bookish girl book club

Hello, bookish friends. Are you ready for another book? This time we're choosing among four non-fiction books. I think they are all interesting choices and I'm curious to see what catches your eye.

Wild Swans by Jung Chang

Blending the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history, Wild Swans has become a bestselling classic in thirty languages, with more than ten million copies sold. The story of three generations of women in twentieth-century China, it is an engrossing record of Mao's impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love. Chang captures in gripping, moving -- and ultimately uplifting -- detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.

--Book summary courtesy of Simon & Schuster

Beyond the Killing Fields by Usha Welartna

In 1975, after five years of devastation and upheaval caused by civil war, the Cambodian people welcomed the victorious communist Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot. Once in power, the new regime tightly closed Cambodia to the outside world. Four years later, when the Vietnamese communists invaded Cambodia and defeated the Khmer Rouge, the world learned that during their control the Khmer Rouge had turned the country into "killing fields", in one of the most horrifying instances of genocide in history. Of an estimated population of 7 million people, about 1.5 million had been killed or had died of starvation, torture, or sickness. After the Vietnamese takeover, thousands of survivors of the Khmer Rouge, fearful of continuing war and a new communist regime, fled their homeland. Approximately 150,000 of them settled in the United States. This book documents the Cambodian refugee experience through nine powerful first-person narratives of men, women, and children who survived the holocaust and have begun new lives in America.

--Book summary courtesy of Amazon.com

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

In this interesting read for parents, Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, explores how various factors come together for the ultimate success of an individual. Gladwell compares greats such as Mozart and Bill Gates, professional hockey players and other highly successful adults and analyzes how culture, circumstance, birthdate, luck, and even the timing of entry into kindergarten may play into each person's growth potential. One of the key statistics Gladwell employs is that 10,000 hours of time spent on a given skill, especially during youth, will create excellence in that area.

--Book summary courtesy of Carol

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell writes, "It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good."