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Barbara VanDenburgh scopes out the shelves for this week’s hottest new book releases.
1. “Klara and the Sun,” by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf, fiction, on sale Tuesday)
What it’s about: From the Nobel Prize-winning author of “Never Let Me Go” and “The Remains of the Day” comes a new story told from the perspective of Klara, an Artificial Friend who watches the world from her place in the store, hopeful that someone will choose her.
The buzz: “A haunting fable of a lonely, moribund world that is entirely too plausible,” says a starred review from Kirkus Reviews.
2. “The Committed,” by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove, fiction, on sale Tuesday)
Could the left withstand a coup attempt if it ever won the presidency? nationofchange.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nationofchange.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Isabel Allende never thought she would count herself in the group of wave-making women protagonists she’s used to writing about. “In March 2013, I was in Mexico for a women’s conference and I did a speech on feminism that went viral,” she says. “Some time later, my editors decided they wanted to print the speech into a booklet.” When she read it, Allende was less than impressed. “It sounded so dated because so much has happened relating to the movement since that time: #MeToo, the Women’s March, LGBTQ+ progression, and more recently with Black Lives Matter,” she says. “So I told them, ‘No, we’re not going to do this.’”
During the fall of 2020, Choose Democracy trained 10,000 people in nonviolent strategies to stop an election-related power grab in the United States. George Lakey served as the lead trainer, and Eileen Flanagan as the trainings coordinator. In the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol Building and the subsequent inauguration of Joe Biden, they began a dialog about risks to our republic going forward and how activists can minimize them. The following is an edited version of their discussion.
Eileen: One of the major lessons of the Choose Democracy trainings was that the political center plays a crucial role in determining the outcome of coup attempts. Despite Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election, the U.S. center ultimately sided with constitutional procedures. Local officials and judges of both parties upheld the election results. Other “pillars of power,” like the military and the business community refused to cooperate with Trump’s scheme. While severely b