Book Discussion Meeting, Saturday, March 5, 2016, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

 

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, The Big Read selection for 2016

In Robert McCrum's 2014 article on The Maltese Falcon for a series by The Guardian on the 100 all-time best crime fiction books, he quotes Raymond Chandler, creator of the Philip Marlowe detective series:

...“He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” He also gave his characters a distinctive language and convincing motivations in a genre that had grown stereotyped, flaccid and uninvolving.

The Maltese Falcon is the Hammett novel that jumps from the pages of its genre and into literature. It’s the book that introduces Sam Spade, the private detective who seduced a generation of readers, leading directly to Philip Marlowe. Dorothy Parker, never a pushover, confessed herself “in a daze of love” such as she had not known in literature “since I encountered Sir Lancelot” and claimed to have read the novel some 30 or 40 times.  

Perhaps The Maltese Falcon is most widely known through the 1941 classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor, but there were two prior movie incarnations of the novel.

The first movie version of The Maltese Falcon was filmed in 1931 and is somewhat racier due to having been made prior to the Hayes Code, which regulated "morality" in movies. Some critics have rated this movie as equal, if not superior, to the familiar 1941 version.

The second movie version of The Maltese Falcon was made in 1936, starring Bette Davis, and renamed "Satan Met a Lady," and according to critics, sometimes seems as much a comedy as a crime story.

I was able to locate a short documentary about the life of Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, on YouTube.



On line, I also found a memoir of Dashiell Hammett by his long-time friend and companion, author and playwright Lillian Hellman, from the November 25, 1965 issue of The New York Review of Books.

Book Discussion Meeting, Saturday, February 6, 2016, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell

Paraphrased from Wikipedia:

Daniel Woodrell was born March 4, 1953, in Springfield, Missouri. He grew up in Missouri and dropped out of high school to join the Marines. Later he earned a BA from the University of Kansas and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

He lives in West Plains, Missouri, in the Ozarks (AKA "West Table, Missouri, in his novels), and is married to the novelist Katie Estill
,
Woodrell has set most of his eight novels in the Missouri Ozarks, a landscape which he knew from childhood. He has created novels based on crime, a style he termed "country noir", a phrase which has been adopted by commentators on his work.

In addition to finding readers for his fiction, Woodrell has had two novels adapted for films. Woodrell's second novel, Woe to Live On (1987), was adapted for the 1999 film Ride with the Devil, directed by Ang Lee.

The more recent Winter's Bone (2006) was adapted by writer and director Debra Granik for a film of the same title, released commercially in June 2010 after winning two awards at the Sundance Film Festival, including the Grand Jury Prize for a dramatic film.Several critics called it one of the best films of the year and an American classic, and it received four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.

In the interview video below, Daniel Woodrell talks briefly about The Maid's Version and about drawing inspiration for his writing from the people and environs of the Missouri Ozarks.



In the above  interview, Woodrell mentions that the West Table dance hall explosion of 1929 was based on a real dance hall explosion, which took place in West Plains in 1928 and continues to be remembered and memorialized to this day. There are also numerous websites dedicated to keeping the memory of the dead alive. One of the most informative is an archival page from Howell County with newspaper articles of the day chronicling the event. A nonfiction history has also been written by Lin Waterhouse, and she has set up a Facebook page about  her book and about remembering the dead.

Late Post this Month

Due to unforeseen circumstances, posting about this month's book, The Maid's Version, by Daniel Woodrell, will be late this month, but I should have some material up by Friday afternoon (February 5) and hope to see you all on Saturday.

Book Discussion Meeting, Saturday, January 9, 2016, San Leandro Main Library, 2:00 PM

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

Born in 1959, Bryan Stevenson grew up in Milton, Delaware, and attended Eastern University (Pennsylvania) and Harvard Law School. In Just Mercy, he tells about his working life, spent mostly in the American South, helping indigent people, especially African American and other minority people already incarcerated or facing trial, to get the kind of legal representation that they are so often denied. He went on to found the Equal Justice Initiative, In the video below, he gives a TED talk about his work This talk raised more than $1 million to fund a campaign to stop the practice of trying and sentencing children as adults.



