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Book Group: Past books

Book Group Information

A list of books selected and read by this book group from 2008 to 2013 can be found here. For recent books, see below.

04/22/2024 - 12:00pm The Gender Knot

The Gender Knot: A feminist man’s explanation of patriarchy avoiding guilt, blame, anger, denial.

03/18/2024 - 12:00pm The Power of Crisis

The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats—and our Response—Will Change the World 2022 by Ian Bremmer. Recent crises show threats & possibilities for hope. Discusses global health emergencies, climate change, and AI. “Provides a roadmap for surviving—even thriving in—the 21st century.”

02/19/2024 - 12:00pm Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

Covid was definitely not the first one. This book examines human history as far back as the Paleolithic through eight serious encounters with infectious disease. Do any patterns emerge? Does it make a difference to view history with disease at the center, perhaps from the main viewpoint of the virus/bacterium?

01/15/2024 - 12:00pm Debt: The First 5000 Years

Sweeping narrative history essentially argues that many of our ideas about money and credit are limited, if not wrong.

12/18/2023 - 12:00pm Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It

Everybody complains about big Pharma but we aren’t fixing it yet.

11/20/2023 - 12:00pm Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity

How do people get misled so easily?

10/16/2023 - 12:00pm Persuasion in Parallel: How Information Changes Minds about Politics

Persuasion in Parallel: How Information Changes Minds about Politics: "Overturns” conventional wisdom. Is sharing information useless in politics? This book argues that people do change their minds in response to information.. Uses evidence from randomized controlled trials; most everyone updates toward information, at least a little. Affects people on both right and left. “The other side is not lost."

09/19/2023 - 1:00pm Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth 2021, 352 pages. About “the neuroscience of consciousness,” drawing from many disciplines, this book advances its own model, reviews competing model, and is a lucid, accessible, engaging read. A “great wide look.” Blurb: “You could even say that we’re all hallucinating all the time. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.”

08/15/2023 - 1:00pm Indigenous Continent: the Epic Contest for North America

Indigenous Continent: the Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hamalainen, 2022, 600 pp., The history “recast” from a Native American perspective; “magisterial”; “Indigenous power has affected everything about America.”

07/18/2023 - 1:00pm Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and what comes next.

Location: Zoom
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88955380062?pwd=UWwwU2h6Ym11TGFHQUlWSDlzdVM0Zz09

A “study of the road to Jan. 6 and the possible future of the politics-versus-religion battle in the U.S.” Includes his own experiences in prayer meetings in the 1990s and an account of the years-long campaign of White Christian nationalism including 1960-2015.

From Amazon:

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