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 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: |