Book Club Kit
Dear Reader: World War I used to be known as the Great War—or, more touchingly, as “the war to end all wars.” Clearly, not only did WWI not put a stop to war, but also, owing to subsequent conflicts, it’s mostly not remembered at all, despite its having largely established at its outset the violent character of the twentieth century. The sheer scale of the global destruction wrought by WWI makes it impossible to fully comprehend. That’s why I knew I needed to approach this history through two perspectives: one an individual human’s view and one a literal bird’s-eye view. I hope that the dual voices of Cher Ami, the heroic messenger pigeon, and Charles Whittlesey, the courageous soldier, will expand your own understanding of bravery, dedication, love, and resilience. If, like me, you already admire pigeons, then I hope my book inspires you to admire them even more. And if you don’t, then I hope my book inspires you to take another look at these remarkable creatures. Sincerely,
Kathleen
R e adin g G r oup Qu est i on s an d To p ic s f or d i s c us s i on 1. T he book opens with two epigraphs: one from Aristotle and one from General Joseph Joffre. Why do you think the author chose these to precede the story? What themes do they set you up to expect?
2. K athleen Rooney chooses to tell the story in the alternating voices of Cher Ami, a pigeon, and Charles Whittlesey, a human. How would the story be different if she had only offered one perspective? What do the two interwoven perspectives do for the impact of the overall narrative?
3. D o you consider yourself an animal lover? Does that love extend to pigeons? Did this book change the way you look at pigeons or other animals? If so, how?
4. C her Ami speaks, from inside the Smithsonian, of “World War II, which happened even though the horrors of the Great War were said to have obviated all future war” (page 7). Did you know much about World War I, aka the Great War, prior to reading this book? If so, how did this book make you see it anew? If not, what shocked you in this book’s depiction of that conflict?
5. C ompare the attitudes that the animals have regarding their role in the war to those attitudes held by the humans. How are they similar and how are they different?
6. W hen he’s an undergraduate at Williams College, Whit writes in his yearbook that the purpose of a college education is “learning to judge correctly, to think clearly, to see and to know the truth, and to attain the faculty of pure delight in the beautiful” (page 50). How do his youthful idealism and his excellent education prepare him—or not—for the horrors of trench warfare?
7. B oth Cher Ami and Whit fall in love during their time on the front in France. How do their relationships to their beloveds—Baby Mine and Bill Cavanaugh, respectively—compare and contrast?
8. T he media, including Damon Runyon and others, plays a complex role in this story in that it makes the men—and animals—of the Pocket so famous as to require them to be saved (when, under other circumstances, they would have been sacrificed), but it also paints a simplified and damaging picture of their heroism and what they endured. How should people on the home front think about the experience of soldiers at war, given that the information that they receive will always be suspect?
9. A fter she is shipped to the United States, Cher Ami is used by the army as a public relations tool in order to make people feel better about the war. How does that make you feel?
10. W hit returns home from the war with negative feelings about the decisions made by his commanders, yet he is extremely generous with his time and his fame whenever the army or other organizations request his assistance. Why do you think that is?
11. W hit chooses not to tell anyone of his plans to board the ship to Havana, not even his most trusted friend, Marguerite. Why do you think he opted not to tell even her, and what might have happened if he had?
12. W hen James Larney, the signal-panel carrier who kept a diary in the Pocket, hears about Whit’s disappearance, he buys a ticket for the Toloa to try to understand what happened to his beloved commanding officer—but he does not feel as though he is able to comprehend it. Did you come away from the book with an understanding of what happened to Whit?
