Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

Slate critics Dan Kois, Hanna Rosin, and Meghan O'Rourke discuss Lawrence Wright's epic investigation into Scientology.

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This month World Book Club are guests of the American Embassy in London and Harriett Gilbert and a studio audience will be talking to US superstar thriller writer John Grisham. They will be discussing his gripping debut novel A Time To Kill, written almost 30 years ago while Grisham was still a jobbing attorney in Mississippi.

In the novel a black father takes the law into his own hands after worrying that the legal system will fail to adequately punish the two white men who brutally raped and beat his daughter. In a fascinating discussion about racism in the deep south of America hear how John Grisham has wrestled with his own feelings of prejudice, his changing views on the death penalty and how he's stumped for words when told he's beautiful!

(Image: John Grisham. Credit: Bob Krasner)

Can the spoken word be a reliable record of past events?

For many Native people, the answer is unequivocally affirmative. Histories of family, tribe, and nation, narratives of origin and migration, foodways and ceremonies, and the provisions of countless treaties have been passed down through successive generations without written documents. The colonizing society has maintained a starkly different view, elevating the written word to a position of authority and dismissing the authenticity of oral tradition. Are these two views irreconcilable?

Exploring the contested memorialization of four controversial episodes in the history of the Delaware (or Lenape) Indians’ encounter with settlers, Andrew Newman finds unexpected connections between colonial documents, recorded oral traditions, and material culture. On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) is a thoughtful meditation on how we know the past.

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This month on World Book Club Harriett Gilbert will be talking with one of Sri Lanka’s leading writers, Romesh Gunesekera, about his acclaimed novel Reef.

Reef is the moving, multi award-winning story of young Triton, a talented young chef who goes to work for Mister Salgado, a marine biologist obsessed by swamps, sea movements and the island's disappearing reef.

So committed is Triton to pleasing his master’s palate that he is oblivious to the political unrest threatening his Sri Lankan paradise, and yet subtle undercurrents of impending doom do ripple through Triton’s haunting story of memory and friendship.

Slate’s Dan Kois, Hanna Rosin, and David Haglund discuss Lauren Groff’s novel of a 1970s hippie commune.

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Joy Porter is the author of Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America (University of Nebraska Press, 2011).  She has also written several other publications, including, To Be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker (University of Oklahoma Press, 2001) and Land & Spirit in Native America (Praeger Press, 2012), and she co-edited a book with Kenneth M. Roemer, entitled The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2005).  In her latest book, she carefully tells the fascinating story of an elusive subject that sparks many historical debates: the organizational history and inclusion of Native American freemasons in America.  She covers the broad chronology of freemasonry in general, from the British origins in the  sixteenth-century to freemasonry in America from the eighteenth- to the twentieth-centuries. She explains how freemasonry is one of many institutions that exemplified the process of the transatlantic exchange of ideas from Europe to the Americas.  More specifically, she examines the Native American freemasonry from an interdisciplinary approach, such as using theories from performance studies and socio-psychological ideas of associationalism.  Furthermore, she examines Native American freemasonry from the lense of understanding the idea of “ornamentalism” (a concept borrowed from Edward Said’s work, Orientalism) to evoke the historical and racial perceptions of Native Americans from the colonial era, and how some of these ideas shifted over time.  Listen in.

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Deploying hashtags and hunger strikes, flash mobs and vigils, the Idle No More movement of First Nation peoples in Canada is reaching a global audience. While new technology and political conditions alter the landscape of dissent, Indigenous activists using a wide tactical array to further their demands is not anything new, the media’s breathless claims notwithstanding.

Frederick E. Hoxie has composed a powerful new book highlighting this truth. In eight moving chapters stretching from the American Revolution to the contemporary period of self-determination, This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made(Penguin 2012) introduces us to courageous men and women whose names might not be familiar but whose legacies are still felt. Facing down a settler state determined on their erasure, they struggled to carve out a place for Native nationhood within — but not necessarily of— the polity that surrounded them.

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To mark the release of the acclaimed film of David Mitchell’s masterpiece Cloud Atlas around the world, there’s another chance to catch the multiple prize-winning English author talking about his dazzling novel.

With dramatic use of time-shifts and literary forms, Cloud Atlas circles the globe, reaching from the South Seas of the nineteenth century to a post-apocalyptic future.

Offering an enthralling and often chilling vision of humanity’s will to power and where it will lead us, David Mitchell's deftly crafted novel follows the stories of six people whose lives interlock in subtle and mysterious ways.

So go see the film or even better read the book and listen for another chance to join Harriett Gilbert and writer David Mitchell to hear what readers both in the studio and around the world made of Cloud Atlas.

Slate’s David Plotz, Julia Turner, and Seth Stevenson celebrate Jane Austen’s classic novel on its 200th birthday.

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Colin Calloway is one of the leading historians of Native American history today and an award- winning author. Calloway is the John Kimball, Jr. 1943 Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hanover, and has been part of the institution for several decades.  He has published a textbook, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (Bedford/St. Martin’s), which has a fourth edition published in 2012.

Not surprisingly, he has also published a fascinating new work entitled Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Dartmouth College Press, 2010).  When we think about the history of Indian education, we may think about the broad legacy of educating Native Americans at boarding schools from the late-nineteenth to the twentieth century, or more specifically about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, or Native American educational program that existed at Hampton University, the historically black college in Virginia.  However, Calloway covers a much older legacy of Native American education rooted in the eighteenth-century, and continues to the present-day at Dartmouth College.

As an alumna of the College, I was always fascinated by the “Indian history” at this institution. Some current ways the college pays homage to its original mission include recruiting Native American students, supporting academic and student resources, such as the Native American Studies department, and the Native American Program which hosts college-wide events, such as the upcoming 40th annual Pow Wow held in May.  Calloway’s book provides greater insight into understanding how the shadows of Dartmouth’s complicated colonial history of Native American education are viewed today.  Listen in to learn more about this fascinating study.

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