A Daughter's Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg
John Guy, 2008
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780618499151


Summary
With the novelistic vividness that made his National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Queen of Scots “a pure pleasure to read” (Washington Post BookWorld), John Guy brings to life Thomas More and his daughter Margaret— his confidante and collaborator who played a critical role in safeguarding his legacy.

Sir Thomas More’s life is well known: his opposition to Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, his arrest for treason, his execution and martyrdom. Yet Margaret has been largely airbrushed out of the story in which she played so important a role. John Guy restores her to her rightful place in this captivating account of their relationship.

Always her father’s favorite child, Margaret was such an accomplished scholar by age eighteen that her work earned praise from Erasmus. She remained devoted to her father after her marriage—and paid the price in estrangement from her husband. When More was thrown into the Tower of London, Margaret collaborated with him on his most famous letters from prison, smuggled them out at great personal risk, even rescued his head after his execution.

John Guy returns to original sources that have been ignored by generations of historians to create a dramatic new portrait of both Thomas More and the daughter whose devotion secured his place in history. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1949
• Where—Warragul, Australia
• Raised—UK
• Education—Cambridge University
• Awards—Whitbread Biography Award
• Currently—teaches at Cambridge

John Guy is a leading British historian and biographer.

Born in Australia in 1949, he moved to Britain with his parents in 1952. He was educated at King Edward VII School in Lytham, and Clare College, Cambridge, where he read history, taking a First. At Cambridge, Guy studied under the Tudor specialist Geoffrey Rudolph Elton. He was awarded a Greene Cup by Clare College and the Yorke Prize by the University of Cambridge.

During his academic career, he has held posts at St Andrews University (where he is Honorary Professor and was sometime Vice-Principal for Research), Bristol University—and in the US: University of California at Berkeley, Rochester University and Johns Hopkins University. Guy currently teaches at Cambridge University, as a fellow of Clare College, where he teaches part-time so he can devote more time to his writing and broadcasting career.

Guy specializes in the history of Tudor England and has written extensively on the subject. His books have been critically acclaimed, My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots was awarded the 2004 Whitbread Biography Award. He is also the author of A Daughter's Love: Thomas More and His Daughter Meg, 2008. Among his current projects is a volume in the New Oxford History of England on the early Tudor period.

His style is one of re-assessment and evaluation and his works often involve him re-telling and re-evaluating history from a novel viewpoint.

He is now married to Julia Fox, a former history teacher, who has written Jane Boleyn: The Infamous Lady Rochford. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
John Guy…has had the good idea of considering More and his remarkable eldest daughter, Margaret, as a pair, and examining the bond between them.... In A Daughter's Love, Guy reminds us that More was…a man who heard hellfire crackling. His absorbing, thoroughly researched book does justice to two exemplary women—and reminds us that history is full of ironies.
Claire Tomalin - New York Times

"You alone have long known the secrets to my heart," affirmed Sir Thomas More to his eldest daughter, Margaret (1505-1544), shortly before his execution for defying Henry VIII. Guy (NBCC award winner for Queen of Scots) describes the Catholic More as a witty and flawed man: a future martyr who condemned others to be burned at the stake, who educated his daughter (Erasmus himself paid tribute to her for correcting his Latin) yet warned that women should not seek recognition for their intellectual work because it resulted in "infamy." Yet Meg's deep intellectual and religious kinship with her father ultimately strengthened More while in prison despite his crushing fears of suffering. Using extensive sources, Guy provides unprecedented insight into this intense relationship. Ironically, since More segregated his private and professional lives, there is less information about his relationship with Margaret during his years of ambition in the Tudor court, but Guy reveals an invaluable perspective on Henry VIII's political and religious machinations. Because of Margaret's dedication to her father and her own intellectual endeavors, More's body of work was saved, preserving his memory, reputation and martyrdom.
Publishers Weekly

Thomas More (1478-1535), Henry VIII's lord chancellor, a humanist scholar, and a canonized Catholic saint, is remembered as a man of unwavering principle for his refusal to recognize his king as the supreme head of the English Church, an act that led to More's execution. Thomas's eldest and favorite daughter, Margaret (he called her Meg) is much less known to us. Guy (history, Clare Coll., Univ. of Cambridge, Queen of Scots) examines their relationship in this dual biography and shows that although omitted from the historical record, Margaret played a crucial role in the formation of her father's legacy by compiling a posthumous collection of his works. A renowned scholar, she was praised by the famous humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam. In his last years, Margaret was Thomas's closest confidante and supporter, and the only one to visit him regularly in the Tower. Guy does an excellent job of providing a balanced view of Thomas More, who is also remembered for his brutal persecution of Protestants—as lord chancellor he had several burned at the stake—and for his destruction of Protestant books. Although there is no shortage of books on him, this one provides a fresh and insightful view. Recommended for academic libraries and large public libraries.
Library Journal

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for A Daughter's Love:

1. Describe Thomas More's attitude toward his daughter and foster-daughter, both named Meg. He educates the two young women and inspires their ambitions, yet, ultimately, how does he view a woman's role in society?

