Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace One school at a Time

by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

Greg's story begins on K2 in the Balti region of Pakistan as a great mountain climbing survival tale. But this is not the most exciting part of the book. We learn that the same qualities that make a successful climber also enable Greg to overcome obstacles to build a one room school in remote Northern Pakistan. He survives fatwas issued by mullahs and kidnapping in Waziristan. He succeeds by being a completely genuine citizen of this earth. He then works on, from his basement in Bozeman, to establish the Central Asia Institute that has built 64 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as created vocational opportunities and libraries for the women in these villages. Yes, all this, while the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were also on the move in a region where Americans are mostly feared and hated. This book is truly inspirational and hopeful in a time when good news is hard to find.

Cris Wilson

Suite Francaise

by Irene Nemirovsky

This book is a great mixture of imagination and history of the fall of France in 1940. The first section "Storm in June," follows a cross section of the Parisian population as they come to terms with the impending disaster. Most of the characters are from the elite class and are spoilt and self centered. They feel they have a right to good food and lodging as they flee the capital. The story shows how much caste and class matter and how people were really on their own. The French countryside in all its lush summer beauty is described in contrast to the devastating path of the war.

The second part, "Dolce" covers the occupation by the Germans of a small French village. The French see the war as a conflict between the Germans and the British and they are just waiting for a return to peace and a normal life. Nemirovsky describes how easy it is for women to befriend the young German soldiers, especially when most of the village men are fighting or imprisoned. The Germans are depicted as individuals capable of acts of consideration and kindness instead of a monolithic evil force rolling over the countryside.

Once you have finished the book it is vital to read the appendix. The story of Irene Nemirovsky during the war and then what happened to her manuscripts until they were published 60 years later is another book in itself.

Cris Wilson

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
by Jean Dominique Bauby

This spring the library began hosting a new book club called the Book Lover's Cafe. We meet at the Port Townsend Community Center Lounge the first Monday of the month at 2:30. The group began with a short work of nonfiction, Jean Dominique Bauby's “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” Bauby was paralyzed by a brain stem stroke that left him a quadriplegic with "locked-in syndrome" able only to blink the left eye lid to communicate. Bauby helped us empathize with the emotions he felt when he vividly recalled "the simmering memories" of preparing and eating meals and the loss of physical activity and sensual touch. We also noted the lines that the "glory of friendship keeps the vultures at bay". Bauby so appreciated letters when friends wrote of slices from their everyday life rather than spiritual or philosophical bromides.

His writing was neither bitter nor full of self pity. It was a very realistic description of his plight yet full of ironic humor and lyrical flights of imagination.

We also discussed future book club reads. Here are some of the suggested titles.


Life of Pi- Yann Martel
An award winner in Canada (and winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize), Life of Pi, Yann Martel's second novel, should prove to be a breakout book in the U.S. At one point in his journey, Pi recounts, "My greatest wish--other than salvation--was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One that I could read again and again, with new eyes and fresh understanding each time." It's safe to say that the fabulous, fablelike Life of Pi is such a book. --Brad Thomas Parsons

Bel Canto- Ann Patchett
Amazon.com's Best of 2001In an unnamed South American country, a world-renowned soprano sings at a birthday party in honor of a visiting Japanese industrial titan. His hosts hope that Mr. Hosokawa can be persuaded to build a factory in their Third World backwater. Alas, in the opening sequence, just as the accompanist kisses the soprano, a ragtag band of 18 terrorists enters the vice-presidential mansion through the air conditioning ducts. Their quarry is the president, who has unfortunately stayed home to watch a favorite soap opera. And thus, from the beginning, things go awry.


The Inheritance of Loss- Kiran Desai
Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states—Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet—meet. At the head of the novel's teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds "too messy for justice." He lives in an isolated house with his cook, his orphaned seventeen-year-old granddaughter, and a red setter, whose company Jemubhai prefers to that of human beings. The tranquillity of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook's son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter's affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai's life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.

Elegy for Iris- John Bayley
Memoir by the husband of novelist Iris Murdoch of her life and effects of her struggle with Alzhemiers

The Worst Hard Time- Tim Egan
From The New Yorker On April 14, 1935, the biggest dust storm on record descended over five states, from the Dakotas to Amarillo, Texas. People standing a few feet apart could not see each other; if they touched, they risked being knocked over by the static electricity that the dust created in the air. The Dust Bowl was the product of reckless, market-driven farming that had so abused the land that, when dry weather came, the wind lifted up millions of acres of topsoil and whipped it around in "black blizzards," which blew as far east as New York. This ecological disaster rapidly disfigured whole communities. Egan's portraits of the families who stayed behind are sobering and far less familiar than those of the "exodusters" who staggered out of the High Plains. He tells of towns depopulated to this day, a mother who watched her baby die of "dust pneumonia," and farmers who gathered tumbleweed as food for their cattle and, eventually, for their children.



