In the Garden of Beasts Book Group Discussion Questions

We will be discussing Erik Larson’s In The Garden of Beasts tomorrow for the Las Vegas Non-Fiction book group. Here are the questions I will use to keep the discussion going:

Which aspects of life in Berlin surprised you the most as you read this story? How does
this version compare to others you have read?

What have learned about the period leading up the World War II that you had not known?

How does the fact that you know the eventual outcome of Nazi Germany affect the way you experience the book?

When William Dodd first went to Germany he thought that Hitler would have a positive influence on Germany. Many others, German and Non-German also believed this. Why do you think this was?

Martha thought that Germany seemed to be a modern, civilized society when she arrived in Berlin. To what extent was it at that time?

What did you think of Martha as a person?

What was it that made Dodd begin to suspect the rumors he had been hearing about Nazi brutality were true?
Why did Dodd’s warnings about Hitler fall on indifferent ears in the US? What was the primary concern of the US in its relationship with Germany?

Did America’s own anti-semitism play any role in dismissing the growing chorus of concern ?
What was Hitler’s formula for establishing control, despite limited military and economic means?

How did the slow buildup of popular support occur? What was the role of random arrests, propaganda, and a minority scapegoat?

In what ways has Hitler’s formula been repeated elsewhere in the world?

What were events/episodes you find most chilling in Larson’s account of the rise of Nazism?

What do you think of William Dodd and his family? Did you find anything about them admirable?
How does Erik Larson portray Hitler and other higher-ups in the Nazi party in this book?

Discuss the book’s epilogue, “The Queer Bird in Exile.” What does Martha’s legacy as a fighter for equality say about her spirit, and her temperament? How did she finally overcome her naïveté?

How would you have been affected by an experience like hers in Berlin?

The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau

The subtitle of this book is “set your own rules, live the life you want and change the world.” So, you may be surprised to learn that such a all-encompassing subject is covered in just 227 pages. Guillebeau has never really had a “proper” job, he has worked quite a few jobs that sound pretty terrible, volunteered in Africa for four years, and then become an entrepreneur. He spends quite a lot of time convincing the reader about the advantages of becoming an entrepreneur, talking about his own travels and shooting down any paltry excuses he has heard as to why this lifestyle cannot be lived.

I agree with Guillebeau on many things. He raises excellent points about the value of money and how much of it you might really need. He makes several short and snappy lists to focus your thinking on your goal and how to get it. He grumbles about how much time many people spend on “busywork” or filling in the time they must be at their desks with pointless tasks. He does not place a huge value on college. He puts focus on experiences rather than things.

Personally, I gave up a very cushy job with a high salary and excellent prospects to move to another country and bum around a bit, spending very little money, running a small and fulfilling business and generally waiting around to see what life will throw at me next. I like my life. My bible in this lovely comfortable lifestyle has been Tim Ferriss’
The Four Hour Work Week which I found quite a lot more useful than this one. He covers a lot of the same stuff but with lots more practical advice and a lot less showing off about how many countries he has visited.

He points out that “by itself, money has no value,” well-put and completely true. I disagree with him on savings and security, there is no way I would have given up my job if I did not have some investments to make me feel safe. But then, not everyone is lucky enough to have been in my position before they have the realisation that sitting in an office, moving numbers around on a computer, with many people whom you would not choose to spend time with, is an insane way to spend such a large portion of your life.

I read this as a sort of refresher on the philosophy in general, looking for a few new ideas, and to generally re-focus. It has done this for me, and I was able to skirt over quite a bit of it, because I have already got there on my own. I find the tone a little patronising, with the assumption that the reader has never had any of these ideas themselves, let alone has acted on any of it. I think he is right on many issues, though, and if you have ever wondered if there’s a little more to life than the nine-to-five then I recommend that you give this a read and then go away and have a very long think.

Be The Pack Leader by Cesar Millan

I watched one episode of this man’s TV show and realised that I do not take in information through the TV very well, so I needed to read one of his books. Cesar has written several books on his experiences with dogs and I am currently having some dominance issues with my youngest dog, so I chose this one.

This is not a book about how to train your dog. If you want a book with instructions on teaching commands and such like then this is not it. This book goes some way to explaining how a dog’s mind works and makes suggestions on how best for us humans to interact with them. It is fascinating and very useful, but not in the way that you would see immediate effects. This explanation of the reason’s behind a dog’s actions and reactions ought to get any dog owner thinking.

