Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War
Virginia Nicholson, 2008
Oxford University Press
328 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780195378221
Summary
Almost three-quarters of a million British soldiers lost their lives during the First World War, and many more were incapacitated by their wounds, leaving behind a generation of women who, raised to see marriage as "the crown and joy of woman's life," suddenly discovered that they were left without an escort to life's great feast.
Drawing upon a wealth of moving memoirs, Singled Out tells the inspiring stories of these women: the student weeping for a lost world as the Armistice bells pealed, the socialite who dedicated her life to resurrecting the ancient past after her soldier love was killed, the Bradford mill girl whose campaign to better the lot of the "War spinsters" was to make her a public figure—and many others who, deprived of their traditional roles, reinvented themselves into something better.
Tracing their fates, Nicholson shows that these women did indeed harbor secret sadness, and many of them yearned for the comforts forever denied them—physical intimacy, the closeness of a loving relationship, and children. Some just endured, but others challenged the conventions, fought the system, and found fulfillment outside of marriage. From the mill-girl turned activist to the debutante turned archeologist, from the first woman stockbroker to the "business girls" and the Miss Jean Brodies, this book memorializes a generation of young women who were forced, by four of the bloodiest years in human history, to stop depending on men for their income, their identity, and their future happiness.
Indeed, Singled Out pays homage to this remarkable generation of women who, changed by war, in turn would change society. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1955
• Where—Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, UK
• Education—Cambridge University
• Currently—lives in East Sussex, England
Virginia Nicholson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1955. Her father was the art historian and writer Quentin Bell, acclaimed for his biography of his aunt Virginia Woolf. Her mother Anne Olivier Bell edited the five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s Diaries.
Virginia grew up in the suburbs of Leeds, but the family moved to Sussex when she was in her teens. She was educated at Lewes Priory School (Comprehensive). After a gap year working in Paris she went on to study English Literature at King’s College Cambridge.
In 1978 Virginia spent a year living in Italy (Venice), where she taught English and learnt Italian. Returning to the UK in 1979 she re-visited her northern childhood while working for Yorkshire Television as a researcher for children’s programmes. In 1983 she joined the Documentary department of BBC Television.
In 1988 Virginia married screenwriter and author William Nicholson. Following the birth of their son in 1989, Virginia left the BBC and shortly afterwards the Nicholsons moved to East Sussex. Two daughters were born in 1991 and 1993.
Living in Sussex, Virginia became increasingly involved with the Trust that administered Charleston, home of her grandmother the painter Vanessa Bell, in due course becoming its Deputy Chairman. Her first book (co-authored with her father) Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden was published in 1997. In 1999/2000 she made a ten-city tour of the USA to promote the book and Charleston itself.
In November 2002 Viking published Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 to critical acclaim. Its publication in the USA in February 2004 was followed by a sell-out lecture and publicity tour round five American cities.
Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War, was published in August 2007. In this latest book Virginia Nicholson has set out to tell the stories of a remarkable generation of women forced by a historic tragedy to reinvent their lives. Singled Out received a spate of enthusiastic reviews which applauded it as a pioneering and humane work of social history. The work on this book was combined with her continuing commitment to the Charleston Trust. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
The women Nicholson celebrates changed our culture. They turned the Victorian spinster into the modern career woman. But, she believes, they were also different from modern women. Like anyone who has lived through a war, they had lower expectations of happiness and a stoicism and dignity that were all their own. Her book applauds the celebrities but does not forget the obscure.... Powerful.... Inspiring.
John Carey - Sunday Times (London)
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 Singled Out:
1. Talk about the moment when the senior mistress at Bournemouth High School for Girls announced the "terrible fact" that "only one out of 10 of you girls can ever hope to marry." Having been raised in the Edwardian era, when marriage was all women were prepared for...and expected to attain...how must those young women at Bournemouth have felt? How would that pronouncement have made you feel?
2. Consider the public's treatment of the so-called "War Spinsters." Why would the Daily Mail have labeled them "a disaster to the human race"? What made their own country-men and -women turn against them...even to the point of suggesting that they be exported to Canada? If you had been one of those women, would you have remained in the UK...or headed out to Canada or Australia?
3. What about those who deigned to give the women advice for landing a husband? Funny...condescending...insulting...?
4. Talk about the "survivor's guilt" that some women experienced—Gertrude Caton-Thompson, among others. How did they cope?
5. What difference did socioeconomic class make in how the women redefined (or did not) their lives as single women?
6. Discuss the many paths the women chose to support themselves and find fulfillment. Which of the women's stories do you find most impressive—in terms of obstacles overcome or achievements? Are there any for whom you feel particular sympathy, or whose stories make you most angry, or sad?
7. How did the women find sexual fulfillment—or did they? What about Marie Stopes' responses to letters she received from women? What about Radclyffe Hall and her championship of lesbianism?
