lit alleyways and winding canals. Berendt also finds intrigue in unexpected quarters. We follow a vicious boardroom feud that ignites within Save Venice, an international fundraising group formed to help restore the city's old buildings and artworks. We also encounter Philip and Jane Rylands, caretakers of Ezra Pound's aged companion of 50 years, Olga Rudge, who are later accused of exploiting the woman's senility in a bid for Pound's Venice cottage and private papers. With the exception of the occasional wrong turn (Berendt lingers far too long over the apparent suicide of a local gay artist, for example), this is an engaging journey in which the author navigates Venice's shadowy politics, its tangled bureaucracy and its elegant high-society nightlife with a discerning, sanguine touch. Berendt does great justice to an exalted city that has rightly fascinated the likes of Henry James, Robert Browning and many filmmakers throughout the world.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1. Count Marcello says to Berendt, "What is true? What is not true? The answer is not so simple, because the truth can change. I can change. You can change. That is the Venice effect" (p. 2). How do you see the "Venice effect" at work in this book?

2. Discuss the symbolism of Ludovico De Luigi's painting of the Fenice on fire, placed incorrectly (but on purpose) in the middle of the Venetian Lagoon.

3. Berendt writes, "Venetians seemed to be asking themselves the very questions that I, too, had been wondering about—namely, what it meant to live in so rarefied and unnatural a setting" (p. 42). What answers, if any, do you think the author and his subjects come to in the pages of The City of Falling Angels?

4. Rose Lauritzen calls Venice a "village with an edge." In your opinion, what about Venice makes it like a village, and what gives it an "edge"?

5. Mario Moro collects and parades around in uniforms of all types—he has everything from firefighter to naval captain. A local tells Berendt that Mario is just like the Venetian families living in grand palaces and obsessed with nobility, or artists who dream of being the next great Maestro. Identify some of the people in this book who exhibit this type of fantasy and self-delusion. Do you think it is a benign or harmful trait?

6. The families that Berendt encounters in Venice are often fighting vicious internal wars, or recovering from battles past. What are some of the family dramas he relays in The City of Falling Angels? Be sure to present both sides of the story!

7. Like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Carnival is an annual celebration that has, in a sense, defined Venice for generations of locals and millions of tourists. Discuss the meaning and execution of Carnival and how it has changed over the centuries. What is the difference between the way the Venetians and the tourists celebrate Carnival?

8. uerrino Lovato explains on page 101 that "Apollonian restraint and Dionysian abandon" are very important to Italian theater, and also to Venice itself. After reading his explanation about the two ancient cults, describe how this dichotomy is still at work in Venice today with regard to politics, social customs, relationships, architecture, and art.

9. Much of The City of Falling Angels is devoted to people intricately bound to or exceptionally wrapped up in the past. Discuss the significance of Patricia Curtis's portrait by Charles Merrill Mount and her habit of dressing all in white, as well as Daniel Curtis's collection of architectural fragments.

10. Several of the "central" figures in this book—the Lauritzens, the Curtis family, Olga Rudge, the Rylands—are not native Venetians. How do you view these people in light of Mario Stefani's opinion that "anyone who loves Venice is a true Venetian" (p. 331)? Do you think any of them are "true Venetians"? Why or why not?

11. With his repeated mentions of both Wings of the Dove and The Aspern Papers, Berendt returns throughout The City of Falling Angels to a theme of "the feigning of love as a means to gain something of value" (p. 184). Identify the various situations in the book that illustrate this theme.

12. After seeing a seagull tear out and eat the heart of a pigeon, Ludovico De Luigi tells Berendt, "An allegory: the strong versus the weak. It's always the same. The powerful always win, and the weak always come back to be victims all over again" (p. 233). In what ways does this allegory reflect the events of The City of Falling Angels? Do you think De Luigi's observation is true?

13. What is it that finally makes Count Volpi participate in Venetian society, if only for one night at the Save Venice ball?

14. Tourism in Savannah, Georgia, skyrocketed after the publication of Berendt's last book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Does reading The City of Falling Angels make you want to visit Venice? What specific aspect of the city most intrigues or repels you? If you have read both books, compare and contrast them.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend
Susan Orlean, 2011
Simon & Schuster
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439190142


Summary
He believed the dog was immortal.

