Montreal Non-Fiction Book Club Meetup

Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea:

From Goodreads:

Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the unchallenged rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population.

Taking us into a landscape most of us have never before seen, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive totalitarian regime today—an Orwellian world that is by choice not connected to the Internet, in which radio and television dials are welded to the one government station, and where displays of affection are punished; a police state where informants are rewarded and where an offhand remark can send a person to the gulag for life.

Demick takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors. Through meticulous and sensitive reporting, we see her six subjects—average North Korean citizens—fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival. One by one, we experience the moments when they realize that their government has betrayed them.

Nothing to Envy is a groundbreaking addition to the literature of totalitarianism and an eye-opening look at a closed world that is of increasing global importance.

RULES:

1. Sign-ups (RSVPs) for book discussions are open as soon as this discussion is posted.
2. There is a limit of 10 people who can sign-up. The others will be on the waitlist.
3. $2 attendance fee per Meetup or $10 for the year.
4. Please change your RSVP from YES to NO if you can no longer attend this discussion to make room for people on the waitlist.

Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End:

From Goodreads:

In Being Mortal, author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.

Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.

RULES:

1. Sign-ups (RSVPs) for book discussions are open as soon as this discussion is posted.
2. There is a limit of 10 people who can sign-up. The others will be on the waitlist.
3. $2 attendance fee per Meetup or $10 for the year.
4. Please change your RSVP from YES to NO if you can no longer attend this discussion to make room for people on the waitlist.

David Grann's The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder:

From Goodreads:

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.

RULES:

1. Sign-ups (RSVPs) for book discussions are open as soon as this discussion is posted.
2. There is a limit of 10 people who can sign-up. The others will be on the waitlist.
3. $2 attendance fee per Meetup or $10 for the year.
4. Please change your RSVP from YES to NO if you can no longer attend this discussion to make room for people on the waitlist.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance:

From Goodreads:

From bestselling authors and journalistic titans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to rethink big, entrenched problems that seem mired in systemic from climate change to housing, education to healthcare.

To trace the global history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of growing unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, the entire country has a national housing crisis. After years of slashing immigration, we don’t have enough workers. After decades of off-shoring manufacturing, we have a shortage of chips for cars and computers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean energy infrastructure we need. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.

Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the environmental problems of the 1970s often prevent urban density and green energy projects that would help solve the environmental problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions in matters of education and healthcare have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.

Progress requires the ability to see promise rather than just peril in the creation of new ideas and projects, and an instinct to design systems and institutions that make building possible. In a book exploring how can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and how we can adopt a mindset directed toward abundance, and not scarcity, to overcome them.

RULES:

1. Sign-ups (RSVPs) for book discussions are open as soon as this discussion is posted.
2. There is a limit of 10 people who can sign-up. The others will be on the waitlist.
3. $2 attendance fee per Meetup or $10 for the year.
4. Please change your RSVP from YES to NO if you can no longer attend this discussion to make room for people on the waitlist.