The Evolving Book Group: New Formats Mean More Engagement | Cover Story

The Evolving Book Group: New Formats Mean More Engagement | Cover Story

The Passion of Artemisia

See more information about the artist and the author, Vreeland:

http://www.svreeland.com/image-gal.html

From this page there are links to reviews and other information.  It is the author's page:

http://www.svreeland.com/artem.html

Nice comments from the book publisher, Penguin:

http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/passion_of_artemisia.html

In LitLovers.com:

http://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/13-fiction/82-passion-of-artemisia-vreeland?showall=1

Paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi

Check this page:

Gentileschi

Artemisia Gentileschi; Books

Artemisia [videorecording] / Miramax Zoë and Premiere heure ; Long Métrage ; producer, Patrice Haddad ; screenplay by Agnés Merlet and Christine Miller ; directed by Agnès Merlet

Artemisia Gentileschi : the image of the female hero in Italian Baroque art / by Mary D. GarrardGarrard, Mary DGrayslake 2nd Floor ND623.G364 G37 1989  

Birds Without Wings - Editorial Reviews

 

From Publishers Weekly

It's been nearly a decade since Captain Corelli's Mandolin became a word-of-mouth bestseller (and then a major feature film), and devotees will eagerly dig into de Bernières' sweeping historical follow-up. This time the setting is the small Anatolian town of Eskibahçe, in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. The large cast of characters of intermixed Turkish, Greek and Armenian descent includes breathtakingly lovely Philothei, a Christian girl, and her beloved Ibrahim, the childhood friend and Muslim to whom she is betrothed. The narrative immediately sets up Philothei's death and Ibrahim's madness as the focal tragedy caused by the sweep of history—but this is a bit of a red herring. Various first-person voices alternate in brief chapters with an authorial perspective that details the interactions of the town's residents as the region is torn apart by war; a parallel set of chapters follows the life of Kemal Atatürk, who established Turkey as a modern, secular country. The necessary historical information can be tedious, and stilted prose renders some key characters (like Philothei) one-dimensional. But when de Bernières relaxes his grip on the grand sweep of history—as he does with the lively and affecting anecdotes involving the Muslim landlord Rustem Bey and his wife and mistress—the results resonate with the very personal consequences that large-scale change can effect. Though some readers may balk at the novel's sheer heft, the reward is an effective and moving portrayal of a way of life—and lives—that might, if not for Bernières's careful exposition and imagination, be lost to memory forever.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

"Destiny caresses the few, but molests the many," a proverb-prone narrator reflects as he begins the story of Eskibahçe, a small town in Anatolia, and of its inhabitants' fate in the turmoil of the early twentieth century. After generations of cheerful intermingling, the town's Muslim Turks, Christian Greeks, and Armenians are divided by the First World War and then by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. De Bernières gamely tries to illustrate the human cost—a complex series of migrations and persecutions—through a cast of endearing, folksy characters. He interleaves the narratives with the biography of Kemal Atatürk. But history, in this case, may be too vast for his approach; despite many affecting moments, both the big picture and the small stories are lost in an overwhelming sprawl.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Turkey

Map of Turkey

Historical Timeline

Birds Without Wings - related web pages

Author's website:
http://www.louisdebernieres.co.uk/birds.html

The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/books/review/31KROINL.html?_r=0


From The Guardian / The Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/20/fiction.louisdebernieres


From LitLovers.com:
http://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/13-fiction/7872-birds-without-wings-de-bernieres?showall=1

From The Morning News, an interview: 
http://www.themorningnews.org/article/birnbaum-v.-louis-de-bernires

Birds Without WIngs - Publisher notes, questions, etc.