So begins Susan Orlean’s sweeping, powerfully moving account of Rin Tin Tin’s journey from orphaned puppy to movie star and international icon.

Orlean, a staff writer at The New Yorker who has been hailed as “a national treasure” by the Washington Post, spent nearly ten years researching and reporting her most captivating book to date: the story of a dog who was born in 1918 and never died.

It begins on a battlefield in France during World War I, when a young American soldier, Lee Duncan, discovered a newborn German shepherd in the ruins of a bombed-out dog kennel.

To Duncan, who came of age in an orphanage, the dog’s survival was a miracle. He saw something in Rin Tin Tin that he felt compelled to share with the world. Duncan brought Rinty home to California, where the dog’s athleticism and acting ability drew the attention of Warner Bros.

Over the next 10 years, Rinty starred in 23 blockbuster silent films that saved the studio from bankruptcy and made him the most famous dog in the world. At the height of his popularity, Rin Tin Tin was Hollywood’s number one box office star.

During the decades that followed, Rinty and his descendants rose and fell with the times, making a tumultuous journey from silent films to talkies, from black-and-white to color, from radio programs to one of the most popular television shows of the baby boom era, The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin.

The canine hero’s legacy was cemented by Duncan and a small group of others—including Bert Leonard, the producer of the TV series, and Daphne Hereford, the owner of the current Rin Tin Tin—who have dedicated their lives to making sure the dog’s legend will never die.

At its core, Rin Tin Tin is a poignant exploration of the enduring bond between humans and animals. It is also a richly textured history of twentieth-century entertainment and entrepreneurship. It spans ninety years and explores everything from the shift in status of dogs from working farmhands to beloved family members, from the birth of obedience training to the evolution of dog breeding, from the rise of Hollywood to the past and present of dogs in war.

Filled with humor and heart and moments that will move you to tears, Susan Orlean’s first original book since The Orchid Thief is an irresistible blend of history, human interest, and masterful storytelling—a dazzling celebration of a great American dog by one of our most gifted writers. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—October 31, 1955
• Where—Cleveland, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Michigan
• Currently—lives in upstate New York


Susan Orlean is an American journalist. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992, and has contributed articles to Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Outside.

Orlean was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and graduated from the University of Michigan. She was then a staff writer at the Portland, Oregon, weekly Willamette Week, and soon began publishing stories in Rolling Stone, Esquire, Vogue, Outside, and Spy.

In 1982 she moved to Boston and became a staff writer for the Boston Phoenix and later a regular contributor to the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. Her first book, Saturday Night, was published in 1990, shortly after she moved to New York and began writing for The New Yorker magazine. She became a New Yorker staff writer in 1992. Orlean was also a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2003.

Orlean is the author of several books, including The Orchid Thief, a profile of Florida orchid grower, breeder, and collector John Laroche. The book formed the basis of Charlie Kaufman's script for the Spike Jonze film Adaptation. Orlean (portrayed by Meryl Streep in an Oscar-nominated role) was, in effect, made into a fictional character; the movie portrayed her as becoming Laroche's lover and partner in a drug production operation, in which orchids were processed into a fictional psychoactive substance.

She also wrote the Women's Outside article, "Life's Swell" (published 1998). The article, a feature on a group of young surfer girls in Maui, was the basis of the film Blue Crush.

In 1999, she co-wrote The Skinny: What Every Skinny Woman Knows About Dieting (And Won't Tell You!) under her married name, Susan Sistrom. Her previously published magazine stories have been compiled in two collections, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People and My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere.

She also served as editor for Best American Essays 2005 and Best American Travel Writing 2007. She contributed the Ohio chapter in "State By State" (2008).

In 2011 she published a biographical history about the dog actor Rin Tin Tin, followed by The Ghost FLower in 2016, and The Library Book in 2018.  (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/21/2018.)

