Apr.-May 2025 Meeting
Nobody Knows My Name
James Baldwin
4.37
4,507 ratings445 reviews
From one of the most brilliant writers and thinkers of the twentieth century comes a collection of "passionate, probing, controversial" essays ( The Atlantic ) on topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society.
Told with Baldwin's characteristically unflinching honesty, this “splendid book” ( The New York Times ) offers illuminating, deeply felt essays along with personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and other writers.
“James Baldwin is a skillful writer, a man of fine intelligence and a true companion in the desire to make life human. To take a cue from his title, we had better learn his name.” — The New York Times
Genres
Nonfiction
Essays
Race
Classics
History
African American
Memoir
...more
242 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1961
Literary awards
National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction (1962)
Original title
Nobody Knows My Name
This edition
Format
242 pages, Paperback
Published
December 1, 1992 by Vintage
ISBN
9780679744733 (ISBN10: 0679744738)
ASIN
0679744738
Language
English
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38458.Nobody_Knows_My_Name
Feb.-Mar. 2025 Meeting
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
Yuval Noah Harari
4.19
19,914 ratings2,437 reviews
Goodreads Choice AwardNominee for Readers' Favorite History & Biography (2024)
From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world.
For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite allour discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive?
Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.
Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.
Genres
Nonfiction
History
Science
Philosophy
Technology
Audiobook
Artificial Intelligence
...more
528 pages, Hardcover
First published September 10, 2024
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/204927599-nexus
Jan. 2025 Meeting
Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
Robert M. Sapolsky
4.25
4,169 ratings682 reviews
One of our great behavioral scientists, the bestselling author of Behave, plumbs the depths of the science and philosophy of decision-making to mount a devastating case against free will, an argument with profound consequences.
Robert Sapolsky's Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: we may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at base of human behavior, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there's some separate self telling our biology what to do.
Determined offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works--the tight weave between reason and emotion, and between stimulus and response, in the moment and over a life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody's "fault"; for example, for centuries we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession. Yet as he acknowledges, it's very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others, and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together. By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognizing that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world.
GenresSciencePhilosophyNonfictionPsychologyNeuroscienceBiologyAudiobook
528 pages, Hardcover
First published October 17, 2023
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83817782-determined
Nov. 2024 Meeting
Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity
Sander van der Linden
4.03
650 ratings101 reviews
Winner of the 2024 APA William James Book Award • Winner of the 2024 Harvard Goldsmith Book Prize • Winner of the 2024 Nautilus Book Award (Silver) • A Next Big Idea Club Must-Read • A Financial Times Best Book of the Year 2023 • One of Nature’s best science picks
Informed by decades of research and on-the-ground experience advising governments and tech companies, Foolproof is the definitive guide to navigating the misinformation age. From fake news to conspiracy theories, from inflammatory memes to misleading headlines, misinformation has swiftly become the defining problem of our era. The crisis threatens the integrity of our democracies, our ability to cultivate trusting relationships, even our physical and psychological well-being―yet most attempts to combat it have proven insufficient. In Foolproof , one of the world’s leading experts on misinformation lays out a crucial new paradigm for understanding and defending ourselves against the worldwide infodemic. With remarkable clarity, Sander van der Linden explains why our brains are so vulnerable to misinformation, how it spreads across social networks, and what we can do to protect ourselves and others. Like a virus, misinformation infects our minds, exploiting shortcuts in how we see and process information to alter our beliefs, modify our memories, and replicate at astonishing rates. Once the virus takes hold, it’s very hard to cure. Strategies like fact-checking and debunking can leave a falsehood still festering or, at worst, even strengthen its hold. But we aren’t helpless. As van der Linden shows based on award-winning original research, we can cultivate immunity through the innovative science of “prebunking”: inoculating people against false information by preemptively exposing them to a weakened dose, thus empowering them to identify and fend off its manipulative tactics. Deconstructing the characteristic techniques of conspiracies and misinformation, van der Linden gives readers practical tools to defend themselves and others against nefarious persuasion―whether at scale or around their own dinner table. 35 illustrations
GenresNonfictionPsychologyPoliticsSociologyScienceSelf HelpSocial Science
368 pages, ebook
First published February 16, 2023
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61089459-foolproof
Oct. 2024 Meeting
Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
Claire Dederer
3.78
13,320 ratings2,387 reviews
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Nonfiction (2023)
From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, a passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of #MeToo, and of the link between genius and monstrosity.
In this unflinching, deeply personal book that expands on her instantly viral Paris Review essay, What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? Claire Dederer asks: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Naipaul, Miles Davis, or Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss? She explores the audience's relationship with artists from Woody Allen to Michael Jackson, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.
GenresNonfictionEssaysArtAudiobookFeminismMemoirPhilosophy
257 pages, Hardcover
First published April 25, 2023
Sep. 2024 Meeting
How to Stand Up to a Dictator
Maria Ressa
4.34
3,346 ratings597 reviews
What will you sacrifice for the truth?
Maria Ressa has spent decades speaking truth to power. But her work tracking disinformation networks seeded by her own government, spreading lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate, has landed her in trouble with the most powerful man in the country: President Duterte.
Now, hounded by the state, she has multiple arrest warrants against her name, and a potential 100+ years behind bars to prepare for—while she stands trial for speaking the truth.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator is the story of how democracy dies by a thousand cuts, and how an invisible atom bomb has exploded online that is killing our freedoms. It maps a network of disinformation—a heinous web of cause and effect—that has netted the globe: from Duterte's drug wars, to America's Capitol Hill, to Britain's Brexit, to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare, to Facebook and Silicon Valley, to our own clicks and our own votes.
Told from the frontline of the digital war, this is Maria Ressa's urgent cry for us to wake up and hold the line, before it is too late.
GenresNonfictionPoliticsMemoirHistoryBiographyJournalismAsia
288 pages, Paperback
First published November 17, 2022
867 people are currently reading
8,254 people want to read
About the author
Profile Image for Maria Ressa.
Maria Ressa
3 books229 followers
Maria Angelita Ressa is a Filipino American journalist and author, the co-founder and CEO of Rappler, and the first independent Filipino Nobel laureate. She previously spent nearly two decades working as a lead investigative reporter in Southeast Asia for CNN.
In 2020, she was convicted of cyberlibel by the Philippine government under the controversial Philippine Anti-Cybercrime law, a move condemned by human rights groups and journalists as an attack on press freedom.
Ressa was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Dmitry Muratov for “their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58297471-how-to-stand-up-to-a-dictator
Aug. 2024 Meeting
The Life-Sized City Full Episodes
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAnkQkEib48rLGXwxaCyU6Te9TBLTxsaL
July. 2024 Meeting
Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back
Rebecca Giblin
, Cory Doctorow
4.28
820 ratings124 reviews
A call to action for the creative class and labor movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media
Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)--or both.
In Culture Heist, scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue that thanks to "chokepoint capitalism," exploitative businesses create insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that rightfully belongs to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well-illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon's role in radically changing publishing's economics, to the influence of Spotify in leveraging digital rights management, these few vicious monopsonists have lobbied for more barriers for new entrants.
By analyzing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow first deftly show how powerful corporations construct "anti-competitive flywheels" designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices.
In the book's second half, Giblin and Doctorow explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work.
Culture Heist is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that's been siphoned away--before it's too late.
GenresNonfictionPoliticsEconomicsBusinessTechnologyFinanceHistory
312 pages, Hardcover
First published September 27, 2022
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60098290
June. 2024 Meeting
The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change Our World
Tim Marshall
3.95
3,836 ratings340 reviews
Spy satellites orbiting the moon. Space metals worth more than most countries’ GDP. People on Mars within the next ten years.
This isn’t science fiction. It’s astropolitics.
Humans are heading up and out, and we’re taking our power struggles with us. Soon, what happens in space will shape human history as much the mountains, rivers and seas have on Earth. It’s no coincidence that Russia, China and the USA are leading the way. The next fifty years will change the face of global politics.
In this gripping book, bestselling author Tim Marshall lays bare the new geopolitical realities to show how we got here and where we’re going, covering the new space race; great-power rivalry; technology; economics; war; and what it means for all of us down here on Earth. Written with all the insight and wit that have made Marshall the UK’s most popular writer on geopolitics, this is the essential read on power, politics and the future of humanity.
Genres
Nonfiction
Politics
Geography
History
Science
Space
Audiobook
...more
320 pages, Hardcover
First published April 27, 2023
May. 2024 Meeting
When We Cease to Understand the World
Benjamín Labatut
,
Adrian Nathan West
(Translator)
4.14
37,367 ratings5,188 reviews
One of The New York Times Book Review ’s 10 Best Books of 2021
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature
A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining.
When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.
Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.
At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.
Genres
Science
Nonfiction
History
Philosophy
Short Stories
Essays
Physics
...more
193 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 1, 2022
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Mar. & Apr. 2024 Meeting
Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
Francis Fukuyama
4.35
4,432 ratings375 reviews
The second volume of the bestselling landmark work on the history of the modern state
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, David Gress called Francis Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order "magisterial in its learning and admirably immodest in its ambition." In The New York Times Book Review, Michael Lind described the book as "a major achievement by one of the leading public intellectuals of our time." And in The Washington Post, Gerard DeGrott exclaimed "this is a book that will be remembered. Bring on volume two."
Volume two is finally here, completing the most important work of political thought in at least a generation. Taking up the essential question of how societies develop strong, impersonal, and accountable political institutions, Fukuyama follows the story from the French Revolution to the so-called Arab Spring and the deep dysfunctions of contemporary American politics. He examines the effects of corruption on governance, and why some societies have been successful at rooting it out. He explores the different legacies of colonialism in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and offers a clear-eyed account of why some regions have thrived and developed more quickly than others. And he boldly reckons with the future of democracy in the face of a rising global middle class and entrenched political paralysis in the West.
A sweeping, masterful account of the struggle to create a well-functioning modern state, Political Order and Political Decay is destined to be a classic.
Genres
Politics
History
Nonfiction
Political Science
Economics
Philosophy
World History
...more
668 pages, Paperback
First published September 25, 2014
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27280433
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Jan. & Feb. 2024 Meeting
Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution
Tania Branigan
4.01
448 ratings66 reviews
“It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution,” Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children condemned parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned. Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as an absence; official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia. Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness. Deftly exploring how this era defined a generation and continues to impact China today, Branigan asks: What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited, or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?
Genres
History
Nonfiction
China
Politics
Asia
Memoir
Cultural
304 pages, Hardcover
First published February 2, 2023
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62586098-red-memory?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=yG0B0y9MTH&rank=1
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Oct. & Nov. 2023 Meeting
How Civil Wars Start: An
How to Stop Them
Barbara F. Walter
4.26
4,218 ratings632 reviews
Civil wars are the biggest danger to world peace today - this book shows us why they happen, and how to avoid them.
Most of us don't know it, but we are living in the world's greatest era of civil wars. While violence has declined worldwide, civil wars have increased. This is a new phenomenon. With the exception of a handful of cases - the American and English civil wars, the French Revolution - historically it has been rare for people to organise and fight their governments.
This has changed. Since 1946, over 250 armed conflicts have broken out around the world, a number that continues to rise. Major civil wars are now being fought in countries including Iraq, Syria and Libya. Smaller civil wars are being fought in Ukraine, India, and Malaysia. Even countries we thought could never experience another civil war - such as the USA, Sweden and Ireland - are showing signs of unrest.
In How Civil Wars Start, acclaimed expert Barbara F. Walter, who has advised on political violence everywhere from the CIA to the U.S. Senate to the United Nations, explains the rise of civil war and the conditions that create it. As democracies across the world backslide and citizens become more polarised, civil wars will become even more widespread and last longer than they have in the past. This urgent and important book shows us a path back toward peace.
Genres
Politics
Nonfiction
History
War
Political Science
Audiobook
Sociology
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 6, 2022
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/58369678
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Aug. & Sept. 2023 Meeting
What We Owe the Future
William MacAskill
3.87
3,980 ratings511 reviews
An Oxford philosopher makes the case for "longtermism"—that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.
The fate of the world is in our hands. Humanity’s written history spans only five thousand years. Our yet-unwritten future could last for millions more—or it could end tomorrow. Astonishing numbers of people could lead lives of great happiness or unimaginable suffering, or never live at all, depending on what we choose to do today.
In What We Owe the Future, philosopher William MacAskill argues for longtermism, that idea that positively influencing the distant future is a key moral priority of our time. From this perspective, it’s not enough to reverse climate change or avert the next pandemic. We must ensure that civilization would rebound if it collapsed; counter the end of moral progress; and prepare for a planet where the smartest beings are digital, not human.
If we make wise choices today, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will thrive, knowing we did everything we could to give them a world full of justice, hope and beauty.
GenresPhilosophyNonfictionScienceHistoryEconomicsPoliticsAudiobook
335 pages, Hardcover
Published August 16, 2022
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59802037-what-we-owe-the-future?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=hCfyxCreFR&rank=1
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July 2023 Meeting
Steal Like An Artist By Austin Kleon: Executive Summary of Steal Like An Artist
West and Harris Publishing
4.30
46 ratings1 review
For centuries, we’ve been programmed to believe that in order to achieve something great, one must suffer more than most.
The stereotype of the tortured artist is one that has been around for as long as the arts have been. It is believed that artists must suffer and torture their souls in order to create the masterpieces that will be handed down throughout the ages, and allow their names to live forever.
…but what if I told you that wasn’t true?
