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Book Group: Past books

Book Group Information

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

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

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03/17/2020 - 1:00pm	Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion	Religions and mythologies from around the world teach that God or gods created humans. Atheist, humanist, and materialist critics, meanwhile, have attempted to turn theology on its head, claiming that religion is a human invention. In this book, E. Fuller Torrey draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to propose a startling answer to the ultimate question. Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods locates the origin of gods within the human brain, arguing that religious belief is a by-product of evolution.
02/18/2020 - 1:00pm	The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming	It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. Across the US, “500-year” storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually.
01/21/2020 - 1:00pm	White Fragility	Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality.
11/19/2019 - 1:00pm	The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone	Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it.
10/21/2019 - 4:00pm	Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past	October 21, 2019: 4-6 pm at the Jeff Center in the Old Ashland Armory From Amazon: A groundbreaking book about how ancient DNA has profoundly changed our understanding of human history. Geneticists like David Reich have made astounding advances in the field of genomics, which is proving to be as important as archeology, linguistics, and written records as a means to understand our ancestry.
09/16/2019 - 4:00pm	Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts	September 16, 2019: 4-6 pm at the Jeff Center in the Old Ashland Armory Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson (2019)
08/19/2019 - 4:00pm	Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things are Better Than You Think	August 19, 2019: 4-6 pm at the Jeff Center in the Old Ashland Armory The Jefferson Center Book Group meets on the third MONDAY of the month, 4-6 pm, at The Jefferson Center, in the Old Ashland Armory at 208 Oak Street, suite 101. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling (2018) From Amazon: "Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.
07/15/2019 - 4:00pm	Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live	July 15, 2019: 4-6 pm at the Jeff Center in the Old Ashland Armory The Jefferson Center Book Group meets on the third MONDAY of the month, 4-6 pm, at The Jefferson Center, in the Old Ashland Armory at 208 Oak Street, suite 101. Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live by Rob Dunn From Amazon: "A natural history of the wilderness in our homes, from the microbes in our showers to the crickets in our basements
06/17/2019 - 4:00pm	A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918	June 17, 2019: 4-6 pm at the Jeff Center in the Old Ashland Armory The Jefferson Center Book Group meets on the third MONDAY of the month, 4-6 pm, at The Jefferson Center, in the Old Ashland Armory at 208 Oak Street, suite 101. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914-1918 by G. J. Meyer (2007). From Amazon: "Drawing on exhaustive research, this remarkable, intimate account tells the story of how World War I reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of the world we live in today.
05/20/2019 - 2:00pm	Jeff Ctr Book Brp: The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey (2018)	May 20, 2019: 2-4 pm at the Jeff Center in the Old Ashland Armory. Today we refer to Christianity’s conquest of the West as a “triumph.” But this victory entailed an orgy of destruction in which Jesus’s followers attacked and suppressed classical culture, helping to pitch Western civilization into a thousand-year-long decline. In The Darkening Age, Catherine Nixey brilliantly resurrects this lost history, offering a wrenching account of the rise of Christianity and its terrible cost.

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