From legendary actor and activist Sean Penn comes a scorching, darkly funny novel about Bob Honey—a modern American man, entrepreneur, and part-time assassin. Bob Honey has a hard time connecting with other people, especially since his divorce. He’s tired of being marketed to every moment, sick of a world where even an orgasm isn’t real until it is turned into a tweet. A paragon of old-fashioned American entrepreneurship, Bob sells septic tanks to Jehovah’s Witnesses and arranges pyrotechnic displays for foreign dictators. He’s also a contract killer for an off-the-books program run by a branch of US intelligence that targets the elderly, the infirm, and others who drain this consumption-driven society of its resources. When a nosy journalist starts asking questions, Bob can’t decide if it’s a chance to form some sort of new friendship or the beginning of the end for him. With treason on everyone’s lips, terrorism in everyone’s sights, and American political life sinking to ever-lower standards, Bob decides it’s time to make a change—if he doesn’t get killed by his mysterious controllers or exposed in the rapacious media first. A thunderbolt of provocative words and startling images, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff marks the fiction debut of one of America’s most acclaimed artists.

“It seems wrong to say that so dystopian a novel is great fun to read, but it’s true. I suspect that Thomas Pynchon and Hunter S. Thompson would love this book.” —Salman Rushdie

“An almost literally up-to-the-minute fever dream of a novel.” –Bill Maher

Sean Penn won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performances in Mystic River and Milk, and received Academy Award nominations as Best Actor for Dead Man Walking, Sweet and Lowdown, and I Am Sam. He has worked as an actor, writer, producer, and director on over one hundred theater and film productions. His journalism has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, and HuffPost. This is his first novel.

Anthropologist
Natalia Roudakova
will discuss her timely new book
 LOSING PRAVDA:
 Ethics and The Press in Post-Truth Russia
Friday, April 13, 7PM

What happens when journalism is made superfluous? Combining ethnography, media analysis, moral and political theory this book examines the unravelling of professional journalism in Russia over the past twenty-five years, and its effects on society. It argues that, contrary to widespread assumptions, late Soviet-era journalists shared a cultural contract with their audiences, which ensured that their work was guided by a truth-telling ethic. Post-communist economic and political upheaval led not so much to greater press freedom as to the de-professionalization of journalism, as journalists found themselves having to monetize their truth-seeking skills. This has culminated in a perception of journalists as political prostitutes, or members of the 'second oldest profession', as they are commonly termed in Russia. Roudakova argues that this cultural shift has fundamentally eroded the value of truth-seeking and telling in Russian society.

“Natalia Roudakova brings deep ethnographic research, fluency in social theory, and an engaged ethical sense for the deep urgency of journalism to this thoughtful and essential book. Her account of the surprising career of Russian journalism - from its fall from grace as a moral outlet under the Soviets to its 'prostitution' in a time of oligarchs, big money, and 'kompromat' - offers not only a sparkling case study but a vision of the high societal stakes of journalism more generally. Losing Pravda presents us with an uncannily familiar media environment. The conditions that Roudakova analyses, such as fake news, sponsored content, swirling rumors and cynicism, punctuated here and there by the courageous few committed to telling the truth, are not unique to Russia. In a way, Roudakova has helped us understand not only the Russian scene, but also our own in the age of Donald J. Trump.” --John D. Peters, University of Iowa

Professor Natalia Roudakova received her M.A. at Kazan State University, Russia and her Ph.D. at Stanford University. She has taught at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and at UCSD; and served as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.

Harvard University China authority
 William H. Overholt
 will discuss his timely new book
 CHINA’S CRISIS OF SUCCESS
 Sunday, April 29, 2 P.M.

