Join Acorn's New Nonfiction Book Club!

 

Acorn is pleased to announce that we’ve started a nonfiction book club!  Our first selection is Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed, a memoir of unusual candor and substance. Think of it as Eat, Pray, Love for the 99%; or the saner person’s Into the Wild. It’s also enjoying an extended moment in the cultural spotlight as the latest pick in Oprah’s Book Club and a future Reese Witherspoon movie.

By 26, Strayed had endured the death of her mother and subsequent disintegration of her family and marriage. Still grieving, she drops out of college, dates the seriously untrustworthy, and heads towards a dangerous addiction. By happenstance she learns about the Pacific Crest Trail—a rugged nature path that begins at the U.S-Mexico border and ends in British Columbia—and begins saving and planning for her expedition. Though she was a backpacking novice, she tackles an 1,100-mile segment along the mountains of California and Oregon.

Don’t worry, Strayed doesn’t magically transform into an indestructible Amazonian goddess during her journey. Instead, she learns how to reflect, adapt, and appreciate her life in ways that really resonate. She writes about finding a way to keep going, even when you’re underprepared and overwhelmed by the task at hand--and possibly broke, very hungry, and missing a hiking boot. Her self-deprecating wit and tendency to moon over the unwashed hunks she encounters on the PCT bring levity to her powerful story.

Please contact the Reference Department to sign up for the club and to reserve your copy of Wild. The book club’s first meeting will take place on Thursday, October 4 at Oliver’s Bar and Grill at 7:30 p.m. Join us for a lively discussion and a refreshing beverage! 

-Megan

Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard

After the mysterious, but seemingly accidental, murder of his estranged father in a London suburb, former advertising agent Richard Pearson decides to visit his father’s adopted home.  As he investigates the murder, he discovers the dark side of the unassuming suburb: the megamall at the center of town. The local residents have become enamored with the mall and the consumerist lifestyle that goes with it. The novel begins as a traditional mystery complete with an elusive love interest, but it gradually becomes a typical Ballard dystopia when the residents’ consumerism leaves them with a void that can only be filled with violence.  They harass immigrants, stage violent marches through town, and aggressively support local sports teams.  In Kingdom Come, consumerism leads to boredom and boredom leads to fascism. For those readers who are unfamiliar with JG Ballard, this is a light introduction to his more brutal works like Crash and Cocaine Nights.

-Mike

Engines of Change by Paul Ingrassia

With the abundance of information regarding every aspect of car ownership, maintenance, and lore available at a moment's notice, it's become increasingly difficult to tie both new and meaningful narratives to the history of the automobile. From Henry Ford's Model T and the beginnings of a middle class, to the alternative-fuel Prius and its barrage of Hollywood drivers, most of the facts have become common knowledge, the type of thing that doesn't take a history book or a manual to learn. By acknowledging the difficulty in crafting a non-academic study of cars, Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars by the Pulitzer-Prize winning Paul Ingrassia is the perfect text for a shallow study of 20th century car culture.

For example, the chapter on Cadillac tackles the rise of Chrysler's designer Virgil Exner and his creation of sleek tail-fins, the ultimate status symbol that was later adopted by General Motors to create one of the most iconic symbols of post-war prosperity and a nod to the Cold War space-race. Weaving through references to literature, television, and film captures what made car-culture appealing to both teenagers and their parents, from the appropriation of a German people's car (originally commissioned by Adolf Hitler) by Grateful Dead-loving hippies, to the excesses of John DeLorean's quintessential 80's drug-trafficking vessel popularized by the Back to the Future franchise. More than mere references, the book strays from being overtly preachy or detailed to provide brief snapshots of American culture, whether economic, social, or just a glimpse at the evolving nature of marketing tactics, while avoiding the incomprehensible jargon of automobile aficionados. While most likely unhelpful to experts, the book caters mercifully to the casual curiosity of readers who enjoy seeing where cultural paths cross with their Automobile 101 certificate in hand. In Engines of Change, Ingrassia tackles not just fifteen of the most well-known cars in North America, but their legends as pop culture icons.

