Discussion Books, Resources and Activities for 2020
LAVA discussed (or will soon discuss) the following books during 2020.  Click book names for reading resources, or browse month by month.  Resources for books read in other years are also available.
January We met at Bill and Andi's house to share a meal and exchange opinions on books on the 2020 voting list.   Here are the voting results.
February There There by Tommy Orange, 290 pages, 2018

National Geographic has a video of the 31st annual Gathering of Nations in a coliseum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, attended by more than 700 tribes. The fictional "Big Oakland Powwow" would have been similar but on a smaller scale.

PBS has a useful seventeen-minute video interview with the author.

Several reviews of the book.

The Wikipedia articles on this novel and the author.

A long interview with the author by Powell's Bookstore.

The author mentions the Sand_Creek_massacre on page 217 and elsewhere.

On page 218, Thomas Frank talks about an artist called James Hampton who created the Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly.

On page 3, the author talks about the Indian Head test pattern that used to be shown on television after the end of programming.

March The 1619 Project by the New York Times, 2019

This project examines the legacy of slavery in the U.S. on the 400th anniversary of the arrival in the English colonies of the first enslaved people from Africa. It began as a special edition of the New York Times' Sunday magazine for August 20, 2019. Here are its main articles:

The New York Times partnered with the Pulitzer Center to provide additional resource materials for this project.

The Wikipedia article on the 1619 Project covers the history of this project.

Some aspects of this project have generated controversy:

  • An overview of the controversy can be found in The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts, an article in The Atlantic by Adam Serwer.
  • Several historians have expressed disagreement with Nkole Hannah-Jones' statement in the lead essay that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery." Gordon Wood, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian, argued that John Adams, "the leading advocate for independence in the Continental Congress", was a strong opponent of slavery, and that many political leaders at that time thought "that slavery was on its last legs and that it would naturally die away." (His comments, together with those of some other historians who expressed objections, appeared in an utterly unexpected place: interviews by a British Trotskyist organization.)
  • The controversy reached the pages of the American Historical Review, which says it was a hot topic at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association.
  • Leslie M. Harris, an African American woman who is a professor of history at Northwestern University and a specialist in the history of slavery in the U.S., was a fact-checker for this project who vigorously objected to the idea that the War of Independence was fought partly in defense of slavery. She was stunned to learn that she had been ignored, but she supports the project anyway on the grounds that it is helping to correct more basic inaccuracies in the national narrative about slavery. In an article in Politico, an on-line magazine, she says "it is easy to correct facts; it is much harder to correct a world view."

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has good material, including this map of the movement of captured Africans to the Americans, which shows a startlingly large proportion landing in Brazil and the Caribbean Islands.

1619 marked the beginning of the slave system in the English colonies, but enslaved African had actually been brought much earlier to Spanish Florida, which did not become part of the U.S. until 1821.

Irvin Painter, an African American historian, says the captured Africans who landed in Jamestown in 1619 were indentured servants, not slaves, in an article in the Guardian called "How we think about the term 'enslaved' matters".

Here are some charts and maps about slavery from National Geographic. The one at the bottom, which shows the geographic distribution of enslaved people in the U.S. in 1810, just after the slave trade became illegal, has some surprises.

April We couldn't have a regular book discussion because of the covid-19 lockdown, so we had a Zoom check-in of LAVA members to see how everyone was doing.

May We had a Zoom discussion of two videos by Yuval Harari: his seventeen-minute TED talk Why Humans Run the World and his one-hour talk at Google headquarters about his new book, Lessons for the 21st Century.

June Dopesick by Beth Macy, 363 pages, 2018.

This work of non-fiction traces the disastrous growth of opioid addiction in the US, beginning with the introduction of Oxycontin in 1996. The New York Times called it "A harrowing, deeply compassionate dispatch from the heart of a national emergency... a masterwork of narrative journalism, interlacing stories of communities in crisis with dark histories of corporate greed and regulatory indifference." According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control), "More than 750,000 Americans died from drug overdoses from 1999 to 2018," and "Opioids were involved in more than 46,000 drug overdose deaths in 2018."