The book, Steal Like an Artist, will open your eyes to the path of true success as an artist, author, or in any creative field. It will teach you how to optimize your time, and enhance your creativity through small tricks and major changes that you can make in your life. Making a living in a creative field has never been easy. Despite this, thousands, if not millions, of people dream about that very path in life.
Now’s the time to stop dreaming, and to start doing…
*** BONUS ***
Download the book now and get your bonus ebook “The Vault of Motivational Quotes’ where you can have access to words of wisdom from the greatest and most inspiring leaders on the planet!
GenresSelf Help
33 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 1, 2015
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25964435-steal-like-an-artist-by-austin-kleon
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Apr. & May. 2023 Meeting
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
Sarah Bakewell
4.24
14,496 ratings1,915 reviews
Paris, near the turn of 1933. Three young friends meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their friend Raymond Aron, who opens their eyes to a radical new way of thinking. Pointing to his drink, he says, 'You can make philosophy out of this cocktail!'
From this moment of inspiration, Sartre will create his own extraordinary philosophy of real, experienced life–of love and desire, of freedom and being, of cafés and waiters, of friendships and revolutionary fervour. It is a philosophy that will enthral Paris and sweep through the world, leaving its mark on post-war liberation movements, from the student uprisings of 1968 to civil rights pioneers.
At the Existentialist Café tells the story of modern existentialism as one of passionate encounters between people, minds and ideas. From the ‘king and queen of existentialism'–Sartre and de Beauvoir–to their wider circle of friends and adversaries including Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Iris Murdoch, this book is an enjoyable and original journey through a captivating intellectual movement. Weaving biography and thought, Sarah Bakewell takes us to the heart of a philosophy about life that also changed lives, and that tackled the biggest questions of all: what we are and how we are to live.
Genres
Philosophy
Nonfiction
History
Biography
France
Politics
Psychology
...more
440 pages, Hardcover
First published March 3, 2016
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25658482-at-the-existentialist-caf
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Feb. & Mar. 2023 Meeting
plenty to discuss:
- what is the purpose of art?
- art for art's sake or art in the service of religion, imperial power, the proleteriat, social awareness, fine art Phd's etc?
- do market values have anything to do with artistic merit?
- should taxpayers be paying for something most don't like?
- are there objective criteria for assessing art or is art appreciation entirely subjective?
- should there be different criteria for different cultures?
- is the character of an artist relevant to artistic merit?
What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in a Nutshell
Will Gompertz
4.21
8,437 ratings552 reviews
In the tradition of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, art history with a sense of humor
Every year, millions of museum and gallery visitors ponder the modern art on display and secretly ask themselves, "Is this art?" A former director at London's Tate Gallery and now the BBC arts editor, Will Gompertz made it his mission to bring modern art's exciting history alive for everyone, explaining why an unmade bed or a pickled shark can be art—and why a five-year-old couldn't really do it. Rich with extraordinary tales and anecdotes, What Are You Looking At? entertains as it arms readers with the knowledge to truly understand and enjoy what it is they’re looking at.
Genres
Art
Nonfiction
History
Art History
Design
Art Design
Cultural
...more
464 pages, Hardcover
First published September 6, 2012
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15929764-what-are-you-looking-at
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Feb. 2023 Meeting
Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention- and How to Think Deeply Again
Johann Hari
4.27
23,235 ratings2,798 reviews
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Nonfiction (2022)
Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening--and how to get our attention back.
In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions--even abandoning his phone for three months--but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention--and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.
We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers' productivity.
Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus--as individuals, and as a society--if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.
GenresNonfictionPsychologySelf HelpScienceProductivityAudiobookPersonal Development
357 pages, Hardcover
First published January 6, 2022
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Jan. 2023 Meeting
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
Merlin Sheldrake
4.37
20,910 ratings3,066 reviews
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Science & Technology (2020)
There is a lifeform so strange and wondrous that it forces us to rethink how life works…
Neither plant nor animal, it is found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space, and thrives amidst nuclear radiation.
In this captivating adventure, Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems. They can solve problems without a brain, stretching traditional definitions of ‘intelligence’, and can manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties, which have influenced societies since antiquity, have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. The ability of fungi to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web’, is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet they live their lives largely out of sight, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented.
Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into this hidden kingdom of life, and shows that fungi are key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel and behave. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.
GenresNonfictionScienceNatureBiologyEnvironmentAudiobookEcology
366 pages, Hardcover
First published May 12, 2020
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52668915-entangled-life
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Oct. 2022 Meeting
Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
by Anil Seth
4.21 · Rating details · 616 ratings · 97 reviews
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW STATESMAN, THE ECONOMIST & BLOOMBERG BOOK OF THE YEAR
A GUARDIAN & FINANCIAL TIMES SCIENCE BOOK OF THE YEAR
Anil Seth's radical new theory of consciousness challenges our understanding of perception and reality, doing for brain science what Dawkins did for evolutionary biology.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53036979-being-you
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Sept. 2022 Meeting
by Joanna Chiu (Goodreads Author)
4.15 · Rating details · 357 ratings · 64 reviews
While the United States stumbles, an award-winning foreign correspondent chronicles China’s dramatic moves to become the world’s dominant power.
As the second-largest economy, China is now extending its influence across the globe. Joanna Chiu has spent a decade tracking China’s propulsive rise, from the complicity of democratic nations, to a new colonialism coming from its multibillion-dollar “New Silk Road” initiative, to its growing sway on foreign countries and multilateral institutions. Chiu transports readers to protests in Hong Kong, underground churches in Beijing, and exile Uighur communities in Turkey, exposing Beijing’s use of high-tech police surveillance and aggressive human rights violations against those who challenge its power. With increasingly close ties between authoritarian states, the new world order documented in China Unbound lays out the disturbing implications for prosperity and freedom everywhere. (less)
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Paperback, 304 pages
Published September 28th 2021 by Anansi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56642484-china-unbound
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Aug. 2022 Meeting
Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life
Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life
by Daniel Klein
3.81 ·
Rating details · 2,666 ratings · 436 reviews
One of the bestselling authors of Plato and a Platypus travels to Greece with a suitcase full of philosophy books, seeking the best way to achieve a fulfilling old age. Daniel Klein journeys to the Greek island Hydra to discover the secrets of aging happily. Drawing on the lives of his Greek friends, as well as philosophers ranging from Epicurus to Sartre, Klein learns to appreciate old age as a distinct and extraordinarily valuable stage of life. He uncovers simple pleasures that are uniquely available late in life, as well as headier pleasures that only a mature mind can fully appreciate. A travel book, a witty and accessible meditation, and an optimistic guide to living well, Travels with Epicurus is a delightful jaunt to the Aegean and through the terrain of old age led by a droll philosopher. A perfect gift book for the holidays, this little treasure is sure to please longtime fans of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar and garner new ones, young and old. (less)
Hardcover, 176 pages
Published October 30th 2012 by Penguin Books
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15808241-travels-with-epicurus
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Jul. 2022 Meeting
Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli 2021 / 256p
Helgoland: The World of Quantum Theory
by Carlo Rovelli
4.09 · Rating details · 3,379 ratings · 483 reviews
A startling new look at quantum theory, from the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time.
One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli has entranced millions of readers with his singular perspective on the cosmos. In Helgoland, he examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving.
Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg made the crucial breakthrough for the creation of quantum mechanics, setting off a century of scientific revolution. Full of alarming ideas (ghost waves, distant objects that seem to be magically connected, cats that appear both dead and alive), quantum physics has led to countless discoveries and technological advancements. Today our understanding of the world is based on this theory, yet it is still profoundly mysterious.
As scientists and philosophers continue to fiercely debate the meaning of the theory, Rovelli argues that its most unsettling contradictions can be explained by seeing the world as fundamentally made of relationships rather than substances. We and everything around us exist only in our interactions with one another. This bold idea suggests new directions for thinking about the structure of reality and even the nature of consciousness.
Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience. Shifting our perspective once again, he takes us on a riveting journey through the universe so we can better comprehend our place in it. (less)
Hardcover, 256 pages
Published May 25th 2021 by Riverhead Books (first published September 2020)
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(Mar. & April 2022)
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth
4.37 · Rating details · 3,524 ratings · 515 reviews
From The New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth, the untold story of the cyberweapons market-the most secretive, invisible, government-backed market on earth-and a terrifying first look at a new kind of global warfare.
Zero day: a software bug that allows a hacker to break into your devices and move around undetected. One of the most coveted tools in a spy's arsenal, a zero day has the power to silently spy on your iPhone, dismantle the safety controls at a chemical plant, alter an election, and shut down the electric grid (just ask Ukraine).
For decades, under cover of classification levels and non-disclosure agreements, the United States government became the world's dominant hoarder of zero days. U.S. government agents paid top dollar-first thousands, and later millions of dollars- to hackers willing to sell their lock-picking code and their silence.
Then the United States lost control of its hoard and the market.
Now those zero days are in the hands of hostile nations and mercenaries who do not care if your vote goes missing, your clean water is contaminated, or our nuclear plants melt down.
Filled with spies, hackers, arms dealers, and a few unsung heroes, written like a thriller and a reference, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is an astonishing feat of journalism. Based on years of reporting and hundreds of interviews, The New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth lifts the curtain on a market in shadow, revealing the urgent threat faced by us all if we cannot bring the global cyber arms race to heel. (less)
Hardcover, 528 pages
Published February 9th 2021 by Bloomsbury Publishing
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Feb. 2022 Meeting
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas (Goodreads Author)
4.16 · Rating details · 12,449 ratings · 1,808 reviews
An insider's groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite's efforts to "change the world" preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve.
Former New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas takes us into the inner sanctums of a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can--except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. We see how they rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor; how they lavishly reward "thought leaders" who redefine "change" in winner-friendly ways; and how they constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm. We hear the limousine confessions of a celebrated foundation boss; witness an American president hem and haw about his plutocratic benefactors; and attend a cruise-ship conference where entrepreneurs celebrate their own self-interested magnanimity.
Giridharadas asks hard questions: Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? He also points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world. A call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike. (less)
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Hardcover, 288 pages
Published August 28th 2018 by Knopf Publishing Group
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Oct. 2021 & Jan. 2022 Meeting
Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts
by Stanislas Dehaene
4.18 · Rating details · 1,444 ratings · 192 reviews
A breathtaking look at the new science that can track consciousness deep in the brain
How does our brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before.
In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state. We can now pin down the neurons that fire when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information and understand the crucial role unconscious computations play in how we make decisions. The emerging theory enables a test of consciousness in animals, babies, and those with severe brain injuries.
A joyous exploration of the mind and its thrilling complexities, Consciousness and the Brain will excite anyone interested
in cutting-edge science and technology and the vast philosophical, personal, and ethical implications of finally quantifying
consciousness. (less)
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Hardcover, 336 pages
Published January 30th 2014 by Viking
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18079692-consciousness-and-the-brain?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=AsQTSTIKA5&rank=3
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I Am Not Your Negro
by James Baldwin, Raoul Peck (Editor)
4.48 · Rating details · 4,600 ratings · 559 reviews
To compose his stunning documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck mined James Baldwin s published and unpublished oeuvre, selecting passages from his books, essays, letters, notes, and interviews that are every bit as incisive and pertinent now as they have ever been. Weaving these texts together, Peck brilliantly imagines the book that Baldwin never wrote. In his final years, Baldwin had envisioned a book about his three assassinated friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. His deeply personal notes for the project have never been published before. Peck s film uses them to jump through time, juxtaposing Baldwin s private words with his public statements, in a blazing examination of the tragic history of race in America. (less)
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Paperback, 144 pages
Published February 7th 2017 by Vintage (first published 2017)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33198164-i-am-not-your-negro?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=7UkBxx08Wz&rank=5
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Oct. 2021 Meeting
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
by Michael J. Sandel
4.22 · Rating details · 3,862 ratings · 585 reviews
These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favour of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the promise that "you can make it if you try". And the consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fuelled populist protest, with the triumph of Brexit and election of Donald Trump.
Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the polarized politics of our time, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalisation and rising inequality. Sandel highlights the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success - more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility, and more hospitable to a politics of the common good. (less)
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Paperback, 272 pages
Published September 10th 2020 by Allen Lane
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50364458-the-tyranny-of-merit
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Sep. 2021 Meeting
How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future
by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt
4.19 · Rating details · 16,741 ratings · 2,205 reviews
Donald Trump's presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we'd be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang--in a revolution or military coup--but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one.
Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die--and how ours can be saved. (less)
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Hardcover, 320 pages
Published January 16th 2018 by Crown Publishing Group (NY)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35356384-how-democracies-die
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Aug. 2021 Meeting
Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt
by Steven Johnson (Goodreads Author)
3.82 · Rating details · 1,659 ratings · 224 reviews
The New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Map and How We Got to Now returns with the story of a pirate who changed the world
Most confrontations, viewed from the wide angle of history, are minor disputes, sparks that quickly die out. But every now and then, someone strikes a match that lights up the whole planet.
Henry Every was the seventeenth century's most notorious pirate. The press published wildly popular--and wildly inaccurate--reports of his nefarious adventures. The British government offered enormous bounties for his capture, alive or (preferably) dead. But Steven Johnson argues that Every's most lasting legacy was his inadvertent triggering of a major shift in the global economy. Enemy of All Mankind focuses on one key event--the attack on an Indian treasure ship by Every and his crew--and its surprising repercussions across time and space. It's the gripping tale one of the most lucrative crimes in history, the first international manhunt, and the trial of the seventeenth century.
