Because each of us likely has our own definition and perspective, in early 2009 John Noltner began interviewing people about what peace meant to them. His goal was to create a collection of thoughts on peace from a wide variety of people and use it to foster a larger public conversation about the topic. A freelance photographer based in Minneapolis, Noltner also took black and white portrait photographs of his subjects. In addition to creating a traveling exhibit, another result of his efforts is his book, A Peace of My Mind, Exploring the Meaning of Peace One Story At a Time, which contains excerpts of about 50 interviews and the subjects’ portraits. (Many of the full interviews are available on the book’s web site as podcasts.)

A significant number of those interviewed, particularly those with a religious orientation, tend to look toward an internal peace as a first and essential step. They believe that the personal effort of finding an inner peace contributes to and builds peace in the world as a whole. Others tend to view it as an absence of war. Yet there hasn’t been much of that, notes Luyen Phan, an international student advisor. He believes peace can arise by building on cultural awareness and exchanges so that what happens elsewhere in the world has more meaning to us.

Economic and personal security also play a role in some visions of peace. Some express the concept that “nobody gets seconds until everyone gets firsts” or that the measure of success isn’t monetary but the intangible values that prompt people to strive to help others. There is also a sense in some interviews that personal safety or the knowledge that a person has food and shelter are key components.

Some views are striking because of the individual’s background. Jamal Hashi was in elementary school when war broke out in his native Somalia. Now a restaurant owner, his observations have a somewhat unique religious backdrop and perspective.

The core of the message [in the Bible and Qur'an] is: achieve peace, give peace, and live by peace. But what do we fight about? The difference of who was the messenger. It’s like killing the mailman because he wasn’t the same mailman last week. Did you get the mail? That’s all that matters.

Others are more lyrical. Take for example, Melvin Carter Jr., a retired St.Paul police officer, who considers peace it “living symphonically” with each other. “[Y]ou know, in the symphony you’ve got all kinds of stuff happening — rhythmically and melodically and harmoniously — at the same time. [Yet the instruments work] together in such a way that doesn’t clash.”

One thing that is clear is that regardless of how people view or strive for peace, it is not a state we should consider only during particular times of the year. Thus, A Peace of My Mind would be one of those Christmas gifts that has the propensity to long outlast the event.

Hudlin Wagner in John Noltner’s A Peace of My Mind

Wilson chronicles her family’s sojourn in Running Away to Home: Our Family’s Journey to Croatia in Search of Who We Are, Where We Came From, and What Really Matters. It is a journey of family discovery more meaningful than she envisioned and into a world far different from their lives in middle America. And although Wilson sets out to discover her past, she learns more about living in the present.

Running Away to Home takes readers inside Mrkopalj and its environs. Wilson gives firsthand accounts of her and her family’s experiences. Although Wilson was the one in search of where she came from, her husband and children (six and almost four at the time) adapted more rapidly to village life and the cultural differences. One thing all of them learned is that life operates differently in a small mountain village. For example, the family agreed to rent the to-be-renovated second floor of the house of Robert Starcevic, who ran one of the town’s “bistros.” When they arrived, the remodeling had barely begun. Despite promises from Robert that it would be done in a day, a couple days, a week or two, the Wilsons never ended up living in the space they intended. Rather, they took over the smaller third floor of the house, which housed Robert’s daughters’ rooms. This was due in part to Robert often preferring to spend his days indulging in local libations and watching the world, a not uncommon activity in the village.

It may have been that approach that made a 21st Century American mother take the longest to acclimate. Rather than the constant motion of work and family activities back home, the 800 or so residents of Mrkopalj lived a slower pace. This doesn’t mean no one worked hard. To the contrary, Wilson found that life in the village could be “bone-hard.” There was no industry to speak of and many supported themselves by what they and their neighbors could grow, often on their own small plots. They would rise early to manually tend to their plots and livestock or to perform household chores. They would cut trees in the forest to gather firewood for the coming winter. Much of their work was done without the labor-saving conveniences most Americans would expect to use.

