• Evil Geniuses by Kurt Andersen
• Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
• The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
• The Stranger by Albert Camus
• Gut by Giulia Enders
• Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
• Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
• Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
• Writers and Lovers by Lily King

This work of non-fiction describes a carefully planned and dangerously successful campaign that began in the 1970's to tilt power in the U.S. even more toward the rich. The author, who works in the news media, has authored both fiction and non-fiction books.

The Wikipedia pages for the author and this book. The latter provides a detailed summary of the book.

Here is an eighteen-minute video interview with the author. There are lots more videos of the author discussing this book here.

A chart showing changes in Gini coefficients for over 20 countries since World War II. Higher lines indicate greater income inequality.

Barry Ritholtz, who manages money for rich people, posted this article on the different income gains for people who are merely rich and those who are "superrich."

On page 359, the author approvingly mentions the Niskanen Center, which was "created by apostate defectors from Charles Koch's libertarian Cato Institute." They call for "free-market 'socialism'" based on markets that are designed to protect the common good. Here is their website and their lengthy policy statement,

Several reviews of the book.

The Wikipedia articles about Susan Choi and this novel.

The author's website.

A six-minute PBS video interview with the author about Trust Exercise.

Several reviews of this novel. I found the review in The Atlantic to be helpful.

Some periodicals have published longer opinion pieces about this novel, including Vox's "The mind-boggling end of Susan Choi's Trust Exercise, explained" and Slates's "What Really Happened".

The website for the Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, which Susan Choi attended.

"Peter Wohlleben ... draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers." The author worked for over twenty years for the forestry commission in Germany and is now working for the return of primeval forests. This surprise best-seller in Germany (320,000 copies in the first year) has since been translated into several other languages.

The reviews in the New York Times and the Guardian are generally positive.

Some reviewers with scientific backgrounds, however, have been more critical, including Erin Zimmerman, Sharon Elizabeth Kingsland and Sarah Boon. The latter reviewer says the author "is talking about real processes that happen in a forest. You just have to be aware that he's anthropomorphising forests excessively, and take some of his ideas with a grain of salt."

Wohlleben says that scientific accounts of the interlinking lives of trees is usually written in language that is inaccessible to non-specialists. The Wikipedia article on "Plant to plant communication via mycorrhizal networks" is an example of writing on this topic that not easily accessible.

This article from the BBC on the "woodwide web" tries to take a more balanced approach. Don't miss the photo of an astonishingly dense network of oyster mushroom mycelium.

A ten-minute video interview with the author.

An interesting seven-minute video from Oregon Public Broadcasting about the fungus that is the largest known organism in the world.

The Wikipedia article on the author.

A few days after his mother's funeral, a Frenchman in Algeria kills an Arab who was involved in a conflict with one of the Frenchman's neighbors. During his imprisonment and trial, he considers the meaninglessness of life and the indifference of the universe. The best-selling French novel ever, the title of the book sometimes translated as The Outsider. The author won the Nobel Prize for literature.

In a 1946 review of the novel in The New Republic, the reviewer says, "The tension of the story consists entirely of the obstinacy with which this man refuses to lie."

This review of the new Matthew Ward translation discusses the difficulty of getting that first sentence right.

The Wikipedia article on Camus and on this novel.

A six-minute animated TED-Ed talk on Camus' philosophy.

This brief clip of Camus presenting his Nobel Prize acceptance speech includes a key line from it.

This two-minute video by the BBC explains the origin of the term "existentialism". Stephen Fry, who played Jeeves, the "gentleman's gentleman," in the "Wooster and Jeeves" series, supplies the voice. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is male-oriented and absolutely not academic in tone.

Wikipedia's version of the arguments for and against absurdism.

Written by a young researcher working on her PhD in microbiology, this book is a charming and sometimes consciously silly explanation of the workings of the human digestive system. It includes lots of health tips and is especially strong in its explanation of the relatively new science of the human biome, the intestinal bacteria that are necessary for our survival. The book has sold more than three million copies in six languages.

The author's fourteen-minute TED talk

On page 89, the author talks about the "migrating motor complex," the intestinal "housekeeper." Here is a four-minute video of it in action.

A half-minute animated video of the intestines in motion.

The Wikipedia article about the author.

A twenty-minute video interview with the author.

"The Invisible Organ Shaping Our Lives: Milestones in Human Microbiota Research", a survey of scientific research from MIT Press.