A conversation with KATHLEEN ROONEY, author of CHER AMI AND MAJOR WHITTLESEY The character of Cher Ami possesses a really interesting and peculiar consciousness. She is a pigeon, but she’s also speaking from the afterlife. As you were writing, how did you conceive of Cher Ami’s voice and what her level of omniscience would be? In what ways were her circumstances freeing and in what ways were they limiting? In our culture, the world of animals—let alone the idea of emotionally complex animals with a command of language—tends to be dismissed as kid stuff. Like, talking animals? That’s for children. This bias is unfortunate, though, because increasingly, we’re discovering that animals truly are capable of far more thought, reason, and emotion than science and human vanity have historically given them credit for. It was exciting for me to pick a perspective—that of a real-life war hero who happens to be a deceased messenger pigeon—that would be a challenge to that arrogance. As series like the adult cartoon Bojack Horseman have shown, talking animals can be a way to explore heavy questions and events, and I hope I’ve done something like that with Cher Ami. The fact that she is real—she really lived and died in service to the U.S. military and she really is taxidermied inside the Smithsonian—suggested so much narrative possibility. It was engaging to get to make up the rules by which her consciousness—both in life and in the afterlife—would work in the book. You tell the story of Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey with such care and compassion. What initially drew you to this story? And what were you hoping to bring to the story in a novelization that wasn’t apparent or reflected in factual historical accounts? Both Cher Ami and Charles Whittlesey were colossally famous in their day—from the moment they became well-known in 1918 all the way up until World War II overshadowed World War I. But I was struck, when I was learning about them, by the propagandistic use to which their experiences were put. The deaths of the tens of thousands of pigeons who were killed in WWI should be horrifying, as should the deaths of the millions of enlisted men—not to mention civilian men, women, and children—killed in the conflict. But at the time, the telling of the stories of Cher Ami and Whit was almost exclusively used to suggest that actually, no, the war was full of triumphs and heroism—animals and men who gave the last full measure in a righteous conflict. I wanted to examine them in a more subtle and shaded way and to see who they were before they became shorthand for American valor. Because they were valorous—what they both did is incredible. But to just say “Welp, they were heroes!” is to reduce what it must have been like to be them, and to sweep their complexity and joy and suffering away.
Has your relationship to pigeons changed over the course of writing this book? How so? Rooting for the underdog has always been my inclination, and these days, pigeons are kind of the underdogs of the avian world. People ignorantly claim that pigeons are dirty and dumb, that they harbor disease, that they’re ugly—none of which is true. They claim—to quote a foolish and grating phrase—that they’re “rats with wings” (which I find insulting not only to pigeons but also to rats, who are impressive animals in their own right). But ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved them—their ability to live under even the most adverse conditions, the iridescence of their feathers, their cooing sounds, their rippling flight. My affection probably goes all the way back to watching Mary Poppins when I was very small and being brought to tears by the song “Feed the Birds” and the sequence of the homeless woman outside St. Paul’s Cathedral selling crumbs for “tuppence a bag.” Pigeons—in addition to being beautiful, intelligent, loving, and loyal—are integral to the charm of almost any urban scene. So has my relationship to them changed? Reading back over this answer, I’d say yes—I sound like even more of a kooky pigeon lady than I did when I started the book, but I’m okay with that. Pigeons are worth it. This is not the first time you’ve fictionalized a historical figure or events. What’s the biggest challenge in making history come alive? What have you learned about the aspects of the human (or animal!) experience that endure through the ages? The challenge in writing Cher Ami was similar to the challenge of writing Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk in the sense that, because it was based on true events, I had a decent template to follow, but I had to find ways to make the story more lively than a Wikipedia chronology. If you stay too faithful to the facts, your story and characters can feel inert and flat. In the case of Lillian, the key was allowing her to take her long walk. And in the case of Cher Ami, the key was Cher Ami herself—deciding to tell 50 percent of the story in a voice that most people would never expect: first-person pigeon from beyond the grave. World War I is a subject that so much has been written about that I needed to find a small portion of a massive conflict that most readers would be unfamiliar with, but that they would be sympathetic towards. Alternating this story from the firsthand account of these two forgotten figures—one a bird and one a man, both of whom gave everything they had—seemed like the best way to bring the conflict to life and to reveal what it has to show over one hundred years later. What kind of research did you do to bring this story to life? Did you learn anything that surprised you? I was already pretty familiar with the sickening loss of human life World War I caused, with the total number of military and civilian casualties being over forty million, with an estimated twenty million deaths and twenty-one million wounded, and with the deaths breaking down to about 9.7 million military personnel and about ten million civilians. But in doing my research, the sheer scale of animal fatality blew my mind and broke my heart anew. Sixteen million animals—including dogs, mules, horses, donkeys, camels, and at least 100,000 pigeons—were dragooned by humans to “serve” in the conflict. It’s hard to figure out exactly how many of these animals died, but when they did, it was of exactly the same horrors the humans were killed by: bullets, mortars, grenades, illness, exposure, starvation, thirst, disease, and exhaustion. Numbers only tell you so much and I hope that by focusing on these two beings, one a human and one a bird, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey can help readers feel this loss from a planetary standpoint.
