Book Discussion Kits

Nonfiction Kits

The Kits: All adult titles, with summaries | All adult titles, by author | All adult titles, by title | All youth titles, by title | New Adult Titles | New Youth Titles | Information about the Kits

Kits by Genre or Age: Contemporary Fiction | Historical Fiction | Memoir/Autobiography | Mystery | Nonfiction |Grades 4-5 | Grades 6-9

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Ackerman, Diane. The Zookeeper's Wife.

The story of Jan Zabinsky, the director of the Warsaw zoo, and his wife Antonina, who sheltered 300 Jews and Polish resisters in the zoo's cages and sheds during WWII. Book Discussion Questions from BookBrowse.

Bloom, Stephen. Postville.
The author, a secular Jew and journalism professor, explores his own identity as a Jew and the culture clash that erupts in a nearby Iowa town when a Lubavitch group from Brooklyn establishes a Kosher slaughterhouse there. Book Discussion Questions from MPL.

Buford, Bill. Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.
A chronicle of a journalist's apprenticeship at Mario Batali’s New York restaurant Babbo, as well as a stint learning butchering in Italy. Book Discussion Questions from ReadingGroupChoices.

Campbell, James. The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea, the Forgotten War of the South Pacific.
Campbell follows in the footsteps of the WWII soldiers known as the Ghost Mountain Boys across New Guinea’s mountainous jungles, a journey that historians describe as "one of the cruelest in military history." Book Discussion Questions from MPL.

Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
Diamond spans the globe and millenniums to determine the reasons for the demise of ancient civilizations like the Anasazi and the Mayans. Examining the past provides lessons for the future so that we may avoid another devastating collapse. Book Discussion Questions from BookBrowse.

Ephron, Nora. I Feel Bad About My Neck.
A candid, wry, amusing collection of essays on women getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests---and life itself. Book Discussion Questions from ReadingGroupGuides.

Erenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America.

Journalist Erenreich, leaving her past life behind and working in a series of low wage jobs, chronicles the barriers to even getting by while waitressing, cleaning houses and working at Wal-Mart. Book Discussion Questions from the author.

Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures.
In chapters that alternate between the history of the Hmong and a highly personal story of a young Hmong girl who is severly ill with seizures, we learn about Hmong culture and the dramatic clash between it and American medicine in the early 1990s. Book Discussion Questions from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: the Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
Gladwell uses real-life examples to investigate the concept of "thin-slicing," the way in which one's unconscious makes instantaneous decisions. Book Discussion Guide from the author.

Graham, Katharine. Personal History.
Taking the helm as the Publisher of the Washington Post following her husband's suicide, Graham became involved in both making news and reporting on it as the Post became embroiled in Vietnam and Watergate. Book Discussion Guide from Random House.

Harr, Jonathan. A Civil Action.
In this tale of a legal system gone awry--with greed and power fighting against justice--two of the nation's largest corporations are accused of causing the deaths of children in Woburn, MA. Book Discussion Questions from WHC.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year in Food Life.

Kingsolver and her family eat only local food for a year, including home-raised turkeys and chickens and garden grown and canned veggies. Book Discussion Questions from ReadingGroupGuides.

Larson, Erik. The Devil in the White City.
Two events focused attention on Chicago in 1893: the World's Fair with its hundreds of newly built structures (all white), and the investigation into the crimes of Dr. Henry Holmes, reputedly the first American serial killer. Book Discussion Questions from ReadingGroupGuides.

Larson, Erik. Isaac's Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History.
An account of the 1900 hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas and killed 6,000 people. Larson uses personal papers, letters, newspapers and government archives as the source material for this engrossing tale. Book Discussion Questions from MPL.

Lopez, Steve. The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music.
Journalist Lopez befriends a schizophrenic former Juilliard student playing a battered violin beside a shopping cart of belongings in L.A. Chosen by Porchlight as their Madison Cares community read. Book Discussion Questions from Porchlight.

Maraniss, David. They Marched Into Sunlight.
The dramas unfolding in Saigon and Madison in October 1967 are woven together in this work by Washington Post reporter Maraniss. Book Discussion Questions from MPL.

Martinez, Ruben. Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail.
Martinez investigates the deaths of three migrant workers, the Chavez brothers. Martinez spends a year with the brothers’ extended family as they work their way across the U.S., including a stint at a Wisconsin meat packing plant. Book Discussion Questions from MPL.

McCullough, David. 1776.
Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough portrays the militarys experience during the Revolutionary War, providing insight into the lives of not only the men who led the ranks, but also those who filled them. Book Discussion Questions from MPL.

Mortenson, Greg. Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations-- One School at a Time.
During a 1993 mountain-climbing venture, author Greg Mortenson is aided by rural Pakistani villagers, then promises to help build a school there. Over the next decade, this initial promise results in his building fifty-five schools in the region.

Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.

A tough, witty discourse on why food is more than the sum of its nutritional parts. Book Discussion Questions from MPL.

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.
The moral and ecological issues of the food system are traced through four meals, one from McDonald's, one prepared from Whole Foods products, one prepared from products from a small, utopian Virginia farm, and the last from foraged and hunted food. Book Discussion Questions from Sierra Club.

Seierstad, Asne. The Bookseller of Kabul.
A western reporter shares what she learned as a burka wearing woman living with a bookseller's family in Afghanistan. Life after the fall of the Taliban includes stories both horrifying and uplifting. Book Discussion Questions from MPL.

Tolle, Eckhart. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose.
The spiritual leader who wrote The Power of Now returns with a follow-up focused on personal transformation through a changed conciousness. Book Discussion Questions from ReadingGroupGuides.

Wallach, Janet. Desert Queen: the Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Advisor to Kings¦.
This biography of Gertrude Bell, a contemporary of Lawrence of Arabia, recounts her life surrounded by powerful men-- her own countrymen and desert sheiks-- and how Bell helped shape Iraq. Book Discussion Questions from MPL.

Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us.
A ‘fantasy’ nonfiction book by a science writer that explores what would happen to the earth’s flora and fauna, as well as our built environment, if suddenly all humans disappeared. Book Discussion Questions from MPL.

Winchester, Simon. The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.
A paranoid schizophrenic, incarcerated in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum for murder, Dr. W.C. Minor provided tens of thousands of quotations for use in the Oxford English Dictionary for its first publication in the nineteenth century.