Johnson uses the extraordinary story of Henry Every and his crimes to explore the emergence of the East India Company, the British Empire, and the modern global marketplace: a densely interconnected planet ruled by nations and corporations. How did this unlikely pirate and his notorious crime end up playing a key role in the birth of multinational capitalism? In the same mode as Johnson's classic non-fiction historical thriller The Ghost Map, Enemy of All Mankind deftly traces the path from a single struck match to a global conflagration. (less)
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Hardcover, 286 pages
Published May 12th 2020 by Riverhead Books
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Jul. 2021 Meeting
The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)
by Katie Mack (Goodreads Author)
4.28 · Rating details · 3,233 ratings · 556 reviews
From one of the most dynamic rising stars in astrophysics, an accessible and eye-opening look—in the bestselling tradition of Sean Carroll and Carlo Rovelli—at the five different ways the universe could end, and the mind-blowing lessons each scenario reveals about the most important concepts in physics.
We know the universe had a beginning. With the Big Bang, it went from a state of unimaginable density to an all-encompassing cosmic fireball to a simmering fluid of matter and energy, laying down the seeds for everything from dark matter to black holes to one rocky planet orbiting a star near the edge of a spiral galaxy that happened to develop life. But what happens at the end of the story? In billions of years, humanity could still exist in some unrecognizable form, venturing out to distant space, finding new homes and building new civilizations. But the death of the universe is final. What might such a cataclysm look like? And what does it mean for us?
Dr. Katie Mack has been contemplating these questions since she was eighteen, when her astronomy professor first informed her the universe could end at any moment, setting her on the path toward theoretical astrophysics. Now, with lively wit and humor, she unpacks them in The End of Everything, taking us on a mind-bending tour through each of the cosmos’ possible finales: the Big Crunch; the Heat Death; Vacuum Decay; the Big Rip; and the Bounce. In the tradition of Neil DeGrasse’s bestseller Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Mack guides us through major concepts in quantum mechanics, cosmology, string theory, and much more, in a wildly fun, surprisingly upbeat ride to the farthest reaches of everything we know. (less)
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Hardcover, 240 pages
Published June 9th 2020 by Scribner
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Jun. 2021 Meeting
Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice
by Martha C. Nussbaum
3.92 · Rating details · 338 ratings · 59 reviews
Anger is not just ubiquitous, it is also popular. Many people think it is impossible to care sufficiently for justice without anger at injustice. Many believe that it is impossible for individuals to vindicate their own self-respect or to move beyond an injury without anger. To not feel anger in those cases would be considered suspect. Is this how we should think about anger, or is anger above all a disease, deforming both the personal and the political?
In this wide-ranging book, Martha C. Nussbaum, one of our leading public intellectuals, argues that anger is conceptually confused and normatively pernicious. It assumes that the suffering of the wrongdoer restores the thing that was damaged, and it betrays an all-too-lively interest in relative status and humiliation. Studying anger in intimate relationships, casual daily interactions, the workplace, the criminal justice system, and movements for social transformation, Nussbaum shows that anger's core ideas are both infantile and harmful.
Is forgiveness the best way of transcending anger? Nussbaum examines different conceptions of this much-sentimentalized notion, both in the Jewish and Christian traditions and in secular morality. Some forms of forgiveness are ethically promising, she claims, but others are subtle allies of retribution: those that exact a performance of contrition and abasement as a condition of waiving angry feelings. In general, she argues, a spirit of generosity (combined, in some cases, with a reliance on impartial welfare-oriented legal institutions) is the best way to respond to injury. Applied to the personal and the political realms, Nussbaum's profoundly insightful and erudite view of anger and forgiveness puts both in a startling new light.
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3.92 · Rating details · 348 ratings · 61 reviews
Hardcover, 336 pages
Published May 2nd 2016 by Oxford University Press, USA (first published May 1st 2016)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26721206-anger-and-forgiveness
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May 2021 Meeting:
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
by Peter Godfrey-Smith
3.86 · Rating details · 13,291 ratings · 1,609 reviews
Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? What does it mean that evolution built minds not once but at least twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?
In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on, the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journeys.
But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? Drawing on the latest scientific research and his own scuba-diving adventures, Godfrey-Smith probes the many mysteries that surround the lineage. How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually “think for themselves”? What happens when some octopuses abandon their hermit-like ways and congregate, as they do in a unique location off the coast of Australia?
By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind—and on our own. (less)
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Hardcover, 257 pages
Published December 6th 2016 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28116739-other-minds?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=FNcWEKM4MM&rank=1
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Apr. 2021 Meeting:
War: How Conflict Shaped Us
by Margaret MacMillan
3.62 · Rating details · 844 ratings · 186 reviews
The internationally renowned historian and bestselling author of Paris 1919 contemplates the existence of war: why it occurs, and what it says about human nature.
War is always with us, even in peace. It has shaped humanity, its institutions, its states, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject not least because it brings out the most vile and the noblest aspects of humanity.
Margaret MacMillan looks at the ways in which war has shaped human history and how, in turn, changes in political organization, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight. The book considers such much-debated and controversial issues as when war first started; whether human nature dooms us to fight each other; why war has been described as the most organized of all human activities and how it has forced us to become still more organized; how warriors are made and why are they almost always men; and how we try to control war.
Drawing on lessons from classical history as well as analysis of modern warfare from all parts of the globe, MacMillan reveals the many faces of war--the way it shapes our past, our future, our views of the world, and our very conception of ourselves. (less)
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Published September 22nd 2020
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54111936-war?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=SJRfyzjpt2&rank=1
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Mar. 2021 Meeting:
How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
by Lisa Feldman Barrett
4.09 · Rating details · 4,733 ratings · 613 reviews
A new theory of how the brain constructs emotions that could revolutionize psychology, health care, law enforcement, and our understanding of the human mind.
Emotions feel automatic, like uncontrollable reactions to things we think and experience. Scientists have long supported this assumption by claiming that emotions are hardwired in the body or the brain. Today, however, the science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology—ans this paradigm shift has far-reaching implications for us all.
Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose theory of emotion is driving a deeper understanding of the mind and brain, and shedding new light on what it means to be human. Her research overturns the widely held belief that emotions are housed in different parts of the brain and are universally expressed and recognized. Instead, she has shown that emotion is constructed in the moment, by core systems that interact across the whole brain, aided by a lifetime of learning. This new theory means that you play a much greater role in your emotional life than you ever thought. Its repercussions are already shaking the foundations not only of psychology but also of medicine, the legal system, child-rearing, meditation, and even airport security.
Why do emotions feel automatic? Does rational thought really control emotion? How does emotion affect disease? How can you make your children more emotionally intelligent? How Emotions Are Made answers these questions and many more, revealing the latest research and intriguing practical applications of the new science of emotion, mind, and brain. (less)
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Hardcover, 448 pages
Published March 7th 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (first published January 5th 2016)
ISBN0544133315 (ISBN13: 9780544133310)
Literary AwardsPEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing Nominee for Longlist (2018)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23719305-how-emotions-are-made?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=KB460gh6uB&rank=1
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Feb. 2021 Meeting:
Machines Like Me
by Ian McEwan
3.59 · Rating details · 19,401 ratings · 2,600 reviews
Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding.
Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever – a love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma. Ian McEwan’s subversive and entertaining new novel poses fundamental questions: what makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns of the power to invent things beyond our control. (less)
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Paperback, 306 pages
Published April 18th 2019 by Jonathan Cape
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42086795-machines-like-me
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Jan. 2021 Meeting:
The School of Life: An Emotional Education
by Alain de Botton (Goodreads Author) (Editor)
4.31 · Rating details · 1,916 ratings · 176 reviews
Discover everything you were never taught at school about how to lead a better life...
Introduced and edited by the bestselling author of The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel and The Course of Love
We spend years in school learning facts and figures but the one thing we're never taught is how to live a fulfilled life. That's why we need The School of Life - a real organisation founded ten years ago by writer and philosopher Alain de Botton. The School of Life has one simple aim: to equip people with the tools to survive and thrive in the modern world. And the most important of these tools is emotional intelligence.
This book brings together ten years of essential and transformative research on emotional intelligence, with practical topics including:
- how to understand yourself
- how to master the dilemmas of relationships
- how to become more effective at work
- how to endure failure
- how to grow more serene and resilient
The School of Life is nothing short of a crash course in emotional maturity. With all the trademark wit and elegance of Alain de Botton's other writings, and rooted in practical, achievable advice, it show us a path to the better lives we all want and deserve. (less)
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Paperback, 310 pages
Published September 5th 2019 by Hamish Hamilton
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43264830-the-school-of-life
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Dec. 2020 Meeting:
Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo
4.29 · Rating details · 5,233 ratings · 647 reviews
Figuring out how to deal with today's critical economic problems is perhaps the great challenge of our time. Much greater than space travel or perhaps even the next revolutionary medical breakthrough, what is at stake is the whole idea of the good life as we have known it.
Immigration and inequality, globalization and technological disruption, slowing growth and accelerating climate change--these are sources of great anxiety across the world, from New Delhi and Dakar to Paris and Washington, DC. The resources to address these challenges are there--what we lack are ideas that will help us jump the wall of disagreement and distrust that divides us. If we succeed, history will remember our era with gratitude; if we fail, the potential losses are incalculable.
In this revolutionary book, renowned MIT economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo take on this challenge, building on cutting-edge research in economics explained with lucidity and grace. Original, provocative, and urgent, Good Economics for Hard Times makes a persuasive case for an intelligent interventionism and a society built on compassion and respect and show how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of the day. It is an extraordinary achievement, one that shines a light to help us appreciate and understand our precariously balanced world. (less)
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Kindle Edition, 417 pages
Published November 12th 2019 by PublicAffairs
Original TitleGood Economics for Hard Times
ASINB07PCQLKSS
Edition LanguageEnglish
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51014619-good-economics-for-hard-times
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Nov. 2020 Meeting:
Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Care Even If the Universe Doesn't
by Ralph Lewis, Michael Shermer
4.19 · Rating details · 27 ratings · 8 reviews
A psychiatrist presents a compelling argument for how human purpose and caring emerged in a spontaneous and unguided universe.
Drawing on years of wide-ranging, intensive clinical experience, and his own family experience with cancer, the author helps the reader to understand how people cope with random adversity without recourse to supernatural belief. In fact, as he explains, coming to terms with randomness, while initially frightening, can be liberating and empowering. Realizing that the universe is fundamentally random is not usually the cause of nihilism, apathy, or feelings of pointlessness about life.
Written for those seeking a scientifically sound yet humanistic worldview, the book examines science's inroads into the big questions claimed by religion and philosophy. Dr. Lewis shows how our mistaken intuitions about purpose are entangled with assumptions that life events happen for an intended reason and that the universe has inherent purpose. Integrating disparate scientific fields, he shows how not only the universe, life, and consciousness could have emerged and evolved spontaneously and unguided - so too could purpose, morality, and meaning. There is persuasive evidence that these qualities evolved naturally and unmysteriously in humans, as conscious, goal-directed social animals.
While acknowledging the social and psychological value of progressive forms of religion, the author respectfully deconstructs even the most sophisticated theistic arguments for a purposeful universe. Instead, he offers an evidence-based, realistic yet optimistic, compassionate worldview. (less)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38710757-finding-purpose-in-a-godless-world
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Oct. 2020 Meeting:
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
by Kai-Fu Lee (Goodreads Author)
4.16 · Rating details · 7,938 ratings · 1,010 reviews
Dr. Kai-Fu Lee—one of the world’s most respected experts on AI and China—reveals that China has suddenly caught up to the US at an astonishingly rapid and unexpected pace. In AI Superpowers, Kai-fu Lee argues powerfully that because of these unprecedented developments in AI, dramatic changes will be happening much sooner than many of us expected. Indeed, as the US-Sino AI competition begins to heat up, Lee urges the US and China to both accept and to embrace the great responsibilities that come with significant technological power. Most experts already say that AI will have a devastating impact on blue-collar jobs. But Lee predicts that Chinese and American AI will have a strong impact on white-collar jobs as well. Is universal basic income the solution? In Lee’s opinion, probably not. But he provides a clear description of which jobs will be affected and how soon, which jobs can be enhanced with AI, and most importantly, how we can provide solutions to some of the most profound changes in human history that are coming soon. (less)
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Hardcover, 255 pages
Published September 25th 2018 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38242135-ai-superpowers
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Sep. 2020 Meeting:
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism.
by Cory Doctorow
4.38 · Rating details · 24 ratings · 5 reviews
"Surveillance capitalism is everywhere. But it’s not the result of some wrong turn or a rogue abuse of corporate power — it’s the system working as intended. This is the subject of Cory Doctorow’s new book, which we’re thrilled to publish in whole here on OneZero."
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Edition LanguageEnglish
URLhttps://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55134785-how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=sIpz56DQXT&rank=1
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Aug. 2020 Meeting:
The Arts and Science of Relationships: Understanding Human Needs
https://www.coursera.org/learn/human-needs
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July 2020 Meeting:
The Science of Happiness
The first MOOC to teach positive psychology. Learn science-based principles and practices for a happy, meaningful life.
https://www.edx.org/course/the-science-of-happiness-3
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Jun. 2020 Meeting:
Data Ethics, AI and Responsible Innovation
Our future is here and it relies on data. Predictive policing, medical robots, smart homes and cities, artificial intelligences - we can all think about how any of those could go wrong. Discover how we can build a future where they are done right.
https://www.edx.org/es/course/Data-Ethics-AI-and-Responsible-Innovation
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May 2020 Meeting:
A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway
4.04 · Rating details · 114,537 ratings · 7,975 reviews
Hemingway's memories of his life as an unknown writer living in Paris in the twenties are deeply personal, warmly affectionate, and full of wit. Looking back not only at his own much younger self, but also at the other writers who shared Paris with him - James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald - he recalls the time when, poor, happy, and writing in cafes, he discovered his vocation. Written during the last years of Hemingway's life, his memoir is a lively and powerful reflection of his genius that scintillates with the romance of the city. (less)
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Paperback, Vintage Classics, 192 pages
Published September 6th 2012 by Vintage (first published 1964)
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Apr. 2020 Meeting:
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
by Matthew Walker
4.44 · Rating details · 47,814 ratings · 5,989 reviews
A New York Times bestseller
The first sleep book by a leading scientific expert—Professor Matthew Walker, Director of UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab—reveals his groundbreaking exploration of sleep, explaining how we can harness its transformative power to change our lives for the better.
Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, wellness, and longevity. Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why we suffer such devastating health consequences when we don't sleep. Compared to the other basic drives in life—eating, drinking, and reproducing—the purpose of sleep remained elusive.
An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming. Within the brain, sleep enriches our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming mollifies painful memories and creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge to inspire creativity.
Walker answers important questions about sleep: how do caffeine and alcohol affect sleep? What really happens during REM sleep? Why do our sleep patterns change across a lifetime? How do common sleep aids affect us and can they do long-term damage? Charting cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and synthesizing decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood, and energy levels; regulate hormones; prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes; slow the effects of aging; increase longevity; enhance the education and lifespan of our children, and boost the efficiency, success, and productivity of our businesses. Clear-eyed, fascinating, and accessible, Why We Sleep is a crucial and illuminating book. (less)
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Hardcover, 1st edition, 368 pages
Published October 3rd 2017 by Scribner
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
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Mar. 2020 Meeting:
Superior: The Return of Race Science
by Angela Saini
4.26 · Rating details · 695 ratings · 116 reviews
An astute and timely examination of the re-emergence of scientific research into racial differences
Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science.
After the horrors of the Nazi regime in WWII, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of unrepentant eugenicists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Hernstein's and Charles Murray's 1994 title, The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races.
If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas, and considered race a social construct, it was still an idea that managed to somehow make its way into the research into the human genome that began in earnest in the mid-1990s and continues today. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Saini shows us how, again and again, science is retrofitted to accommodate race. Even as our understanding of highly complex traits like intelligence, and the complicated effect of environmental influences on human beings, from the molecular level on up, grows, the hope of finding simple genetic differences between "races"--to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores or to justify cultural assumptions--stubbornly persists.
At a time when racialized nationalisms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, Superior is a powerful reminder that biologically, we are all far more alike than different. (less)
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Hardcover, 256 pages
Published May 21st 2019 by Beacon Press
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/42042093-superior
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Feb. 2020 Meeting:
Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
3.71 · Rating details · 8,306 ratings · 1,348 reviews
Americans are a "positive" people—cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive, we are told, is the key to success and prosperity.
In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude. Evangelical mega-churches preach the good news that you only have to want something to get it, because God wants to "prosper" you. The medical profession prescribes positive thinking for its presumed health benefits. Academia has made room for new departments of "positive psychology" and the "science of happiness." Nowhere, though, has bright-siding taken firmer root than within the business community, where, as Ehrenreich shows, the refusal even to consider negative outcomes—like mortgage defaults—contributed directly to the current economic crisis.
With the myth-busting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America’s penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out “negative” thoughts. On a national level, it’s brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best—poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science, and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage. (less)
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Hardcover, 206 pages
Published October 13th 2009 by Metropolitan Books
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452749-bright-sided
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Jan. 2020 Meeting:
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters
by Tom Nichols
3.82 · Rating details · 3,531 ratings · 591 reviews
The rise of the internet and other technology has made information more easily-accessible than ever before. While this has had the positive effect of equalizing access to knowledge, it also has lowered the bar on what depth of knowledge is required to consider oneself an "expert." A cult of anti-expertise sentiment has coincided with anti-intellectualism, resulting in massively viral yet poorly informed debates ranging from the anti-vaccination movement to attacks on GMOs. This surge in intellectual egalitarianism has altered the landscape of debates-all voices are equal, and "fact" is a subjective term. Browsing WebMD puts one on equal footing with doctors, and Wikipedia allows all to be foreign policy experts, scientists, and more.
As Tom Nichols shows in The Death of Expertise, there are a number of reasons why this has occurred-ranging from easy access to Internet search engines to a customer satisfaction model within higher education. The product of these interrelated trends, Nichols argues, is a pervasive distrust of expertise among the public coinciding with an unfounded belief among non-experts that their opinions should have equal standing with those of the experts. The experts are not always right, of course, and Nichols discusses expert failure. The crucial point is that bad decisions by experts can and have been effectively challenged by other well-informed experts. The issue now is that the democratization of information dissemination has created an army of ill-informed citizens who denounce expertise.
When challenged, non-experts resort to the false argument that the experts are often wrong. Though it may be true, but the solution is not to jettison expertise as an ideal; it is to improve our expertise. Nichols is certainly not opposed to information democratization, but rather the enlightenment people believe they achieve after superficial internet research. He shows in vivid detail the ways in which this impulse is coursing through our culture and body politic, but the larger goal is to explain the benefits that expertise and rigorous learning regimes bestow upon all societies. (less)
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Hardcover, 272 pages
Published March 1st 2017 by Oxford University Press, USA (first published August 2016)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26720949-the-death-of-expertise?from_search=true
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Dec. 2019 Meeting:
“For our December meeting, we are going to finish our discussion of Bottle of Lies and then have an open session for conversation about our favourite picks this year. We'll also have time to hear about previews of potential future books if available e.g. Big Potential by Shawn Achor; The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray; Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.” And -Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini
ALSO:
An interesting article we can touch upon, about Jordan Peterson: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/16013
AND:
Why Conservatives and Liberals Think Differently
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Nov. 2019 Meeting:
Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom
by Katherine Eban (Goodreads Author)
4.42 · Rating details · 667 ratings · 117 reviews
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
From an award-winning journalist, an explosive narrative investigation of the generic drug boom that reveals fraud and life-threatening dangers on a global scale—The Jungle for pharmaceuticals
Many have hailed the widespread use of generic drugs as one of the most important public-health developments of the twenty-first century. Today, almost 90 percent of our pharmaceutical market is comprised of generics, the majority of which are manufactured overseas. We have been reassured by our doctors, our pharmacists and our regulators that generic drugs are identical to their brand-name counterparts, just less expensive. But is this really true?
Katherine Eban’s Bottle of Lies exposes the deceit behind generic-drug manufacturing—and the attendant risks for global health. Drawing on exclusive accounts from whistleblowers and regulators, as well as thousands of pages of confidential FDA documents, Eban reveals an industry where fraud is rampant, companies routinely falsify data, and executives circumvent almost every principle of safe manufacturing to minimize cost and maximize profit, confident in their ability to fool inspectors. Meanwhile, patients unwittingly consume medicine with unpredictable and dangerous effects.
The story of generic drugs is truly global. It connects middle America to China, India, sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil, and represents the ultimate litmus test of globalization: what are the risks of moving drug manufacturing offshore, and are they worth the savings?
A decade-long investigation with international sweep, high-stakes brinkmanship and big money at its core, Bottle of Lies reveals how the world’s greatest public-health innovation has become one of its most astonishing swindles.
(less)
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ebook, 512 pages
Published May 14th 2019 by Ecco
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/42448266-bottle-of-lies
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Oct. 2019 Meeting:
The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
4.08 · Rating details · 358 ratings · 47 reviews
“The Fourth Age not only discusses what the rise of A.I. will mean for us, it also forces readers to challenge their preconceptions. And it manages to do all this in a way that is both entertaining and engaging.” —The New York Times
As we approach a great turning point in history when technology is poised to redefine what it means to be human, The Fourth Age offers fascinating insight into AI, robotics, and their extraordinary implications for our species.
In The Fourth Age, Byron Reese makes the case that technology has reshaped humanity just three times in history:
- 100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to language.
- 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture, which led to cities and warfare.
- 5,000 years ago, we invented the wheel and writing, which lead to the nation state.
We are now on the doorstep of a fourth change brought about by two technologies: AI and robotics. The Fourth Age provides extraordinary background information on how we got to this point, and how—rather than what—we should think about the topics we’ll soon all be facing: machine consciousness, automation, employment, creative computers, radical life extension, artificial life, AI ethics, the future of warfare, superintelligence, and the implications of extreme prosperity.
By asking questions like “Are you a machine?” and “Could a computer feel anything?”, Reese leads you through a discussion along the cutting edge in robotics and AI, and, provides a framework by which we can all understand, discuss, and act on the issues of the Fourth Age, and how they’ll transform humanity. (less)
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Hardcover, 320 pages
Published April 24th 2018 by Atria Books
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https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35297413-the-fourth-age
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Sept. 2019 Meeting:
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells (Goodreads Author)
4.21 · Rating details · 4,201 ratings · 928 reviews
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.
This is only a preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await--food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today.
Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation. (less)
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Hardcover, 310 pages
Published February 19th 2019 by Tim Duggan Books
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41552709-the-uninhabitable-earth
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August 2019 Meeting:
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund
4.37 · Rating details · 42,370 ratings · 4,528 reviews
Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.
When asked simple questions about global trends—what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers.
In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse).
Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases.
It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.
Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future.
“This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance…Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope this book will be.”
— Hans Rosling, February 2017. (less)
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Hardcover, 342 pages
Published January 25th 2018 by Sceptre
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July 2019 Meeting:
Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment
by Yanis Varoufakis
4.37 · Rating details · 1,906 ratings · 264 reviews
What happens when you take on the establishment? In this blistering, personal account, world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis blows the lid on Europe’s hidden agenda and exposes what actually goes on in its corridors of power.
Varoufakis sparked one of the most spectacular and controversial battles in recent political history when, as finance minister of Greece, he attempted to renegotiate his country’s relationship with the EU. Despite the mass support of the Greek people and the simple logic of his arguments, he succeeded only in provoking the fury of Europe’s political, financial and media elite. But the true story of what happened is almost entirely unknown – not least because so much of the EU’s real business takes place behind closed doors.
In this fearless account, Varoufakis reveals all: an extraordinary tale of brinkmanship, hypocrisy, collusion and betrayal that will shake the deep establishment to its foundations.
As is now clear, the same policies that required the tragic and brutal suppression of Greece’s democratic uprising have led directly to authoritarianism, populist revolt and instability throughout the Western world.
'Adults In The Room' is an urgent wake-up call to renew European democracy before it is too late. (less)
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Kindle Edition, 560 pages
Published May 4th 2017 by Vintage Digital
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34673467-adults-in-the-room?from_search=true
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June 2019 Meeting:
The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
4.02 · Rating details · 66 ratings · 10 reviews
In a brilliant but sobering work of journalism, Ellen Ruppel Shell takes a hard look at the forces that are reshaping the nature of work in America, overturning the often espoused mythology that retraining workers in software, engineering, and the sciences is the key to job security and career success, and achieving the middle-class dream in the future.
In a wide-ranging narrative that takes us from a downsized marketing executive in Massachusetts, to a father of three in Appalachia finding purpose and meaning working in a convenience store chain, to an unemployed autoworker retraining in "advanced manufacturing," Shell reveals how work is essential to our flourishing and pyschological well-being--and how so many of the avenues to well-paid and meaningful work will be challenged in the years ahead. The future of work is not being faced openly. We live in a world where the rewards of employment are concentrated in the hands of the few. Today, the top 10 percent of wage earners in the U.S. bring home 9 times the income of the other 90 percent, and the top .01 percent earn 184 times as much. The economic gap between the few and the many is so vast, Shell says, that we might as well be members of a different species. Moreover, since the 1970s, real wages for most of us have stagnated, and with it our purchasing power. Half of all Americans earn less than $30,000 a year. And the paths to landing those good-paying jobs that secure our financial future are disappearing in the wake of automation and the rise of AI. (less)
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Hardcover, 400 pages
Published October 23rd 2018 by Currency
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38363182-the-job
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May 2019 Meeting:
The Little Book of Lykke: The Danish Search for the World's Happiest People
by Meik Wiking
4.03 ·
Rating details · 5,316 ratings · 591 reviews
From the author of the international bestseller The Little Book of Hygge
Lykke (Luu-kah) (n): Happiness
It's easy to see why Denmark is often called the world's happiest country. Not only do they have equal parental leave for men and women, free higher education and trains that run on time, but they burn more candles per household than anywhere else.
So nobody knows more about happiness - what the Danes call lykke - than Meik Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen and author of the bestselling sensation The Little Book of Hygge . But he believes that, whilst we can certainly learn a lot from the Danes about finding fulfilment, the keys to happiness are actually buried all around the globe.
In this captivating book, he takes us on a treasure hunt to unlock the doors to inner fulfilment. From how we spend our precious time, to how we relate to our neighbours and cook dinner, he gathers evidence, stories and tips from the very happiest corners of the planet. This is the ultimate guide to how we can all find a little more lykke in our lives.
Meik Wiking is the CEO of The Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen and is one of the world's leading experts in happiness. Committed to understanding happiness, subjective well-being and quality of life, Meik works with countries across the world to discover and explore global trends of life satisfaction. Only someone absolutely dedicated to happiness sits in coffee shops across the world counting peoples' smiles!
