InspireSeattle - Book Club

InspireSeattle - Books Read

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About Book Club

The InspireSeattle book club is always seeking new regarding key political issues of these times. We meet every 4 to 6 weeks on a Sunday evening for 2 hours to discuss our latest book. The meeting place rotates among the homes of our membership, located from West Seattle to Mountlake Terrace. Carpooling is encouraged and is generally available.

Each book club concludes with a discussion of which book the majority of attendees would prefer to read next. You can take a look at a list of books previously suggested by InspireSeattle members or make your own suggestion at the book club or online.

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Click here to see a list of books previously read by the InspireSeattle book club.

View a list of books suggested for future book clubs, or

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Click here to read reviews of books by book club members

What we're reading for our next gathering,
Sunday, November 24, 2024 at 6pm

Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
by Anne Applebaum

From the Pulitzer-prize winning, New York Times bestselling author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them

We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.

International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don't stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren't linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan's essay calling for "containment" of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.

Planning ahead?
After the meeting described above, we will be discussing Nexus : A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Harari Yuval Noah