W5H Book Club

This month, Apollo on Call and W5H Book Club are uploading together. Dave and Luki read Other Rivers: A Chinese Education by Peter Hessler. The book focuses on the quirks and challenges in the education system the author witnessed as a visiting professor in China. At the end, Dave and Luki reflect on an entire year of reading books about China, and how they feel at the end of this journey. Check o...

For this month’s W5H Book Club episode, we read Daughters of the Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick. The focus is on the children that were trafficked from China to the United States as a result of the CCP’s one-child policy. Check out Dave’s Substack for more! https://davidmhsu.substack.com/

In this episode, Luki and I discuss the unbelievable growth of China on the world stage. So unbelievable, in fact, that some experts don’t believe it!

This month, Luki and I sit down to talk about AI, and the AI arms race between China and the USA, which is entirely foretold in Kai-Fu Lee's 2018 book about AI!

Hey everyone, we are back with a special announcement.!We are bringing the W5H Book Club approach to the world of Medical Humanities! Through medhum.org . Dave has started a new podcast called Apollo On Call, a monthly discussion about medical humanities. The goal of medhum is to explore the human condition as expressed through medicine, literature, and the arts. To that end, Luki will be joining...

W5H discusses Louisa Lim's 2014 book on the events of Tiananmen Square 1989.

This month, Luki and Dave convene to talk about China through the lens of understanding the conflict between the U.S. and China over Taiwan.

This month, we sit down to discuss Wild Swans by Jung Chang, an epic look at three generations of women in a Chinese family that spans the history of modern China from the turn of the century through the 1990s.

This month, Luki and Dave break down Richard McGregor's The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers. We try to understand if the book really manages to lift the veil off one of the most secretive and powerful organizations in the world.

For our second book on China, the W5H team convenes to discuss Leslie T. Chang's book on the migrant worker phenomenon in China, circa early 2000s, when millions of young people, mostly women, left the countryside to seek out a new life in the booming country's factories and cities.

What's the deal with China? Luki and Dave reconvene for a new season of W5H as they attempt to understand China and its place in the modern world. China Witness is an oral history of modern China. From lantern makers to army generals, the writer Xinran gives us the stories of regular people in China, told in their own voices.

W5H wraps up their season on classic literature by reading a classic, and now mostly banned, novel about justice in the 1930s American deep south.

In the season's penultimate episode, W5H breaks down one of Leo Tolstoy's shorter works, The Death of Ivan Illych and ponders the meaning of death, as well as life.

W5H reads their first novel by a woman, the original rom-com novel. Is it possible for two 21st century Asian guys to appreciate Jane Austen? Well, at least we tried...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's famous novel is considered by many to be the defining work of Latin American literature. Beautiful, magical, and just plain weird, join us as we take a look at this 20th century magic carpet ride of a novel.

W5H takes a look at the British colonial experience in India through the lens of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. The novel looks at pre-partition India and the tinder box of different ethnicities and cultures that threatened to light at any moment. Race, identity politics, and who should be telling the story of the oppressed?

The W5H team dives back into the 21st century as they discuss Ernest Hemingway's post WW1 classic, the Sun Also Rises.

Luki and Dave convene to discuss the classic, original anti-establishment, minimalist, naturalist, environmentalist manifesto. Henry David Thoreau spent a few years living out in the wilderness at Walden Pond, and penned one of the most highly thought of American works of naturalism. But is it truly a great read, or just the ramblings of a crank?

W5H reviews one of the landmark works of western literature, the original gangster of all epic action movies, the Iliad by Homer. Was it a dud, or is it really deserving of the title of one of the greatest literary works of all time?

This week, Luki and Dave dig into the recesses of their high school curriculum and plow through a classic they've never read before. Should they have just left well enough alone? Stay tuned.

Season 2 of W5H kicks off and we are venturing into literary fiction for the first time with a reading of the classic allegory Animal Farm.

The End of Education marks the end of season 1 of W5H and the end of our discussion about "What is wrong with Education." We take a look at Zack Slayback's book, and then round out our season with an overall breakdown of what we have learned through these 11 books.

If you've made it this far into our podcast season reading list, then you are in for a real treat. Tara Westover's memoir about her own journey in education is eye opening and fascinating. If ever a book about home schooling could be called thrilling and exhilarating, this is it. If you only read one of the books we read this year in our discussion about what is wrong with education, make...

The W5H team breaks down Jonathan Kozol's classic book Savage Inequalities. Published in 1991, the book is considered a landmark work in its brutal depiction of the failure of the education system and the issues of poverty that lie at the heart of America's education crisis.

This week, the W5H team breaks down Harvey P. Weingarten's treatise on the state of the Canadian University education system. How do Canadian universities stack up agains the world's best? Is there a more compelling argument in favour of a university education than the fact that university graduates earn more money? What about Co-op? And problem based learning?