Book Club - Nomadland (Film) - CANCELED!

For February, we'll discuss the Movie -- Nomadland (Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress)

“People wish to be settled,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “Only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” This tension between stability and uprooting, between the illusory consolations of home and the risky lure of the open road, lies at the heart of “Nomadland,” Chloé Zhao’s expansive and intimate third feature.

Based on Jessica Bruder’s lively, thoroughly reported book of the same name, “Nomadland” stars Frances McDormand as Fern, a fictional former resident of a formerly real place. The movie begins with the end of Empire, Nevada, a company town that officially went out of existence in late 2010, after the local gypsum mine and the Sheetrock factory shut down. 

Fern, a widow, takes to the highway in a white van that she christens with the name Vanguard and customizes with a sleeping alcove, a cooking area and a storage space for the few keepsakes from her previous life. Fern and Vanguard join a rolling, dispersed tribe — a subculture and a literal movement of itinerant Americans and their vehicles, an unsettled nation within the boundaries of the U.S.A.