UVA Club of Charlottesville: Hoos Reading Hoos Book Club

All alumni, friends and families are invited to join us for the Hoos Reading Hoos Book Club, where we will discuss "Culpability" by Bruce Holsinger, Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at UVA.

About Bruce Holsinger:

Bruce Holsinger specializes in the literature and culture of the medieval world, with additional interests in historical fiction, modern and contemporary theory, the history of the book, and premodern religious cultures. His new book, The Parchment Inheritance: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age (forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2022), explores the parchment record of the premodern world from a number of different angles: environmental history, theology, historical genetics, and so on. His research for this project has involved extensive collaboration with an international team of bioarchaeologists, conservators, and other scholars in the emerging field of "biocodicology": the biomolecular analysis of written objects, particularly parchment. His previous books, including The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory as well as Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, have explored the shaping role of the medieval in the making of modern critical thought and political discourse. His first book, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer, won the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book, the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America, and the Philip Brett Award from the American Musicological Society.

Read his full bio here.

About the Book:

“I was riveted until the very last shocking sentence!”—Oprah Winfrey 

"The most of-the-moment novel I’ve read all year, and it’s the book of the summer.”—Real Simple

"A wise, propulsive, and deeply powerful novel.”—Laura Dave, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me

Set at a summer rental on the Chesapeake Bay, a riveting family drama about moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence, from the bestselling author of the “wise and addictive” (New York Times) The Gifted School.

When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret that implicates them in the accident. During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie’s future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei’s odd behavior tugs at Noah’s suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident—suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal. When Charlie falls for Monet’s teenage daughter, the stakes are raised even higher in this propulsive family drama that is also a fascinating exploration of the moral responsibility and ethical consequences of AI. Culpability explores a world newly shaped by chatbots, autonomous cars, drones, and other nonhuman forces in ways that are thrilling, challenging, and unimaginably provocative.” —GoodReads Review

For more information on this event, please contact Molly Switzer (Col '89), Book Club Chair, at mollyhoo89@gmail.com.