American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
Monica Hesse, 2017
Liveright House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781631490514
Summary
A breathtaking feat of reportage, American Fire combines procedural with love story, redefining American tragedy for our time.
The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn’t stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion.
Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was desolate―there were hundreds of abandoned buildings. And by the dozen they were burning.
The culprit, and the path that led to these crimes, is a story of twenty-first century America. Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse first drove down to the reeling county to cover a hearing for Charlie Smith, a struggling mechanic who upon his capture had promptly pleaded guilty to sixty-seven counts of arson.
But as Charlie’s confession unspooled, it got deeper and weirder. He wasn’t lighting fires alone; his crimes were galvanized by a surprising love story. Over a year of investigating, Hesse uncovered the motives of Charlie and his accomplice, girlfriend Tonya Bundick, a woman of steel-like strength and an inscrutable past. Theirs was a love built on impossibly tight budgets and simple pleasures. They were each other’s inspiration and escape…until they weren’t.
Though it’s hard to believe today, one hundred years ago Accomack was the richest rural county in the nation. Slowly it’s been drained of its industry―agriculture―as well as its wealth and population. In an already remote region, limited employment options offer little in the way of opportunity.
A mesmerizing and crucial panorama with nationwide implications, American Fire asks what happens when a community gets left behind. Hesse brings to life the Eastern Shore and its inhabitants, battling a punishing economy and increasingly terrified by a string of fires they could not explain. The result evokes the soul of rural America―a land half gutted before the fires even began (8 pages of illustrations). (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1981-82
• Raised—Normal, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.,A., Bryn Mawr College
• Awards—Edgar Award
• Currently—lives in Maryland
Monica Hesse is the national bestselling author of the true crime love story American Fire and the Edgar Award-winning young adult historical mystery novel Girl in the Blue Coat, which has been translated into a dozen languages and was shortlisted for the American Booksellers Association's Indies Choice Award.
Hesse is a feature writer for the Washington Post, where she has covered royal weddings, dog shows, political campaigns, Academy Awards ceremonies, White House state dinners, and some events that felt like a mixture of all of the above. She has talked about these stories, and other things, on NBC, MSNBC, CNN, CSPAN, FOX and NPR.
She has been a winner of the Society for Feature Journalism's Narrative Storytelling award, and a finalist for a Livingston Award and a James Beard Award. Monica lives in Maryland. with her husband and a brainiac dog (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[Hesse] has talent to burn.… American Fire is an excellent summer vacation companion. It has all the elements of a lively crime procedural: courtroom drama, forensic trivia, toothsome gossip, vexed sex. It also happens to be a very good portrait of a region in economic decline.… As with S-Town and the best episodes of This American Life, Hesse has managed to wring tension and excitement out of a story with a known ending. One of the most elusive skills in narrative nonfiction, and Hesse has it, is knowing the proper order to arrange your facts. She also superbly conveys the folkways of the Eastern Shore and the disruptive, confusing effect the fires had on its community.… Hesse is a lovely stylist. She has a flair for creating a sense of place. Her character sketches are models of compression, easily collapsible into lockets.
Jennifer Senior - New York Times
The propulsive pleasure of American Fire rests in author Monica Hesse's decision not to force a thing. The book has the brisk diligence of big-city journalism (Hesse writes for the Washington Post) and the languid chattiness of the small town where she lived while researching it.… Hesse gathers the pieces but leaves connections to the reader. When they snap together, the feeling is a bit like gazing upon a blaze you've just lit.
Karl Vick - Time
In American Fire, journalist Monica Hesse faces…quandaries of interpretation, faulty memory and lies, and deals eloquently with the he-said-she-said elements of her story.… What emerges is a vivid depiction of a community that is struggling economically in present-day America, but is rich in its human connections.
Ilana Masad - NPR.org
One of the year's best and most unusual true-crime books.
Randy Dotinga - Christian Science Monitor
Accomack County, Virginia, is utterly unique, but not completely atypical of America’s forgotten places: bypassed by progress on the wrong side of Chesapeake Bay, dotted with houses rotting into literal tinder. Hesse, a Washington Post reporter, finds true-crime gold here.… Hesse forgoes paint-by-numbers suspense, revealing the culprits early on before backing up into their hard-knock love story, their eventual arrest, and perceptive snapshots of an unusually vivid corner of drug-racked Red America.