His first book, The Little Book of Hygge, became an international bestseller and will soon be published in 31 countries. (less)
Hardcover, 288 pages
Published September 7th 2017 by Penguin Life
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34879265-the-little-book-of-lykke?from_search=true
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April 2019 Meeting:
The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy by Mariana Mazzucato 4.14 · Rating details · 231 ratings · 32 reviews Modern economies reward activities that extract value rather than create it. This must change to insure a capitalism that works for us all. In this scathing indictment of our current global financial system, The Value of Everything rigorously scrutinizes the way in which economic value has been determined and reveals how the difference between value creation and value extraction has become increasingly blurry. Mariana Mazzucato argues that this blurriness allowed certain actors in the economy to portray themselves as value creators, while in reality they were just moving existing value around or, even worse, destroying it. The book uses case studies - from Silicon Valley to the financial sector to big pharma - to show how the foggy notions of value create confusion between rents and profits, a difference that distorts the measurements of growth and GDP. The lesson here is urgent and sobering: to rescue our economy from the next, inevitable crisis and to foster long-term economic growth, we will need to rethink capitalism, rethink the role of public policy and the importance of the public sector, and redefine how we measure value in our society. (less) Get A Copy Amazon CAOnline Stores ▾Libraries Hardcover, 384 pages Published September 11th 2018 by PublicAffairs More Details... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29502362-the-value-of-everything?from_search=true
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March 2019 Meeting:
Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City
by Tanya Talaga
4.53 ·
Rating details · 2,062 ratings · 373 reviews
In 1966, twelve-year-old Chanie Wenjack froze to death on the railway tracks after running away from residential school. An inquest was called and four recommendations were made to prevent another tragedy. None of those recommendations were applied.
More than a quarter of a century later, from 2000 to 2011, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The seven were hundreds of miles away from their families, forced to leave home and live in a foreign and unwelcoming city. Five were found dead in the rivers surrounding Lake Superior, below a sacred Indigenous site. Jordan Wabasse, a gentle boy and star hockey player, disappeared into the minus twenty degrees Celsius night. The body of celebrated artist Norval Morrisseau’s grandson, Kyle, was pulled from a river, as was Curran Strang’s. Robyn Harper died in her boarding-house hallway and Paul Panacheese inexplicably collapsed on his kitchen floor. Reggie Bushie’s death finally prompted an inquest, seven years after the discovery of Jethro Anderson, the first boy whose body was found in the water.
Using a sweeping narrative focusing on the lives of the students, award-winning investigative journalist Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this small northern city that has come to manifest Canada’s long struggle with human rights violations against Indigenous communities. (less)
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Paperback, 376 pages
Published September 30th 2017 by House of Anansi Press
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33154545-seven-fallen-feathers?from_search=true
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February 2019 Meeting:
Description:
The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior
by Stefano Mancuso
4.18 ·
Rating details · 190 ratings · 38 reviews
Do plants have intelligence? Do they have memory? Are they better problem solvers than people? Plant Revolution—a fascinating, paradigm-shifting work that upends everything you thought you knew about plants—makes a compelling scientific case that these and other astonishing ideas are all true.
Plants make up eighty percent of the weight of all living things on earth, and yet it is easy to forget that these innocuous, beautiful organisms are responsible for not only the air that lets us survive, but for many of our modern comforts: our medicine, food supply, even our fossil fuels.
On the forefront of uncovering the essential truths about plants, world-renowned scientist Stefano Mancuso reveals the surprisingly sophisticated ability of plants to innovate, to remember, and to learn, offering us creative solutions to the most vexing technological and ecological problems that face us today. Despite not having brains or central nervous systems, plants perceive their surroundings with an even greater sensitivity than animals. They efficiently explore and react promptly to potentially damaging external events thanks to their cooperative, shared systems; without any central command centers, they are able to remember prior catastrophic events and to actively adapt to new ones.
Every page of Plant Revolution bubbles over with Stefano Mancuso’s infectious love for plants and for the eye-opening research that makes it more and more clear how remarkable our fellow inhabitants on this planet really are. In his hands, complicated science is wonderfully accessible, and he has loaded the book with gorgeous photographs that make for an unforgettable reading experience. Plant Revolution opens the doors to a new understanding of life on earth. (less)
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Hardcover, 240 pages
Published August 28th 2018 by Atria Books (first published 2017)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35721619-the-revolutionary-genius-of-plants
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January 2019 Meeting:
Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
by
Eric Klinenberg
4.28 · Rating details · 83 Ratings · 13 Reviews
An eminent sociologist and bestselling author offers an inspiring blueprint for rebuilding our fractured society.
We are living in a time of deep divisions. Americans are sorting themselves along racial, religious, and cultural lines, leading to a level of polarization that the country hasn't seen since the Civil War. Pundits and politicians are calling for us to come together, to find common purpose. But how, exactly, can this be done?
In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, churches, synagogues, and parks where crucial, sometimes life-saving connections, are formed. These are places where people gather and linger, making friends across group lines and strengthening the entire community. Klinenberg calls this the "social infrastructure" When it is strong, neighborhoods flourish; when it is neglected, as it has been in recent years, families and individuals must fend for themselves.
Klinenberg takes us around the globe--from a floating school in Bangladesh to an arts incubator in Chicago, from a soccer pitch in Queens to an evangelical church in Houston--to show how social infrastructure is helping to solve some of our most pressing challenges: isolation, crime, education, addiction, political polarization, and even climate change.
Richly reported, elegantly written, and ultimately uplifting, Palaces for the People urges us to acknowledge the crucial role these spaces play in civic life. Our social infrastructure could be the key to bridging our seemingly unbridgeable divides--and safeguarding democracy. (less)
Hardcover, 288 pages
Published September 11th 2018 by Crown Publishing Group (NY)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37707827-palaces-for-the-people?from_search=true
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December 2018 Meeting:
Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most
by
Steven Johnson
3.61 · Rating details · 111 Ratings · 26 Reviews
The hardest choices are also the most consequential. So why do we know so little about how to get them right?
Big, life-altering decisions matter so much more than the decisions we make every day, and they're also the most difficult: where to live, whom to marry, what to believe, whether to start a company, how to end a war. There's no one-size-fits-all approach for addressing these kinds of conundrums.
Steven Johnson's classic Where Good Ideas Come From inspired creative people all over the world with new ways of thinking about innovation. In Farsighted, he uncovers powerful tools for honing the important skill of complex decision-making. While you can't model a once-in-a-lifetime choice, you can model the deliberative tactics of expert decision-makers. These experts aren't just the master strategists running major companies or negotiating high-level diplomacy. They're the novelists who draw out the complexity of their characters' inner lives, the city officials who secure long-term water supplies, and the scientists who reckon with future challenges most of us haven't even imagined. The smartest decision-makers don't go with their guts. Their success relies on having a future-oriented approach and the ability to consider all their options in a creative, productive way.
Through compelling stories that reveal surprising insights, Johnson explains how we can most effectively approach the choices that can chart the course of a life, an organization, or a civilization. Farsighted will help you imagine your possible futures and appreciate the subtle intelligence of the choices that shaped our broader social history. (less)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37966381-farsighted
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November 2018 Meeting:
Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity
by Carlo Rovelli
4.29 · Rating details · 3,517 Ratings · 493 Reviews
From the best-selling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics comes a new book about the mind-bending nature of the universe
What are time and space made of? Where does matter come from? And what exactly is reality? Scientist Carlo Rovelli has spent his whole life exploring these questions and pushing the boundaries of what we know. Here he explains how our image of the world has changed throughout centuries. Fom Aristotle to Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday to the Higgs boson, he takes us on a wondrous journey to show us that beyond our ever-changing idea of reality is a whole new world that has yet to be discovered.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29767627-reality-is-not-what-it-seems?rating=1
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October 2018 Meeting:
The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands
by Chris Turner
4.13 · Rating details · 46 Ratings · 18 Reviews
Bestselling author Chris Turner brings readers onto the streets of Fort McMurray, showing the myriad ways the oil sands impact our lives and demanding that we ask the question: To both fuel the world and to save it, what do we do about the Patch?
The Patch is the story of Fort McMurray and the oil sands in northern Alberta, the world’s second largest proven reserve of oil. But this is no conventional story about the oil business. Rather, it is a portrait of the lifecycle of the Patch, showing just how deeply it continues to impact the lives of everyone around the world.
In its heyday, the oil sands represented an industrial triumph and the culmination of a century of innovation, experiment, engineering, policy, and finance. Fort McMurray was a boomtown, the centre of a new gold rush, and the oilsands were reshaping the global energy, political, and financial landscapes. But in 2008, a new narrative emerged. As financial markets collapsed and the cold, hard, scientific reality of the Patch’s effect on the environment became clear, the region turned into a boogeyman and a lightning rod for the global movement combatting climate change. Suddenly, the streets of Fort McMurray were the front line of a high-stakes collision between two conflicting worldviews–one of industrial triumph and another of environmental stewardship–each backed by major players on the world stage.
The Patch is a narrative-driven account of this ongoing conflict. It follows a select group of key characters whose experiences in and with the oil sands overlap in concentric narrative arcs. Through this insightful combination of global perspective and on-the-ground action, The Patch will show how the reach of the oil sands extends to all of us. From Fort Mac to the Bakken shale country of North Dakota, from Houston to London, from Saudi Arabia to the shores of Brazil, the whole world is connected in this enterprise. And it demands that we ask the question: In order to both fuel the world and to save it, what do we do about the Patch? (less)
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Hardcover, 368 pages
Published September 19th 2017 by Simon and Schuster Canada
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33584810-the-patch
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September 2018 Meeting:
A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership
by James Comey
4.24 · Rating details · 20,133 Ratings · 3,369 Reviews
Former FBI Director James Comey shares his never-before-told experiences from some of the highest-stakes situations of his career in the past two decades of American government, exploring what good, ethical leadership looks like, and how it drives sound decisions. His journey provides an unprecedented entry into the corridors of power, and a remarkable lesson in what makes an effective leader.
Mr. Comey served as Director of the FBI from 2013 to 2017, appointed to the post by President Barack Obama. He previously served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. deputy attorney general in the administration of President George W. Bush. From prosecuting the Mafia and Martha Stewart to helping change the Bush administration's policies on torture and electronic surveillance, overseeing the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation as well as ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Comey has been involved in some of the most consequential cases and policies of recent history. (less)
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Hardcover, First Edition (U.S.), 290 pages
Published April 17th 2018 by Flatiron Books
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35108805-a-higher-loyalty?ac=1&from_search=true
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August 2018 Meeting:
The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story
by Hyeonseo Lee (Goodreads Author), David John
4.45 · Rating details · 21,715 Ratings · 2,225 Reviews
An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships – and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom.
As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal totalitarian regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and to realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told “the best on the planet”?
Aged seventeen, she decided to escape North Korea. She could not have imagined that it would be twelve years before she was reunited with her family.
She could not return, since rumours of her escape were spreading, and she and her family could incur the punishments of the government authorities – involving imprisonment, torture, and possible public execution. Hyeonseo instead remained in China and rapidly learned Chinese in an effort to adapt and survive. Twelve years and two lifetimes later, she would return to the North Korean border in a daring mission to spirit her mother and brother to South Korea, on one of the most arduous, costly and dangerous journeys imaginable.
This is the unique story not only of Hyeonseo’s escape from the darkness into the light, but also of her coming of age, education and the resolve she found to rebuild her life – not once, but twice – first in China, then in South Korea. Strong, brave and eloquent, this memoir is a triumph of her remarkable spirit. (less)
Hardcover, 304 pages
Published July 2nd 2015 by William Collins
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25362017-the-girl-with-seven-names?ac=1&from_search=true
https://www.forbes.com/video/5813005358001/#2b78a9147977
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed4SeoQypy0
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July 2018 Meeting:
Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead
by Cecile Richards, Lauren Peterson (Contributor )
4.37 · Rating details · 461 Ratings · 75 Reviews
From Cecile Richards—the president of Planned Parenthood, daughter of the late Governor Ann Richards, featured speaker at the Women’s March on Washington, and “the heroine of the resistance” (Vogue)—comes a story about learning to lead and make change, based on a lifetime of fighting for women’s rights and social justice.
Cecile Richards has been an activist since she was taken to the principal’s office in seventh grade for wearing an armband in protest of the Vietnam War. Richards had an extraordinary girlhood in ultra-conservative Texas, where her hell-raising parents—her civil rights attorney father and political activist mother—taught their kids to be troublemakers. In the Richards household, the “dinner table was never for eating—it was for sorting precinct lists.”
She watched her mother, Ann, transform herself from a housewife to a force in American politics who made a name for herself as the straight-talking, truth-telling governor of Texas. But Richards also witnessed the pitfalls of public life that are unique to women, and the constant struggle to protect and expand equal rights—both exemplified by her marathon congressional testimony, where she held her own against hostile questions for five hours.
As a young woman, Richards worked as a labor organizer alongside women earning a minimum wage, and learned that those in power don’t give it up without a fight. Now, after years of advocacy, resistance, and progressive leadership, she shares her story for the first time—from the joy and heartbreak of activism to the challenges of raising kids, having a life, and making change, all at the same time. She shines a light on the people and lessons that have gotten her through good times and bad, and encourages readers to take risks, make mistakes, and make trouble along the way. Richards has dedicated her life to taking on injustice, and her memoir will inspire readers to hope and action. (less)
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Hardcover, 304 pages
Published April 3rd 2018 by Touchstone
ISBN 1501187597 (ISBN13: 9781501187599)
Edition LanguageEnglish
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35721620-make-trouble?from_search=true
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cecile-richards-planned-parenthood-make-trouble-new-book/
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June 2018 Meeting:
The Effective Citizen: How to Make Politics Work for You
by Graham Steele
really liked it 4.0 · Rating details · 8 Ratings · 2 Reviews
Effective citizens--engaged, knowledgeable, and persistent, and united in common cause--are the most powerful force that ever was, or ever will be. I hope this book will help citizens to be more effective.