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Book Reviews
Fascinating.... The sweeping story of the soulful German shepherd who was born on the battlefields of World War I, immigrated to America, conquered Hollywood, struggled in the transition to the talkies, helped mobilize thousands of dog volunteers against Hitler and himself emerged victorious as the perfect family-friendly icon of cold war gunslinging, thanks to the new medium of television.... Do dogs deserve biographies? In Rin Tin Tin Susan Orlean answers that question resoundingly in the affirmative.... By the end of this expertly told tale, she may persuade even the most hardened skeptic that Rin Tin Tin belongs on Mount Rushmore with George Washington and Teddy Roosevelt, or at least somewhere nearby with John Wayne and Seabiscuit.
Jennifer Schuessler - New York Times Book Review


Stunning.... A book so moving it melted the heart of at least this one dogged Lassie lover.... Don't let the book's title fool you. Calling Rin Tin Tin the story of a dog is like calling Moby-Dick the story of a whale. Orlean surfs the tide of time, pushing off in the 1900s and landing in the now, delivering a witty synopsis of nearly a century of Rin Tin Tins and American popular culture. The result is a truly exceptional book that marries historical journalism, memoir, and the technique of character-driven, psychologically astute, finely crafted fiction: a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.
Meredith Maran - Boston Globe


Orlean's deadpan sense of humor and ear for the odd and beguiling fact make it hard to put down the book. But there's also something haunting about it, a sense of the brevity of life and fame. . . . Orlean's writing is built to last. As individual as a fingerprint, or a face, it turns what could have been a footnote to history into a touching account of the way one life resonates with others.
Margaret Quamme - Columbus Dispatch


Dazzling.... Susan Orlean has fashioned a masterpiece of reporting and storytelling, some of it quite personal and all of it compelling. Animal-related books have always peppered best-seller lists—Seabiscuit comes quickly to mind—and this one will top such lists. It deserves to, and also to work its way into millions of hearts and minds.... [Carl] Sandburg called Rin Tin Tin "thrillingly intelligent" and "phenomenal." The same can be said for this remarkable book.... Spectacular.
Chicago Tribune


It's a story of magnificent obsession. Nearly a decade in the making, combining worldwide research with personal connection, it offers the kind of satisfactions you only get when an impeccable writer gets hold of one heck of a story.
Kenneth Turan - Los Angeles Times


Remarkable.... Orlean's pursuit of detail is mind-boggling.... The book is less about a dog than the prototypes he embodied and the people who surrounded him. It is about story-making itself, about devotion, luck and heroes.... Ultimately, the reader is left well nourished and in awe of both Orlean's reportorial devotion and at her magpie ability to find the tiniest sparkling detail.
Alexandar Horowitz - San Francisco Chronicle


With this stirring biographical history, Orlean follows up her bestselling The Orchid Thief with another tale of passion and dedication overcoming adversity and even common sense—this one centering on Rin Tin Tin, the German shepherd who founded a film and TV dynasty. After spending a lonely childhood in an orphanage, the young soldier Lee Duncan discovers on the battlefield of WWI France the puppy that will make a name for him as one of Hollywood's top dog trainers, and become his life's guiding purpose. The book follows Rin Tin Tin's trajectory from early Hollywood's "Poverty Row," where Duncan sought the dog's first film deal, to international celebrity in silent films, radio shows, and TV programs. Though Rin Tin Tin's contracts began to lapse in later years, Duncan never ceased grooming canine successors and shopping around scripts, and producer Bert Leonard lived on friends' couches as he poured money into colorizing old episodes of The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin. Orlean directs a sympathetic gaze toward these men so haunted by their memories of the dog that swept them into stardom. Even readers coming to Rin Tin Tin for the first time will find it difficult to refrain from joining Duncan in his hope that Rin Tin Tin's legacy will "go on forever..
Publishers Weekly


In this exceptional book, Orlean (staff writer, The New Yorker; author, The Orchid Thief) portrays the magical bond, which led to lasting international fame, between a special puppy found on a World War I battlefield and Lee Duncan, the man who rescued him. She spent ten years researching and writing their story, a richly textured narrative filled with personal accounts, astute cultural and social backdrops, behind-the-scenes details on film and television, and an informed look at the historical roles of dogs in war, on-screen, and in the home. Orlean describes Rin Tin Tin's career from the early days in film through the popular 1950s television series. His heroic persona transformed into immortal legend, as subsequent dogs sustained both his name and the noble qualities he symbolized. Duncan and others who were a part of Rinty's story are honestly yet compassionately portrayed. Orlean also shares her own tales of epic research. Verdict: This is a thoroughly researched and masterfully written work that will please a wide audience, especially those who remember this noble canine hero. It is also an important addition to the literature of cultural, entertainment, and animal history. —Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ
Library Journal

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Discussion Questions
1. Were you familiar with Rin Tin Tin before reading this book? What memories do you have of the famous dog? What was it like to delve back into the history of Rin Tin Tin? If this was your first introduction to him, what impressions did the book give you?