2. How did Erasmus differ from More in his attitudes toward women? What did Erasmus think of More's daughter Margaret?

3. Discuss More's view of the family?

4. How would you describe Thomas More as an individual? What were his character and personality traits and what did he most value in life? To what does Guy attribute his rise under King Henry?

5. Talk about More's daughter Margaret in the same light—what were her traits and what did she value? What affect did her devotion to her father have on her marriage? Any comments there?

6. What caused More's downfall?

6. How does John Guy present King Henry VIII? Does his portrait of the king alter or confirm your own views of Henry's reign and personage? What did you find most surprising in Guy's portrayal of Tudor England and its politics?

7. Discuss More's correspondence in the Tower to his step-daughter. He is clearly making a political statement: how does he defend himself through his writing?

8. What have you learned from reading Guy's work? Did you learn anything new about life in Tudor England...life in the court...the role of women in society...the power of absolute monarchy...the Reformation and its virulent politics of catholicism vs. protestantism?

9. What do you think of More's views of protestants and the ways in which he prosecuted them?

10. What does it say about Margaret who, while accepting her father's views of heretics, took an oath of allegiance to Henry VIII? Why did she follow that course of action?

10. Following the execution, why did Margaret seek her father's severed head? What else did she do following More's death? What did she wish to achieve?

11. Have you read other books, or seen films, about this period in English history? Most especially, have you read the 2009 Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel, published in 2009, one year after Guy's book. How does John Guy's portrait of Thomas More compare (or contrast) with the other works?

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

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Teacher Man 
Frank McCourt, 2005
Simon & Schuster
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743243780


Summary 
Since the publication of Angela's Ashes nearly a decade ago, Frank McCourt has become one of literature's superstars. He is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Booksellers Association ABBY Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. More than four million copies of Angela's Ashes are now in print; its sequel, 'Tis, has sold more than two million in America; and the books have been published in more than twenty countries and languages.

In Teacher Man Frank turns his attention to the subject that he most often talks about in his lectures—teaching: why it's so important, why it's so undervalued. He describes his own coming of age—as a teacher, a storyteller, and, ultimately, a writer. He is alternately humble and mischievous, downtrodden and rebellious. He instinctively identifies with the underdog; his sympathies lie more with students than administrators. It takes him almost fifteen years to find his voice in the classroom, but what's clear in the thrilling pages of Teacher Man is that from the beginning he seizes and holds his students' attention by telling them memorable stories. And then it takes him another fifteen years to find his voice on the page.

With all the wit, charm, irreverence, and poignancy that made Angela's Ashes and 'Tis so universally beloved, Frank McCourt tells his most exhilarating story yet-how he became a writer. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—August 19, 1930
• Death—July 19, 2009
• Where—Brooklyn, NY, USA
• Education—B.A., New York University; M.A. Brooklyn College
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1997; National Book Critics Circle
   Award, 1996
• Currently—New York, NY


Francis "Frank" McCourt was an Irish-American teacher and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, best known as the author of Angela’s Ashes.

Frank McCourt was the eldest son of Malachy McCourt (1901-1986) and Angela Sheehan (1908-1981). Frank McCourt lived in New York with his parents and four younger siblings: Malachy, born in 1931; twins Oliver and Eugene, born in 1932; and a younger sister, Margaret, who died just a few weeks after birth, in 1935. Following this first tragedy, his family moved back to Ireland, where the twin brothers died within a year of the family's arrival and where Frank's youngest brothers, Michael (b. 1936) and Alphie (b. 1940), were born.

Unable to find steady work, in the depths of the depression, McCourts returned to their mother's native Limerick, Ireland in 1934, where they sank deeper into poverty. McCourt's father, from Toome in County Antrim, was often without work, but drank with the little money he did earn. When McCourt was eleven, his father left with other Irishmen to find work in the factories of wartime Coventry in England. His brothers Malachy McCourt and Alphie McCourt are also autobiographical writers. In the mid-1980s Francis and Malachy created the stage play A Couple of Blaguards, a two-man show about their lives and experiences.

He sent little money to the family, leaving Frank's mother to raise four surviving children, often by begging. Frank's public education ended at age 13, when the Congregation of Christian Brothers rejected him, despite a recommendation from his teacher. Frank then held odd jobs and stole bread and milk in an effort to provide for his mother and three surviving brothers, Malachy, Michael (who now lives in San Francisco), and Alphonsus ("Alphie") (who lives in Manhattan); the other three siblings had died in infancy or early childhood in the squalor of the family circumstances. Frank McCourt himself nearly died of typhoid fever when he was ten. In Angela's Ashes, McCourt described an entire block of houses sharing a single outhouse, flooded by constant rain, and infested with rats and vermin.

