Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, June 1, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

Synopsis

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men. ‎Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. She becomes the first female diver. One evening at a nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again, and begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished.

Meet Jennifer Egan

Egan was born in Chicago in 1962 but grew up in San Francisco. After graduating from Lowell High School, she majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating, Egan spent two years at St John's College, Cambridge supported by a Thouron Award where she earned an MA

Egan came to New York in 1987 and worked a strange array of jobs while learning to write, such as catering at the World Trade Center. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, among other periodicals, and her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.

Egan's first novel, The Invisible Circus, was released in 1995 and adapted into a film of the same name released in 2001 and starring Cameron Diaz. She has published one short story collection and four novels, among which Look at Me was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and “The Bipolar Kid” received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Jennifer Egan’s 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, has been awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

She currently lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn with her husband and two sons. As of February 28, 2018, she is the President of the PEN America Center.

Partial Bibliography

Novels

• The Invisible Circus (1995)
• Look at Me (2001)
• The Keep (2006)
• A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)
• Manhattan Beach (2017)

Short fiction

• Emerald City (short story collection; 1993, UK; released in US in 1996)
• "Black Box" (short story; 2012, US; released on The New Yorker's Twitter account)

There were shorter videos available of Jennifer Egan talking about Manhattan Beach, but this video at the Brooklyn Historical Society is full of detail about all the research she put into writing this book. There are a few time when she points to slides being displayed over head which are not visible from the camera angle, which I admit is kind of frustrating, but I still found this video more informative than the others I watched.



New York City during the World War II Era

As Jennifer Egan mentions in the above video, Manhattan Beach was a beach-side resort community during the period in which the book was set. I found a page with 16 picture postcards from the Manhattan Beach of that era.

Here are a couple of pictures from the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Here's a video on how to properly deploy an underwater diving suit. Unfortunately it's kind of long, but it helps reinforce the description from the book.



In the book, Anna's father is a bag-man making connections between the Longshormen's Union and the mob. This was a notorious concern at that time, as explained in this article about the link between those two organizations.

The Cadillac 62 Series, the last model off the production line until after the war.
(Dexter Styles car)

The Bay Area's Own Shipbuilding and Repair World War II History

The San Francisco Bay Area had its own prominent role to play in wartime shipping, and you can find monuments to those days if you care to take a short day trip.. The Mare Island shipyards were featured in the book, and you can find a historic park and museum in Vallejo.

Better known is the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historic Park in Richmond, where you can still sometimes meet women who actually lived the kind of life story as portrayed in the book.

Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, May 4, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

DeLisle, Mississippi

Synopsis: Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.

The Deepwater Horizon fire

The Author

Jesmyn Ward was born in Berkeley in 1977. Her family moved to DeLisle, Mississippi, when she was 3 years old, and she grew up there. She was bullied by Black students at the public school she attended, so her mother's employer paid her tuition to a private school, where she was bullied and isolated for being the only Black child in the school. DeLisle forms the model for the fictional town of "Bois Sauvage," which is the setting for both Sing, Unburied, Sing, and her previous novel Salvage the Bones. She moved away from Mississippi to attend Stanford University, where she earned a BA in English in 1999 and an MA in media studies and communication in 2000.

She received a MFA from the University of Michigan and returned to the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She was so traumatized by what she saw that she was unable to write for three years, during which time she was shopping around her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds, and had become so discouraged that she was making plans to enroll in a nursing program when her book was finally published to much critical acclaim. Her second book was a memoir entitled Men We Reaped about 5 young men from DeLisle who died young, including her younger brother who was killed by a drunk driver. This memoir was short-listed for the National Critics Circle Book Award for autobiography.

In 2011, Ward published her second novel, Salvage the Bones, which won the National Book Award. Sing, Unburied, Sing, published in 2017, also won the National Book Award. In 2017 she also was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.

In the short PBS video clip below, Jesmyn Ward answers readers' questions about Sing, Unburied, Sing.




For Further Reading

Parchman Farm

The Marshall Project, named in honor of Justice Thurgood Marshall, is great resource for material criminal justice issues. This link will take you to a photo essay about the prison plantation system, like Parchman Farm, which still exists to this day.

If you want to do a deep dive into criminal justice issues, I recently read a fascinating article about the prison abolition movement in the New York Times. If you have the time, it is really thought provoking.