Non-Fiction Book Club

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.

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.

“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.

From Amazon:

From Amazon:
“Climate change: it is arguably the most urgent and consequential issue humankind has ever faced. How we address it in the next thirty years will determine the kind of world we will live in and will bequeath to our children and to theirs.

In The Future We Choose, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac–who led negotiations for the United Nations during the historic Paris Agreement of 2015–have written a cautionary but optimistic book about the world’s changing climate and the fate of humanity.
The authors outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a carbon neutral, regenerative world. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can and must do to fend off disaster.”

Come meet with us via Zoom. We meet twice a month.
Thursday Jan 14 at 2pm: https://tinyurl.com/UFPbookclub1
Thursday Jan. 28 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.