Boris Katchka - Vulture
American Fire is not only a twisted love story but also a portrait of Accomack County, Virginia, a once-wealthy farming community crumbling from economic hardship.
Nora Horvath - Real Simple
Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse has created a near-masterpiece in American Fire. This true crime book—about a series of arsons on the rural Virginia coast and the Bonnie-and-Clyde duo who committed them—is not just about the crimes themselves, but about the community those crimes affected. It's well-written and eye-opening, and I couldn't put it down. For fans of Hillbilly Elegy and In Cold Blood.
Annie Butterworth Jones - Tallahassee Democrat
Hesse offers sociological insight into a small town…. There is something metaphorical, she notes, about a rural county suffering through a recession being literally burned to the ground. The metaphor becomes belabored…but otherwise this is a page-turning story of love gone off the rails.
Publishers Weekly
Hesse enters the compelling narrative with restraint in probing, essayistic analyses. She tells the story of the fires and of the Eastern Shore and the people she got to know there with an earned familiarity that, at the same time, speaks of the unknowability of a vast, rapidly changing nation.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [C]aptivating.… [T]he surprises arrive in the manner of the arrest, the motives for the fires, and the outcomes of the multiple trials. Throughout, the author offers a nuanced portrait of a way of life…. A true-crime saga that works in every respect.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our talking points to help start a discussion for American Fire … then take off on your own:
1. Talk about the setting of American Fire, the isolated county on the far side of the Chesapeake Bay. How would you describe its economy, its residents, and history? In what way are rural areas like Accomack County tailor-made for arsonists?
2. At one point, the author tells us that the arson aroused suspicions throughout the community, that "people turned on friends and neighbors." Yet the arson also seems to have brought people together. How would you say the arson affected the community?
3. Consider, also, the human effort involved in fighting and investigating the fires: Hesse tells us that over 41,000 manpower hours were involved. What impressed you most about the authorities' responses?
4. It took the police months to solve the crime? How did they finally catch the culprits?
5. A group of profilers descended on Accomack County. Talk about their insights and whether or not they were helpful in solving the crime?
6. Hesse takes a chapter to compare Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick to Bonnie and Clyde Barrow. What are the similarities? Aside from the Barrows, how would you describe Charlie and Tony?
7. Follow-up to Question 6: What motivated the couple to turn to arson, especially on such a grand scale? What do you think of the two? Hesse spends a good deal of time detailing the specifics of their lives: does she build a sympathetic portrait? Do they spur your sympathy?
8. Hesse calls arson "a weird crime." What makes it so strange?
9. Fire itself interests the author—the way it's set, the way it moves, the way it's fought. Why do humans find fire so fascinating? What is the power it holds over us?
10. Even though we know the outcome in catching the arsonists, American Fire still thrums with suspense. How does Monica Hess do that?
11. What is the significance of the book's title, American Fire? Why "American"?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State
Lawrence Wright, 2018
Knopf Doubleday
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525520108
Summary
With humor and the biting insight of a native, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower explores the history, culture, and politics of Texas, while holding the stereotypes up for rigorous scrutiny.
God Save Texas is a journey through the most controversial state in America.
Texas is a red state in the heart of Trumpland that hasn't elected a Democrat to a statewide office in more than twenty years; but it is also a state in which minorities already form a majority (including the largest number of Muslims).
The cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king but Texas now leads California in technology exports. The Texas economic model of low taxes and minimal regulation has produced extraordinary growth but also striking income disparities.
Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. And Wright's profound portrait of the state not only reflects our country back as it is, but as it was and as it might be. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 2, 1947
• Raised—Abilene and Dallas, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., Tulane University; M.A., American University in Cairo
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize-Nonfiction
• Currently—lives in Austin, Texas
Lawrence Wright is an American author, screenwriter, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. He is best known as the author of the 2006 nonfiction book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.
Background and education
Wright graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, Texas, in 1965 and was inducted into the school's Hall of Fame in 2009. He is a graduate of Tulane University and earned an M.A. in Applied Linguistics at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, where he also taught for two years.
In 1980 Wright began working for the magazine Texas Monthly and contributed to Rolling Stone magazine. He joined the staff of The New Yorker in late 1992.
The Looming Tower
Wright is the author of six books but is best known for his 2006 The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. A quick bestseller, the book was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and he is considered by some journalists as one of the most knowledgeable background sources for Al Qaeda and 9/11.