-Anna

Seven: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker

Seven: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker is a new book on Acorn's shelf.  Hatmaker takes seven months to intentionally focus on seven areas of life:  clothes, shopping, waste, food, possessions, media, and stress.  The book reads like a blog where the author writes about her reflections about each area, how much she has been shaped by each area, and how she takes deliberate action to cut out the excess in her life.  She uses this experiment to think about how the average American has so much excess, especially compared to the rest of the world.  She considers how her excess has interfered with her relationship with God and with others.  Although some of her ideas may be considered radical or extreme, this book does offer ways to reflect on one's own thoughtless excesses in life, why and how to cut back, and how to generously give to others. 

-Janice

Youth Services Department

The Illustrated Biographies of Lauren Redniss

Through eclectic primary sources, insatiable curiosity, and inventive illustrations, Lauren Redniss exquisitely captures the riveting experiences and consequences of her subjects’ lives in her biographies.

Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Dorothy Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfeld Follies looks at the existence of a dancer, actress, teacher and general enthusiast who toured the world and met everyone from Charles Lindbergh to Caribbean dictators without missing a beat. The book’s ingenious scrapbooking renders Eaton both more familiar and monumental, perfectly grounding her spirited life within the context of a dizzying century.
Marie Curie’s improbable trajectory—which is the stuff of some potent Brontë-Alger cocktail—is brought to life in the stunning Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, a Tale of Love and Fallout. Born Maria Skłodowska in Poland, Curie was first a governess shunned by her motherland’s aristocrats, then the Sorbonne’s first female professor, and later the first person to win multiple Nobel Prizes. She worked (and bicycled!) happily alongside Pierre until his tragic carriage accident, then became the victim of a xenophobic witch-hunt.

Redniss really digs into the Curies’ far-reaching accomplishments. Yes, their discoveries brought about great advances in medicine, but also laid the foundation for the atomic bomb. The book’s cyanotypes have a haunting, dreamy vivacity that beautifully captures the Curies’ feverish, indomitable minds. Plus, they actually glow.

I highly recommend Redniss’s books to anyone looking for an intimate, inspired take on other people’s lives.

-Megan

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ernest Cline, best known for his acclaimed film Fanboys, packs the same joy of all things geeky, intergalactic, and (surprisingly) sentimental in his debut novel, Ready Player One. Set in 2044, a future where the virtual reality program OASIS is an all-encompassing, 24/7 lifestyle for avatars in escape from the dreadful world of oil shortage and overpopulation, young Wade Watts is swept into a frenzied search for the creator's hidden egg: billions of dollars and total control of the hundreds of universes in OASIS. Like the beloved video games of the creator's childhood, the egg can only be found by solving a number of increasingly difficult puzzles based on 80's pop culture. Whether reciting movie dialogues or solving baffling riddles, Wade will have to fight to find the egg before the Sixers, an evil empire with their own plans to turn OASIS into a giant, money-making machine.

Despite the recent over saturated trend towards nostalgia, the ultimate key in appreciating Ready Player One is finding the humor in Cline's earnest devotion to Devo, Monty Python, and Dungeons & Dragons: everything fabulous and geeky pre-1990. With a fast-paced style reminiscent of role playing games and a heavy dose of vintage television shows (spoiler alert! There are robots), Cline's tribute to the intellect of pop culture obsession never overshadows the very real narratives of isolation, the dangers of escape, and the ever-persistent threat of giant corporations. Funny, entertaining, and yes, nostalgic, Cline's take on good versus evil provides the perfect backdrop for this virtual egg hunt.

-Anna

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

David Graeber is a former professor of Anthropology at Yale and he currently works in the Social Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London; he is also an outspoken Anarchist. He has most recently been in the news because of his participation in the General Assemblies of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Graeber's anarchism is not an antagonistic rebellion, but one that fits in a certain tradition of Anthropology: a fundamental critique of capitalism. That capitalism sprung from a society based on barter and that its monetary system has only made life easier is the basic assumption of modern economics. Graeber denies that any society was ever based on barter and traces the development of both trade and coinage throughout history. He covers ancient Mesopotamia, India, Egypt and Greece through to the global recession of 2008. Moving from one geographical location to another, Graeber reveals commonalities such as the use of debt as currency, periodic forgiveness of debt, and the links between empire and coinage. Some of his claims may be radical, but he presents a well organized and lengthy base for his arguments.
With so many books being published about the current economic situation, Graeber's is unique in its scope. It's worth the read for a fresh perspective on the challenges of our modern economy.

-Mike