In the Heart of the Sea: the Sinking of a the Whale Ship Essex- Nathaniel Philbrick
Amazon.comThe appeal of Dava Sobel's Longitude was, in part, that it illuminated a little-known piece of history through a series of captivating incidents and engaging personalities. Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea is certainly cast from the same mold, examining the 19th-century Pacific whaling industry through the arc of the sinking of the whaleship Essex by a boisterous sperm whale. The story that inspired Herman Melville's classic Moby-Dick has a lot going for it--derring-do, cannibalism, rescue--and Philbrick proves an amiable and well-informed narrator, providing both context and detail. We learn about the importance and mechanics of blubber production--a vital source of oil--and we get the nuts and bolts of harpooning and life aboard whalers. We are spared neither the nitty-gritty of open boats nor the sucking of human bones dry.

Cris Wilson

Party Out of Bounds

Party Out of Bounds: the B-52s, R.E.M. and the Kids Who Rocked Athens, Georgia. by Rodger Lyle Brown. everthemore books. 2003.

Reviewed by Dave Van Kleeck


Just think about the wonderful trajectory of some of the centers of creativity in American popular music over the last few decades. It seems like you could skip effortlessly back and forth across the country, at least a couple of times, in trying to get to each one. Traveling from the Folk scene of Greenwich Village, out to the vibes of the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles, then back to Detroit for the Motown sound, and down south for the Southern Rock scene coming out of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, then to the College Rock milieu of Athens, Georgia, and finally back out west to Seattle for the Grunge Rock scene, you could easily cover a lot of ground. Think about the lives and times these trajectories have covered too. Stopping at each of these centers of inventiveness you'd work your way through the Sixties, the Seventies, the Eighties, and the Nineties. Whew!

Just visualize some of the artists and bands that have come from each of these pivotal places: there is Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan singing in Greenwich Village; Big Brother & the Holding Co., Country Joe & the Fish, and the Grateful Dead playing in San Francisco; the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield launching folk rock in L.A.; Smoky Robinson, the Temptations, and Martha & the Vandellas shaking in Detroit; the Marshall Tucker Band and the Allman Brothers Band jamming in the 70s South; the B-52s, Love Tractor, and R.E.M. rocking in Athens; and finally, Pearl Jam and Nirvana putting Seattle on the map. Kind of restores your faith in America, doesn't it?

In view of the release of R.E.M.'s Accelerator album this past week, I thought it would be fun to highlight a book in the library's collection that focuses on the Athens, GA scene of the 1980s. Entitled Party Out of Bounds: The B-52's, R.E.M. and the Kids Who Rocked Athens, Georgia and written by Rodger Lyle Brown, it lays out much of the carrying on that went on in the town where College Rock stirred itself out of dingy clubs and frat parties into the mainstream of popular music. Originally published in 1991 and reprinted with a new introduction in 2003, it "tells the story of a town and a time that has become legendary in the history of contemporary popular art and music. Witten by someone who was at the center of the Athens music scene, the book is a 'you-are-there' account of wild kids rampaging in ramshackle houses jamming on pawnshop guitars, creating the scene that gave birth to such important bands as the B-52s and R.E.M."

As you'll learn from the book there was so much more going on in Athens than just the rise of these two bands. It was also a cultural nexus of highly talented and highly original artists, musicians, and poets. The B-52s and R.E.M. were but a part of this vibrant, peculiarly Southern vortex. Some of my favorites from the Athens scene include Jim Herbert, the painter, filmmaker, and Michael Stipe's art professor at the University of Georgia with his eccentric, yet highly engaging aesthetic; the band Pylon (all you have to do is watch the footage of them in the film "Athens, GA: Inside Out" to see why); and Love Tractor, another unconventional band that pushed boundaries and stirred a friendly rivalry with R.E.M. Even the visionary folk artist Reverend Howard Finster appears in the book.

All in all, this is a fun read. As the author freely admits, it’s a “conjured” history and certainly not scholarly, but for those of you interested in this stop on the trek across America's musical landscape, it's way worth your time!