The book's title is from the Quran 4:78: "Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower," a phrase Osama bin Laden quoted three times in a videotaped speech seen as directed to the 9/11 hijackers.
A 2010 HBO documentary, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, is based on Wright's experience in the Mid-East while researching The Looming Tower. The film looks at al-Qaeda, Islamic radicalism, hostility to America and the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. It combines Wright's first-person narrative with documentary footage and photographs.
In 2018, Hulu premiered The Looming Tower in a 10-part TV mini-series. Wright co-wrote the series with Alex Gibney. While the book goes back to the founding of Al-Qaeda, which grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1950s, the TV series begins with the bombing of the U.S. Embassies in east Africa in 1998.
Going Clear
Stemming from an earlier New Yorker article, Wright published a full-length book on Scientology—Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief in 2013. During his research for the book, Wright spoke to 200 current and former Scientologists; a number of those conversations are included in the book, along with an examination of the organization's history and leadership.
In an interview with the New York Times, Wright revealed he had received "innumerable" letters threatening legal action from lawyers and celebrities representing Scientology. The Church published an official statement in its newsroom and blog rebutting Wright's claims.
In 2015 the book was adapted as a documentary film. Wright worked with Alex Gibney, with whom he would collaborate three years later on The Looming Tower 2018 drama series.
Other
Wright plays the keyboard in the Austin, Texas, blues collective WhoDo.
He is also a playwright, having worked on a script over several years about the making of the 1963 film Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Rex Harrison. The play, titled Cleo, was scheduled to open in Houston in October, 2017. The opening was delayed however because of the catastrophic flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey. It finally opened six months later in April, 2018. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/10/2018.)
Book Reviews
The book rambles far and wide, and it's a testament to Wright's formidable storytelling skills that a reader will encounter plenty of information without ever feeling lost.… His tone is gentle, occasionally chiding…. Certain readers might crave more righteous anger from someone writing about Texas, especially now, when there's little room for agreement and plenty at stake. But Wright's project is perspective, not conquest.
Jennifer Szalai - New York Times
Lawrence Wright's superb new book …is his most personal work yet, an elegant mixture of autobiography and long-form journalism, remarkably free of elitist bias on the one hand, and pithy guidebook pronouncements on the other. For those seeking the joys of line-dancing or the 10 best rib joints in Waco, this is not your book (cover story).
David Oshinsky - New York Times Book Review
Compelling…timely…. There is a sleeping giant in Texas, and Wright captures the frustration and the hope that reverberate across the state each time it stirs.
Cecile Richards - Washington Post
Terrific…all-encompassing…[fueled] with literary tension.… Wright’s words could speak for both Texas and America.
Chris Vognar - Dallas Morning News
Wright tames his sprawling subject matter with concise sentences and laser-precise word choice.…Gives readers a front-row seat to the battle within the Texas GOP between business-oriented conservatives, led by House Speaker Joe Straus, and the social-conservative wing headed up by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
Chris Gray - Houston Chronicle
[A] compelling and insightful potpourri of history, encounters, and observations.… Wright has managed to sew together a patchwork quilt of a narrative into a substantive State of the state.
Bob Ruggiero - Houston Press
(Starred review) Wright… takes an unflinching look at Texas… in all its grandeur and contradictions.… Wright’s large-scale portrait, which reveals how Texas is only growing in influence, is comprehensive, insightful, and compulsively entertaining.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) [A]n impressive ode to the Lone Star State.… [A] masterful service of revealing both the warts and beauty of Texas' big state of mind. —Jacob Sherman, John Peace Lib., Univ. of Texas at San Antonio
Library Journal
(Starred review) [A] thoughtful, engrossing, and often-amusing … "waltz through Texas"… whose history, politics and culture Wright finds endearing, repelling, and puzzling.… An important book about a state and people who will continue to have a large impact on the U.S. —Jay Freeman
Booklist
(Starred review) Wright…has illuminated a variety of intriguing subcultures. His native Texas is as exotic as any of them.… A revelation—Wright finds the reflection of his own conflicted soul in the native state he loves and has hated.
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 GOD SAVE TEXAS … then take off on your own:
1. Overall, how well do you think Lawrence Wright portrays the state of Texas? Is his assessment fair or unfair? Do you detect a scent of elitism or not? What aspects of Texan history, culture, and politics does he admire? Of what is he critical?