On Bryan Stevenson's website, you can find a page with pictures and stories of some of the people he mentioned in his book, including Walter McMillan, the man whose unjust trial and imprisonment were at the heart of the story of Just Mercy.

Walter McMillan on the day of his release

Criminal Justice Reform as Hot Topic in Popular Culture

The latest Netflix streaming video binge-watch for the past few weeks has been "Making a Murder," about a man, Steven Avery, who was wrongfully convicted of rape, freed, and right after he filed a wrongful imprisonment lawsuit, was rearrested and charged with the murder of a woman who disappeared while on her way to see him. The Netflix series raises questions about Avery's second conviction. Below is the trailer.



Some of the best consciousness-raising commentary in the past few years has come from British-born comedian, John Oliver, formerly of "The Daily Show" now with his own show, "Last Week Tonight" on HBO. Oliver has used his show as a platform to attack many of the inequities of the American justice system. Below are four segments from just the last six months, attacking serious issues using humor. (Warning, because Oliver is a Brit and his show in on HBO, the outraged analogies can get more than colorful from time to time, especially considering the emotional topics under consideration).

Bail


Public Defenders


Mandatory Minimums


Prisoner Reentry


Here are a couple of older but relevant videos.

Municipal Violations


Elected Judges

Book Discussion Group, Saturday, December 5, 2015, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

 

Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman 

In 1945 American soldiers discover a train near Salzburg filled with unspeakable riches.

 Meet the Author

Again, from the unimpeachable found of all wisdom, Wikipedia, cut and pasted for your convenience:

Born December 11, 1964, is an Israeli American novelist and essayist. She has written seven mystery novels in the series The Mommy-Track Mysteries and three other novels. She has also written autobiographical essays about motherhood. Waldman spent three years working as a federal public defender and her fiction draws on her experience as a lawyer.

 Waldman's grandparents on both sides immigrated to North America from Ukraine early in the 20th century. Her father, Leonard, was from Montreal, Canada, but was living in Israel when he met her mother, Ricki. After they married, they moved to Jerusalem, where Waldman was born. After the Six-Day War in 1967, her family moved to Montreal, then Rhode Island, finally settling in Ridgewood, New Jersey when Waldman was in sixth grade. Waldman attended Wesleyan University, where she studied psychology and government and studied in Israel in her junior year, graduating in 1986. She returned to Israel after college, to live on a kibbutz, but found it unsatisfying. Waldman then entered Harvard Law School. She graduated with a J.D. in 1991.

After graduating from law school, Waldman clerked for a federal judge, worked in a large corporate law firm in New York for a year, and then moved to California with Chabon, where she became a criminal defense lawyer. Waldman was a federal public defender for three years in the Central District of California. Chabon mentioned on their first date that it was his intention to care for his children so his wife could pursue her career, which he did after the birth of their first and second children. After the birth of her first child, she tried juggling legal work with mothering, then left her job to be with her husband and child. This was short-lived.

Waldman was an adjunct professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley from 1997 to 2003. She also worked as a consultant to the Drug Policy Alliance, a resource center advocating a drug policy based on harm reduction. Waldman has said she will not be returning to the legal profession. In her fiction Waldman has drawn extensively on her legal experience.

Waldman has been married to author Michael Chabon since 1993.The couple work from the same office in the backyard of their home. They edit each other's work, and offer each other advice on writing, sometimes going on "plot walks" to discuss issues. Waldman and Chabon live in a 1907 Craftsman house in the Elmwood district of Berkeley, California, with their four children. (Note that the Readers Roundtable read and discussed Michael Chabon's book, Telegraph Avenue, in June of 2014.)

Waldman was raised in a Jewish family, attended Hebrew school and Jewish summer camps, and lived on a kibbutz in Israel for a year while in the tenth grade. She has said that her parents were atheists, but very Jewish, and that her "whole life was immersed in Judaism, but in a very specific kind of Labor–Zionist Judaism." Despite this, she did not celebrate becoming a Bat Mitzvah.Many characters in her fiction are Jewish, and her novel, Love and Treasure, is about the Holocaust. Waldman has written several times about her 2002 diagnosis of bipolar disorder, an illness that runs in her family, and has spoken publicly about parenting while having a mental illness.