From Random House, Inc: 
 http://www.randomhouse.com/book/38303/birds-without-wings-by-louis-de-bernieres#aboutthebook

WHITBREAD AWARD FINALIST

A Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller“A quite astonishing, and compulsively readable, tour de force. . . . De Bernières’s subtly differentiated characters attach themselves to us and won’t let go.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and author biography that follow are designed to enliven your group’s discussion of Birds Without Wings, Louis de Bernières’s eagerly awaited follow-up to the acclaimed Corelli’s Mandolin. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Birds Without Wings is a hugely ambitious novel about the pleasures of peace, the meaning of home, and the foolishness and fratricide of war. In its rich tapestry of scenes and characters, it encompasses the whole range of human emotions and behaviors, from the most savagely cruel to the most selflessly compassionate.

Discussion Questions:

1. Why has Louis de Bernières chosen Birds Without Wings as his title? What actual and symbolic roles do birds play in the book? What does Karatavuk mean when he writes at the end of the novel, “We were birds without wings. . . . Because we cannot fly we are condemned to do things that do not agree with us” [p. 550–551]?

2. The setting of Birds Without Wings is an early twentieth-century Turkish village. How, despite its distant setting, does the novel mirror the contemporary world? In what way is the world of the novel vastly different from the world today?

3. In his prologue, Iskander the Potter says that he misses the Christians after they were removed from Eskibahçe: “Without them our life has less variety, and we are forgetting how to look at others and see ourselves” [p. 7]. Why does he feel that the presence of “others” allowed the villagers to see themselves? Why is the loss of variety so important? Why were so many different kinds of people able to live together in Eskibahçe so peacefully?

4. What makes Eskibahçe such a marvelously colorful village? Who are some of its most eccentric and engaging characters? How does the village change over the course of the novel?

5. The novel vividly describes the nationalist fervor that swept the world in the early twentieth century: “Serbia for the Serbs, Bulgaria for the Bulgarians, Greece for the Greeks, Turks and Jews out!” [p. 16] What causes these feelings? What are their ultimate consequences?

6. After Ayse and Polyxeni convince the reluctant Daskalos Leonidas to write a message in tears on the wings of a dove, which they hope will fly to Polyxeni’s dead mother, Ayse exclaims, “It’s incredible! A man with that much education, and he didn’t even know about how to get a message to the dead” [p. 77]. What does this scene suggest about the gulf between traditional and modern ways of understanding the world?

7. On the way to Smyrna, Iskander prefaces his story by saying, “The thing about stories is that they are like bindweeds that have to wind round and round and creep all over the place before they get to the top of the pole” [p. 128]. Is what Iskander says here true of the novel itself? How does the story line “creep all over the place”?

8. What kind of man is Mustafa Kemal? How does he achieve his great military success? What are the ultimate consequences of his actions?

9. Leyla tells Rustem Bey that the women in town are saying he is a bad master because he doesn’t beat her [p. 228]. What does this passage suggest about the relationship between women and men in the novel? What roles are women expected to play? In what ways are they oppressed by their culture?

10. What are the most horrific aspects of war as they are described in Birds Without Wings? What are its greatest cruelties? What surprising acts of compassion do the soldiers perform for one another and even for their enemies? How does war affect the village of Eskibahçe?

11. Why does de Bernières use different narrators and different points of view in the novel? Does this multiplicity of voices mirror some of the novel’s main themes?

12. What is the significance of the relationships between Philothei and Ibrahim and between Karatavuk and Mehmetçik? Why are these young people so drawn to each other despite their religious differences?

13. Can Birds Without Wings be read as a cautionary tale for our own times? What does the novel say about the larger themes of love and war, revenge and forgiveness, both toward oneself and others?

MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN

Here a few links to Internet related sites.  There is actually a lot of online information both about the book, and on closely related topics.