At age nineteen he left Ireland, returning to the United States where, after a stint working in New York City's Biltmore Hotel, he was drafted during the Korean War and was sent to Germany. Upon his discharge from the US Army, he returned to New York City, where he held a series of jobs.

He graduated in 1956 from New York University with an MA degree in English. He taught English at McKee High School in Staten Island. Frank McCourt taught across a range of five New York schools, including McKee Technical and Vocational High School and Stuyvesant High School. He also taught in the English department of New York City Technical College of the City University of New York. In a 1997 New York Times Op-Ed essay, Mr. McCourt wrote about his experiences teaching immigrant mothers there.

He received the Pulitzer Prize (1997) and National Book Critics Circle Award (1996) for his memoir Angela's Ashes (1996), which details his impoverished childhood in Limerick. He also authored 'Tis (1999), which continues the narrative of his life, picking up from the end of the previous book and focusing on life as a new immigrant in America. Teacher Man (2005) detailed the challenges of being a young, uncertain teacher.

McCourt was a member of the National Arts Club and was a recipient of the Award of Excellence from The International Center in New York. In 2002 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Western Ontario.

It was announced in May 2009 that he had been treated for melanoma and that he was in remission, undergoing home chemotherapy. On 19 July 2009, he died from the cancer, with meningeal complications, at a hospice in Manhattan.

Extras
• McCourt was first married in August 1961 (div. 1979), to Alberta Small, with whom he had a daughter, Margaret. He married again, in August 1984 (div. 1985) to psychotherapist Cheryl Ford. He married his third wife, Ellen Frey McCourt, in August 1994, and they lived in New York City and Roxbury, Connecticut. He is survived by Ellen, his daughter Maggie, a granddaughter Chiara, grandsons Frank and Jack, and his three brothers and their families.

• In his free time, McCourt took up the casual sport of rowing. He once sank his Wintech recreational single scull on the Mohawk River in New York, and had to be rescued by a local rowing team. (Author bio from Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
McCourt has produced a collection of aphorisms that will grace classroom posters till the last red pen runs dry. ("You'd be better off as a cop. At least you'd have a gun or a stick to defend yourself. A teacher has nothing but his mouth.") And at most, he's described the teacher we all wish we'd had.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

This final memoir in the trilogy that started with Angela's Ashes and continued in 'Tis focuses almost exclusively on McCourt's 30-year teaching career in New York City's public high schools, which began at McKee Vocational and Technical in 1958. His first day in class, a fight broke out and a sandwich was hurled in anger. McCourt immediately picked it up and ate it. On the second day of class, McCourt's retort about the Irish and their sheep brought the wrath of the principal down on him. All McCourt wanted to do was teach, which wasn't easy in the jumbled bureaucracy of the New York City school system. Pretty soon he realized the system wasn't run by teachers but by sterile functionaries. "I was uncomfortable with the bureaucrats, the higher-ups, who had escaped classrooms only to turn and bother the occupants of those classrooms, teachers and students. I never wanted to fill out their forms, follow their guidelines, administer their examinations, tolerate their snooping, adjust myself to their programs and courses of study." As McCourt matured in his job, he found ingenious ways to motivate the kids: have them write "excuse notes" from Adam and Eve to God; use parts of a pen to define parts of a sentence; use cookbook recipes to get the students to think creatively. A particularly warming and enlightening lesson concerns a class of black girls at Seward Park High School who felt slighted when they were not invited to see a performance of Hamlet, and how they taught McCourt never to have diminished expectations about any of his students. McCourt throws down the gauntlet on education, asserting that teaching is more than achieving high test scores. It's about educating, about forming intellects, about getting people to think. McCourt's many fans will of course love this book, but it also should be mandatory reading for every teacher in America. And it wouldn't hurt some politicians to read it, too.
Publishers Weekly

Here is the long-anticipated final installment in the trilogy of memoirs by Pulitzer Prize winner McCourt (Angela's Ashes). His previous volumes told the tale of his life through many categories of struggle and triumph, from a poverty-stricken childhood in Limerick to a return to his birthplace, New York City, and his quest there for a better existence. In Teacher Man, however, McCourt focuses upon his particular journey as a teacher in New York City public school classrooms, from his first day in front of a class at a vocational high school in Staten Island-he had not graduated from high school himself but had talked his way into NYU for a college degree covered by the GI Bill—to his accomplishments as a veteran instructor, skilled in unorthodox methods of teaching English and creative writing to exceptional students. McCourt's characteristically vivid storytelling, with his rendering of the distinct and searing voices of particular students, enables his readers to see, hear, and feel this story, a voyage of discovery for students and teacher and, ultimately, all who read this marvelous book. A particular interest in the teaching profession is not required: Teacher Man relates to us all. Every bit as good as Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, this is highly recommended. —Mark Bay, Cumberland Coll. Lib., Williamsburg, KY
Library Journal

The pathos McCourt created in his first two memoirs just may be wearing thin. While some critics thought Teacher Man focused, fresh, and exciting, others saw a self-deprecating author at work, his prose littered with clichés.... Still, the memoir rings true for teachers in its depictions of daily classroom trials, and McCourt’s honesty and storytelling gifts remain unsurpassed.
Bookmarks Magazine