2. Follow-up to Question 1: If you are from Texas (native or transplant), how accurate is Wright's depiction of the state? Do you have familiarity with any of the events and landmarks he mentions? What are your favorite and/or least favorite associations and memories of living there?
3. Follow-up to Question 1: If you are not from Texas, what are your opinions of the state? Has Wright's book altered your perceptions for better or worse? Are you inspired to visit the state? If so, where would you like to go, and what would you like to see or experience while there?
4. Why do Texas and Texans inspire such strong reactions, often outrage as Wright points out, from non-residents?
5. Politically, Wright says of the state: "It should be as reliably blue as California. Instead, he says, "it is the Red Planet in the political universe." Care to comment on that?
6. What does Wright mean when he talks about a state "culture that is still raw, not fully formed, standing on the margins but also growing in influence, dangerous and magnificent in its potential"?
7. Talk about the many stereotypes people have of Texans: "cowboy individualism, a kind of wary friendliness, super-patriotism combined with defiance of all government authority, a hair trigger sense of grievance, nostalgia for an ersatz past that is largely an artifact of Hollywood." Are those fair attributes, overdrawn, or simply a bunch of tiresome cliches? What would you add to the list and what would you remove from it?
8. Why did Wright return to Texas, having fled the state after high school while attempting to do, as he writes, "everything I could to cleanse myself of its influence"?
9. In what way does Texas, according to Wright, portend America's future? Good thing, bad thing, or why bother to judge?
10. Discuss some of the dichotomies that permeate the state—world-class cultural institutions, for instance, juxtaposed with dire poverty?
11. What factors are driving the state's astonishing growth, both economically and demographically?
12. If you live outside of Texas, do you resent Texas, or envy her …or merely wish the state well?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement
Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, 2019
Penguin Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525560340
Summary
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters who broke the news of Harvey Weinstein's sexual harassment and abuse for the New York Times — Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey reveal the thrilling, untold story of their investigation and its consequences for the #MeToo movement.
For many years, reporters had tried to get to the truth about Harvey Weinstein’s treatment of women. Rumors of wrongdoing had long circulated.
But in 2017, when Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey began their investigation into the prominent Hollywood producer for the New York Times, his name was still synonymous with power.
During months of confidential interviews with top actresses, former Weinstein employees, and other sources, many disturbing and long-buried allegations were unearthed, and a web of onerous secret payouts and nondisclosure agreements was revealed. These shadowy settlements had long been used to hide sexual harassment and abuse, but with a breakthrough reporting technique Kantor and Twohey helped to expose it.
But Weinstein had evaded scrutiny in the past, and he was not going down without a fight; he employed a team of high-profile lawyers, private investigators, and other allies to thwart the investigation. When Kantor and Twohey were finally able to convince some sources to go on the record, a dramatic final showdown between Weinstein and the New York Times was set in motion.
Nothing could have prepared Kantor and Twohey for what followed the publication of their initial Weinstein story on October 5, 2017.
Within days, a veritable Pandora’s box of sexual harassment and abuse was opened. Women all over the world came forward with their own traumatic stories. Over the next twelve months, hundreds of men from every walk of life and industry were outed following allegations of wrongdoing.
But did too much change—or not enough? Those questions hung in the air months later as Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, and Christine Blasey Ford came forward to testify that he had assaulted her decades earlier.
Kantor and Twohey, who had unique access to Ford and her team, bring to light the odyssey that led her to come forward, the overwhelming forces that came to bear on her, and what happened after she shared her allegation with the world.
In the tradition of great investigative journalism, She Said tells a thrilling story about the power of truth, with shocking new information from hidden sources.
Kantor and Twohey describe not only the consequences of their reporting for the #MeToo movement, but the inspiring and affecting journeys of the women who spoke up—for the sake of other women, for future generations, and for themselves. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey are investigative reporters at the New York Times.
Kantor has focused on the workplace in her reporting, and particularly the treatment of women, covered two presidential campaigns, and is the author of The Obamas. Twohey has focused much of her attention on the treatment of women and children, and in 2014, as a reporter with Reuters News, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.
The authors have shared numerous honors for breaking the Harvey Weinstein story, including a George Polk Award, and, along with colleagues, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. (From publisher.)
