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Book Group: Past books

Book Group Information

Tue, 01/15/2013 - 5:34pm — Sandra.Coyner

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

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09/15/2020 - 1:00pm	These Truths: A History of the United States	A groundbreaking investigation that places truth itself―a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence―at the center of the nation’s history
08/18/2020 - 1:00pm	Outliers: The Story of Success	Location: the Jeff Center in the Old Ashland Armory From Amazon: In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?
07/21/2020 - 1:00pm	How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt	Is our democracy in danger?
06/16/2020 - 1:00pm	Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst, by Robert Sapolsky	Location: the Jeff Center in the Old Ashland Armory Second half of book. From Amazon: Why do we do the things we do?
04/21/2020 - 1:00pm	Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst, by Robert Sapolsky	Location: the Jeff Center in the Old Ashland Armory First half of book. From Amazon: Why do we do the things we do?
03/17/2020 - 1:00pm	Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion	Religions and mythologies from around the world teach that God or gods created humans. Atheist, humanist, and materialist critics, meanwhile, have attempted to turn theology on its head, claiming that religion is a human invention. In this book, E. Fuller Torrey draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to propose a startling answer to the ultimate question. Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods locates the origin of gods within the human brain, arguing that religious belief is a by-product of evolution.
02/18/2020 - 1:00pm	The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming	It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. Across the US, “500-year” storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually.
01/21/2020 - 1:00pm	White Fragility	Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality.
11/19/2019 - 1:00pm	The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone	Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it.
10/21/2019 - 4:00pm	Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past	October 21, 2019: 4-6 pm at the Jeff Center in the Old Ashland Armory From Amazon: A groundbreaking book about how ancient DNA has profoundly changed our understanding of human history. Geneticists like David Reich have made astounding advances in the field of genomics, which is proving to be as important as archeology, linguistics, and written records as a means to understand our ancestry.

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