His new book is hardly a teaching manual; however, what it is on one level is a tough but poignant and certainly eloquent defense of the sacrifices and honorableness of those in the teaching profession ("Teaching is the downtown maid of professions. Teachers are told to use the service door or go round the back") and a lesson itself in taking yourself seriously—but not too. —Brad Hooper
Booklist

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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 Teacher Man:

1. Talk about the tension, described by McCourt, between the teachers and school administrators. How do the bureaucrats interfere with, even hinder, McCourt's efforts in the classroom? Does this tension exist in today's classrooms? Are teachers always right, especially in using unorthodox teaching methods? Or should administrators have powers of oversight to ensure students recieve quality or standardized instruction? At what point does interference become inhibiting to classroom creativity?

2. Discuss some of the ways in which McCourt motivated his students? What goes into making an inspired teacher?

3. This book has been seen as a "coming-of-age" story—in that it traces McCourt's development from an inexperienced teacher to a fully competent and confident one, capable of dealing both with recalcitrant students and interfering administrators. Can you trace the stages of McCourt's professional growth? In other words—what does he learn, how and when does he learn it?

4. What lesson did McCourt learn from the incident with the African-American girls at Seward Park High School and the Hamlet theater production?

5. McCourt believes that teachers are not given their proper due in society—they're the "downtown maid of professions." Do you agree with his assessment? Should teachers be valued more and, if so, how do we go about doing so?

6. For McCourt teaching is about forming intellects, not simply "teaching to the test." But in reality, students need to score well on assessment/achievement tests in order to do well in life. Can this ongoing contradiction ever be resolved?

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

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Riding the Bus With My Sister
Rachel Simon, 2002
Penguin Group USA
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780452284555


Summary
Rachel Simon's sister Beth is a spirited woman who lives intensely and often joyfully. Beth, who has an intellectual disability, spends her days riding the buses in her Pennsylvania city. The drivers, a lively group, are her mentors; her fellow passengers are her community.

One day, Beth asked Rachel to accompany her on the buses for an entire year. This wise, funny, deeply affecting book is the chronicle of that remarkable time. Rachel, a writer and college teacher whose hyperbusy life camouflaged her emotional isolation, had much to learn in her sister's extraordinary world. These are life lessons from which every reader can profit: how to live in the moment, how to pay attention to what really matters, how to change, how to love—and how to slow down and enjoy the ride.

Elegantly woven throughout the odyssey are riveting memories of terrifying maternal abandonment, fierce sisterly loyalty, and astonishing forgiveness. Rachel Simon brings to light the almost invisible world of developmental disabilities, finds unlikely heroes in everyday life, and, without sentimentality, portrays Beth as the endearing, feisty, independent person she is.

This heartwarming book about the unbreakable bond between two very different sisters takes the reader on an inspirational journey at once unique and universal. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—Newark, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Bryn Mawr College; M.F.A, Sarah
   Lawrence College
• Awards—several philanthropical (below)
• Currently—lives in Wilmington, Delaware

Rachel Simon is an American author of both fiction and non-fiction. Her six books include the 2011 novel The Story of Beautiful Girl and the 2002 memoir Riding The Bus With My Sister. Her work has been adapted for film, television, radio, and stage.

Simon was born in New Jersey and spent most of her first sixteen years in the New Jersey towns of Newark, Millburn, Irvington, and Succasunna. During that time, she began writing short stories and novels, which she shared widely with friends and teachers but never submitted to editors. When Rachel was eight, her parents split up. She and her three siblings remained with their mother for eight years, and then moved to Easton, Pennsylvania to live with their father, with Rachel also becoming a boarding student at Solebury School in New Hope, PA.

Rachel studied anthropology at Bryn Mawr College and graduated in 1981. She then moved to the Philadelphia area and worked at a variety of jobs, including supervisor of researchers for a television study at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College in 1988.

Just before graduating, she won the Writers At Work short story contest, and when she attended the Writers At Work conference that June in Park City, Utah, she decided to be more courageous than she’d been as a teenager. She brought multiple copies of a collection of short stories, Little Nightmares, Little Dreams, that she’d just completed and handed them to every agent and editor who was interested. An editor from Houghton Mifflin bought the manuscript six weeks later and published it to critical acclaim in 1990.

Career
Until 2011, when The Story of Beautiful Girl was published, Rachel Simon was best known for her memoir, Riding The Bus With My Sister (2002). A national bestseller, it became a seminal book in the disability community and a frequent selection on high school reading lists. It was also adapted for a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie in 2005 and has been rebroadcast frequently on the Hallmark Channel. The film stars Rosie O' Donnell as Rachel’s sister Beth and Andie McDowell as Rachel, and was directed by Anjelica Huston.