8. What was the cultural and historical impact of the "war spinsters"? The thrust of Nicholson's book is to show not just how the women coped, even thrived, but to hold them up as forerunners of the modern career woman. Do you agree? If they were pioneers, why did it take another 50 years (at least) for feminism—career and educational opportunities, equal pay, and widespread public acceptance—to take hold? Were they real pioneers...or simply anomalies of their time?
9. Singled Out is a scholarly work. Do you find it emotionally compelling or overly academic? Also, Nicholson packs a lot of women's stories into her book. Did you find it difficult to remember them and keep them straight?
10. How lonely were these women? Does a lifetime of engaging work and service to others compensate for a lack of husband and children?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page
The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam
G. Willow Wilson, 2010
Grove Atlantic
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802145338
Summary
The extraordinary story of an all-American girl’s conversion to Islam and her ensuing romance with a young Egyptian man, The Butterfly Mosque is a stunning articulation of a Westerner embracing the Muslim world.
When G. Willow Wilson—already an accomplished writer on modern religion and the Middle East at just twenty-seven—leaves her atheist parents in Denver to study at Boston University, she enrolls in an Islamic Studies course that leads to her shocking conversion to Islam and sends her on a fated journey across continents and into an uncertain future.
She settles in Cairo where she teaches English and submerges herself in a culture based on her adopted religion. And then she meets Omar, a passionate young man with a mild resentment of the Western influences in his homeland. They fall in love, entering into a daring relationship that calls into question the very nature of family, belief, and tradition.
Torn between the secular West and Muslim East, Willow records her intensely personal struggle to forge a “third culture” that might accommodate her own values without compromising the friends and family on both sides of the divide. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 31, 1982
• Where—Morris County, New Jersey
• Raised—Boulder, Colorado, USA
• Education—B.A., Boston University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington, and Cairo, Egypt
Gwendolyn Willow Wilson, known professionally as G. Willow Wilson, is an American comics writer, memoirist, novelist, essayist, and journalist. She is best known for relaunching the Ms. Marvel title for Marvel Comics (which stars a 16-year-old Muslim superhero named Kamala Khan). But she has also received praise for her memoir and novels.
Early life
Wilson was born in Morris County, New Jersey, where she spent the first ten years of her life. She first encountered comics in the fifth grade while reading an anti-smoking pamphlet featuring the X-Men. Fascinated by the characters, she began watching the cartoon X-Men every Saturday.
Two years later she and her family moved to Boulder, Colorado where Wilson continued to pursue her interest in comics and other forms of popular culture such as tabletop role-playing games.
When she turned 27, Wilson decided to leave Colorado and to pursue a degree in history at Boston University. During her sophomore year, while experiencing adrenal problems, she decided to study world religions, including Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Having grown up in an unreligious household, Wilson drawn to Judaism's belief in an "indivisible God who is one and whole." Yet, although Judaism "was a near perfect fit," she explained in a 2017 interview, "it was created for a single tribe of people."
Wislon then turned her focus to Islam, which she saw as "a sort of a deal between you and God." The 9/11 terrorist attack set back her religious studies—fearing she had misjudged the religion—but later resumed her studies.[2] After graduation, on the way to Cairo where she had taken a job to teach English, Wilson experienced a converstion to Islam: "I made peace with God. I called him Allah."
Living in Egypt, and struggling to negotiate a new culture, Wilson met Omar, a young physics teacher, who offered to serve as a cultural guide, and within a matter of months, the two became engaged. Later, the couple moved to the United States where Wilson returned to her writing career, and Omar worked as a legal advocate for refugees.
Jouralism
During her time in Cairo, Wilson began contributing articles to the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times Magazine and National Post. She was also a regular contributor to the now-defunct Egyptian opposition weekly Cairo Magazine. Wilson was the first Western journalist to be granted a private interview with Ali Gomaa after his promotion to the position of Grand Mufti of Egypt.
Wilson's experiences in Egypt are the subject of her 2010 memoir, The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam, which was named a Seattle Times Best Book the same year.
In 2007, Wilson wrote her first graphic novel, Cairo, with art by M.K. Perker; it was named one of the best graphic novels of 2007 by Publishers Weekly, The Edmonton Journal/CanWest News, and Comics Worth Reading. In 2008 the paperback edition was named one of Best Graphic Novels for High School Students in 2008 by School Library Journal, and one of 2009's Top Ten Graphic Novels for Teens by the American Library Association.
Comics
A year later, in 2008, Wilson launched her first ongoing comic series, "Air." Reunited with her Cairo graphic artist M.K. Perker, "Air" received the Eisner Award for Best New Series of 2009, while NPR named it one of the top comics of 2009.
