Non-Fiction Book Club - Zoom
Please join us - men and women - for discussions of anything non-fiction: history, science, biography, memoir, food, poetry- you name it!
We meet 6 times per year and gather in June to pitch books for the upcoming year. Meeting are at 3 pm on the 3rd Monday of the month in September, November, January, February, March and May.
September 21, 2020 Book is:
Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil by Susan Neiman
New Yorker review
What can be compared to the Holocaust? Everything? Detention camps on America’s border? Nothing? This history war, generally the province of academics, has recently become part of American political discourse. Into this discussion comes Susan Neiman’s “Learning From the Germans.”
Neiman, who has lived in Germany for much of her adult life, and who directs Berlin’s Einstein Forum, contrasts Germany’s response to the Holocaust with America’s response to slavery and centuries of racial discrimination. Her concern is not “comparative evil” — which event is worse — but “comparative redemption,” how each community has responded to and reframed the memory of its unsavory past.
Neiman contends that postwar Germany, after initially stumbling badly, has done the hard work necessary to grapple with and come to terms with the legacy of the Holocaust in a way that could be a lesson to America in general, and the American South in particular.
Questions?
Contact Laurie Cousart cell: 267-716-4776 or
email at lauriecousart@gmail.com