The success of the book and adaptation of Riding The Bus With my Sister led to Rachel becoming a widely sought-after speaker around the country. The book has also received numerous awards, including a Secretary Tommy G. Thompson Recognition Award for Contributions to the Field of Disability from the US Department of Health and Human Services; a TASH Image Award for positive portrayals of people with disabilities; and a Media Access Award from California Governor's Committee for Employment of People with Disabilities.

Other adaptations of Rachel Simon’s work include the title story from Little Nightmares, Little Dreams (1990), which has been adapted for both the National Public Radio program Selected Shorts, and the Lifetime program “The Hidden Room.” Another story from that collection, “Paint,” was adapted for the stage by the Arden Theatre Company (Philadelphia).

Rachel’s other titles are the novel The Magic Touch (Viking, 1994), the memoir The House on Teacher's Lane (2010); and an inspirational book for writers, The Writer's Survival Guide (1997). She has received creative writing fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.

Personal life
She is married to Hal Dean, an architect whom she met shortly after she graduated from college. Their highly unusual, nineteen-year-long path to marriage, is recounted in The House On Teacher’s Lane. They now live in Wilmington, Delaware. Rachel visits frequently with her sister Beth, whose love of bus riding is chronicled in Riding The Bus With My Sister, and who does still ride the buses. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
This perceptive, uplifting chronicle shows how much Simon, a creative writing professor at Bryn Mawr College, had to learn from her mentally retarded sister, Beth, about life, love and happiness. Beth lives independently and is in a long-term romantic relationship, but perhaps the most surprising thing about her, certainly to her (mostly) supportive family, is how she spends her days riding buses. Six days a week (the buses don't run on Sundays in her unnamed Pennsylvania city), all day, she cruises around, chatting up her favorite drivers, dispensing advice and holding her ground against those who find her a nuisance. Rachel joined Beth on her rides for a year, a few days every two weeks, in an attempt to mend their distanced relationship and gain some insight into Beth's daily life. She wound up learning a great deal about herself and how narrowly she'd been seeing the world. Beth's community within the transit system is a much stronger network than the one Rachel has in her hectic world, and some of the portraits of drivers and the other people in Beth's life are unforgettable. Rachel juxtaposes this with the story of their childhood, including the dissolution of their parents' marriage and the devastating abandonment by their mother, the effect of which is tied poignantly to the sisters' present relationship. Although she is honest about the frustrations of relating to her stubborn sister, Rachel comes to a new appreciation of her, and it is a pleasure for readers to share in that discovery.
Publishers Weekly


(Adult/High School) When she received an invitation to her mentally retarded sister's annual Plan of Care review, Simon realized that this was Beth's way of attempting to bring her back into her life. Beth challenged the author to give a year of her life to riding "her" buses with her. Even though Simon didn't know where it would take her, she accepted. During that time, she came to see her sister as a person in her own right with strong feelings about how she wanted to live her life, despite what others thought. Not everyone on the buses, drivers or passengers, liked or even tolerated Beth, and it shamed the author to realize that she sometimes felt the same way about her sibling. As the year passed, Simon came to the realization that "No one can be a good sister all the time. I can only try my best. Just because I am not a saint does not mean that I am a demon." The time together became a year of personal discovery, of acceptance, and of renewed sibling love and closeness. Clear writing and repeated conversations allow readers to hear the voices of both sisters. There is much to mull over, to enjoy, and to savor in this book.-Peggy Bercher, Fairfax County Public Library, VA.
School Library Journal


Family relationships and forgiveness converge in this true-life chronicle by novelist Simon (The Magic Touch, 1994) of a year that gave her better understanding of her mentally retarded sister. Beth Simon has ridden buses for years. Not the way most people do, to get from point A to point B, but "a dozen a day, some for five minutes, others for hours." When hyper-busy, thirtysomething Rachel comes for a visit, Beth asks for a holiday gift: for one year, several times a month, her sister will ride the buses with her. Reluctantly, Rachel agrees. Over the course of the year, she slowly comes to appreciate Beth's ingenuity and stops viewing her solely as a burden. The author gracefully avoids sounding preachy or didactic; she reveals herself to be at times supremely frustrated with her sister's behavior. ("On seventeen buses, over twelve hours, Beth's talk brims with spite about the brutes she encounters. . . . Her babble is unceasing, booming, and unvarying from bus to bus.") The real heroes here are the drivers, who include Beth in family outings, visit her in the hospital, encourage her to try new things, provide her with stability and human connections absent in her highly dysfunctional family. Rachel begins to see that her own life consists of nothing but work; she shut out friends and lovers long ago. This realization, along with Beth's helpful matchmaking ("I wAnt to havE a driver as a BrothEr in law," she writes), leads to a significant relationship. Rachel's reflections on her own life are interspersed with memories of a far-from-ideal childhood: undiagnosed depression exacerbated by Beth's condition toppled their mother, who took up with a violent ex-con after a nasty divorce. The three disparate narratives come together quite well and leave the reader cheering for a reconciliation between the sisters and the rest of the family.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
1. The memoir opens with Beth's annual Plan of Care review, and Beth's request of Rachel to accompany her on bus rides for an entire year. Discuss Rachel and Beth's relationship at the outset of the book: What kind of dynamic do they have? What kind of a role does Rachel play in Beth's life at this point (and vice versa)? What obstacles to their relationship are evident from the first? What do you think was the motivation for Beth's request? Did their tension reflect tensions that you have felt with family members? To whom did you relate to more, Rachel or Beth?