The New York Times review of the book.

Instead of reading a book this month, we will watch a three-part PBS video at home and then discuss it together. The video is based on a book of the same name (2008, 210 pages). The author is the Provost of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and a professor at the University of Chicago. He was a co-discoverer of the key evolutionary link between fish and land dwellers. His book and video tell the story of that discovery and its meaning. Publisher: "By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genomes look and function like those of worms and bacteria."

A 96-minute video that apparently is a condensed version of the three-hour PBS videos.

An interview with the author in the New York Times

This New York Times article discusses the rise of Tiktallik memes in popular culture.

The Wikipedia article on Neil Shubin

The Wikipedia article on Tiktaalik

The PBS website for "Your Inner Fish"

According to the New York Times Book Review, this novel is "about a marriage in which each partner has a radically disparate view, not just of their union, but of the type of narrative constituted by their lives. It's as if husband and wife each inhabit a different novel, in a different genre -- one sunnily domestic, the other gothic."

Here are several reviews of the book. The reviews in the New York Times and the New Yorker provide different perspectives.

This interview with the author by the National Book Foundation provides some good insights, as does this shorter one by Entertainment Weekly.

The Wikipedia article on the author

The author's web site

A ten-minute video interview by PBS with the author about this novel.

On page 112, Lotto and Mathilde attend an opera at a site in central New York that clearly is modeled on Glimmerglass.

On page 124, Leo said he lived in a hay bale house on a commune in Nova Scotia.

During this month, we traditionally discuss the book chosen by Writers & Books for their "Rochester Reads" program. This year's selection is a novel about a wise-cracking, African American writer on a book tour who seems to be losing his grip on reality: a young boy keeps appearing to him out of nowhere.   This novel won the the 2021 National Book Award.

The Writers & Books website has information about the author and this year's programs.

Here are several reviews of the book, including this one from the Washington Post.

An interview with the author in Southern Review of Books.

A lively, twelve-minute video interview with the author.

The author's web site

The author of this non-fiction book says a hidden caste system lies beneath race relations in the U.S. In her words, "Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things."

Here are several reviews of the book. Several of the reviewers appear to be of Indian ancestry, including the author of this long review in the New Yorker.

Wilkerson acknowledges Allison Davis as a social researcher who helped to introduce the concept of "caste" to explain race relations in the U.S.

The Wikipedia article on Bhimrao Ambedkar, whom Wilkerson calls the "Martin Luther King of India".

A seven-minute interview with the author by Trevor Noah, whose "Born a Crime" LAVA read in 2019.

On page xv, Wilkerson discusses a photo of a German in 1936 who stood out in a crown by refusing to give the Nazi salute.

The author's website.

The Wikipedia articles on the author and this book.

The Wikipedia article on caste.

Wilkerson points out that it is entirely possible not to be consciously biased against African Americans yet still have a subconcious bias. The Harvard website has a self-administered test for measuring this subconcious bias. It depends on providing speedy responses to images. Helpfully, it begins with a test run that doesn't count toward the results. No one will be asked to share their test results! This test has received criticism, such as this article on the website of the American Psychological Association.

Here are some terms that waiters use, such as "4-top".

Here is an interesting hour-long conversation about this novel between Lily King and Ann Patchett. LAVA has read four novels by Ann Patchett, and Writers and Lovers is the second one by Lily King that we have read. The discussion of the book begins at the 6:58 mark.

If you are simply interested in hearing the author speak for a short while, here is a five-minute video of her telling about this book.

A brief but informative printed interview with the author.

There are an unusually large number of reviews of this novel.

The author's web site.

The pedestrian bridge over the Charles River in Boston is an important landmark in this novel. On page 189, Casey rides her bike past the flock of geese near the bridge, which, she notes is where she and Silas first kissed. This link connects to a "street view" image from Google Maps. "Drag" the image to rotate it as necessary to see the bridge and the geese in the shade of a tree. You can also click on the path to "walk" to the spot where you clicked. Pressing the "esc" key switches you to a regular map.

On page 90, the Kroks (the Harvard Krokodiloes) serenaded the restaurant with "Loch Lomand".

Casey biked to work on a nearly antique banana bike. The restaurant where she worked was near Harvard University, about a mile north of the pedestrian bridge. She lived in a potting shed that seems to have been a mile or more south of the bridge.