2. Orlean attributes Lee's fierce love of dogs to his traumatic childhood, in which both his mother and father abandoned him for a time. As Orlean writes: "The experience shaped him; for the rest of his life, he was always deeply alone....The only companion in his loneliness he would ever find would be his dog, and his attachment to animals grew to be deeper than his attachment to any person." (p. 15) Do you agree with this assessment? What other forces, if any, contributed to Lee's love of dogs?

3. Lee and the first Rin Tin Tin shared an incredibly close bond. Do you think Lee's devotion to Rinty was more of an endearing character trait, or a symptom of deeper personal issues? Consider the many people who felt wronged or resentful toward Lee—his daughter Carolyn, his wife Charlotte, and his wife Eva, in your answer.

4. Lee steadfastly believed that Rinty was destined for greatness and, as Orlean writes, "he was lucky to be his human guide and companion." (p. 34) Do you think Lee underestimated, or misunderstood, his importance in creating the Rin Tin Tin juggernaut?

5. On the strangely frequent coincidences that kept Rin Tin Tin's narrative alive, Orlean writes, "Everything connected to Rin Tin Tin was full of happenstance and charm, lightning strikes of fortune and hairpin turns of luck; from a standstill, life around Rin Tin Tin always seemed to accelerate out of the depths of disappointment to a new place filled with possibility." (p. 262) Reflect on a few such serendipitous moments. Do you think life tends to look coincidental in hindsight—or was Rin Tin Tin's story really blessed?

6. Although he never made concrete plans to ensure the continuation of Rinty's legacy, Lee insisted that "There will always be a Rin Tin Tin." (p. 3) Was Lee being prophetic or delusional—or both?

7. The original Rin Tin Tin was considered essentially human in popular culture. A review of one of his films, for example, describes his eyes as conveying something "tragic, fierce, sad and…a nobility and degree of loyalty not credible in a person." (p. 71) Why was Rinty so completely and earnestly anthropomorphized by millions of fans? Where do you stand on the scale from "a dog is a dog" to "Rin Tin Tin was essentially human"?

8. Orlean notes that "when Rin Tin Tin first became famous, most dogs in the world would not sit down when asked." (p. 123) With that in mind, how much of the awe and reverence surrounding Rin Tin Tin the first would you attribute to the novelty of trained dogs? How much stands the test of time?

9. At the height of his earning power, Rin Tin Tin was paid eight times as much as his human co-stars. Do you think this was fair? Why or why not?

10. Orlean writes that Rin Tin Tin, alive on the screen, "was everything Americans wanted to think they were—brave, enterprising, bold, and most of all, individual." (pp. 87, 89) How much of Rin Tin Tin's emotional depth do you think came from viewers projecting their own feelings on him?

11. Orlean writes, "As his fame grew, Rin Tin Tin became, in a way, less particular—less specifically this one single dog—and more conceptual, the archetypal dog hero." (p. 97) In what ways did Rin Tin Tin shift from a literal representation to a symbolic figure? What specific moments, if any, highlight this shift?

12. How did the evolution of the film and television industries dictate the various reincarnations of Rin Tin Tin? Why was Rin Tin Tin—the dog and the archetype—so wildly successful, both in films and later in television?

13. By the late 1950s, Rin Tin Tin's aura of invincibility was beginning to wear off. Orlean explains, "Now, instead of being a miracle, he was a model. He was the dog you could aspire to have, and maybe even manage to have, at home." (p. 217) What explains this shift? Is it necessarily a bad one?

14. The criteria used to determine Rin Tin Tin's descendants evolved as the Rin Tin Tin ideal expanded through time and across mediums. As Orlean concludes, "The unbroken strand is not one of genetics but one of belief." (p. 137) Why did this evolution from genetics to belief occur? Do you think this reliance on human decisions, rather than canine pedigrees, undermines the magical reverence of Rin Tin Tin the first?

