What we’re about
You are invited to join us in the Modern Mind Book Discussion Group weekly as we explore the contents of an intellectually challenging text.
About 15 people attend our virtual Zoom meetings each week, but most do not RSVP through Meetup.com. The group has existed since around 2002. This profile was created in 2015 to help promote it.
Each week, the focus is given to one or two chapters. We typically stay on a single book for a few months. The choice of a text is voted on by attendees. Categories selected usually include science, philosophy, history, sociology, religion, economics, or psychology. If you are very curious about the world and enjoy sharpening your understanding on complex topics with some very friendly people, then give our group a try. The meetings are held online from 10:00 - 11:30 AM EST on Sunday mornings. Even if you have not read the chapter(s) planned for that meeting, we encourage you to visit. Our discussions, inspired by the book's content, typically become general enough to where anyone might contribute or enjoy listening to other members share.
Here are many of the books that we have read in previous years:
"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
"The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt
"How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain" by Lisa Feldman Barrett
"The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" by Steven Pinker
"Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future" by Robert Reich
"The Federalist Papers" by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
"Understanding Islam: An Introduction to the Muslim World" by Thomas Lippman
"1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created" by Charles C. Mann
"Nonsense: Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language" by Robert Gula
"The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters" by Anthony Pagden
"Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind" by George Makari
"The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World" by Jeremy Rifkin
"Post-Truth" by Lee McIntyre
“The Sacred Depths of Nature” by Ursula Goodenough
"The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government" by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer
"Exhalation: Stories" by Ted Chiang
"The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God" by David Linden
"How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer" by Sarah Bakewell
"Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction" by Thomas Dixon
"Women After All" by Melvin Konner
"The Essential Tillich" by Paul Tillich
"The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present" by Eric Kandel
Short stories by Anton Chekhov
"The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America" by Louis Menand
"Hamlet" by William Shakespeare
"No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model" by Richard Schwartz
"Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction" by Susan Blackmore
"Moral Man and Immoral Society" by Reinhold Niebuhr
"The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth" by Jonathan Rauch
"Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are" by Frans de Waal
"The Philosophy of Humanism" by Corliss Lamont
"Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century" by Peter Watson
"Science: A Four Thousand Year History" by Patricia Fara
"The Odyssey" by Homer
“Hen’s Teeth and Horses Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History” by Stephen Jay Gould
"Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman
"The Gene: An Intimate History" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
"Myths America Lives By" by Richard T. Hughes
"The History of White People" by Nell Irvin Painter
"A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains" by Max Bennett
"Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness" by Sy Montgomery
“A Swim in the Pond in the Rain” by George Saunders
"The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World" by Nichola Raihani
"Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think" by Andy Norman
"Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science" by Charles Wheelan
"The Happiness Hypothesis" by Jonathan Haidt
"Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe" by Bernardo Kastrup
"The Brain: A Very Short Introduction" by Michael O'Shea
"Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience" by Nancy Sherman
"Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America" by Heather Cox Richardson
"The Consolations of Philosophy" by Alain de Botton
“Henry James: Major Stories & Essays” – a collection of works by the author