Wilson also wrote "Superman" fill-in issues #704 and 706 of Superman, the five-issue mini-series "Vixen: Return of the Lion." and "The Outsiders." She then revived "Mystic,"a four-issue miniseries for Marvel Comics (with art by David Lopez)—although a CrossGen revival, Willow's version of "Mystic" bears little resemblance to its previous incarnation.
In 2014, Marvel debuted a new "Ms. Marvel" series written by Wilson. The book stars Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenager living in Jersey City, New Jersey, who takes up the mantle—now that the previous Ms. Marvel, Carol Danvers, has taken the name Captain Marvel.
Although worried about criticism, Wilson did not believe Kamala should wear a hijab because the majority of teenage Muslim Americans do not cover their heads. Yet despite their initial concern, Kamala was received positively—some seeing her as a symbol for equality and religious diversity.
In 2018, Wilson began writing "Wonder Woman" from DC Comics. The character will battle Ares in an arc entitled "The Just War."
Novels
Wilson also turned to novels: 2013 saw the release of her debut, Alif the Unseen. The book won the 2013 World Fantasy Award for best novel.
Wilson's next fantasy novel came out in 2019 —The Bird King, the story of a concubine in the royal court of Granada, the last emirate of Muslim Spain, as the new Christian monarchy begins its rule. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/18/2019 .)
Book Reviews
[S]atisfying, lyrical memoir…. Arguably, Wilson's decision to take up the headscarf and champion the segregated, protected status of Arab women can be viewed as odd; however, her work proves a tremendously heartfelt, healing cross-cultural fusion.
Publishers Weekly
Moments of clarity and humor thread through this uplifting story of one young American seeking integrity in a fractured world. A first-rate memoir and love story that is a delight to read. —Lisa Klopfer, Eastern Michigan Univ. Lib., Ypsilanti
Library Journal
Debut memoir chronicles Wilson's conversion to Islam…. Enlightening cultural description and analysis blends somewhat awkwardly with self-regard.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for THE BUTTERFLY MOSQUE … then take off on your own:
1. What first drew G. Willow Wilson to Islam? What explanation does she offer for her conversion, and does it satisfy you? In what way did her religious, or non-religious, background influence her decision to convert?
2. Comment on this passage from the book: "Religion was taboo in my family, and Islam was taboo in my society—these pressures are not easily shaken off, and I sometimes felt as guilty as if I had committed a crime." What precisely makes her feel guilty?
3. What are the challenges she has faced, particularly after 9/11, in accepting Islam as her faith?
4. What distinctions does Wilson make between fundamental Islam and "true" Islam? She says that Islam is an "antiauthoritarian sex-positive faith." Did you disagree at the outset of the book… and did you change your mind by the book's end? Or not.
5. Discuss Wilson's struggles to reconcile Egyptian culture, once she has moved to Egypt, with her own values and expectations.
6. How easy would you find it to integrate yourself into another culture, especially one so very different from Western culture as Egypt's?
7. Do you agree—or disagree—with this statement by Wilson:
Cultural habits are by and large irrational, emerge irrationally, and are practiced irrationally. They are independent of the intellect, and trying to fit them into a logical pattern is fruitless; they can be respected or discarded, but not debated.… Culture belongs to the imagination; to judge it rationally is to misunderstand its function.
8. Talk about her condemnation of American and Canadian behavior she witnesses in the marketplace. What most disturbs her about their behavior? Do you think she over-generalizes… or makes an astute observation? As a Westerner, how do her criticisms make you feel?
9. Discuss Wilson's anxieties on becoming engaged to Omar, especially when she writes that she "was terrified. There are few things more overwhelming than love in hostile territory.”
10. What do make of the fact that Wilson dons a headscarf. What are her reasons? What does the headscarf mean to her?
11. How does Wilson defend Islam's patriarchal attitude toward women? What does she find comforting?
12. Follow-up to Question 11: Do you think the following point is valid? Wilson says at one point that a woman in the Middle East …
is far less free than a woman in the West, but far more appreciated. When people wonder why Arab women defend their culture, they focus on the way women who don’t follow the rules are punished, and fail to consider the way women who do follow the rule are appreciated.
13. What new insights into the Middle East, Muslims, and Islamic life does Wilson present? Has reading this book altered your views of Islam? In what way does the book challenge the stereotypes portrayed by the media?
14. Do you feel this is a book that those in government—or anyone involved with foreign relations—should read?
15. What is the significance of the book's title?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page (summary)
Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions
Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father's Story of Love and Madness
Michael Greenberg, 2008
Knopf Doubleday
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307473547
In Brief
A Time Best Book of the Year
Hurry Down Sunshine is an extraordinary family story and a memoir of exceptional power. In it, Michael Greenberg recounts in vivid detail the remarkable summer when, at the age of fifteen, his daughter was struck mad. It begins with Sally's sudden visionary crack-up on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continues, among other places, in the out-of-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city's most sweltering months. It is a tale of a family broken open, then painstakingly, movingly stitched together again.
