Readin' Vegans--"Doppelganger"

For our online book club on Sept. 24 we'll discuss Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World , by Naomi Klein (2023). 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. 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. If you can't get on, call us at 303-300-2368. We hope you can join us! If you'd like to read ahead: Oct. 22 -- Fast Food Genocide, Joel Fuhrman MD Nov. 19 (note 3rd Tues.) -- Everyday Utopia, Kristen Ghodsee Dec. -- no meeting ----------------------------------- What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self―a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo? Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to chart a path beyond despair. The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.