Khushbu Shah with J. Kenji López-Alt
Culture & Cuisine
A Year Which Will Live in Infamy
Note: This is a Tandem Book Club event: Join us at 6:30pm to discuss a related title, Joan is Okay, by Weike Wang. Learn more and register below.
Note: Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a person whose life went unchanged in 2020, arguably one of the most consequential years in human history. It marked an unprecedented time, left indelible memories in our minds, and set off ripple effects we still feel even today. Disruption of normal life was nearly universal; however, the ways in which we experienced disruption were varied.
Acclaimed sociologist and bestselling author Eric Klinenberg’s latest work 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed offers an account of a single year in modern history told through the stories of seven New Yorkers. From an elementary school principal to a bar manager, a subway custodian to a political aide, the book sheds light on the human experience of that fateful time four years ago, illuminating both individual and collective uncertainty, fear, loss, and hope.
Although the book is centered on New York City, 2020 also explores the political spheres of the nation’s capital and beyond, as well as epidemiological battles, policies, and movements worldwide. Set against the backdrop of a tense presidential election and social unrest, Klinenberg offers a window into a recent time of reckoning and an invitation to examine ourselves and our experiences.
Eric Klinenberg is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Modern Romance and author of Palaces for the People, Going Solo, Heat Wave, and Fighting for Air. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, and This American Life. He lives in New York City.
This is a Tandem Book Club event! Join us at 6:30pm in The Forum Library, one hour prior to the Eric Klinenberg event to discuss the evening’s featured topic.
Topic: New York in 2020
Tandem Book Club title: Joan is Okay by Weike Wang
The Elliott Bay Book Company is an independently owned bookstore founded by Walter Carr in 1973, at 109 Main Street. Over the next three and half decades, the bookstore shifted and expanded within the Globe Building adding event space for author readings as well as Seattle’s first bookstore café.
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