Among Greenberg's unforgettable cast of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic Classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary aspirations. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine is essential reading in the literature of affliction alongside classics such as Girl, Interrupted and An Unquiet Mind. (From the publisher.)
top of page
About the Author
A native New Yorker, Michael Greenberg is a columnist for the Times Literary Supplement (London), where his wide-ranging essays have been appearing since 2003. His fiction, criticism, and travel pieces have been published in such varied places as The Oprah Magazine, Bomb, Village Voice, and New York Review of Books. He lives in New York with his wife and son. (From the publisher.)
top of page
Critics Say . . .
What sets Hurry Down Sunshine apart from the great horde of mediocre memoirs, with their sitcom emotions and too neatly resolved fights and reconciliations, is Greenberg's frank pessimism, dark humor and fundamental incapacity to make sense of his daughter's ordeal, let alone to derive an uplifting moral from it…beyond family drama, Hurry Down Sunshine is a very New York book, filled with the kind of characters increasingly rare in a city where real kooks can no longer afford to live.
Rachel Donadio - New York Times
Greenberg renders the details of his daughter's breakdown with lyrical precision. He ably describes the heightened sense of being that is often a component of madness—and the way it beckons to outsiders.
Nell Casey - Washington Post
Lucid, realistic, compassionate, and illuminating... In its detail, depth, richness and sheer intelligence, Hurry Down Sunshine will be recognized as a classic of its kind.
Oliver Sacks - The New York Review of Books
There is a dancing, dazzling siren seductress at the heart of this book and...[it is] madness itself.... The startling associative imagery that gives Greenberg's writing its power is like a domesticated version of the madness that nearly carried away his daughter's life.
Time
[A]bout tenacity and tenderness, feeling helpless but being present, about cracking up, then finding the wherewithal to glue the jagged pieces of your mind back together again. But mostly it's about love.
Oprah Winfrey - O, The Oprah Magazine
This is a harrowing, brutally honest, and extremely well written account of the mental breakdown of a loved one. The author's descriptions of his daughter's behavior offer a much more meaningful lesson for readers about what constitutes mania than could ever be gleaned by reading a textbook. Anyone who has been through a similar experience, or simply wants to read afirst-person account of mental illness and its effects, will find this book a good read. —William Miles, MD, Rush University Medical Center
Doody Review Services
(Audio version.) Columnist and author Greenberg's heartbreaking and inspiring memoir details his daughter's downfall into insanity one hot summer in New York City. Greenberg writes with a raw passion and intensity, capturing the essence of every detail and event as if they were occurring in real time as he types. His reading is a heartfelt and honest attempt to relate the experiences with as much restrained emotion as possible, offering it as part headline news story, part editorial. With perfect pitch, tone and pacing, Greenberg is a talented narrator, who will surely capture and hold listeners' attention.
Publishers Weekly
Times Literary Supplement (UK) columnist Greenberg's elegiac, beautifully crafted memoir chronicles the summer his teenaged daughter, Sally, lost her mind to madness. In it, Greenberg observes the experience and its effect on everyone involved with meticulous care. At times acutely painful, at times painfully funny, his story alternates between the progression of Sally's bewildering, frightening decline and Greenberg's own at times comically absurd experience as he simultaneously deals with a dependent brother suffering from his own demons; a difficult, obtuse wife; and a New Age ex-wife who, after each visit, offers cosmic explanations for her daughter's condition before retreating to her home in the country. Characters from the psychiatric ward where Sally spends nearly a month are often indistinguishable in their strangeness from the doctors themselves, giving the atmosphere of the hospital a hauntingly surrealistic air. The whole effect is one of a wrathful storm passing through Greenberg's life, turning every relationship upside down as it shattered any semblance of inner peace in both father and daughter and destroyed their ability to communicate at the time. Sure to become a new classic in the literature of mental illness; highly recommended for all public libraries
Library Journal
Greenberg chronicles his 15-year-old daughter Sally's manic breakdown in vivid yet surprisingly detached prose. In July 1996, the author awoke to find a furiously annotated copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets and loose pages of Sally's poetry strewn about their Greenwich Village apartment. That night, the police escorted his daughter home for "acting crazy" in the streets. Greenberg and second wife Pat pieced the story together from Sally's breathless, incoherent account. She had been struck by a vision: We are all born geniuses, but society robs us of the gift. When the police pulled up, she was on a mission to communicate this to anyone who would listen-even people in the speeding cars she was convinced she could thwart with her hand. Michael and Pat took the "feral, glitter-eyed" Sally to the nearest emergency room, where a psychiatrist gave a preliminary diagnosis of bipolar 1 and admitted her to the psych ward. In his text, her father deals with the shock of Sally's condition by portraying it in the context of literary madness. Greenberg quotes Lowell's descriptions of his own manic episodes, cites Spinoza and alludes to Plato, Byron, Hemingway and Woolf. This might seem aggrandizing, but the author is trying to demonstrate that Sally's insights are sometimes justified, while at the same time avoiding James Joyce's fatal error of enabling his daughter's madness by participating in her visions. Sally spent 24 days in the ward, flanked by her quirky family and a tableau of other colorful characters, before she returned home, highly medicated and bravely determined to believe her therapist's assertion that psychosis is not an identity. Greenberg's talent for description occasionally runs away from him in a narrative that could be slightly tighter, but his erudite portrait of bipolar disease as experienced from both inside and out is dazzling. Sally's own precocious descriptions of her mania serve as no small aid. Bears enlightening and articulate witness to the sheer force of an oft-misunderstood disease.
