Reading Non-Fiction 2020/21

Welcoming new members. We will start a waiting list when full.

We will consider eight recent works of nonfiction, allowing two sessions for each book. We will focus on evidence, arguments and conclusions as well as on the rhetorical strategies employed by the authors. More generally, we will consider the nature of the nonfiction genre itself. Members will divide up responsibility for leading discussions. Chosen by the group, the books to be read are as follows: The Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. Mark Bourrie; Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives. Daniel J. Levitin; Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know. Malcolm Gladwell; A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. Adam Gopnik; Gods of the Upper Air: a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex and Gender in the Twentieth Century. Charles King; Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Girls and Women. Jessica McDiarmid; The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People. Martin Puchner; and one more to be determined.