Book #1:
Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future
Date: Thursday, February 26
Time: 12:30-1:45pm
Location: KMC M8-170
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| For close to a decade, technology analyst Dan Wang―“a gifted observer of contemporary China” (Ross Douthat)―has been living through the country’s astonishing, messy progress. China’s towering bridges, gleaming railways, and sprawling factories have improved economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout the society. This reality―political repression and astonishing growth―is not a paradox, but rather a feature of China’s engineering mindset.
In Breakneck, Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China―one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad
Blending razor-sharp analysis with immersive storytelling, Wang offers a gripping portrait of a nation in flux. Breakneck traverses metropolises like Shanghai, Chongqing, and Shenzhen, where the engineering state has created not only dazzling infrastructure but also a sense of optimism. The book also exposes the downsides of social engineering, including the surveillance of ethnic minorities, political suppression, and the traumas of the one-child policy and zero-Covid.
In an era of animosity and mistrust, Wang unmasks the shocking similarities between the United States and China. Breakneck reveals how each country points toward a better path for the other: Chinese citizens would be better off if their government could learn to value individual liberties, while Americans would be better off if their government could learn to embrace engineering―and to produce better outcomes for the many, not just the few.
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Book #2:
Oryx and Crake
Date: Wednesday, March 25
Time: 12:30-1:45pm
Location: KMC M8-170
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Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey—with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake—through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.
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Book #3:
There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
Date: Thursday, April 30
Time: 12:30-1:45pm
Location: KMC M8-170
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The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.
In this gripping and deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Maurice and Natalia make a fresh start in the country’s “Black Mecca” after being priced out of DC. Kara dreams of starting her own cleaning business while mopping floors at a public hospital. Britt scores a coveted housing voucher. Michelle is in school to become a social worker. Celeste toils at her warehouse job while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children—and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation’s working homeless.
Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Goldstone reveals the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are the nation’s hidden homeless—omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive problem.
By turns heartbreaking and urgent, There Is No Place for Us illuminates the true magnitude, causes, and consequences of the new American homelessness—and shows that it won’t be solved until housing is treated as a fundamental human right.
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