If you are curious about AD HERENNIUM, you can actually read some of it here, in a University of Chicago page.
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Rhetorica_ad_Herennium/home.html

The author of this month's book has an interesting website which includes several videos:
http://joshuafoer.com/

The always good reader's guide from LitLovers.com is here:
http://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/14-non-fiction/8342-moonwalking-with-einstein-foer

One of the reviews in the NY Times will be found in the following link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/books/review/book-review-moonwalking-with-einstein-by-joshua-foer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

A video where Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, speaks about the book:

http://joshuafoer.com/daniel-kahneman-on-moonwalking-with-einstein/

The movie rights to the book have been acquired by Columbia Pictures:

http://collider.com/columbia-moonwalking-with-einstein/80897/

Tony Buzan's website:  http://www.tonybuzan.com/

Daniel Tammet:  http://www.danieltammet.net/index.php

Books for November 2012 - February 2013

November 27

Birds Without Wings
Louis de Bernieres, 2004, 576pp
The setting is a small village in southwestern Anatolia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Everyone there speaks Turkish, though they write it in Greek letters. It’s a place that has room for a professional blasphemer; where a brokenhearted aga finds solace in the arms of a Circassian courtesan who isn’t Circassian at all; where a beautiful Christian girl named Philothei is engaged to a Muslim boy named Ibrahim.

December 18

The Passion of Artemisia
Susan Vreeland, 2002, 352 pp.
Set against the lush tapestry of Renaissance Rome; this is a mesmerizing tale of love, art, and most notably, the love of art. After Artemisia Gentileschi, a promising young painter, is raped by her instructor, a papal court orders her torture and her father betrays her. Shamed but not vanquished, she asks her harsh parent to arrange her marriage to another painter and, thus vindicated in the eyes of society and the church, she begins a new life. But not a happy one.

January 29, 2013

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
Erik Larson, 2011, 464 pp.
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence.

February 26, 2013

Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese, 2009, 541 pp.
An enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home. Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. 

All blurbs courtesy of LitLovers.com

People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks

Tuesday, April 24 at 2 p.m.

In 1996, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, which has been rescued from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images.

 

The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime by Miles Harvey

Tuesday, May 29 at 2 p.m.

For archivists, this is a dark, but by no means unfamiliar, tale. It is, in part, the story of Gilbert Bland, a man with a history of petty crime who somewhat haphazardly stumbled upon the lucrative and relatively safe occupation of hacking maps out of old books in research repositories and selling them at enormous profit. 2000, 405 pp.

 

The Paris Wife: A Novel by Paula McLain

Tuesday, June 25 at 2 p.m.

A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley. In Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love when she meets Ernest. 2011, 336pp

 

Lady Macbeth by Susan Fraser King

Tuesday, July 31 at 2 p.m.

A captivating take on Lady Macbeth, who tells her side of the story with a forceful, uncompromising daring. Gruadh, the future Lady Macbeth and the daughter of 11th-century Scottish prince Bodhe, survives several kidnappings in her girlhood and, determined to uphold the traditions of fierce Celtic women warriors, learns how to fight. 2008, 352 pp.

 

The Informationist: A Thriller by Taylor Stevens

Tuesday, August 28 at 2 p.m.

This brilliant debut introduces a great new action heroine, Vanessa Michael Munroe, who doesn’t have to kick over a hornet’s nest to get attention, through her take-no-prisoners attitude. A young girl who went missing while a tourist in Africa lures Munroe from usual assignments to a hunt for information on a trail four years cold. 2011, 309 pp.

 The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

Tuesday, September 25 at 2 p.m.

Berlin, 1942: When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence running alongside stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people he can see in the distance. 2006

 

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer

Tuesday, October 30 at 2 p.m.

On average, people squander forty days annually compensating for things they’ve forgotten. Joshua Foer used to be one of those people. But after a year of memory training, he found himself in the finals of the U.S. Memory Championship. Even more important, Foer found a vital truth we too often forget: In every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories. 2011,

 

Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres

Tuesday, November 27 at 2 p.m.

The setting is a small village in southwestern Anatolia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Everyone there speaks Turkish, though they write it in Greek letters. It’s a place that has room for a professional blasphemer; where a brokenhearted aga finds solace in the arms of a Circassian courtesan who isn’t Circassian at all; where a beautiful Christian girl named Philothei is engaged to a Muslim boy named Ibrahim. 2004, 576pp