Hello Fellow Book Lovers and History Buffs!

Please join me each week to discuss issues raised in my book, Thaddeus Lamb, and other books like it that examine 20th-century history, trying to understand how we got to where we are today. Books like American Pastoral, The Corrections, The Book of Daniel, and Before We Were Yours. Films like The Butler, Forrest Gump, or BlacKkKlansman.

Every week I will offer a short book review, movie review, or essay that gives my take on some recent historical perspectives on current issues raised in these books or films, and I invite you to join the conversation. So, it’s sort of an online book club for lovers of 20th-century history, mainly from the 1950s on, but it’s really about the issues and what film and literature can tell us about them. I hope you will join me in exploring questions like these:

• How did we get so divided?
• Why are some people so fearful of change, changing demographics and social standards?
• How much of what passes for news is propaganda?
• How much are we being manipulated, for whose benefit, and how can we tell?
• How do we distinguish social norms (like women working or gay marriage) from moral standards?
• What makes a standard a moral standard anyway?
• What should the relation between religion and politics be?
• Should there be a wall of separation?
• What does history tell us about questions like these?
• Can literature or film, or TV capture or clarify them?

I am fascinated by 20th-century history, partly because it is a period of revolutionary change, and partly because I think it tells us so much about how we got to where we are today. I hope you will check it out and join the conversation.