Announcing the Special Guest

We are pleased to welcome writer and professor Michael Meyer as the special guest for the California Book Club’s July gathering, where he will discuss American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis with its author, Adam Hochschild, and CBC host John Freeman.

Meyer is the author of five works of nonfiction, including a trilogy about China. His first, The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed (2009), joins a thousand years’ worth of stories about the city with a study of its present and how it has changed. The book was published a few years after Meyer had completed a program of advanced studies in Chinese at Tsinghua University in Beijing. After it was released, Meyer received a Whiting Writers’ Award for Nonfiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The author’s next book, which won a Lowell Thomas Award for Best Travel Book from the Society of American Travel Writers, was In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China (2015). The book, which includes memoir, details the transformation of a commune into a company town. His third book, The Road to Sleeping Dragon: Learning China from the Ground Up (2017), a personal book about immersion in life in China, won the same award.

In Meyer’s fascinating fourth book, Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet: The Favorite Founder’s Divisive Death, Enduring Afterlife, and Blueprint for American Prosperity (2022), he takes a look at a little-known episode in the founding father’s life. Franklin had set up a unique scheme whereby he gifted £2,000 to Philadelphia and Boston. The money was to be loaned to tradesmen over the following two centuries for purposes of getting their work off the ground. The loans were supposed to be repaid with interest over a decade, with the final payout being sizable. Meyer writes, “Franklin believed that skilled workers formed the foundation of American democracy. They provided crucial services while interacting daily with people of all classes, creeds, and colors. Essentially, they kept the pulse of a community’s street-level public and economic life and laid the groundwork (literally) of a healthy society.” Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet delves into this plan and also traces the fate of the funds.

The special guest’s most recent nonfiction work is A Dirty, Filthy Book: Annie Besant’s Fight for Reproductive Rights (2024), which examines the Victorian-era London obscenity trial of Annie Besant, a mother who published a birth control pamphlet. Unusually for the time, she argued that women had a right to choose whether to have children.

Meyer, who is now an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh, is a former student of Hochschild’s (and of past CBC author Maxine Hong Kingston’s). Meyer and Hochschild will have much to discuss about the craft of writing nonfiction that captures earlier places and times.

“There is something unknowable in every person’s life, let alone one who lived so long ago,” Meyer writes in Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet. Luckily, we have smart and sophisticated writers to illuminate some of the mystery and the complexities. We’re anticipating a wonderful conversation about American Midnight and what our history can teach us about the present. Hope you’ll join us.•

Join us on July 16 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Hochschild will sit down with host Freeman and special guest Meyer to discuss American Midnight. Register for the Zoom conversation here.