The CDC says, "the total number of [opioid] prescriptions dispensed peaked in 2012 at more than 255 million and at a prescribing rate of 81.3 prescriptions per 100 persons." Here is their map showing the national opioid prescribing rates in 2012. The "Prescribing Rate" column at the right of the chart below the map shows the rate per 100 residents. If the annual national rate of over 81 opioid perscriptions per 100 persons was already dangerously high, what can one say about the rates for the Virginia towns of Martinsville (548) and Norton (570)?

The Drug Overdose Epidemic: Behind the Numbers, by the CDC.

Several graphs showing the trend of opioid death rates.

A New York Times reporter who wrote a book about the opioid epidemic wrote this story after revisting southwest Virginia.

A multi-year collection of local newspaper stories about the opioid epidemic in southwest Virginia and neighboring east Tennessee.

A seven-minute video of a drive through St. Charles, VA, one of the first to be hit by the opiod epidemic. The video doesn't mention it, but this road eventually dead-ends at a mountain, forcing everyone to turn around and drive back through town.

A fifteen-minute video interview with the author about this book in 2019 at the National Book Festival.

The author's web site

The Wikipedia article about the author.

July Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny, 371 pages, 2010

In this work of crime fiction, Armand Gamache, head of Quebec's homicide squad, is doing historical research at the Literary and Historical Society when the body of an amateur archeologist is discovered it its cellars. Meanwhile, there is unfinished police business in Three Pines, a charming village that is the heart of this series of novels. Booklist: "[Penny] constructs an absolutely airtight ship in which she manages to float not two but three freestanding but subtly intertwined stories." This novel won five different awards for crime fiction excellence.

The Literary and Historical Society of Quebec has expanded its building and mission and is now known as the Morrin Centre

Quebec has had a turbulent history during the last few decades, including Quiet Revolution in the 1960s and 70s, which effected vast social changes in the province, and the October Crisis of 1970, which resulted in federal troops placed in Quebec to help deal with bombings by those who wanted Quebec to be a separate nation.

The massive James Bay Project includes several dams on the La Grande River in northern Quebec.

The shops mentioned in the novel are actual shops. On page 18 and elsewhere, the author mentions J. A. Moisan's grocery, the Paillard bakery, and Le Petit Coin Latin cafe.

A three-minute video of the author outlining what the book is about.

A three-minute video about the difficulty of choosing a location for a movie that is set in the mythical town of Three Pines.

A short video of an ice canoe race at the Ottawa winter carnival.

A five-minute video travelogue about Quebec City

The author's web site

August The Plot against America by Phillip Roth, 391 pages, 2004.

In this speculative novel, Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election by promising to keep America out of the war. Afterwards, the country descends into anti-Semitism. New Yorker: "It's not a prophecy; it's a nightmare, and it becomes more nightmarish - and also funnier and more bizarre - as it goes along."

Several reviews of the book. I liked the review in the Christian Science Monitor by Ron Charles, who later became the chief reviewer for the Washington Post.

A six-minute video interview with Phillip Roth about this book.

The trailer for the HBO movie of "The Plot Against America."

A useful essay by Phillip Roth about how the book was written.

The Wikipedia article about the author.

On page 303, the author mentions New York mayor La Guardia reading the comics on radio during a newspaper strike

The German-American Bund was an actual organization.

The author often alludes to left-wing media outlets of the thirties, such as (page 18) the tabloid newspaper "PM" and a radio station (page 164) called WEVD, which was named after socialist Eugene V. Debs.

In 1935 Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel along these same lines called It Can't Happen Here. Much earlier, in 1908, before Hitler and Mussolini, and even before the word "facism" had been coined, Jack London wrote The Iron Heel about a dystopian future in which a growing labor movement is crushed by a brutal autocracy. Eerily, the event in the novel that precipitated this was a sneak attack on Honolulu, whose port is Pearl Harbor, by Germany! (Jack London also wrote a novel about a devastating global pandemic called The Scarlet Plague.)