2. Why does Beth love riding the buses? What does she gain from this ad hoc community? Does our understanding of her devotion to the buses deepen over the course of the book, and if so, how does Simon make that happen? Do we come to certain realizations before the character of Rachel does? Examine your own reactions as you read, and when and why they changed. Have you known other people who are devoted to an activity that you do not understand? How did your understanding of Beth's bus riding affect your thoughts about those other people?

3. How do the italicized sections of the book, which relay Rachel and Beth's family history, inform the present-day chapters? Describe the tone of these sections, and the way in which Simon manages to convey their tragic and convoluted past. How does she deal with emotionally charged scenes from the past, and how do they inform our understanding of not only present-day situations and events, but also present-day relationships?

4. Discuss our perspective of Rachel's mother throughout the book: from her panic and despair over the baby Beth's mental disability, to her growing alienation from her children and husband, to her emotional collapse and marriage to "the bad man." How do we view her reunion with her children when they are grown? How does Simon deal with the way each child shifts from anger to forgiveness? At what points do you sympathize with her mother and at what points do you judge her? Discuss the extent to which this is due to the way Simon writes about her mother. How does the story of Rachel's mother shed light on other mothers you might have known who have reached the breaking point with their families?

5. Consider and discuss Rachel and Beth's father: his departure from the family soon after their move to Pennsylvania; his return when their mother kicks Laura, Rachel and Max out of the house; and his tumultuous relationship with Beth, both before and after his remarriage. To what degree do we see him as a sympathetic character? Compare his ability to come to terms with Beth's disability when she was a child with his gradually becoming worn down by their relationship in her adolescence and twenties. Compare and contrast his actions with the actions of their mother. Are there ways in which either is more or less adept than the other? If you know other parents of children with special needs, how do their experiences compare with the experiences of Beth's parents?

6. Examine the relationship between all of the children growing up: Laura, Rachel, Beth and Max. Compare their relationships with each other as children to their relationships with each other as adults. What has changed, and what has remained the same? How supportive of one another were they as children, compared to their lives as adults? How did their dynamic shift over time? What do you think were the direct causes? Would things have been different if the family had stayed together?

7. Discuss the way that Rachel, Laura, and Max were affected by being the siblings of a person with special needs. How much of a role do you think Beth's disability played in their growth as individuals? How did their parents' feelings toward Beth affect the ability of the other siblings to accept her? What are some of the emotions that Rachel reveals she felt about her sister, starting with her being a little child, then a teenager and young adult, and finally a woman entering middle-age? What is the impact of her parents' own difficulties on her sense of her own responsibility toward Beth? Examine Simon's approach to the times when she was not feeling positive about her sister. Discuss the device of the "dark voice." Have you known other siblings of people with disabilities? How do their emotions and concerns mirror those of their parents, and how are they distinct or unique?

8. Discuss Jacob, the Christian bus driver who would have Beth "do unto others as you would have done to you." Consider how we see his role in Beth's life, which goes beyond bus driver to become a true friend (one who takes her to the beach with his family, and cares for her before and after her operation). What kind of a person is Jacob? What makes him likeable, and what keeps him from being an overly sentimental person, or "character," in the book? Compare his role in Beth's life with the friendship he begins to form in Rachel's life. He is clearly on a spiritual journey. Are other characters in the book also on a quest to live a more spiritual life? What is the role of spirituality in the book?

9. Compare and contrast the different bus drivers with one another: Claude, Jacob, Happy Timmy, Rodolpho, Rick, Henry, Estella, Crazy Bailey, Jack, Bert, Cliff and Melanie. Who are your favorites? Which personalities are more vivid than others? What does each contribute to Beth's daily rides? Describe Beth's "falling out" with men such as Claude, Henry, and Cliff. Do we see these men as sympathetic characters or slightly villainous for their lack of patience? Discuss how your perceptions of bus drivers were affected by the characters you "met" over the year. What do their experiences teach us?

10. Now consider Rachel's relationships with the bus drivers. How does her need for their insight and kindness compare to Beth's? How do her relationships with them differ from Beth's, or do they at all? What do you think the bus drivers gain from their friendships with Beth, and subsequently, Rachel (for example, Jacob, Rick or Rodolpho)? How do we see their relationships progress from the opening of the book to its end?