Kirkus Reviews
top of page
Book Club Discussion Questions
1. Why does the author doubt Sally's psychosis? How does each family member deal with the crisis differently, and what do their reactions tell you about them?
2. The author refers to the illness of James Joyce's daughter and how Joyce copes with Lucia's madness. Discuss the differences and similarities between Greenberg's and Joyce's reactions to their daughters' illnesses.
3. Consider the author's grief over Sally's illness in relation to his mother's guilt over her troubled son, Steven. In what ways are parental guilt intensified in times of crisis?
4. Before her psychotic episode, Sally refuses to believe Pat's devotion to her is sincere. How does their relationship change as Sally battles to overcome the psychosis? How does Pat's revelation about her close friend after the fight with Michael shed light on her devotion to Sally as a mother?
5. How does the Hasidic family respond to Noah's psychosis? How was it different from Sally's family? Were there any similarities? Why do you think Noah and Sally were drawn to each other?
6. Throughout the story, the author interjects scenes that reflect current events happening in the world. How does Greenberg use these events to give the reader a better understanding of what he is going through?
7. Greenberg's mother arrives at the hospital dressed in a new outfit each day. Similarly, when Greenberg returns to his studio to write for the first time since Sally has come home, he removes all references to chaos and crisis from his book. Greenberg writes, “the harder the blow, the more polish is required”. Do you think a mutual need to restore order is an effort to fix Sally or simply a defense mechanism?
8. When Greenberg takes a dose of Sally's medication to try and see the world as she does, the reader also gets a glimpse of that world. What is your reaction? Does it change Greenberg's perception of her illness? How does Greenberg's medicated state influence his meeting with Jean-Paul?
9. How is the narrator's relationship with his brother, Steven, both a responsibility he enjoys as well as a source of burden for him? Cite examples.
10. Greenberg describes infant Sally, as distinctly fiery: “a thrasher, a gripper, a grasper, a yanker of fingers and ears”. In what ways does Sally's madness inform the way the author reflects on her infancy and childhood?
11. Compare Sally's use of the name “Father” to Greenberg's own description of himself as her “touchstone of sanity”. How does this change after his fight with Pat?
12. In the midst of a crisis, families either pull together or are torn apart. How did Sally's illness change the dynamics between family members?
13. How is psychosis understood and misunderstood in society, and how has this changed over time? If Steven were raised in Sally's generation, do you think he would have turned out differently?
14. Do you feel that Greenberg and Pat and Robin did a good job in caring for Sally during her time of crisis? Would you have responded differently?
15. Would you describe the relationship between Sally's biological mother Robin and her stepmother Pat as tense? Harmonious? What do you think of the position of a stepmother in such a situation?
16. Do you think Dr. Lensing was an effective therapist to Sally?
17. James Joyce called psychosis “the most elusive disease known to man and unknown to medicine.” Do you think mental illness is a medical disease or an extreme aspect of who we are as human beings?
18. Throughout Hurry Down Sunshine we see glimpses of Sally's unusual verbal brilliance. Do you think these flashes of brilliance are symptoms of Sally's psychosis or an expression of who she really is? Do you think it is possible to separate Sally's behavior while psychotic from her personality and way of being when she is not psychotic or do they seem to be aspects of a single person?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page
Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions
I Am Hutterite: The Fascinating True Story of a Young Woman's Journey to Reclaim her Heritige
Mary-Anne Kirby, 2010
Thomas Nelson, Inc.
244 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780849948107
In Brief
A fascinating journey into the heart and culture of a reclusive religious community.
I Am Hutterite takes readers into the hidden heart of the little-known Hutterite colony where author Mary-Ann Kirkby spent her childhood. When she was ten, her parents packed up their seven children and a handful of possessions and left the colony to start a new life. Overnight they were thrust into a world they didn't understand, a world that did not understand them.