Sept We took a break during September instead of having a meeting.
October Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari, 416 pages, 2015

One of the best-selling non-fiction books of modern times and translated into 45 languages, Sapiens is highly educational and brimming with sweeping (and debatable) statements. Barak Obama: "It gives you a sense of perspective on how briefly we've been on this earth, how short things like agriculture and science have been around, and why it makes sense for us to not take them for granted."

This long review in Slate is useful. It compares this book with other sweeping surveys of history, and it highlights many of the book's most interesting discussion points.

Here are several other reviews. Galen Strawsen, one of the most respected philosophers of our time, was, unsurprisingly, bothered by Harari's "swashbuckling" approach, saying in his review in the Guardian, "There's a kind of vandalism in Harari's sweeping judgments." On the other hand, Avi Tuschman, an evolutionary anthropologist and author of Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us, liked it in his review in the Washington Post.

The Wikipedia articles on the author and this book.

The author's web site, which has a separate page for this book.

Harari now has a graphic version of this book. Here is a brief excerpt.

A three-minute video review of Sapiens by Barak Obama.

Harari's seventeen-minute TED talk "Why Humans Run the World". This video is a repeat from our informal meeting last May when we adjusted to the pandemic by having a Zoom discussion of two videos by Harari.

The Wikipedia article on Gobekli Tepe, the ancient and astonishing archaeological site in Turkey, with lots of photos. Harari discusses it on page 90.

November Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips, 256 pages, 2019.

This novel's story, which told by a series of women, centers around the disappearance of two young sisters. It is set in the Russian Kamchatka Peninsula, located about mid-way between Japan and Alaska. Los Angeles Review of Books: "A sophisticated and powerful literary thriller... By taking us through the year after the sisters were kidnapped, character by character, slowly spiraling back, Phillips is able to strike at so much of what ails not only Russia but also most tradition-bound areas all over the world today." This novel won the National Book Award for fiction.

Several reviews of the book.

A fourteen-minute video of the author discussing the book. Her part of the video begins at the 5:57 mark.

A seven-minute video of a trip through the mountains of Kamchatka.

A five-minute video of the Sunrise dance of the Evens people on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and a five-minute video of other traditional dances from the Evens People.

The first and last chapters include a story about an earthquake that literally caused "disappearing earth". That story apparently refers to this earthquake.

An article on reindeer herders in Kamchatka that was written by Phillips before this book's publication. It has lots of good photos.

An interview with the author in the Paris Review.

The author's web site includes a page of articles she has written on a variety of subjects, complete with links to most of them.

The Wikipedia article on Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, with several photos.

A few photos of Esso village from Wikipedia, plus several tourist photos of Esso other parts of Kamchatka.

December The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre, 338 pages, 2018.

The true story of Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB chief in London who, as a double agent, funneled information to British intelligence. The CIA wanted to know his identity, but the person they assigned to find out was himself a Soviet double agent. Gordievsky was spirited out of the USSR in a daring rescue.

A forty-minute video interview with the author about this book.

A thirty-eight-minute audio interview with Gordievsky on BBC.

The Wikipedia article on MI6, also known as the SIS.

The MI6 has a new high-tech, fortress-like building in London.

This article in Smithsonian Magazine says that Gordievsky might actually have been exposed not by Ames but by another, still undiscovered double agent.

Gordievsky has written an autobiography

The author's web site.

The MI6 agent who was called Veronica Price in the book was actually named Valerie Pettit. When she died, the Times printed an updated version of the photograph of the exfiltration team, using her actual name and unblurring her face. Compare to the team photo between pages 274 and 275 in the book.

When the team passed the last checkpoint and were safely inside Finland, the driver played a recording of Finlandia to signal to Gordievsky, who was hidden in the car's trunk.