Our next book is American Lion by Jon Meacham

American Lion illuminates one of our most significant yet dimly recalled presidents. Andrew Jackson was a battle-hardened warrior, the founder of the Democratic Party, and the architect of the presidency as we know it. His story is one of violence, sex, courage, and tragedy. With his powerful persona, his evident bravery, and his mystical connection to the people, Jackson moved the White House from the periphery of government to the center of national action, articulating a vision of change that challenged entrenched interests to heed the popular will–or face his formidable wrath.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book on July 8th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Some thoughts about Exiles

- Exiles is a hybrid of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Does this heterogeneous nature hurt or help the text?

- Hansen characterizes Hopkins' faith this one way (pg. 102):

His faith was a faith that found hope and sturdiness even in the face of mystery, paradox, and philosophical difficulties. Because he'd felt God's love and tenderness so often in the past, he knew there was no meanness in him. There was justice, yes, and authority, and an awesome power that was greater than weather, greater than worlds. But usually there was just an airy mystery, and on the bleakest occasions a sense of God watching with slack interest but resisting any temptation to intercede.

Do you think this is the sort of faith typical of someone who joins a religious order?

- Would Hopkins' life have been easier had he chosen not be a Jesuit?

- Was the childlike Sister Aurea (who was of questionable intelligence) the type of person who should enter a religious order?

- What did you think of the poem?

Here's a clip of Hansen reading from Exiles at Eastern Michigan University. Though is his performance leaves something to be desired, he reveals some interesting tidbits about his research process at the beginning and end of the segment:


In this segment, Hansen reads the section in which the Deutschland hits the sandbar:


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We'll be meeting to discuss this book on June 10th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our next book is Exiles by Ron Hansen

With Exiles, Ron Hansen tells the story of a notorious shipwreck that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of “elected silence” with an outpouring of dazzling poetry. Hopkins was a Jesuit seminarian in Wales, and he was so moved by the news of the shipwreck that he wrote a grand poem about it, his first serious work since abandoning a literary career at Oxford to become a priest. He too would die young, an exile from the literary world. But as Hansen’s gorgeously written account of Hopkins’s life makes clear, he fulfilled his calling.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book on June 10th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Some thoughts about Death with Interruptions

- Did the government make the right decision in choosing to deal with the maphia?

- Why does Saramago make the formal choice not to capitalize names?

- Why does Saramago have death fall in love with a musician? Is there any significance to this?

- Why make death fall in the love at all? Saramago’s intention in the first half of the book is pretty obvious; i.e. to show what would happen if people stopped dying. Second half is more mysterious and far more poetic. Does anyone have any hunches as to what Saramago’s intention with the second half of the book was?

Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. Here's a link to his Nobel Lecture.

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We'll be meeting to discuss this book on May 13th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our next book is Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago

Saramago's philosophical page-turner hinges on death taking a holiday. And, Saramago being Saramago, he turns what could be the stuff of late-night stoner debate into a lucid, playful and politically edgy novel of ideas. For reasons initially unclear, people stop dying. There's much debate and discussion on the link between death, resurrection and the church, and while the clandestine traffic of the terminally ill into bordering countries leads to government collusion with the criminal self-styled maphia, death falls in love with a terminally ill cellist. Saramago adds two satisfying cliffhangers—how far can he go with the concept, and will death succumb to human love? The package is profound, resonant and—bonus—entertaining.

We'll be meeting to discuss this book on May 13th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Some thoughts about Class

- On page 18, Fussell states, “Americans find Knowing Where You Stand harder than do most Europeans.” He thinks because America is (at least on paper) a classless society we are more conscious of which class we belong to, and often have anxiety about fitting into the class of our choice. Do you agreed with his analysis?

- Fussell also asserts that class is not about money, but far more about taste, knowledge, and perceptiveness (presumably about class signals). What are some of the implications of this?

- One of the meatier sections of the book concerns the educational system. The author quotes Paul Blumberg (p. 134) “ ‘The educational system has been effectively appropriated by the upper strata and transformed into an instrument which tends to reproduce the class structure and transit inequality.’ ” True or not true?

- Fussell defines ‘prole drift’ (p. 172) as “the tendency in advanced industrialized societies for everything inexorably to become proletarianized. Prole drift seems an inevitable attendant of mass production, mass selling, mass communication, and mass education, and some of its symptoms are best-seller lists, films that must appeal to virtually everyone (except the intelligent, sensitive, and subtle), shopping malls, and the lemming flight to the intellectual and cultural emptiness of the Sun Belt.” Is culture really going in that direction? Isn’t Fussell’s complaint that of every generation about the generation that comes after it? AND any thoughts about his characterization of the Sun Belt?

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We'll be meeting to discuss this book on April 8th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Our next book is Class by Paul Fussell

In Class: A Guide Through the American Status System Paul Fussell explodes the sacred American myth of social equality with eagle-eyed irreverence and iconoclastic wit. This bestselling, superbly researched, exquisitely observed guide to the signs, symbols, and customs of the American class system is always outrageously on the mark. Class is guaranteed to amuse and infuriate, whether your class is so high it's out of sight (literally) or you are, alas, a sinking victim of prole drift.


We'll be meeting to discuss this book on April 8th at the Main Library in Conference Rm 3 at noon. Feel free to bring a lunch.