Book Discussion Meeting, Saturday May 2, 2015, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Oleander Girl by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Dakshineswar Kali Temple near Kolkata

From the unimpeachable source of all wisdom, Wikipedia:

 Chitralekha Banerjee Divakaruni was born in Kolkata (Calcutta), India. She has two brothers. She received her B.A. from the University of Calcutta in 1976. That same year, she went to the United States to attend Wright State University where she received a master's degree. She received a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1985 (Christopher Marlowe was the subject of her doctoral dissertation).

Divakaruni put herself through graduate school by taking on odd jobs, working as a babysitter, a store clerk, a bread slicer in a bakery, a laboratory assistant at Wright State University, and a dining hall attendant at International House, Berkeley. She was a graduate teaching assistant at U.C.Berkeley She taught at Foothill College in Los Altos, California and Diablo Valley College. She now lives and teaches in Texas, where she is the at the nationally ranked University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

Divakaruni is a co-founder and former president of Maitri, a helpline founded in 1991 for South Asian women dealing with domestic abuse. Divakaruni serves on its advisory board and on the advisory board of a similar organisation in Houston, Daya. She also serves on the emeritus board pf Pratham Houston, a non-profit organisation working to bring literacy to disadvantaged Indian children. She volunteers for Indo American Charity Organization, a non-profit which raises money to assist various charities in the Houston area.

Meet the author at the book launch of Oleander Girl at the Asia Society Texas Center

Book Discussion on Saturday, April 11, 2015, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

2015 "Big Read" Event, Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea

Meet the Author

Luis Urrea was born in 1955 in Tijuana, Mexico, to a Mexican father and American mother. His family eventually moved across the border to San Diego, and he spent most of his childhood there. He graduated from UC, San Diego and did graduate work at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was a relief worker at the dumps in Tijuana, the memory of which colors much of his writing. He moved to Boston to teach expository writing and fiction at Harvard, and it was at about this point that his career as a writer began to take off. He now lives in Napierville, IL, and is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Many of us were fortunate to be able to hear Mr. Urrea speak at the San Leandro Library last month. In addition to this year's "Big Read" selection, Into the Beautiful North, Mr. Urrea has written three other novels, several books of memoirs and short stories, and several non-fiction works including The Devil's Highway from 2004, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Last month, I posted an interview of Mr. Urrea by Bill Moyers, in which they talked about The Devil's Highway. This interview can be found by scrolling down on the home page or by clicking on this link.

In the YouTube clip below, Luis Urrea talks with a reporter from San Diego's public television station about Into the Beautiful North



The Magnificent Seven

It is the movie, "The Magnificent Seven," that inspires Nayeli and her friends to take the perilous journey into the north.



Bonus trivia question: Who is the only one of the seven still alive?

ROAD TRIP!

El Rosario, Sinaloa, AKA "Tres Camarones"

Entry to the temple of Nuestra Senora del Rosario, built in the mid 1700s

The lagoon in El Rosario

Tijuana, Baja California

Tijuana dump

Mexico-US border fence at beach in Tijuana

Los Yunaites

La Jolla Beach, San Diego

Viva Las Vegas!

Lake Estes, Colorado

Prairie Dog Town, Oakley, KS

"Seemore" and "Readmore" guarding the door at the library in Kankakee, IL

Book Discussion on Saturday, March 14, 2015, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

Meet the Author

Because she is fairly young and has published only one book, Amanda Coplin's official biography, the one at her official website and at her publisher's website, is only one paragraph long:

Amanda Coplin was born in Wenatchee, Washington. She received her BA from the University of Oregon and MFA from the University of Minnesota. A recipient of residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the Omi International Arts Center at Ledig House in Ghent, New York, she lives in Portland, Oregon. The Orchardist is her first book.

She opens up a little bit more in an interview with The Oregonian about the important influences in her life and on the story she tells in The Orchardist, especially about having started with her grandfather as a model for the character William Talmadge. She also speaks about her grandfather and other topics related to her book in this on the weekly television show "Well Read." (Her interview is in the first 19 minutes of the video, while in the last part the hosts discuss similar or related books by other authors and have some good reading recommendations.)



The Landscape of the Wenatchee Valley

The Orchardist is set in the Wenatchee Valley of Eastern Washington, "the apple capital of the world," where the Wenatchee River flows into the Columbia. This is where Amanda Coplin grew up, and she mentions in her TV interview about how her characters are influenced by the landscape. I was able to find a few evocative photos online.

The Wenatchee Valley

Lake Wenatchee

Peshastin Pinnacles near Wenatchee with Orchard in Foreground

Apples Looking Ready for Harvest

Wild Horses

Eastern Washington is wild horse country. The Appaloosa  horse emerged as a distinctive breed  in the border region between Washington and Idaho and was highly priced by the the Nez-Perce people, "the finest light cavalry  in the world" in their time.

Fine Appaloosa Horse

The open range gradually became too small to support wild horses in large numbers, and many of them were rounded up.