I want to be able to communicate with my dogs as best as I possibly can. They have already made a huge effort to understand me; they know several English words and will follow commands. So, it seems only polite for me to try to understand them a little better. It is not a “how to train your dog” book, probably because that would be as impossible to write as a “how to raise your kids” book. Every dog is different, and one dog could have seemingly similar behaviours to another dog, but for quite different reasons.

A lot of Cesar’s interactions with dogs are intuitive. He has spent many years dealing with them. So, this limits the advice he can give through the medium of a book. He bases a lot of his suggestions around having calm-assertive energy. I appreciate what he is saying. But. One will be calm and assertive when one feels that one knows what he is doing with a pet, if one has no clue why their pet is behaving a certain way it is hard to be calm and assertive. After ten years working in financial trading it would be equally as useful for me to tell him to make a take a large speculative position by using his gut. That only works when you have practiced it for a while. I do take his point and I am doing my best, though. I am working on being calmer around the dogs and sending the positive energy. I do believe in that. On the whole, the book has provided me with some useful food for thought.

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

I am a fan of Barbara Kingsolver, and I love the subject matter she has chosen for this book. But I did find myself skimming through quite a lot of this one. It seemed that an awful lot could have been edited out and we would still have had a nice novel.

The story centres around a woman who lives on a farm in the Mid-West-ey / Southern-ish area of the US that many Europeans such as myself will probably never visit. She is under thirty with two kids, not much of a social life and a fairly unsatisfactory marriage.

Suddenly, probably due to Global Warming, a group of butterflies decides to settles in her family’s farm. Actually, a group of butterflies is known as a “kaleidoscope of butterflies” but I felt a bit silly saying that. They should migrate to Mexico in the Winter, but this year they did not, they ended up here. Some scientists arrive to study them and to try to work out why.

Our hero, the unusually-named Dellarobia, is exposed to educated and privileged city-folk for the first time. On the whole she likes it, she feels a little beneath them intellectually and in the wider ways of the world, but she finds that she has strengths and the scientists like and respect her.

There are some lovely science bits where biology graduate and ex-scientist Kingsolver explains what could have made the butterflies come to this area, and a long conversation the characters have about Global Warming. My favourite part of the book is when a middle-class know-it-all smarty pants makes some suggestions to working-class poor Dellarobia who hasn’t eaten out in two years and buys everything she doesn’t make or grow herself at the Goodwill store on how she can reduce her carbon footprint by re-using, recycling, driving less, using electricity less and, the punch-line; flying less.

Kingsolver never fails to make me laugh or to make me think. I could have shaved off seventy or so pages from this novel but it was still a joy to read, as all her novels are.

I’m a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson

This book advertises itself to be “notes on returning to America after twenty years away.” I am a Bill Bryson fan, and have read quite a lot of his books. I know that he is an American who moved to England not long after he graduated from university, fell in love with an English woman and settled there, had a family, and stayed for a while. I find his views on my own country well-observed, unique and highly amusing. As a Brit living in the US, I have a few views of my own about the differences between our two countries, so I was looking forward to reading what he had to say.

It turns out that the chapters of this book were originally used as regular columns in some publication or other in the UK. I will agree that some of them are as advertised, and notes on returning to America after time away, but may of them are humorous comments on modern life in general, or in fact Bryson’s life in general. If you like Bill Bryson, then you will like his stories, but do not expect a book full of anecdotes about America from the perspective of someone who has just arrived. It is probably about 35% that.

I read this for the Sin City Bookers book group, in 2013, and the book was written in 1999. There are references to the millenium bug and fax machines quite a lot of grumbling about the computer that makes it a little dated. There are some issues that he discusses that I did enjoy, even on arriving from the UK in 2011 I can say that I was also baffled by the sheer amount of junk food, personal taxes, the “war on drugs,” the excessive number of cup holders American cars have, why no-one in this country walks anywhere, Thanksgiving, how very bloody cold the North East can get, the advertising of lawyers and pharmaceuticals, diners and shopping. To name but a few.