One major failing of the book, though, is that it contains no pictures, despite the fact Wilson’s web site contains 128 photos in a gallery called “Life in the Village.” Wilson says that was a conscious decision. She wants readers to come up with their own images of the village and its people in their minds. Yet virtually all readers have never taken such a step in location and daily life. Not sharing photographs in the book deprives them of actually seeing the people and sites that feature so prominently in it.

Although Wilson did not feel immediately accepted, she did catch up with her family in adjusting to and feeling the fabric of life in the village. Her search for her ancestors seemed less imperative and Wilson noted that she learned more about what their lives may have been like than about them personally. And, for her, that was perhaps the real lesson of their four months living in the village. Among other things, history and a sense of place seemed woven into the fabric of life. Croatia was far from immune from the political, nationalist and ethnic disputes that affected southeastern Europe and the Balkans. Yet while these fractures still lurked beneath the surface, they seemed far less important than the deep sense of community. This meant “they all lived together in messy harmony in Mrkopalj. In addition, for all our American advantages — jobs, industry, good malls — they felt sorry for me. No one in Mrkopalj could fathom what it must have been like to not even know my great-grandparents.”

Graced by an ability to increasingly turn at humorous eye at their acclimation process, Running Away to Home shows how the Wilsons seem to find themselves amidst a world much different than they knew. “Mrkopalj showed us that it didn’t matter what we had,” Wilson says. Instead, experiencing the small things that contributed to the life and culture of Mrkopalj stood in sharp contrast to and often felt more congruous than life in America, “a place where people had everything and appreciated so little.”

As Wilson and her family discover, even when you leave home it doesn’t mean you can’t find a niche and fellowship in other places, and in ways you might least expect.

Jennifer Wilson, Running Away to Home

Kafkaesque? In East Germany (the German Democratic Republic or “GDR”), it was entirely legal to file an application to leave the country and live elsewhere. Of course, if you applied to leave you were suspected of wanting to leave. Wanting to leave was the criminal offense of “Attempting to Flee the Republic.” Thus, a legal act made you a criminal.

Orwellian? The State Security Service (“Stasi”) had 97,000 employees in a country of 17 million. But the Stasi also had more than 173,000 informers. That meant there was one Stasi officer or informer for every 63 people. Some estimate that if all part-time informers were included, there was one informer for every 6.5 citizens. Or take the case of a highly popular East German rock band. When they sounded too political, the Stasi did not ban the band. Instead, they were told, “You no longer exist.” Not only were they not on the radio or covered in the press, the record company reprinted its catalog to omit the band.

Caught up in this perverse world were the East Germans themselves. And they are the real focus of Funder’s book, not only those who were spied upon but those who worked for Stasi. Funder, an Australian, displays her affection and admiration for the East Germans throughout her book. The book was sparked during her employment with a TV station in West Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She was puzzled why producers felt that the GDR was a subject best forgotten. She embarked on her own search to find out what it was like to live in what the German media called “the most perfected surveillance state of all time.”

Although written as a first person account of her exploration, Stasiland succeeds in allowing East Germans to tell their own story and bringing an entirely human face to both the spies and the spied upon. Stories of those affected by the Stasi’s pervasiveness, of course, abound but Funder does a fine job of finding stories among everyday people that go to the heart of life there. Surprisingly, when she placed a newspaper ad asking to speak with former Stasi officers and unofficial collaborators, she was flooded with responses. Why were there so many Stasi veterans? As a Stasi instructor told Funder, there was more and more work to do as time went on “because the definition of ‘enemy’ became wider and wider.” In fact, being investigated may have been enough alone to make you an enemy of the state.

