Ten Lessons For A Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (October 6, 2020) 320 Pages
 Fareed Zakaria, noted columnist, author and CNN host, has applied his considerable intellect to examining the “emerging post-pandemic world”. His ability to formulate a perspective that is both abstract and practical is brilliant, and his work is hugely enlightening and thought-provoking. This compact little book abounds with insights and is wholly readable, almost as a handbook. It is a “must-read” as we begin to come out of the worst of this global disaster.
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This Month’s Book Recommendations

Parable of the Sower
by Octavia E. Butler
Grand Central Publishing; Reprint edition (April 30, 2019) 368 pages
When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyper-empathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others’ emotions.

Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny. More

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
by Heather McGhee
One World (February 16, 2021) 448 pages
Heather McGhee’s specialty is the American economy—and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the financial crisis to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a common root problem: racism. But not just in the most obvious indignities for people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too.

It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out? More

This Month’s Book Recommendations

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Chelsea Green Publishing (March 22, 2017) 320 Pages
Economics is the mother tongue of public policy. It dominates our decision-making for the future, guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times.
Pity then, or more like disaster, that its fundamental ideas are centuries out of date yet are still taught in college courses worldwide and still used to address critical issues in government and business alike.
That’s why it is time, says renegade economist Kate Raworth, to revise our economic thinking for the 21st century. In Doughnut Economics, she sets out seven key ways to fundamentally reframe our understanding of what economics is and does. Along the way, she points out how we can break our addiction to growth; redesign money, finance, and business to be in service to people; and create economies that are regenerative and distributive by design.
Named after the now-iconic “doughnut” image that Raworth first drew to depict a sweet spot of human prosperity (an image that appealed to the Occupy Movement, the United Nations, eco-activists, and business leaders alike), Doughnut Economics offers a radically new compass for guiding global development, government policy, and corporate strategy, and sets new standards for what economic success looks like. More

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson
Random House (August 4, 2020) 496 pages
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. More

This Month’s Book Recommendation by Paula McCormack

Evicted, Poverty and Profit in the American City 
by Matthew Desmond
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, 2016
Crown; Reprint edition (February 28, 2017) 448 pages

EVICTED is a wrenching sociological study of the effects of the housing crisis in our cities and how our economic system perpetuates the severe problems associated with it. Although non-fiction, it is not academic in its approach; rather, the author shares the personal experiences of several families as they try to keep some form of housing. It’s very clear as the reader follows these people’s stories, that Desmond refrains from any judgment, and lets the reader come to his or her own conclusion as to how and why people seem stuck in such dead-end lives while living in the “land of opportunity”. It’s a wake-up call for anyone who blames poor people for being poor, as any group of people who have experienced generational housing problems would succumb to these forces. Of course, individuals vary and sometimes break free of the cycle, but with much difficulty, despite our social support networks which do little to address this issue. Without a stable home, even a very modest or substandard home, people cannot develop the skills they need to come into adulthood responsibly. It truly is one of the basic human needs (air, water, food and shelter). Without STABLE shelter, one has little security, sense of community, continuity in education or sense of hope. Without home, very little else is possible.

This Month’s Book and Film Recommendations

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy
by Talia Lavin
Hachette Books (October 13, 2020) 288 pages
Culture Warlords is the story of how Lavin, a frequent target of extremist trolls (including those at Fox News), dove into a byzantine online culture of hate and learned the intricacies of how white supremacy proliferates online. Within these pages, she reveals the extremists hiding in plain sight online: Incels. White nationalists. White supremacists. National Socialists. Proud Boys. Christian extremists. In order to showcase them in their natural habitat, Talia assumes a range of identities, going undercover as a blonde Nazi babe, a forlorn incel, and a violent Aryan femme fatale. More

Jonathan Scott’s Power Trip
KPBS Video, Independent Lens Film Series
Property Brothers co-host and home-renovation expert Jonathan Scott journeys all across the U.S. to uncover why clean, renewable energy isn’t available to all. While traveling to learn both the obstacles and opportunities for achieving energy freedom, Jonathan talks with conservatives fighting for solar freedom; sits down with farmers struggling to make ends meet; engages coal workers desperate for a new, healthy means of making an income; the Navajo Nation who built a utility-scale solar plant; religious leaders who made a desperate attempt to help meet their community’s energy needs; and politicians at the forefront of the battle for energy freedom. More