China’s Crisis of Success reveals China’s core strengths and weaknesses, in the process potentially revolutionizing much of our understanding of China. On one hand, other than human rights China has served the needs of its people much better than most Western theories acknowledge. For instance, contrary to widely accepted political analyses, Chinese communism is not uniquely susceptible to corruption and environmental degradation; developing democracies like India are much worse. Contrary to the most highly regarded economic theorists, China is far more economically inclusive than its democratic counterparts at similar levels of development; for instance, homeownership is 20 percentage points higher than the U.S. Moreover, China’s administrative system, denigrated by respected Western analysts as crippled by factionalism and incapable of long-range planning, actually demonstrates extraordinary strengths. Comparative analysis also reveals China’s weaknesses. There is no widely applicable Beijing Model, as China’s path can only be emulated by countries experiencing certain extreme conditions and even then only for a limited time. Xi Jinping’s extraordinary ability to eliminate rivals does not necessarily convey comparable ability to implement reform policies. Implementation of those policies at a time of financial stringency requires paying a heavy price in economic growth and political support and thus far the leadership has been unwilling to pay much of that price. Lack of this leaves China in a crisis of success: a big success, a proportionately big crisis, and resulting uncertainty as to whether the future will bring continued political and economic success, stagnation, or collapse of the model.

William H. Overholt has been a Senior Fellow in Harvard’s Asia Center and previously its Kennedy School of Government since 2008. During 2013-15 he also served as Senior Fellow and then President of the Fung Global Institute in Hong Kong.  His career includes 16 years doing policy research at think tanks, nine years at Harvard University, and 21 years running investment bank research teams.  Previously he held the Asia Policy Distinguished Research Chair at RAND’s California headquarters and was Director of the Center for Asia Pacific Policy; concurrently he was Visiting Professor at Shanghai Jiaodong University and, earlier, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Korea’s Yonsei University. During 21 years in investment banking, he served as Head of Strategy and Economics at Nomura’s regional headquarters in Hong Kong from 1998 to 2001, and as Managing Director and Head of Research at Bank Boston's regional headquarters in Singapore.  During 18 years at Bankers Trust, he ran a country risk team in New York from 1980 to 1984, then was regional strategist and Asia research head based in Hong Kong from 1985 to 1998. At Hudson Institute from 1971 to 1979, Dr. Overholt directed planning studies for the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of State, National Security Council, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Council on International Economic Policy. Dr. Overholt’s other books include Renminbi Rising: The Emergence of a New Global Monetary System; Asia, America and the Transformation of Geopolitics; The Rise of China; Asia’s Nuclear Future; and The Future of Brazil.  With Zbigniew Brzezinski, he founded the periodical Global Political Assessment in 1976 and edited it until 1988.

Eminent ecologist

Jeremy B.C. Jackson and

 award-winning journalist

Steve Chapple

 will discuss their timely new book

BREAKPOINT:

Reckoning with America’s
Environmental Crises

Professor
Yunte Huang
will read from and discuss his critically acclaimed new book
INSEPARABLE:
 The Original Siamese Twins and
Their Rendezvous with American History
Sunday, June 10, 2PM

With wry humor, Shakespearean profundity, and trenchant insight, Yunte Huang brings to life the story of America’s most famous nineteenth-century Siamese twins. Nearly a decade after his triumphant Charlie Chan biography, Yunte Huang returns with this long-awaited portrait of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874), twins conjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fused liver, who were “discovered” in Siam by a British merchant in 1824. Bringing an Asian American perspective to this almost implausible story, Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Boston in 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvy showmen who gained their freedom and traveled the backroads of rural America to bring “entertainment” to the Jacksonian mobs. Their rise from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich southern gentry; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves, is here not just another sensational biography but a Hawthorne-like excavation of America’s historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal, for tyrannizing the “other”—a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.

“Inseparable tells an astonishing story, by turns ghastly, hilarious, unnerving, and moving. Huang is a dazzling writer, bold, energetic, and intellectually alert. His gripping account of the lives of the celebrated Siamese twins Cheng and Eng not only richly illuminates the past of P.T. Barnum and Mark Twain but also probes the racial and sexual politics of the present.” — Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve.

“Chang and Eng waltzed, arm and arm, indivisible, across a brutally divided America. Huang's spellbinding account tells their story with a complexity, and sensitivity, with which it has never been told before.” — Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

Yunte Huang is a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Transpacific Imaginations and Charlie Chan, which won the 2011 Edgar Award and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. Having come of age in China as a student in the time of Tiananmen Square, Huang now lives in Santa Barbara, California.