"Last Roundup" in 1906

There is now a scenic area in central Washington overlooking the Columbia River, which is called Wild Horses Monument. On a hill in that monument is a series of iron statues titled "Grandfather Cuts Loose the Ponies" by sculptor David Govedare, commissioned on the occasion of Washington State's centennial in 1989.

The Big Read 2015: Into the Beautiful North

Don't forget that the March Readers Roundtable meeting has been changed from this Saturday, March 7, to next Saturday, March14, when we will discuss The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin. This change of date was made so that we could all attend a Big Read event from 2:00 to 4:00 at the main library on March 7, at which time, Luis Alberto Urrea, the author of Into the Beautiful North, the Big Read selection for 2015, will be speaking in person. To whet your appetite, here is a video of Mr. Urrea's appearance on "Moyers and Company" in 2012.



It should also be noted that several of Luis Alberto Urrea's books have recently been added to the available e-books and audiobooks on the library's portal for downloadable books.

Saturday, February 7, 2015, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Book Suggestions for the Rest of 2015

Please send your suggestions to Peggy via email (psunlane@yahoo.com), or be prepared to offer suggestions at the beginning of the February 7 meeting. We will be choosing books for June through December of 2015 either via email (or phone) as soon as possible after the meeting or at the March meeting, depending on how soon the names are needed for publication of the community calendar.

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

Ms. Baker Kline has a more thorough than usual biography at her official site, which I will link to here without trying to rewrite. In the video below, she answers the ten questions she gets asked most often by book clubs.



I was also able to find a brief video where the widow of a man who had been an orphan train rider speaks about her late husband's experience.

January 10, 2015, 2 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Meet the Author

According to Ms. Adichie's official unofficial website, which is more complete than her official website and sometimes referred to by her official website for more complete information:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born on 15 September 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria, the fifth of six children to Igbo parents, Grace Ifeoma and James Nwoye Adichie. While the family's ancestral hometown is Abba in Anambra State, Chimamanda grew up in Nsukka, in the house formerly occupied by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. Chimamanda's father, who is now retired, worked at the University of Nigeria, located in Nsukka. He was Nigeria's first professor of statistics, and later became Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University. Her mother was the first female registrar at the same institution.

Chimamanda completed her secondary education at the University's school, receiving several academic prizes. She went on to study medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the University's Catholic medical students.

At the age of nineteen, Chimamanda left for the United States. She gained a scholarship to study communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia for two years, and she went on to pursue a degree in communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University. While in Connecticut, she stayed with her sister Ijeoma, who runs a medical practice close to the university.

Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieChimamanda graduated summa cum laude from Eastern in 2001, and then completed a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

It is during her senior year at Eastern that she started working on her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which was released in October 2003. The book has received wide critical acclaim: it was shortlisted for the Orange Fiction Prize (2004) and was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (2005).

Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (also the title of one of her short stories), is set before and during the Biafran War. It was published in August 2006 in the United Kingdom and in September 2006 in the United States. Like Purple Hibiscus, it has also been released in Nigeria.

Chimamanda was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University during the 2005-2006 academic year, and earned an MA in African Studies from Yale University in 2008.

Her collection of short stories, The Thing around Your Neck, was published in 2009. Chimamanda says her next major literary project will focus on the Nigerian immigrant experience in the United States. [Note: This refers to Americanah, but the bio apparently hasn't been updated since the book was published.]

Chimamanda is now married and divides her time between Nigeria, where she regularly teaches writing workshops, and the United States. She has recently been awarded a 2011-2012 fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Chimamanda Adichie on Americanah



Chimamanda Adichie on Feminism

This TEDx talk gained some degree of interest lately after Beyonce sampled it for one of her songs.

Nigerian Comfort Food

In Americanah, the Nigerian comfort food of choice seems to be jollof rice, which appears to be a similar to gumbo. Here is a highly rated recipe from the BBC.




Nigerian Popular Music

Ifemelu describes Obinze's mother as looking like Onyeka Onwenu, one of the most popular Nigerian singers of the 1980s and an icon of Ifemelu's childhood. Ms. Onwenu started her career as a secular musician but now focuses on gospel and inspirational music. In this video, she joins King Sunny Ade, another icon of Nigerian popular music, to advise young people to save themselves for marriage.



In Americanah, when they are teenagers, Obinze introduces Ifemelu to the music of Fela Kuti, one of the best know Nigerian musicians outside of Nigeria. This video shows Fela and his music and dance review when he was at the top of his game. The film was shot by Ginger Baker, the former drummer for Cream who was working as Fela's drummer at that time. Fela claimed to have been influenced by American R&B music, and in particular by James Brown.



As an adult, one of Ifemelu's favorite Nigerian singers was Obiora Nwokolobia-Agu, who sings under the stage name of "Obiwon".  His song "Obi Mu O" was one of the songs Ifemelu played over and over again to comfort her broken heart after she chased Obinze back to his wife.