Book Reviews
Two years after their landmark reporting on sexual harassment and abuse allegations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein helped set off the #MeToo movement (and won a Pulitzer Prize), these two Times journalists take readers behind their reporting and expand the Weinstein story to be "less about the man and more about his surround-sound ‘complicity machine,'" our reviewer, Susan Faludi, wrote. It reads, she said, "a bit like a feminist All the President’s Men."
New York Times
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, 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)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
Kirk Wallace Johnson, 2018
Penguin Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101981610
Summary
A rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief.
On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History.
Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying.
Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness.
Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief …
What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins?
In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1980?
• Where—West Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Chicago
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Kirk W. Johnson is the author of To Be a Friend Is Fatal and the founder of the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, among others. He is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the American Academy in Berlin, and the USC Annenberg Center. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
A fascinating book …the kind of intelligent reported account that alerts us to a threat and that, one hopes, will never itself be endangered.
Wall Street Journal
Vivid and arresting.… Johnson [is] a wonderfully assured writer.
Times (UK)
Within pages I was hooked. This is a weird and wonderful book.… Johnson is a master of pacing and suspense.… It’s a tribute to [his] storytelling gifts that when I turned the last page I felt bereft.
Maggie Fergusson - Spectator (UK)
One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.… Johnson is an intrepid journalist … [with] a fine knack for uncovering details that reveal, captivate, and disturb.
Christian Science Monitor
An uncommon book… [that] informs and enlightens.… A heist story that manages to underline the enduring and continuing importance of natural history collections and their incredible value to science. We need more books like this one.
Science
Johnson succeeds in conveying the gravity of this natural-history "heist of the century," and one of The Feather Thief’s greatest strengths is the excitement, horror, and amazement it evokes. It’s nonfiction that reads like fiction, with plenty of surprising moments.
Outside
A riveting story about mankind’s undeniable desire to own nature’s beauty and a spellbinding examination of obsession, greed, and justice …[told] in engrossing detail.… A gripping page-turner.
Bustle
(Starred review) [An] enthralling account of a truly bizarre crime.… Johnson goes deep into the exotic bird and feather trade and concludes that though obsession and greed know no bounds, they certainly make for a fascinating tale. The result is a page-turner.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) [M]ind-blowing…a riveting historical tour of the feather trade from the 1800s to the present. The resolution, however, is frustrating and demonstrates both the importance and difficulty of preserving our natural history. —Deirdre Bray Root, formerly with MidPointe Lib. Syst., OH
Library Journal
(Starred review) A remarkably compelling story of obsession and history.
Booklist
(Starred review) [C]aptivating.… Throughout, Johnson's flair for telling an engrossing story is, like the beautiful birds he describes, exquisite.… A superb tale about obsession, nature, and man's "unrelenting desire to lay claim to its beauty, whatever the cost."
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 FEATHER THIEF … then take off on your own:
m. Johnson reports that a fly-tier expert warned Johnson away from pursuing the story of the Tring theft. "I don’t think you want to write that story.… We’re a tight-knit community, fly-tiers, and you do not want to piss us off.” Johnson becomes frustrated by those who don't seem to grasp the seriousness of Rist's crime. Why is it such a serious crime?
m. What was Edwin Rist's motivation for his theft? Actually, is obsession a motivation?
m. What are your thoughts regarding Edwin Rist's legal penalty? Fair? Too light?
m. When the author interviews Rist, he shows little remorse for his theft. What do you think of Rist and his self-exoneration? He says at one point:
[A]ll of the scientific data that can be extracted from them has been extracted from them. You can no longer use DNA, because what you would want to do it for is to prolong and help living birds, which hasn’t really worked anyway, because they’re still going extinct, or will go extinct depending on what happens with the rainforests.
Is Rist correct? Or is that beside the point?
m. Follow-up to Question XXX: Juxtaposed to Rist's lack of remorse is the museum's science director who calls the theft a "catastrophic event," of "stealing knowledge from humanity." Is it catastrophic? What do the losses mean to science?
m. Talk about why the loss of the birds' identity tags is so devastating to the scientists.
m. In what way does the basic conflict at the heart of this book continue today? That conflict is the belief that nature is worth preserving for posterity vs. the belief that nature is put here for the use and betterment of humankind. In what other areas do we see this debate playing out, and where do you stand in regards to it?
m. Is The Feather Thief an important book or merely an entertaining book about an absurd obsession? Do we need care about what happened to the birds of Tring? What is their value to science? Johnson says that the curators had protected the specimens for years, because they "understood that the birds held answers to questions that hadn't yet even been asked." If the questions haven't been formulated by this juncture in history, are they really that important?
m. Of the three sections of the book—the story of the theft, the history of Alfred Russell Wallace and the Victorian era's "feather fever," the author's experiences researching this book—which do you find most interesting?
m. Alfred Russell Wallace once expounded on the importance of cataloguing the natural world:
[T]he individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth’s history; and, as a few lost letters make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will necessarily render obscure this valuable record of the past.