15. Orlean writes that at one point she felt like "everybody I met or heard about in connection to Rin Tin Tin was a little crazy." (p. 282) Do you agree? Why or why not? Consider the various actions that Lee, Burt, and Daphne took in the name of defending Rin Tin Tin's legacy.

16. Bert takes over as the protagonist of the book after Lee dies. How do you feel about the way the narrative continues after Lee's death?

17. What do you think Lee and Bert would have thought of this book?

18. Orlean wonders, of the many different iterations of Rin Tin Tin, "Could that wide, wide range of manifestations really belong to anyone?" (p. 297) What do you think? If yes, who owns which parts of the legacy—legally, sentimentally, practically? Do you think Orlean herself now owns a part of the legacy, too?

19. Orlean writes that she sometimes "began to wonder if the legacy of RTT was finally contracting." (p. 311) What do you think? How does her book factor in this observation?

20. Orlean delves into many historical events and movements in the book—dogs in the military, obedience training, movie and television history—to name a few. Which facts surprised you the most?

21. Do you believe that there will always be a Rin Tin Tin? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Michael Lewis, 2003
W.W. Norton & Co.
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393324815

Summary
The Oakland Athletics have a secret: a winning baseball team is made, not bought. In major league baseball the biggest wallet is supposed to win: rich teams spend four times as much on talent as poor teams.

But over the past four years, the Oakland Athletics, a major league team with a minor league payroll, have had one of the best records. Last year their superstar, Jason Giambi, went to the superrich Yankees. It hasn't made any difference to Oakland: their fabulous season included an American League record for consecutive victories. Billy Beane, general manager of the Athletics, is putting into practice on the field revolutionary principles garnered from geek statisticians and college professors.

Michael Lewis's brilliant, irreverent reporting takes us from the dugouts and locker rooms—where coaches and players struggle to unlearn most of what they know about pitching and hitting—to the boardrooms, where we meet owners who begin to look like fools at the poker table, spending enormous sums without a clue what they are doing.

Combine money, science, entertainment, and egos, and you have a story that Michael Lewis is magnificently suited to tell. (From the publisher.)

Moneyball became a 2011 film staring Brad Pitt.

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Author Bio
• Birth—October 15, 1960
• Where—New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton; M.B.A., London School of Economics
• Currently—Currently—lives in Berkeley, California


Michael Lewis is an American contemporary non-fiction author and financial journalist. His bestselling books include Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (2014); The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2010); The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (2006); Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003); and Liar's Poker (1989).

Background
Lewis was born in New Orleans to corporate lawyer J. Thomas Lewis and community activist Diana Monroe Lewis. He attended the private, nondenominational, co-educational college preparatory Isidore Newman School in New Orleans. Later, he attended Princeton University where he received a BA in art history in 1982 and was a member of the Ivy Club.

After graduating from Princeton, he went on to work with New York art dealer Daniel Wildenstein. Despite his degree in art history, he nonetheless wanted to break into Wall Street to make money. After leaving Princeton, he tried to find a finance job, only to be roundly rejected by every firm to which he applied. He then enrolled in the London School of Economics to pursue a Master's degree in economics.

While still in England, Lewis was invited to a banquet hosted by the Queen Mother at St. James's Palace. His cousin, Baroness Linda Monroe von Stauffenberg, one of the organizers of the banquet, purposely seated him next to the wife of the London Managing Partner of Salomon Brothers. The hope was that Lewis, just having obtained his master's degree, might impress her enough for her to suggest to her husband that Lewis be given a job with Salomon Bros.—which had previously turned him down. The strategy worked: Lewis was granted an interview and landed a job.

As a result of the job offer, Lewis moved to New York City for Salomon's training program. There, he was appalled at the sheer bravado of most of his fellow trainees and indoctrinated into the money culture of Salomon and Wall Street in general.

After New York, Lewis was shipped to the London office of Salomon Brothers as a bond salesman. Despite his lack of knowledge, he was soon handling millions of dollars in investment accounts. In 1987, he witnessed a near-hostile takeover of Salomon Brothers but survived with his job. However, growing disillusioned with his work, he eventually quit to write Liar's Poker and become a financial journalist.

