Original Proposal

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UtahOwl
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Joined: Mon Jul 28, 2008 10:48 pm

Original Proposal

Post by UtahOwl »

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Dark Money was originally proposed by Utah Owl (aka June Taylor) on February 11 and received 17 views before being elected by the participants of our March 16 meeting as the focus book for our April 20 meeting.

However, the original February 11 proposal was riddled with errors. Accordingly, the following is substituted.

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
From: ReadingLiberally-SaltLake@johnkarls.com
To: ReadingLiberallyEmailList@johnkarls.com
Bcc: The Approximately 150 Recipients of Our Weekly E-mail
Subject: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right – for April 20
Date: Sat, March 19, 2016
Time: 4:21 am MST – 5:26 am MST (due to 100/hour limit)
Attachment:
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Dear Friends,

Our next meeting is Wednesday evening April 20 at the Salt Lake Public Library (210 East 400 South).

NB: For those who like to avoid having to Skype during vacations, our future meeting dates are:

Wed Apr 20 (Apr 13 is the Library’s semi-annual book sale)
Wed May 18 (to maintain minimum 4-week gap)
Wed June 15 (to maintain minimum 4-week gap)

NB: And for long-range planners, though the Library does not accept reservations for the last half of each year until May 15:

Wed July 13
Wed Aug 10
Wed Sep 14
Wed Oct 19 (Oct 12 is Yom Kippur)
Wed Nov 15 (to maintain minimum 4-week gap)
Wed Dec 14


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OUR FOCUS BOOK

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right ($17.97 hard cover + shipping or $14.99 Kindle from Amazon.com – 484 pages).

New York Times Bestseller (currently third on the NY Times’ Hardcover/Non-Fiction list).


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AUTHOR BIO

Jane Mayer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three bestselling and critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction books. She co-authored Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988, with Doyle McManus, and Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, with Jill Abramson, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, was named one of The New York Times’s Top 10 Books of the Year and won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Goldsmith Book Prize, the Edward Weintal Prize, the Ridenhour Prize, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. For her reporting at The New Yorker, Mayer has been awarded the John Chancellor Award, the George Polk Award, the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, and the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence presented by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Mayer lives in Washington, D.C.


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BOOK REVIEW EXCERPTS

“Jane Mayer’s Dark Money.... is absolutely necessary reading for anyone who wants to make sense of our politics.... Mayer is telling the epic story of America in our time. It is a triumph of investigative reporting, perhaps not surprising for a journalist who has won most of the awards her profession has to offer.... She’s a pro, and she’s given the world a full accounting of what had been a shadowy and largely unseen force.... [R]emarkable.”
—The New York Review of Books

"The book is written in straightforward and largely unemotional prose, but it reads as if conceived in quiet anger. Mayer believes that the Koch brothers and a small number of allied plutocrats have essentially hijacked American democracy, using their money not just to compete with their political adversaries, but to drown them out.... Dark Money emerges as an impressively reported and well-documented work.... The importance of Dark Money [flows] from its scope and perspective.... It is not easy to uncover the inner workings of an essentially secretive political establishment. Mayer has come as close to doing it as anyone is likely to come anytime soon.... She makes a formidable argument.”
¬—From the cover of the Times Book Review

[D]eeply researched and studded with detail.... it seems destined to rattle the Koch executive offices in Wichita as other investigations have not. [Dark Money] could inspire a more intense discussion about the impact of this wealthy conservative cadre on the Republican Party and the recent course of American politics.”
¬—Washington Post

ombshells explode in the pages of Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s indispensible new history.... combines her own research with the work of scores of other investigators, to describe how the Kochs and fellow billionaires like Richard Scaife have spent hundreds of millions to ‘move their political ideas from the fringe to the center of American political life.’”
—The London Guardian

“Packed with revelations.... One of the essential books about our political system’s unparalleled capacity for perpetuating income inequality. Dark Money is more than just a work of political journalism — it’s a vital portrait of a nation that, as perhaps never before, is being shaped by a few very rich, very conservative businessmen.”
—San Francisco Chroncicle


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RSVP’s REQUESTED BY NEXT FRIDAY

In accordance with our quorum-policy revision of 6/12/2013, instead of waiting until the last week before each monthly meeting to request RSVP's and canceling if we do not have our minimum quorum of six, RSVP's are requested in our first-of-the-monthly-cycle weekly e-mail.

Those who have RSVP’d will be informed immediately when we reach six so they can proceed to read the materials with assurance a discussion will take place.

If there are not six RSVP's by 11:59 pm next Friday, then next week's weekly e-mail will announce that the 4/20/2016 meeting is cancelled.


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SKYPE PARTICIPATION

Non-Utah-residents (and residents who are out of town) are invited to participate in our meeting via Skype.

If you would like to do so, please press your reply button and type “request participation via Skype” and we will contact you to make appropriate arrangements.


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We hope to see all of you on April 20th.

Your friend,

John K.

PS -- To un-subscribe, please press "reply" and type "deletion requested."

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