Do you think he is right?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Sting-Ray Afternoons: A Memoir
Steve Rushin, 2017
Little, Brown and Company
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316392235
Summary
A wild and bittersweet memoir of a classic '70s childhood
It's a story of the 1970s. Of a road trip in a wood-paneled station wagon, with the kids in the way-back, singing along to the Steve Miller Band.
Brothers waking up early on Saturday mornings for five consecutive hours of cartoons and advertising jingles that they'll be humming all day. A father—one of 3M's greatest and last eight-track-salesman—traveling across the country on the brand-new Boeing 747, providing for his family but wanting nothing more than to get home.
It's Steve Rushin's story: of growing up within a '70s landscape populated with Bic pens, Mr. Clean and Scrubbing Bubbles, lightsabers and those oh-so-coveted Schwinn Sting-Ray bikes.
Sting-Ray Afternoons paints an utterly fond, psychedelically vibrant, laugh-out-loud-funny portrait of an exuberant decade. With sidesplitting commentary, Rushin creates a vivid picture of a decade of wild youth, cultural rebirth, and the meaning of parental, brotherly, sisterly, whole lotta love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 22, 1966
• Raised—Bloomington, Minnesota, USA
• Education—Marquette University
• Awards—National Sportswriter of the Year
• Currently—lives in western Connecticut
Steve Rushin is an American journalist, sportswriter, memoirist, and novelist. He was named the 2005 National Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association, and is a four-time finalist for the National Magazine Award.
Early life
Rushin grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota, the third in a family of five kids. He was steeped in sports and sports lore from an early age, watching baseball and football games at the town's Metropolitan Stadium while selling hot dogs and soda to Twins and Vikings fans. Even more, he comes from a long line of talented sports players, including three big-league baseball players from his mother's side.
♦ His great-great uncle, Jack Boyle, had a long career with the Phillies.
♦ His grandfather, Jimmy Boyle, played catcher for the New York Giants.
♦ His great-uncle, Buzz Boyle, was an outfielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
♦ His father, Don, was a blocking back for Johnny Majors at the University of Tennessee.
♦ His older brother, Jim, was a forward on the Providence hockey team that reached the Frozen Four in 1983.
Words and literacy were emphasized in his household: his mother was a teacher and was certain that her son's love of reading (books along with cereal boxes) and writing meant he would become a lawyer, while his businessman father had him look up words in the big red family dictionary and report back on their definitions.
Journalism
Rushin graduated from Marquette University and two weeks later went to work for Sports Illustrated. Within three years, at age 25, he was made a Senior Staff Writer, the youngest ever at SI. In 1994, Rushin wrote a major feature for the magazine's 40th anniversary issue, "How We Got There." Based on different facets of sports and sports history, the article reached 24 pages, longer than any other article published in a single SI issue. From 1998 Rushin penned the "Air & Space" column, eventually departing the magazine in early 2007. Three years later he returned as a contributing writer, and in 2011 wrote his column "Rushin Lit."
Rushin also contributed to Golf Digest and Time magazine. He has written numerous essays for The New York Times with memoirist and former Sports Illustrated colleague Franz Lidz.
Books
Rushin is the author of Pool Cool (1990, a billiards guide), Road Swing: One Fan's Journey Into the Soul of America's Sports (1998, a travelogue ), The Caddie Was a Reindeer (2004, a collection), The Pint Man (2010, a novel), The 34-Ton Bat: The Story of Baseball as Told Through Bobbleheads, Cracker Jacks, Jockstraps, Eye Black, and 375 Other Strange and Unforgettable Objects (2013, baseball history ), and Sting-Ray Afternoons (2017, a memoir).
