Skip to main content

The Progressive Book Club

By


Apparently, the Progressive Book Club was the brain child of Howard Dean last year.  It is an attempt to counter the long standing Conservative Book Club, which dates back to 1964, ironically the year Goldwater ran for president.  The PLC has yet to gain much traction, but one hopes that it actually might grow into something.  My guess is that it will be another political casualty as progressive reading tastes are far too diffused to be as neatly packaged as the stuff they peddle at the CBC.

Comments

  1. avrdsNovember 25, 2010 at 12:08 AM

    It would be great if they had a site to discuss real books like we do here. For example, one of the reasons the Alter book is so powerful is that while it is 100% sympathetic to Obama and acknowledges the 100% mess left behind by Bush et al., it doesn't take any easy shots. So it doesn't feel like a polemic when you're reading it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. James FergusonNovember 25, 2010 at 8:57 AM

    You should be able to join without necessarily buying books. I like what the guy did who created Mubi, formerly the Auteurs. It is free to join, but if you want you can watch movies individually, or pay a small monthly fee like Netflix, to watch an incredible range of international movies. He also has tie-ins with all the major film festivals and offers a selection of movies for free. As a result, there are many lively chats, you can create your own favorite lists, etc.

    PBC strikes me as very limited and purely a response to CBC.

    ReplyDelete
  3. James FergusonNovember 25, 2010 at 9:50 AM

    Take that back. I see now that they have a Progressive Reader,

    http://www.progressivereader.com/

    ReplyDelete
  4. Rick DiguetteNovember 26, 2010 at 11:21 PM

    I visited the website and came away from it wondering who on earth would want to read most of those books?

    For those of you who have read and admire The Leopard, I recommend Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March. Wonderful book.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more