The Reader's Shelf—Stranger Than Fiction: True Tales

If your book group is looking for a way to rev up its meetings and move beyond the handy-dandy dysfunctional novel of the month, consider reading nonfiction. These books offer your group the opportunity to explore history, current events, biographies, and social science—and everything that falls in between. It's a way to learn more about the real world and to become more insightful readers of the daily newspaper. Plus, so much of the nonfiction that's published these days is just so interesting, and so, well, discussible.

In FAST FOOD NATION (Houghton. 2001. ISBN 0-395-97789-4. $25; pap. Perennial: HarperCollins. 2002. ISBN 0-06-093845-5. $13.95), Eric Schlosser looks at the American obsession with quick, cheap food. His lacerating portrayal of the McDonaldization of the food industry covers such topics as the meatpacking business, the plight of fast-food workers, the effect of fast food on the American diet, the flavoring secrets behind fast food, and the government's role in all of this. Start by asking your group when they think they'll next eat a hamburger and fries! (For a follow-up meeting, the group might want to read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, written in 1906, and begin the discussion with a "compare and contrast" question.)

New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell's THE TIPPING POINT: HOW LITTLE THINGS CAN MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE (Little, Brown. 2000. ISBN 0-316-31696-2 $24.95; pap. Back Bay. 2002. ISBN 0-316-34662-4. $14.95) examines how ideas, like viruses, take hold in our society. Among his examples: why unexpected best sellers like Rebecca Wells's Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood occur, why some TV shows succeed and others fail (even when they're nearly identical), why Paul Revere's midnight ride to warn the populace that the British were coming worked so well to galvanize the Americans, and why Hush Puppies® shoes are so popular. Group members might want to offer suggestions for ideas they wish would capture our imaginations—and whom they know who could make them happen.

David Simon, who garnered plaudits and fame aplenty for his gritty book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, spent a year, with coauthor (and ex-policeman) Edward Burns, getting to know the people who hung out at the corner of drug-infested Fayette and Monroe streets in west Baltimore. Their award-winning account of the people they grew to know, THE CORNER: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF AN INNER-CITY NEIGHBORHOOD (Broadway. 1998. ISBN 0-7679-0031-6. pap. $15.95), explores the bleak—really, all-but-hopeless—existence of the young people whose lives revolve around the drugs they sell, buy, and ingest. Riveting, moving, and grimly depressing, this is a must-read view of life among the most underprivileged in America today. A good question to consider is the likelihood (or not) of the war on drugs having any effect on the lives of the people portrayed in Simon and Burns's book.

In a similar vein, Barbara Ehrenreich's NICKEL AND DIMED: ON (NOT) GETTING BY IN AMERICA (Metropolitan: Holt. 2001. ISBN 0-8050-6388-9. $23; pap. Owl. 2002. ISBN 0-8050-6389-7. $13) recounts the author's experiences of going underground into the world of the working poor. Ehrenreich takes a year off from her life as a successful writer and plays the role of a woman forced, by the then newly passed Welfare Act, to go back to work for minimum wage (often $6–$7 an hour); in Ehrenreich's case this meant working as a house cleaner, nursing home assistant, and as a checker at Wal-Mart. Ask your book group to consider how long they would last—at that pay—in any of those jobs. (You might also consider reading George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, his very autobiographical novel about his experiences masquerading as a lower-class Brit.)

Sherwin Nuland, in the National Book Award– winning HOW WE DIE: REFLECTIONS ON LIFE'S FINAL CHAPTER (Vintage. 1995. ISBN 0-679-74244-1. pap. $14), helps us understand the emotional and physical realities of death. He looks very closely at the six most common causes of death, including cancer, heart attack, AIDS, Alzheimer's, accident, and stroke, but he also discusses death from old age, suicide, and murder. These discussions are framed within the particular contexts of the deaths of people with whom Nuland had a close relationship, including his older brother, an aunt, and a longtime patient. As with any wise and humane physician, Nuland clearly intended his groundbreaking book as a comfort to readers. The question that begs to be asked, then, is just how comforted the members of the book group were. (Two particularly good fiction choices for companion reads are Connie Willis's Passage and Jim Crace's Being Dead.)

Paco Underhill's WHY WE BUY: THE SCIENCE OF SHOPPING (S. & S. 1999. ISBN 0-684-84913-5. $25; pap. 2000. ISBN 0-684-84914-3. $15) deconstructs just how it is that we make our decisions of what stores to frequent and why we purchase what we do. It turns out that all those seemingly spur-of-the-moment selections are actually motivated through the almost subliminal effects of well-trained salespeople, store layout, product placement, and lighting. We all have shopping stories—the day we were dashing through Nordstrom's on our lunch hour and were captured by the sight of a beautiful blouse, the way we go into a grocery store convinced we only need a quart of milk and leave with a basket full of groceries—so a good way to approach this extremely readable book is to ponder how much of what Underhill describes matches what we know of ourselves and the stores where we shop.