In his uniquely straightforward and accessible style, Political insider Graham Steele pulls back the curtain on our political system and gives readers a look inside. A lawyer, analyst, former Nova Scotia cabinet minister, and author of the Globe & Mail bestselling memoir What I Learned About Politics, Steele answers the burning questions of Canadians: Who really runs the parties? What does a backbencher do? How does a citizen effectively navigate the system, and achieve change through a politician? What is "truthiness?"
A primer for anyone who wants to become a politician or influence one, The Effective Citizen explains how politicians think and what factors influence that thinking; how to interpret the "non-answer" in political speech; and acknowledges that in politics, "bland is safe." Ideal for political neophytes and junkees all the same, Steele's newest book will have the whole country talking. (less)
Hardcover, 280 pages
Published October 27th 2017 by Nimbus Publishing (CN)
ISBN 1771085312 (ISBN13: 9781771085311)
Edition LanguageEnglish
URLhttps://www.nimbus.ca/store/effective-citizen.html
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35873492-the-effective-citizen
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May 2018 Meeting:
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
by Michael Wolff
3.53 · Rating details · 40,338 Ratings · 6,527 Reviews
With extraordinary access to the West Wing, Michael Wolff reveals what happened behind-the-scenes in the first nine months of the most controversial presidency of our time in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.
Since Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, the country―and the world―has witnessed a stormy, outrageous, and absolutely mesmerizing presidential term that reflects the volatility and fierceness of the man elected Commander-in-Chief.
This riveting and explosive account of Trump’s administration provides a wealth of new details about the chaos in the Oval Office, including:
-- What President Trump’s staff really thinks of him
-- What inspired Trump to claim he was wire-tapped by President Obama
-- Why FBI director James Comey was really fired
-- Why chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner couldn’t be in the same room
-- Who is really directing the Trump administration’s strategy in the wake of Bannon’s firing
-- What the secret to communicating with Trump is
-- What the Trump administration has in common with the movie The Producers
Never before in history has a presidency so divided the American people. Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion. (less)
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Hardcover, 322 pages
Published January 5th 2018 by Henry Holt and Co.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36595101-fire-and-fury?ac=1&from_search=true
Hardcover, 304 pages
Published June 13th 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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April 2018 Meeting:
Description:Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?
by Graham Allison
4.2 · Rating details · 668 Ratings · 93 Reviews
CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES ARE HEADING TOWARD A WAR NEITHER WANTS. The reason is Thucydides’s Trap, a deadly pattern of structural stress that results when a rising power challenges a ruling one. This phenomenon is as old as history itself. About the Peloponnesian War that devastated ancient Greece, the historian Thucydides explained: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Over the past 500 years, these conditions have occurred sixteen times. War broke out in twelve of them. Today, as an unstoppable China approaches an immovable America and both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump promise to make their countries “great again,” the seventeenth case looks grim. Unless China is willing to scale back its ambitions or Washington can accept becoming number two in the Pacific, a trade conflict, cyberattack, or accident at sea could soon escalate into all-out war.
In Destined for War, the eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison explains why Thucydides’s Trap is the best lens for understanding U.S.-China relations in the twenty-first century. Through uncanny historical parallels and war scenarios, he shows how close we are to the unthinkable. Yet, stressing that war is not inevitable, Allison also reveals how clashing powers have kept the peace in the past — and what painful steps the United States and China must take to avoid disaster today. (less)
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Hardcover, 384 pages
Published May 30th 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31125556-destined-for-war
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March 2018 Meeting:
A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
by Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg
4.16 · Rating details · 826 Ratings · 169 Reviews
A trailblazing biologist grapples with her role in the biggest scientific discovery of our era: a cheap, easy way of rewriting genetic code, with nearly limitless promise and peril.
Not since the atomic bomb has a technology so alarmed its inventors that they warned the world about its use. Not, that is, until the spring of 2015, when biologist Jennifer Doudna called for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new gene-editing tool CRISPR—a revolutionary new technology that she helped create—to make heritable changes in human embryos. The cheapest, simplest, most effective way of manipulating DNA ever known, CRISPR may well give us the cure to HIV, genetic diseases, and some cancers, and will help address the world’s hunger crisis. Yet even the tiniest changes to DNA could have myriad, unforeseeable consequences—to say nothing of the ethical and societal repercussions of intentionally mutating embryos to create “better” humans.
Writing with fellow researcher Samuel Sternberg, Doudna shares the thrilling story of her discovery, and passionately argues that enormous responsibility comes with the ability to rewrite the code of life. With CRISPR, she shows, we have effectively taken control of evolution. What will we do with this unfathomable power?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30971755-a-crack-in-creation?ac=1&from_search=true
Hardcover, 304 pages
Published June 13th 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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February 2018 Meeting:
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
by Cathy O'Neil
3.87 · Rating details · 5,488 Ratings · 932 Reviews
A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on mathematical modeling—a pervasive new force in society that threatens to undermine democracy and widen inequality.
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated. But as Cathy O’Neil reveals in this shocking book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student can’t get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his race or neighborhood), he’s then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a “toxic cocktail for democracy.” Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.
Tracing the arc of a person’s life, from college to retirement, O’Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. Models that score teachers and students, sort resumes, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole, and monitor our health—all have pernicious feedback loops. They don’t simply describe reality, as proponents claim, they change reality, by expanding or limiting the opportunities people have. O’Neil calls on modelers to take more responsibility for how their algorithms are being used. But in the end, it’s up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change. (less)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28186015-weapons-of-math-destruction
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January 2018 Meeting:
No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
4.24 · Rating details · 2,411 Ratings · 396 Reviews
"Trump is extreme but he's not a Martian. He is the logical conclusion of many of the most dangerous trends of the past half-century. He is the personification of the merger of humans and corporations--a one-man megabrand, with wife and children as spin-off brands. This book is to help understand how we arrived at this surreal political moment, how to keep it from getting a lot worse, and how, if we keep our heads, we can flip the script and seize the opportunity to make things a whole lot better in a time of urgent need. A tool-kit for shock-resistance." --from the Introduction
The election of Donald Trump produced a frightening escalation in a world of cascading crises. The Trump Administration's vision--the deconstruction of the welfare and regulatory state, the unleashing of a fossil fuel frenzy (which requires the sweeping aside of climate science) and an all-out attack on vulnerable communities under the guise of a war on crime and terrorism--will generate wave after wave of crises and shocks around the world, to the economy, to national security, to the environment.
In No Is Not Enough, Naomi Klein embraces a lively conversation with the reader to expose the forces behind Trump's success and explain why he is not an aberration but the product of our time--Reality TV branding, celebrity obsession and CEO-worship, Vegas and Guantanamo, fake news and vulture bankers all rolled into one. And she shares a bold vision, a clear-eyed perspective on how to break the spell of his shock tactics, counter the rising chaos and divisiveness at home and abroad, and win the world we need. (less)
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Paperback, 240 pages
Published June 13th 2017 by Knopf Canada (first published 2017)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34814047-no-is-not-enough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9AKi1frOYM
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October to December 2017 Meeting:
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky
4.41 · Rating details · 473 Ratings · 105 Reviews
Why do we do the things we do?
More than a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.
And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. A behavior occurs--whether an example of humans at our best, worst, or somewhere in between. What went on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happened? Then Sapolsky pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell caused the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli that triggered the nervous system? By now he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened.
Sapolsky keeps going: How was that behavior influenced by structural changes in the nervous system over the preceding months, by that person's adolescence, childhood, fetal life, and then back to his or her genetic makeup? Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than one individual. How did culture shape that individual's group, what ecological factors millennia old formed that culture? And on and on, back to evolutionary factors millions of years old.
The result is one of the most dazzling tours d'horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, and downright heroic in its own right. (less)
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Hardcover, 790 pages
Published May 2nd 2017 by Penguin Press
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31170723-behave?from_search=true
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September 2017 Meeting:
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World
by Peter Wohlleben, Tim Flannery (Foreword), Jane Billinghurst (Goodreads Author) (Translator), Susanne Simard
4.07 · Rating details · 6,674 Ratings · 1,144 Reviews
In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben shares his deep love of woods and forests and explains the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in the woodland and the amazing scientific processes behind the wonders of which we are blissfully unaware. Much like human families, tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, and support them as they grow, sharing nutrients with those who are sick or struggling and creating an ecosystem that mitigates the impact of extremes of heat and cold for the whole group. As a result of such interactions, trees in a family or community are protected and can live to be very old. In contrast, solitary trees, like street kids, have a tough time of it and in most cases die much earlier than those in a group.
Drawing on groundbreaking new discoveries, Wohlleben presents the science behind the secret and previously unknown life of trees and their communication abilities; he describes how these discoveries have informed his own practices in the forest around him. As he says, a happy forest is a healthy forest, and he believes that eco-friendly practices not only are economically sustainable but also benefit the health of our planet and the mental and physical health of all who live on Earth.
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Hardcover, 271 pages
Published September 13th 2016 by Greystone Books,Canada (first published May 25th 2015)
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28256439-the-hidden-life-of-trees
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July & August 2017 Meetings::
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
by Jane Mayer (first half - include through to chapter 7)
4.34 · Rating Details · 6,757 Ratings · 1,270 Reviews
Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers?
The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against “big government” led to the ascendancy of a broad-based conservative movement. But as Jane Mayer shows in this powerful, meticulously reported history, a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system.
The network has brought together some of the richest people on the planet. Their core beliefs—that taxes are a form of tyranny; that government oversight of business is an assault on freedom—are sincerely held. But these beliefs also advance their personal and corporate interests: Many of their companies have run afoul of federal pollution, worker safety, securities, and tax laws.
The chief figures in the network are Charles and David Koch, whose father made his fortune in part by building oil refineries in Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. The patriarch later was a founding member of the John Birch Society, whose politics were so radical it believed Dwight Eisenhower was a communist. The brothers were schooled in a political philosophy that asserted the only role of government is to provide security and to enforce property rights.
When libertarian ideas proved decidedly unpopular with voters, the Koch brothers and their allies chose another path. If they pooled their vast resources, they could fund an interlocking array of organizations that could work in tandem to influence and ultimately control academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and, they hoped, the presidency. Richard Mellon Scaife, the mercurial heir to banking and oil fortunes, had the brilliant insight that most of their political activities could be written off as tax-deductible “philanthropy.”
These organizations were given innocuous names such as Americans for Prosperity. Funding sources were hidden whenever possible. This process reached its apotheosis with the allegedly populist Tea Party movement, abetted mightily by the Citizens United decision—a case conceived of by legal advocates funded by the network.
The political operatives the network employs are disciplined, smart, and at times ruthless. Mayer documents instances in which people affiliated with these groups hired private detectives to impugn whistle-blowers, journalists, and even government investigators. And their efforts have been remarkably successful. Libertarian views on taxes and regulation, once far outside the mainstream and still rejected by most Americans, are ascendant in the majority of state governments, the Supreme Court, and Congress. Meaningful environmental, labor, finance, and tax reforms have been stymied.
Jane Mayer spent five years conducting hundreds of interviews-including with several sources within the network-and scoured public records, private papers, and court proceedings in reporting this book. In a taut and utterly convincing narrative, she traces the byzantine trail of the billions of dollars spent by the network and provides vivid portraits of the colorful figures behind the new American oligarchy.
Dark Money is a book that must be read by anyone who cares about the future of American democracy. (less)
ebook, 464 pages
Published January 19th 2016 by Doubleday
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27833494-dark-money
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6zSy5lAxd0
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June 2017 Meeting:
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
by Arlie Russell Hochschild
4.17 · Rating Details · 4,563 Ratings · 852 Reviews
In Strangers in Their Own Land, the renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country--a stronghold of the conservative right. As she gets to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she famously champions, Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground and quickly warms to the people she meets--among them a Tea Party activist whose town has been swallowed by a sinkhole caused by a drilling accident--people whose concerns are actually ones that all Americans share: the desire for community, the embrace of family, and hopes for their children.
Strangers in Their Own Land goes beyond the commonplace liberal idea that these are people who have been duped into voting against their own interests. Instead, Hochschild finds lives ripped apart by stagnant wages, a loss of home, an elusive American dream--and political choices and views that make sense in the context of their lives. Hochschild draws on her expert knowledge of the sociology of emotion to help us understand what it feels like to live in "red" America. Along the way she finds answers to one of the crucial questions of contemporary American politics: why do the people who would seem to benefit most from "liberal" government intervention abhor the very idea? (less)
Hardcover, 288 pages
Published August 16th 2016 by New Press
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28695425-strangers-in-their-own-land
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March & April 2017 Meetings:
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
4.4 · Rating Details · 2,802 Ratings · 365 Reviews
Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity’s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods.
Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style—thorough, yet riveting—famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda.
What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century—from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus.
With the same insight and clarity that made Sapiens an international hit and a New York Times bestseller, Harari maps out our future.
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Kindle Edition, 448 pages
Published February 21st 2017 by Harper (first published September 2016)
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31138556-homo-deus?ac=1&from_search=true
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March 2017 Meeting:
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee
3.95 · Rating Details · 5,883 Ratings · 487 Reviews
In recent years, Google’s autonomous cars have logged thousands of miles on American highways and IBM’s Watson trounced the best human Jeopardy! players. Digital technologies—with hardware, software, and networks at their core—will in the near future diagnose diseases more accurately than doctors can, apply enormous data sets to transform retailing, and accomplish many tasks once considered uniquely human.
