Schedule & Reading List
Socialization from 7:00p – 7:30p on meeting nights. Book discussion from 7:30p-until. The Amazon links below are affiliate links and proceeds are used to fill the beer fridge. If you can’t see the links, disable your adblocker for this site (whitelist).
Participation requires 2 commitments: we will make 50%+ of the meetings and we will read 50%+ of each book. Without these, our discussion is hindered by the lack of trust and common (reading) vocabulary.
Wednesday January 12, 2022
King Leopold’s Ghost
Adam Hochschild
416 pages; 12:34 audiobook
In the late nineteenth century, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium carried out a brutal plundering of the territory surrounding the Congo River. Ultimately slashing the area’s population by ten million, he still managed to shrewdly cultivate his reputation as a great humanitarian. King Leopold’s Ghost is the horrifying account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions and a deeply moving portrait of those who defied him.
Tuesday, February 8, 2022
Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us
Brian Klaas
320 pages; 9:06 audiobook
Does power corrupt, or are corrupt people drawn to power? Are entrepreneurs who embezzle and cops who kill the result of poorly designed systems or are they just bad people? Are tyrants made or born? If you were suddenly thrust into a position of power, would you be able to resist the temptation to line your pockets or seek revenge against your enemies?
Corruptible draws on over 500 interviews with some of the world’s top leaders—from the noblest to the dirtiest—including presidents and philanthropists as well as rebels, cultists, and dictators. Corruptible also features a wealth of counterintuitive examples from history and social science: you’ll meet the worst bioterrorist in American history, hit the slopes with a ski instructor who once ruled Iraq, and learn why the inability of chimpanzees to play baseball is central to the development of human hierarchies.
Corruptible challenges basic assumptions about becoming a leader and what might happen to your head when you get there. It also provides a roadmap to avoiding classic temptations, suggesting a series of reforms that would facilitate better people finding a path to power—and ensuring that power purifies rather than corrupts.
Thursday, March 17, 2022 (New Date)
The Odyssey
Homer (Robert Fitzgerald translation)
515 pages; 10:15 audiobook
Composed at the rosy-fingered dawn of world literature almost three millennia ago, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home.
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters
Steven Koonin
320 pages; 7:14 audiobook
Steven Koonin draws upon his decades of experience—including as a top science advisor to the Obama administration—to provide up-to-date insights and expert perspective free from political agendas.
This book gives readers the tools to both understand the climate issue and be savvier consumers of science media in general. Koonin also tackles society’s response to a changing climate. Unsettled is a reality check — what we know, what we don’t, and what it all means for our future.
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965
Jia Lynn Yang
336 pages; 11:56 audiobook
The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia.
Jia Lynn Yang recounts how lawmakers, activists, and presidents from Truman through LBJ worked relentlessly to abolish the 1924 law. Through a world war, a refugee crisis after the Holocaust, and a McCarthyist fever, a coalition of lawmakers and activists descended from Jewish, Irish, and Japanese immigrants fought to establish a new principle of equality in the American immigration system. Their crowning achievement, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, proved to be one of the most transformative laws in the country’s history, opening the door to nonwhite migration at levels never seen before – and changing America in ways that those who debated it could hardly have imagined.
Wednesday, June 8, 2022
This Tender Land
William Kent Krueger
464 pages; 14:19 audiobook
A novel about an orphan’s life-changing adventure traveling down America’s great rivers during the Great Depression, seeking both a place to call home and a sense of purpose in a world sinking into despair.
1932: Located on the banks of the Gilead River in Minnesota, Lincoln School is home to hundreds of Native American boys and girls who have been separated from their families. The only two white boys in the school are orphan brothers Odie and Albert, who, under the watchful eyes of the superintendent Mrs. Brickman, are often in trouble for misdeeds both real and imagined. The two boys’ best friend is Mose, a mute Native American who is also the strongest kid in school. And they find another ally in Cora Frost, a widowed teacher who is raising her little girl, Emmy, by herself.
As they search for a place to belong, these four remarkable children will lose their innocence but gain the strength to survive in the face of terrible loss.
Tuesday, July 5, 2022
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Richard Rothstein
368 pages; 9:32 audiobook
Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation but through laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments.
The deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.
Thursday, August 4, 2022 (NEW DATE!)
Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam
Vivek Ramaswamy
368 pages; 10:27 audiobook
Vivek Ramaswamy is a traitor to his class. He’s founded multibillion-dollar enterprises, led a biotech company as CEO; he became a hedge fund partner in his 20s, trained as a scientist at Harvard and a lawyer at Yale, and grew up the child of immigrants in a small town in Ohio. Now he makes the case that politics has no place in business and sets out a new vision for the future of American capitalism.
This book offers a better way forward. America’s elites may want to sort us into demographic boxes, but we don’t have to stay there. Woke, Inc. begins as a critique of stakeholder capitalism and ends with an exploration of what it means to be an American in 2021 – a journey that begins with cynicism and ends with hope.
Tuesday, October 4, 2022 (TWO MONTH GAP)
Reading 1: The 1619 Project (PDF Download of the original, not the 2021 book)
Reading 2: Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers
Robert L. Woodson Sr. (Editor)
224 pages; 7:01 audiobook
The 1619 Project is a long-form journalism endeavor developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, writers from The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine which “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.”
According to the new orthodoxy, the United States was founded as a racist nation—and everything that has happened throughout our history must be viewed through the lens of the systemic oppression of black people. A collection of the most prominent and respected black scholars and thinkers has come together to an alternative story of black Americans in all its complexity, diversity of experience, and poignancy.
Wednesday, November 9, 2022
The Lincoln Highway
Amor Towles
592 pages; 16:39 audiobook
In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew.
Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.
Tuesday, December 6, 2022
Folks, This Ain’t Normal
Joel Salatin
371 pages; 15:14 audiobook
From farmer Joel Salatin’s point of view, life in the 21st century just ain’t normal. Here, he discusses how far removed we are from the simple, sustainable joy that comes from living close to the land and the people we love. Salatin has many thoughts on what normal is and shares practical and philosophical ideas for changing our lives in small ways that have big impacts.
Salatin, hailed by the New York Times as “Virginia’s most multifaceted agrarian since Thomas Jefferson [and] the high priest of the pasture”, and profiled in the Academy Award-nominated documentary Food, Inc. and the best-selling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, understands what food should be: wholesome, seasonal, raised naturally, procured locally, prepared lovingly, and eaten with a profound reverence for the circle of life.
And his message doesn’t stop there. From child-rearing to creating quality family time, to respecting the environment, Salatin writes with a wicked sense of humor and true storyteller’s knack for the revealing anecdote.
What I Think 