Personal
Rushin and his wife, Rebecca Lobo, live with their four children in Western Connecticut. Lobo is a college basketball analyst and former basketball player. The couple met in a Manhattan bar one night after Rushin had written in Sports Illustrated about sleeping with 10,000 women one night—referring to a WNBA game he had been watching when he fell asleep. Rushin recalled their meeting:
She asked if I was the scribe who once mocked…women's professional basketball. Reluctantly, I said that I was. She asked how many games I'd actually attended. I hung my head and said, "None." And so Rebecca Lobo invited me to watch her team, the New York Liberty, play at Madison Square Garden.… It was—for me, anyway—love at first slight.
In May, 2007, he was the Commencement Day speaker at Marquette, where he was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters for "his unique gift of documenting the human condition through his writing." He said to the graduating class:
Sometimes it pays to think inside a box. And so my daughter and I lay in that box and gazed out at the dozens upon dozens of tulips my wife planted in rows last fall. They bloomed this month, tilting ever so slightly the sun. And I thought how remarkable it is that in nature, life wants to grow towards the light.
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/31/2017.)
Book Reviews
In his funny, elegiac memoir Sting-Ray Afternoons, Rushin mines…ineffably familiar terrain with a sense of irony and deep affection, working hard to capture the look and feel of the 1970s.… Much of what Rushin writes about—the Sears Christmas Wish Book, leaded gasoline, Johnny Carson's many vacations—will strike a chord with anyone who, like me, grew up in that era. What makes the book more than just late-baby-boomer nostalgia is the writing, which is knowing and funny.
Jim Zarroli - NPR
Magnificent... You will not read a better book this summer - and maybe well into the fall and winter, too.
New York Post
Sting-Ray Afternoons is [Rushin's] story of growing up in Bloomington in the 1970s. It's a lighthearted, sentimental look back at a Minnesota childhood with a twist of wryness.… Rushin's told-with-a-smile stories of childhood are worth the trip: bundling into a snowmobile suit in winter, piling into the Ford LTD Country Squire for a cross-country summer vacation, making mild mischief with neighborhood friends, and one memorable disaster when nature called and wouldn't be kept waiting. All seen through that gauzy, yellowish filter that blurs memory with Dad's Super 8 movies.
Casey Common - Minneapoolis Star Tribune
Whether quoting his father as he describes his five kids (“I have one redhead and four shitheads”) or retelling stories about him being drunk on what was the then new Boeing 747, it’s through his father that Rushin captures the mystery and magic of childhood.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Rushin approaches his passion with a mischievous gleam in his eye, a point of view captured perfectly in this anecdote-filled account of the sport's odd corners.... In an era of sports literature when societal significance and statistical algorithms aren't always as fun as we'd hoped, Rushin has reintroduced readers to silliness. Read it with a smile.
Booklist
Although frequent sidetracks into generic comments on life in middle America … sometimes detract from the author's personal story, the nostalgic sweetness of his memories carries the book along comfortably. Rushin provides convincing evidence that life in the '70s wasn't as chaotic as it's often made out to be.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Sting-Ray Afternoons ... then take off on your own:
1. Begin your discussion by talking about the Rushin family—Steve's parents and siblings. What kind of family life did his mother and father provide? Does it seem familiar to you? Do you find it different from the way parents approach raising a family today?
2. If you're about Steve Rushin's age, growing up in the same era—the 1970s—was your upbringing similar? Do you recognize or have affection for some of the same cultural icons, or even just simple everyday objects, that he seems to have? What else would you add?
3. Rushin also talks about childhood terrors, in things as simple as a Christmas special or a pop song. Did you have similar fears?
4. The author writes glowingly about the Midwest, which he says was comprised of "unfailingly decent and generous people," who were modest, lived with a sense of humility, and found it unseemly to toot their own horns. Is Rushin's a case of looking through rose-colored glasses or an clear-eyed assessment? Are those virtues similar to those where you grew up?
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5. Follow-up to Question 4: Rushin says the kindnesses "don't seem to recede at all with the passage of time but follow me, the way the moon always followed our car at night." What do you think? Have those traits he describes stayed the same in your life, where you live now or once lived?
6. What statements, or observations do you find particularly funny? How about Rushin's description of Sister Mariella in her "full-penguin habit" with the look of "a woman perpetually caught between elevator doors"? Are there other sections that strike you because of their nostalgia or their particular insights?
7. What about Rushin's inclusion of short histories of consumer products like the Weber Grill or his beloved Sting-Ray bike? Are they interesting?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)