In The Second Machine Age MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee—two thinkers at the forefront of their field—reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives.
Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Professions of all kinds—from lawyers to truck drivers—will be forever upended. Companies will be forced to transform or die. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar.
Drawing on years of research and up-to-the-minute trends, Brynjolfsson and McAfee identify the best strategies for survival and offer a new path to prosperity. These include revamping education so that it prepares people for the next economy instead of the last one, designing new collaborations that pair brute processing power with human ingenuity, and embracing policies that make sense in a radically transformed landscape.
A fundamentally optimistic book, The Second Machine Age alters how we think about issues of technological, societal, and economic progress. (less)
Paperback, 336 pages
Published January 25th 2016 by W. W. Norton & Company (first published January 20th 2014)
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23316526-the-second-machine-age
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February 2017 Meeting:
You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself
by David McRaney
3.9 · Rating Details · 2,533 Ratings · 262 Reviews
The author of the bestselling You Are Not So Smart shares more discoveries about self-delusion and irrational thinking, and gives readers a fighting chance at outsmarting their not-so-smart brains
David McRaney’s first book, You Are Not So Smart, evolved from his wildly popular blog of the same name. A mix of popular psychology and trivia, McRaney’s insights have struck a chord with thousands, and his blog--and now podcasts and videos--have become an Internet phenomenon.
Like You Are Not So Smart, You Are Now Less Dumb is grounded in the idea that we all believe ourselves to be objective observers of reality--except we’re not. But that’s okay, because our delusions keep us sane. Expanding on this premise, McRaney provides eye-opening analyses of fifteen more ways we fool ourselves every day, including:
- The Misattribution of Arousal (Environmental factors have a greater affect on our emotional arousal than the person right in front of us)
- Sunk Cost Fallacy (We will engage in something we don’t enjoy just to make the time or money already invested “worth it”)
- Deindividuation (Despite our best intentions, we practically disappear when subsumed by a mob mentality)
McRaney also reveals the true price of happiness, why Benjamin Franklin was such a badass, and how to avoid falling for our own lies. This smart and highly entertaining book will be wowing readers for years to come.
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Hardcover, 320 pages
Published July 30th 2013 by Avery
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16101143-you-are-now-less-dumb
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January 2017 Meeting:
A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age
by Daniel J. Levitin
3.69 · Rating Details · 337 Ratings · 78 Reviews
From The New York Times bestselling author of THE ORGANIZED MIND and THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC, a primer to the critical thinking that is more necessary now than ever.
We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process—especially in election season. It's raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies. New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written reports revealing the ways lying weasels can use them.
It's becoming harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, distortions, and outright lies from reliable information? Levitin groups his field guide into two categories—statistical infomation and faulty arguments—ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. Infoliteracy means understanding that there are hierarchies of source quality and bias that variously distort our information feeds via every media channel, including social media. We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren't. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning—not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it. Readers learn to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection. Levitin's charming, entertaining, accessible guide can help anyone wake up to a whole lot of things that aren't so. And catch some lying weasels in their tracks!
Hardcover, 304 pages
Published September 6th 2016 by Dutton
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December 2016 Meeting:
The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness
by Todd Rose
4.08 · Rating Details · 575 Ratings · 104 Reviews
In this ground-breaking book perfect for readers of The Power of Habit and Quiet, Harvard scientist Todd Rose shows how our one-size-fits-all world is actually one-size-fits-none.
Each of us knows we’re different. We’re a little taller or shorter than the average, our salary is a bit higher or lower than the average, and we wonder about who it is that is buying the average-priced home. All around us, we think, are the average people—with the average height, the average salary and the average house.
But the average doesn’t just influence how we see ourselves—our entire social system has been built around this average-size-fits-all model. Schools are designed for the average student. Healthcare is designed for the average patient. Employers try to fill average job descriptions with employees on an average career trajectory. Our government implements programs and initiatives to serve the average person. For more than a century, we’ve believed that the best way to run our institutions is by focusing on the average person. But when you actually drill down into the numbers, you find an amazing fact: no one is average—which means that our society built for everyone is actually serving no one.
In the 1950s, the American Air Force found itself with a massive problem—performance in expensive, custom-made planes was suffering terribly, with crashes peaking at seventeen in a single day. Since the state-of-the-art planes they were flying had been meticulously crafted to fit the average pilot, pilot error was assumed to be at fault. Until, that is, the Air Force investigated just how many of their pilots were actually average. The shocking answer: out of thousands of active-duty pilots, exactly zero were average. Not one. This discovery led to simple solutions (like adjustable seats) that dramatically reduced accidents, improved performance, and expanded the pool of potential pilots. It also led to a huge change in thinking: planes didn’t need to be designed for everyone—they needed to be designed so they could adapt to suit the individual flying them.
The End of Average shows how success lies in customizing to our individual needs in all aspects of our lives, from the way we mark tests to the medical treatment we receive. Using principles from The Science of the Individual, it shows how we can break down the average to create individualized success that benefits everyone in the long run. It's time we stopped settling for average, and in The End of Average, Todd Rose will show you how. (less)
Hardcover, 256 pages
Published January 19th 2016 by HarperOne
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24186666-the-end-of-average
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November 2016 Meeting:
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice
by Bill Browder (Goodreads Author)
4.35 · Rating Details · 7,299 Ratings · 873 Reviews
A real-life political thriller about an American financier in the Wild East of Russia, the murder of his principled young tax attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the Kremlin's corruption.
Bill Browder's journey started on the South Side of Chicago and moved through Stanford Business School to the dog-eat-dog world of hedge fund investing in the 1990s. It continued in Moscow, where Browder made his fortune heading the largest investment fund in Russia after the Soviet Union's collapse. But when he exposed the corrupt oligarchs who were robbing the companies in which he was investing, Vladimir Putin turned on him and, in 2005, had him expelled from Russia.
In 2007, a group of law enforcement officers raided Browder's offices in Moscow and stole $230 million of taxes that his fund's companies had paid to the Russian government. Browder's attorney Sergei Magnitsky investigated the incident and uncovered a sprawling criminal enterprise. A month after Sergei testified against the officials involved, he was arrested and thrown into pre-trial detention, where he was tortured for a year. On November 16, 2009, he was led to an isolation chamber, handcuffed to a bedrail, and beaten to death by eight guards in full riot gear.
Browder glimpsed the heart of darkness, and it transformed his life: he embarked on an unrelenting quest for justice in Sergei's name, exposing the towering cover-up that leads right up to Putin. A financial caper, a crime thriller, and a political crusade, Red Notice is the story of one man taking on overpowering odds to change the world. (less)
Hardcover, 380 pages
Published February 3rd 2015 by Simon & Schuster
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22609522-red-notice
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September & October 2016 Meeting:
The Gene: An Intimate History
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
4.35 · Rating Details · 1,892 Ratings · 369 Reviews
THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a magnificent history of the gene and a response to the defining question of the future: What becomes of being human when we learn to “read” and “write” our own genetic information?
Siddhartha Mukherjee has a written a biography of the gene as deft, brilliant, and illuminating as his extraordinarily successful biography of cancer. Weaving science, social history, and personal narrative to tell us the story of one of the most important conceptual breakthroughs of modern times, Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices.
Throughout the narrative, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—cuts like a bright, red line, reminding us of the many questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In superb prose and with an instinct for the dramatic scene, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome.
As The New Yorker said of The Emperor of All Maladies, “It’s hard to think of many books for a general audience that have rendered any area of modern science and technology with such intelligence, accessibility, and compassion…An extraordinary achievement.” Riveting, revelatory, and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, and an essential preparation for the moral complexity introduced by our ability to create or “write” the human genome, The Gene is a must-read for everyone concerned about the definition and future of humanity. This is the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master. (less)
Hardcover, 608 pages
Published May 17th 2016 by Scribner
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27276428-the-gene?from_search=true
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August 2016 Meeting:
Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt
by Chris Hedges
4.30 · Rating Details · 355 Ratings · 64 Reviews
Revolutions come in waves and cycles. We are again riding the crest of a revolutionary epic, much like 1848 or 1917, from the Arab Spring to movements against austerity in Greece to the Occupy movement. In Wages of Rebellion, Chris Hedges—who has chronicled the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline in his books Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class—investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution, rebellion, and resistance. Drawing on an ambitious overview of prominent philosophers, historians, and literary figures he shows not only the harbingers of a coming crisis but also the nascent seeds of rebellion. Hedges’ message is clear: popular uprisings in the United States and around the world are inevitable in the face of environmental destruction and wealth polarization.
Focusing on the stories of rebels from around the world and throughout history, Hedges investigates what it takes to be a rebel in modern times. Utilizing the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Hedges describes the motivation that guides the actions of rebels as “sublime madness” — the state of passion that causes the rebel to engage in an unavailing fight against overwhelmingly powerful and oppressive forces. For Hedges, resistance is carried out not for its success, but as a moral imperative that affirms life. Those who rise up against the odds will be those endowed with this “sublime madness.”
From South African activists who dedicated their lives to ending apartheid, to contemporary anti-fracking protests in Alberta, Canada, to whistleblowers in pursuit of transparency, Wages of Rebellion shows the cost of a life committed to speaking the truth and demanding justice. Hedges has penned an indispensable guide to rebellion. (less)
Hardcover, 304 pages
Published May 12th 2015 by Nation Books (first published March 31st 2015)
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168271-wages-of-rebellion
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July 2016 Meeting:
Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
by Mary Roach (Goodreads Author)
4.16 · Rating Details · 696 Ratings · 181 Reviews
Best-selling author Mary Roach explores the science of keeping human beings intact, awake, sane, uninfected, and uninfested in the bizarre and extreme circumstances of war.
Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries—panic, exhaustion, heat, noise—and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them. Mary Roach dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper. She visits a repurposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare Marine Corps medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds. At Camp Lemmonier, Djibouti, in east Africa, we learn how diarrhea can be a threat to national security. Roach samples caffeinated meat, sniffs an archival sample of a World War II stink bomb, and stays up all night with the crew tending the missiles on the nuclear submarine USS Tennessee. She answers questions not found in any other book on the military: Why is DARPA interested in ducks? How is a wedding gown like a bomb suit? Why are shrimp more dangerous to sailors than sharks? Take a tour of duty with Roach, and you’ll never see our nation’s defenders in the same way again. (less)
Hardcover, 288 pages
Published June 7th 2016 by W. W. Norton & Company
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26530320-grunt
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June 2016 Meeting:
Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman (Goodreads Author)
3.94 · Rating Details · 1,251 Ratings · 241 Reviews
From one of the world's leading authorities on global security, Future Crimes takes readers deep into the digital underground to illuminate the alarming ways criminals, corporations, and even countries are using new and emerging technologies against you and how this makes everyone more vulnerable than you ever thought possible.
Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways, but there is an ominous flip side. Criminals are often the earliest, and most innovative, adopters of technology, and modern times have led to modern crimes. Today's criminals are stealing identities, draining online bank accounts, and erasing computer servers. It's disturbingly easy to activate baby monitors to spy on families, to hack pacemakers to deliver a lethal jolt of electricity, and to analyze a person's social media activity to determine the best time for a home invasion.
Meanwhile, 3D printers produce AK-47s, terrorists can download the recipe for the Ebola virus, and drug cartels are building drones. This is just the beginning of a tsunami of technological threats. In Future Crimes, Marc Goodman rips opens his database of hundreds of real cases to give readers front-row access to these impending perils. Reading like a sci-fi thriller, but based in startling fact, Future Crimes raises tough questions about the expanding role of technology in our lives. The book is a call to action for better security measures worldwide, but most importantly it will empower readers to protect themselves against looming technological threats before it's too late. (less)
Hardcover, 393 pages
Published February 24th 2015 by Doubleday
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22318398-future-crimes
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May 2016 Meeting:
The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future
by Max More (Editor), Natasha Vita-More
4.15 · Rating Details · 82 Ratings · 7 Reviews
The first authoritative and comprehensive survey of the origins and current state of transhumanist thinking The rapid pace of emerging technologies is playing an increasingly important role in overcoming fundamental human limitations. Featuring core writings by seminal thinkers in the speculative possibilities of the posthuman condition, essays address key philosophical arguments for and against human enhancement, explore the inevitability of life extension, and consider possible solutions to the growing issues of social and ethical implications and concerns. Edited by the internationally acclaimed founders of the philosophy and social movement of transhumanism, "The Transhumanist Reader" is an indispensable guide to our current state of knowledge of the quest to expand the frontiers of human nature. (less)
Paperback, 460 pages
Published May 6th 2013 by Wiley-Blackwell (first published February 28th 2013)
With the abundance of pages we have decided to cover chapters 1, 6, 10 & 19.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16287039-the-transhumanist-reader
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April 2016 Meeting:
Pharmageddon
by David Healy
4.35 · Rating Details · 55 Ratings · 10 Reviews
This searing indictment, David Healy's most comprehensive and forceful argument against the pharmaceuticalization of medicine, tackles problems in health care that are leading to a growing number of deaths and disabilities. Healy, who was the first to draw attention to the now well-publicized suicide-inducing side effects of many anti-depressants, attributes our current state of affairs to three key factors: product rather than process patents on drugs, the classification of certain drugs as prescription-only, and industry-controlled drug trials. These developments have tied the survival of pharmaceutical companies to the development of blockbuster drugs, so that they must overhype benefits and deny real hazards. Healy further explains why these trends have basically ended the possibility of universal health care in the United States and elsewhere around the world. He concludes with suggestions for reform of our currently corrupted evidence-based medical system. (less)
Hardcover, 320 pages
Published March 12th 2012 by University of California Press (first published February 4th 2012)
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13268364-pharmageddon
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March 2016 Meeting:
The Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World
by Emma Marris
4.05 · Rating Details · 264 Ratings · 43 Reviews
A paradigm shift is roiling the environmental world. For decades people have unquestioningly accepted the idea that our goal is to preserve nature in its pristine, pre-human state. But many scientists have come to see this as an outdated dream that thwarts bold new plans to save the environment and prevents us from having a fuller relationship with nature. Humans have changed the landscapes they inhabit since prehistory, and climate change means even the remotest places now bear the fingerprints of humanity. Emma Marris argues convincingly that it is time to look forward and create the "rambunctious garden," a hybrid of wild nature and human management.