Writing
Lewis described his experiences at Salomon and the evolution of the mortgage-backed bond in Liar's Poker (1989). In The New New Thing (1999), he investigated the then-booming Silicon Valley and discussed obsession with innovation.

Four years later, Lewis wrote Moneyball (2003), in which he investigated the success of Billy Beane and the Oakland A's. In August 2007, he wrote an article about catastrophe bonds entitled "In Nature's Casino" that appeared in the New York Times Magazine.

The Big Short, about a handful of scrappy investors who foresaw the 2007-08 subprime mortgage debacle, came out in 2010. Flash Boys, detailing high-speed trading in stock and other markets, was published in 2014. Like both The Big Short and Moneyball, the book features an underdog type who is ahead of the pack in understanding his industry.

Lewis has worked for The Spectator, New York Times Magazine, as a columnist for Bloomberg, as a senior editor and campaign correspondent to The New Republic, and a visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote the "Dad Again" column for Slate. Lewis worked for Conde Nast Portfolio but in February 2009 left to join Vanity Fair, where he became a contributing editor.

Film
The film version of Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, was successfully released in 2011. The Big Short, with its all-star cast—Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gossling, and Brad Pitt—came out in 2015 to top reviews.

Personal life
Lewis married Diane de Cordova Lewis, his girlfriend prior to his Salomon days. After several years, he was briefly married to former CNBC correspondent Kate Bohner, before marrying the former MTV reporter Tabitha Soren in 1997. Lewis lives with Tabitha, two daughters, and one son (Quinn, Dixie, and Walker) in Berkeley, California. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/11/2016.)

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Book Reviews
Whether Billy Beane is a prophet or a flash in the pan remains to be seen. In either case, by playing Boswell to Beane's Samuel Johnson, Lewis has given us one of the most enjoyable baseball books in years.
Lawrence S. Ritter - New York Times

The Oakland Athletics have reached the post-season playoffs three years in a row, even though they spend just one dollar for every three that the New York Yankees spend. Their secret, as Lewis's lively account demonstrates, is not on the field but in the front office, in the shape of the general manager, Billy Beane. Unable to afford the star hires of his big-spending rivals, Beane disdains the received wisdom about what makes a player valuable, and has a passion for neglected statistics that reveal how runs are really scored. Beane's ideas are beginning to attract disciples, most notably at the Boston Red Sox, who nearly lured him away from Oakland over the winter. At the last moment, Beane's loyalty got the better of him; besides, moving to a team with a much larger payroll would have diminished the challenge.
The New Yorker

[An] ebullient, invigorating account of how an unconvential general manger named Billy Beane rebuilt the A's, a team with the second lowest payroll in baseball, into a team that won 103 games last year—as many as the filthy-rich Yankees.
Time

One of the best baseball—and management—books out. It chronicles and examines the extraordinary success of the Oakland Athletics' general manager, Billy Beane, who is a colorful mix of genius, discipline and emotion. If you ever come across anyone connected with professional baseball and want to witness an interesting sight, just mention Beane and this book—there will be gurgling, sputtering, angry mutterings.
Forbes


Lewis (Liar's Poker; The New New Thing) examines how in 2002 the Oakland Athletics achieved a spectacular winning record while having the smallest player payroll of any major league baseball team. Given the heavily publicized salaries of players for teams like the Boston Red Sox or New York Yankees, baseball insiders and fans assume that the biggest talents deserve and get the biggest salaries. However, argues Lewis, little-known numbers and statistics matter more. Lewis discusses Bill James and his annual stats newsletter, Baseball Abstract, along with other mathematical analysis of the game. Surprisingly, though, most managers have not paid attention to this research, except for Billy Beane, general manager of the A's and a former player; according to Lewis, "[B]y the beginning of the 2002 season, the Oakland A's, by winning so much with so little, had become something of an embarrassment to Bud Selig and, by extension, Major League Baseball." The team's success is actually a shrewd combination of luck, careful player choices and Beane's first-rate negotiating skills. Beane knows which players are likely to be traded by other teams, and he manages to involve himself even when the trade is unconnected to the A's. " 'Trawling' is what he called this activity," writes Lewis. "His constant chatter was a way of keeping tabs on the body of information critical to his trading success." Lewis chronicles Beane's life, focusing on his uncanny ability to find and sign the right players. His descriptive writing allows Beane and the others in the lively cast of baseball characters to come alive.
Publishers Weekly