With great humor, Kirkby describes how she adapted to popular culture, and with raw honesty she describes her family's deep sense of loss for their community. More than a history lesson, I Am Hutterite is a powerful tale of retracing steps and understanding how our beginnings often define us. (From the publisher.)
top of page
About the Author
• Birth—ca. 1959
• Where—Manitoba, Canada
• Awards—Sask Book Awards (Nonfiction); 2 Can-Pro Awards
(tv journalism)
• Currently—lives in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada
Mary-Ann Kirkby spent the first ten years of her life in a Hutterite Colony in Manitoba, Canada. In 1969 her parents did the unthinkable. They uprooted their 7 children and left the only life they had ever known, thrusting them into a society they did not understand and which did not understand them.
Mary-Ann's transition into popular culture is both heartbreaking and hilarious. An award-winning television journalist, Mary-Ann learned the fine art of storytelling at the knees of her gifted Hutterite teachers.
Mary-Ann began her career as a news anchor and reporter in Dauphin, Manitoba. Later, she became senior reporter at CTV in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. From 1993-1996, she worked in Ottawa as a freelance journalist and served as Media Relations Consultant for the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations.
She lives in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. (From the publisher.)
Critics Say . . .
This sweeping prairie memoir, self-published in Canada in 2007, rapidly garnered both commercial and literary applause. Recounting the author's journey from a Hutterite girlhood to an adolescence of desperate striving to catch up with fashions of the time, the book manages to pack information about Hutterite life into a coming-of-age narrative without slowing it down. Kirkby's family moved away from their Manitoba colony when she was 10 years old, after what she calls a “near idyllic childhood” in the cradle of a communal society. Once a reader commits the many characters and their relationships to each other to memory, the book becomes as riveting and well-paced as a novel. Kirkby captures the complex cadences of Hutterite life—the bawdy humor and knack for storytelling that stands beside austere ritual, the poverty of personal possession and freedom that exists beside the security of community life—with pitch-perfect writing. She also manages to avoid either vilifying or romanticizing a culture that has been subjected to both. Readers will find themselves hoping that Kirkby follows the popular trend in memoir writing: producing a sequel.
Publishers Weekly
The Hutterite faith was founded in the 16th century by Jacob Hutter, an Austrian hatmaker who believed in shared property and people working together for the common good. Their practices of adult baptism, staunch pacifism, and community life led to persecution that drove them from Europe to North America. Those prejudices continue to this day: Kirkby details the misunderstandings faced when her family attempted to integrate into Canadian society. She tells the story of several generations of both sides of her family, their immigration to Canada, their becoming part of the Hutterite community, and what drove her parents to leave to join the "English" world of outside society. Kirkby describes her journey from burying her past to fit in as a child with her peers to finding acceptance of her heritage as an adult while writing this book. Interlaced throughout are descriptions of Hutterite cuisine and fashion, and explanations of religious practices and politics within these groups. Verdict: Kirkby's prose weaves a poignant tapestry of life in a Hutterite colony, both the joys and the hardships, a story that is at times heartbreaking. But readers won't be able to put the book down as they're drawn into her world. Those who grew up in "English" society will get to enjoy not only a well-researched family history but also a wonderfully detailed cultural and religious history of these societies as shown through the eyes of the author. Highly recommended. —Crystal Goldman, San José State Univ. Lib., CA
Library Journal
top of page
Book Club 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 I Am Hutterite:
1. Begin with a discussion of the history of the Hutterites: their martyred founder, Jacob Hutter, and his beliefs; their fleeing persecution and eventual diaspora in the U.S. and Canada. How different are the Hutterites' beliefs from mainstream Christianity...and what are the similarities? How similar are the Hutterites to Amish and Mennonite communities?
2. What was it like for Mary-Ann, as a child, to live in the Hutterite colony? In what ways did her childhood differ from your own? Do you feel Mary-Ann idealized her childhood years in the colony by glossing over troubles...or did she paint a fairly realistic picture?
3. What inferences can you draw from Mary-Ann's description of life in a tightly controlled, highly structured religious community? What are the benefits, what are the drawbacks?
4. Talk about the disagreement between Mary-Ann's father and uncle that drove the family from the colony. How important was the role of forgiveness to her parents and how did they find a way to forgive?
5. Discuss the hardships the family—parents and children— struggled to adapt to the "English" world. What struck you most about their trials—what was most difficult for them...what did you find particularly heart-rending...surprising...or even funny?
6. Talk about the prejudices the family faced in the English world?
7. Does the Hutterite way of life—its simplicity and interdepen-dence—cause you to reflect upon our own culture with its consumerism and emphasis on the individual? Does our modern way of life come across as better or worse? Are there things we could learn from the Hutterites?
8. How does Mary-Ann eventually carve out her own identity? What does she learn from her past? Why does she choose to embrace her heritage rather than ignore—or, worse, reject—it? In what ways does she believe her past has enriched her life?
