Mile High History Book Club

This month we will be discussing A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism by Victoria Smolkin. We will discover the various ways that the Soviet government attempted to turn the USSR into a godless society and evaluate the failures and successes of their experiments.

Length: 339 pages | ~10 hrs audiobook

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools―from education, to propaganda, to terror―to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society.

Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments.

Here's an interview with the author, if you haven't finished the book but still want to have full context: https://youtu.be/4PjCGnKNeyQ

For this meeting, we’ll be discussing Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. A tightly written history of how the assassination of James Garfield collided with 19th-century politics, medical incompetence, and one of the most grotesque failures in American public life.

Length: 354 pages | ~10 hrs audiobook

Book Description

When President James A. Garfield was shot in 1881, the bullet itself was not immediately fatal. What followed was months of suffering driven by political dysfunction, media frenzy, and doctors who confidently applied disastrously outdated medical practices. Candice Millard tells the intertwined story of Garfield, his deranged assassin Charles Guiteau, and the state of American medicine at the dawn of the modern age.

The book is as much about how power, ego, and bad science can kill as it is about the murder of a president, and it makes a strong case that Garfield was effectively finished off by his doctors, not his shooter.

Here's a lecture given by the author, if you haven't finished the book but still want to have full context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aHBCPNAKB0&pp=ygUhZGVzdGlueSBvZiB0aGUgcmVwdWJsaWMgaW50ZXJ2aWV3

For this meeting, we’ll be discussing Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent by Dipo Faloyin. A comprehensive survey of the diverse cultural and political landscapes across the African continent that critiques the historical and contemporary misconceptions of the region as a monolith.

Length: 400 pages | ~9.5 hrs audiobook

Book Description

Too often, the Western imagination treats Africa as a single, tragic entity defined solely by poverty and strife. Dipo Faloyin offers a necessary and witty corrective, tracing the continent's story from the arbitrary, "sandbox" borders drawn by European powers at the 1884 Berlin Conference to the modern-day pulse of metropolises like Lagos.

Here is a lecture and interview with the author that provides excellent context on the book’s central themes and the "stereotypes of modern Africa": Dipo Faloyin — Africa Is Not a Country