A solid piece of iconoclasm: the intriguing tale of Major League baseball's oddfellows—the low-budget but winning Oakland Athletics. Here's the gist, that baseball, from field strategy to player selection, is "better conducted by scientific investigation—hypotheses tested by analysis of historical baseball data—than be reference to the collective wisdom of old baseball men." Not some dry, numbing manipulation of figures, but an inventive examination of statistics, numbers that reveal what the eye refuses to see, thanks to ingrained prejudices. As in most of Lewis's work (The New New Thing, 1999, etc.), a keen intellect is at work, a spry writing style, a facility to communicate the meaning of numbers, an infectious excitement, and a healthy disdain for the aura and power of big bucks. Such is the situation here: The Oakland A's have a budget that would hardly cover the Yankee's chewing tobacco. Their General Manager, Billy Beane, and his band of Harvard-educated assistants, are the heirs of Bill James (of whom there is an excellent portrait here). They creatively use stats to discover unsung talent—gems not so much in the rough as invisible to the overburden of received wisdom—a guy who will get on base despite being shaped like a pear or control the strike zone even if his fastball can't get out of third gear, measuring the measurables to garner fine talent at basement prices. At least for a few seasons, until the talent's worth is common knowledge and off they go to clubs who can pay them millions. And the A's win, and win and win, not yet to a Series victory, but edging closer. The story clicks along with steady momentum, and possesses excellent revelatory powers. There s a method to the madness of the Beane staff, and Lewis incisively explains its inspired, heretical common sense. Has Lewis spilled Beane's beans? Maybe so, but considering the mulish dispositions of baseball's scouts and front offices, they'll miss the boat again.
Kirkus Reviews

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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 Moneyball:

1. Michael Lewis writes of Billy Beane, "it was hard to know which of Billy's qualities was most important to his team's success." What are those qualities? What kind of character is Beane? And what do you think most accounts for his success in remaking the A's?

2. Why does Billy Beane stop playing baseball, which seems to Lews an unimaginable decision. What explanation is offered? Why do you think Beane quit playing?

3. What does Lewis mean by the following passage...and what are baseball's "eternal themes?

The old scouts are like a Greek chorus; it is their job to underscore the eternal themes of baseball. The eternal themes are precisely what Billy Beane wants to exploit for profit—by ignoring them.

4. Follow-up to Question 3: Talk about the way Beane turns received wisdom on its head: his theory of selecting players. In his eyes, what makes a player valuable?

5. How has measuring each player's on-base percentage, for instance, revolutionized baseball strategy, at least in Oakland?

6. Are the geeks going to take over sports (as well as the rest of the world)—is their cutting-edge analytical data the future? Put another way—is Beane a "flash in the pan" as the New York Times reviewer wonders? Have Beane's methods truly redefined the way baseball is...and will be played?

7. What does the book's subtitle mean by "an unfair game"? Why "unfair"?

8. Follow-up to Question 7: Newsweek columnist George Will, an avid baseball fan, once proposed that teams pool financial resources so as to level the playing field between big media market teams and small market teams. How do you feel about his proposal? (Will, by the way, is a conservative in politics, despite his socialistic approach to sports.)

9. Who is Lewis referring to, and what does he mean, when he writes...

Baseball offered a comfortable seat to the polysyllabic wonders who quoted dead authors and blathered on about the poetry of motion. These people dignified the game, like a bow tie?

Lewis goes on to say that those polysyllabic wonders "were harmless. What was threatening was cold, hard intelligence." What was threatening about data?

10. Lewis gives us Beane-in-action as he trades players. What are some of the tactics Beane uses to outfox his opponents?

11. Who are some of the other characters Lewis describes? Bill James? Jeremy Brown? Any other vignettes you found particularly engaging?

12. In his review of Moneyball, Steve Forbes points out that the three players who formed the foundation of the A's success—Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, and Mark Mulder—were "the kind of players any GM would have taken." He also points out that other small-budget teams have had similar successes: Seattle Mariners and the Anaheim Angels (a mid-level budget) for instance. Does Forbes's arguments undermine the premise of Michael Lewis's book...and Beanes' analytical approach?

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

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