JUNE: DEEP PLAY, BY DIANE ACKERMAN

This book invites people to look closely at the human saga, and consider how much of it revolves around play. Simple play, elaborate play, crude play, sophisticated play, violent play, casual play. Most animals play. Evolution itself plays with lifeforms. Whole cultures play with customs, ideas, belief systems, and fashions. But it’s a special caliber of play, deep play, that makes thrill-seeking understandable, creativity possible, and religion inevitable. Deep play awakens the most creative, sentient, and joyful aspects of our inner selves. More than anything else, our passion for deep play has made us the puzzling and resplendent beings we are.

There is one gathering this month:
Thursday June 10: https://tinyurl.com/UFPbookclub1

If you are a member, you will also receive the Zoom link in the week of the meeting. If you are a new member, contact Julie to get on the email list. We look forward to welcoming new members.

MAY: DIE WISE, BY sTEPHEN jENKINSON

With lyrical prose, deep wisdom, and stories from his two decades of working with dying people and their families, Stephen Jenkinson places death at the center of the page and asks us to behold it in all its painful beauty. Die Wise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well. Die Wise is for those who will fail to live forever.
 
Dying well, Jenkinson writes, is a right and responsibility of everyone. It is not a lifestyle option. It is a moral, political, and spiritual obligation each person owes their ancestors and their heirs. Die Wise dreams such a dream, and plots such an uprising. How we die, how we care for dying people, and how we carry our dead: this work makes our capacity for a village-mindedness, or breaks it.

Thursday May 13 at 2pm: https://tinyurl.com/UFPbookclub1
Thursday May 27 at 2pm: https://tinyurl.com/UFPbookclub2

If you are a member, you will also receive the Zoom link in the week of the meeting. If you are a new member, contact Julie to get on the email list. We look forward to welcoming new members.

APRIL: HUMANKIND: ALL ABOUT LOVE, BY BELL HOOKS

All About Love offers radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives. In eleven concise chapters, hooks explains how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood. She offers a rethinking of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring peace and compassion to our personal and professional lives, and asserts the place of love to end struggles between individuals, in communities, and among societies. Moving from the cultural to the intimate, hooks notes the ties between love and loss and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most important love of all.

Thursday April 8 at 2pm: https://tinyurl.com/UFPbookclub1
Thursday April 26 at 2pm: https://tinyurl.com/UFPbookclub2

If you are a member, you will also receive the Zoom link in the week of the meeting. If you are a new member, contact Julie to get on the email list. We look forward to welcoming new members.

MARCH: Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman

“Humankind made me see humanity from a fresh perspective.”

 If there is one belief that has united the left and the right, psychologists and philosophers, ancient thinkers and modern ones, it is the tacit assumption that humans are bad. It’s a notion that drives newspaper headlines and guides the laws that shape our lives. . .  Human beings, we’re taught, are by nature selfish and governed primarily by self-interest.

But what if it isn’t true? . . . Rutger Bregman provides new perspective on the past 200,000 years of human history, setting out to prove that we are hardwired for kindness, geared toward cooperation rather than competition, and more inclined to trust rather than distrust one another. In fact this instinct has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens.

. . . Bregman shows us that believing in human generosity and collaboration isn’t merely optimistic—it’s realistic . . .  if we believe in the reality of humanity’s kindness and altruism, it will form the foundation for achieving true change in society, a case that Bregman makes convincingly with his signature wit, refreshing frankness, and memorable storytelling.

Come meet with us via Zoom. We meet twice a month.
Thursday Mar.11 at 2pm: https://tinyurl.com/UFPbookclub1
Thursday Mar. 25 at 2pm: https://tinyurl.com/UFPbookclub2

If you are a member, you will also receive the Zoom link in the week of the meeting. If you are a new member, contact Julie to get on the email list. We look forward to welcoming new members.

FEBRUARY: TEN LESSONS FOR A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD, BY fAREED zAKARIA

From Amazon:

“COVID-19 is speeding up history, but how? What is the shape of the world to come?  Lenin once said, “There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen.” This is one of those times when history has sped up. CNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria helps readers to understand the nature of a post-pandemic world: the political, social, technological, and economic consequences that may take years to unfold. Written in the form of ten “lessons,” covering topics from natural and biological risks to the rise of “digital life” to an emerging bipolar world order, Zakaria helps readers to begin thinking beyond the immediate effects of COVID-19. Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World speaks to past, present, and future, and, while urgent and timely, is sure to become an enduring reflection on life in the early twenty-first century.

Come meet with us via Zoom. We meet twice a month.
Thursday Feb.11 at 2pm: https://tinyurl.com/UFPbookclub1
Thursday Feb. 25 at 2pm: https://tinyurl.com/UFPbookclub2

If you are a member, you will also receive the Zoom link in the week of the meeting. If you are a new member, contact Julie to get on the email list. We look forward to welcoming new members.

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