• The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan
• The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
• My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor
• Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
• The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger
• A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
• Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches by Samuel C. Gwynne
• Just Kids by Patti Smith

Several people die in a lifeboat while they were adrift for many days after the sinking of a passenger ship in 1914, and the wife of a wealthy man is subsequently tried for murder. The heart of this novel is her version of what happened, but is she a reliable narrator?

The author's web site includes a diagram of the fictional lifeboat and a list of its passengers. Its list of discussion questions is similar to the one in the back of the book, but it has been expanded.

Here are several reviews of the novel. I especially liked the reviews in the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian.

A brief video of the author presenting a summary of the story.

An article about the author in the New York Times.

On page 216, the lawyers discuss a classic ethical dilemma about two drowing men who compete for a plank that will support only one person. Known as the Plank of Carneades, it was first discussed over 2000 years ago.

This interview with the author includes a discussion of two legal cases from the 1800s that cover situations similar to the one in this novel.

In this interview, the author talks about the process of writing the novel.

Every March we open our meeting to the general public to discuss the book chosen for the "Rochester Reads" program organized by Writers & Books.  This year's choice, The Age of Miracles is about the crisis created when the earth's spin begins to slow, gradually lengthening each day. It is told from the viewpoint of an eleven-year-old girl.

Writers & Books always provides an informative interview with the author and a discussion guide.

A web site devoted to the book.

The Wikipedia article about this book.

This book was a publishing sensation, earning its author a huge fee, but reviewers' opinions of it varied greatly. The reviewer in the New York Times loved it, but the reviewer in the Guardian thought it was a "pallid failure".

This twelve-minute TED talk by the author about the lifeboat crisis resulting from the wreck of the Essex is strangely reminiscent of The Lifeboat, which we discussed last month.

The background premise of the novel, the slowing of the earth's rotation, would be a violation of the conservation of angular momentum. The university-based HyperPhysics teaching project says, "As far as we can tell, conservation of angular momentum is an absolute symmetry of nature. That is, we do not know of anything in nature that violates it."

The centrifugal force caused by the earth's spin is actually much weaker than the novel depicts, and in our part of the world it pulls at a sharp angle rather than straight up. Here is an explanation.

The memoirs of the third woman and the first Latina to become a Supreme Court Justice. A diabetic from the age of seven, she was valedictorian of her high school class and graduated summa cum laude from Princeton. She became a federal district judge before the age of forty. Washington Post: "Anyone wondering how a child raised in public housing, without speaking English, by an alcoholic father and a largely absent mother could become the first Latina on the Supreme Court will find the answer in these pages. It didn't take just a village: It took a country."

The Wikipedia article on Sonia Sotomayor.

Reviews of this book in the New York Times and the Washington Post. The latter, which is especially recommended, contrasts it with My Grandfather's Son, the autobiography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

A moving two-and-a-half minute video of Sotomayor talking about the phone call from Obama announcing her nomination to the Supreme Court.

A ten-minute NPR video of Sotomayor talking about the photos in her family album.

An interview with Sotomayor in the German magazine Der Spiegel.

When she was young, Sotomayor's family lived in a very rough area in the South Bronx known as "Fort Apache".

Sotomayor greatly admired Judge Franklin M. Johnson, who helped end discrimination against African Americans in the south.

In her book, Sotomayor sometimes used the term "Nuyorican".

This article in Slate is based largely on Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor and the Politics of Justice, a biography of Sotomayor by Joan Biskupic.

In this work of non-fiction, Millard tells the story of the assassination of President James A. Garfield, who was shot by a deranged gunman four months after he was elected. His death two months later was caused more by his doctors' missteps than the bullet.

Charles Guiteau, the man who shot Garfield, lived for a while in the Oneida Community, about 35 miles east of Syracuse.

Review in the New York Times

This short article in the Washington Post tells how Millard came to be a writer.

In this five-minute video, Millard talks about her process of research and writing. She says this book actually originated with her research into Alexander Graham Bell, not President Garfield.

The city of Lincoln, Nebraska chose this book for their annual city-wide project to read the same book. They developed this extensive collection of reading resources for it.

Pages 21-22 of the book say that President Garfield's mother's maiden name was Eliza Ballou. She came from the same family as Hosea Ballou, one of the founders of Universalism, which eventually merged with the Unitarians to form the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Pages 162-166 say that one of the first doctors to reach the wounded Garfield was an African American named Charles Purvis, who sensibly asked Dr. Bliss to quit sticking his fingers into the wound. Purvis was a friend of Susan B. Anthony; he worked with her in the American Equal Rights Association, which fought for equal rights for both women and African Americans.

A young man in Pakistan tells an American listener the story of his life prior to the terrorist attacks of 9/11: his happiness at Princeton, his success on Wall Street and his romance with a beautiful American. But is the listener planning to kill the Pakistani? Is the Pakistani planning to kill the listener? Are they both victims of over-active imaginations? This novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize.

The author's web site

You might want to dip into this one-hour video interview with the author to get an idea of the author's personality.

In this six-minute interview, the Canadian interviewer is surprised to hear that Americans tend to see this book as a thriller rather than a satire.