11. Discuss Beth's romantic relationship with Jesse: How would you describe their dynamic? How does their relationship compare with what you know of Sam and Rachel's relationship? Is mental disability portrayed as being a significant factor in Beth and Jesse's compatibility? What did you think of the way Rachel's family handled Beth's burgeoning sexuality, and Beth's annual reminder to Rachel: "Its TEn years since I cant Have a baBy?" Did learning about Beth and Jesse's relationship affect the way you view adults with disabilities? How?

12. What kind of a man is Jesse? What kind of a role does he play in Rachel's life, let alone Beth's? What kind of "character" does he play in the story that unfolds throughout the memoir? Discuss his and Beth's relationship in light of their racial differences, and how they handle their commitment to one another in the face of social opposition. What is the effect on the reader of Jesse riding his bicycle on the periphery of scenes that haven't been about him? What do you think of Jesse's definition of love?

13. Why does Rachel struggle with self-determination? How did it develop in the community at large, and why was Rachel unaware of it until she rode with Beth? What is the role that self-determination plays in Beth's present-day life? Does Rachel's acceptance of it lead her to deal with her sister differently? Compare and contrast the way that Rachel dealt with Beth's "knock-out shot" with the way that Olivia would have dealt with it. What are your feelings about self-determination?

14. Discuss the symbol of the moon. When does it first appear as a symbol, and how does it develop over the course of the book? Examine the symbol of the mountain, which also appears throughout the book. Discuss the use of certain objects or natural phenomena within specific chapters: Beth's bus pass in "The Journey," the airplane in "The Dreamer," the snow in the sterilization section of "Lunch with Jesse," Jack's book in "The Loner," the ocean in "Be Not Afraid," the blue bus in "The Girlfriend," the outdoor candles in "Swans and Witches," and the rainstorm in "Beyond The Limits of the Sky."

15. Is the book enhanced by the inclusion of Beth's letters? How and why? What about Jack's recipes? The references to music?

16. Discuss the various explorations of language that occur throughout the book. What do you think about People First Language? The epithet that Rachel hears her classmates use in school? Did you find yourself questioning your own way of speaking, in the past or present? What is Beth's definition of "cool"? Why does Simon elaborate on Beth's three different meanings for "I don't know"? How does all of this discussion of language expand the larger themes of Beth's struggle for independence and Rachel's struggle to accept Beth?

17. Discuss the ramifications of Rachel's outburst near the culmination of the memoir, where she blurts out "I hate you," in response to Beth's surly, inhospitable demeanor. What does this heat-of-the-moment admission do to both sisters? What kind of change does it invoke in Beth's behavior, and what does it reveal to Rachel about her own feelings? How does it alter their relationship? Why did Simon include it?

18. Compare the annual "Plan of Care" review at the end of the book with the one at the beginning. What kind of progress or change has been made in the way Beth lives her life? What relationships have altered between the people in Beth's apartment? Discuss Rachel's revelations at this meeting and her reaction to Beth's curt "The year's over."

19. Describe the impact of the epilogue to the book, "A Year and a Half Later." What does it demonstrate about Rachel's transformation over the year? What progress has Beth made? How satisfying is this ending, for both the reader and Rachel? What kind of message does Simon leave us with, and how effective is her story as a medium for that message? How did you feel when you finished the final paragraph?
(Questions from the author's website.)

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The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands
Aidan Hartley, 2003
Penguin Group USA
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594480119


Summary
Hartley, a frontline reporter who covered the atrocities of 1990s Africa, embarks on a journey to unlock the mysteries and secrets of his own family's 150-year-colonial legacy in Africa, and delivers a beautiful, sometimes harrowing memoir of intrepid young men cut down in their prime, of forbidden love and its fatal consequences, and of family and history, and the collision of cultures that defined them both. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—1965
• Where—Nairobi, Kenya
• Education—Oxford University
• Currently—lives in Kenya

Aidan Hartley is a Kenyan journalist. He was born in Nairobi in 1965. From age 7-12 he attended Ravenswood School, a boarding school near Tiverton in Devon, England. He graduated from Oxford and the School of Oriental and African Studies, (SOAS) with a degree in Area Studies.

As a foreign correspondent for Reuters news agency, Hartley covered Africa in the 1990s—wars in Somalia, famine in Ethiopia and genocide in Rwanda. He is the author of The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands, which was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He is currently a columnist for the Spectator, and a correspondent for Unreported World. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
The former Reuters correspondent has written the most startling memoir of Africa for a generation. It is a complicated book. A white Kenyan, born of a line of colonial adventurers...he saw [in journalism] an opportunity to re-engage with the continent of his birth, yet his experience of Africa's postcolonial dismantling seems only to confirm he doesn't belong.... As a quest for belonging, his years on the road seem more likely to have been a failure. Yet his recollection of them is gripping, and often intensely moving
Guardian (UK)

