Price range: £0.00 through £5.00
Book Club: “Hospicing Modernity” by Vanessa Andreotti
Wednesday April 9th
Doors & drinks 6.30pm; Book discussion starts 7pm
“This is not a book to be picked up lightly. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira [aka Vanessa Andreotti] is carrying stories that will do things with you. Her book will change you, if you let it. There’s strong medicine here, badly needed. There are clues to how we find the paths that lead to the unknown world ahead, beyond the end of the world as we know it.” -- Dougald Hine
(Publisher's description): Vanessa Machado de Oliveira [aka Vanessa Andreotti] presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behaviour patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.
Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance. We take more than we give; we inoculate ourselves in positive self-regard while continuing to make harmful choices; we wreak irreparable havoc on the ecosystems, habitats, and beings with whom we share our planet. But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability?
Machado de Oliveira breaks down archetypes of cognitive dissonance — the do-gooder who does “good enough,” then retreats to business as usual; the incognito capitalist who, at first glance, may seem like a radical change-maker — and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently.
She explains how our habits, behaviours, and belief systems hold us back . . . and why it’s time now to gradually disinvest.
She offers us thought experiments that ask us to:
- Reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis
- Better assess our surroundings and interact with difference, uncertainty, complexity, and failure
- Expand our capacity to hold personal and collective space for difficult and painful things
- Understand the “5 modern-colonial e’s”: Entitlements, Exceptionalism, Exaltation, Emancipation, and Enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism
- Interrupt our satisfaction with modern-colonial desires that cause harm
- Create space for change driven neither by desperate hope nor a fear of desolate hopelessness
"This is a book about breaking spells. And not just the obvious kind, but the grievously impacted, deep-in-the-psyche variety. Important and powerful, Hospicing Modernity diligently tracks a complex word — modernity — through the bewildering forest of our times.” — Martin Shaw
Book Club meets on the second Wednesday of every month.
Kairos, 84 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4TG
Doors open at 6.30pm. Book discussion starts at 7pm. Food provided. Pay bar or BYOB.
Free for members, £5 non-members. (Members please still register in advance so we can plan numbers.)