The stories that arose in this type of atmosphere range from heartbreaking (parents separated from their ill child for years because of the Wall) to bizarre (the Stasi’s collection of “smell samples”). Like the reader, Funder is an outsider in this society, allowing readers to share her feelings and reactions as she learns of the big and small moments of life in the GDR. By recounting events and viewpoints from both sides, she also provides readers a more complete look at and better understanding of the GDR and its residents.

First published in English in 2003, Stasiland won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize of Non-Fiction in 2004. Yet the stories and the people behind them seem timeless and the book remains as worthy a read today as it did then.

Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life is an “authorized” biography of Vonnegut. In 2006, having just published Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, Shields sought and eventually obtained Vonnegut’s agreement to work with him on a biography. Unfortunately, after just three meetings, Vonnegut fell and suffered irreversible brain injuries that led to his death in April 2007. After Vonnegut’s death, his literary executors told Shields they chose someone else to write the “authorized” biography. As a result, they denied Shields permission to quote from some of Vonnegut’s letters. (The new authorized biographer was told by the estate six months later he was no longer the authorized biographer)

Yet And So It Goes (a title based on a repeated phrase in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five) is about as thoroughly researched as they come. Not only did Shields interview 125 of Vonnegut’s contemporaries, friends and family members, he still had access to some 1,500 personal letters, nearly all of them never before seen. He never quotes at length from any of those letters but provides plenty of footnotes (many chapters have 150 or more) for those interested in the source material. More important, his background as a journalist gives the book a straightforward style that makes it a pleasure for the reader who isn’t worried about where each statement comes from.

One of the most appealing aspects of the book is its balance. Approaching it chronologically, Shields details aspects of the author’s life that Vonnegut and others felt affected him psychologically and emotionally, but doesn’t meander into the pop psychoanalysis seen in some biographies. The book does not hesitate to explore Vonnegut’s often unusual relationship with his first wife, Jane, his occasional (and at times long-term) dalliances, and his perhaps even more unusual relationship with his second wife, Jill Krementz, but, for the most part, Shields lets the participants or those with firsthand knowledge speak for themselves. (Krementz refused to be interviewed for the book.) He examines the source and meaning of material in Vonnegut’s works, but doesn’t go romping off in “lit crit” analysis. He talks about the discrepancies between the public persona and the private person, but lets the reader decide whether and how it affects their view of Vonnegut.

Readers of Vonnegut’s books often encountered parts of his life, whether as part of the story or in introductions to the work. This, of course, is most notable in Slaughterhouse-Five, based on Vonnegut’s own experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany, when it was firebombed. In explaining how Vonnegut wrote, and often struggled with, his novels, And So It Goes delves deeper into how those experiences affected him and, moreover, influenced his writing. And while Vonnegut went on to become, or at least be perceived as, a spokesman for the left, Shields shows that even that isn’t as clear as it seems. To some extent, Vonnegut created the style and cast the role for himself. That isn’t to say these weren’t honestly held beliefs; it’s simply that practice is often different than theory. While he was acclaimed by many protesting the Vietnam War and critical of the capitalist system, among the investments in that spokesman’s portfolio were a strip mining company and Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of the napalm used in Vietnam. If anything, the fact he wasn’t the same age as his fans may have been to his benefit. “He was the establishment,” writes Shields, “which added gravitas to his indictments of ‘the system.’”

Shields concludes, and most readers will likely agree, that Vonnegut was “a reluctant adult,” more a man of contradictions and multiple identities than a paragon of literary or other virtue.

He was a counterculture hero, a guru, and a leftist to his fans; a wealthy investor to his broker; a champion of family and community, and yet a distant father; … a satirist of American life, but feeding at the trough of celebrity of to his ears.

So what can we conclude from Shields’ thoughtful exploration of Vonnegut, his struggles and his successes? From the standpoint of this longtime Vonnegut fan, we should be damn glad Vonnegut was the way he is portrayed in the book. Otherwise, his mark on our literary landscape and culture may not have been as profound.

So it goes.

Charles J. Shields, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life