For our April 25 online book club, we'll discuss THE FLAG, THE CROSS, AND THE STATION WAGON: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened, by Bill McKibben (2022).
You need not have attended a previous discussion to join us for this one. We'll discuss the book until about 8:00, followed by open conversation.
If you'd like to read ahead:
May 23 -- Leave Only Footprints, by Conor Knighton
June 27 -- The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson (fiction)
July 25 -- A Wild Idea, by Jonathan Franklin
The Zoom link to the discussion is posted on the right, visible to those who RSVP. PLEASE NOTE: THIS LINK DISAPPEARS AT THE MEETUP START TIME, THAT IS, 7:00 PM. We'll be available from 6:50 on to help anyone who might need extra time to connect.
You will need a computer, laptop, smartphone or other device with internet access. It's pretty easy; if you're curious, check out
https://zoom.us/.
If you can't get on, call us at 303-300-2368.
We hope to "see" you there!
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Bill McKibben—award-winning author, activist, educator—is fiercely curious. “I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity.”
Like so many of us, McKibben grew up believing—knowing—that the United States was the greatest country on earth. As a teenager, he cheerfully led American Revolution tours in Lexington, Massachusetts. He sang “Kumbaya” at church. And with the remarkable rise of suburbia, he assumed that all Americans would share in the wealth.
But fifty years later, he finds himself in an increasingly doubtful nation strained by bleak racial and economic inequality, on a planet whose future is in peril.
And he is curious: What the hell happened?
In this revelatory cri de coeur, McKibben digs deep into our history (and his own well-meaning but not all-seeing past) and into the latest scholarship on race and inequality in America, on the rise of the religious right, and on our environmental crisis to explain how we got to this point. He finds that he is not without hope. And he wonders if any of that trinity of his youth—The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon—could, or should, be reclaimed in the fight for a fairer future.
“This is a book that every American who cares about democracy and truth needs to read. . . So much went wrong over the fifty-plus years McKibben traces, and he follows the lines with care and sympathy.“
―HBT News
