In his new book Last Best Hope, America in Crisis and Renewal, award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America’s descent and envisions a path toward overcoming our divisions, injustices, and paralyses. The former Mayor of Culver City, CA, Thomas Aujero Small helped guide the city’s response to the Covid crisis, witnessing firsthand the massive pressure that the pandemic put on democracy in our politically divided society.

Packer and Small will discuss the crucial issues raised in Packer’s book, and the despair and hope for democracy in America that this crucible year has so starkly revealed.

This event is co-hosted with Village Well Books & Coffee in Culver City, CA.

Participants

George Packer is an award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His previous books include The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the National Book Award), The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (winner of the Hitchens Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography). He is also the author of two novels and a play, and the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell. His essays and articles have appeared in Boston Review, The Nation, World Affairs, Harper's, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among other publications. Packer was a columnist for Mother Jones and was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 2003 to 2018.

Thomas Aujero Small is founder and CEO of the nonprofit Culver City Forward, a public-private partnership to bring together leaders from the Culver City business, government, educational, philanthropic, and community groups to provide a non-partisan and fact-based platform to strengthen Culver City’s economy, support the local workforce, and meet the diverse needs of the business, civic, and community stakeholders. Small formerly served on the City Council of Culver City, California, from April 2016-December 2020, including his rotation as Mayor of Culver City from 2018 to 2019. Small was elected unanimously as Mayor by his colleagues on the City Council in 2018. Prior to his election to City Council, he served as Commissioner of Cultural Affairs.

Livestream on June 19, 2021 at 11:00 a.m. (PST).

Watch here.

Free admission.