Whilst this is not my favourite Bryson book, it’s a funny one. It is not as good as the travel ones or the researched factual ones because you do not learn so much, and you do get the feeling that he is recycling his material a little in this one. There were still a few points that I had tears of laughter on my face, and many points that I had to read aloud to my husband.

The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

In this book, Mlodinow argues that in the majority of cases, successes and failures that have been attributed the clear causes are actually more likely to be influenced by chance. He gives us the anecdotal evidences of Bill Gates and Bruce Willis, both in the right place at the right time to launch their careers. I am one hundred percent with him on this. You can do certain things to put yourself in the right place at the right time, but such a lot of my own personal successes are down to luck rather than judgement, I cannot disagree with him.

The first half of the book deals with various scholars from years gone by and their theories on probability. This dragged a little for me, I am much more interested in the theories than the theoriser’s biographies, so I admit I skimmed a little here. Also, my work background has given me plenty of experience in calculating probabilities and making decisions under uncertainty so I am pretty familiar with the theory on this subject.

There are some nice stories in this book that illustrate a lot of Mlodinow’s points. There is one about a syndicate who calculated the return on an investment of buying every single lottery ticket in one US State in one week would be more than 300% so they attempted to do just that. There is another about a fifth century Greek philosopher called Zeno who said that if we want to travel anywhere we must traverse an infinite number of finite distances, which would take an infinite amount of time, therefore we never get anywhere. While I read this book I was also listening to Douglas Adams reading me his fabulous Restaurant at the End of the Universe (not at the exact same time, though, audio books are for walking the dogs to). Adams takes this a step further by saying that there are an infinite number of planets in the solar system with a finite number of beings on each one, therefore there population of the universe is zero.

There is a mind-boggling point about false positives in medical testing, where he tells us of the time when he get a false positive result for an HIV test. As he points out, the test that will be 100% successful in finding all cases of a disease will simply produce a positive result in 100% of the tests. He then compares hedge funds with coin-tossing, which I have to take points from him for doing, as an ex-trading analyst who truly believe that there is at least some skill in all that stuff.

So, this is the sort of popular science book that I like. There are new, challenging and thought-provoking ideas in here, told in a simple and clear way, with a few lovely anecdotes that I can steal. Oh, did I tell you about the wine that was given top marks by one “expert” and called the worst wine of the decade by another…?

Spook by Mary Roach

This is a humorous but informative and though-provoking look at the ways in which science has attempted to prove or disprove whether or not there is any kind of afterlife. This is such an interesting and controversial subject because I doubt very much that we can ever know the answer for sure. Although some people have had “near death experiences” and have told the tale, this is not the same as being dead. What happens after the initial few minutes of lovely fields or bright lights and tunnels? It could be heaven and angels, the eternal fire of hell, or just the lights being switched off forever. Or, of course, something else. We all have our beliefs, but not one of us can know for sure. I read it for the Las Vegas Non-Fiction book group and had a very good two hour discussion.

The afterlife that many these scientists are investigating is a general Western one. It is one of a separate dimension where the dead can pop back to ours now and again to communicate with the living. The first chapter looks at a Hindu view of reincarnation, in particular, a boy that remembers his past life. As Roach says, several children who live in countries where reincarnation is accepted have memories of past lives. It is not so common in countries where the majority of people believe something else. That is the problem with much of the anecdotal evidence on the afterlife. If someone is seeking out a medium to speak to their lost loved ones then they want it to be real. They want a connection, so they will find one. To take it a step further, none of us wants our lives to be over, so we are all hoping, perhaps some more than others, that there is something else to look forward to once this life is over.

Roach talks about the 21 grams that our bodies allegedly lose when we die. She has a look at some ectoplasm. She goes to a school for mediums. She meets with people testing various theories of what brings on hallucinations or visions of ghosts. None of the studies seem to be conclusive, to me. Of course, no proof of afterlife is not proof that there is no afterlife. Just as proof that many mediums are awful scum preying on gullible grieving people does not mean that some of them are not genuine, caring people who truly believe that they are communicating with spirits.

My summary of the book is that lots of people have been trying to prove this one way or the other for a very long time and nobody has done so yet. It is a well told story, though and roach is highly entertaining. Where we go after we are dead is a subject that everyone has pondered at one time or another so I would challenge anyone not to find it thought-provoking.