Reading Local Seattle

The Global Issues & Ethics Book Group is devoted to discussing books that cover the most relevant topics of our everyday lives. The selection for September is The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria describes "the rise of the rest" in The Post-American World—the political and economic ascendance of countries such as China, India, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and Kenya. With his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination, Zakaria outlines the contemporary diffusion of power, drawing on lessons of history to help the United States face the challenge—and opportunities—of the post-American world. Reza Aslan in Slate called it, "A far-reaching analysis...Zakaria's strength lies...in offering a lens through which to understand America's role in a globalized world."

The Global Issues & Ethics Book Group is devoted to discussing books that cover the most relevant topics of everyday lives. Our August selection is Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey D. Sachs. The world stands at a crossroads. Either we continue on our path of environmental degradation, rapid population growth, and vast populations trapped in extreme poverty—or we choose international cooperation and sustainable development and avoid the cascade of global crises that will surely result if we do not. Drawing on years of experience as economic advisor to governments and organizations across the globe, Sachs presents a new paradigm that offers practical solutions—and genuine hope for a crowded planet. The New York Times Book Review called it, "Lucid, quietly urgent, and relentlessly logical...this is Big think with a capital B."

Each month, the Elliott Bay Book Club reads and discusses the best in contemporary fiction with the occasional classic thrown in for good measure. Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days is a multifaceted retelling of the story of John Henry, the black steel driver who died outracing a machine designed to replace him. On another level it's the story of a disaffected black journalist on a mission to set a record for junketeering who attends the first annual John Henry Days festival. It is also a high velocity thrill ride through the tunnel where American legend gives way to American pop culture, replete with p.r. flacks, stap collectors, blues men, and turn of the century song pluggers. John Henry Days is an acrobatic, intellctually dazzling, and laugh-out-loud funny book that will be read and talked about for years to come. The late John Updike said it, "Does what writing should do; it refreshes our sense of the world ... An ambitious, finely chiselled work."

Elliott Bay's Drama Book Group, Stages, meets once a month to read, enjoy and discuss great plays and dramatic works, contemporary and classic, from the U.S. and around the world. The selection this month is Life After God by Michael Lewis MacLennan, adapted from the story by Douglas Coupland. This play is a lively, penetrating look at the first generation raised without religion. The play centers on the eccentric, sensitive Scout and six friends who went to school together, and how their lives unravel fifteen years later as they face the challenges and disillusionment of adulthood.

As the literature of ideas and imagination, Science Fiction and Fantasy simply demands discussion. The groups selection for July is The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. The Earth's leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand—despite the fact that the fierce alien enemy they would oppose is inscrutable, unconquerable, and very far away. A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite military unit, Private William Mandella, has been propelled through space and time to fight in the distant thousand-year conflict; to perform his duties and do whatever it takes to survive the ordeal and return home. But "home" may be even more terrifying than battle, because, thanks to the time dilation caused by space travel, Mandella is aging months while the Earth he left behind is aging centuries... Jonathan Letham says, "There are a handful of moments when an American science fiction novel has abruptly and seemingly effortlessly satisfied every possible expectation conveyed not only by the genre's ambitions, but by the whole literary landscape with which it was contemporary: Sturgeon's More than Human, Dick's The Man in the High Castle, LeGuin's The Dispossessed, and Gibson's Neuromancer. The Forever War is one such book, and like those others, still carries with it that air of recognition and possibility."