In this optimistic book, readers meet leading scientists and environmentalists and visit imaginary Edens, designer ecosystems, and Pleistocene parks. Marris describes innovative conservation approaches, including rewilding, assisted migration, and the embrace of so-called novel ecosystems.
Rambunctious Garden is short on gloom and long on interesting theories and fascinating narratives, all of which bring home the idea that we must give up our romantic notions of pristine wilderness and replace them with the concept of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden planet, tended by us. (less)
Paperback, 224 pages
Published August 20th 2013 by Bloomsbury USA (first published August 30th 2011)
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13168199-the-rambunctious-garden
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February 2016 Meeting:
China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa
by Howard W. French
3.75 · Rating Details · 534 Ratings · 97 Reviews
An exciting, hugely revealing account of China’s burgeoning presence in Africa—a developing empire already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people.
A prizewinning foreign correspondent and former New York Times bureau chief in Shanghai and in West and Central Africa, Howard French is uniquely positioned to tell the story of China in Africa. Through meticulous on-the-ground reporting—conducted in Mandarin, French, and Portuguese, among other languages—French crafts a layered investigation of astonishing depth and breadth as he engages not only with policy-shaping moguls and diplomats, but also with the ordinary men and women navigating the street-level realities of cooperation, prejudice, corruption, and opportunity forged by this seismic geopolitical development. With incisiveness and empathy, French reveals the human face of China’s economic, political, and human presence across the African continent—and in doing so reveals what is at stake for everyone involved.
We meet a broad spectrum of China’s dogged emigrant population, from those singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, commerce, and even environment (a self-made tycoon who harnessed Zambia’s now-booming copper trade; a timber entrepreneur determined to harvest the entirety of Liberia’s old-growth redwoods), to those just barely scraping by (a sibling pair running small businesses despite total illiteracy; a karaoke bar owner–cum–brothel madam), still convinced that Africa affords them better opportunities than their homeland. And we encounter an equally panoramic array of African responses: a citizens’ backlash in Senegal against a “Trojan horse” Chinese construction project (a tower complex to be built over a beloved soccer field, which locals thought would lead to overbearing Chinese pressure on their economy); a Zambian political candidate who, having protested China’s intrusiveness during the previous election and lost, now turns accommodating; the ascendant middle class of an industrial boomtown; African mine workers bitterly condemning their foreign employers, citing inadequate safety precautions and wages a fraction of their immigrant counterparts’.
French’s nuanced portraits reveal the paradigms forming around this new world order, from the all-too-familiar echoes of colonial ambition—exploitation of resources and labor; cut-rate infrastructure projects; dubious treaties—to new frontiers of cultural and economic exchange, where dichotomies of suspicion and trust, assimilation and isolation, idealism and disillusionment are in dynamic flux.
Part intrepid travelogue, part cultural census, part industrial and political exposé, French’s keenly observed account ultimately offers a fresh perspective on the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: why China is making the incursions it is, just how extensive its cultural and economic inroads are, what Africa’s role in the equation is, and just what the ramifications for both parties—and the watching world—will be in the foreseeable future. (less)
Hardcover, 304 pages
Published May 20th 2014 by Knopf (first published January 1st 2014)
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18373202-china-s-second-continent
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January 2016 Meeting:
The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler
by Thomas Hager (Goodreads Author)
4.22 · Rating Details · 1,189 Ratings · 189 Reviews
A sweeping history of tragic genius, cutting-edge science, and the discovery that changed billions of lives—including your own.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, humanity was facing global disaster. Mass starvation, long predicted for the fast-growing population, was about to become a reality. A call went out to the world’s scientists to find a solution.
This is the story of the two enormously gifted, fatally flawed men who found it: the brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and the reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and saved millions of lives. Their invention continues to feed us today; without it, more than two billion people would starve.
But their epochal triumph came at a price we are still paying. The Haber-Bosch process was also used to make the gunpowder and high explosives that killed millions during the two world wars. Both men were vilified during their lives; both, disillusioned and disgraced, died tragically. Today we face the other unintended consequences of their discovery—massive nitrogen pollution and a growing pandemic of obesity.
The Alchemy of Air is the extraordinary, previously untold story of two master scientists who saved the world only to lose everything and of the unforseen results of a discovery that continues to shape our lives in the most fundamental and dramatic of ways. (less)
Hardcover, 336 pages
Published September 9th 2008 by Crown (first published January 1st 2008)
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3269091-the-alchemy-of-air
December 2015 Meeting:
Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
by Jon Kabat-Zinn
4.1 of 5 stars 4.10 · rating details · 19,945 ratings · 778 reviews
In this book, the author maps out a simple path for cultivating mindfulness in one's own life. It speaks both to those coming to meditation for the first time and to longtime practitioners, anyone who cares deeply about reclaiming the richness of his or her moments.
Paperback, 304 pages
Published January 5th 2005 by Hachette Books
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14096.Wherever_You_Go_There_You_Are
November 2015 Meeting:
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
Presents problems and potential solutions to the question of how we can best address our mortality. Through stories and research, he shows that we are shifting from a highly medicalized end of life to an experience in which we can have some sort of meaning. Physicians are keen on intervening whenever a body is diseased or broken. Yet this medical imperative applied to terminally ill individuals can be frustrating, expensive, and even disastrous. Gawande suggests that what most of us really want when we are elderly and incapable of taking care of ourselves are simple pleasures and the autonomy to script the final chapter of life. Making his case with stories about people who are extremely frail, very old, or dying, he explores some options available when decrepitude sets in or death approaches: palliative care, an assisted living facility, hospice, an elderly housing community, and family caregivers.
October 2015
Data and Goliath - Bruce Schneier 383p
An exceptionally readable yet thoroughly chilling book about the dangers of the ubiquitous mass surveillance we face thanks to modern life. Schneier describes the types of data being collected about us, stemming from our interactions, activities, purchases, and where we go…. who we converse with and the duration of the conversation, the things we read (especially electronically), and what we buy. Corporations use this data to deliver targeted advertising and sell our information to other corporations at a large profit. Governments employ the data to map our interactions and otherwise infiltrate our privacy.
Sept. 16, 2015 · 7:00 PM
The Organized Mind – Daniel Levitin 396p
Advances in computer technology and the rise of the Internet have led to an onslaught of information confronting us each day. Levitin explains how the mental processes of attention, working memory, and categorization limit the amount of information that we can take in and remember. By employing practical strategies that work in concert with these mental processes, we can become more organized, make more informed decisions, and increase our efficiency at work, at home, and in our social lives.
6 went-Ja,Helen - ORGANIZER/EVENT HOST, Laura, Malloreon, Gauri, Tabatha
July 15, 2015 · 7:00 PM
The Germ Code - Jason Tetro
Helen Laura Ja
3 Readers
The Germ Code is a fascinating journey through an unseen world, an essential manual to living in harmony with germs and a life-enhancing (as well as life-saving ) good read. Since the dawn of the human race, germs have been making us sick. Human beings are engaged in a "war on germs," in which we develop ever-more sophisticated weapons and defensive strategies. Microbiologist Jason Tetro takes us outside the lab and shows the enormous influence of germs upon humanity's past, present and future. He also explains that not every germ is our foe, and offers advice on harnessing the power of good germs to stay healthy and make our planet a better place. "
June 17 · 7:00 PM, 2015
Lawrence in Arabia - S. Anderson
Helen Laura Lillian Alan Y.
4 Readers | 5.00
Lawrence in Arabia (577p)
With strong and insightful writing, using T.E. Lawrence as a window onto the tragic history of World War I and its settlement in the Middle East, Anderson makes this complicated history both vivid and engaging. He embeds T. E. Lawrence deeply in the complex environment of World War I diplomacy and policy throughout the Middle East. He skillfully describes British policy confusion reflected in the contradictory negotiations with French allies, the Arab forces, and ….. the huge losses of life and resources. The book makes clear the arrogance and self-serving actions of the British and French as they sought to replace Ottoman rule over the Arabs with their own imperial domination, generating decades of Arab resistance, political disorder, and economic stagnation in the region.
May 20 · 7:00 PM, 2015
The Lonely War by Nazila Fathi
Helen Laura Ja
3 Readers | 4.00
Lonely War: One Woman's Account of the Struggle for Modern Iran (336p)
New York Times correspondent Fathi was being watched. The Iranian agents had her apartment under surveillance and tailed her when she went out. The intimidation and fear were too much for her, and she and her family escaped to a life of exile from her homeland. Now the journalist retells both her own story and that of Iran in this gripping account of the three decades following the revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power and created the Islamic Republic. Ever the professional, Fathi maintains a reasonable and precise tone, even when recounting violent protests and personal discrimination. She distills complex events at the national level down to their impact on individuals, such as the video-man peddling bootleg copies of foreign movies and TV shows, and the girls sitting by the pool, wondering when they will be allowed to swim again. The regime as observed by Fathi is oppressive and yet full of surprising contradictions, while the people remain undaunted despite the odds. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of modern Iran.
April 15 · 7:00 PM
Information Doesn't Want to be Free - C. Doctorow
Helen
1 Member
Information Doesn't Want To Be Free : Laws For The Internet Age - Cory Doctorow (192p) In sharply argued, fast-moving chapters, [he] takes on the state of copyright... LEARN MORE
March 18 · 7:00 PM, 2015
The Red Market - Scott Carney
Helen Lillian Ray
3 Readers
The Red Market: The red market : on the trail of the world's organ brokers, bone thieves, blood farmers, and child traffickers (254p) Journalist Carney investigates the... LEARN MORE
February 18 · 7:00 PM
Dollars and Sex - Marina Adshade
Helen Laura Wesley
3 Readers
Where Did the Romance Go? For a short month, an easy read. This UBC economics professor discusses sexual behavior in terms of micro- and macroeconomic principles. She... LEARN MORE
January 21 · 7:00 PM
Willpower by Roy Baumeister
Helen Laura Lillian Ray Alan Y. Nabil
6 Readers
Making any new year's resolutions? This book reports key findings on willpower: for instance, each of us has a finite supply of it and deplete it whenever we draw on it... LEARN MORE
September 24, 2014 · 7:00 PM
The Story of Art - E. H. Gombrich
Helen Lillian Malabika R.
4 Readers
Thank you to Malabika for suggesting this book; it's an area we haven't explored yet. Gombrich's venerable work has inhabited a unique niche, having been created... LEARN MORE
August 27, 2014 · 7:00 PM
The Undercover Economist TIM HARFORD
Helen Jasmine Lillian Tabatha rsb
5 Readers
The Undercover Economist: Exposing why the rich are rich, the poor are poor and why you can never buy a decent used car Who really makes money from fair trade coffee?... LEARN MORE
July 23, 2014 · 7:00 PM
Dead Aid - D. Moyo
Helen Wesley Malabika R.
3 Readers
(Since this may conflict with vacation time we will confirm this date at the June meeting.) In this important analysis of the past fifty years of international (largely... LEARN MORE
June 25, 2014 · 7:00 PM
Tesla: Man Out of Time - M. Cheney
Helen Nick C. Tabatha Malabika R.
4 Readers | 5.00
Margaret Cheney explores the brilliant and prescient mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest scientists and inventors. Called a madman by his enemies, a genius... LEARN MORE
May 28, 2014 · 7:00 PM
The War That Ended Peace - M. MacMillan
Helen Wesley CSC Malabika R.
4 Readers | 5.00
A fascinating portrait of Europe from 1900 up to the outbreak of World War I. The century since the end of the Napoleonic wars had been the most peaceful era Europe had... LEARN MORE
April 23, 2014 · 7:00 PM
The Lucifer Effect by P. Zimbardo
Helen Nick C. CSC Tabatha Lillian
5 Readers | 3.00
What makes good people do bad things? How can moral people be seduced to act immorally? Where is the line separating good from evil, and who is in danger of crossing it?... LEARN MORE
March 26, 2014 · 7:00 PM
The Theory That Would Not Die by S. McGrayne
Helen Lillian Wesley CSC
4 Readers
The riveting account of how a seemingly simple theorem ignited one of the greatest controversies of all time. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning... LEARN MORE
February 26, 2014 · 7:00 PM
Consumed by Benjamin Barber
Helen Nick C. Lillian
3 Readers
February 12, 2014 · 7:00 PM
MEETING POSTPONED
Helen Nick C.
2 Readers
MEETING POSTPONED - Date TBA Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow citizens whole Author: BENJAMIN R BARBER A piercing and vital look... LEARN MORE
January 15, 2014 · 7:00 PM
A Concise History of Byzantium - W. Treadgold
Helen Lillian
2 Readers
December 2, 2013 · 7:00 PM
Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking SUSAN CAIN
Helen
2 Readers
November 12, 2013 · 7:00 PM
The Universe Within - Neil Turok
Helen
1 Member
For more details of the upcoming meeting and to rsvp please go to http://www.meetup.com/Non-fictionBookclubToronto/