The Wikipedia article on the author

Several reviews of the novel

The novel has been made into a film that obviously required significant alteration.

A short but informative short interview with the author

This interview with the author is very long, but it covers some interesting points, including the use of names like "Erica/America, Underwood Samson/US and Changez (who 'changes' over the course of the story)", and the surprising information that the "number one talk-show host in Pakistan, Begum Nawazish Ali, is a transvestite." Here is a ten-minute video of that talk show.

The author describes his book as a dramatic monologue, a form associated with the poems of Robert Browning, such as My Last Duchess.

The story takes place mostly in the Anarkali Bazaar in Lahore. Here is a three-minute video of a shopping expedition to that bazaar for wedding supplies. (Just ignore the first twenty seconds.)

A young woman moves from Bangladesh to Rochester, NY, to marry a man she met through an on-line dating service, but both are hiding something from their past. Important to her new life in Rochester is her job at Starbucks at Twelve Corners in Brighton. Freudenberger was recently named to the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list of young writers with promising futures.

Here is an insightful review of this novel in the New York Times by Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the book we read in June. Hamid has some interesting things to say about the role of Kim in the novel's structure.

A review of this novel in the Guardian

The author describes the process of writing this novel in this interview in Bookpage.

Several other reviews

Amina's and Nasir's fathers fought in Bangladesh's War of Independence. It was preceeded by the Bengali Language Movement, which sought to defend the local language.

If you want to see and hear the author, here is a video of her reporting from India as a journalist, but unfortunately its content has nothing to do with this month's book. (Her report is about the Parsi community, which figured in A Fine Balance, a book that LAVA read in 2004.)

The author missed a chance to make a connection in this novel. On page 207, when George visited Bangladesh he tried to visit the "famous parliament buildings" that were designed by architect Louis Kahn. Unmentioned is the fact that a short distance away from Amina's job at Starbucks is the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, which was also designed by Kahn.

Here is the short story in the New Yorker that grew into this novel, which has very similar text beginning on page 8.

The novel frequently mentions the Islamic Center of Rochester although Amina and George never get around to visiting it.

Amina and George met on-line at AsianEuro.com, which has been renamed AsianDating.com

The publisher's reading guide

In 2004, in a rural village in Chechnya, a part of Russia devastated by conflict, a small group of people deal with personal conflicts and take care of each other in grim circumstances. This novel won the National Book Critics Circle's Prize for outstanding first book.

The author visited Chechnya and posted some great photos on his web site.

The Wikipedia article on Chechnya has information on the first and second post-Soviet wars there. It also explains the fascinating teip (clan) system in Chechnya.

A 26-minute video interview with the author by the Washington Post.

For the good of his village, Khassan almost killed his own son with a kinzhal, but he was interruped by Sonja. Khassan noted the resemblance of that event with Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac, a story that is shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims. The Wikipedia article explains the story in detail from the viewpoint of all three religions.

This non-fiction work is the story of Quanah Parker, whose Caucasian mother was kidnapped as a child by the Comanche Indians and assimilated into their culture. The Comanches fought a forty-year war with the U.S. military, holding back the westward march of settlers. Quanah Parker was one of their most successful warriors. This book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

A 75-minute video of the author talking about this book.

The Smithsonian has a large collection of historical paintings of the Plains Indians. The seventh one (click it to enlarge) shows a band of Native Americans in an utterly flat and featureless landscape moving their camp with the help of horses and dogs.

Several reviews of the book (at bottom of page)

Several people, mostly in blogs and such, have expressed objections to the book. This reviewer says the book is not based on modern research and that the author makes sweeping statements that "are easily proved false," such as the author's claim that the Comanches never farmed or lived in villages. This reviewer, who says he took a break from reading the book after 27 pages, lists examples of what he considers to be bias and misinformation found in those few pages. This collection of comments includes one that complains that the book is written from a liberal perspective that excuses Comanche atrocities on the grounds that "morality is subjective to culture."

The Wikipedia article on the Comancheria shows a map of the area that Comanches occupied.

Much of the conflict in this book occurred in the vacinity of the Llano Estacado, the Caprock_Escarpment, with its abrupt change in altitude. A pivotal battle took place in Palo Duro Canyon. Colonel Mackenzie's troops slipped unnoticed down the sides of the canyon to attack a large Indian camp but then found themselves almost trapped at the bottom. (page 280).

This National Park Service history shows two versions of a painting of a Comanche warrior shooting arrows while carrying a long lance and clinging precariously to his horse's side.

Parker was the main force behind the creation of the Native American Church, which is based on peyote.

This review in the Guardian by a friend of Smith's provides some useful context. Here are four more reviews (scroll down to see them).

The Wikipedia article on Patti Smith's first album, Horses, includes what is probably Mapplethorpe's best known photo, which he took for the album's cover. Here are the tracks from that album on YouTube.

Here is Patti Smith singing "Because the Night," which she wrote with Bruce Springsteen.

The Wikipedia article on Mapplethorpe and a collection of his photos from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Wikipedia has photos and information about the Hotel Chelsea. Even more stories about it are in this article.

Similarly, here is the Wikipedia article on Max's Kansas City restaurant along with an article with additional stories.

The Wikipedia article on punk rock.