ALL ABOUT PIGEONS A fact sheet from KATHLEEN ROONEY
In Kathleen Rooney’s new book—CHER AMI AND MAJOR WHITTLESEY—the character of Cher Ami is based on the real life messenger bird and World War I hero of the same name. Here, the author explores the many reasons why the oft overlooked bird is worthy of our praise.
The word “pigeon” is a French translation of the English word “dove.” There’s no scientific difference between the two; they’re the same. The common city pigeon (Columba livia) is a descendant of the rock dove and is one of the first birds ever domesticated by humans, probably dating back to about 4,500 BCE in Mesopotamia. Humans and pigeons have lived closely together for millennia, thanks in part to the birds’ phenomenal homing skills which allow them to return to their nests from up to 1,300 miles away. In addition to being good navigators, pigeons are extremely strong with high endurance, and have been known to fly as far as 1,500 miles on a single trip. They can fly as high as 6,000 feet and average a speed of almost 77 miles per hour, with top speeds of almost 93 miles per hour having been attained by some birds. Because of pigeons’ homing talent, humans have called upon pigeons to carry the news throughout history, ranging from messages on flood levels up and down the Nile in ancient Egypt to the results of the Olympic Games in Greece in the eighth century. As early as 500 BCE, the emperor of China used pigeons to receive messages in Beijing from outer provinces because a bird could travel in as many hours as it took a horse and rider days. Hannibal used pigeons during his siege of Rome, and Julius Caesar sent them to relay messages from his military campaigns in Gaul. Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan created a pigeon post that spanned a sixth of the world. Besieged Parisians relied on pigeon post in the Franco-Prussian War, and, of course, pigeons served as messengers in both WWI and WWII. During World War I, over 100,000 pigeons were used on the battlefield. Pigeons are included in the Animals in War Memorial in London’s Hyde Park in honor—as the dedication says—of “all the animals that served and died alongside British and allied forces in wars and campaigns throughout time.” It was unveiled in 2004 on the ninetieth anniversary of the start of World War I. People didn’t start calling pigeons “rats with wings” until this false idea was popularized in the 1980 movie Stardust Memories; pigeons are actually quite clean and not at all disease-ridden.
Pigeons do not migrate, but, rather, adapt to one environment and remain there year-round—a lot like humans. Pigeons are one of a relatively small number of species who pass the mirror test for self-recognition. Pigeons can distinguish different humans in photographs. According to a 2016 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pigeons can be trained to recognize dozens of words, with the most accomplished pigeon being able to learn as many as sixty. According to a 1995 study published in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, pigeons can successfully learn to discriminate between paintings by Monet and Picasso. When pigeons mate, they mate for life. Male and female pigeons share equal responsibility in raising their chicks. Both take turns sitting on the eggs and both feed the babies pigeon milk—a secretion that both male and female birds produce in their crops. Pigeons are still kept as pets, bred, and raced around the world; in 2019, a Belgian racing pigeon named Armando sold for $1.4 million. The auction house said that Armando’s athleticism made him, in soccer terms, the Lionel Messi of the avian world. The brilliant inventor Nikola Tesla fell in love with a white pigeon who visited him at the window of his room in the Hotel St. Regis in New York City: “I loved that pigeon . . . as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. . . . As long as I had her, there was a purpose in life,” he said.
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