A lyrical, passionate memoir of this dark continent. On the surface, Hartley's book professes to explore why his father and so many other Englishmen of his generation turned time and time again to Africa. Its real aim is far more ambitious: to explore the motives of many generations of white people—good and bad, but mostly confused—who have washed up on Africa's wilder shores of love. His judgement of the foreign politicians who have involved themselves in the continent is tough without being hysterical. And he has a sure pen for character! he writes best about the dichotemies within himself—his ache for Africa, his rage at its horrors, his longing for peace.
Economist

Toward the end of this mesmerizing chronicle, Hartley writes simply of Rwanda, "Like everything in Africa, the truth [is] somewhere in between." Hartley appreciates this complexity, mining the accounts that constitute his book not for the palliative but for the redemptive. Born in 1965 in Kenya into a long lineage of African colonialists, Hartley feels, like his father whose story he also traces, a magnetic, almost inexplicable pull to remain in Africa. Hartley's father imports modernity to the continent (promoting irrigation systems and sophisticated husbandry); later, Hartley himself "exports" Africa as a foreign correspondent for Reuters. Both men struggle to find moral imperatives as "foreigners" native to a continent still emerging from colonialism. Hartley's father concludes, "We should never have come here," and Hartley himself appears understandably beleaguered by the horrors he witnesses (and which he describes impressively) covering Ethiopia, Somalia and Rwanda. Emotionally shattered by the genocide in the latter ("Rwanda sits like a tumour leaking poison into the back of my head"), the journalist returns to his family home in Kenya, where he happens upon the diary of Peter Davey, his father's best friend, in the chest of the book's title. Hartley travels to the Arabian Peninsula to trace Davey's mysterious death in 1947, a story he weaves into the rest of his narrative. The account of Davey, while the least engaging portion of the book, provides Hartley with a perspective for grappling with the legacy that haunts him. This book is a sweeping, poetic homage to Africa, a continent made vivid by Hartley's capable, stunning prose.
Publishers Weekly


Only a person who truly understands Africa, having been born, raised and nurtured by the continent, could be as honest a reporter of its glories and horrors as Aidan Hartley. He worked as a reporter during the '90s and was witness to some of the terrible massacres, famines and suffering; but as an African native himself, though one with Western eyes, he reveals an Africa rarely seen by Americans. Contrasting with his own adventures are those of his father's friend, Peter Davey, who experienced different trials in East Africa a generation before Hartley, an honest and vivid writer. Much of what he writes is not pretty, but everything is insightful. (Ages 15 to adult.)
KLIATT

Hartley, a journalist and British subject...offers a startlingly refreshing perspective on the political, social, and cultural impact of British colonialism in Africa and Arabia.... He criticizes the policies of the UN and the U.S. in many of the world's trouble spots, putting a contemporary face on historic colonialism with an accuracy and veracity seldom seen in Western critiques. —Vernon Ford.
Booklist

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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 for The Zanzibar Chest:

1. Is Aidan Hartley Kenyan or British? What does he consider himself?

2. Describe the era into which Hartley was born—the changes in Africa as it moved from colonialism to post-colonialism? How does Hartley see the impact of European colonialism on Africa as its nations attempt to become stable, productive sovereign states?

3. What do you make of Hartley's father? What does Hartley make of him?

4. The Zanzibar Chest is in many ways a quest story. Why does Hartley want to connect with the past generations of his family? What does he hope for? Does he ever "find" what he's looking for?

5. As a follow-up to Question 3: Hartley says, "What I was looking for was a war that I could call my own—a complete experience that would define me as the son of my father and involve me as an insider." What does he mean?

6. How did the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States affect Africa? What happened to the continent once the cold war "cooled off"?

7. What does being a journalist mean to Hartley? What did he hope to accomplish as a journalist—in Somalia and elsewhere?

8. Describe the conditions in Somalia when Hartley arrived: the "Dionysian orgy of destruction." Hartley says it was a privilege to have witnessed "a people who tumbled into the abyss with such style." What does he mean?

9. To what does Hartley attribute the Somalian U.S. military disaster? Does his depiction of events square with accounts you might have read, or seen, before, say, in Black Hawk Down?

10. Hartley is open and frank about his drug and alcohol abuse. Were you sympathetic, or not, to his reasons?

11. Why is Hartley drawn to violence? How does it affect his relationships to both men and women?

12. Talk about the horrors of Rwanda. How did it affect Hartley? How does his account of the bloodshed and tragedy compare with other accounts you might have read of or seen?

13. Hartley writes about Rwanda, "Like everything else in Africa, the truth lies somewhere in between." Can you explain what he means?

14. How does Hartley portray some of his fellow correspondents?

15. How does Peter Davey's story compare to Hartley's own story? What does Hartley see in Davey's story that resonates with his own life?

16. How did Davey's death represent the loss of innocence of Hartley's father?

17. Talk about the ways in which Hartley criticizes both the United States and the United Nations? How does he feel they have failed Africa? Are his criticisms fair?

18. What did you find most disturbing, or chilling, as you read this book? What was most difficult to read about?

19. What solutions exist for Africa to participate fully in the 21st century? What does Africa need to do...and what is required of the international community?

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

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