9. Would you like to see a sequel to this memoir?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assurd an Allied Victory
Ben Macintyre, 2010
Crown Publishing
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307453280
Summary
In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated— Operation Mincemeat. The purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed, and the Allies ultimately chose.
Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu could not have been more different. Cholmondeley was a dreamer seeking adventure. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister. But together they were the perfect team and created an ingenious plan: Get a corpse, equip it with secret (but false and misleading) papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would, they hoped, take the bait. The idea was approved by British intelligence officials, including Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond). Winston Churchill believed it might ring true to the Axis and help bring victory to the Allies.
Filled with spies, double agents, rogues, fearless heroes, and one very important corpse, the story of Operation Mincemeat reads like an international thriller.
Unveiling never-before-released material, Ben Macintyre brings the reader right into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles and spies, and the German Abwehr agents who suffered the “twin frailties of wishfulness and yesmanship.” He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley and Montagu and their near-impossible feats into a riveting adventure that not only saved thousands of lives but paved the way for a pivotal battle in Sicily and, ultimately, Allied success in the war. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1963
• Where—England, UK
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK
Ben Macintyre is a British author, historian, and columnist writing for The Times newspaper (London). His columns range from current affairs to historical controversies.
Books
MacIntyre is the author of a book on the gentleman criminal Adam Worth, The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief (1992). He also wrote The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan (2004). In 2008 MacIntyre released an informative illustrated account of Ian Fleming, creator of the fictional spy James Bond, to accompany the For Your Eyes Only exhibition at London's Imperial War Museum, which was part of the Fleming Centenary celebrations.
Three of his most recent books center on World War II and have become international bestsellers. In 2007, he published Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy. The story centers on Chapman, a real-life double agent during the Second World War. Operation Mincemeat, issued in 2010, recounts the Allied deception their impending invasion of Italy. Double Cross, released in 2012, is about the Allies' D-Day spy network.
All three books have been made into BBC documentaries—Operation Mincemeat (in 2010), Double Agent: The Eddie Chapman Story (in 2011), and Double Cross (in 2012). His most recent book, published in 2014, is A Spy Among Friends: Phil Kilby and the Great Betrayal. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Operation Mincemeat is utterly, to employ a dead word, thrilling. But to call it thus is to miss the point slightly, in terms of admiring it properly.... What makes Operation Mincemeat so winning, in addition to Mr. Macintyre's meticulous research and the layers of his historical understanding, is his elegant, jaunty and very British high style. The major players in this spy story seem to have emerged from an Evelyn Waugh novel that's been tweaked by P. G. Wodehouse. This isn't to say that Mr. Macintyre has embellished his teeming cast of eccentrics. It's to say that he fully appreciates them, and his fondness for them is contagious.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Ben Macintyre...is a first-rate journalist who seems to have talked to everyone connected with the operation (or their descendants) and worked his way through recently declassified documents in the National Archives. But—true to the spirit of the operation—his most important source turned out to be the deceased Montagu himself, or more specifically, a dusty trunk he left behind with bundles of files from MI5, MI6 and Naval Intelligence; letters, memos, photographs; original, uncensored drafts; and so on, an intelligence bonanza more genuine than the one foisted on the Germans. Macintyre has made the most of it. Here, finally, is the complete story with its full cast of characters (not a dull one among them), pure catnip to fans of World War II thrillers and a lot of fun for everyone else.
Joseph Kanon - Washington Post
A nearly flawless true-life picaresque …zeroes in on one of the few times in war history when excessive literary imagination, instead of hobbling a clandestine enterprise, worked beyond its authors’ wildest dream….Almost inedibly rich with literary truffles—doppelgangers, obsession, transgression, self-fashioning.... It is hard to oversate how cinematic this story really was.
New Republic
London Times writer-at-large Macintyre (Agent Zigzag) offers a solid and entertaining updating of WWII's best-known human intelligence operation. In 1943, British intelligence conceived a spectacular con trick to draw German attention away from the Allies' obvious next objective, Sicily. The bait was a briefcase full of carefully forged documents attached to the wrist of Major William Martin, Royal Marines—a fictitious identity given to a body floated ashore in neutral Spain. Making the deception plausible was the task given to two highly unconventional officers: Lt. Comdr. Ewen Montagu and Squadron Leader Charles Cholmondeley. Macintyre recounts their adventures and misadventures with panache. The body was that of a derelict. Its costuming included the underwear of a deceased Oxford don. An attractive secretary provided the photo of an imaginary fiancée. The carefully constructed documents setting up the bogus operation against Greece and Sardinia convinced even Hitler himself. The Sicily landings were achieved as almost a complete surprise. And the man who never was entered the history and folklore of WWII.