Saturday, December 6, 2014, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

Meet The Author

According to Wikipedia, Rachel Kushner was born in 1968. I don't find anything to confirm that, but I also don't find anything to contradict that, so I'm buying it. According to a profile on her from The New York Times:

Ms. Kushner was born in Eugene, Ore., to bohemian parents who were completing doctorates in biology and spent long hours in their labs. For a time the family, which included an older brother, lived in a Merry-Pranksters-like bus. “Our parents had Ph.D.’s, but we were dirty ragamuffin children,” she recalled. “I spent a huge amount of time by myself. I daydreamed and learned how to be alone and not be lonely.”

 Her father, whose Jewish New York family was in the Communist Party, collected beatnik poetry and rode a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle. Her mother, who Ms. Kushner said once slept in Central Park for a summer, is from a family of St. Louis Unitarians who lived for a time in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Ms. Kushner’s grandfather worked for a nickel-mining company there, the inspiration for her first novel, “Telex From Cuba,” nominated for a National Book Award in 2008.

At 16, Ms. Kushner enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where she majored in political economy, raced on the ski team and managed to get good grades while feeling unprepared, she said, academically and socially. To help with the bills, she worked as a waitress in a blues bar where she was frequently the only white person.
...
In 1997 she headed for New York City and Columbia University’s master of fine arts program, where at 29 she was older than most of her classmates. Jonathan Franzen was among her teachers. “I had the sense that she came from a place where nobody had told young women what they could and couldn’t be,” he said. “She was strikingly curious and well informed about the mechanics of the real world, and was neither afraid of intellectual content, nor in any way pretentious about it.”

Rachel Kushner is also the author of an earlier critically acclaimed novel, Telex From Cuba, which also was nominated for a National Book Award as was The Flamethrowers, making Ms. Kushner the only writer to have both her first two novels nominated for a National Book Award. On YouTube, you can find a video of her talking to the Los Angeles Review of Books about The Flamethrowers.



At the end of the paperback edition of The Flamethrowers that most of us read, there is is an article called "Curated by Rachel Kushner," which contains a commentary on the cultural influences that inspired The Flamethrowers. This article was originally published in the Paris Review. An electronic online version of this article is available, which contains all the images reproduced at the back of the book plus a few that were not in the back of the book, all with commentary on each image. For those who were intrigued by the story of Jack Goldstein, and the record, "The Murder," which leads off the Paris Review article, here is the substance of "The Murder," as played back on YouTube for a little light easy listening.

Times and Places Visited in The Flamethrowers

Italy Before World War I

Sandro Valera's father (referred to only as "Valera" in the chapters in which he appears) along with his friends represent a cultural movement that appeared in Italy shortly before World War I—Futurism. This YouTube short gives an overview of what Futurism was all about.

The Great American Desert

"Spiral Jetty" by Robert Smithson

The heroine of The Flamethrowers, Reno, comes from the Great Basin and returns there to create a work of "land art" using a motorcycle. The most well-know work of land art in the US is "Spiral Jetty" by Robert Smithson. This earth and rock spiral is located on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake, and Reno had seen it in person, which impresses none of her New York friends. Reno's love affair with speed began with her girlhood idolization of "Flip Farmer," whom I took to be a loosely fictionalized version of Craig Breedlove, who in 1964 was the first human to drive over 500 miles an hour.

Craig Breedlove or Flip Farmer?

On YouTube, I found some stock footage of Breedlove's record-setting 1964 run, which is reproduced in the book as Flip Farmer's record-breaking run. The track of white salt between the two oil lines is also described in the chapter on Reno's ill-fated run.

New York City in the Mid-to-Late 1970s

I think everyone my age has kind of an idea what the late 1970s scene was like in New York City, but I had a hard time finding any actual material about it on line. I did find some photos by Allan Tannenbaum in this article appropriately entitled "Dirty, Dangerous & Destitute." There is also this 10-minute film, "News from Home," by Chantal Akerman, which Rachel Kushner said was one of the sources of inspiration for The Flamethrowers. Apparently the film is supposed to have a voice-over of Akerman reading letters from her mother at home in Belgium while she sweeps the streets and the skyline with her camera. This YouTube version is minus voice-over, but I have a feeling it was in either Flemish or French anyway.

Italy in the 1970s

Strike at Fiat Plant in 1969

Toward the end of the book, the action in The Flamethrowers moves back to Italy, this time in the late 1970s, a time when Sandro declares Italy to be "a mess," (apparently unlike New York City). The unrest in real-life Italy culminated in the kidnapping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 by a leftist faction called the Red Brigades, which is echoed in the kidnapping and murder of Sandro's older brother in the Flamethrowers. Here is a very short fragment from a documentary about the Red Brigades.

Update: Grave Stele of a Little Girl (ca. 450 to 440 BC)

 

This gravestone is thought to be the inspiration for the stone frieze of a Grecian slave girl that Sandro and Ronnie became obsessed with when they were working as guards at the Metropolitan Museum. It should be noted that this girl was almost certainly not a slave as the graves of slaves were not commemorated, especially with such elaborate carvings. Also, she does not have a cord around her neck as described in The Flamethrowers.