Register here for 2025 Book Study Group sessions.
After registering, Zoom will send you a confirmation email with your personal link for joining the meetings. Please do not share that link; it is yours alone.
Share the fun of the Book Study Group by encouraging others to register with the link above.
Currently reading:
Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen (June 2021)
As seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times.
This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next.
Schedule:
Beginning February 17, 2025
Every other Monday for 90 minutes
9:00 am PT / 10:00 am MT / 11:00 am CT / 12:00 pm ET
Book Study Group guidelines are simple:
- Read the chapters and bring your thoughts to the next meeting.
- Register for the meetings via Zoom (using the REGISTER button below). After registering, Zoom will send you a unique link to join the series of meetings. Do not share the link, it is unique to you.
- Contact Peter Nelson with any questions
About the Book Study Group
Since 2018, between 20 and 30 avid readers meet every two weeks via Zoom to discuss. We choose books with depth and relevance to issues of the day.
List of previous books read by the Book Study Group.
Vision for the Book Study Group
- We participate in in-depth discussions and share ideas on books that speak to our ecological integrity, social and economic justice, and peaceful coexistence.
- We educate ourselves about ecological, social, economic concerns so that we have better and more effective ideas about how to co-create change, and act from knowledge and insight gained through our reading and our dialogue.
- We attract diversity.
- We have facilitators trained in helping diverse groups of individuals with different approaches and ideas to have discussions where all can be heard.
- We can act as a possible educational resource for other action groups within EAN
- We continue to select books by having members offer suggestions, and then choose by majority vote/agreement
- We encourage the formation of smaller groups from within the book group who want to chat, discuss, and just enjoy each other’s company
- We hold an annual BIG READ for all members of EAN
- We conclude each meeting with an action step to reduce GHG in the atmosphere.