Publishers Weekly
Macintyre (assoc. editor, Times of London; Agent Zigzag) takes readers on an exciting World War II adventure as he details one of the most famous military intelligence operations of the 20th century. In July 1943 the semidecomposed body of a man who seemed to be a British soldier was discovered floating off of southwestern Spain. When the body was examined by Spanish officials (Spain was neutral but sympathetic to Germany), they identified him as Royal Marine officer William Martin and passed on the information discovered in his belongings. It was all a deception that included love letters from a fiancée, her photograph, stubs of London theater tickets, bank notices, and so on. More crucially, Major Martin was carrying sealed letters to senior military figures in North Africa. When these documents reached Berlin they induced a response from the German military that greatly enabled the Allied invasion of Sicily. Mcintyre turns this successful Allied endeavor into a rousing story, recounting also the life of the Welshman who died down on his luck and became the body of "William Martin." VERDICT This retelling of a well-known part of World War II espionage history will appeal to military history buffs, especially those new to this particular episode, and to readers of adventure fiction, who will find it hard to put down. —Sheri Beth Scovil, Bartow Cty. Lib. Syst., Cartersville, GA
Library Journal
The exciting story of the ingenious British ruse that distracted the Nazis from the Allied Sicilian invasion. Although the invasion finally took place July 10, 1943, allowing the Allied forces an initial foothold into the German "Fortress Europe," the trick that kept the Nazis from fortifying Sicily took place months before. The dead body of a British major, "William Martin," had been hauled in on April 30 by fishermen off the port of Huelva, Spain, a pro-German outpost, his briefcase full of top-secret letters by British officers detailing the invasions of Greece and Sardinia and sure to land in the eager hands of the Germans. In fact, the body was a plant, a suicide victim actually named Glyndwr Michael. He had been plucked from a morgue in London, kept on ice for a few months, dressed in a well-used British Navy uniform, stocked with identification, fake official letters and correspondence from his father and fiancee "Pam," and slipped into the Spanish waters by a British submarine. London Times writer at large Macintyre (Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal, 2007, etc.) skillfully unravels this crazy, brilliant plan by degrees. The "corkscrew minds" at British Navy Intelligence, headed by John Godfrey and his assistant, Ian Fleming (yes, of James Bond fame), put forth the germ of the idea, which was then developed to its fantastic implementation by RAF flight officer Charles Cholmondeley and Lt. Commander Ewen Montagu, first under the code name "Trojan Horse," then the more prosaic "Operation Mincemeat." The author's chronicle of how the last two intelligence officers lovingly created an entire personality for "Major Martin" makes for priceless reading. Astoundingly, as Winston Churchill noted exultantly, the Nazis swallowed the bait "rod, line and sinker."Macintyre spins a terrific yarn, full of details gleaned from painstaking detective work.
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 Operation Mincemeat:
1. What could explain the fact that German intelligence, hardly an un-intelligent group, fell for a feint like Operation Mincemeat...to the point where Hitler deployed troops to Greece rather than Sicily?
2. In an Amazon interview, Ben Macintyre says that what most fascinated him in researching the book was "the elaborate, many-layered deception...as if [the organizers of the operation] were writing a novel...." In what way was the creation of Mincemeat like a writing novel?
3. What do you think of Charles Cholmondeley? Would you consider him the unsung hero behind Operation Mincemeat? Or would you reserve the "hero" title for Ewan Montague? Or is there someone else?
4. Do you think Ewan (Bill) and Jean Leslie (Pam) actually had an actual affair? There are hints that, indeed, they might have, but only hints. What do you think?
5. The characters who worked on the the plot were a strange eccentric group of people, many with blistering egos. What do you think made them cohere as a group and pull off, successfully, this multi-faceted escapade?
6. Do you find it ironic that poor Glyndwr Michael, who led an insignificant life, became far more valuable as a dead men? What might this suggest about the pathos, even tragedy, of real life...or the old saw—"life is stranger than fiction"?
7. You might get a hold of the 1956 film, The Man Who Never Was, and play a few clips. The film is based on the events of Operation Mincemeat. Compare book and film.
8. Discuss the brilliant planning—and fine-tuning— that went into the success of the operation. What impressed you most...or surprised you most?
9. Talk about the ways in which luck also played a part in the operation's success.
10. Could someone create a story of your own (real) life and pass it on as credible to enemy intelligence? What would you want them to include in the bio—what kind of, say, "wallet litter"? Even better, divide up into groups and devise your own fictional character, someone who might be carrying information valuable to the enemy. How would you create such a life—and make it seem real? Is it sorta...kinda...like writing a novel?
11. What does Macintyre mean when he says that the overall scheme was a "double bluff"?
12. What does this book reveal about the spy-world during war—the role that "intelligence" played back then...and might still play today? How would you prioritize what is more important in determining the outcome of war? Would you say...intellligence, leadership, or fighting?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page (summary)