After a very long hiatus, Reading Liberty is back for Winter 2022! When planning this semester we had hoped that the pandemic would have been a distant memory and we would be back to in person meetings. Unfortunately, the latest wave crushed that. Nonetheless, we will proceed with online meetings and hope for at least one in person session this semester.
The book for this semester is Virginia Postrel's Fabric of Civilization.
Textiles are one of humanity's oldest and most influential technologies, but nowadays most people take them for granted. Drawing on her widely praised new book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, author Virginia Postrel will take us on a tour of some of the innovations--in fiber, spinning, weaving, and dyeing--that gave us today’s textile abundance and the ways textiles shaped civilization as we know it.
As always membership is open to anyone member of campus and is free. Just sign up and provide your details. You will be added to the Teams channel and will receive a book by mail. Please sign up by January 30th to ensure delivery of the book before the first meeting on February 15. The author will join us on March 22. We are still hoping that this might be an in person meeting. The final meeting will be April 12. All meetings will be held from 12:00-2:00. Bonus, if we meet in person, a light lunch will be served.
Virginia Postrel is a Los Angeles-based author, columnist, and researcher. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute at Chapman University and a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. Her previous books include The Power of Glamour, The Substance of Style, and The Future and Its Enemies. During her research for The Fabric of Civilization, she learned to weave and is now the program co-chair for the Southern California Handweavers' Guild.