The Hungarian Gold Train

From the official site detailing the Hungarian Gold Train settlement: "The Hungarian Gold Train was a train of approximately 24 freight cars that contained personal property which was taken, seized, confiscated or stolen by the Hungarian government from Hungarian Jews. The personal property in issue was taken into custody by the United States Army on or about May 11, 1945 near Werfen, Austria and later moved to Salzburg, Austria."

Salzburg, Austria

Book Discussion, Saturday November 7, 2015, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Tzemach Lemon

Meet the Author

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Biography from Amazon.com: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The New York Times best sellers Ashley's War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield and The Dressmaker of Khair Khana. She is also a contributor to Atlantic Media's Defense One site. In 2004 she left ABC News to earn her MBA at Harvard, where she began writing about women entrepreneurs in conflict and postconflict zones, including Afghanistan and Rwanda. Following MBA study she served as a vice president at the investment firm PIMCO. She has written for Newsweek, the Financial Times, and the International Herald Tribune, as well as for the World Bank and Harvard Business School. She gave a TED Talk on Ashley's War and its all women's Special Ops team this past May, following on her 2011 TED Talk on the importance of investing in global entrepreneurs. A Fulbright scholar and Robert Bosch fellow, Gayle speaks Spanish, German, French and is conversant in Farsi.

Below is a TED Talk by Gayle Tzemach Lemon about Kamila Sidiqi and other female entrepreneurs in conflict areas and about the challenges they face and have overcome.

The Afghanistan Puzzle

Just as an example of why the situation in Afghanistan is so complicated, this is a map showing the territories of the different ethnolinguistic groups that form the nation of Afghanistan. The the dark brown area is the territory of the Pashtun people, the people traditionally known as Afghans throughout Central and South Asia. The Pashtun are also one of the major ethnic groups of Pakistan. This is the ethnic group that the Taliban came from. The bright green area is the traditional territory of the Tajik people, the ethnic group that the Sidiqi family belong to. The Tajik language is from the Persian family of languages. The Tajik people are also the majority ethnic group of Tajikistan, a Central Asian republic that was formerly part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

Note: This map was created in 1985, and no doubt the boundaries of the different ethnic territories have shifted, maybe even significantly, since then.

UPDATE: Afghan Dresses

Here are links to a few sites selling Afghan dresses, including wedding dresses, so that you can get an idea what goes into creating one.

Saneens
Zarinas
Afghan Fashion 

Book Discussion, Saturday, October 3, 2015, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Belle Cora by Phillip Margulies

From a review by Clea Simon in The San Francisco Chronicle:

"Confession may be good for the soul, but it can be dull to read. Ever since the first antiheroes (and antiheroines) shared their stories under the guise of cautionary tales, the best authors have known this to be true—and have given their repentant retellings more emphasis than the contrition that follows. Longtime nonfiction author Phillip Margulies follows this format with "Belle Cora," a rollicking first novel that tracks an American Moll Flanders on her roller-coaster ride from respectability into quite profitable sin and back again. As her fortunes rise and fall, her life, which spans 1828 to 1919, also serves as an enjoyable allegory for the settling of the American West, with plenty of sex and violence along the way."

Meet the Author

Phillip Margulies

The only biographical information available anywhere on the internet reads:  Phillip Margulies is the author of several books on science, politics, and history for young adults. He has won two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children. However, I was also able to find an article where he was interviewed about his favorite place to write. [Spoiler: It's Starbucks.]

The Story Behind the Story

There really was a Belle Cora. Her name was Arabella Ryan. She is most famous as having been the paramour and last-minute wife of Charles Cora, a gambler who was hanged by the Vigilance Committee in San Francisco in 1856. This article tells the story.

Execution of James P. Casey and Charles Cora by the Vigilance Committee, May 22, 1856.